#134: Flies in the Face of Reason (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens134:0?r=4uduif6gFWnKY3Bktmi8XwCNa7UxSJpb View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 134th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss Howard Zinn, scones, and the existence of God. We discuss accidents and injury, and Bret proposes a hypothesis for why his recent bicycle ac...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 130 something...
Four.
Four, 134.
Well, all right.
That's cool.
Not a tough check for primeness.
This is Brett Weinstein.
Yes, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and you are Dr. Heather Hying, and this is the Dark Horse Podcast, as I mentioned earlier.
And we've got some things on the agenda.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're going to talk about accident and injury.
And we're going to talk about isopropyl alcohol.
Yep.
I want to talk about the moon.
The moon, and I should tell you that I promised to reveal.
I have, it's not an absolute proof, but I have a strong indication that there is a god and that he is fond of me.
So I'm going to be revealing that here on the- Where did you promise that?
On Twitter.
I see.
On Twitter.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I can't promise what's made on Twitter.
No, no, I'm keeping this one.
I'm mostly outside of the scope of that sort of thing.
So, okay.
So there is that, and I also promised to deliver a decisive blow to our most dedicated and I think obsessed critics.
Okay.
Alright.
Okay, I don't know anything about that either.
No you don't.
So you'll have to remember to put it in here somewhere.
Yes.
Let's do our logistics first though.
Good.
Shall we?
After, we'll be doing a Q&A after this episode.
You can go to darkhorsesubmissions.com to ask questions.
We always encourage you to look up our book, which is a lot different from but totally consistent with Dark Horse Podcast, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, available now in both Spanish and French, and soon to be out in Korean and Russian and Lithuanian and Polish and lots of other languages as well.
Though there is still time to learn those languages if you prefer to read it in one of them, with the exception of Spanish and French, I believe.
Those, it's already out.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, I feel like there's time to learn those languages no matter what.
Oh, it's never too late to learn those languages, but if you want to have them on the ready so when it is released, still hot off the press, you are able to read it in Lithuanian, now would be the time to get on that.
That would be the time.
We are streaming on both YouTube and Odyssey, and the chat is live on Odyssey.
And of course, after we are done, it will be uploaded to Spotify as well and available all of the places that you may listen to podcasts.
We have a new store, which we announced on our last live stream 10 days ago.
Zach, if you can show that.
We are very, very excited to be working with Squidprint, who has produced the store.
I'm not seeing it yet.
Okay.
We have on there the stuff that we have had on the previous tour, and I can't see it yet, so I'm not remembering what any of it is.
They will never know you were stalling.
We have Tour de France.
Yeah, that's so small.
That's just Dark Horse stuff.
So you want to talk about some of the products we have?
Yeah, we have Tour de France.
It's like bike racing on steroids.
We've got Pfizer.
The breakthroughs never stop.
Yeah.
Pun entirely intentional.
Entirely intentional.
Satire and therefore protected speech.
Yeah, similarly YouTube.
YouTube community guidelines because you can't handle the truth.
Yep.
And we've got things that aren't quite so politically dangerous, like we've got an epic tabby, some complex systems, we've got to saddle up the dire wolves we ride tonight.
So all sorts of good stuff here, including some backpacks and bags and such, which were not available in our previous store.
So do go there.
It's at darkhorsestore.org to find some of that new gear.
We're pretty excited about it.
You can visit my natural selections sub stack where this week I posted something that I found that I'd written over 10 years ago on the the trivialization of our lives in an era in which we are told that we have all of these labor-saving devices which are supposed to free us but in fact what they do is draw us in and grab our attention and don't let go so we have actually in many ways less
Less time to spend thinking deeply on things in the era when we have more devices which are supposed to be freeing us in order to attend to the deeper things.
And we are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing both our full episodes on Odyssey or YouTube or Spotify or Clips on both YouTube and Odyssey.
And just a reminder that last summer, about a year ago now, YouTube demonetized us for taking the crazy position that, as scientists, And really, it shouldn't even matter that we're scientists, but that we were interested in talking about the evidence for the claims being made by public health officials around all things COVID, and that was deemed untenable by YouTube, so...
It was deemed misinformative.
Misinformative.
And though we have been borne out many, many times, they have never reinvestigated this or explained why we are still demonetized.
But in any case, we are grateful to our sponsors.
Before we get to them, I do want to say a new episode of Dark Horse.
Let's do this afterwards.
- Okay. - So yeah, so just do all the money stuff at once. - Sorry.
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There are a lot of things that you can do to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words, of course.
What constitutes, for instance, good food?
Well, good food is real food, whole food, food that's been alive recently and was grown with care and conditions as ancient as possible, given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even many people who eat such a diet are missing something.
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No, that's not a thing.
Cardamon and cinnamom?
Cardamom and cinnamon.
There you go.
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I would like the record to reflect that when Dark Horse emerges as a send-up of Dark Horse, that we invented it, right?
Okay, good.
Just so long as that is clear.
Absolutely.
Our final sponsor this week is Allform, a company that makes terrific custom sofas.
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I should say.
Yeah?
I'm going to interrupt you here.
Oh, please do.
That because we actually don't know what happens when we're not here, and we don't have cameras in the living room, it's possible there's more than just the two cats and the dog that lies on the sofa when we're not here.
Right.
We don't know who they invite in.
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They have friends.
They do, as do our children.
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Awesome.
So thank you again to our sponsors.
And you wanted to say something about, you know, we've been releasing what we're calling guest episodes.
Brett hosted guest episodes of Dark Horse weekly for a number of weeks now, and we're going to try to keep up that schedule.
Yeah, with a few off weeks here and there for the foreseeable future.
And this week's episode was Matthias Desmet.
Professor Matthias Desmet.
It's a very good episode.
It is one of several recent episodes in which I have disagreed with the guest, not over the fundamentals necessarily of what was under discussion, but about significant issues.
And what emerges from those discussions is, of course, very interesting.
The kinds of conversations we should all be having.
We should all be having, and they emerge very naturally in this context amongst various heterodox thinkers.
So anyway, lots of people have really enjoyed the Matthias Desmet conversation, lots of positive feedback, so check it out.
And just to repeat, so we had talked about his book, which was also the reason I think his book has just come out officially in English, in the translation in English.
Which was part of the reason for you to have a conversation now, but we talked about it when we got an advance copy back a couple months ago, and it's called The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
It's really remarkable.
Yeah.
It's really good.
And I really enjoyed talking to him as well.
I got the sense that he is very much a fellow traveler and has a similar approach to things and therefore has run into similar things inside the academy.
So, always interesting to see that that phenomenon is not local to the institutions you've been in.
It happens every time somebody behaves in a particular steadfast manner.
They run into the same thing.
And in this case, not local to the United States.
Right.
It's academy-wide.
All right.
All right.
So, I would, because the existence or non-existence of God puts everything else we do in a decidedly different context, I think we should start there.
Okay.
Are you willing?
I am.
I didn't know that we were talking about this.
Well, I know.
As I already said.
See, that's the thing.
So, I really have no excuse at this point, because I didn't know we were talking about this when you first mentioned it, and I had a few minutes to get used to the idea.
Yeah, to wrap your mind around the idea.
Well, yeah.
Wait till you try wrapping your mind around the conclusion here.
All right, so in order to, first of all, this, it's not a proof, but this evidence means nothing if I'm just making it up.
So we have to establish that I am not just making this up.
We have been doing a whole bunch of cleaning up our house.
We're doing some spring cleaning, and it's a little late.
Why?
Because things were cluttered enough that we didn't get to it until now.
We have been blocked.
But nonetheless, well, all right, close enough to true.
That part may be an embellishment.
Here's the thing.
Yesterday I did take some things to Goodwill.
Yes.
Am I correct?
Including several paper bags full to the top with stacks of books.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
Now at the top of one I did not.
I guess I never think of books as clutter.
Right.
Well, neither here nor there.
I did not dig into these bags.
I figured you would know whether these things should go or not, but I did notice on the top of one of the bags.
Remember anything interesting at the top of one of those bags?
Well, I don't remember the order in which the bags were put together, but I know the book that you pulled.
Not the one that I pulled.
I did rescue one book, the Klutz Book of Knots, which comes with two different color pieces of paracord.
And so by having two different colors, you can very easily detect what the diagrams I don't know where you're going, but here's the reason that book ended up in the bag to donate.
We were going through Toby's bookshelf and just trying to get stuff a little cleaner in there.
Toby, who is now a 16-year-old young man, and he pulled that up and said, I don't think we need this.
I said, you know, your dad and I, I said to him, have had that book for as long as I can remember.
It's an unusual book because it literally has these two pieces of cord that come off of it.
Like, I still don't know how to make knots.
I really wish I did.
It's one of these obvious skills that isn't that elaborate.
It's not like learning another language, right?
Like, why don't I?
And so my feeling is, given how much I like books, if this book has been this unsuccessful in teaching me my knots, this book must be a failure, which is why it went into the donate bag.
Oh, believe me, if I needed to make the argument for getting rid of that book, it would have been precisely the one you just delivered.
But I'm not prepared to give up yet.
And, you know, there's a question about the cost of that book.
You know, maybe this is the year we learn to tie those knots.
But anyway, so there was another book at the top of one of those bags.
You don't remember something that you thought, well... There were a lot of books.
All right.
I've got a lot of books.
Okay, well this one, because I'm in Portland, I slid it under another book so that when I donated it, no, a riot wouldn't break out and we wouldn't be chased out of town as morally defective people.
Oh, I didn't donate, they were my Scandi, did I?
I think I held onto that one.
No, you donated Howard Zinn.
No, I didn't donate Howard Zinn.
I donated the child's version of Howard Zinn.
Okay.
We kept Howard Zinn, but we had somehow the child's version of Howard Zinn.
Oh, God.
You can't say that.
No, we got rid of our entire stash of Howard Zinn.
I didn't.
I didn't go grab it.
Well, this complicates.
This actually is now an argument that there is no God.
And we have had the Zinn on our shelf since we were, you know, about as long as we've had that knot book since we were undergrads.
Right.
Yeah.
A People's History of the United States is the name of the actual book, and that's how one of our children got handed in one of their classes in middle school or high school, like, the children's version of Howard Zinn.
Like, what is this?
Who needs this?
So I should just say, as long as we're on this Howard Zinn, and by the way, the evidence for, it's not that this is evidence that God doesn't exist.
It's evidence that he either doesn't exist or that he doesn't like me, all right?
Because he's now put me in a very awkward spot.
I think that much we already know.
Well, I don't know which of those two it is.
It could be a cold universe that doesn't give a crap, or it could be a God who doesn't like me either way.
A personalized.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
There are various reasons that the Evergreen State College is notable in history.
It shows up in history in various places.
It has given rise to some interesting people.
Paul Stamets, the mushroom guy.
It has given rise to Matt Groening of Simpsons and Futurama fame.
It has given it… Linda Barry, I think?
Linda Barry.
Oh, God.
What?
This is awkward.
Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain played there.
He did not go to school there, but there is video of him playing.
Kurt Cobain played here, yes.
He did.
Well, of course, he was a, you know, a Washington guy.
So that, the comic from Seinfeld who said some really racist stuff on stage and was never heard from again.
Kramer?
Yeah, Kramer.
He was an Evergreen grad.
Anyway, there are various places that Evergreen shows up in history.
The guy who played Kramer.
And, you know, our episode, our famous exit from the college is one of those historical moments.
I thought you were suggesting that we were on Seinfeld there for a moment.
I don't recall that.
It's possible, but I just don't recall that.
But in any case, one of the places that Evergreen shows up in history, and this is a little bit sad, is that it was going to be Howard Zinn's next stop when he died.
In fact, there were banners up announcing... When we were there?
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah, Howard Zinn was slated to speak there.
Actually, like two days before Evergreen melted down, Naomi Klein spoke there, and I went with Forest Landry to her presentation.
That's right!
Um, but anyway, so, um, here's the reason that this is now evidence that either God does not exist or does not like me.
It's because I thought that you had gotten rid of the people's history.
Done.
Done, right?
Nope.
And then, right, I, you know, I didn't think terribly much about that fact, but it obviously struck me.
And then this morning, you come home With this item for one of our children.
Okay.
There it is.
Okay.
This is the morning of a podcast.
It's two scones.
A live stream.
So you've stolen the treats for the children.
For a higher purpose.
I've borrowed them.
Yeah.
The scones.
So here's the thing.
I admit that I do not yet see the connection between scones and Howard Jones.
You don't see it, but you're about to see it.
And you can imagine that if I had been correct about what you were dispensing with, right?
He who is without zin cast the first scone.
Here we are on a podcast.
You see?
Right, so had you gotten rid of our library of Howard Zinn, that would have been evidence that God was setting me up for this and liked me.
It would not have been evidence that he liked you, maybe the opposite, and the same goes for our audience.
But in my case, that would have been like, you know, the perfect volleyball set.
But now, discovering that in fact we still have Zin, I've now embarrassed myself by making that pun, and- Oh no no, I think you recovered brilliantly, given the actual truth of the situation, but I think we're right there.
Thank you, I'm becoming a professional, despite my better instincts.
Hey Zack, Mom got you a scone, if you would- No, here, I'll put it on the edge of the desk.
Zach's got a fig scone.
A fig scone.
Toby's got like a white chocolate and orange scone or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sounds good, right?
Oh, Fairfax is like, yeah, where's my scone?
That's a triple pun though, right?
Zin, cast, podcast, scone.
Oh, I didn't get the cast podcast one.
See, that's why, if it had just been two, then that's, that's, that's, it's not evidence of God.
It's not that level.
But three that line up together, not only the three items, but in time.
Fairfax is going to eat the scones now.
Hey Zach, why don't you come get your scone?
Yeah, you're externalizing the scone costs.
Enjoy.
Give them to Toby.
Things have now gotten out of control.
Alright, well, I think we've concluded that either there is no god, or if there is one, he doesn't like you very much.
That's the evidence at the moment.
Where are we headed next?
Well, so there was another thing that you were going to add.
Oh, there's several.
The three things I thought we were going to talk about were accident and injury, isopropyl, and the moon, and moon landing, and mooniness in general.
But there was another thing that you mentioned also.
Oh, the critic thing?
Yes.
Can we do that now, or do you want to say that?
That is in line.
That is part of one of the other little segments we had planned, so it will come up naturally.
You had suggested the first thing was accident and injury.
Okay, so I presume we are talking about the accident that befell me this week?
Yes.
Yes, all right.
Which was not, I should say, God's attempt to declutter his universe.
We don't know that.
If so, he's not very good at it.
Well, he put in a good effort there.
It was a bad... It was not a good accident.
Let me describe this, and there's a reason I'm going to describe it.
It will give you some insight into how somebody with my particular interest and skill set views things like injury that befall me, but I think also it's scientifically interesting.
So I've been an avid cyclist since I was a teenager.
I picked it up in, I had liked kind of BMX bikes as a kid, but I picked up actual road cycling from a biology teacher.
Dr. Pete, who had a class in our high school in which he basically taught us how to ride distance and be good at it and manage your bike.
This is going to have been at the high school that you were invited to leave.
The high school that you and I met at.
Right.
No, it was the one I was invited to leave.
Yes.
In any case, so I've been a cyclist for a very long time and I probably take a fall off my bike every two to three years on average.
But it's been at least six since I've fallen off my bike.
It's before we left Evergreen.
I think the last fall I took was above Eureka when we were at our friend Antonia and Gary's house and I was riding around in the hills above their house.
I believe I was riding your bike and I fell off it.
Yep.
Um, but anyway, uh, I was riding this week.
And it's not for, I mean, you've not quite as much this winter, but you've done a lot of actually winter riding here in Portland, like urban, winter, slippery, wet, cool, uh, riding and, um, have had no, no mishaps until now.
No mishaps.
And I've been sort of tracking it.
It's like, oh, it's been a long time.
Maybe I'm over that thing, but maybe it's going to get me at some point.
And so I've just kind of been watching it.
And I was riding, and I wasn't far.
I was, in fact, a block and a half from our house on a piece of road.
It's a terribly, terribly paved piece of road.
It's chip coat, which is basically crushed rock that they lay down, they smooth it, and then they spray a tar sealant into it to lock it all together.
So it's jagged and rough.
And it's also- Yeah, can I just- I don't even- I don't read this road.
I can see that it was once chip-coated, but it was so long ago that it really reads as a gravel road, where there's like places where there's patch of chip-coat still showing through, but it's mostly gravel.
It's not.
You should go back and check it.
I agree that mentally it sort of strikes one that way because it's so broken up.
And the reason that it has not been redone is that the taxes are not high enough here in Portland.
So our taxes are really as high as anywhere you could live in the States, but they're not high enough for them to do things like repay roads as necessary because they're being used to, I don't know, virtue signal from antennas?
I think they're arresting people engaging in criminal activity?
No, they're not doing that.
Building up public works, dealing with invasive species.
No, they're not doing any of those things.
Public art, maybe?
I don't know.
I think it must all be going into virtue signaling.
There is certainly a lot of that.
Yes.
Well, what there isn't is a lot of high quality pavement.
There are gigantic potholes and things.
But anyway, this piece of road in question is chip coat.
It's got giant potholes in it and large sections that have eroded away and are now gravel.
So it's a dangerous piece of road to ride, but it's also the piece of road that I know best because it's the way out of where we live.
So I ride it several times a week, sometimes, you know, 10 times a week.
So I know where every pothole is.
Here's the thing, I was riding along, usually in one of these falls, you know what happened, right?
Something happened in traffic and you Steer to avoid it, and you hit something you didn't mean to hit, or you slide on a railroad track, or something like that.
You know what happened.
In this case, I didn't know what happened, right?
My first awareness of the accident was as I was hitting the ground, sliding, and then, oh my god, it finally happened.
I hit my head, right?
I've never hit my head falling off my bicycle before, and I think that's because, usually, Your mind goes into what feels like slow motion.
It's really the opposite, and we can come back and talk about why that is.
The frame rate increases, which gives the sense of it being slow motion.
Right.
Your mind, because there is potential value in some small thing you would do, you know, putting out your hand and breaking your wrist rather than your head or whatever, goes into high gear, which feels slow because you've got more frames per second, and so it feels like a longer period of time.
And it probably also moves from short-term to longer-term memory more quickly and more accurately.
So, not only do you have more information per actual unit time, but you're more likely to actually have the recall for it later.
And I wrote about this in that memories of a mugging piece that I wrote about the mugging experience in Quito.
Yeah.
Well, I think when you say Quito, you're talking about the capital of Ecuador, not a diet plan.
Yeah, the mugging I experienced in keto where someone grabbed a scone out of my hand because they said that's not on the diet.
You could have been mugged in ketosis.
I mean, you know, that happens to people, I'm sure.
But nonetheless, so typically you have a lot of information, and then you do get to dwell on the details, hopefully, so that you build the wisdom of whatever happened to you this time so it doesn't happen to you again, right?
In this case, I don't have anything until I hit the ground and was sliding, and then felt my head hit the ground.
And I literally, before I was done sliding, had the thought that I am no longer in the situation where I can say a helmet has actually never done me any good.
Doesn't mean it's not worth wearing, but it never helped me because it never hit my head.
In this case, I did.
And you had a full-face helmet on.
No, I did not.
No, you did not.
I had a good quality bicycle helmet.
A high quality helmet, but it was not a full face.
Nope.
And I hit the side of my head.
But anyway, here's the crazy thing.
Okay, I went down.
No idea why I've fallen.
There's nobody there.
This had nothing to do with somebody surprising me or anything like that.
I just fell in a place that I know quite well.
But as I fell, my handlebar twisted more than 90 degrees to the left.
And I fell on my left.
Now that's weird, because as your wheel turns to the left, it would tend to throw you to your right.
So that raises questions about what happened here that would cause me to be literally tangled in my bicycle wheel all the way to the left, lying on my left side, and I hit the left side of my helmet, I'm scraped, I I tore a bunch of skin off my shoulder, my ribcage, my butt, my ankle, my knee, all the way down the left side.
And you actually almost certainly have at least some hairline fracture or fractures in your pelvis.
Yeah, I certainly...
Cracked, probably cracked my sacrum.
We didn't get the x-ray because it wouldn't have changed anything about the... He spent a long time with our awesome osteopath the next day.
Yep.
And that was his assessment.
Yep.
Hey, Dr. Miller, if you're watching.
But in any case, okay, so I was down on my left side with the wheel twisted to the left.
What happened?
Well, two hypotheses.
One of them Toby generates, which I agree is a possibility.
Toby our 16 year old son who is also an avid cyclist.
Let's say that there was a large rock in the road and I didn't realize it was there and I hit it.
Sometimes you hit a rock and it will shoot out from under your tire, right?
And That would possibly throw me off onto the left, and then as I was falling to the left, steering to the left might have been the attempt to regain control.
But I have no memory of this, and that's weird, because A, it's a phenomenon I'm very familiar with.
B, it makes a noise, right?
That sound of the thing resonates through your tire, and you hear like an echoey, hollow sound when that happens, and I have no memory of such a sound.
I went back.
I don't see the object.
Could be lost.
Could have shot off far enough.
Two things here.
I know you haven't gotten to your second hypothesis yet, but one is that you and Toby had actually just gotten back from you picking up Toby at camp, the camp that you and your brother Eric went to as children yourselves in far northern California, and you had taken some time Coming back, you'd stopped again at our friend's, Antonia and Gary's house outside of Eureka, and then come up the coast and spent in kind of the sea lion caves.
And you had taken with you electric unicycles.
Yep.
And the two of you had been exploring a lot, every place you went, on electric unicycles, which you already had those skills tremendously.
But you also were in a mode of thinking about being on a wheeled vehicle and how to look out for Yep, I had been in that mode, so I should just say there was a little innovation here.
We took our electric car, which changes the way a road trip works because you have to plug it in and spend some time, which can strand you.
Uh, as you're waiting, but by bringing these electric unicycles, they're small enough that you can have two of them in the car.
And when we would plug in, we would go, uh, find a smoothie somewhere and it allowed us to explore.
It was like tenders on a boat, right?
It was like little, you know, boats with an outdoor motor, outboard motor that can take you to, uh.
You got your electric four wheel and you got your two electric one wheels.
Yeah, which is funny because I used to joke that the electric unicycles were like the poor man's Tesla, and they kind of are.
I mean, it's a one-wheeled electric vehicle and has a lot of the same advantages, but I digress.
Anyway, so we've got Toby's hypothesis that I hit a stone, it shot out from my front wheel, and that I steered to catch myself.
I don't believe it's right because none of the cognitive stuff matches And I also think... What do you mean none of the cognitive stuff matches?
What does that mean?
That had I hit something unexpected, that that would have immediately triggered my emergency rescue yourself bicycle mode.
I would have memory of it.
You would have a memory of something odd happened.
Something odd happened.
As opposed to the first thing you know is your head is hitting the ground.
I'm hitting the ground, right.
So I don't really think that that's what occurred, but I can't rule it out.
But here's the other thing about it.
In that accident, Right?
This one this week.
No, no.
In that accident of the type that Toby describes, I believe I would have had the following experience.
My wheel, let's say I hit something really sizable, was really not paying attention, and it shot out and pulled my front wheel off to the right.
I would have then, the wheel would have then hit the pavement and maybe bounced, making things worse.
But I would have had at least a couple of attempts to rescue myself before I finally lost control and fell.
Well, except that, and again, I don't know what your next hypothesis is, but when it first happened, I thought you were biking alone, but when we were talking about it shortly thereafter and trying to figure out if you needed to go to the ER right away or if you were stable, And you were kind of stunned, like, what happened?
You're so experienced and you're so skilled, and this is just very, very unusual.
We've had one of the wettest springs and early summers on record, and summer has finally come to the Pacific Northwest.
And in fact, we've had a couple of searingly hot days.
And my experience of both the actual bit of gravel road and then the road that you're calling really old chip coat, but that really reads as gravel to me and to, I think, other people.
My experience on these roads on foot has been usually either when it's wet out, they're just kind of glued in place with mud, or when it's dry out, it's had some time to settle in and the gravel or the chip coat or whatever sort of locks in place.
And it feels now like there's a lot of loose rock on the surface just kind of floating.
Like, you know, the very wet followed by the searingly dry but not for very long has left things in a much more unstable situation than it normally would be.
Yep.
I did go back and look at the spot.
I don't find it abnormal.
Okay.
So, I did look into that hypothesis.
Could be.
But again, the weirdest thing to me is that Something severe enough to knock me off the bike did not register until it had already happened.
There's just something so odd about that.
And so here's the other hypothesis, and I must say I find it truly disturbing.
Okay, and I have not heard this one.
Yeah, you've not heard it.
You refuse to share it with me.
Well, I just thought it would be better to have a live conversation about it.
Okay, so I've been learning, as you well know, to ride a motorcycle.
Yep.
Okay, here's the thing.
This has worried me from the beginning.
Motorcycle, your mind, because a motorcycle is just a motorized bicycle at some level.
It rides very differently at one level because it's so heavy.
And you know, the suspension is sort of very mushy.
I don't ride a bike with suspension, but even if you do, it's a lot crisper than the, you know, because that weight is on the shocks of a motorcycle.
It's a very different feel.
But your mind, if you're a cyclist, Your mind calls your bicycling skills up to learn to ride the motorcycle, and then it modifies them.
But here's the problem.
On a bicycle, at least in the US, your right hand operates your right brake lever, which operates your rear brake, okay?
And then your left one operates the front brake, okay?
That's standard setup.
On a motorcycle, your right hand indeed operates a brake, but it's your front brake, okay?
Now, on a bicycle, the distinction between your two hands makes all the difference in the world because there's a huge asymmetry in what your two brakes do, right?
In a car, you hit one pedal and the car balances.
The difference between your front and your back brakes is not something you're aware of, except maybe theoretically.
But as you brake, on a bicycle, you slow down rapidly.
That puts all your weight onto the front wheel.
Right, so that creates a problem.
If you grab only your rear brake on a bike, then the rear wheel tends to slide and you don't stop very quickly because all of the weight just went on the front wheel.
So most of your braking force, if you have to stop quickly, it's your front brake that does it.
But, if you only hit the right brake on a bicycle, and therefore only are braking the rear wheel, your front wheel is still free to spin, and so you're not likely to stop short, and you're not likely to fly over your handlebars.
It's not that one of your brakes is better and the other is worse.
The question is, what are you doing?
If you're in extremely slidy conditions on a bike, then you do want to use your rear brake, even though it's terrible at stopping you because it leaves you in control because your front wheel stays on the ground and doesn't lock up.
If your front wheel locks up on a bike, you tend to fall.
It's not 100%.
Some people say if your front wheel slides, you'll fall.
It's not 100%, but it's very high chance.
If your front wheel slips, you tend to fall.
This is all built in unconsciously in the cyclist.
The difference between your right and your left hand, right?
Right rear, I tend to be very aggressive, and then left front, I tend to be very careful because what I don't want to do is either cause a slide or go over the handlebars, but it's where most of my braking force is.
So I'm very good at playing these things off against each other.
So what, if so on a motorcycle, which I have yet to ride, your right hand controls your front brake, you said.
What does your left hand control?
The clutch.
Oh.
Now here's the problem with that.
So your other brake, your rear brake, is your foot.
So there's no clutch on a bicycle, but you got like thumbs are dealing with your transmission.
In my case, I've got a twist shifter on my right hand.
But here's the disturbing hypothesis.
So by the way, I've been thinking from the beginning, and in fact I've now read that some people do this.
If you ride both a bicycle and a motorcycle, you should swap which lever operates which brake so that your right hand phenomenon is consistent between the two objects.
But I haven't done it.
It's on my agenda, but I just haven't gotten to it.
So, here's the thing.
You should swap to match standard bicycle protocol?
No, you can't swap the motorcycle, so you swap your bike.
Which makes you then better at using your bike and your motorcycle without making a mistake, but it makes you worse any time you borrow a bike.
This is like people with... I never remember how you're supposed to pronounce it when it's a keyboard.
Is it Dvorak or Dvorak?
Oh no, I think it's Dvorak when it's a keyboard.
It's two different guys, the composer and the keyboard guy.
So yeah, I was once handed... a student had her laptop set up with Dvorak.
I was like, I can't do anything with this.
I just don't know what to do.
And she's like, oh, but it's so much more efficient.
I'm like, that's great for you, but can you use mine?
She's like, kind of.
Like, right, you can't use all the other keyboards.
Right.
Well, I have been told, I've not checked this, but I've been told that if you sit down at a Dvorak keyboard and you attempt to write something and it's clearer when you've sat down at the Dvorak keyboard, then that means you have to change fields.
Fields.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
But OK, so here's the question.
As you know, with a clutch, and the clutch on a motorcycle isn't too different.
You drive stick.
The clutch on a motorcycle isn't, it's the same phenomenon as the clutch in a car, where there is no penalty for pushing the thing down quickly.
I mean, ideally you do want to push it down quickly, and then you want to release it carefully, and you have to do that with feel, right?
Every clutch is different, every vehicle is different, and every clutch in every vehicle is a little bit different.
Right.
And, you know, different in terms of which individual clutch was put in, and the age of the thing, and all sorts of things.
But, Here's the question.
I was riding along.
Was I in bicycle mindset?
Did I grab?
Was I shifting?
You mean were you in motorcycle?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did I say bicycle?
Motorcycle.
I'm wondering if my motorcycle knocked me off my bicycle.
If what I did is I grabbed the clutch, which should have no negative impact.
If I shifted my bike, which does not require a clutch, grabbed the clutch, which was my front brake.
Now you would think ordinarily Front brake would put you over the handlebars and we'd know that it happened because that's how I would have fallen except Except you weren't on a flat clear surface with perfect grip, right?
I was on that surface like you were describing with all of the loose stuff So if I did that grab the front brake didn't go over the handlebars But then it caused a front wheel slide where I was falling over to the left and I tried to recover it would have produced exactly this effect and Indirect effect of the danger of motorcycling if you're also a bicyclist.
Yeah, the danger of motorcycling and the similarity of the two, right?
Your electric unicycle isn't going to confuse you about bicycling because they're so different that they get recorded as different activities.
But your bicycle and your motorcycle have enough analogy that the differences between them could be Quite devastating, and in this case, I'm wondering if that would explain- Well, specifically, sorry, but specifically with regard to the fact that your hands, these most dexterous, most, you know, primate-identified things with which we have become prominent in the world, are actively controlling the vehicle, and they're doing so in similar but not identical ways.
Similar, and if you think about where that… Contradictory.
That similarness is worst.
Your left hand being your powerful brake on a bike and being a clutch on the motorcycle where there's no penalty for grabbing it.
It's like, oh man, I could see that getting me in trouble.
And I think the thing that it explains, the reason that I find this sort of compelling is that there would be nothing because the only obstacle I hit was my own confusion.
It would leave me no memory of their having, you know, it's not like I hit a piece of two by four that was lying in the road.
The pothole had grown larger and it caught the front of my wheel.
There was literally nothing except that maybe I was shifting, and because my mind now says to shift, you grab your left hand, that that would have thrown me off the bike and it would be like, well, what happened?
Why did my brakes suddenly lock up?
That's remarkable.
I feel like I can't assess it at the empirical level beyond what you've said since I have yet to be on a motorcycle, but it sounds quite plausible.
Yeah, too plausible.
That's why I bring it up here.
As soon as I realized that, I was like, it explains too many of the things that are weird here.
What I would love is a prediction from that hypothesis that would allow me to test it and at least… Without requiring you to fall on your head again?
Precisely.
For one thing, the fall, you know, the bike frame perfectly unscathed.
And this is a bike that you designed and made and brazed and even welded parts.
No brazing, it's all... No brazing?
No, it's brazing, no welding.
Silver solder and brass.
Yeah, so I mean this is a particularly cherished item.
Oh, I would have been quite frustrated with myself if I had damaged the frame.
But I did, you know, I busted a brake lever.
I, you know, you only fall on a helmet once you have to, although I'm pretty sure the helmet retained its ability to protect me.
Um, you don't risk it.
You buy a new helmet.
So I did.
So anyway, it was pretty expensive fall in addition to the, you know, the doctor and, uh, and all that.
But, um, but yeah, I don't want to have to fall again for many reasons in order to test it.
But it seems to me that there might be, sometimes there's a way, even though the event has already happened, there'll be some other like You know, the pattern of damage to the bike or something would predict it.
But I haven't yet figured out what the other prediction would be.
But as a hypothesis, testable or not, unfortunately it fits too well.
Wow.
Yep.
Well, yeah, I don't know what else to say about it.
Yes.
Except, you know, I'm watching you every day remarkably get better and do a lot of things that it just wasn't clear the day of how ambulatory you were going to be for, you know, maybe months even.
Yeah, I was pretty messed up, although I did get back on the horse to ride home, which, you know.
You did.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
So, you can see that had the initial segment here demonstrated the very probable existence of a God who liked me, that this whole episode with falling off the bicycle would then be in a very different context.
I mean, then it would be God likes me today, maybe he didn't like me earlier in the week.
Maybe it's something you said.
It often is.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Well, exactly.
Yes.
All right.
But without a God, I think we can chalk this up to physics.
Okay.
All right.
Let's chalk it up to physics.
Chalk it up to physics.
With so many other things, like every single other thing that ever has happened.
Chalking it up to physics.
Of course.
What else would you chalk it up to, including chalk?
Well, I mean I feel like from there we could either go to isopropyl, which is more like chemistry, or we could go to the moon, which is a lot of physics as well.
As you like, whichever of those you would like.
Let's go to the moon and then we can come back to the isopropyl.
What's isopropyl?
Isopropyl.
Isopropyl.
Okay, the moon.
We're a couple days past a full moon, which in summer, which it is of course in the Northern Hemisphere, is a particularly glorious, glorious thing.
On a clear summer night where it stays late, it stays light late, and the full moon comes up either a little bit before or a little bit after, depending on exactly where you are in the full moon.
The sunset, you might be able to navigate at night without any external sources of light.
So, you know, not in a city where there are all these external sources of light, but if you're in nature, and you're not so much in the forest, but if you're in nature with an open sky, Wandering around at night and navigating with your own eyes having adapted to very low levels of light, which are provided by the reflected light from the Sun off of the Moon, is truly an extraordinary experience.
And that is all true, but the reason I specifically wanted to talk a little bit about the Moon today is because today is the 53rd anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11.
Apollo 11, of course, being Well, let's go back a few years from that.
So, that was July 16th, 1969.
And in 1961, JFK had provided the mission objective in which he said, we want to perform a crude lunar landing, crude, C-R-E-W-E-D, a crude lunar landing and return to Earth.
And the NASA site, which I'll link to in the show notes, It has a lot of history there, and so I didn't actually find it.
But as I remember it, of course, we were babies for the actual landing that happened in 1969.
Both of us watched from our places in different parts of LA, me from the lap of my father who had been injured.
I was massively injured in this accident a few days before I was born, so we got to watch this from our various infant-like states.
But I believe that JFK had basically said, before the decade is out, that the goal was before the 60s were over.
And of course, JFK was then assassinated not too long after that, but the United States made it with only a few months to spare with the Apollo 11 mission.
66 years after the first powered flight, which is a comparison one should keep in mind from the moment that the Wright brothers, I believe it was Wilbur, got off the ground for 30 seconds and that counted as the first powered flight to landing men on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth in 66 years.
It's a blink.
It's such a short period of time in the 20th century.
We saw this acceleration of progress that, of course, we continue to see now, and we talk about this all the time, the hyper-novelty that both plagues us, but is also a testament to human ingenuity and ability.
And actually not on Apollo 11, but on an earlier Apollo mission, on Apollo 8 at the end of 1968, December 24th, as it happens.
Actually, Zach, do you have the shot, the Earthrise photograph?
If you could show this, which will be familiar to everyone, and certainly everyone who was alive then.
We were We were not.
We were fetuses then.
But this photograph, which was, again, taken on December 24th, 1968 on the Apollo 8 mission, was humanity's first view of our planet from outside of our planet.
And what an extraordinary philosophical moment that was.
Soon followed, seven, eight months later, by visions hearing that humans were actually on a different astronomical body.
Two things, yeah.
I don't know if they belong right here, but that image.
So, first of all, there is a phenomenon of Most or all of the astronauts who saw a view like this something called the overview effect Which is it is a philosophical transition.
There's something about seeing The entirety of humanity, you know in one field of view That is hard for astronauts to describe that motivates them to try to get other people to understand what it is they have seen and experienced and what it implies and I think it is
It is a profound, it is a revelation of something true that although the rest of us can glean it and we can in fact see that image, it is hard to appreciate what it would be like if it was your own eyes rather than a picture.
Yeah, no, it's, you know, the closest that I've experienced, I think, or the thing that this most reminds me of is the experience that I had repeatedly as a kid, having grown up close enough to the ocean in Los Angeles that it was about a mile or so walk, and once I was You know, seven or eight or nine and my parents let me wander off alone because that's what good parents do.
I would go down to the beach and just look out at the ocean and my sense was simultaneously one of Wow, I'm so small.
I'm so small.
And in a way, there's a humility that is generative that comes from that.
And also, look at how much that is not known and that is yet to be discovered and that there is yet to be explored.
And look how many opportunities await me and all of us.
And in that case, the thing that I was looking at was the ocean, the vast ocean, which is so much smaller than the vastness of space and yet still so large compared to a single human life.
Yeah, it is stunning.
It's the kind of thing I feel like I should check before I say it, but I'm so certain of it.
I also get the same sense looking at the ocean.
It is a calibration of significance, as is looking into the night sky, if you're lucky enough to be able to look into the night sky and see stuff.
But I'm certain That the amount of ocean that one can see standing, probably even if you're standing at the same, you know, certainly if you're standing on the cliffs, looking down at the ocean, but I think even if you're standing at the shore, looking out at, you know, 180 degrees of ocean, that is undoubtedly a space large enough, you know, you could put everybody on earth in that space, you could probably put everybody
Who had ever lived in that space?
And gosh, I don't know.
I feel quite certain of it.
But anyway, maybe I'll be wrong, and we'll find out.
But it would be interesting to know, okay, if that's true, let's take all the people, you know, 8 billion people, right?
Could you fit 8 billion people in that space?
And if so, how much, you know, could they be COVID distant from each other?
I mean, you know, right?
Like, I would love to know.
But anyway, somebody will know how to do that calculation, and I'd be curious to know the answer.
The other thing I wanted to say, though... Before you do, interesting that what you referred to as the overview effect has to do with seeing all of humanity in one place.
And your reference here, again, was putting all the people in your field of view.
I think it has never been the thing that I thought about is like, that's all the people.
Right.
Oh.
It's like that's all of the existence of humanity and the earth and everything that yes, we are, but that everything is.
And that the human part of it, I can totally see how you would have a sense of urgency around wanting to communicate that to the other people if you were the actual astronaut seeing Earthrise, which is not there anymore.
But no, it's okay.
But it hasn't been the source of the deep philosophical explorations that my brain has gone to.
Oh, it wasn't until this moment until you put the two of them in proximity to each other, right?
That overview effect, you know, at some level, maybe it's not what every astronaut sees, but there's something about it that is like, wow, they're all there.
And then, you know, there's the Carl Sagan version of this, the pale blue dot.
Which is even more profound because there the earth is barely recognizable.
It's so tiny.
There was one other thing that that image calls to mind.
You want to put the image back up?
And I remember it.
Actually, I think you mentioned Oliver Sacks somewhere recently.
I don't know if it was a substack or somewhere.
But Oliver Sacks is somebody who's now gone, but somebody who's been important to us through his writing.
And I remember- He was a neurologist who wrote Who wrote basically patient accounts, accounts of his patients that revealed deep and sometimes universal human truths.
Maybe my favorite book of his is An Anthropologist on Mars, which went into some depth on five different cases, but they're all terrific.
I haven't read a book of Oliver Sacks that I didn't find compelling and surprising.
Yeah, I can't remember if the vignette I'm about to describe is... I think it's the man who mistook his wife for a hat, but it might be an anthropologist on Mars.
But anyway, he's got a patient who has a retrograde amnesia.
That is to say, the amnesia is spreading backwards in time, so the patient thinks he's younger and younger because he doesn't remember anything beyond a certain moment, and that moment is receding towards his birth, right?
It's a very profound and disruptive I don't want to say he doesn't believe it, but he isn't sure.
You've got two explanations for such a thing.
Either this person has some pathology that would explain that, or they're faking.
Maybe they don't know they're faking, but you need to ascertain that they are indeed Not just representing this as true, but that it is actually their experience of the world.
And, you know, so he described several times like going in, talking to the guy, you know, having a, interviewing him and then going away for a certain amount of time and then coming back and the guy has no memory of him and he re-interviews him.
Asked him the same questions.
The guy wants the same clarifications.
It's very eerie, right?
But at some point he takes, I believe, that photograph and he shows it to this guy who is at that point an old man who thinks he's like in his 20s, right?
And you can do things like show him a mirror.
And this would have been in the 70s or 80s.
So this old man's Life in his 20s would have preceded humans being able to see the Earth from the outside.
Right.
Substantially.
And preceded, in fact, even the discussion of doing that, right?
So, anyway, he presents him this photograph, and he says, describe what you see.
And the man says something like, that's a picture of the Moon.
And Sachs says, no, it's not.
That's a picture of the earth.
And he says, it can't be because if it were, you'd have to get a camera up there.
And Saks says the equivalent of, well, they did.
And the shock that the man experiences is evident.
And this convinces Saks that in fact, I hope I'm reporting this right, but that's my memory of the interaction that this can It compels him that is, in fact, a real pathology because the man's confused.
You know, that photo is so familiar to all of us that, you know, in order to be confused by it, you'd really especially viscerally confused, not just to say that you were confused, but to be shocked by it.
Yeah, and deeply uncomfortable to your core.
Right.
Yeah.
What does that mean about where I am in time, for example?
Indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess only just one more thing.
About the Moon here, so this is, again, this was taken on the Apollo 8 mission, which did not land on the surface, I think.
Not correct.
I know that, yeah.
In late 1968, but we see the Moon's surface in the foreground with the Earth rising above it in the background.
But from the Earth, relative to the Earth, the Moon is tidally locked.
What that means is that if you take the Moon's rotation around the Earth, the amount of time it takes for the Moon to rotate around the Earth once as its year, and the amount of time that the Moon takes to orbit around its own axis as its day, that the Moon's year is equivalent to the Moon's day, which means that the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth.
And so the logic I just went to, whenever you hear something being described as tidally locked relative to what it's orbiting around, that means that it's day length and its year length are the same, such that the object at the center, be it the sun if it's a planet or a planet if it's a moon, always sees the same side of the object that is orbiting it.
And we have in English, and I presume, although I didn't look into it, presumably other cultures and other languages as well, this idea of the dark side of the Moon.
Right?
I was going to say.
And there is no literal dark side of the Moon because when we are seeing a Moon that looks dark to us, that is on a new Moon, the other half is light.
And when we see a full Moon, the other half is dark, but we are always seeing the same face.
But there is a metaphorically dark side of the Moon, right?
That it is dark to us.
That half of the Moon that we never see from this planet is dark to us because it's outside of our purview.
It's outside of our possible view, and so we cannot know it.
And one of the things that landing on the Moon does is potentially bring the metaphorically dark side of the Moon into the light for us.
It brings it into our awareness at this empirical level that we never could have had before.
Yeah, I agree, and so does orbiting the Moon and all of that stuff.
This is true.
The fact that there is no dark side.
No literally dark side.
No permanently dark side.
No literally dark side.
I really feel like no literally dark side, but the darkness also refers to unknown.
Well, I agree with your metaphorical point.
I mean, there's always a dark side of the Moon.
It's just not always the same side, right?
But there's a metaphorically dark side that sometimes is literally lit by photons and sometimes literally not.
There is a mysterious side of the Moon.
There's an inherently mysterious side of the Moon.
To us, from our perspective as humans on the planet that it is orbiting.
Yeah.
But the fact that there is arguably no dark side of the Moon is evidence that if there is a god, he does not like Pink Floyd.
Or if there's Pink Floyd, they don't like God.
Those are not mutually exclusive.
Okay.
Yeah.
And?
Well, just saying.
Just saying.
All right.
All right.
Yeah, maybe that's enough moon for now, perhaps.
All right.
I believe the next segment is the one I had discussed.
Is that right?
Isopropyl?
Yep.
So here is...
There are a couple facets of this.
At the end of this will come a challenge to our most obsessed and, I think, despicable critics.
I do want to say that we are not inherently against critics.
We like critics.
In fact, you have asked for better skeptics.
We have had better skeptics arrive on our doorstep, for which we are very grateful.
I also wanted to Show, I don't know who generated this.
Hey Zach, do you want to put up that meme that showed up this week?
Or at least I saw it for the first time this week.
Somebody, they landed a punch.
Here we go.
Okay.
Somebody.
I don't get it.
Has decided that I look like a schnauzer.
And I don't think they're way off.
I think they've.
So for those just listening at home, this is new to me.
Brett Schnaustein.
Schnaustein, I don't even know how you pronounce it, with you in a still from I guess our last two live streams ago maybe.
With a schnauzer.
With a schnauzer in front of me.
I really don't see it.
The facial hair I think is reminiscent in some ways.
Okay.
All right.
Nonetheless, I thought it was clever.
I don't know who generated it.
It could be one of our despicable critics or it could be somebody else who just decided to come up with a meme.
But anyway, I got a chuckle out of it.
So, you know, appreciate it.
But we have some critics that I don't really appreciate because they don't seem to be capable of anything other than tearing down value generated by others.
Anyway, we'll get back to them in a second.
I had an experience.
Uh, last night that resulted in an innovation.
Okay.
Okay.
And the experience, as you know, you were very much there for the beginning of the story.
Um, as we closed down, so we have an issue in our house where in order to make the pet thing work, where the dog is out and protects the cats from coyotes and the cats have a way to get back in the house quickly if something were to show up.
We end up leaving doors open, which is bad because insects come in and, you know, we're biologists, we tolerate it better than most, but it's still annoying.
And last night as we turned off lights around the house to go to bed, so the house is growing increasingly dark, that meant that the last light in the house attracted all of the five flies that had gotten into the house during the day.
So, they were in the bathroom.
And as you, having brushed your teeth, left, you grumbled about the five flies that were quite annoying.
It's, you know, five flies is a lot for one small room.
So, anyway, I walked in.
Just like, welcome, welcome to the bathroom, Brad.
I'm leaving now.
Exactly.
You can have it, you and the five flies.
So anyway, I brushed my teeth, and I noticed the flies too, and was thinking what to do about them, but I was left without good tools, right?
And so at one point, several flies landed on the large bathroom mirror on the wall, and I thought, I'll wait.
I know.
I need a cup and I need a piece of paper and I'll put the cup over the fly and I'll slide the piece of paper in behind it and so I grabbed a glass.
was actually a duplicate of this here glass.
And now you can imagine the predicament, which is that I've got a large plate glass mirror, and I'm going to go take this other piece of glass and try not to break either one of them while I'm getting the fly.
But I did it.
Okay, I put the glass on the mirror, and the fly was trapped, and I slid the paper in there, and I was feeling pretty good.
And I took the glass, and I walked over to the toilet.
And I thrust it down, and I pulled the paper off.
So the fly flung right into the toilet water and sat there helplessly on the surface, fluttering its wings and not succeeding.
And I thought, this is going to be the thing we get grief over.
Just smash the fly.
And I thought, well, but no, smash the fly is terrible for one thing.
A, it ain't that easy.
B, it's going to leave a big splattered fly at best on the mirror, which is then going to need cleaning.
It's not good.
Fly guts.
Right.
And you're more likely to get the fly, it's going to land on your wall and then you're going to smash it and then you're going to have this bloody stain there until you paint over it.
Anyway, so I flung the fly down into the toilet, he landed in the water, I felt so good, and then a moment later he flew out.
And now he's covered in toilet water!
Right, exactly!
And so what was my next thought?
My next thought was, okay, that did not, you know, it's like a prototype of a plan, but it's not a good one.
No, really not.
Okay, now I'm thinking, okay, well, you know, Great.
So you've got five flies flying around, one of which is covered in toilet water.
You don't know which one that is.
They're touching all sorts of stuff.
But of course, now I'm thinking, I'm thinking like me.
And I have been a fan of isopropyl alcohol since long before this COVID thing.
Because isopropyl alcohol, hey, Zach, you want to put up a diagram of the molecule of isopropyl alcohol?
So isopropyl alcohol is marvelous, marvelous stuff.
And here it is.
And I'm actually much more impressed with the actual stuff than I am with this diagram.
Well, me too, but I just wanted to point out this is what it looks like and what makes it an alcohol.
You can see, for those of you just listening, you've got a molecule here with three carbons in a chain.
The two end carbons have their three free electrons that are not joining them to the other carbon occupied by a hydrogen.
And then the middle carbon has one hydrogen and then it has an OH group.
Oxygen and a hydrogen sticking off.
And what makes something an alcohol is an OH group sticking off a carbon that has all of its electrons occupied in a covalent bond.
Awesome description.
Okay, thank you.
So, all that time in organic chemistry was not entirely wasted.
Much of it was, but not all of it.
All right, so isopropyl alcohol.
You can now go back to whatever, to us, to the Schnauzer and Dr. Heather Hying.
All right, so isopropyl alcohol is great stuff, and it's great for various reasons.
One, I had trouble ascertaining this, I had trouble finding the evidence for this in my brief survey this morning, but I believe it's a molecule that is produced in nature with some regularity, which means that it's a molecule we are likely to have encountered for millions of years, therefore have a good apparatus for detoxifying it.
Empirically speaking, it is certainly true that although it is somewhat toxic, it is very slightly toxic compared to all sorts of other things that you can use it as a substitute for.
Ethanol would be better.
Ethanol, we have a very direct history with detoxifying.
It's better stuff.
But isopropyl alcohol, you can't really get ethyl alcohol in a pure form.
It either comes in an expensive drink form, or if you get it in a concentrated industrial form, it has a bitterent added to it to keep people from abusing it.
So isopropyl alcohol, you can get it, it's cheap, works for all kinds of things.
It's disinfecting.
It's antiseptic.
You can clean with it.
It's a wonderful solvent.
It's great for windows because it has a high vapor pressure so it doesn't leave streaks.
It evaporates very rapidly off the windows.
You can get rid of at least small amounts of frost because it's an alcohol.
It lowers the freezing point of water, taking a frozen water and turning it back into a liquid water, so you can open a lock.
You can do all kinds of good things with it.
I learned something today.
There's been a mystery for me about alcohols forever.
The mystery is I think they're non-polar, right?
And yet you can make a drink that's based of water.
Why doesn't it separate like salad dressing?
And there's a term for what it does.
It's not actually dissolving in water.
It is, I've now forgotten the term.
There's another term which I will come up with.
All that time spent in organic chemistry was not as useful as you thought.
No, it was not.
It failed to answer this question.
This may be an inorganic chem issue, actually.
But in any case, an alcohol, especially isopropyl alcohol, will also, because it's nonpolar, will dissolve grease.
So if you spray water or something water-based on a grease, it will have little effect.
You can homogenize the film over a larger area.
Exactly.
As everyone who has tried to clean up behind their stove with water has experienced.
Right.
Soap works, but then you have to deal with the soap.
But alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, works brilliantly.
It works brilliantly and it can save you so much money, right?
We used to have tons of this stuff lying around and when COVID hit and it suddenly became scarce, we were at the end of our supply and we were stuck with everybody else trying to find it.
We got like wintergreen flavored isopropyl alcohol that had been sitting in the bottom of a warehouse for who knows how long.
But anyway, Here's a tip.
Instead of spending more than you would spend for gasoline to buy a gallon of windshield wiper fluid, get a thing of 70% isopropyl alcohol and add a bit of it into the water in your reservoir and it will both increase the use of the water in cleaning your windshield and vastly decrease the quantity you spend to make that stuff.
And again, it works as an antifreeze.
Yes, exactly.
It works as an antifreeze.
It drops the freezing point of water well below, if you put enough of it in, well below the meaningful one, so you can change it for summer and winter as appropriate and save even more money in the summer.
But anyway, I digress.
Here I was, having lost to this fly.
I came up with a good idea and it almost worked, and now I've got a toilet water covered fly flying around.
I because I'm now in the mindset of like a toilet water covered fly, I'm thinking isopropyl alcohol, which of course I have a spray bottle right there.
Let's at least clean the fly.
Let us launder the fly.
So anyway, no one can tell where that fly came from.
Right.
Right.
Take your fingerprints off.
So I grabbed the isopropyl alcohol and then I realized, wait a minute.
So we've got spray bottles of isopropyl in our bathrooms because it's a great cleanser.
It's a great cleanser.
If a cat were to, for example, hork on your carpet, then you could saturate the carpet.
Not our cats!
No, but somebody else's cat was to break in.
a bunch of grass on the carpet, right?
Then you could saturate the carpet with the isopropyl alcohol, and then you take the steam cleaner, and you don't need the steam part of that.
You just suck the stuff out of your carpet with the steam cleaner, and it pulls all the stuff, all the hork that may have seeped into the carpet right out.
Anyway, it's great stuff.
It's a really unusual dark horse today.
It is a little unusual, but useful.
This is going to be crazy.
This is news you can use, guys.
This is news you can use.
You need a steam cleaner, a whole bunch of isopropyl alcohol.
You are a master of the steam cleaner.
And the isopropyl alcohol.
I'm also a master of the isopropyl.
I'm going ninja level, though, on the isopropyl.
Okay, so you've got this toilet water covered fly, and you've got a spray bottle full of... Disguised in a crowd of flies.
In a crowd of flies.
You've got a spray bottle, a high quality spray bottle full of isopropyl, No, it's our lowest quality spray bottle, but good enough.
It's after midnight.
It's after midnight.
I've got a grudge now, right?
I've been bested by this fly once, and it's not going to happen again.
Okay, so here's the thing.
These flies now, my first thought was, now you take the cup, you put it on the mirror, you get the fly, and then you spray isopropyl alcohol in on the fly, right?
And then you put him in the damn toilet and see if he can fly out.
Not for long.
Okay, good.
I go after it with the glass, which again, I have to not break the mirror, I have to not break the glass.
Yeah, you noticed that the mirror was not broken this morning.
Good job.
It was not broken.
Thank you.
But, okay, now the fly.
I don't know if this is my imagination or just bad luck, but now the fly seems skittish about the cup.
I can't get anywhere near it, right?
My initial success.
Do you think it's the same fly or not?
You don't know.
I think the flies now know they're being chased.
That my activity with the flies has now put them – I actually think – So, I want to know what your long-term – I mean, I know you're getting there, but like, seriously, now you're going to try to douse all the flies with isopropyl, and you can't tell them apart, because it's not like you put leg bands on them or something.
You can't tell the flies apart.
How long do you do this before you figure – like, if you're actually successful in what you're now talking about, how many times do you have to catch flies before you figure, okay, I've caught 87 flies, and there's only five of them.
What are the chances that it's only four of those five flies?
Right, right, right.
Like, how do you do the analysis on this?
I don't.
I don't need it anymore, because I'm now ninja level, right?
Now, I should point out, I'm the second ninja level anti-fly guy in our family.
Oh my god, Toby is amazing.
Toby is amazing, and Toby's trick is rubber bands, which he... pew!
And he can hit flies at a great distance, and he's very accurate.
If you say, hey Toby, there are flies in this room, he'll get them.
And he cleans them up.
He cleans up the corpses.
Mostly.
The problem is if you have high ceilings, you end up with rubber bands and fly guts.
Distributed various places.
Yeah, if there's high ceilings with like ledges.
A fan, or yeah, any place it can stick.
That's right.
Nonetheless, he is ninja level with respect to dealing with the flies.
He's not ninja level with respect to leaving a clean battlefield, right?
Okay, so.
Why chromosome types?
Back to my predicament last night.
I'm now armed with the isopropyl.
I'm armed with a glass, and it occurs to me I have never thought to spray the flies dry.
With isopropyl?
Yes!
Okay.
They never needed laundering before.
Well, here's the thing.
They just needed killing.
One of them landed right before me.
And I spritzed it.
I didn't have to get that close.
I had it on mist.
In a second.
Oh god.
So I sprayed the fly.
You took video.
How did you take video?
I didn't.
I did that this morning.
I wanted to demonstrate this so the audience would believe me.
I sprayed the fly on the mirror.
I didn't need to get close enough.
I didn't have to alert him that I was coming.
I just misted him.
Fell to the counter right there.
Grabbed him, threw him in the toilet.
Next fly lands.
It took me about three minutes, four minutes to be done with all the flies.
And now the mirror is clean as well.
Exactly!
You spray this in the mirror, you barely need to come back at it with anything because of the high vapor pressure.
See the earlier part of the conversation.
This reminds me a little bit of your innovation of man dusting.
Yes.
Oh, that's another good one.
Yeah.
So, I feel like for sure you and I are right that on average men don't really dust.
No, they do not.
They generate dust.
Oh, boy.
And some people have particular responses to dust.
Right.
Many women have an aesthetic reaction like, oh god, it's dusty.
I don't want to look at that.
But you, for instance, have a reaction to inhaling it more than I do say.
But I have the aesthetic reaction like, I just don't want to look at the dust.
You can go months without noticing the dust and not seeing it.
But arm you with a leaf blower.
A leaf blower.
And here's the thing, kids.
If you're going to do this inside your house, you need an electric leaf blower.
I would recommend getting an electric.
You haven't actually done this inside the house.
Only on special occasions.
But you have done it to actually clear out the garage.
The garage, the outbuilding, places where dust accumulates.
Yeah, you know, there are certain surgical circumstances where there's something you can't reach in the house.
But anyway, you don't do this in the house with a gas-powered blower, but you also don't really... Electric leaf blower has one little disadvantage.
It's slightly less powerful, but it has so many advantages.
It's not loud when you're not using it.
It doesn't idle.
Right.
It's great.
It's a marvelous tool.
It's actually a wonderful tool, yeah.
Yeah, and it's much, much quieter.
So, man dusting goes into the same category as... God, it's not killing two flies with one stone.
It's like accomplishing two distinct... I don't have the right aphorism.
It's stoning two or more flies and then dispensing with them.
Well, but you also end up with a clean mirror.
That's my point.
Right.
It's like you end up sort of inadvertently cleaning something... Right.
...that you wouldn't have thought to do.
No, but it's... I'm pretty sure they go out stoned.
That's...
That's what I saw.
Yes, I mean having the flies die a gentle and perhaps even gleeful death.
Intoxicated death.
Hey Zach, you want to show this video so people can see what I'm talking about?
It was hard to capture because I have the isopropyl in one hand and the video... see that?
Okay.
I don't know.
I don't know if the fly thought you were God or Satan.
I was effectively God to that fly.
And not a benevolent God.
This was a Yahweh-style... Taking that fly to its permanent home in apparently the toilet?
Is that where you were putting them?
Yes.
I see.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, I don't know if they recover.
I didn't run that experiment.
Ah, so you didn't want to just put them in the trash can and then open the cabinet at some point and have a crew of flies fly out.
That would have made for a good story, but no, I didn't want that to happen.
Okay, so can we get back to my critics and our critics?
Well, first of all, there's two tie-ins here.
There's two tie-ins.
Neither of us has begun drinking yet, right?
Not even a little.
I mean, I have been inhaling a certain amount of isopropyl alcohol since last night.
Apparently, yes.
Remember earlier when we were in the Bahamas?
Oh, I do in April.
Do you remember that beautiful beach where it was reported to us by our lovely hosts that there was a pair of tropic birds nesting, that they had been on the beach and the tropic birds had made some attempt to get rid of them?
Yeah.
Well, that beach was very beautiful.
And the idea of seeing tropic birds up close near their nest was so tantalizing that I really wanted to go to that beach.
And at some point, I cobbled together the necessary materials including, you know, the tender boat and you and Toby and we set off to go to that beach.
Remember what happened next?
No.
Got to the beach.
Nice beach.
Went looking for the tropic birds and didn't find the tropic birds, but the biting flies came after us, right?
That's like our critics, right?
They're like biting flies, right?
They have no consequence, but they're very, very annoying.
They don't vector anything, let's see, the actual biting flies.
The critics may vector things.
Yeah.
But the biting flies, as far as we know, you know, there are biting flies, of course, in the world that do vector things like tsetse flies and such.
But the biting flies on the Bahamian beaches, as far as we know, don't vector anything, but they take a chunk out of you, and they leave a welt, and it's not pleasant.
It's not pleasant.
It's enough to destroy.
But you don't end up with, I mean, you could, I guess, get an infection that festers, etc.
But you're not going to get a disease from this, but it's really unpleasant.
Yes, they're an ankle-biting annoyance.
Anyway, that is how I feel about not all of our critics, right?
Some of our critics I appreciate, but the critics who just basically that's what they do, where their whole purpose is to tear down stuff that other people do without actually contributing anything to the world.
And so, my point about the isopropyl alcohol is that that, yes, it's funny, but Tremendously useful.
If you've ever been plagued by flies that you couldn't get out of a room, you now, you know, for the price, and I would recommend you get the high quality Zepp, the Zepp spray bottle.
Not a sponsor.
Not a sponsor yet.
They may be when they see this.
You want the high quality Zepp, the yellow and blue bottle.
You want 70% isopropyl alcohol.
You'll find lots of other uses for it, but now you can eliminate any fly that lands near enough for you to get to it, right?
That's tremendously useful, and what I want to know is if any of the people who have become obsessed with us Have ever come up with anything that useful, and I want to hear what it is.
I want to know if they have contributed anything to humanity as useful as isopropyl alcohol versus a fly, okay?
And I don't think probably sum total, if you took their contributions to humanity, the sum total of them could come up with anything that useful.
I suspect you're right, and I welcome the challenge being leashed on the world.
Yeah, all right, hell yeah.
And I don't know, some small amount of guilt about the flies, but they had to go.
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, they did.
They had to go.
They weren't invited.
We weren't going to go after them outside, were we?
Right.
The flies.
I mean, I could steal their position.
The flies?
Yeah.
I mean, we did open the door.
How are they to know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
How were they to know?
How were they to know?
But they had, I mean, you know, they had to go.
- Still in the position of the place that came to the house.
Okay, that's where we are.
- Isopropyl alcohol may be more toxic than I realize, but it's fun. - Someone in the chat contributed but it's very possible to get drunk by a man.
Is it possible to be drunk this many hours later?
Yeah, and I had none of it.
I was not exposed, although I probably went to the bathroom in the middle of the night at some point, so.
You left it really fumy in there.
I don't know.
Okay, I think we're good.
All right.
I think we're done.
This has been a different episode of Dark Horse.
Yes, it has.
And I wouldn't have had fun.
This is Livestream 134.
We'll be back next time.
No?
Next week, same time, here comes the dog who apparently needs her little carotinized tips clipped off of herself.
Hello, friend.
We're going to take a 15-minute break and be back with our live Q&A.
You can ask questions for the live Q&A at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can email any logistical questions that you've got about things going on to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Consider joining our Patreons.
We're right now at mine.
You can ask questions that we'll try to get to in our live Q&A on the last Sunday of the month.
We've got a snorty, sneezy dog rolling around behind us, but she has not had access to any isopropyl, so no worries.
No worries there.
We're in good hands with our Labrador.
And without further ado, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
