In this 136th 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 the tragic tale of a woman who became a murderer….or actually, we discuss a murderer who claims to have become a woman. We talk about the order to close Tavistock, the gender identity clinic in England, and whether “affirmative care” for children who declare themselves trans may soon be a thing of the ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 136 of If I'm not mistaken, it is hot in Portland.
Oh, my goodness.
It is hot.
I have decided that what I'm going to do is I'm going to wear a t-shirt for this podcast.
And although that's kind of not in keeping what I'm going to do is I'm going to define it as a button down because that's how things are.
Haha, yes, well that is in keeping with some of what we'll be talking about today.
But yeah, you're going full otter today.
I'm full otter.
The otter is riding a bicycle.
For those of you just listening, it's not a photograph of an otter riding a bicycle, but it is a shockingly realistic depiction of an otter riding a bicycle.
Yeah, and Otter being safe, looking both ways, or at least looking back over his shoulder.
Yep, seeing if he's being followed.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, yeah, it is hot, as it has been many places, but this is super unusual.
For Pacific Northwest, here we are.
Yes, we, I forgot to point out, I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, and you are Dr. Heather Hying.
I am, and you are.
And today we're going to talk about sex and gender, murder, transition, things like that, Wikipedia, definition, the recession, and the drinking age for young people.
Awesome.
I don't exactly see the connection between these three things, but I'm sure we'll find something.
It will be obvious in retrospect, I'm hoping.
Alright, so task keeping first.
We follow these live streams when we have time, as we do today with a live Q&A, so you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Go there now, ask questions.
We will get to as many as possible after we end This first hour, hour and a half live stream, and then start with the live Q&A about 15 minutes afterwards.
We have this book out in French that's upside down.
This book, which in English is this, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
And we're doing some more Spanish language interviews.
We're not speaking in Spanish because unfortunately our Spanish just isn't that good.
It's getting better.
The interviews help.
Yeah, it's great.
So it's coming out.
It's been out in Spain since, I think, June, and it's coming out in many countries in Latin America in U.S.
Spanish edition either August or maybe early September.
So that's happening and it's out in French now.
If you're watching on YouTube, we are of course live as well on Odyssey, and the chat is live on Odyssey, and we're everywhere where you find your podcasts after that.
We have a store, darkhorsestore.org, where you can find not otters on bicycles, but other cool things, epic tabbies, digital book burnings, that sort of thing.
You can find me, my writing, at naturalselections.substack.com.
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Which is July 30th.
I had that wrong earlier.
We will be doing a private Q&A.
The questions have already been asked, but it's small enough.
We engage with the chat.
It's a lot of fun.
It's fun, and it's like a nice little community of people.
It really is.
It's a back and forth banter anyway.
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And also, before we come back to you next week on our next live stream, Brett will have one of his conversations on Saturday morning next.
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Many of them have been there for years.
Wonderful.
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All of our sponsors have products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
So, without further ado, here we go, the three sponsors for this episode.
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Alright, now before we get going, I realize there's something I forgot to say last week that I should have.
I did an interview on a product that no one will have heard of called QPark.
That's an acronym.
And I did it with the author and the It is his brainchild.
What does that make him?
The brainfather of Kew Park, Paul Arant.
Anyway, it is on his channel, but I think you should look at it.
Among other things in there, we have a discussion, which I did not see coming, but nonetheless I think was interesting, about the utility of Kew Park, which is a mechanism for leveling the playing field in arguments.
And the question that Paul raised was, what would be the utility of such a thing?
In the context of the argument that we have with Sam Harris.
And so in this I invite Sam to potentially use this software in order to have out the argument that we have been headed for for so long.
And anyway, I hope many people will go look at it.
We will provide a link to that video in the description.
If you're interested in this, I've been involved in the project for quite a number of years, I think four years now at this point, and it is almost ready for prime time.
If you're interested in the project, sign up for the Kew Park Twitter account and the Kew Park YouTube channel and you can hear more about it as it develops.
Now what you've written down there looks like a very unusual spelling of the word that you are using.
Yes, as I said, it's an acronym for a process.
How is it spelled?
No one is going to be able to find it if you don't tell them.
I should tell them now?
Yes!
Okay, yes.
It is Q-P-A-R-Q.
Q, it's that terminal Q that's a little surprising.
The terminal Q, which is not followed by a U.
An E, a U, or an E. Right, it's not followed by much.
The initial one is followed by the rest of the acronym, but it's not followed by- Being non-terminal and all.
Yeah, exactly.
I know this has been fascinating to people who have been wondering how you would spell Kew Park if you were to set out to do such a thing.
Given that you're trying to send people to Kew Park, it's- It's important that they- It's not a word that anyone's heard before, because presumably Paul and his, what do you call him, brain father?
He's the brain father.
His brain team came up with that word.
Maybe he did on his own, but it warrants just a spelling.
I know that's not... Yeah, no, it's... It doesn't tend to be what you do, but... I will say I think it is a truly terrible name for this piece of software, but I will point out that many of the most important features of our world have terrible names.
It's become kind of... Name another.
Google.
Oh, okay.
Google.
The Beatles.
The Beatles.
Arguably the greatest band in the history of rock and roll.
Their name is predicated on one lackluster pun.
It's not a good name, but great band.
So anyway, I think the... You would have felt better about them if it had been predicated on two lackluster puns?
I would have felt much better about it if it had been predicated on a single excellent pun.
That would have been fine, right?
Or something obscure.
You know, The Doors.
That's a good name, right?
The Doors and not the Beatles.
The Doors of Perception.
Beatles?
Okay.
Oh, The Doors of Perception.
The Doors of Perception, right?
So there's something important.
Yep.
So yeah, I think the Beatles had a terrible name, but succeeded in spite of it.
It's almost as a hobby handicap of rock and roll kind of phenomenon.
That's not going to make any sense to anyone but you, but you got it.
Yep.
Here we are.
Yes.
Okay.
Shall we talk about murder?
Of course.
All right.
We always start there.
We always start there.
The New York Times reported this week on a two-time violent killer who, upon release from prison at the age of 81, went on to kill again.
Tragic.
And the killer is a woman, which is both tragic and very unusual.
So I'm going to just read the first five paragraphs of this article.
Why is it hiding from me now?
Where did it go?
Why does my computer do this to me?
It's the interface with the streaming computer.
Okay, here we go.
Yeah, you can show this again or show this now.
I don't know.
It's a little jumbled at the top, but maybe that doesn't matter.
I don't know why it's doing this.
So this is the New York Times piece this week.
How did a two-time killer get out to be charged again at age 83?
Marceline Harvey is accused of dismembering a woman in Brooklyn.
Her life was defined by a tormented relationship with women and herself and a simmering anger.
This is published yesterday, and here are the first five paragraphs of the article.
The person before the parole panel in June 2019 was tall and slim, in far better shape than 81 years of life might have suggested.
Mild and polite, the supplicant seemed nothing like the murderer who had spent decades in prison, first for shooting a girlfriend dead in 1963, and then for stabbing another in 1985, stuffing her corpse into a bag and leaving it in Central Park.
I am no longer that person, the inmate told the parole board commissioners.
Despite misgivings, they would rule in favor of release.
Two and a half years after leaving Cayuga Correctional Facility, Marceline Harvey was accused again, charged with killing Susan Layton, 68.
Part of Ms.
Layton's body were found in March inside a shopping cart in East New York stuffed in a bag.
In Ms.
Harvey's apartment, investigators found a bloody mop, a tub full of towels, and a box for an electric saw.
For seven decades leading up to her latest arrest, Ms.
Harvey navigated New York's intricate criminal justice bureaucracy, the country's largest police apparatus, the state's overlapping welfare agencies, its prisons, and the officials charged with deciding who remains in them.
She confronted the system in some moments, manipulated it in others.
Behind her was a trail of crimes so grisly that for decades, parole officials refused to let her out.
Now Ms. Harvey has pleaded not guilty to murder.
Ms. Harvey's lawyer at the Brooklyn Public Defender's Office declined to comment on her case.
Ms. Harvey, who was being held at Rikers, could not be reached for comment.
She declined an interview request.
So that's the first part of a long article, of which I will share more shortly.
But this is an amazing story.
Very unusual.
Very, very unusual.
And so I actually looked up, I've got the FBI statistics from 2019 on homicides by sex that are single victim, single offender crimes only.
So this obviously is not a single victim crime.
And I strongly suspect that these numbers I'm about to share would be even more strongly skewed in multiple victim crimes.
But I wasn't able in the short amount of time I was looking to find multiple victims, single offender crimes.
But what I find from 2019, again on the FBI site, is male offenders out of a total of, I don't have the total written down here, but male offenders in, again, single victim, single offender homicides were numbered 5,839 and female offenders were 683.
Which is actually higher than I was expecting.
And when you do the math on that, that's 90%.
90% of single victim, single offender homicides as recorded by the FBI in 2019, 90% had men as the offenders.
90% had men as the offenders, which makes a female homicidal maniac rather, rather completely unusual.
Well, it's probably much more unusual than that statistic.
As I said.
Right, but because of the definition of homicide as opposed to murder.
In other words, a justifiable homicide if somebody is being attacked and they kill their attacker.
That counts as a homicide, but not a murder.
Indeed.
And so there may be many.
I would guess that that is distributed unequally, too.
Yes.
I don't know, but.
I agree.
I agree.
And of course, I mean, there's a lot of places where you can find statistics.
And I went with the FBI.
Imagine from, you know, from before COVID, just imagine that they would be somewhat clean.
I'm sure there are reasons to object to their numbers as with anyone's.
There you go.
Something like 90% of homicides with one victim and one offender are done by men.
But if we go back to that article...
Here we go.
We go back to the same New York Times article, and I'm just, I'm reading here from a PDF so that I could highlight some.
The very next paragraph says: "Decades worth of police documents and court records detail the life of Ms. Harvey, a transgender woman, who transitioned at some point after her release from prison." Central to her tale are more than three decades of parole board minutes obtained through the state's freedom of information law.
In them, she insists that authorities exaggerated evidence, changes stories about crimes she admitted, and veers between a contrition and blaming those she killed.
The records include several examples of her harassing or attacking women throughout her life.
She was accused of attempted rape at 14.
The victim was an eight-year-old girl.
Ms.
Harvey, who by her own account struggled with her mental health, said she had to choke down rage when women challenged her manliness before she transitioned.
Making fun of her soft voice, for example.
Go on.
Talk about burying the lead.
This is unbelievable.
I mean, it's the same damn pattern that we have discussed before with for, you know, obviously the context is entirely different, but Chelsea Manning, who was Bradley Manning, The crime for which she was imprisoned happened in her male form.
She transitioned afterwards.
So even if you give full credit to the idea that a person can transition from one gender to the other, there is still a historical fact Right.
What Chelsea Manning did had nothing to do with giving secret documents to WikiLeaks, right?
Bradley Manning did that.
And in this case, the person who engaged in the crime for which she was incarcerated for all those years.
Crimes.
Crimes was a man.
Yeah, and frankly still is.
This is bullshit, right?
And, you know, a considerable risk of being a broken record on this topic.
How is this kind?
Who is this kind to?
How is this compassionate?
Who does it serve to pretend that sex isn't real and that violence against women By a man who was engaged in violence against women his entire life?
Is in fact violence perpetrated by a woman?
No.
The only possible crime that this homicidal maniac has committed that could plausibly, and I think that would be a stretch, but could plausibly be suggested to have been performed by a woman, by a trans woman, is the last one after the release from prison.
At the point that the person was already in their in their 70s, I believe.
This is total incoherence.
It's farce.
And it's tragedy, right?
It's it's tragedy and farce at the individual level, at the justice level, and at the society level.
So well, we are in, we are seeing And, you know, there are a lot of ways that we will be mocked for saying that this is one of the canaries in the coal mine, that this is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, but this is.
This is the way that the West falls.
Everyone, every child and every adult knows that sex is real and that sex is binary, and that however you decide you want to express yourself doesn't change what you are.
I would add to that that the behavior of the New York Times in obscuring that fact and pretending that there is a different fact which is not even logically coherent is the equivalent of a journalistic crime.
This is, as we always point out, The supposed paper of record.
And the point is this isn't any sort of record.
This is a fairy tale being presented as the record of something.
And I would point something out.
To the extent that all adults, all reasonable adults, understand that there are differences between males and females, think about the consequence of Pretending that one can simply transition by saying I'm I've moved from one category to the next what does that do to the statistics?
Well, one thing it does is the number of murders that are Perpetrated by women is going to go up right now.
Those aren't murders perpetrated by women Right?
At most, they are murders perpetrated by trans women, but the point is, whose bill do they go on?
Right?
Is there a problem with women becoming more violent?
No.
Is there a problem with men saying that they are women and remaining violent, or something like that?
Obvious prediction, which I am certain would be borne out.
If the FBI, for instance, started collecting data on Gender is the wrong freaking thing to be using here.
Yeah.
But homicide by offender, male, female, trans woman, trans man.
Obviously, what you would have leading the way would be men and trans women with Women, you know, proportional to their representation in society, below that, and trans men probably lowest of all.
Yeah, that's an important prediction.
Yeah, and we are just, it's not even like we've been in like a relay race and we're like passing the baton to the next country that wants to pick it up.
We're pretending the baton never existed.
We're pretending all sorts of things about About who we are and what we are and how life works that is rendering us, like I said, farcical.
We look ridiculous because...
Even at this point, and we'll talk a little bit shortly, but even the very liberal, famously left-leaning countries in Scandinavia are now pulling back from a lot of this gender insanity.
They are, and again we'll talk, America is just like remaining staunch.
We are remaining staunch in our deep confusion.
Yeah, and it is, as we have pointed out, it is a revolution that is at least It is probably emerging from academia, which is bizarrely taken over by particular false notions and has increasingly been so over decades.
But this is now taking over the sciences.
As I somewhat famously said in Mike Naina's documentary on the Evergreen Affair, this has spilled out into all of civilization.
You know activist district attorneys refusing to charge people for crimes basically blaming society for their bad behavior etc.
But this also so couple things are true one the ability to even say what is true right you could say hypothesis men and women are not substantially different right.
But then you make it impossible to test that hypothesis if you confuse the question of who actually is male and female, right?
So that's what's happening at a statistical level.
But there's also a way, there's something in this story that comes from a very different thread, something that's bugged me for literally decades.
I do have more to share about it too, but go for it now.
All right.
We, when we deal with punishing people, right, when we imprison people, We ought to be defining two categories.
Some people can be rehabilitated.
We ought to take the possibility of rehabilitating them very seriously, and we ought to invest in the structures that actually succeed in rehabilitation, whatever they may be.
It's a discoverable answer.
And then there are lots of people who aren't rehabilitatable.
They are psychopaths, in the worst case.
Right why did this person get out at all right crimes that grizzly certainly suggest that somebody is completely is beyond indifferent maybe they delight in you know in murder and dismembering.
And rape, and sexual assault.
And sexual assault, all of these things.
So the question is even, let's say that there was a 10% chance that that person was rehabilitatable and that they somehow violate the trend that we know from so many other psychopaths, right?
There's no reason to think that that's a category, but let's say it was.
It's still not worth risking other people's lives on that gamble.
They've done enough to justify keeping them away from civilization for the rest of their life.
Why was this person even eligible to be released given that they, as far as we know, modern psychology tells us a psychopath cannot be rehabilitated, so why are we pretending otherwise when it comes to our legal system?
Well, to be fair to the New York Times, this is a point they make.
Now, they're deeply confused about what the sex of the homicidal maniac in question is, and they claim that that's a difficult question to think about, but that the real question, which is simpler, is exactly the one you just raised.
Okay.
Just a few more bits from the piece.
Quote, A homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms.
Layden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms.
Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.
Speaking from Rikers to the New York Post, Ms.
Harvey referred to herself as having two personas.
One, a violent male named Harvey Marcelin, the name she used for most of her life and is included in court records.
And the other is soft-spoken woman named Marceline Harvey.
So.
Born in 1938, Ms.
Harvey spent her youth in New York, wrong, the child of a single mother.
Even as a teenager, she displayed a propensity for violence, particularly toward women, and had a complicated gender identity.
Who the fuck cares?
Yeah.
Sorry.
According to court records and parole board minutes, Ms.
Harvey, no, was treated at Catholic charities which paired clergy and laypeople with troubled children after the attempted rape at 14.
Now, that paragraph, I was obviously adding a lot of editorial commentary while I was reading it, but that paragraph on its own, ending with, uh, was treated at Catholic charities after the attempted rape at 14, makes her sound like a victim.
At the time, this was Harvey, a 14-year-old violent young man who attempted the rape of an 8-year-old girl.
This is journalistic malpractice.
As a young adult, Ms.
Harvey, described then as a tall, slender man, lived with her mother and earned... No, not described!
Not described!
Accurately observed to be.
Not described.
Wrong.
Like none of this none of this makes sense.
In early 1963, Ms.
Harvey was again accused of rape.
This time as a 24 year old.
This time as a 24 year old.
Man, they should say.
Right.
It goes on and on and on.
The problem here is even to the extent, right, and I always bend over backwards to do this correctly, though I think at some level this- It's got, they've jumped the shark.
It falls under my rubric of you don't have to take sophistry seriously.
That's right.
The fact is, right, if we say gender is the software of sex, right?
That only goes so far, right?
That linguistic trick they played there with the rape, the attempted rape at 14, where because she is described as female, she is the presumed victim in that paragraph.
Right.
That is not about software.
Right?
The fact is, it may not be impossible for a woman to rape a man, but it is certainly much less probable at the level of morphology.
Right?
The fact is, an intermittent organ is not a matter of opinion.
It is something that is either present right and therefore can be weaponized or not present and the point is the New York Times years later doesn't get to pretend that that's nobody's business because it was apparently central to the incident.
Just point of order biology speak may not be everyone's language and you did not say intermittent organ although that is one possible.
interpretation of what, in fact, the organ is as well.
Intromittent organ is an organ that can penetrate and is a penis.
Or if you happen to be a squamate, if some of our listeners are, in fact, snakes or lizards, hemipenes, two of them.
I don't think we have that many squamates listening, but I could be wrong.
I hope so.
I mean, maybe some of our listeners have squamates attending to them.
That is possible.
That is possible.
Intro Muttendorgen is what you said, and it's not a matter of opinion.
It's not a matter of opinion.
And in fact, the question of what prison to send you to got a penis.
No women's prison under any circumstances.
I don't care how you dress.
I don't care how many shrinks have diagnosed you.
The point is that's a hazard to women, right?
You know, if you've had it removed, we can talk about whether or not you just decided you were a woman or.
You know, that's a long-standing issue.
There's at least a question then.
But no, if you are an intact man, the idea of being sent to a women's prison because it's how you say you feel, what universe have we landed in?
That's insane.
This is actually relevant.
If you put my screen back up again, Zach, this is a picture from the same New York Times article.
This is Marceline Harvey, the supposed woman who has committed all of these terrible crimes.
Check out that trans woman pattern baldness she's got going on there.
I mean, that is quite something.
Yeah.
I'll bet there are other problems she's having.
Maybe hearing loss, typical of older trans women?
I'll bet she doesn't quite have the bone density loss that older trans men are often finding themselves afflicted with.
Yeah.
You know why?
Because these are anatomical and physiological descriptions of what happens to men and to women as they age.
Men are far less likely to experience bone density loss as they age, osteoporosis and such, and women are far less likely to experience male pattern baldness and hearing loss, especially at the higher frequencies.
So, you know, just look at the hairline.
In addition to everything else about this person, again a homicidal maniac by every definition, and know that this is not a Marceline, despite the fact that he decided to switch the order in which his names go.
Well, the New York Times clearly demonstrates that they are just simply suckers because this person's history demonstrates that there is a complete absence of moral constraint.
Yep.
If somebody has a complete absence of moral constraint enough that they can murder and dismember other people multiply, then we are talking about somebody who might find lying not that big a deal.
Right.
Right.
And you know, okay, so this person is lying.
Yep.
Even in the case that they're not somehow that this is an accurate report from inside.
This person has denied other people their entire lives and done so apparently in cold blood.
Yes.
So, you know, yes, I would assume that this person is probably lying.
And if they're not, the injustice done by not taking their stuff seriously is a tiny one compared to the injustice that they have done.
And they're intact and everything.
The story is absurd.
You know how I used to say certain stories diagnose the system.
This is one such story.
Yeah.
And that's actually a perfect place to end and to segue into talking about Tavistock.
But first, just two more short quotes from this New York Times article.
Ms.
Harvey, quote, presented as a mild-spoken, very tall black man, said Anne Brennan, the nurse who ran the intake.
I said, well, why are you in the women's shelter?
Apparently, quote, apparently his feelings and identity were far more important than all the other women that were terrified of him, she said.
And next thing we know, there's another woman dead.
So, this does feel a little bit like the moment when a lot of people woke up when, what's his name, who won the swimming competition pretending to be a woman?
Leah Thomas.
Leah Thomas, yeah.
Where just the pictures made it so clear, and you know, there was no violence here.
There was injustice, but there was no tragedy at the level that we see here.
But it was really patently clear when you just put the visuals and the story in front of people, right?
So let us hope.
Let us hope that this wakes some more people up.
We see To segue here, we do see the tide turning, as I alluded to earlier, over in transitioning of youth space.
Not in the U.S.
yet.
Hopefully that will happen soon.
But the infamous Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic in England, it is the big gender identity clinic, and it has taken a lot of flack from a lot of good people who have gotten no end of flack in return, has been ordered to shut down by next spring.
Wow.
Why by next spring?
Why not right now?
But okay, it's been ordered to be shut down and this is extraordinary.
So yeah, go for it.
Yeah, I just want to point out that the idea that this clinic is apparently engaged in procedures that are egregious enough that it needs to be shut down raises exactly the question about if it needs to be shut down, what about the procedures that happen between now and when it is shut down?
Right.
And this is reminiscent of what happened as Mandates were lifted over COVID, and so I want to point out, this is now a hallmark of how Goliath behaves when it's caught red-handed, right?
So it can be caught, it can be forced to change course, it cannot be forced to admit that it is changing course, and the way it makes it appear that it's just simply involved in something normal rather than a tacit admission that it was full of shit, Is that it sets a timeline, which makes it seem like, oh, this is just another, you know, bureaucratic date on the calendar, rather than, oh, my God, this clinic has been injuring young people and needs to stop yesterday, not a month from now.
Much less, you know, eight months or, you know, whenever, whenever spring counts as, you know, beginning of spring is still, what, seven, eight months away?
Yeah.
More than that.
So, I don't know.
I mean, we need better language for this, but Goliath Sucks is basically where I am with it.
Yeah.
Goliath Sucks hides behind its own bureaucracy in order to maintain a semblance of business as usual.
That's just the thing.
It has a very, this is boring, business as usual.
There's something in the future.
It's not that it's happening tomorrow because we suddenly realized we're maiming children.
Yeah, exactly.
So there are a lot of pieces of the story, and I will link to several of these in the show notes, and we're not going to talk a whole lot about it now, but I will show you, for instance, I first heard about this from the Genspec press release, which you can show here, which is quite careful and has all of these links on it.
So Genspect is an excellent organization, which is at the forefront of the question of the conclusion that we should not be transitioning children, and that we should not be encouraging children to question what they are on the basis of a fleeting flight of fancy.
But among what they have here, actually, if I may, Zachary, have my screen back for a moment.
Thank you.
They've got a Times of London article here.
Tavistock Gender Clinic Forced to Shut Over Safety Fears.
This is published just a few days ago, July 28th.
The NHS, the National Health Service in England, is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under 18s.
It has been ordered to close, exactly as you said, and this is due to a report put out by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass.
Who is leading a review of the service.
And I also have that review which I will post to the show notes.
It's very long, it's very detailed.
She and her team went and did interviews and assessments and all sorts of the right sorts of investigations as to whether or not this clinic, which has been patently hurting children, For a long time now, should continue to be the one and only place that children who are presenting with some kind of gender dysphoria in Great Britain should be sent to.
And the conclusion was a resounding no.
No, they should not.
There need to be more options.
There need to be more options besides affirmative care, which is If you wake up one day and say you're a turtle, you're a turtle.
Nope, not that.
If you wake up one day and say you're a toaster, you're a toaster.
Nope, not that.
If you wake up one day and say you're the sex that you are not, well then yes, we have just the puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones and then surgery for you.
It's insane and finally it is stopping, at least in Great Britain.
Well, it will be soon.
So, related to Goliath hiding behind its bureaucracy, we are also watching everything foundational, right?
The things that we all once agreed on being undone at every level.
And so with the mandates, we saw what I... Vaccine mandates.
The vaccine mandates, we saw what I argued was a double violation Because not only did informed consent not exist in the context of the vaccines in question, but those who refused to administer them, and in some cases take them, were in jeopardy of their jobs.
So the obligation to resist immoral orders was itself being punished.
And in this case, we have what is an obvious violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
Right.
The fact is the purpose of this clinic was to violate the Hippocratic Oath, right?
Now it may be, and I agree with the following statement.
If you are one of those rare people who is gender dysphoric and is going to reach adulthood and remain compelled that something is not right, Right.
You need help.
And the earlier we give you that help, likely the better it works.
So I do have compassion for people who experience this early and know it.
But it's a very tiny number of people.
And the problem is that this clinic is not acting with caution with respect to, yes, there are a tiny number of those people and we need to sort them out and find them in amongst the vast sea of people who are momentarily confused about their gender.
Instead, the point is affirmative care is a euphemism for a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
Right?
The fact is, this is Doing physical harm, right?
Just measurable harm.
Disrupting the reproductive capacity, the sexual well-being and capacity of these people.
You know, altering, destroying functional tissue and replacing it with, at best, a simulation of the other sex's hardware, right?
That is harmful!
Right?
What happened to first do no harm?
Well, it got obscured by affirmative care, which, you know, who's not for affirmative care?
It sounds like preventative care, right?
Well, it ain't.
Sounds positive.
Yep, sure does.
Yep.
Not yes, but yes, and.
We're gonna say yes to all the things, including affirmative care.
Yeah, I will say, I made some of those arguments in, and Zach, you can show this briefly, this piece that I, I wrote it a lot earlier, but I published in my sub stack in November of last year, Protect Children, Do Not Allow Them to Medically Transition, in which I make precisely this argument, which is that
Even though there will be some very rare people who are actually going to live a more fulfilled life by existing as much as possible as the sex that they are not.
And those people will presumably know that pretty young.
We risk far more harm to far more people by ever allowing children or youth to transition, because those errors will be much, much, much more numerous.
And I would add one other thing to it, which is even if we were to take the trans activists at face value and imagine that there is a huge increase in the number of people in this category, it immediately invites the next question, which is what's causing that?
And to the extent that there is something causing it that is novel, the question is, can we figure out what it is so that we don't do this to any more people?
Yeah.
What happened to diagnosis and prevention?
In fact, gosh, have I ever heard anyone in this argument talk about preventing transness?
Right.
Where is that?
Right?
And because it has been slid in as if it's the next civil rights battle, as if it is inherently who you are, this will sound... I will be called a bigot for even saying that because I wouldn't say I'm trying to prevent homosexuality.
No.
Right?
But transness appears to be a malfunction, a dysfunction between your actual sex and either what your brain understands or something else that happened in development.
I would be a little cautious about that, because we do have many cultures which have this category.
And so I would argue that the increase is almost certainly the result of malfunction.
But not every case is the result of malfunction, or at least we don't know that yet.
Yeah, I don't think I agree with that.
Now we do have, I mean, in fact, we do know and I've written about in a couple of other essays, for instance, genetic anomalies as in, I think, Dominican Republic, where we actually can track, oh, there's a lot of people who What is it, the Machiambras, who, and I don't remember which way it is, I think, are born appearing to be male and then become female in puberty, become visibly female in puberty, or maybe it's the other way around.
I can't remember.
No, I think that's right.
And so, you know, that's a malfunction.
That's a genetic malfunction.
There's a question about it.
We have this pattern in many cultures.
We also have a question about Just as we have in many species, the production of more offspring than adults can manage to feed, right?
So there's basically selection is playing a game where it doesn't have enough information about what the future will look like.
And so it biases in a direction.
And we have that game also played with respect to the balance between the sexes.
And so in cultures where there are too many men and not enough women or vice versa, The idea that some group of people can switch categories and be paired up and that the society makes allowances for that could arguably be a very sensible... Could play the role without actually being able to fully play the role.
Right.
Because, you know, born female, you're never going to produce sperm.
No, but... Born male, you're never going to produce eggs.
It's at the right level.
It's at the level you would expect selection to fix the problem, which is to say, we will treat you this way, but nobody's confused about what it actually means.
I see this as a possibility under rare and very particular circumstances.
So, okay, I cede that point to you.
The bigger point right now is, as you said, the incredible rise in people claiming to be trans.
And some of it, as has been very well discussed by all sorts of people, including us, I think, is about social contagion, but there's also the question of what we are doing, what we are doing society-wide that may be prompting this.
And the fact is that we are flooding our waterways with endocrine disruptors and with what are, for many people, cross-sex hormones, right?
Our waterways and our airways are flooded with garbage, and the point is Airwaves is really what I mean.
But the point is, yeah, we are treating this sensitive developmental process with complete disregard.
We are ignoring the fact that the harms are quite clearly, the most likely cause is novelty, hyper-novelty in this case.
And also, to the extent that one can say what I said, which is that transness exists in many cultures, there's a reason that you might expect it to emerge, right?
So it's not inherently pathological.
But even in those cases, I am not aware of a case in which either pharmaceutical or surgical modification is the response.
And so, to the extent that somebody believes that they are in this other category, Not altering them, first doing no harm, allowing them to transition, supporting them in so doing, but leaving open the possibility that if that doesn't turn out to be what was bugging them, that maybe they get to go backwards, right?
That has to be left open.
And the idea that somehow, not only are we going to embrace that some huge percentage of the population has this condition, and that we are We are obligated morally to address it early, but that we are obligated morally to address it irreversibly is, you know, it's three steps insane.
Yeah, no, it really truly is.
You know, we are everything about what the West and now, you know, specifically, the United States is doing on this front is wrongheaded.
increasingly irreversible, ignores reality and everything that has come before, and makes us look like idiots.
Yeah.
And puts us at risk of far more than simply being laughingstocks of the rest of the world.
Right, and we are, you know, how dumb is the predicament, right?
You either get to look like an idiot for taking this seriously in cases where it clearly is not what it appears, or you get to be a bigot, right?
In what universe is that your choice?
Right, that's evidence that somebody has erased a possible category because they don't want anybody in it.
And the fact is, all the reasonable people have skepticism, they have compassion, they are trying to navigate the difficult question.
That's not bigotry.
No.
Right?
Not at all.
No, it's not.
And actually, increasingly as we've had this conversation, I'm wondering about the complete lack of discussion of addressing root causes and preventing.
Yeah.
Other than the activists who are leading the charge, I don't think that people who actually are living, you know, the few people that I and we are still in touch with who are living as trans people would say, this is a better life than if I weren't dealing with gender dysphoria.
Yeah, I don't think I've met a single trans person who had that perspective.
And I will say we know newly, so we knew a number of trans students.
We newly know Blair White and Buck Angel, who are... I don't know Blair White.
Well, I've met Blair White a couple times.
I have never met Buck Angel in person, but we've certainly interacted.
Electronically.
But anyway, I think they're doing a very good job.
They're, you know, politically very far apart from each other.
They're doing a very good job.
These are two people who are, have transitioned very compellingly, right?
And they are very open about what it is and what it isn't.
And anyway, I think they provide a pretty good model for how to discuss these issues without losing your mind.
Yeah, I think that's probably true.
I haven't paid a lot of attention there.
I know a couple of people who aren't public personas, who I'm not going to name here, who I'm thinking of, who struggle mightily and live as the sex that they are not, knowing that they are not the sex that they present as.
And wish that they didn't have to.
Didn't have to, yeah.
Right.
And all decent people will have compassion for that predicament.
And frankly, all reasonable people will also agree that you do not take a child's word when they wake up one morning at face value and send them to the clinic.
And think, Thank a lot of people for working hard for many years to get Tavistock shut down in the near future and hope that that begins to cause the rest of the dominoes to fall.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Well.
All right.
I'll hold off on the rest of that conversation.
You wanted to talk about, among other things, Wikipedia.
Oh, Wikipedia, yes.
Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, which was I would argue until recently, and have argued many times, the greatest encyclopedia in the history of the universe by orders of magnitude.
It was never perfect.
It was never perfect.
But now- How do you assess?
I'm just going to interrupt here.
How do you assess quality of encyclopedia by orders of magnitude?
That feels like adding a quantitative element here that has no place.
It's so easy.
Okay.
Right.
The question is, how encyclopedic is it?
And, you know, pick another encyclopedia and pick a topic.
It's still encyclopedic though, isn't it?
So that's not the question.
Well, no, no.
So, two things have to be true.
Let's say that it covered every topic in the universe at random.
That it had an entry for every topic and it was lorem ipsum in every entry, right?
That might be technically encyclopedic, but it's not meaningfully encyclopedic, right?
Now, to be fair, if you pick up the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find some slant in there.
Those articles are written by people, those people have perspectives, those perspectives are not completely excluded from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and they were never completely excluded from Wikipedia either.
Wikipedia had a kind of a You know, there were certain topics and there still are certain topics you can go to to get a textbook level explanation of something, right?
If you want to know about atomic orbitals, right?
My guess is you can still go to Wikipedia and you can see the diagrams of the various orbitals.
You can see a description of how they affect covalent bonding, etc.
All that stuff is probably okay because it's probably not that political.
Now, at some point, somebody is going to decide that certain orbitals are transphobic and then everything's going to go to hell.
You won't be able to go to Wikipedia.
But for the moment, there are certain topics that you can still go there and find a reasonable entry.
And there are other topics in which you just can't, right?
Because something is at stake and the mechanisms, whatever they are behind the scenes, result in complete gobbledygook.
happening.
And I won't say too much about the COVID stuff at the moment.
You and I are still I have not been to Wikipedia in some time and looked at it, but I believe we are still being actively slandered by Wikipedia with no mechanism for doing anything about it.
Over things that we said about COVID, which We stand by.
We stand by and have largely been borne out by the evidence.
And we're looking more and more true with every passing week.
Right.
So, in any case, what emerged this week was that same noxious behavior on a different topic where it was immediately visible to a bunch of people.
And the question was one of, are we in a recession?
Right?
Now, what happened was a prior- the recession- Has any human being walked around in the US in the last six months and actually wondered?
That, my dear, is not the question.
Six months ago, technically, we weren't because, well, what's the definition?
You were going somewhere.
But the point is, Wikipedia itself reported the standard definition, which was two consecutive quarters of reduction in GDP.
Okay.
Okay.
Technical, boring, economic, whatever.
Now, here's the problem with that definition.
Okay.
Right?
The problem with that definition is the midterms are coming up.
Oh, no.
And what if we were in a recession?
What if quarters, what if the midterms happened during a quarter?
Holy crap.
Of the year.
This is really awkward.
Yeah.
So, I don't know who decided to put the midterms in a recession, but somebody screwed up.
Yeah.
Okay?
So, the solution here is- Maybe it was the people who brought on the fucking recession.
I don't know, but nonetheless, it cannot be that the Biden administration will be forced to face an election in a recession.
That's just not fair.
That's team blue, goddammit.
Okay?
No, it's not fair.
So what they have done is they have argued that although some people will tell you that a recession is two consecutive quarters.
This is now Biden administration, not Wikipedia.
Correct.
Okay.
The Biden administration has changed the definition that they ascribe to.
The definition is now, it is a decline in general activity as discovered by the National Board of Economic Research.
General activity?
General economic activity?
Yes, well look, let's give them their due.
We're just like walking around, like what's activity here?
It's economic.
Yeah, it's productivity, it's trade.
I don't think that this is... It's probably a multivariate measure.
Multivariate would be okay if we could all agree on what the variables were.
But the problem is, this is subjective.
By saying that this particular entity Has to discover a, you know, it's got two subjective elements, right?
Over the period of several months, you have to have a general decline in activity.
Now that may actually be, if those weren't two subjective measures that not only lend themselves to being gamed, but are also There to be defined by a particular entity, which can therefore presumably be captured and probably is.
And not to be redefined at any moment that a person wants to come in and say, no, we're not in a recession, are we?
Right.
So the point is, it is a subjective recession that we are not in.
Were a recession an objective fact, then we would be in one because we've just had those two quarters and you don't have to take anybody's word for it.
You can just go and look at the two quarters and say, ah!
Okay, so this is standard politics.
I mean, it's increasingly terrible and ridiculous.
But this is, you know, this is unfortunately, Team Blue standard politics, Team Red would do the same thing or something like it, I'm sure if, you know, if they had the wherewithal and the work currently had the power to do so.
How does that relate to Wikipedia?
Well, Wikipedia went about changing the definition so that it matched Team Blue's self Yes, you do want to show the two screenshots from Wikipedia.
Well, start showing them.
Um, the two screenshots from Wikipedia.
Yes.
Yes.
You do want to show the two screenshots from Wikipedia.
Well start showing them.
All right.
Keep talking, man.
Yes.
I am now talking about the fact that there are screenshots which will show that if you now go to the recession entry in Wikipedia, not only does the definition reflect that it is the National Board of Economic Researchers' job And, you know, it's not like the National Board of Economic Research has said we're not in a recession.
They just apparently haven't done the analysis yet.
So, OK, so these are coming out of order.
This is what happens if you click, if you go within Wikipedia's recession entry.
It says that there is a disagreement about the definition and then if you click through you get to some media outlets have circulated an outdated version of this article claimed to be its current state.
Please check if claims or screenshots you have seen are consistent with what's actually here.
Okay, so They've changed the definition inside of Wikipedia.
They are now putting warnings on the circulation of the earlier objective definition, which did not require you to ask anyone if we're in a recession.
And look, the game is obvious, right?
The game is completely obvious, which is the point.
The facts are obviously not facts.
We have a team that wants complete power to define what is a fact, and they are perfectly willing to take things that are wrong and say they are true, and they are perfectly willing to take true things and say they are wrong, right?
They have done it repeatedly.
In this case, what they've done is they've said, and again- So you're talking about Wikipedia now?
Or are you talking about politics?
I'm talking about Team Blue.
And it's affiliates in tech, right?
We have Wikipedia, the greatest encyclopedia the universe has ever known.
I swear by orders of magnitude on the basis that you could look up, you know, orders of magnitude, more things and find credible information.
And that went on for many years.
Never was, it was never perfectly, perfectly objective.
It can't be, but it is now a weapon of war.
It is a weapon in a political war, which means several things.
It means One.
In the space where we need that greatest encyclopedia that all humanity can go to and just agree on the basic facts of what's going on, right?
The foundation of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria to which we all have access.
That thing doesn't exist because there's something with its name sitting in that niche.
A giant parasitic glob is sitting in that niche, slandering people who are trying to tell you what you need to know, redefining things so that the only thing you are left with Is somebody else's subjective assessment which is obviously you know I mean imagine.
Imagine Trump runs in 2024, right?
Then the point is the logic behind the scenes is going to be nothing that increases the chances that Trump will win can be allowed to have the status of a fact.
And we are going to see the same bullshit that we saw over Hunter Biden's laptop, right?
That same thing is going to emerge again and is going to take over our ability to have a basic conversation about where we are, what pathogens we face, what we might do about them, what our economic standing is.
And you can't run a civilization this way, right?
This is going to run us absolutely into the ground.
And so what I see is they've done us a favor.
We lived through this with COVID for years, okay?
We lived with them manufacturing nonsense and parading it as facts and forcing people to subscribe to them, right?
Follow the science.
That's what they told us.
In this case, What we've got is follow the economics, where the economics is as defined by a particular agency who gets to say we are or are not in a recession.
And I will say I know nothing about the National Board of Economic Research.
I am.
Hoping that the universe has been wise enough to put someone at the head of that agency named Simon so that this can be the obvious game of Simon Says that it is and we can all recognize that we are being had and what we need are independent economic authorities who are capable of telling us what's really going on because that is necessary for us to steer the ship.
Yep.
So do you want Zach to show any of the other screenshots that you had pulled up?
I don't think they're necessary at this point.
You all at home get the gist of what has taken place.
Oh, I will say, yeah, you want to show the NPR screenshot?
Okay.
So I will say, NPR reported on the story.
And it reported on it in a way that I found troubling, much as the way the New York Times reported on the murder... Homicidal maniac.
The homicidal maniac story, thank you.
Yes.
That you were describing.
And the point is, it says that Wikipedia has locked down the edits, and they specifically imply that it's a bunch of people who have newly registered accounts who are disrupting this rather than Wikipedia itself intervening on behalf of the Biden administration.
Oh, come on, NPR.
Wake up.
So, the NPR here says, what is a procession?
Wikipedia can't decide.
And I just, while you were talking just then, I went to the Wikipedia page, which is consistent with what you said, but it's interesting to actually read what the Wikipedia page says on a procession.
Can I share this?
Yes.
Now, we're not in a position to do it, but what I would love to do is go back and see what the recent changes to it have been, because many people, including Elon Musk, have noticed That this is going on, and so this is obviously a hot potato for them.
Of course.
So the second paragraph, Zach, you can show my screen if you like, the second paragraph of Wikipedia's current entry as of July 30, 2022 on recession reads, although, I guess I can make it a little bigger for those watching at home, although the definition of a recession varies between different countries and scholars, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country's real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of recession.
Okay.
In the United States, a recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as, quote, "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale retail sales." In the United Kingdom, it is defined as negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters.
So, that in the United States of recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research thing as a slight of words there in which, you know, why do we care what the National Bureau of Economic Research says?
And that goes to the NBR's recession dating procedure, but why are we going to them at all?
So again, I'm not arguing that they might not have a more useful measure.
What I'm arguing is that A, this is designed to look like something so technical you couldn't possibly care about it.
Okay, so different economists are battling over which measure to use.
Do you want to use GDP alone or these other, you know, the composite measure?
I'm not arguing the composite measure might not arguably be better.
What I'm arguing is that not only is this now an explicit appeal to authority, right?
GDP is something that you will get a supposedly objective measure of what is the rate for the last month.
Or the last quarter.
You can go from there and figure out if you're in a recession, right?
In this case, you have to go to these authorities, right?
So that's a, that is an anti-scientific move.
What's more, not only is it these authorities are going to tell you based on these categories, which they will have to assemble in some sort of a formula that will weight different things and is prone to be gamed.
Right, well don't look at the model behind the curtain.
Nice.
That's very good.
But not only are you going to need a formula that is going to take a bunch of things and is ripe for gaming because you could downweight things that suggest you are in a recession and upweight things that suggest you're not.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, there will be arbitrary differences.
The recession may lag, the measure may lag in certain And so those parameters could be prioritized if you wanted it not to be a recession.
Sure.
But the fact that they've introduced two subjective phrases in saying even what that formula is going to look like, right?
So it's a significant decline.
Oh, it's a significant decline over the course of many months.
How many months?
Right.
You put two wiggle words in there.
Two to ten, depending on what we're trying to maximize.
Right.
It's an utter absurdity.
And, you know, an obvious game.
And obviously anybody who is doing that is not your friend.
They don't want you to know if you're in a recession.
They want you to think you're not in one, whether you're in one or not.
Which itself is, I mean, this is presumably not the point, but it's a form of gaslighting.
I mean, they're trying to gaslight the American public into thinking that we're not experiencing what we're experiencing.
When we go to fill up our tanks with gas, or buy milk or bread, or observe that somehow a lot of people are out of work and yet also there's not enough labor to fill positions, And, you know, this is one of the ways that presumably they're able to game the numbers.
It's like, oh, well, unemployment isn't that high.
Well, it's because most people who are unemployed haven't been seeking work, and so they drop off the unemployment numbers after I can't remember how many months.
Like, they're not counted in the number of people who are unemployed anymore if they're not actively looking for work.
Anyway.
In any case.
I want our listeners to keep their eye on the ball.
The transition from objective measures to subjective measures is what somebody who wants to game your mind is going to do.
And the problem with using something like Wikipedia in this game is that it means that not only is Wikipedia a dangerous, weaponized source, but the opportunity for a competitor to arise to do the marvelous job that Wikipedia was built to do It's very unlikely that that will occur.
And the cost to civilization of us not having a trustable Wikipedia is almost impossible to calculate.
The value that comes from having a truly encyclopedic encyclopedia that at least aspires to be objective and as complete as possible is a tremendous loss.
No, and it's not the same as saying, well, go back to the 90s.
There was no Wikipedia.
Why won't it be like them?
Because we have had it, and it still looks like it did to most people.
And so this is not like, okay, well, we just don't have Wikipedia anymore.
This is living in a world that is post-Wikipedia, and still most people assume that Wikipedia still exists as what you have described as the best encyclopedia the universe has ever known.
Greatest encyclopedia the universe has ever known by orders of magnitude.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
I miss it.
I will say that.
Indeed.
Yep.
Okay.
You had one more topic that you wanted to talk about today, which was the drinking age.
Oh, yes.
The drinking age.
I feel that I have now lived enough years that I should definitely, I don't know what the drinking age is, but I feel that I have attained the right to have a drink.
Really?
Yeah.
Not now.
Okay.
No, not now.
No.
It's too early.
What I really wanted to talk about was something that occurred to me.
So, let me just say, this thought is an old thought, and it didn't start with alcohol.
It started with, quote unquote, drugs.
Okay?
Where I always felt a bit betrayed by the fact that I was told that drugs were dangerous.
I, of course, then tried pot.
At the time, pot was a pretty mild phenomenon, and my thought was, oh, They were full of shit.
They were lying to me about drugs being dangerous.
And the problem is, many drugs are dangerous.
And somebody needs to really sit you down and say, look.
Here are the dangers of pot.
Here are the dangers of...
The powders, here are the dangers of the hallucinogens, right?
So you have some idea what landscape you're even in, and that by having this policy that basically tries to keep you away from drugs, that they're creating the gateway drug phenomenon.
I was just going to say, you know, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs.
Ad campaign that we grew up with made marijuana into more of a gateway drug because some people like you described your own experience, held off for a while and then upon finally trying, it went like, oh, well, okay.
- Oh my God, that's not a big deal. - What's the deal? - And I will also say, I find this complexifying, but I now believe that marijuana is a much more dangerous drug than it was.
It has become a much more profound... Because there's been human selection for not only an increase in THC, but an out-of-whackitude of the THC to, you know, other psychoactive compounds.
The other, you know, CBD and CBG in particular, I think, and the others that we haven't even named yet, which mean that you have more of the sort of psychotic-inducing aspects of marijuana and fewer of you know, fewer of the tempering effects that made it, you know, made an interesting plant and also not all that strong.
Yeah.
It sure ain't ditch weed, right?
Now.
Yeah.
It's a whole different thing.
And so, you know, there's still a discussion to be had about whether it's anywhere near as dangerous as something like alcohol, but the potentially profound effects that modern pot has are not comparables.
So, you know, the absurdity of... Comparable to?
To what it was.
You know, the absurdity of reefer madness at the time, right, is being lost because the fact is now it's at least a profound drug, or it can be.
But the point is, okay, so that's the long-standing thought about why do we say drugs?
That's not cool.
You're misleading young people and they need more information, not less.
Well, and I'm sorry, but like also, you know, there's a whole lot of legal drugs that you can get your doctor to give you that are really dangerous.
Oh, true.
And, you know, street drugs versus pharma drugs is not A proxy for dangerous versus not dangerous.
Right, it really isn't.
And in fact, in some of the cases, it's the same damn drug.
Right, right, right.
So, you know, some of the ADHD stuff is really pharmaceutical meth, pretty much.
And, you know, we deal with it in totally different ways.
But all right, so here's the modern thought.
The modern thought is There's A, there's always been something weird about the drinking age being 21 in the US.
It's weird, you know, if we're going to draft you and send you overseas to attempt to kill people and risk being killed, right?
That does suggest that you're ready for a certain amount of responsibility.
It's also not effective, right?
People who are not 21 typically do not respect the drinking age.
They end up finding ways to drink.
And my sense is they get into a lot of freaking trouble.
And here's the question.
The question is, if we were to elect, so first of all, The alcohol molecules, which we discussed on the podcast a couple weeks ago, right?
These OH groups.
Oh, when we're talking about isopropyl.
Yeah, when we're talking about isopropyl.
Do not drink.
Oxygen-hydrogen pairs sticking off a saturated carbon, right?
A carbon with all of its electrons covalently bonded, or all of its outer electrons.
That alcohol molecule in ethanol, right?
It's all pretty interchangeable in terms of its effect, right?
That is to say the alcohol, the ethanol in wine and the ethanol in vodka Is not different.
In fact, the hard alcohol is distilled from the microorganisms can only take you so far because they die from alcohol poisoning at 12% or whatever it is.
And so you have to distill down further to get rid of more water to concentrate the stuff.
And the point is, look, dear young people, we understand that you're going to drink.
We understand that you're probably going to get drunk, probably more than you should, and you're probably going to go farther than you should, and you're probably going to learn some ugly, vomity lessons, and we wish you wouldn't.
May you do that only once and learn the lesson.
Right.
May one trial learning be the lesson of your drinking career.
However, Why are you in such a freaking rush?
Why do you need this stuff concentrated?
Right?
The concentration has a problem built into it, which is that it makes it very hard to know the instantaneous measure of how drunk you are, lags, how much, how drunk you're going to be based on what you've already consumed, because it takes time for the stuff to hit your blood.
Right?
So it is very easy for somebody who is not experienced with this stuff to drink, uh, Too much, because at the point that they make the decision to take their last drink, they haven't fully understood how drunk they are.
Right.
Or how drunk they're about to be.
I mean, some of the logic, of course, and maybe you're getting here, is for the same reason that pot was selected to be very, very strong, because it was cheaper and easier to get illegally across borders if you needed less volume to get a sufficient amount to get people high across borders.
If it's illegal for young people to buy alcohol, they have a better chance of sneaking a fifth of vodka into a party than they do of bringing in a case of beer.
Well, that is not a point I was going to make, but I think it's a truly excellent point.
It is the same kind of selective effect of prohibition, it's just a different prohibition that has caused marijuana to become concentrated and caused alcohol to be, or concentrated alcohol to be preferred by young people in many cases.
But here's the question.
If we had a two-tiered drinking age, right?
So that you were legally allowed to buy beer, wine, and hey, if you're sensitive to wheat, try cider.
It's really good, but you need the dry stuff.
People think you want a sweet cider, you don't.
You want a dry cider, but... Brett likes it so dry, it's sandy.
Yeah, it's gritty.
Wow, it's dry.
Yeah.
Did it?
My son... So our 18-year-old producer's son says... He is alerting us that apparently, I haven't fact-checked him, but he is alerting us that until what he says is the mid-20th century, that there was a two-tiered drinking age.
All right.
So let's just say, I don't know that that's true.
I haven't heard that before.
If so, that's really interesting information.
It may be that that date is wrong.
I would imagine we would know it if it was really mid-20th century.
I don't know.
I've never thought about this.
But anyway, it doesn't matter.
The point is, I believe that So there are two problems with the concentrated alcohol.
One, it's much easier to make a big error, right?
Much easier to make.
And this is in fact why beer then liquor never sicker, liquor then beer never fear.
The point is, if you start drinking the slower to hit your system stuff and then you move into the stuff that's harder to calibrate, you're much more likely to make an error.
Whereas if you step from the harder stuff to the less concentrated stuff, It slows you down.
Well, you're also adding water into your system.
Right, and that's what I was saying.
Staying hydrated, keeping your body a little cool, getting up and walking around, you know, even just like, oh, I have to get up to move to get myself another beer is, you know, helpful in the process of not getting alcohol poisoning.
Right, so the fact is, it's not like, you know, the molecule is the same, right?
The question is how much water it comes with.
And more water is good.
It keeps you from getting dehydrated and therefore hungover.
It slows you down so you're much more likely to detect, oh, maybe I've had enough.
And the point is, it's a better training exercise.
So it seems to me that we should have a two-tiered thing.
That the question is, the number of people we lose To either alcohol addiction where they get out of control with it or death because they exert bad judgment on it or any of the other problems that arise.
How much harm could we reduce if we gave people the ability to experiment with a lower caliber alcohol earlier in life before we granted them the ability to buy the higher caliber stuff?
Yeah, I like it.
All right.
I think it's right.
And apparently it used to be the case.
Apparently it used to be the case.
If Zach is correct.
He doesn't tend to be wrong on things that he proclaims like this.
Yeah, I find he is frequently right.
Sometimes that is annoying as hell, but he is frequently right about things.
I could say the same thing about you.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
I hope you could say the same thing about me.
I could and I do.
All right.
I think we've reached the end.
Wait, no.
There's one more thing.
There was breaking news that was delivered to me right before the podcast.
I think we should at least touch on it.
Have we broken?
We have not broken.
Okay.
Something is very broken in the state of Denmark.
Denmark.
Here's a piece of information I suspect you don't know.
You remember Joe Biden?
Yeah.
Oh, he tested positive again, didn't he?
Tested positive again!
He was on PEX11, wasn't he?
Well, but here's the question.
Was he?
I think so, but here's the question.
I think that, look, I don't know, I don't trust anything that comes out of this White House.
Or the tests.
Like even if they were being totally straight with us, the tests are crap, but... Right.
I don't know that they wouldn't have reason to pretend, but let's just say that this is for real, and maybe it is just for real.
Maybe they're for once telling it to us straight, he got COVID, he tested negative, and he's now tested positive again.
I mean, that matches the thing that happened with Pax Lovid, the antivirals, yeah.
But these people are dumb enough to give the President Pax Lovid?
I mean, that's news to me, right?
These people have access to good information.
They can get the drugs that work if they want.
They don't have to take this, you know, Frankenase bullshit that they've assembled in the lab because they can patent it.
What did you call it?
Frankenase?
It's like a Frankenstein enzymatic… Oh, Frankenace.
Yeah, Frankenace, sorry.
Oh, I see, I see.
No, it's not a good term.
That's not going to catch on.
It's not going to catch on.
We can agree to that.
Enzymatic chimeras.
Right.
Yeah.
They can get him whatever they want.
And these people, believe me, they lie like they're drinking water.
They could give him ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
They could just tell us that they're giving him all of the latest fancy stuff from Pfizer and Merck and everybody would be happy.
But But I think when you take either of those two drugs that you just named, I think you actually sprout a MAGA hat on your head.
Isn't that right?
Oh, wow.
I don't know.
It turns you into some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist.
Okay, okay.
Prepping, Republican.
Suppose that's true.
Science denying.
Wait, no.
Some of those things, but let's say let's say that that's true.
Okay.
So the man's sick.
He's president.
They don't want him to die because they don't have anybody to run his place in 2024 among other reasons.
Okay, so there's an op-ed I think in WaPo today saying actually what he needs to do is to say before the midterms that he won't be running in 2024 because that's the only way that the Democrats have any chance of maintaining any Yeah, but the problem is, as much as he totally sucks, everybody else in the party does too, so... Presumably not everybody else.
Well, it's real close, but in any case... A lot of us are running away, but there's no place to run to.
Right.
The running away part is easy.
The running to, that's a much tougher call.
But okay, so suppose you're right, and if you take ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine because you've got COVID, that you sprout a MAGA hat, but can't they fix that in post?
I would think so.
I mean, they've got people.
Yeah.
They've got technical chops.
They totally do.
Yeah.
I mean, remember that beautiful set in which they pretended to be vaccinating the president in a beautiful austere room in the White House?
No.
You never saw this picture?
No.
Oh, there was a picture from an awkward angle where the president is clearly being injected with something in a Potemkin room.
And, you know, it just really summed up the whole COVID experience.
Okay, so that's the breaking news.
Yeah, that's the broken news.
That's the broken news.
That's the broken news.
I mean, I guess the other thing that they're now they, the they, the Christian Anderson and company, they are making another bid for this is definitely zoonotic.
This definitely came from the market in Wuhan.
And we're not racist, but this is definitely about what those people eat.
And you know, not about the fact that we created this damn thing in a lab and now the entire population of the entire planet is going to be living with it forever.
Yeah.
We will return to that topic very soon.
Okay.
We will.
Okay.
Yeah.
I think we are now there.
Okay, we're now there.
So we're going to take a break.
For those of you who are watching us live, if you want to take a break for 15 minutes or so, come back.
We'll be here with a live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can join our Patreons.
If you are interested in doing so, you can get access to our Discord.
We have that private Q&A tomorrow at 11am Pacific on Sunday, July 31st.
And Brett has his couple of more intimate conversations coming up on Saturday and Sunday of next week.
The first Saturday and Sunday of the month.
Exactly.
We encourage you if you I don't know that we spent that much time today really getting into evolutionarily deep things, but everything that we do is inspired by the evolutionary thinking that we lay out in our book.
So, what are you smirking about?
I'm smirking about the fact that they rob us of all the terms that we need, and the problem of being inspired, right?
Like, now everything Asian-inspired It's a term that people who are full of crap use.
Are you kidding me?
We're going to defend it.
We are actually inspired.
I'm not?
Jesus.
No.
You are not inspired now.
I'm really not.
No.
Okay.
I can't end with the things that I say at the end on that note.
So you have to say something better.
Say something better.
You have to say something better before I sign off.
Friends, it can't get much worse.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Hey, everyone.
Despite what you've seen here today, do be good to the ones you love.
