#76: Too Dumb For Fiction (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 76th 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. In this episode, we discuss Portland going off the rails again. More riots and vandalism happened downtown, and we went to document some of it: the Apple store, the dumpster fires, the volunteers picking up trash, the companies proclaiming that we are “united by love” while (only) the white women in their displays are...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 76.
It is pandemonium here.
We have gone out into Portland to see how things have changed overnight and it has caused chaos.
But we are here with you to discuss what is going on and its relevance to, you know, the future if there is one.
Indeed.
Today we're going to talk some about Portland, about our hometown which we still love and we know that most of the people living here love it too and therefore we have to wonder over and over again why what is happening is being allowed to happen.
So we're going to talk some about what's happening.
Unfortunately we did not have the time to get all of our pictures and video totally organized.
This is not right.
But we're going to show some of those to you and for those of you listening only we'll describe what we're showing.
Then we are going to talk about some of the numbers in stories from this week.
We got the number 3, the number 90, the number 13, and the number 2.5 billion.
I'm concerned about the number 13.
2.5 billion I can handle, but 13's always been rough.
No, 2.5 billion is a familiar kind of cozy feeling number.
Not to me.
Not to me.
No, it's sort of ominous.
I think you're going to feel differently once you hear why 2.5 billion is in the news.
No, no, but kinesthetically speaking, it's sort of a color of mauve I've never liked.
Kinesthetically, really.
Kinesthetic, that's not the term.
What's the term when you see color?
I don't know what you're trying to say.
Oh, synesthetically.
Synesthetic, that's what I meant.
Synesthetically, I would say.
I don't have synesthesia, but if I did, it would be a color of mom that I just can't tolerate.
Well, this is a conversation for another time, but as you know, I have long thought that we all start out with some degree of synesthesia, that we are sort of part of what childhood is, is learning how to separate our senses and catalog them as separate entities.
Sometimes, to our detriment.
And also that there is persistent synesthesia that can come out in particular situations.
And in fact, I think I wrote about that a little bit in the essay I wrote about having been mugged at knife point in keto.
Right.
Yes, you did.
Anyway, then we're going to talk about a lizard that isn't a lizard, and coyotes.
When is a lizard not a lizard?
That's such an odd thing to happen, so I'm looking forward to that.
We're going to find out.
So first, first, announcements.
Announcements, yes.
Announcements.
That's traditional.
Yeah, no ads today.
But at my Patreon right now, the 48-hour window is open to ask questions for the two-hour private Q&A that we do every month on the last Sunday of the month at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
So if you have been thinking about perhaps doing that, now is a good moment to join.
And then all the rest of the things are generally true.
If you're enjoying this, subscribe, like, all of that.
Definitely like.
Definitely like.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Portland is gorgeous.
Especially this week.
Oh my goodness.
I think anyone in the Pacific Northwest, I suspect right now, is having this just amazing weather.
Unseasonable, warm, not into hot really, blue skies.
The trees are beginning to leaf out.
You know, many of the trees, the magnolias and the cherries, are still in full bloom.
The birds are in mating season, so there's a lot of song going on.
It is just a stunning, stunning moment in Portland.
And actually an unusual one, because the leaves are not yet out, the flowers are in bloom, and the weather is so clear, we're not dealing with our typical coolish, drizzly weather that we would ordinarily.
Right, well, but no, in the summer we usually get this kind of weather, but the plants are in a different phase, and the birds are in a different phase.
This is like August weather with April ecology, and it's kind of amazing.
It really is.
It's bringing out the coyotes, which we talked about last week and we'll talk about at the end of the hour here.
We have begun to attract Steller's jays, just glorious, and it's brought out the riders.
Yes, it has brought the rioters right out to the streets.
It's a very hospitable weather condition.
Absolutely, what else are you going to do?
All the festivals are shut down.
Sure, rioting is what's happening.
Yeah.
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about it.
Let us.
To be honest, it's a little unclear exactly what the riots in Portland are about because there's a national riot phenomenon that has seen an uptick as a result ostensibly of a couple of shootings in various places, including Chicago.
And we also had a shooting here in Portland yesterday, about which there's not a lot of information, and I'm cautious because early reports are always wrong, and these aren't early reports exactly, but still, the full information isn't out, but it sounds like a white guy, seemingly mentally unstable, waving a firearm in a park was shot and killed by police.
And so the pattern that we have increasingly seen is that any shooting at all by police is taken to be a validation of the model in which the police are simply out of control and shooting people willy nilly and when race can be invoked it is and when it can't it's quietly sidelined.
And the fact is it's completely tautological framework because the fact is there are a lot of police and frankly there are a lot of citizens and there's a lot of crime and there's going to be, there are going to be shootings that are valid, there are going to be shootings that are errors, there is no way you could do policing that would be perfect in this regard and so if what you do is simply take every time
If somebody is shot by police as evidence that the police are out of control, then you will just have an excuse to riot, you know, on the regular.
Well, and at some level, it's a rejection of the aphorism that the perfect is the enemy of the good, right?
So the perfect is the enemy of the good.
We all of us should be able to recognize that in a complex system, we will not achieve perfection.
That humans are fallible, humans will commit crime.
And therefore, we need a police force.
And not only are humans imperfect, but police are imperfect.
And in any demographic, be they police or right-handers or Bolivians or, you know, short people or whatever it is, there are going to be some people who are great and some people who are not.
And that will be true for police as well.
But the idea that if they can't be perfect, if they cannot get the numbers of errors to zero, then we need to get rid of them entirely.
Yeah.
Gosh, we just keep on coming back here.
And, you know, I think we've been avoiding it more and more because how often can you say the same thing?
Right.
Obviously.
This clearly makes no sense.
It is logic done by people who have no capacity for logic, apparently, or it's just an excuse either way.
Right.
But it's not even that the errors have to be zero.
Right.
Getting the errors to zero can't be done.
Right.
You would have to have such a draconian system in which no crime could be committed, in which the police would have to I don't think it's possible.
I don't care how draconian you go.
You can't get it to zero.
I mean, you could lock everybody in solitary confinement and keep them away from every place in which crime could conceivably happen or something.
But my point is there is no livable life that does not involve errors.
However, this also isn't about errors, right?
We leap to the stage of having riots long before anybody knows if the police made a mistake, right?
And if they had, that's not an invalidation of the concept of policing.
It is not a justification for rioting.
There's some level of error you would expect.
But the fact that there doesn't even need to be an error really tells the tale.
Yes, not only will no errors be tolerated at all, zero tolerance for error, but also zero tolerance for force in response to force.
Like zero tolerance for state-sponsored force In response to street-level force, and violence, and looting, and rioting, and all of these things.
Right, and obviously people who have the capacity to think know that what you're really trying to do is to minimize harm, right?
So there will be some harm done by the police, there will be some harm done by criminals, and what you would like is a system that overall minimizes harm, which does not mean brings it to zero.
That is a utopian and inconceivable outcome.
The fact is there is no, every single instance of anything newsworthy is taken as evidence of what the rioters imagined that they already knew, or as I said before, or it's simply an excuse.
Yeah.
So we began, we got local chaos, but it's not of the protesting or rioting variety.
Nor is it another catquake.
We began to hear inklings just online last night that there was something going on in Portland, and then a good friend of our producer, our now 17, happy birthday last week, Zachary, 17-year-old son, happened to have been coming home from the coast last night, stopped downtown and called Zach and said, hey, the Apple Store appears to be on fire in downtown Portland.
So, we have a few of the videos that that young man took, the friend of our son, who I'm not going to name because we didn't ask if we could.
And then the three of us, Brett, Zach, and I actually went downtown this morning.
And to assess what we were seeing, to assess what had actually happened and, and, uh, and, you know, found some things a little bit different than what you're expecting.
And, uh, and, uh, a lot of things that were pretty reflective of what we've been told we would see.
So we're going to show you some of that as well.
So Zach, would you like to show some of your friend's video?
You can see fire down there.
Again, this is from last night, this is from just after midnight on, it would be April 17th.
Yep.
in Portland.
So if we go, is there sound, Zach?
Okay, so if I can be heard over this, just describing to people who are merely listening, we've just got, you know, street view shots of here's a dumpster that is smoldering closed.
It's probably on fire.
We don't, we can't see that for sure.
We saw that dumpster this morning.
It was definitely burned.
I know, we're going, we're getting there.
Okay.
We're talking about last night.
And then there was at least one more, Zach, unless I missed it.
Okay, I thought there was one showing the dumpster actually outside of the Apple Store on fire.
Okay, so we're now looking at a white screen.
Okay.
So, this looks like a stepping up of the same sorts of riots that we were seeing last summer.
Do we want to look at some other pictures?
Absolutely.
I thought maybe we'd start with signs.
the first thing on my list, Zach, that I sent you?
No, because they're not in the right order.
Okay, why don't you just lead, Zach?
I'm in prep.
All right, so why don't you flip forward here?
All right, so traditional sentiments, all cops are bastards.
Hold on, no, so I really don't want to show these until the end.
So that one there, that one and the next one, for which there was a composite shot that I had wanted to be the one we were showing here, is all one street.
And so we have store closing, everything must go with an entirely boarded up street.
And then if you go back to the last one, you see right next door, Anarchy sign, an ACAB, all cops are bastards, and several other things which are visible in the larger photograph, but not here.
So I want to come back to my other photos, but not now, because I want to show them at the end of what you want to show.
Okay, so Zach, do you want to put up the other set of photos?
All right.
So here, this is exactly adjacent to the Apple Store, and you see something that has become very common here in Portland downtown.
So you've had windows busted up.
They are They have plywood or OSB put over them, and then these spontaneous murals go up.
And the murals are various different kinds.
Some of them are accusations.
Some of them are designed to portray the protesters as peace-loving and creative.
So presumably we're going to show a bunch of these murals, like there are a lot of beautiful murals.
Many of them have high production values.
Yeah, like actually beautiful street art that, you know, if there was a place to put it that wasn't about having smashed windows and so put wood up in its place, I think that there could legitimately be a place for this sort of art in a functioning city.
Yeah, although I would say, you know, you have talented people, but the fact that somebody is able to put up something colorful and load whatever payload into it they wish, and that this somehow speaks for the people of Portland is absolutely appalling.
So even though some of the murals Um, may say things that, uh, one could resonate with.
A lot of them really don't.
And, you know, either you need some sort of authority to decide what sentiments can be represented, even if you were going to have some place where street art could, uh, could be put up by, by citizens.
And then the problem is, all right, who decides what sentiment is going to go where?
Yeah.
So this one, you can't see the third frame of this mural, what it says, and it's also hard to read.
But how it reads, if you're looking straight on, is, if my heart stops turning, will the world do the same?
And this strikes me as like, okay, hearts don't turn.
Forget the basic biological innumeracy or whatever it is.
No worries on that front.
But I feel like the The initiative behind the sentiment is a desire to have, to know that if their heart stops beating, the whole world will stop.
Right.
And it reveals this level of narcissism absent any apparent desire to fix things or to make things right.
It is entirely about me in the moment and destruction.
Right, and this actually goes to the heart of the misunderstanding here, which is, in some sense, the puzzle is about whatever we are continuing into the future, and the attack on these structures makes it very likely that this system and all those who depend on it will not meaningfully continue into the future.
We will be subjugated by someone else or we will be overrun by some civilization that didn't lose its mind.
And so watching people who conflate their own well-being, who basically demand that the world stop if they do, is preposterous.
A reasonable person understands that you are rooting for Your people, whoever they are, irrespective of whether you're present.
If you died tomorrow, do you stop caring about the people that you love?
No, you're rooting for them.
And suddenly they're hobbled by the fact that they don't have your insight or help in in dealing with the challenges of life.
But it doesn't change your sense about whether or not, you know, things matter.
Things matter whether or not you're there.
And so they've lost they've lost sight of this completely.
So, where I was hoping to go to first, though, was just, you know, was the Apple Store on fire?
Did the Apple Store burn to the ground?
I know you have some pictures of that, and I'd like us to show those to respond to.
You know, just social media at the moment is, as usual, after these things happen, completely polarized.
And we were just there, and we actually talked to one of the workers who was working on cleaning up the So, Zach, can you show one of the pictures from the... Yeah, there you go.
It's a little dark, unfortunately, but let's describe it.
So we're looking at the same mural that you were just looking at up close.
There is a dumpster out in front that has clearly been burned.
We can show you that up close in a second.
And then to the right there, you see barricades which are around the Apple Store, which was being renovated.
And by the dumpster is the awning that they apparently set fire, like the dumpster is under the awning, they set fire to that.
The awning's gone, the tree is burned.
And the dumpster was apparently inside the...
inside the Apple Store compound.
As were the bathrooms that were there for the workers to fix the repairs from the previous riots and the bathrooms got burned to the ground.
So anyway, yes, the Apple compound did burn.
The building did not burn to the ground, nor is it very conceivable that it could given what it's built out of, but nonetheless, Apple was targeted here.
I don't have it ready.
I took it but I didn't capture it.
- Do you have a picture of the placard that Apple's got on the outside? - I don't have it ready.
I took it, but I didn't capture it.
But could you show the mural on the Apple Store?
So I wanna describe something here.
So this mural is no longer on the Apple Store, but it is worth understanding its history in order to understand or to put in context the events of last night.
So the Apple Store, I believe, was being renovated for its own reasons and was open for one day post-renovation, and then it was shut down by COVID.
In the aftermath of being shut down by COVID, it was attacked during riots, windows were broken, people broke in, and then Apple decided to put up basically a black wall all around, a plywood wall.
And then on that wall a local artist spontaneously put up a mural focused on George Floyd and the famous line, I can't breathe, and Apple decided to leave the mural in place.
Many other artists then contributed to the mural and ultimately The mural was donated by Apple to Don't Shoot PDX, which is a local police watch group.
Now, currently on the outer fence of the Apple compound, there is a sign.
Heather, you have it.
You want to read it?
Yeah, I thought we were going to show this.
Yes, please.
So it reads, Apple stands with you in the fight for racial and social justice.
Black lives matter.
It's not in those pictures, Zach.
I just sent it to you.
The community artwork has been entrusted to Don't Shoot Portland in support of their mission for social change.
Don't Shoot Portland, a local black-led human rights nonprofit organization, will incorporate the artwork as part of their Children's Art and Social Justice Council programming.
For more information, visit www.dontshootpdx.org.
And there's another one that, I was not the one who photographed it, that's even more sort of, it's again one of these don't hurt me walls.
And so Apple not only is putting money, in the other one they indicate that they're sending, that they're putting money towards these causes and this is the response, right?
So I want to hone that to a slightly sharper point.
Apple, this is your fault.
You did this to us.
You caused this riot.
Now it may be that it would have happened without your help, but it certainly did happen with your help.
And the fact that you are pretending that people attacking your store and you having to put up plywood and that creating an opportunity for a local artist to express a sentiment that I don't think represents us universally, and then you treat this as something that has to be honored, is creating the problem.
And basically, We have, you know, runaway woke capital.
And woke capital has, you know, the back end, the business end, where it does whatever it does financially speaking.
And it has the front end, where it coddles this kind of sentiment in public.
And goddammit, the problem with the Don't Hurt Me Walls Is that what Don't Hurt Me really means is go hurt somebody else.
So Apple, not only did you have this coming because you set us up for it, but the rest of us who did not have it coming got it too as a result of your activity.
Yeah.
And this sort of statement by the corporations, and small businesses, but you know the small businesses have more to lose, have a higher fraction of their livelihood to lose, is creating the sense among people that this is the majority sentiment, that most Portlanders are behind this, right?
And in fact, we were standing there on the corner of the Apple Store downtown this morning and there were a number of people there looking at what had happened and sort of, you know, some of us were talking And a guy drove by, and what he said through his open window was, the vast majority of people in Portland approve of this.
And he was pissed, and a lot of us are pissed legitimately.
But he said this, and then he drove off, his light turned green, he wasn't running away or anything.
But I wanted to say to him, I'm sure that's not true.
I put almost anyone from Portland on this corner and look at what's happening, and look at what has happened, and recognize that anyone who's tried to walk around downtown in the last year, in the last 11 months, 10 months now, and ask them if they approve of this, and mostly they're going to say no.
That doesn't mean that most Portlanders understand the various concerns and reasons that it's happening, but the fact that downtown has become A disaster area in which this could happen.
Any day that it's nice out, expect that there may be, at the best, vandals running around, and that it's increasingly difficult to find police who can do their jobs, in part because they've been massively defunded, in part because many of them have left because their jobs have become worse than thankless, and in part because they've had their hands tied by the city leadership.
Yes, in fact, we have many different entities playing a role that creates the exact conditions that are going to lead to this.
And Zach, can you show the graffiti in the stairway?
Yep, you briefly passed through it.
By the way, yeah.
I don't have it there.
You did.
Oh, I have it in .
Okay, here it is.
So this is just a piece of graffiti.
This is now commonplace in Portland.
What it says is, kill a cop for fun.
And it has a picture of a smiley face underneath.
It is not uncommon to see sentiments like this.
The idea that police are deserving of being murdered.
We also see graffiti like this about Andy Ngo, a journalist... Not recently, but... I believe a journalist was actually assaulted last night, if I understood what I saw on Twitter correctly, a Portland journalist.
But in any case, you have people telling you what they're actually about, right?
This protest, if you were protesting something important, And somebody else in your protest was saying kill cops for fun, then you would distance yourself so that your important point wasn't lost in an obviously crazy point.
And yet that does not happen.
We have the mixture of all of these.
Things together and they result in people being able to find what they want.
Those who want to see these riots sympathetically can find sentiments that they resonate with and those who want to see the whole picture find chaos because it's an incoherent set of statements and frankly anarchism is so much at the root of this.
Anarchists who in the aftermath of you know after protesting and claiming that this was all driven by Donald Trump As soon as Joe Biden won, we saw them attack the Democratic headquarters and proclaim we are ungovernable.
And the answer is, look, you are ungovernable.
The rest of us are not ungovernable.
We wish to be governed well.
And it's not yours to say whether any of us get good government, right?
Good government is essential.
If you don't understand that and you're going to violate the law, then you need to pay the price.
And what we have in this city, Is we have corporations and city government that are coddling these crazy beliefs.
We have businesses that, you know, are regularly trying to get vandals to move on to someone else, which of course puts someone else in the crosshairs.
And then we have... Well, but it's not in the purview of any small business to obliterate the vandals.
You know, that's the government's job.
Right.
It's the government's job.
And the point is, we in Portland, who understand that governance is necessary, are a majority.
Certainly.
Right?
We're not all insane.
And the problem is, it has become hard to say that we need good governance, that we need policing.
It needs to be good.
But yes, we need policing.
No, don't defund.
Don't abolish.
Right?
These things are necessary to a functional Um, society.
And so, what we are now seeing is what happens when you try to appease crazy people who don't understand the basics.
And, you know, we're getting, unfortunately, what we collectively ordered.
Yeah.
And it's, I mean, it's going to get terrible again.
Like, I mean, this is bad enough, but it's going to get terrible again like it was last summer.
In part for the same reasons that it happened last summer, and forget their cover story, forget like, oh, it's going to be the Chauvin trial verdict.
It's going to be this, that, you know, that's all cover story.
Yeah.
It's all cover story.
The fact is, we have a lot of people who are dispossessed, who have no, cannot see a way forward in the world in which they will be productive and interested and interesting.
And whether or not they are conscious of that.
It is a combination of an economy that is not serving people and crazy loads of student debt and credit card debt and many people have been medicated into oblivion so they can't even recognize what their own moods are and they're on their damn phones all the time and they're just stuck in a hellscape from which they cannot escape and now the lockdowns continue.
There are going to be seemingly almost no live events through the Northern Hemisphere summer.
That's two summers in a row with no outlets, no festivals, no concerts, no ability to get together and have fun and brawl and all.
Well, okay.
Guess what we're going to do then?
We're going to do the thing that the health experts have said is reflective of the actual pandemic, which is systemic racism.
These people aren't about systemic racism.
Some of them, originally.
I mean, as you revealed in your conversation with Brittany King, and as you revealed in your conversations with Jeremy Lee Quinn, this is a whole mishmash of people.
But neither you nor I have said about what is happening right now in Portland or has been happening in this last week.
These are protests that became riots.
As we said about what was happening all of last summer, right?
Because those were regular protests.
And for the most part, we didn't think the protests made a ton of sense, but they were good faith.
And some of them, many of them, were actually about, you know, real heartfelt sentiment and desire for real, honest, good change.
But reliably, like clockwork, every night in Portland, they became riots.
And this that's happening right now, this isn't even a pretense.
It's not even pretending to be protests.
So to be clear about it, two things came together last summer, right?
We have a longstanding fringe anarchist movement.
That has been very active in the Pacific Northwest for a long time, all the way WTO and long before that.
Yeah.
So what's that, like 99 or 2001?
One of those two.
Something in that neighborhood.
But it fused with Black Lives Matter last summer in the George Floyd protest era.
And so, you know, for a while it was sort of cloaked in this excuse.
And now, you know, the two things have more or less parted ways And here what we do now is we just skip right to the riot without, you know, any meaningful explanation.
I do want to correct one thing though.
Okay.
You said that it's going to get worse.
It doesn't have to.
It's going to get worse because we are going to do the same thing that leads it to get worse.
The thing that Apple did, which now Apple has been punished for, for coddling this sentiment, right?
That thing results in it getting worse.
Yes.
Treating these crimes lightly, not arresting people when you do arrest them, setting low bail, the fact of the population creating a bail fund in which people who vandalize businesses are then legally supported by the public.
And even frankly, I have to say, Zach, could you put up the picture of the volunteer this morning?
I wanted to do something before that.
That's not a volunteer.
That's not a volunteer.
Neither is that.
There we go.
So this is one of many volunteers who are cleaning up the streets of Portland this morning, as they do reliably.
Can we actually, so I really wanted to finish with that before we go into talking about the schools.
Okay.
Very quickly, can we just do one thing first?
Sure.
Zach, you had in the pictures that you were showing that you said were from me, something that's a picture that said United by Love.
Can you put that up?
Um, so this was outside.
This is, you know, these are the fancy stores in downtown Portland.
And, um, this I think was a Tiffany's store, maybe?
I'm not sure.
I didn't, this, United by Love.
And then the next one, which is right next door.
By the way, the composition on that photo is excellent.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Um, um, the next one should have been, Okay, so the pictures that you've shown, you need to find the pictures of the women's faces that have been vandalized, that were right next to, that were part of the Tiffany store.
I don't know if they're in mine.
I have, I sent it to you.
So I'm going to describe them for those of you listening.
There is an array of photographs.
There we go.
No, that's it.
Those are them.
And this is, yeah, it's Tiffany.
And it's women.
It's white women and women of color.
And right next to this United by Love sign and all of the white women have had their faces X'd out.
Except there's one white woman in profile who they didn't get.
I think they just didn't recognize her as human or something.
It may be how they understood she identifies.
Yeah, probably so.
So United by Love, you say.
So this elite brand, right?
I don't know if I've ever even been in a Tiffany's.
I mostly know of it from the Hemingway.
Someone Hemingway.
Who is it?
The film.
Audrey Hepburn.
Hepburn, not Hemingway.
Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
But United by Love, and then we see that it's only people with skin of a particular color.
And that, I don't know, that reminds me of eras in which there's been no love uniting people at all, and it didn't.
It doesn't, it doesn't strike me as about inclusion or diversity or equity much.
No, no, it's one irony after the other.
Yeah.
So now, um, I had started seeing actually in my pictures, you can show Zach as well.
And I guess dad has some too.
There were all these volunteers, um, showing picture, uh, all these volunteers, uh, picking up trash, um, because our, Sky-high taxes in the city of Portland apparently can't cover trash cleanup after riots.
We have to bring in volunteers, and these volunteers were to a person, you know, seemed lovely, and they were doing work that needed to be done, and why?
Why are we using volunteers?
Not only why are we using volunteers, but there's something about the way Portland cannot prevent a riot, but it is right on cleaning up and trying to minimize the appearance of the riot the day after.
And this has been going on, you know, for, you know, since the beginning of the George Floyd Riots last year and we could smell solvent some places We were walking where they had already cleaned up a bunch of the graffiti right this morning, right?
They they have a Mechanism for cleaning this stuff up and the point is what part of you doesn't understand that it is your obligation to prevent this and yes clean up that which you cannot prevent but you know
Doing whatever spending whatever including the labor of people who are not being paid to clean up, you know Presumably Portland's best citizens volunteers who are willing to make downtown nicer in such a terrible circumstance Are paying the cost of Portland's worst citizens who frankly have told us what they want to do They want to burn it all down.
They don't believe in any of this stuff They don't believe that there are rules that can work.
They've told us they don't get it and Right?
And so what we're going to do is we're going to leave the cost to, you know, the most benevolent among us to deal with the vandals rather than, you know, support the police in doing good police work and arresting people who harm Portland and its citizens.
I mean, it's just so obvious.
Again, this should not be, we should not be required to say this, but supporting the police and their ability to do good police work.
Can and I believe should include restricting some of what the police are currently doing, which they shouldn't be doing, and actually getting mental health professionals to be able to respond to actual mental health calls as opposed to having police be first responders for all manner of calls, including ones For which they're neither trained, nor is it the best use of their time.
So, unfortunately, that proposal has often been trotted out as a replacement for police.
And that's insane, just as, frankly, it's insane to have police doing all of the work, some of which would be better done by mental health counselors, right?
I don't know, this is not my purview, but clearly there are at least two, and probably many more, sorts of work There's a lot of work that needs to be done and at the moment the police force is being forced to do all of it and of course now it's being forced to do all of it on a shoestring budget with hemorrhaging of the police force because of course good police are running away.
Of course they are.
Yeah.
Really they're in a no-win situation.
And you know, I've talked to police about the fact that people are literally calling for their heads, burning them in effigy, etc.
And you know, I must say they appear to be unaffected by this and just treat it as, oh, yes, that happens.
On the other hand, you know, what a terrible thing to have this job and to have good policing declared impossible and all police declared guilty by a bunch of people who know nothing, right?
Yeah.
That's just, it's an appalling way to treat an essential function of society.
And, you know, the disaster here is just too predictable.
So it's not soon enough, but one thing we need is a candidate for mayor who's not even worse than Ted Wheeler.
Because, you know, we collectively voted Ted Wheeler back in after a summer of demonstrably appalling governance, because the person who was closest in the polls was literally a member of Antifa.
Member, you know, who knows.
A supporter.
A supporter of Antifa, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the problem though is, I agree, we desperately need a mayor who isn't insane.
And frankly, I think Ted Wheeler has behaved very, very stupidly.
But I don't think he's an idiot.
He could get the message and start behaving reasonably.
Of course he could.
But one way or the other, either he wakes up to what's going on and figures out what must be done.
Or he doesn't and he has to be replaced by somebody else, but you wouldn't want the job, right?
If you had that job... Of course police are running away.
Of course the good, you know...
Right.
The people who could do the job don't want it.
And, you know, my point is at some level this is also on the citizens of Portland who are bending over backwards to see reason where there is none.
Right?
Yes.
And, you know, I wouldn't want the job of mayor because I would worry that doing exactly the right thing would just be punished.
Right?
That doing the right thing because it would be portrayed as authoritarian or fascist or whatever it would be portrayed as Would result in, you know, every good bit of governance going thoroughly punished.
Yeah.
So, following up on, you know, like I said, the taxes are very, very high in Portland.
And in a functional system, that's okay.
We are not usually in the position of wondering Where are all those tax dollars going?
But right now we certainly are.
Yeah.
Especially when you've got literally volunteers doing trash cleanup after riots.
And then this is something we were going to talk about last week, but we talked about other things instead.
Meanwhile, the schools in Portland, which, you know, schools are always a big piece of a city budget.
They are working hard on things like changing their names and their mascots.
And so many of you will have heard this, that the Wilson High School, named for the president, has recently been named the Ida B. Wells High School.
As it turns out, Ida B. Wells is a heroic and interesting and valuable historic figure.
I think that any of these name changes, when they are coming now under threat basically, are a mistake.
I also never saw any argument for why Wilson was a horrible person, except he didn't live right now and abide by all of the woke creed, right?
But we see, even if you do that, you're not good enough, right?
So, the school changed their name back, I can't remember, maybe February of this year, something like that, unofficial, January.
And then they felt that they had to change their mascot as well.
And they actually put out to people in the community a number of possibilities.
And the possibility that won was the Evergreens.
Yeah.
You want to pick this up?
No, no, I just, um, we didn't talk about this last week?
No.
Okay, um, so, all right, the Evergreens.
I do another podcast in my head, and I think we did talk about it last week, but, um, but on this podcast we didn't, and, um, so yes, the Evergreens, uh, won, which caused, uh, you know, a small shudder in our family, because Yeah, I know that when I had the opportunity to vote for Masked Gun, and I honestly don't remember what I voted for, but I saw Evergreens and I was just like, oh hell no, come on, let's not.
I don't need to be constantly reminded of Evergreens, right?
Right.
But it won.
But it won.
Okay.
A member of the now Ida B. Wells community pointed out that Ida B. Wells was a famous anti-lynching activist, and therefore somehow evergreen trees can't be mascots because, I don't know, something instead of logic.
Too dumb for fiction.
Too dumb for fiction.
Is what it is.
It is too dumb for fiction.
If you wrote this into a book, a good editor would say, sorry, no, not plausible.
That doesn't work.
The association with trees?
Any trees?
With a black woman who was an activist in an era when lynching was happening, and therefore, of course she was anti-lynching.
I mean, like, Aren't we all?
But also, of course she was.
Can we also not use wooden bookcases?
Where does it stop?
It's just too really absurd.
It's too absurd.
That happened a week or so ago, the evergreen mascot kerfuffle, and of course they've caved.
They've said, oh, we're going back to the drawing board.
We're going to consider some other mascot choices because it can't be evergreens.
And then yesterday we got these things in the mail.
Apparently we need to license our cats.
We do.
I kid you not!
We need to license our cats.
Even if we're going to carry them concealed?
Especially if Yeah, so there are fee options here.
We can pay for one year or two years or three years at a time for the licensing of our cats, for which we will receive.
I did go on the website and find out what we'll receive for this.
It's not insane.
It's about animal control.
If we do license our cats, maybe they'll return them to us if they get lost, although I think that would require that they wear tags.
If they ever met cats, cats slip their tags.
Anyway, Um, on the same day that Portland governance once again fails to keep a freaking violent mob from destroying a bunch of downtown and then employs a citizen army of volunteers to help do the cleanup, they're asking us for money to license our cats.
Yes.
Our cats.
To license our cats.
Our cats.
Right.
Who are anarchists, so in some ways it would make sense, but... They're libertarians.
Yeah.
You're probably right about that.
You're right about that.
But yeah, there is, I mean, I have to say it's very hard not to juxtapose these two facts.
Especially, I mean, let's draw the connection a little tighter on the effect of the failure to enforce the law and punish the guilty for destruction downtown.
It is, of course, closing businesses, as you saw.
There are shuttered businesses across downtown.
And yes, some of that is COVID, but a lot of that has to do with you have to be crazy to start a business, especially in downtown Portland at the moment.
Right.
There are roving bands of maniacs.
And the only way, apparently, not to get vandalized is to, you know, proclaim things in your window that satisfy them or something.
And that won't work either.
Yeah, long term, that's not going to work.
But anyway, the point is, By treating these claims, the claims of the rioters as sacred and therefore coddling the behavior that they engage in as they ostensibly advance these aims.
We are killing the tax base of Portland, right?
The businesses of Portland are going to flee, and that means there will be less tax money with which to do nice things for the people of Portland, with which to build out Portland so it is a more vibrant city with more jobs that would be helpful to people.
And so if you think that the result of destroying businesses in Portland is going to be good for people who are historically oppressed, you don't understand how things work.
So The idea of, yes, we are going to nickel and dime the citizens of Portland.
We're going to demand more and more tax money as we behave in a way that is going to drive businesses out, which is going to lower the salaries and eliminate the careers of people who live here, force them to move to other cities.
So you're going to be left with an underemployed city, and then you're going to squeeze it for taxes.
That's a death spiral for a city.
And yet, somehow, nobody in city government can figure this out.
So yes, we will license those cats when you start enforcing the law in a way that is colorblind and ideology blind and species blind and all of those things.
You're looking at me that way again.
I meant the first three of two of those things.
Yeah, not species blind.
I don't think we want enforcement of law that is species blind.
No.
Although that may be on the list of demands from the Yahoo's downtown at some point.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Are we done with Portland for today?
Are we done with Portland?
We are not quite done with Portland, but it will come back as we discuss our next topic, I have a feeling.
Okay.
Okay, really?
The numbers.
We're going to talk about 3, and 90, and 13, and 2.5 billion.
I have girded my loins for the 2.5 billion.
Okay.
I don't know where Portland shows up in here, in these numbers.
Oh, okay.
Yes, yes, I remember now.
So, just briefly.
Okay, three comes up this week.
These are just numbers from the news this week.
The CEO of Pfizer has said that it is likely that people are going to need a third shot, a booster shot of the Pfizer COVID vaccine a year after getting the first two and that there may just need to be an annual routine of shots.
Apparently the J&J guy, I don't know if it was the CEO or not, said something similar as well with regard to their shot.
So, you know, of course this raises the question, like maybe this is just going to be like the flu shot, where the virus is evolving out from under us as we know it to be.
And so boosters are required to get a closer fit to the actual virus.
The people who are developing the vaccine can get a closer fit to the actual virus that is maximally in circulation at the time.
But, you know, it does raise the question for me.
It raises so many questions.
Do any of the vaccine manufacturers actually have a good idea of, like, what a closer fit to any of the current variants would be?
Or do we have any way of knowing what variants are actually going to be maximally circulating?
So, let's separate two things.
Traditional booster shots are necessary not because of the change of the virus, but because of the degradation of the immunological memory.
You're right, I used booster.
I used booster incorrectly, although the Pfizer CEO did as well.
That does not breed confidence.
Yeah, I was using his language, but you're right.
But anyway, I don't want to nitpick.
I just want to say there are two reasons, you know.
So the flu shot that you supposedly should get every year is about the fact that it's a different It's a new vaccine.
Yes, because it's a new flu.
Right.
And that seems like so that's what may be happening here with COVID.
Well, both things are likely to happen here with COVID.
OK, so on the one hand, we have the very frightening prospect that the way that these vaccines target the spike protein is going to cause these escape mutants to dominate and that we will be chasing.
We're basically just signed up for an arms race.
And that we are learning of the nature of that arms race, that this is, you know, I don't know what... So why aren't both things always happening, though?
I mean, again, we're going to go back to virus origins, and, you know, maybe this is evolving so rapidly in such an unpredictable way precisely because it is not like any other virus we've seen before.
But, you know, why doesn't say needing to get a rabies booster every 10 years if your titers are low, for instance?
Not about both increasing your titers and also with new variants of rabies that has evolved in those 10 years.
In the rabies case, it's easy.
I think, because rabies is so very rare, that what you have is a virus that doesn't have a large canvas on which to paint, and for which there is not a lot of pressure for it to evolve, since such a tiny percentage of any population has rabies.
The point is, rabies, traditional rabies, always has naive animals to infect, so it doesn't get an advantage for change.
So potentially, the more common the pathogen, the more difficult it will be to make a vaccine that is targeted and targeted for a while.
And you know, maybe even I actually have no idea, but you know, I've been tracking for decades, like hoping for the malaria vaccine, like really, really hoping for it.
It may be an mRNA vaccine and I don't know, but somehow that one is super elusive in a way that other mosquito vector diseases like yellow fever have not been.
Yep.
So I think two things are true.
One, there is a large landscape of immunological understanding, and then there's a large landscape of what we don't know.
I mean, I will not cite Donald Rumsfeld in this case, but his wisdom is relevant here with respect to what we do and don't know.
It turns out there was some far more ancient philosophical thing that he was actually riffing on when he talked about the known-knowns and the known-unknowns and the unknown-knowns and the unknown-unknowns.
Well, the thing is I'm a little addicted to the cringe when you invoke Donald Rumsfeld as a source of wisdom.
The evil Yogi Berra or something like that.
But in any case, so we may or may not be dealing with both a booster situation here where your immunological memory decays over time and therefore you need a booster to remind your immune system, hey, this thing is still out there.
And we are almost certainly dealing with this case where we are putting intense pressure on the spike protein by targeting it very narrowly with a vaccine that focuses only on that and indeed only on the original variant of the spike protein, which basically means that any way in which the spike protein can change that is electromagnetically dissimilar from the original spike protein Gives it an advantage in hiding from the immune system.
And so, voila, there's your arms race.
Yeah, yep, there's your arms race.
All right, so that's three.
Let's actually skip to 90 before we go into 13, because it's more in keeping with three.
So 90 is the percent chance that if you self-administer one of the now widely available home COVID tests in England, and you get a positive result, that that positive is false.
90% false positive rate of these self-administered tests that are now being widely used, widely distributed as if I think it was April 9th, and which the results of which are being used to decide whether or not you have to quarantine and thus lose, you know, work, school, life, everything, opportunities.
So, ah boy.
That sounds really cocked up.
This is British, right?
Is that British?
Yes.
Okay.
It doesn't sound British to me.
It's because I deliberately used my most American accent before it.
It's mighty cocked up!
If I'd said that, you would have spotted right away that it was a Britishism.
There's an article in The Guardian on this, and I'll have you put it up in just a second, Zach, but we discussed many episodes ago, and I did not have time to go back and figure out which episode or episodes it was in, the risks of false positives in testing.
I think it was when the first I don't remember what exactly the context was, but we were talking about how as disease prevalence falls, the proportion of people who are tested who receive false positives goes up.
And so you have a situation, especially in the parts of England where this is taking place, Where background rates are understood to be quite low, where the false positives are particularly high, and it's having therefore, you know, in exactly the place where the disease is the least risk, you have the highest proportion of people who are suffering costs that they should not be forced to suffer, especially after 13 months of this.
So let's just give people the logic that makes it easy to deduce.
Okay.
In a case where you're testing for a disease that is, if you were to test for smallpox, right, 100% of positives are false, right?
Because there's no smallpox anymore.
So as the disease prevalence falls, the percentage of those who get a positive that is false, it goes up for this weird reason.
So anyway, what does this do to us in the case where you've got a low prevalence of COVID in Britain and a test that is now being... How frequently do you say it's being administered?
Well, here, I'll read you two paragraphs from this piece.
In one email, Ben Dyson, an Executive Director of Strategy at the Health Department and one of Health Secretary Matt Hancock's advisors, stressed the quote, fairly urgent need for decisions on the point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing.
So this is basically expected that the entire population is doing this asymptomatic testing reliably in order to get back to normal, which we all want.
Quote, on 9th of April, the day everyone in England was able to order twice-weekly lateral flow device tests, these are LFD tests, Dyson wrote, as of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in, say, London, has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test, potentially as low as 10% on an optimistic assumption about specificity, or as low as 2% on a more pessimistic assumption.
So that rate of false positives is from 75% to 98% on these tests that they want people to be doing all the time.
And of course, you've got one person who is now doing this twice a week for many weeks.
is not, does not even have just, you know, if they get a positive, they are increasing their chances of getting any positive and their chances of that positive being false are 75 to 98 percent depending.
And because they're having to take more and more tests, the chances of them getting a positive are higher.
Right.
Now, there are a number of things that we want to know in order to figure out whether a reasonable policy could be rescued out of a test that's this bad.
Right.
So one thing you want to know is, does one false positive predict other false positives?
In the same person.
Right.
If it was true that any given test could throw a false positive but then if you took a second one it would be likely I think the answer to that, that it would be likely to not give a false positive, I think that is likely the case because they're talking about, it sounds like they're talking about doing that, but of course then you've got double the number of tests.
Well, no, you don't have double the number of tests.
You have to follow up with anyone who's got a positive.
You have to follow up and you traumatize people who, oh my God, I got a positive COVID test.
Do I have COVID?
So anyway.
There's also the question that on the good side, the reason that you might deploy a test this bad is that if the false negative rate is low, then those with COVID will be in the sample of those who test positive, even though most of those people are negative.
So you could, if your point is we have to stop COVID from spreading and the point is within the small number of people who get a positive test, most of them don't have COVID, but everybody who has COVID is in that sample too, then you could behaviorally shift things around those people.
Absolutely.
And it could function.
But you would want to be very clear with the public.
Don't freak out when you get a positive test.
Take another one, assuming that a second one is not predicted to give you another false positive.
And if the second one is negative, you don't have it, which would be true if the false negative rate was low.
So you could rescue a policy out of this.
But on its own, that's just a shocking number of false positives.
Yeah, it sure is.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
The next number we want to talk about is 13.
Yes.
Should I start?
Yeah.
Let me actually find... I forgot to pull up... There is of course discussion.
My computer is not working now.
Now of court packing, right, of the Biden administration.
Here we go.
No, okay, never mind.
Yeah, this is not the one.
Maybe it is the one.
Okay.
Yeah, I guess you can show this.
So Robbie George, who is a friend of ours, extraordinary man, who is a professor at Princeton of law, tweets this week, as long as people understand that court packing is a performance, not a proposal, we'll all be fine.
Parentheses, performances masquerading as proposals are anything but unusual in American politics, and indeed in politics generally.
The important thing is to see them for what they are.
So I saw this yesterday, and actually he'd done one earlier, which is what I was trying to pull up, but I'm not finding it.
And I breathed a sigh of relief, and I was like, oh boy, you know, if anyone knows, it's Professor George, and I sure hope he's right.
And I made contact with him to see on what basis he was making that claim, and we got on the phone with him yesterday and spoke with him for a while.
I don't, you know, neither of us, Robbie George is a constitutional scholar, and we are not.
But in very brief, and you will correct me as I make errors, and then we apologize for any errors that remain, the Constitution only mentions the Supreme Court.
Congress needs to create all the other courts.
So the only court mentioned by the Constitution is the Supreme Court.
The other courts are implied.
Their existence is implied, it says, and other courts as may be necessary or something along those lines.
I think that's right.
Yep.
The Supreme Court has explicit jurisdiction in conflicts between states and between foreign ministers, but does not have roving jurisdiction in all things of the states.
And the original number of Supreme Court justices was not specified by the Constitution.
Congress had to decide that, and they could have chosen anything.
They could have chosen one.
They could have chosen 800.
They could have chosen anything.
They chose five.
There was no building for the Supreme Court at first.
They were itinerant.
They rode circuit around the country doing what they did.
Well, when in Washington they met in the Congress, but often they rode circuit, which meant they went out to the other And I think in part because this work was, you know, was on horseback going out into the countryside, that basically five pretty quickly didn't seem like it was enough.
What was invoked was sort of issues of workload.
That number went up to 9 and actually fluctuated, I think, like 9, 10, 9, 8, around there, and then kind of stuck at 9 pretty early.
I can't remember when.
Yeah, sometime in the 1800s, but I'm not sure exactly when.
I don't think we need to.
Do you want to talk about all this stuff about judicial review and Dred Scott?
No, I don't think we need to.
So basically then fast forward to FDR.
So FDR and his New Deal era laws were being repeatedly struck down.
So we had nine Supreme Court justices at this point and his New Deal era laws were being repeatedly struck down by the Supreme Court and this pleased him not at all.
Unlike today, when it's pretty transparent and a government will say, actually we just don't like the tenor of the court and so we're going to add more justices, the explanation for why FDR felt that there were more justices needed
Work is very demanding, and the justices are very old, and so we're going to make new spots in the court for everyone over 70 and a half years old, 70 and six months, who's on the court, and that turns out to have been six of them.
just like that, FDR was suddenly going to get 15 justices where before there were nine, he was going to get to a point six of them.
And boy, was that going to change the tenor of the court?
Because there were, I think, if I remember, there were like four dedicated conservatives and three dedicated liberals.
And there were two who would go either way.
And in fact, it was Justice Owen Roberts, who was one of those two, who started to switch his votes.
And again, we're not going to get into some of the details here, such that FDR did not end up going through with his plan to basically pack the court.
But the fact is that that court packing proposal by FDR was, in many legal scholars' views, maybe the second biggest black eye for him.
He did a tremendous amount of good, I would argue, for sure.
And then there were a couple things that he did that were really quite egregious, and the top item on that list was the decision for the internment of the Japanese, the Japanese Americans, on which side there are a number of people you wouldn't have expected to be.
And then, you know, by Professor George's estimations and apparently other legal scholars as well, this attempt to pack the court was really the second most egregious thing that FDR did, because it would be the end of judicial independence.
If any president can do that, then you do not have an independent judiciary.
And that's just, that's the end.
You know, that's the end of our system of governance.
In the end, because it will create an arms race in which each new administration adds members to the court to change its decision making effectively.
It makes it a subordinate of the executive branch.
And so that's the danger we're in here.
This is part of why some of us are so alarmed to hear this proposal.
You know, it's not that this wasn't floated at the end of the Trump administration.
As you know, something that as a proposal during the election by Biden, but to hear it actually offered as a policy shift is jarring.
And I must say, I also had the reaction.
I was very troubled in hearing that they would seek new seats on the Supreme Court.
And I was very relieved to hear relieved and surprised to hear Robbie George say that he thought this was never going to happen.
Yeah, I mean his position was basically Everyone in Congress knows this history that I just told you.
Yeah.
And there will be a lot of performative stuff going on, and people will trade votes behind the scenes in order to be able to say that they did or they did not vote for this thing.
But he's a conservative, so I think he said something like, even the Democrats know that this would be the end of judicial independence and therefore cannot happen.
The Democrats know, and a few Democrats in Congress are too smart to let it happen.
That doesn't mean that there aren't Democrats who would do this.
There certainly are.
But the point is, you need all the Democrats to support this proposal.
And there are enough Democrats who understand the hazard of this and do not, you know, Both would prevent it because it's the right thing to do and also don't want responsibility for destroying the independence of the judiciary.
And so they won't.
And so Professor George's point was the vote might end up being close because to the extent that people know it's going to fail, they can get in and signal for free.
But that it will it will fail and he said he could be wrong, but that he doesn't, but that this looks like a proposal that is being offered for virtue signaling value and not as a serious proposal and that you can tell because in part the committee that has been established to look into this.
Yeah, I think he said it has 36 people on it.
I remember being co-chair of a committee to find a new provost, which the president of the college, not George Bridges, put 17 people on.
And I was like, you just don't want us to succeed.
What is wrong with you?
Right?
This one has 36 people.
And?
So Dr. George said, look, it's too big.
They made a committee that can't work.
And what's more, they put conservatives on it.
And not only did they put conservatives, but they didn't put brain dead conservatives.
They put smart conservatives on there.
So anyway, they've set it up to fail, which, OK, if that's true, it's still it's a despicable proposal.
But we can breathe a sigh of relief that it's not actually going to happen.
Yeah.
So let's see.
So we're going to get caricatured as right-wingers who want a conservative court.
And we're citing a conservative law professor in order to support our contention that this would be a bad idea.
How do you deal with the caricature?
Or do you just not?
Well, I'm in a tough spot here.
I have a feeling you are, too.
That's why I bring it up.
I will speak for myself.
I am concerned about the number of important properties which govern us, some of which are official governance properties like the Executive Branch and the Congress, but others unofficially govern us, you know, Silicon Valley, for example.
I'm concerned about the degree to which runaway left-wing thought owns these important structures and that it is the failure of anything to credibly oppose these wrong beliefs that is putting us in such danger.
So whereas I would not under ordinary circumstances prefer a conservative court, I think I would not prefer a conservative court, although there's an argument that even if you're
A radical like me, that you want a restraining force, and it might be that the court is the place for conservatism, but at the moment, with this runaway, uninvestigated, team blue, left leaning stuff, you need some force that can say no, and really the only one left is the Supreme Court.
At this point, you know, there's nothing wrong with talking to a conservative.
Robbie George is a great guy and he has a very deep understanding of the issues in play.
And he differs with us somewhat on values, but it's not like I don't respect his perspective or feel any shame at all in talking to him.
He's the person I would go to first to understand anything in this realm.
But it is also the case that the court packing proposal is dangerous.
The idea that it is a remedy is preposterous, right?
It is nakedly political.
And at this moment, if we have, you know, if there was ever an argument for a conservative court, this is the moment that we need such a thing.
And you know, I say that with full understanding that there are certain questions that the court may rule on in which You know, we might get decisions that are very troubling to those of us on the left.
But nonetheless, that may be the price we have to pay to have any branch of government that is capable of restraining the out-of-control forces that have taken control of all things governance.
Yeah, we have lost in too many places a loyal opposition, right?
And this harkens back also to what I was invoking about what's happened in Portland.
That in the last election, which was also a mayoral election here in Portland, we actually had to vote for the guy who helped create, helped facilitate at that point, what would it have been, five months of protests that reliably became riots and made our beautiful downtown a disaster zone.
We had to vote for him because the person running against him was farther to the left.
This isn't the left I recognize.
Farther to the anarchist.
Farther to the destroy everything, burn it all down, all cops are bastards.
It's hard to imagine.
It's impossible really to imagine a Republican candidate for mayor in Portland getting anywhere, but we need two sides to the degree that there are two legitimate sides.
And of course, you can frame these sides across all sorts of axes, but we need for any given set of issues there to be a vibrant and lively set of people on the other side who are allowed to speak and who wield some power so that they can push back.
And we don't have that in Portland.
And we largely don't have that in the Democratic Party.
And we don't have that among corporate CEOs largely.
We don't have that in Silicon Valley.
We don't have that in Hollywood.
We don't have that in the media.
We don't have that in academia.
And this is not the left that you and I grew up with.
This is not a left that we stand by and are proud of.
And so, you know, it's therefore even more clear to us how much we need opposing forces, whether or not you agree with those opposing forces, because their existence itself is what's necessary.
So, I have a little rubric around this, which is… Of course you do.
So there's, you know, there's a reason that I've shown on the podcast before my political compass test, which has me really far over to the left and really far over to the libertarian.
So lower left hand.
Anti-authoritarian and not right.
And very far left.
There's a reason I land there, right?
And it's because of values and beliefs that I actually do hold.
But it does not mean that I think the left is correct and it would be better off if the right simply disappeared.
I know this not to be the case, right?
The point is you have a dynamic tension between the instinct towards progress to make things better, Which, if left unopposed, always treads into territory where it creates unintended consequences and it does harm.
And the impulse to preserve what functions, which, if unopposed, becomes stifling, right?
Becomes stingy and stifling and it doesn't accomplish lots of things that could be accomplished.
So what you want is a force pushing in the direction of making things better and a force holding its feet to the fire and making sure it doesn't propose dumb things that get out of control, right?
It's the tension between those two things that makes the system work.
And my sense is anybody on either side who thinks we'd be better off if the other side disappeared has already told us they don't understand anything about governance and they can be safely ignored.
That's it right there.
That deserves to be shouted from the rooftops.
Anyone on either side who thinks we'd be better off if the other side disappeared has told us already that they know nothing about how things work, and they don't deserve to be listened to.
It's really important and you can always detect this anytime any party, whether it's the fucking Nazis or the Democrats who starts thinking or dreaming about one party rule and what it's going to do now that it's finally decisively defeated the opposition, right?
That is a dangerous force, and it has to be opposed.
So no shame whatsoever in talking to honorable conservatives, and the interesting thing is you will find universally... Oh, I don't... Anyone who says that you're a problem for talking to people, I'm not interested in responding to that.
That was not the caricature that I was talking about.
It was the caricature of, you know, you're concerned about the expansion of the Supreme Court.
Well, then you must love all of the people who've recently been put on it.
We're actually haven't even spoken to that at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in any case, people on both sides who get it recognize the importance of the tension.
And I would just say the final capstone on this is, this is me speaking in riddles, I guess, but Um, I'm a liberal who wants to live in a society so good that I get to be a conservative.
And the point of, the point about this is, if you're actually fighting for a kind of progress that's achievable, then having attained that progress, you don't want to keep going in the direction of progress for its own sake.
So... Yeah, no, I mean, just think...
Many people on the left think they're environmentalists, and another word for an environmentalist is a conservationist.
Conservationists and conservatives share that root of wanting to conserve something that exists.
If you actually don't think you can ever attain what you're trying to do, then you need to stop breaking stuff in our presence and let us create good things.
Yeah.
And if you really think that the good things that exist are not worth conserving, then what universe are we in?
That doesn't make any sense.
It's incoherent.
Yeah, we're in a universe of children throwing a tantrum because they're not happy and they don't know why.
Right.
And you know, again, I think we have to be fair.
At some level, part of the reason that we have so many people eager to burn it all down, people who do not understand what would happen if we burned it all down, Is because society has failed to provide meaningful opportunities for large numbers of people.
It's drugged them when, you know, the real problem was that we under-invested in, you know, schooling and other such things.
And failed to understand what children are and what development is.
Right, and we've allowed markets to deliver toxic toys to all of us that have deranged people who could otherwise have, you know, learned to think clearly.
So anyway, it's not like there isn't some problem that these kids throwing a tantrum in the street and burning down businesses with no understanding of what world they are inviting.
You know, something created that force, and it didn't start with these people.
But you do have to discipline people who have decided to destroy that which they could not have built.
Yeah, that's right.
All right, we're done with 13.
Oh, did you want to show a picture?
Yeah, as long as you have a nine.
Yeah, let's go.
Well, it was 13, but it's going to be nine.
So, Zach, will you show the Ninth Circuit So in our walk around downtown Portland this morning, the three of us, Brett Sack and me, we ran across the Ninth Circuit Court here in Portland.
Yeah, it's actually one block from the Apple Store on Pioneer Square.
Here you go.
So, you know, this is not my favorite picture from the lot, but nonetheless, here we have the door to the Ninth Circuit.
And it is, of course, boarded up because in Portland you wouldn't want to have glass on the ground floor because, you know, that could invite rioting.
Beautiful city.
Yeah.
So, anyway, the irony of this, of course, is that those who are focused on oppression Should be standing around the Ninth Circuit, shoulder to shoulder, protecting it against violence, because courts are absolutely the best tool we've got.
And it's not to say that courts haven't made serious errors, right?
You know, in talking to Robbie George yesterday, you know, we talked about Dred Scott, for example.
Courts make errors, but on balance, you know, it's like seatbelts, right?
Do seatbelts kill a few people?
They do.
People, you know, go into the water and they can't escape their car.
But in general, when you click the seatbelt, you just made yourself way safer because the net effect of seatbelts is so positive.
Well, the net effect of courts on the, you know, rights and opportunities of the oppressed is wildly positive.
And yet here you have, you know, hoodlums attacking the Ninth Circuit and the Apple Store and basically anything that's standing they wish to reduce to rubble.
And it tells you they don't understand anything about what's good for the people they claim to be advocating for.
Yeah.
All right.
2.5 billion is our next number.
It's our final number before we talk a little bit about lizards and a little bit about coyotes.
Do you want to take a guess?
You're just, you're synesthetically terrified at the moment.
By 2.5 billion.
2.5 billion is the number of people on Earth who understand that helium and hydrogen have mass even though they will rise rather than fall towards the Earth.
You think 2.5 billion?
How many people do we have?
7.5 billion?
Yeah, 7.5 to 8.
You think a third of the Earth's population knows that helium and hydrogen have mass?
I think that's high.
I think you're high.
Well, I'm not, but no, you're right.
I'm sorry.
That's probably high.
Okay.
No, in fact, the number 2.5 billion is the number of people who know that insects are animals.
Mmm.
Yeah, I wish that number was higher.
I hope it's that high.
Sure.
Yeah.
That still seems high, probably.
Really?
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
No, I think it seems just about right.
No, because really it's just got to be the number of the educated and the uneducated, both of which will grasp that these have to be animals, and it's the sort of educated who will miss it, right?
I don't know.
I don't know.
So this week, this showed up a bunch of places and I think frankly a lot of them corrected it.
And the only headline that I recovered was from CNN which proclaimed, how many T-Rex were there?
Billions it turns out!
And there were all these headlines this week that were like, 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes once roamed the Earth.
And I looked at that first and I'm like, what?
What?
What are they talking about?
Now, if it had been Stegosaurus, you wouldn't have had this reaction, right?
Of course I would have.
You would have.
Stegosaurus?
Yeah.
Yes.
I hope I'm right about what a stegosaurus is.
A stegosaurus is a big herbivore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
But 2.5 billion is a lot of animals.
So, I mean, precisely because it's sort of 2.5 billion is this number that's close enough to the number of humans on Earth, that it's a number that although it's actually pretty hard to grasp for just about everyone, because it's kind of close, you know, it's about a third of the number of humans on Earth right now, it's a number that most people can sort of get a sense of.
There are as many T-Rexes on earth as there are people?
That seems improbable.
So the actual research... Here we go, Zach, if you just show this briefly.
Absolute Abundance and Preservation Rate of Tyrannosaurus Rex, published by Marshall et al in this week's Science.
Estimating Dinosaur Abundance.
Here we have, from the abstract, we estimate that its abundance at any one time was about 20,000 individuals.
That makes sense.
That it persisted for about 127,000 generations.
Multiply.
Which is a lot.
It's a lot.
Actually, it's about 2.5 million years.
And that the total number of T. rex that ever lived was therefore about 2.5 billion individuals.
And then they go into what the fossil recovery rate is estimated to be and such.
Okay.
That makes some sense.
And pretty much restricted to North America.
20,000 T-Rexes at a time in North America is pretty big, actually.
That's a sizable population.
But I can understand that.
That's plausible.
How many bears do you think there are in North America right now?
I actually have no idea.
I just thought of that question.
I don't know, but probably far fewer than 20,000 at this point.
Oh, no.
North America?
Yeah, you think there's more than that?
Oh, a lot more than that.
Really?
Yeah.
Boy, am I going to get myself in trouble, but yeah, there's got to be a lot more than that.
I mean, if we're including, you know, far reaches of Alaska and Canada.
I still include Canada and North America.
I'm willing to do that, yes.
So do I. I'm very traditional though.
I mean, I'm a liberal in many regards, but I'm conservative with respect to regarding Canada as... A geographic conservative.
As part of North America.
Now, I'm very progressive in regarding it as a 51st state.
We've lived places where we can almost see the Canada.
Yes.
Yeah.
You just stepped on the joke where I pissed off the entire tiny population of Canada by claiming that it was really the 51st state.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I do want you to piss off the entire population of Canada.
They're nice about it, even when pissed off.
So nice.
Unduly nice.
Yeah.
So anyway, there wasn't an actual innumeracy going on here, but these headlines.
And again, unfortunately, I think that so many people were like, what are you guys doing?
What are you talking about?
That they corrected them because no one actually, I think, reported wrongly about the actual research, which is cool.
And it's lots of estimates and maybe the estimates are wrong.
And they actually, I think, say, I don't remember now in the paper, like maybe off by an, it might be an order or two Magnitude in either direction.
Maybe it was just an order of magnitude in either direction, which would mean, you know, 250 million to 25 billion T-Rexes.
But the screaming headlines clearly made it seem like some scientists had just declared that A third as many humans as currently are on Earth once roamed the Earth at the same time, T-Rexes.
And that's insane.
It's insane.
But I do want to point out, less insane if these had been herbivores.
Not gigantic herbivores!
Well, I should look up how big a Stegosaurus is.
They're gigantic!
Okay, I was looking for a... What did they rename the...
I can't remember.
Neither of us are ever dinosaur geeks.
Yeah, not a dinosaur geek.
I like birds, but... We must have been going for a while now, yeah.
But in any case, you know, how many cows are there in North America?
Well, they've had our help.
Right, but my point is there's also a landscape out there, you know, there were a lot of bison.
I don't think there were 2.5 billion bison.
No, there weren't.
Well, there aren't, you know, there are 300 million Americans.
So, you know, just correct for scale.
But my point is a large number is plausible if you're talking about a moderate or small-sized herbivore.
The idea that your top carnivore could possibly attain such a number is insane.
Yes.
So that is also true, but this number is so out of scale that I didn't even get there.
I didn't even get to being like, but it's a top carnivore.
It's like, that number simply makes no sense.
Right.
No, and you reported the number to me with a straight face to see if I was paying attention.
And, you know, it was like a half a second of like, what?
What?
What number did you just say?
But that was partially predicated on the fact that, you know, not only a carnivore, but a huge one.
Yeah.
Right.
The biggest.
And so little tiny arms.
But anyway, yeah, it's amazing.
But you know, it harkens back to what we described, was that last week, when we talked about the absurd RT headline about how the Amazon was actually contributing to Global warming by dying, you know, essentially.
A longer time ago than that, but yes.
But anyway, it's that sort of thing where it's like, you know, somebody in the newsroom just has the most tenuous grasp on science and, you know, puts two and two together and gets something in the neighborhood of seven and, you know, and then... Only the math geeks will care about this.
Right, but... We don't like those people anyway.
What would it take?
To just get basic quality control on scientific claims in mainstream publications.
Just basic quality control.
Well, apparently more than we're willing to give.
Could we start a service like Run It By A Scientist?
Oh, no, that's not good enough.
Run It By A Scientist Who Doesn't Suck.
Right?
We could just collect some scientists who don't suck.
You could buy our time by the hour to just check over a story and see if you said... Dude, I'm not... Like, you are going to get requests.
Oh, no.
Yes.
So you've got to get yourself a project manager, because I'm not project managing this one right here.
All right.
Fair enough.
So, Run It By A Scientist.
Someone want to create that app.
Run It By A Scientist Who Doesn't Suck.
What would be the acronym on that?
So, you want an app, run it by a scientist who doesn't suck.
Yeah, it doesn't make for a good acronym.
It doesn't, no.
Alright, it needs smithing.
It needs work.
Yeah.
So, you and all the people who approach you about this can work on the acronym.
What I need is an app, run it by a marketing person who doesn't suck, and they could come up with something better.
It's really not just the name that's going to be the problem.
We had a picture, and I don't know where the picture is now, last week in our Q&A.
Usually we don't bring stuff from our Q&A into the main part of the podcast because people who are just listening don't have access to that.
You always do on YouTube, of course.
We were asked about a lizard that someone found while gardening outside of Seattle.
I have in my notes, here is the animal in question.
Well, I don't have the picture.
All I have is a book.
I can't show the book though because it's going to reveal that this lizard is not a lizard at all.
This lizard is Ambystoma macrodactyla, long-toed salamander.
Terrible.
Macrodactylym, meaning long-toed.
Ambystoma, it's the type genus of the family Ambystomatidae.
And it's a salamander.
It's not a lizard.
What's the difference?
Wow, our tech is just freaking out today, isn't it?
I thought I actually, and that keeps happening.
I could have shown any number of trees for this, but here is a tree actually that I created for inclusion in our book.
So this tree, some version of it is going to be in our book in the chapter in which we just go through the deep history of the lineage that humans have belonged to.
And so we have more or less reading left to right on this tree of tetrapods time, more or less.
And then the vertical direction, what would be a vertical axis of this for an XY coordinate system is meaningless.
And so what you have here, if you trace, for instance, here from the root of the tree up to here at the top, it happens to be the top, it could be anywhere, we have amphibians.
A salamander is a type of amphibian.
And it's a totally different line up here to get to the lizards.
And lizards is not referring to lizards, other lizards like amphibians, but other snakes and other lizards.
And so this is not the place to give a systematics lecture, but the point is amphibians, of which salamanders are a portion, are sort of a basal tetrapod group.
They don't have an ability to be totally free from the water because they have an egg that desiccates when they get away from water.
And we had this amazing innovation called the amniotic egg, and all the reptiles and their descendants, which includes birds and includes mammals, a separate lineage of reptile descendants, are amniotes, and we can be completely free of the water, and lizards are one of those groups.
But many salamanders look like lizards and vice versa, and there are certainly diagnostic ways that you can tell the difference.
At some level, and this used to be an answer, the very first field season that we spent in graduate school.
We were in Costa Rica with John Vandermeer, who was our professor, and we had four or five other grad students with us, and he basically created a summer-long tropical biology and And kind of land-use course.
And he'd be walking around showing us, like, that's Welfia and that's Socrates.
And he loved the palms.
Like, oh my god, there's so many palms.
How do we tell the difference?
And he started to say things like, that's Gestalt.
Gestalt became the answer that he would give to us as to how to tell the difference between close organisms sometimes.
Oh man, you know that's not helpful, because we don't have the gestalt yet.
We don't have the sense yet of what it is that you are honing in on.
And he's an excellent scientist.
He knew that there are actually characters that describe the history that is revealed to be different between these two different clades.
And he wasn't fully conscious of what he was discerning, but that there are differences between them.
Well, I think he was.
Always conscious of the actual characteristics, but in general, you don't need them.
And so there were times I think he was, you know, I like John quite a bit, and I appreciate his frustration over certain things.
And so at some level, what he was saying was, That's one of these.
That's one of those.
They're different.
Now you figure out what the difference is so you can reliably recognize them.
And, you know, it is something you just have to do.
And so it is, you know, Gestalt is basically like, you know, Once you get the trick, you'll you'll be able to spot the difference, even if you can't or don't want to specify it.
But yeah, so one of the one of the easy differences between that you can you can tell a salamander apart from a lizard is that lizards have scales and some of them are very smooth.
If you're looking at a skink, those scales are going to be very smooth.
They're not going to be keeled.
They're not going to have little ridges down them like, for instance, rattlesnakes do, but they are scales.
If you look at them close, you find that they're scales, and salamanders have no scales, and their skin tends to be a little tackier and often wet as well.
I actually think it's very tasteful.
Yeah, from all of your salamander licking.
Speaking of salamander licking, I did want to point out that Although salamanders and lizards are distinct and recognizably so, that we have run into in our history one place where the two were conflated and it got recorded in an official name.
You remember?
Is it Amphiglossus?
No, it's not Amphiglossus.
No, no, not a Latin name.
It's a place name.
Place name?
You mean like a common name or a place name?
Lizard Lake.
Remember Lizard Lake?
Oh yeah, in B.C.
on Vancouver Island.
Yeah.
So Lizard Lake is a lake with an impressive population of Tariqa granulosa, I think, which is the rough-skinned newt, pound for pound, probably the most toxic animal on Earth.
All newts are salamanders.
Not all salamanders are newts.
Correct.
I know you know that.
Yeah.
So anyway, this lake, it is an actual lake, has a... Lake is a misnomer.
A huge population of these... I don't know if this population is always aquatic.
So Tariqa tends to go on land sometimes and then it breeds in the water.
They migrate on land.
They do.
They're like breeding migrations on land.
But some populations, I think some populations, only the males are permanently aquatic.
Anyway, there's some flexibility around it.
But in this lake, you can stand on the side and look in and in certain places you can see 10, 20 individuals swimming around.
They're very cool because they're toxic.
They're completely unafraid, and so you can interact with these newts, easily catch them, handle them.
Don't lick them.
Licking them is not a good idea.
Eating them is definitely not a good idea.
Same toxin as pufferfish have.
Yes, same.
Detrototoxin.
Exactly.
So anyway, the lake is called Lizard Lake for no good reason.
That's right.
I'd forgotten that.
Well, there you have it.
All right.
I would gladly just go on and on about lizards, but I'm not going to.
We wanted to say a little bit about coyotes following up on last week.
So do you have video to show?
I do have some video to show.
Maybe, yeah.
So you want to set it up?
Sure, sure.
You last week, Brett, we're talking about the game cameras that you've set up all around our property and our problem with these three coyotes that we've been seeing and how our cats are going crazy because we've kept them locked inside because these coyotes are hunting our cats and everyone else's cats as well.
And one of them you saw on the game cameras, we saw on the game cameras that you set up, has one eye.
One eye, their pupil's blown out.
We haven't seen it close enough.
We now know more than we did.
But we showed last time an animal and only one of its eyes reflected, which is very unusual.
And you can see this both on the camera with the infrared, and I also saw it in my headlamp.
When I look out and I look for eyes, only one eye reflected back, which is unique in my experience, actually.
Yep.
Yep, and almost certainly enough to diagnose like that's that individual.
Yep.
Like the chances that another coyote in our area is missing their right eye is very unusual.
And again, I don't know if it's a hole in the head or we didn't at that point.
We now know more, yeah.
Right.
So what was it?
It would have been like maybe the very day after the podcast last week, Sunday or maybe Monday, the weather was turning gorgeous here and I was out with Maddie, our Labrador We live on the edge of this ravine that's this sort of green space that goes down into creeks that flows into a giant, giant park about a mile away.
Which is part of why we have this coyote problem.
And I'm walking down, down, down, and Maddie starts to freak out.
And she gets right up close to a tree, and I'm trying to get her to shut up because I don't know why she's barking.
And I come around this tree, and we're on a very steep slope, and she's up against this big hole in the base of the tree, and out of this tree is poking a snout and a paw.
So she has found a den, and this snout and the paw are grabbing out at her, you know, open-mouthed, and I'm like, oh, oh crap!
Our dog just found the coyote den.
So I managed to get her away and pull her upslope and get her inside and get you, and we go right back down.
And just as we get back down there, we see her, as it turns out, the one-eyed coyote, leap out of this thing and go away.
And then I'll say one more thing and then I'll let you pick up the story.
I looked in the den and found two kits.
So there's two babies in there just downhill of our house that that mama coyote wanted to turn our cats into more coyote.
Mm-hmm.
So anyway, we, quick as we could, set up some cameras on the den, and we caught a very interesting behavior.
So as I was setting up the cameras, Heather was standing just upslope of me, and the coyote mother, the one-eyed coyote, Um, was essentially circling us, and it would go across the ravine and howl, it would go up above us and stand on a log and howl.
This is the middle of the day she's howling.
Middle of the day.
She gets someone from a nearby house to start yelling, shut up!
And I'm like, I'm not going to work with a coyote.
Right.
But anyway, so she was very disturbed by us, and I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen, which was she was going to have to move the kits.
Which, so anyway, I set up cameras, and why don't we show what we caught here.
So you can see her entering on the far right.
She's got a path that she has worn, and the den is smack dab in the center of that ivy-covered tree.
So the ivy is an invasive, sound-ish ivy, which we've been removing.
I haven't read it from this den because I don't want to disturb it.
But, um, so, nothing.
Show the edited one.
So we set up this, yeah, we set up the GoPro.
Do you have her howling on this one, or do you edit it down?
Okay.
Did they hear it just now?
Okay, so you can see her approaching.
So for those just listening, we've got her coming up the path.
Well, down and now up.
It's a very steep path, only big enough for a coyote.
I tried to navigate it.
Okay, now you see her.
She's looking around.
She's very concerned.
And... Still concerned, standing at the front of the den.
Presumably she smells us.
And it smells like us by now, yep.
So she goes in.
Now what you just heard was her picking up one of her kits.
It starts to scream and she gently takes it in her mouth and leaps out and runs away out of frame.
Now we only caught the one on the GoPro.
We have just a fragment of the removal of the other kit on one of the game cameras.
Do you want to show it?
I don't have it here.
The game camera triggered late.
You have another video.
I don't know what that would be.
Geez.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah, it's the same.
It's going to be the same thing.
So anyway.
But we have now days.
So we have photographic and video evidence of her removing both of the kits.
And then visits by her and by at least one other individual late that night and on several successive nights as well to the den.
In fact in one he goes in.
So we don't know what the relationship is between these animals.
Now this animal with the one eye Has been traveling around with two other animals who look very similar to me.
And I wondered before we knew about the den, whether this was her, you know, previous brood, whether these were two animals that she was traveling with.
Because there are a lot of coyotes around here and we hear them howling at night.
You know, there might be 10 animals that we hear.
But these three travel together.
They get along very, very well and it seems like they're probably familial relations.
And it is unclear from the game camera...
Whether or not the visit during the night at the den that is now abandoned is one of those two animals, or whether it's another animal, and whether or not, I don't know.
I think it is unlikely, but it is possible that those kits are actually the one-eyed mother.
By the way, you can tell that this is the same animal because she also has a conspicuous black patch on her back.
So anyway, it makes it quite clear that it's one animal.
Um, but it could be her mate, which I think is unlikely based on the way coyotes usually bond.
Um, or it could be one of the previous brood, if that's indeed who she is hunting with on a nightly basis, but it's all very interesting.
Yeah, it is.
And just to pick up on something else that came up, I think, in the Q&A last time, it was recommended that we get wolf urine and distribute it around to deal with the coyotes, and we ordered some right up, but it just came late last night, and so we have not yet had time, so we do not yet know if or how that will work.
Yes, and you know if the coyotes, so we are still getting evidence of coyotes each night even though the den is now abandoned, but if the coyote problem clears up and we're left with all this wolf urine, we'll have to find other things to do with it.
I don't know if it's good as a drink mixer or...
Apparently, we have not smelled it, we haven't opened it yet, but apparently it is quite putrid.
I'm not looking forward to using this because who knows how it will disturb the ecology.
You know, it's going to drive our own animals nuts, the sudden evidence of wolves, but it is also going to change the ecology of the place, which we're hesitant to do because we're so interested in what's going on out there.
All right, well, it is less likely to perturb the birds much.
Yes.
On account of they are not primarily navigating via smell.
I think, unless you have a particular thumbnail that you've already decided on that you want to show here, we have reached the end.
Reached the end.
Of this rather scattershot, chaotic episode.
Scattershot, chaotic, but nonetheless enjoyable.
No trombones at all.
Yeah, not a one, but... Not a single... Yeah, we'll use one of the shots from downtown as the thumbnail.
All right.
So, announcements.
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Brett also has Patreon conversations every month at his.
Questions can go to darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com and let's see, we haven't updated in a while.
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And subscribe to it, like it, and spread that stuff around.
Absolutely.
And in the meantime, be good to the people you love, and eat good food, and get outside.
