#170: It’s my Earth Day too, Yeah (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 170th 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 sun and the Earth. Near Infrared Radiation (NIR) from the sun penetrates deep inside our bodies, where it stimulates our mitochondria to produce subcellular melatonin, a potent antioxidant. Spend time outside to reap the health benefits. And: It is Earth Day! Let us reject reductionism, specia...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 170 something right?
170, exactly.
170 on the nose.
Wow, that's quite a thing, on the nose.
And here we are, we are back after a week away in the amazing sun.
So, I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and we've already said it's the Dark Horse Podcast, so where are we headed?
Very good.
Well, I think I'm going to talk a little bit about the Sun today.
In Natural Selections this week, I wrote about near-infrared radiation and some of its benefits that we are coming to understand.
So I want to just talk a little bit about that, and then all in service of Earth Day, which is today.
So I have a few excerpts to share.
Earth Day is today?
Earth Day is today.
I thought every day was Earth Day.
No?
Alright, alright.
I've heard that.
I did not check my source, but I've been told that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Although, were that the case, we'd probably be treating the place better.
Yeah, I don't see any evidence that we would be, because we're not, right?
Right.
So, it is Earth Day today, and I'm going to share some excerpts from this fabulous book, The Unsettling of America, Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry, first published in the 70s.
Prescient and, unfortunately, as he writes in the afterward to the third edition in 1995, just as true then and now just as true today as it was when he first wrote it.
So we're going to use that as a jumping off point to talk about some of the things that we really ought to be doing if we were, in fact, honoring Earth on this day, a day named for it, I guess, and on every day.
And then there's a couple other little, little things we might talk about.
What the heck is the Biden administration doing with mortgages?
MIT just dropped its COVID mandates.
We might, we might, we might get there.
But yeah, so a couple little things also, but mostly What does that mean?
Why do we like to celebrate it and then not do anything that actually makes it look like we either understand or give a damn about it?
So that's part of where we're going today.
All right.
All right.
So before we do those, some housekeeping up front.
We're going to do a Q&A this week.
We will be back again next week, but we will not do a Q&A.
So we've got a little bit of an unusual schedule happening right now.
But this week we're going to talk to you guys, at you guys, for a little while.
Take a break and come back with a Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorseemissions.com.
I encourage you always to go check out Natural Selections, where I write weekly, and we'll be talking a little bit about what I wrote there this week again with regard to the near-infrared radiation.
We have a store where you can get merchandise, darkhorsestore.org.
Lots of cool pins and stickers and shirts and backpacks and other awesomeness.
We have, in fact, I have a short excerpt indeed from our book as well in talking about Earth Day, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
This is the first time we've seen it where it says New York Times Bestseller, even though that happened within days of publication.
So, you know, it only took a year and a half to be revealed on the actual cover.
The covers have finally caught up.
Mm-hmm, yes.
They've finally caught up.
But there are signed copies here on the islands where we are, and not everywhere.
You can't just, like, come to the San Juan Islands and be like, hey, I'm looking for my signed copy.
But at Darville's on Orcas Island.
Not just signed, but signed by us.
Yes!
Signed by orcas, maybe.
You know, it could be a lot of people, but in this case, despite the odds, it was actually us.
It was actually us, and as it turns out, orcas, being notably deficient in fingers that aren't encased in fleshy protuberances, don't do a good job of signing books.
And they get them really sloppy.
And sometimes they eat them.
Even if you're not real familiar with orca morphology, you can detect that they do not have fingers by the absence of reports of strangulation of their trainers.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, they will splash them with their tails, perhaps, but no strangulation.
There is apparently one orca who just had enough and went after it.
There are, I think, four cases of death by orca, and three of them are one particular animal.
Really?
Yeah, I believe that's correct.
I hope I'm not repeating an apocryphal story, but I believe that is correct.
And actually, I get it.
And do you think that this was like, I'm fed up, I'm done, I'm a good orca, but I've had enough?
Or was this a psychopathic orca?
No, no, I don't think this is a psychopathic... Look, if you put me in the equivalent of a giant swimming pool for the rest of my life, I might start going after you.
Yeah, you'd be put in more like a cage 10 feet square, allowed just to pace back and forth.
If you did it for no reason, you just sort of plucked me out of the wild and dropped me in there.
I would not feel that it was psychopathy coming forth.
It was just, you know, pretty much had it.
Sure.
I'm just saying it's possible that that was a psychopathic orca.
Yes.
And I don't, you know, we may be talking about something that's not even real.
I think it's just a patient orca.
The rest of them are far too patient, really.
Apparently, yes.
Speaking of Earth Day, like everyone else, all the other species on it, you know, rise up and say we've had enough.
Well, you know, occasionally elephants do this too.
Elephants, you know, and for great reason when you realize, you know, babies captured in front of their parents, parents killed in front of the offspring, all of this stuff, you know.
And the elephants at some point are like, you know what?
It's not clear to us why we're still playing nice with you people.
Yeah.
Because you're not good people.
And maybe you're good people.
Maybe you're the best of what people brings, in which case, why are we paying attention to any of you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Then there's, of course, have you seen this video of, I believe it's a beluga whale returning somebody's phone that they dropped off the side of a boat?
And, again, lacking hands.
How did the beluga whale pull this off?
I have not seen this video.
It carried it in its mouth.
Oh.
And so, on the one hand, this seems like, oh, that's very compassionate.
On the other hand, it's possible, given the effect of cell phones on people, that he was trying to kill somebody.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and didn't want the use of cell phones to be picked up culturally in beluga whale land.
Right, he didn't want suddenly the negative effects of cell phones on human civilization to decrease as a result of dropping them off boats and... No, no, I'm saying the other side of this, which is that the cell phone left in the water might then spread as a thing that blue whales were actually engaging in using.
I missed what you had said, but you're absolutely right that it is possible that it was just a safety measure.
Yeah.
So, and again, I don't know if either of these stories you've told us here today are true or not.
We're going to find out.
I don't think we will, because I'm not going to chase it down, and I don't think you will either.
No, no, it's in the comments, which I'm not supposed to read, but sometimes I do.
Okay.
We are supported by you, and after that, I don't, you know, why?
Wow!
All right, please continue to support us in spite of what may have just happened.
No, we're good.
It's fine.
I'm not going to lie to you, it's not all good.
It's never been all good.
It's never going to be all good.
But it's going to be fine.
No, it's also not going to be fine.
Right here, with our beautiful Turkish rug behind us, it's good.
Our delightful Turkish rug.
Do you even know what it is?
Turkish Delight.
It's a dessert-y thing.
I remember having it once and being a little disappointed.
In Turkey?
When we were in Turkey?
Yeah.
Really?
I don't remember having it there.
You don't?
No.
And we were on our honeymoon, so I think we were mostly experiencing things together.
Yes, we were.
No, I believe, I will have to look up what it was and see if that's a false memory or if I'm remembering it from somewhere else, but I believe I have had Turkish Delight.
I think it was in Turkey.
And I'm not sure it was delightful.
I think that was a stretch.
Turkey was delightful.
Turkey was amazing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, we're going all over the place today.
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And at Brett's Patreon, he does two monthly conversations on the last, no, the first Saturday and Sunday of every month.
And at mine, you get access to a monthly private Q&A, which is small enough that, and it's the two of us, that we actually are able to engage with the chat.
And usually that's on the last Sunday of the month.
But this month, because we're not going to be here next Sunday, we're doing it tomorrow.
So the questions have already been asked, but if you want more after today, if you were just hungering for more, you can join us at 11 a.m.
Pacific tomorrow, Sunday, March, April 23rd, and then we leave that up in case you want to watch but can't join us live.
Uh, let's see, and of course we have sponsors who we appreciate greatly, and we always start these live streams at the top of the hour with three, and only three ads, and then don't have any more throughout.
You can always tell if we're reading sponsored content.
Again, we are very discerning though, so we only read ads for sponsors that we really do believe in, but there's a sound that proceeds and ends the ads, and there's, if you're watching, that green perimeter around the outside, and that's how you know that we're now reading sponsored content after you.
Yeah, it's sponsors that we believe in, or I would imagine we could end up reading something if somebody threatened our children, right?
That would be persuasive.
People would understand why we did it.
I'm not suggesting this.
I'm just fleshing out the whole solution set of reasons that we... Perhaps I'm giving people ideas.
Not really.
One of them's right here, you know.
Our children?
Yes, I noticed them over there earlier.
How about our first guest?
Do you need some coffee?
I could use a little.
All right.
Well, our first sponsor, Heather, is Mindbloom.
That's shocking.
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All right.
Our second sponsor today is Maddie's all-time favorite, and she is barely visible behind... I can't even figure out which way to pivot.
She's fairly... so you can see a little bit of blondness back there behind me.
She doesn't know yet that we're talking about Sunday, so I'm gonna whisper so I don't wake her up.
Right.
This is her all-time favorite sponsor for good reason, because they make food for her.
This is Sundays.
They make dry dog food.
When they approached us about being a sponsor a while ago now, we were dubious.
Maddie, that's the dog, is a Labrador.
Labs will basically eat anything, which you know if you've ever met a Labrador.
Except for people.
They're like the nicest animals in the world, but if it's at all remotely like food, they're in.
That is a good clarification.
Yeah, they're so gentle.
Yes, not eating people.
No, definitely not.
What possible difference, therefore, was she going to show?
Like, she's the opposite of discerning, it seemed to us.
Was she going to show an interest between her usual kibble, and we were spending money on her, you know, we were paying for top quality, you know, high-end brand.
Kosher kibble.
not kosher at all but um and some days we were wrong especially him - Wow, okay.
Yes, we were wrong, I recall being.
Yeah, we were wrong.
Maddie loves the food that Sundays makes.
Okay, so far that doesn't distinguish it from any other food because she just loves food, right?
But no, she really loves this food.
She has even sometimes now become discerning.
I'm not going to say she's always discerning, because sometimes still we put anything in front of her and she's like, yep, it's food, I'll eat it.
But if she's been having Sundays and then you put the old kibble in front of her, sometimes she sits her butt down and looks at you and gives just the saddest look.
And as if to say, I thought you loved me.
Right?
And, uh, if we haven't in fact run out of sundaes, which was our excuse one time, and one time we thought, well, we still have this other stuff, we'll just give you the other stuff, and we fixed it.
I'm like, okay, we'll not give you the high-end kibble that we already bought, we'll give you the sundaes, and boy was she happy.
Uh, she, um, wants her sundaes.
Guess what?
It's also far better for her.
It's not like junk food and she just thinks it tastes great in the moment and then she feels terrible afterwards.
It's far better for her than the standard stuff which is basically burnt kibble that comprises most dried dog food.
Sundays is the first and only human-grade air-dried dog food combining the nutrition and taste of all natural human-grade foods with the ease of a zero prep ready-to-eat formula.
Sundays is an amazing way to feed your dog and in a pinch a person too.
We know because you tried it.
I did.
Yes.
Best I ever had.
Low bar on account of the only dog food that you were ever in any way compelled to try.
So I mean that says something right there, but best is a low bar given that it's only.
It is, but actually, really, like, I wouldn't put any of the kibble in my mouth.
I'm sure I'd be fine if I did, but it just would be a traumatic experience.
In this case, it was not.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Not that I have, but I hear you, yeah.
Sundays is easy for us humans, too.
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All of Sunday's ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat.
In a blind taste test, Sundays outperformed leading competitors 40 to 0.
Sounds like a made-up number.
But here's the thing.
When I have a bowl of... I've already talked about this.
She is enthusiastic for any food, but she is way more enthusiastic for sundae.
She bounces and spins and leaps in anticipation.
Spin being one of the only tricks that we taught her young, and she still does it whenever she thinks we want her to do anything.
She starts with a spin and then waits for further instruction.
So she spins when you're holding a bowl of sundaes in, like, anticipation.
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You know, their blind taste doesn't...
Did they blind the dogs?
Well, maybe they used blind dogs, and I'm wondering if blind dogs have seeing eye dogs, because why wouldn't they?
I think blind dogs have seeing eye people.
Mmm.
Interesting.
Alright.
Yeah.
I'll buy that.
Not trained as such, but effectively.
We're trained as such.
Maybe.
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All right.
All right.
That is all the authors for today.
Let us talk first about... I'm still looking for the cat who was yelling there.
I don't know where he's disappeared to and what kind of trouble he's making.
Or what he was yelling about.
Yeah.
It's just he wants shoes, I think.
Yeah.
So, as I mentioned, for Natural Selections, which is my substack this week, I did a dive into near-infrared radiation.
And we've talked about that a couple of times here on Dark Horse, and indeed at the end of my Natural Selections post I link to the three places That we've talked about some of the benefits of sunlight and a couple other places where I've written about it before in Natural Selections.
The benefits of being outside, the benefits of fresh air, vitamin D, a little bit about what seems to be the case that melatonin that we hear about, which is generated by the pineal gland,
is circulating melatonin, and that's what we hear about, that's what we're taking these supplements, some people at night to help them get to sleep, but it seems to be the less important, the less common kind of melatonin in our bodies.
And that is to say the melatonin that is produced by our pineal glands and which is called circulating melatonin.
In fact, more of the melatonin that we have, and there are a couple of other minor sources, but the majority of melatonin it seems that we are generating by our bodies is in the mitochondria in what's called subcellular melatonin.
And what prompts the mitochondria to make subcellular melatonin is near-infrared radiation.
And near-infrared radiation is coming from the Sun.
In fact, approximately, by many estimates, 70% of the photons that hit your body from the Sun, and not just yours, but mine too, and his, and all the peoples, and the cats, and everything, about 70% of the photons that are hitting you are in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.
So that means that visible, ultraviolet, middle, and far-infrared, and everything on the outside of those, you know, to the outside of ultraviolet and the outside of infrared, all of that comprises 30% of the photons and near-infrared, just off the red end of what we call the visible spectrum, because we got to name it and it's our visible spectrum.
are these near-infrared photons and they are unique in many ways and one of them is that they go pretty deep into tissue and in fact the
The cerebrospinal fluid, which is the fluid in your central nervous system in both the interstices of your, like the ventricles of your brain, and running also down through your spinal cord, the cerebrospinal fluid seems specifically adapted to reflect near-infrared photons deep, deep, deep into your brain, such that the deep crevices of your brain, the gray matter of your brain, are actually bathed in In sunlight, not in visible light.
It's not, it looks dark in there, but they've got these near-infrared photons and everywhere that near-infrared photons get to, the mitochondria appear to be prompted to make subcellular melatonin, which in turn is an explosively powerful antioxidant and just a general sort of cleaner upper of all sorts of detritus that happens because of normal metabolic processes.
All right, so I'm gonna slow you down here and just figure out whether I understand the basics.
Basically, let's geek out a little bit on the science here.
Yeah.
Near-infrared is outside of the human visual spectrum.
Yes.
It penetrates deeply in a way that light does not, and this actually is intuitive because infrared is heat, as far as our experience, and you can imagine that if you pointed a warm source, if you pointed a hairdryer at your skin, that it would penetrate more deeply than light.
The light, I mean, light, you know, a very bright light can penetrate your finger.
You can see a flashlight through your finger.
But in general, you would expect light to die off very quickly near the surface and heat to go a little bit farther. - So near-infrared and heat aren't synonyms, but I think the analogy holds.
And I will say, actually just show my screen here for a minute, Zach, or for a little bit.
So this is the post.
It is dark inside your head, but even there the sun does shine.
And I'm going to read the first couple of, actually I'll just read the first couple of bits because, and then I'll show the spectrum.
Your thoughts are born in darkness.
All the biology and chemistry and electricity that comprise your brain exist in darkness.
Visible light does not pass through your skull or into your brain.
The motor messages going out, move that, go there, and the sensory messages coming in, smell this, feel that, occur in darkness.
So too do reflections on the past, predictions of the future, plotting and planning, analysis and logic, storytelling and imagining.
All happen where the sun doesn't shine.
Except that last part is not actually true.
It is dark inside your head, but even there the sun does shine.
So again, the visible spectrum, of which here we have an image, and you know everyone who's been through probably elementary school has seen this, where the visible spectrum, and again that's so named only because it is
Our visible spectrum, there are plenty of organisms that see into the ultraviolet and others that see into the infrared, but our visible spectrum is named because we get to name it because we're the ones with language and so it's the visible spectrum even though it's just our visible spectrum, is this tiny band in the middle of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
And off to the short wavelength end you have ultraviolet off the violet end and off to the long wavelength end you have you have infrared and infrared on this graphic is just one big block but the closer to red you are is that's the near infrared and you get to medium infrared and far infrared.
Okay, so a couple things.
One, your point about we named the spectrum, that's why we call it visible.
There are creatures that perceive into the infrared, and there are creatures that perceive into the ultraviolet.
So it is not inherently the limit of these kinds of perceptions.
And I write about that some here too.
Yep.
Um, okay.
Melatonin.
Yes.
Circulating melatonin is functioning as a hormone.
Yeah.
Okay, so hormone, I'm just gonna fill in some details here.
Let me just say though, one of the things I learned, which may be for me the most staggering, it might be really exciting to you too, it might be really boring to most people who don't care about phylogenetics much, but that apparently the, so melatonin is Ancient, like billions of years ancient, like maybe the oldest molecule that is now used as a hormone that exists, okay?
And far older than vertebrates, far older than animals even.
And its original function is as an antioxidant, that the hormonal function is a ladder, an add-on function that came later.
Okay, now this is gonna force me to stretch into a realm where I'm not expert and may get something wrong, but A. I don't think it's terribly surprising that melatonin, which we experience or we understand best as a hormone which is related to the induction of sleep,
is connected to some very ancient pathway, some pre-animal pathway, because the earth being a place where you have these two very different phases every day, a molecule that is involved in something which varies based on whether it's night or day would be adopted into this highly complex pathway in higher animals.
Well, in part, what I'm learning and reading some of the scientific literature on this is it's a mistake to think of melatonin as a hormone of sleep.
That's Circulating melatonin from the pineal gland is associated with darkness and then subcellular melatonin associated with the mitochondria prompted by being bombarded by near-infrared photons is associated with daylight and wakefulness.
And so it is Helping entrain our circadian cycles, for sure.
But, in fact, if we are not exposed to near-infrared light, to near-infrared photons, then we will have a much harder time getting entrained and, A, having subcellular melatonin, having antioxidants, the most powerful antioxidants we have, cleaning up a bunch of the detritus in our cells, which is likely to make us less healthy.
And it will also make it more likely that the pineal gland is going to have to work overtime to get enough circulating melatonin produced because it's supposed to be, is some of the thinking now.
The pineal gland is basically supposed to be doing, like, backup.
Like, let's just produce a little bit more when all the melatonin produced in the mitochondria during the day can't quite get you through the night.
And if, if, What we have done is, for an entire evolutionary history, we were outside.
We were expected to be bathed in near-infrared light all day, every day.
And we came inside, but we still spent a lot of time outside.
And we still had campfire.
So the sun emits near-infrared radiation.
The moon, moonlight, emits near-infrared radiation.
Fire emits near-infrared radiation.
So near-infrared radiation is bounced off the moon.
Is bounced off the moon, exactly.
It's not generating its own.
Campfire, fire of all sorts, candlelight is generating near-infrared radiation.
Incandescent light bulbs, a much smaller amount.
You know, the sun is the major producer and I actually don't know moon versus campfire.
I assume campfire is actually producing more than than mostly the moonlight would.
But even sitting inside by candlelight at night, you get some near-infrared radiation and that will help your body know what to do and entrain your cycles, or sitting with an incandescent bulb.
But what doesn't emit any near-infrared radiation at all is fluorescent bulbs or the LEDs that we currently have.
And this is not due to technological limitations.
We could be, but we are not, because once again the reductionism and the hubris of modern scientism has said, ah, light is what we see by, and therefore the only thing that light is, is what we see by.
And so what I will do, as the creator of a product, is I will create something that, and maybe I'll even call it full spectrum because it's full visible spectrum, but it doesn't, these so-called full spectrum bulbs that we are seeing now, only are full visible spectrum.
They don't go into the near infrared at all, which means if you were inside all day and you have no incandescent lights, you don't have a fire in your fireplace, you don't have candle lights, You are getting almost no near infrared radiation at all, and to the degree that you are not healthy, and you're probably not healthy, that may be a major cause.
Interesting.
So I do, you know, want to give the manufacturers of these things their due.
I don't really want to give the manufacturers of fluorescents their due, because my sense is we were all sold a bill of goods.
Fluorescents are wonderfully electrically efficient, but they are not green, never were green.
The mercury in them makes them dangerous.
They never should have been released.
And they, you know, have an oscillation, right?
Like almost no one He thinks that they are doing well under fluorescence.
They are way too cold.
They are full of mercury.
You break one, you're distributing mercury in your house.
Anyway, they're bad bulbs.
LEDs have potential, but in some sense, it's not even that people think that the visual spectrum is all that matters.
It's that the market is effectively looking for how many lumens you put out.
And that's the measure we use.
Right, that's the measure.
But now like lumens and temperature.
Like increasingly some savvy consumers think, oh I'll also look at temperature.
Still not enough.
Right, and in fact I've been obsessed with the temperature measurement.
Color temperature.
Forever.
Right.
Because The LED bulbs that you buy on average are also way too cold, right?
And they say deceptive things like daylight, and that's really a very cold light.
And so anyway, you know, it's very hard to buy them.
The higher the color temperature number, the colder the light.
So you're actually looking for 2700 is somewhere in the neighborhood of Tungsten.
And it's very hard to get anything warmer than that.
But even so, it's only visible spectrum.
So that may make you feel like, okay, I'm not living in a basement here, but it is not full spectrum, actually.
Sure, of course not.
And I would point out that back in the days when tungsten light bulbs were effectively all there were, or you had a choice between that and fluorescence, people used to deride The tungsten bulbs as heat generators that happen to put out some light.
So anyway, there is this sense, and it's exactly like, you know, what we've done with milk, right?
Mother's milk for babies.
It's like, oh, it's food for babies.
Yeah, it is, but that ain't all it is.
That's right and with everything and you know this is this is a recurring theme in our book too right like food is not just sustenance sex is not just reproduction and at the smaller level you know light is not just what you see by milk is you know mother's milk is not just uh what what keeps the baby alive because it's getting calories and you know, the macronutrients.
It's not just about fat, protein, and carbohydrates.
It's as easy as that is to measure, and to say, and to keep track of.
And that's part of the problem, is that, you know, the harder it is, the more complex the system, the harder it is to have a simple rubric, a simple rule, say, ah, I just need to do this, and now I know what to buy, now I know what to think, now I can, like, outsource that, that thing over there, and be free of having to, frankly, think for myself.
I mean, and it's a particular defect of markets when you market to a consumer because, you know, the consumer becomes obsessed with the megahertz of the processor, the megapixels of the sensor, the, you know, number of lumens of the light bulb, right?
Because there's something that is maybe the most fundamental thing you're trying to do.
You're not juggling all of the trade-offs.
Actually, this is interesting because there's a sex difference in terms of what kinds of simple metrics men and women tend to be focused on, but in both cases it's still just simple, ridiculous metrics.
Okay, yeah, maybe Fairfax should get down off the ladder now.
I wish you would stick to the former.
I don't know why that matters.
Okay, so I'm thinking about with a computer or a car.
I remember it used to be a joke, a way to dismiss.
Oh, the woman cares about the color of the thing and maybe the size of the screen.
If it's a computer, if it's a car, the color primarily, or the interior coverings on the upholstery.
But the man's going to be thinking about the size of the engine or the speed of the processor.
Okay, granted, those maybe female typical concerns are surface and don't have maybe anything to do with the deep functioning, but by focusing on easy-to-measure metrics, more male typical concerns are... those men can be confused into thinking that they've got the big picture, and it's not the big picture.
It's a bunch of little tiny pieces that don't actually add up to the big picture of what is this doing and like what problems is it solving for me and also what problems might it be creating.
So we, of course, saw this during COVID, too, with the obsession over antibodies, right?
Yes.
You know, the immune system is not antibodies.
That's definitely an important component.
But you can find it.
Right.
But you can count it.
You can talk about it.
People know what you're saying, more or less.
And so anyway, it became an obsession.
Now, I, you know, I've been a photographer since you and I met.
Before.
In high school.
I have watched the competition in camera circles, and I've been at it long enough in that case to have watched a reversal of one of these.
Really?
Okay.
Yeah, and it's pretty interesting.
In the early days of digital, right, there was this obsession with megapixels, which at first mattered because the cameras were underpowered.
They didn't have enough receptors, effectively, to render a good image under anything other than optimal conditions.
As the light faded or whatever, they became garbagey.
The human eye could see that pictures were so-called pixelated because there weren't enough of them.
Right.
Is that what we're talking about?
Yeah.
Under perfect conditions, at the right size.
But is that...
Under four conditions, the human eye could see what we would refer to as pixelated pictures because there wasn't a high enough density of pixels.
And not only that, that's true, not only that, but they were disturbing to the eye.
The fact is, the resolution of your eye fades at night, right?
And so we're all used to looking at things that are pixelated, but The eye and the silver on film is chaotic and so it breaks up the patterns, whereas the pixelated stuff on a grid of perfectly regular sensors is disturbing.
It is jarring to see.
You know what it's like is walking under those grid streetlamps at night when they're making a pool of light and so you can actually see and maybe it's coming through foliage.
I am actually now in a video game and I don't like that because I thought I was living a life here.
Yeah, it's exactly like that.
So anyway, at first there was this obsession with megapixels because more megapixels gave you, it obscured that pixelation.
And then it became so gameable Right?
It became relatively easy to imbue a camera with more megapixels without actually improving the image quality or resolution or even improving the number of effective pixels, right?
You were just looking at the number in the sensor, which didn't mean that the processor was really giving you any benefit for it.
So it became a stupid game where more megapixels seemed good but wasn't.
During that time, as people were obsessed with megapixels because they knew what to ask, they were ignoring the most important things that dictated whether or not you got good pictures.
Which was what?
Well, the biggest one to me was the latency.
You hit the button and how long before the thing actually takes an image.
And this matters hugely if you're photographing anything that moves.
Because it is really your ability to catch the instant that the child smiles, that the animal does the interesting thing, And if you hit that moment and then it takes a half a second for the shutter to fire, or worse, you've lost the shot.
And so, you know, at the very least you wanted a balance between You know, a lot of megapixels and low latency.
But then megapixels came back and became important again because effectively the most expensive part of a really good camera is the glass.
It's the lenses.
And if you had a huge number of megapixels, right, then you could use a shorter lens and you could capture the thing that you were looking for in the center of your image and then you could crop in And it wouldn't break down because there were enough megapixels that you got the resolution even when you cut, you know, 70% of the photo out.
So anyway, I watched megapixels go from the thing to ignore to back to the thing that actually mattered.
So that's something to be aware of, is that these things may invert.
But the obsession over a single parameter is no doubt dangerous, and light bulbs are an obvious place where this has maybe even made us unhealthy.
I think certainly it has.
I think certainly it has.
Increasingly people have been talking about things like blue light filters, and getting bright blue light best from the sunlight in the morning, and getting red shifted light at night, but that's still all within the visible spectrum.
That's still all talking about what we can discern with our actual eyes without any aid.
You know, think about what it actually feels like to be out in the sun.
And I was writing this, we were lucky enough, as you said, to be in the sun this last week and I was able to be out like stand-up paddle boarding or snorkeling and then come and read about melatonin and think about this and go, I know!
I just know at the like intuitive level how healthy I feel being out in the sun or we weren't in a place really where there was sand we were just in water but you know sitting on hot like sun hot sand is actually healing as well because and this is someone someone wrote this into the comments on my on my piece and I looked and I was like oh of course Albedo given what it is, dry sand is reflecting some of that near-infrared radiation back at you.
And so if you're sitting in the sun on a beach with dry sand, you're getting the near-infrared both, you know, from above and from below as well.
And it's just like absorbing it.
And especially for those of us who live in the North and are coming out of a You know, a winter feeling sort of pale and sluggish and without enough sunlight in us.
You know, we just get greedy for it.
And I think we don't have the language.
We know we need to breathe.
We know we need to eat.
We know we need to drink.
We don't know at the same level that we need this energy that's coming from a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can't sense directly, but we can actually sense it.
If you go out and you just you try to pay attention, granting that we don't have the language for it, try to pay attention to what it feels like to be in the Sun.
And know that actually, that's healthy.
Don't respond to that by going like, oh, I'd better cover up.
Although it's also true, interestingly, that near-infrared, unlike medium and far-infrared or ultraviolet, actually goes through clothing.
It goes through your skin, it goes through your skull, it goes through clothing.
You know, the thinner the clothing, the lighter-colored the clothing, the easier.
But it goes through clothing so that you can actually get it even if you're outside covered up.
Throws me that it goes through light-colored clothing easier.
I would guess the opposite.
As I said, I read that one place and I thought that seems opposite to me, so that's actually the one thing I just said where I haven't chased that down because it feels like black would absorb, but if it absorbs, then maybe it doesn't go into your skin, whereas if it's white, maybe it goes through.
I'm not totally sure, but thinner rather than thicker clothing, it'll go through more.
Yep.
I wanted to point out, though, I don't think it is in any way that we don't detect the health benefits of this.
What I said was we don't have the language for it.
We don't have the language the way we, like, oh, I'm hungry.
We don't have the language for it.
What do you say?
Like, I need, I crave sunlight?
Like, I guess, but it doesn't... We don't have the language and we don't have the skepticism of experts, right?
And the problem is that these sons of bitches told us Don't tan.
It's bad for you.
It's like a vice, right?
It's a vice.
You're tanning because you're vain or something.
No, actually, there's a reason that people who are tan look healthy, and it's because a tan is not a burn, right?
And it is a measure of your exposure, you know, enough that your cells have actually detected that light and are responding by producing protective melanin.
Don't burn.
Sure.
Yeah, we can all get on that.
Like, absolutely.
Um, but, you know, they told us for however many decades, you know, don't tan, stay out of the sun, wear sunscreen every time you go in the sun, all of that.
They told us during COVID, you know, oh, you can't go to the beach.
Stay inside!
I mean, they literally told us, they literally told us, don't go to a place where there is, I believe, literally zero chance of you contracting COVID.
And then, At the point that that became obvious, they never said oops.
They may have opened the beach, but they did not say, yeah, you should keep in mind that experts sometimes get things completely upside down.
That's what they should have said.
Well, they did keep people from skateboarding, so that's something.
Well, they should have just criminalized it, finally, which would have made all of those bumper stickers so ironic.
Skateboarding is not a crime, Zach.
Right.
Right.
But anyway, look, the point is you get ungodly material harm from the belief in experts who tell you that the height of health is margarine, you know, not tanning, wearing sunscreen. the point is you get ungodly material harm from the Formula for your babies.
Formula for your babies, all of this stuff.
Only soft food for your babies, too, once they're off the formula.
Don't make them work their jaws.
It's hard for them.
Yeah, and it's also hard on the orthodontists if you make them work their jaws because then they've got nothing to do.
Yeah, no ability to pay their mortgage.
Right, and they can't get a boat.
So, but, look, everybody, I don't know what we're doing with kids in school, I don't know what we're teaching them, but we should be teaching them places where experts have really fucked up and it's killed people, right?
So that when the experts say something, it's not that the experts are wrong, but you certainly have to entertain that possibility.
You unfortunately do know some of what we're teaching kids in school, and it ain't that It's that they, the children's, wildest fantasies may actually reflect reality, and that they, the children, know better than the adults, which has got to make kids feel really awesome about the world to know that they, at five or ten, know a lot more than all of the adults who are supposedly in charge.
Well, it's actually kind of a funny paradox, right?
Because what the experts are telling us is that the children, who are as far from expert as anybody could be— Are in fact the experts!
They are the experts.
The experts are telling us the kids are the experts.
And so it does—it's like, well, then we believe the experts, in which case they're wrong, in which case the children aren't the experts, and that leaves a complete vacuum of experts.
Well, the experts are behaving like children, which means that they are the ones in the know.
The children experts and the expert children.
The experts behaving like children are, in their naivete, recovering expertise which would be suspect had they not been childlike.
Yes, yes, yes.
So this is a perfect segue, actually.
So it's Earth Day.
The history of Earth Day is long and a little bit silly, but I think it's honorable in its origins.
It started in 1970 as, in part, a response to things like Rachel Carson's revelations about the role that insecticides were playing in destroying insect
populations and communities and that's and and then going up up to birds and you know that continues a pace that that that problem has not gotten better there were there were advances that we made actually you know we grew up in 1970s and 80s LA where the when the air quality was incredibly bad like you flew into LAX in the 70s and 80s and it was just a it was pea soup it was yellow it was disgusting And they cleaned that up.
Yep.
And largely, I think that was car emission standards.
But, and you know, at some point, mid 70s, catalytic converters and leaded gasoline, like, you know, leaded gasoline went away.
And so that helped a lot, too.
A ton.
Right.
And California being the unusually large, populist, and powerful state that it is, effectively forced that change on the world.
I don't know if it was inadvertent or not, but the fact is it didn't make sense to make two kinds of cars, one for the Californians and one for, I mean, it did happen sometimes.
But very quickly it made sense just to build cars that put out less emissions, and it makes a huge difference.
Actually, I would point out one of the ways in which our move from Oregon to Washington has been a step down is that Oregon has good emission standards, and it matters.
The number of times you find yourself behind some vehicle belching toxic smoke, right, is huge in Washington compared to Oregon because you actually get penalized for it, you know, yearly.
You can't register your vehicle.
Yep.
So anyway, those standards matter, and we forget about them.
It's very easy to gripe about regulations that don't work, but, you know, it is interesting to have bounced back between these two states, which are actually politically very similar, but have come to opposite conclusions on that front.
Indeed.
So I don't want to spend really any time mocking how bad a lot of modern sort of environmentalism is.
We could spend a lot of time there and I don't think it's all that helpful.
But I will say, you can show here my screen briefly, Zach, that earthday.org In celebration of Earth Day has a take action Watch Live Earth Week on Earth Day I and they have six recommendations.
Earth Day I will push for climate literacy, will grow trees, will support sustainable fashion, will help end plastic pollution, will attend a cleanup, will vote Earth.
So if I may have my screen back.
If you click through on those and I, you know, I'll link to this in the show notes but I don't necessarily recommend that you do.
A couple of those are honorable.
Help end plastic pollution.
Yeah, we got a problem.
We got a serious problem.
Any beach you go to, at least in the tropics and apparently a large part of the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is just teeming with plastic.
We got a big problem, right?
And that's the stuff you can see.
The microplastics is a bigger problem, probably.
Some of those are vague.
Others misguided of those those recommendations on Earth Day, which you see if you click through and like, oh, I'm going to vote Earth.
Wait, no, you have to vote the way they want you to.
And it turns out if you read the fine print, it's not actually going to be good for the Earth.
So I read that and I thought, well, geez, right away, I can see that there's some big things that are missing from that.
On Earth Day, I would like to work to slow or halt non-reversible solutions that impact Earth and its inhabitants.
Things like stopping or slowing the application of glyphosate.
On crops.
The use of neonicotinoids insecticides on crops, which again kill the insects and then the birds that eat them and up and up and up the food chain.
I would like there to be no mRNA on my meat.
Thank you very much.
And I'd like roads to be built into wild, deep nature only under conditions when it is absolutely, absolutely necessary.
And that was just like the first four things that came to my head.
In terms of like on Earth Day, let's not sign a petition letter.
Let's be thinking about the actual things that are happening all the time that are actually making this beautiful planet of ours less beautiful by the day.
Yes?
I just want one correction before our lame-ass detractors come after you.
Synthetic mRNA.
You don't want to near me.
Sure.
Yes.
Right.
Okay.
You could imagine... I don't care.
Really?
Okay.
Not you, but... But them.
Yeah.
So our friend Jacob Shockey, who is the founder and executive director of the soon-to-be renamed Beaver Coalition, who I wrote about some of his work in Natural Selections.
You did a wonderful Dark Horse episode with him.
This is going to have been in January, I think.
January, February.
He recommended to me this book, The Unsettling of America, Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry.
I have not, I've only read about half of it so far.
I've jumped around a little bit, but it's, it's remarkable.
It was published first in 1977.
And it's a third edition with an afterword for the third edition written in 1995.
So he's gone back to it a few times, Wendell Berry has.
One of the premises is found early in the book on page eight.
He writes, the revolution has deprived the massive consumers of any independent access to the staples of life, clothing, shelter, food, even water.
Air remains the only necessity that the average person can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution.
Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
So this book is mostly about the value of agriculture and farming.
and agriculture and farming as a kind of ecological and cultural activity that has been destroyed by an industrial and business approach to it.
So let me read a few sections for us to consider.
Here we have in the chapter, The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture, A competent farmer is his own boss.
He has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation, loyalty to his place, pride in his work.
His work days require the use of long experience and practice judgment, for the failures of which he knows that he will suffer.
His days do not begin and end by rule, but in response to necessity, interest, and obligation.
They are not measured by the clock, but by the task and his endurance.
They last as long as necessary, or as long as he can work.
He has mastered intricate formal patterns in ordering his work within the overlapping cycles, human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable, of the life of a farm.
Such a man, upon moving to the city and taking a job in industry, becomes a specialized subordinate, dependent upon the authority and judgment of other people.
His disciplines are no longer implicit in his own experience, assumptions, and values, but are imposed on him from the outside.
For a complex responsibility, his substituted a simple dutifulness.
The strict competences of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of attitude and know-how necessary to life on the farm, which have been in the making in the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the knowledge of some fragmentary task that may be learned by rote in a little while.
I would say, and I'm sure Barry would not argue that farming is the only situation that a human being can find themselves in, which involves actually solving problems as they come and knowing the complexities of the situation.
But it is an obvious one.
Crafting things with your own hands also does this.
But the move to dependency Which is, in large part, what a move to the city is.
Not only makes you dependent on others for, you know, your food, your water, your everything, but it also turns you into a specialist.
And to that point, here we have another excerpt from a little earlier in the book.
This is from the chapter called The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character.
And this is a longer excerpt.
I think it's important.
The disease of the modern character is specialization.
Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough.
The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc.
are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people.
The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint, that of individual persons.
We then begin to see their grotesquerie, indeed the impossibility, of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.
The first and best known hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists.
People who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing.
We get into absurdity very quickly here.
There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach.
Communicators who have nothing to say.
Medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases they have no skill and no interest in preventing.
More common and more damaging are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices.
Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering out of the various functions of character, workmanship, care, conscience, and responsibility.
Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal.
Thus the average, one is tempted to say the ideal, American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturalists and agribusinessmen, the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on.
This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns, making money and entertaining himself.
Remember, this is written in 1977.
He earns money, typically as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else, or perhaps more typically nobody else, will be responsible.
And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him.
The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals, or so we are expected to believe.
All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts.
He is a certified expert himself, and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together.
Between stints at his job, he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawnmower or watch other certified experts on television.
At suppertime, he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife, also a certified expert, procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button.
For a few minutes between supper and sleep, he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching band experts, or perhaps legal experts.
The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world.
He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people.
From morning to night, he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride.
For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor.
His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons.
There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation.
He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people's.
He wishes that he had been born sooner.
Or later.
He does not know why his children are the way they are.
He does not understand what they say.
He does not care much, and does not know why he does not care.
He does not know what his wife wants, or what he wants.
Certain advertisements in pictures and magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive.
He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage.
He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill.
And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts who, in turn, consult certified experts about their anxieties.
That's quite the description, especially given the time period.
1977!
Yeah, amazing.
So I wanted to pick up on a theme there.
You and I have talked about the absurdity of higher ed, which is almost entirely in the hands of people whose graduate work was painfully narrow.
So narrow.
Right?
And there's no reason At the point that you are standing in front of a room of people in their first college biology course, that you want a specialist at the front of the room.
You don't.
You don't?
You want a generalist.
You want somebody who understands the integration of all of the various fields of biology.
You do not want somebody who has focused very narrowly on a single pathway or a single creature or whatever they might have done.
You also don't want specialists making policy.
Right, and the point is you can see it with the educators, because it wasn't always this way, right?
It is the fusion of research with education, and then the monetary perverse incentives that cause people, A, to narrow in the focus, you don't want to invest Five, eight, ten years in a PhD only to, you know, have it not pan out.
So you specialize in something so narrow that it's a sure thing, right?
That is a bizarre and stupid incentive.
We do not get a good return on our investment as a civilization for people being driven to, you know, invest time in a way that causes them to answer some question that couldn't possibly fail.
Right.
We want them to take risks.
And that means some of those PhDs wouldn't pan out.
But that's not what happens.
So anyway, that narrowing, what Barry is pointing out is that the narrowing, the market causes a narrowing, which I think we have to acknowledge creates a huge amount of wealth in the narrow sense.
Right.
The exchange between specialists creates a huge amount of wealth.
But it may destroy the capacity of the individuals who have been specialized to think, which is in some sense what we are suffering from.
That's exactly what we're suffering from.
In fact, I've got one ... you'll recognize this book.
I do recognize that book.
Yeah, this is our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
Here's just two very brief paragraphs from the beginning, from the first chapter, The Human Niche.
To the question of specialization, which we also revisit in some depth in the final chapter of the book.
This is in a section on campfire, which again is a recurrent theme throughout the book, the value of campfire.
And this is before I had thought at all about near-infrared radiation even, but you just know campfire is good for you.
I don't remember if we talk about it in there.
We do talk about the value of fire spectrum relative to light bulbs, especially at night.
Um, just as humanity broke down boundaries between niches that no other organism has broken down, so too have we broken down boundaries between individuals that nothing else has broken down so thoroughly.
With regard to niches, we are a generalist species that contains individuals who are often specialists.
A single ancient American may have been terrific at wayfinding but terrible at keeping the flame.
A single modern human may be terrific at rock climbing but terrible at organizing their files, or excellent with numbers but unskilled in the baking of bread.
As a species, though, we are supremely good at all of these things.
It is connections between us that allow us to transcend our individual limitations, often focusing on our trade while being sustained by the specialized labor of others.
At the boundaries between individuals, we consciously innovate and share ideas and then reify the best and most relevant of those ideas for the current moment in the form of culture.
For millennia, this magic has occurred around the common campfire.
And this, if you're not, if you're taking all of these words very, very literally and narrowly, you may think that that is in contradiction to what Barry is writing, but no.
So Barry is not talking about a solitary farmer doing solitary farm work because, as he aptly points out, that's not how farms work.
That's not what farming is.
That farming always was until agribusiness made it into effectively a corporate process.
about families lineages on pieces of land that they over generations often best had come to know deeply in which there were specialists within the family unit and that there were also specialists within the community where someone may have been better at barn building and another person better at detecting what's wrong with your chickens you know
Uh, but if you're all in good stead with one another, and you have your land, and you own your land, and you know your land well, and your land is different from your neighbor's land, even though both of your land is probably much more similar to it than is a piece of land a hundred miles away, or a thousand miles away, or ten thousand miles away, but you know your land well, and you are not a lone wolf.
And one of the other things that moving to cities does for people is it not only removes from them their own agency and understanding why it is that they're doing the work they're doing.
They're like, I have to show up at a certain time according to the clock as opposed to the sun is up, I need to go tend to the cows or it's the middle of summer and therefore there is work to be done and I just have to get out there and do it and it doesn't matter what time the clock says or how long I've been at it or if I think I should be done for the day because I feel like I've worked enough.
Nope!
If the work is done, the work is done.
If the work is not done, the work is not done.
But this is done in collaboration with others, that you don't have solitary people toiling endlessly on their own in healthy farming situations.
So I would say it raises a question, you know, you can obviously, if you're dedicated to sophistry, you can push the idea of generalism or specialization to the breaking point.
And the real question is, what's the sweet spot?
And with respect to farms, in general, farms have not been all-inclusive, right?
Even the farmers, you know, this person is specializing on livestock, that person is specializing on, you know, vegetables or whatever it is.
I think most family farms, if they were raising animals, also had vegetable gardens.
They had vegetable gardens, right.
But the point is, from the point of view of their relationship to the market, in general, there was some degree of specialization.
And the question is, well, what's the right level?
And if you, let's put it this way, if you push generalism, you and I are generalists, and we like generalists.
But if you push generalism too far, so that you're literally trying to get Everything, you end up a jack-of-no-trades, right?
Jack-of-all-trades pays a cost not being a specialist, but a jack-of-no-trades is worthless, right?
So you can over-generalize, and then you can hyper-specialize, and I think Wendell's point, which is also reflected in our point, is that the specialization thing is easily taken to an absurd point, especially by, and this goes back to the first thing we were discussing, By market forces, which are looking for productivity, right?
How many units did you produce, right?
And so that specialization makes it work.
What will I put in the spreadsheet?
Right.
I say that as a huge fan of spreadsheets.
I love the economy of them, the efficiency of them, but you have to be counting the right stuff.
Some stuff shouldn't be counted, and some stuff is a proxy for the things that you actually want to have measured, and you can't measure it, and you have to remember when you're working with proxies, and most people don't when they are.
Yeah, and you know, the spreadsheet does not preclude you from measuring not only how many units you produced, but how many came back because they were defective, so you know something about quality control, customer satisfaction, you know.
What you really want are properly integrative measures, you know?
Not how many antibodies did this treatment produce, but did it actually produce an improvement in health, an increase in longevity, a resistance to disease that manifests in something integrative?
And I feel like this is maybe even a bigger theme than I thought.
Since we began these live streams a little over three years ago, one of the things we keep returning to is, are you measuring the right thing?
Have you asked the right question?
And is the answer that you have had returned to you or that you're returning to us meaningful?
Just because it has numbers associated with it doesn't mean those are true numbers or that there are numbers that are in any way meaningful.
And if you haven't measured the right thing, if you're talking about antibodies and are simultaneously informing us that for the first time in history, natural immunity is meaningless, then I'm sorry, your expertise is bullshit.
Like we have every reason to think you don't know what you're talking about.
Well, there is a, I don't know what to call it.
Probably internal to the places that these things are decided, there is some name for this process, right?
Some name that they, some euphemism that they use to explain why they're doing it.
But pushing you off of a metric that matters in order that you obsess over something that they can control, right?
In other words, you know, Why did we not measure all-cause mortality and figure out what the effect of COVID was and the various treatments?
Danger.
Right.
All-cause mortality, that sounds like a measure you could get behind, right?
Does it make me live longer?
Maybe I'm not interested in taking the risks if it doesn't, right?
Oh, it does seem to make you live longer.
Well, then that might be something worth taking the risk because, in fact, the benefits seem to exceed them, right?
Yes.
All of these things are not as hard as we are now making them out to be for reasons that are a little obscure.
I mean, it is... I'm remembering when I taught animal behavior.
When we were college professors and I taught animal behavior and I did it, as you know, in a way that was possible to do at Evergreen because it was full-time programs and so it was holistic.
And so it wasn't a four-credit animal behavior class.
It was a 16-credit or sometimes a year-long, you know, 48-credit thing.
In which students were expected to generate their own hypotheses.
Students were expected to generate their own observations from which they were expected to generate their own hypotheses and predictions.
And then the tests, either the experimental tests or the carefully designed observational observational techniques and processes by which they could test their hypotheses.
And I taught them enough statistics that they could then de-analyze the data that they collected, having gone out, having designed what they would do, having gone out and actually collected the data.
And they did literature review, and they wrote up the papers, including both the analysis and what they thought it meant, and they gave talks.
So, all of that.
Which, frankly, there's a lot of PhDs in sciences out there who haven't done all of those steps, and my undergraduates did.
But one of the things that I loved a lot in that process and that I was always interested to find was Maybe the most challenging.
A lot of students just like caught into it right away, but a lot of students had a very hard time, and I think it's a little bit about math-y logicalness stuff, but it's not entirely it, was figuring out what actually needed to be measured.
Like the experimental design part, which I love.
Like okay, now you have the question, that's great, you've come up with a great question, you have good predictions, you know how you will discriminate, discern between these two hypotheses, Or, like, it is possible you've got two alternative hypotheses.
How will you discern between them?
What do you need to go out and measure?
What do you need to observe in those birds or whatever it is in order to discern between these two things?
And that was a huge sticking point for a lot of people.
And for me, you know, I cared a lot less if they ended up knowing, you know, how to run a t-test or a Kruskal-Wallis or, you know, do a great literature review or anything.
If they could figure out having Characterized, truly alternative hypotheses, what they would need to measure in order to discriminate between them, there it is right there.
Now you know how to think, now you know how to go out into the world and apply that to anything.
Anything!
And at the point that the data comes back and you actually see a difference between the two populations.
It's so amazing!
Right, it's really, it's like, wow.
And you own that.
You didn't outsource any of that.
You black-boxed none of that.
I also preferred things like goodness-of-fit tests for stats like chi-squares.
You can literally do this on the back of an envelope.
You don't actually need to plug this into any kind of algorithm and have it go, no, let me think.
Okay, I call it significant.
Oh, I don't know.
Is it really?
It's better if you can do these really simple inferential statistics where you can actually, with one little table of values, go like, Oh, that is, as it looks to me, significant.
Yeah, you're demystifying the process, which is so important, because, I mean, we've just watched civilization go mad over the fact that people didn't really know what science even was.
They sort of think they know what it looks like, and that made them very easy to fool.
But, you know, it may not look like that.
It could look like, you know, a scruffy person in a forest somewhere, you know, counting things in a way that you don't even realize that that's what they're doing.
And, you know, yeah, do they have an envelope?
Maybe they didn't need one.
They could do the stats in the dirt, right?
And the point is, you either did the science part right or you didn't.
It doesn't matter at all whether it looked like you did the science part right, whether you were wearing the right clothing or had the right equipment or anything like that.
If you measured the wrong thing, if you didn't have hypotheses going in, or if you did, but then you measured something that could not allow you to distinguish between them, you don't know anything more than you did.
I mean, you may know some more stuff, but you don't know anything scientifically more than you did.
And you can't say, I did the science and.
You may even know less than that, right?
In fact, I was listening to a podcast with John Ioannidis today, who's one of the most published academics alive.
And anyway, he wrote a famous paper about why most published results aren't likely to be true.
And the point is, okay, it's one thing that there's no information in them.
It's another thing that people think there is.
That's right.
Right?
And that they may be stacking lots of stuff on top of conclusions that don't make any sense.
And this was certainly true in psychology, but when the p-hacking crisis, the replicability crisis, arose in psychology, it was pretty clear that psychology might have a special version of the problem, but it wasn't going to be limited to psychology.
It's anything where p-values were, you know, currency.
Right, which is to say all of the social sciences and the part of biology that has replicants.
That's statistical, yeah.
So yeah, like that.
It's all very uplifting and terrific.
So we've talked, you know, how On this Earth Day, we should see the role that specialization is playing and reductionism and trusting experts rather than your own self and outsourcing everything that might actually allow you to produce things and becoming only a consumer.
Like all of these things are bad for you as an individual and also bad for the community and the Earth.
But there's some other things that are on that list of, you know, not usually necessarily what we think of when we think of like, what's bad for the earth?
Well, failing to understand game theory.
So that's my segue to what the Biden administration did this week with mortgages.
Oh, right.
Which is, and this is just, you know, this, you can show this, this is an article in, Newsweek picked a mainstream source so that all y'alls would know that this is really what happened.
U.S.
Biden raises costs for homebuyers with good credit to help risky borrowers.
And that's basically, I mean, that's what it is.
Homebuyers with good credit scores will soon be facing higher mortgage fees as the Biden administration seeks to close the racial home ownership gap and get more first-time and low-income buyers through the door.
The idea being that in order to allow for mortgage rates, again mortgage rates are sky high of course, and to get them down a little bit for people who haven't yet bought a home and who are a risky investment for banks, It has to come somewhere.
Something's got to give.
And so instead of the federal government saying, this is really, really important to us, so we're going to figure out a way to maybe, you know, send some money over there from us, which I don't think that would be a good idea either.
But no, they're not even supplying anything.
What they're doing is they're saying, We're going to take the people who have good credit, who are historically exactly the people that the banks want to lend to, and we're going to jack up their mortgage rates and then use that additional revenue that's coming from them to help the people with bad credit get into mortgages.
I'm not sure I've ever heard a stupider idea, and it's not the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
There are a lot of equally stupid ideas out there, but I don't think I've actually ever heard a stupider idea.
It's a dumb one.
It's really dumb.
And it misses everything about game theory.
Like, everything.
I think we are once again at the point, during COVID, at some point you and I realized that there was a very clear pattern.
Everything that was recommended was the opposite of true.
Right.
It's an amazing fact.
It is.
First of all, you've got to really know your stuff to get everything upside down, right?
These are experts.
Right, I guess they are.
They may not be on our team, but wow, they certainly seem to know something.
They really know their stuff.
Yeah, so anyway, we're seeing that in so many different places, right?
And this is just another example where it's like, uh, oh my god, there's a virus!
Close the beaches!
What?
You want people to go home?
Really?
Yeah, especially if you've got sick ones at home.
Yeah, right.
Corral people together in a building where they're not gonna make vitamin D. Keep the windows closed.
Right.
Every bad idea.
Well, it's almost like something... I know what people will say, but the point is, look, saboteurs couldn't do better, right?
They would have to work overtime to figure out the number of things that we are now apparently willingly doing to ourselves.
Either that or saboteurs have somehow gotten in and are doing it for their own reasons, but... That would seem to be the more parsimonious explanation, wouldn't it?
At some point, when the Chain of authority is feeding you upside down insight and backwards advice.
And they're actually going to start penalizing people with good credit.
Well, but, I mean, look- And like, apparently, and I did not go deep on this, but I think I intuit from just a couple of lame articles I read that people with variable rate mortgages are actually going to see their monthly costs jump.
Yep.
for mortgages they already have.
Yep.
If they got into a mortgage with decent credit and a decent rate according to the modern version of a decent rate.
So it's either sabotage or it's pandering.
If the idea is that the blue team is now the team of losers, right?
No, I'm sorry, but this is the logic of the situation.
Look, I'm just gonna be, I'm gonna be honest.
I believe that there's a reason that we never get free of communism, even though it's a terrible, terrible, game-theoretically broken idea.
And the reason is, Competition.
It breeds all sorts of things.
It breeds a difference in well-being, only part of which is productive.
Right?
There is some aspect to which the competitive economy produces wealth for people who contribute.
That's what it's supposed to do.
It also produces a whole fuckload of rent-seeking, and the people get very wealthy doing stuff that is not producing any value, and is in fact destroying value.
And that's galling.
Right?
So that's all true.
But it is also true that in a competitive environment, there are people who will properly calculate that they don't have what it takes to compete.
That's going to be a large number of people.
You could imagine you're either above the median and you have what it takes to compete and get ahead a little bit or a lot, or you're below and you just don't have the goods.
And in part you don't have them because civilization fucked up and didn't teach you properly, right?
But the point is you would expect And what Barry is talking about with regard to the move into cities where your work is not your work, like you don't have purpose that is driven by the actual work that you do.
Right, you don't have meaning, you're vulnerable because if the slightest thing changes, if, you know, chat GPT makes your job go away, there's not some program that says, ah, we'll take care of you, that wasn't your fault.
Right.
So, you know, all of those things are going to cause people to routinely, if you are on the losing side of that median and you don't have the tools to get ahead, then the point is, well, why don't we just gang up on the people who do and transfer some stuff?
OK, so if you were going to become the team.
Now, I don't think the Democrats are about protecting those people.
Is it team loser or is it team mercenary?
Well, It's team con artist, because what they're really doing is they are servicing their actual constituents, which are very wealthy, successful competitors.
But they have to win the power with which to service those actual constituents somewhere.
And that means they have to fool voters.
They've got to pander to voters well enough that they actually have some power that they can then monetize.
And so the point is, if they decide our voting bloc are people who don't have what it takes, even though that may be in large measure downstream of them having screwed up the policy that might have given them what it takes, right?
The point is, hey, if we punish, you know, if we're going to become the team of player haters, Right?
We're going to pander to the people who are into that because they can't play.
And again, I'm not blaming people for not having those skills.
I don't think that was their fault.
But it does suggest a reason why you would continue to see the same terrible idea emerge again and again.
And every time it fails, the claim is, well, we never tried it for real, so let's do that.
But no, it fails because of the game theory.
Yes, exactly.
So anyway, this strikes me as if you have terrible credit and you resent people who don't, then your team is punishing the people who have good credit ostensibly to help you, and that would make some sense if what you were trying to do was con people into voting for you just one more time, you know?
Yes, I know that's a cynical take.
On the other hand, it is 2023, and it's hard to keep up.
I wasn't thinking cynical.
I was thinking deeply unfortunate truth, is what I was thinking.
One more thing.
The vaccine mandates, the COVID vaccine mandates at elite schools are beginning to drop, finally.
Um, MIT.
So there's a Twitter account, No College Mandates, which is where I'm where I'm seeing these and I did go and check and like yes, it's true.
They announced this week MIT is dropping its COVID mandates but it's um, it's mid-April, right?
To be effective May 11th.
Mm, right, because the delay, right.
That thing again.
So I just thought we should talk, I don't know, we've talked about this a lot, not on camera, but I don't know if we've actually talked about this utter insanity wherein, and I mean, we were seeing this even in the summer of 2020, when there was all this like going back and forth, like, oh, you know, you don't have to wear a mask, you do have to wear a mask, you do, like, right?
And it would go back and forth, but they would announce, so that was especially on the West Coast, like, and when we were still living in Oregon State at that point, like, okay, In, you know, one week from now, you're no longer going to have to wear a mask in public stores.
Like, one week from now, what are you doing?
Either it's time or it's not.
Stop it already.
And the same thing, like, MIT.
So what are they going to do?
If someone should, like, Someone is, I don't know, I think like temperate people are just passing through their campus are allowed not to be vaccinated there, but someone is due for a booster between now and May 11th and what?
They can't come to class?
They can't be on the faculty until May 11th if they don't get the booster?
Like it just reveals how At least ascientific the entire thing is.
And I think it's actually not.
This thing is not anti-scientific.
It reveals that there's just no science there at all.
Like, all of this is coming in the guise of, like, the experts with the white coats and the Fauci's and all this.
And it's like, no, actually, there's just there's no science there.
Yeah.
There's just nothing.
It is suggestive of a process that obviously does not exist.
That's brilliant.
Yes.
It is suggestive of a process that obviously does not exist.
We're going to put a bunch of stuff on it.
Spandrels.
It's like they forgot the phrase effective immediately.
Right?
Effective immediately.
That's how you do that.
Oh, we've changed our mind on masks.
So effective immediately.
You don't have to wear one.
Oh, thank you.
Good.
And the idea, this was MIT that dropped it.
So this is, you know, the height of expertise, right?
These are the people.
They seem pretty sciencey.
Yeah, it's not rocket science.
Well, it doesn't matter if it is, because those are the rocket scientists, right?
The rocket scientists fucked up COVID longer than anybody else so that they're finally dragging... Oh, no, a lot of the Ivy Leagues still have them out.
Sure, but I guess my point is, shouldn't the Academy be ahead on this stuff?
Right?
The Academy is supposed to be the source of insight.
It's not supposed to be fucking podcast world.
But finally, MIT is catching up to what Joe Rogan viewers knew two years ago?
This is nuts!
In his 1995 afterword to The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes, The response to this book has shown that the universities are not interested in the pursuit of truth by argument.
They are interested in preserving the conclusion of an old argument that, for the most part, they no longer bother to make, namely that the world and all its creatures are machines.
It's brilliant.
I've read enough excerpts there.
Again, from a long time ago, there were people seeing – and in the mid-90s, we were seeing the brokenness of universities as well.
It didn't look like it does now, and there was no woke to be scraped off the top.
There was some at the edges and such, but Zachary is raising his hand as if he's in class.
Are you mic'd?
Now I am.
I just wanted to mention, someone in the chat pointed out, of course, which I think you just forgot to mention or forgot to bring up, that obedience was effective immediately.
That they are perfectly willing to use that tool when it's on the front end and then at least in the mandates they will push it off and see if you're willing to follow.
Brilliant.
To comply for a little bit longer, but when it comes to when the mask mandates come down or anything, it's effective.
They're very eager to grab control and very reluctant to give it up.
And that predicts the delay.
It's like, are you really going to comply?
Because at some level, you know, during that period where it's about to drop, there's not going to be a lot of punishment or anything.
So it's like, are you really for complying to this, in which case you're going to go right through the deadline that they've now set later on, or you're going to stop complying right when they say it's in the future?
Yeah, so it's a way to assess, actually, those who are thinking it through in terms of like, what could the evidence possibly be that finally allowed you to, you know, see reality here?
Or the distinction being those people and the like, well, I just do what I'm told.
So the people who just do what they're told on the MIT campus, presumably have now heard that they are no longer required to do X, Y, and Z as of a date yet to come.
And so they will continue to do what they've been being told to do for years now.
Because what they do, apparently, what is being taught at one of the world's premier engineering schools is do what you're told.
I wonder why we're failing.
Hmm, this does raise an issue that I wanted to briefly mention.
New article in Tablet on spike protein.
Yeah.
That does... Our friend Clayton Fox.
Exactly.
Yes.
Who has done an excellent analysis in which he goes back through the dark days in which I in particular and Robert Malone were accused of spreading misinformation for claiming the spike protein was cytotoxic on Dark Horse.
And the point is, of course, spike protein is cytotoxic.
There was nothing bizarre about that claim at the time.
Yes, you could marshal a counter-argument based on the fact that the protein wasn't the identical one in the coronavirus itself.
It had been locked open, but... As I remember, there was research, and I'd have to go back, but there was research that came out of, in part, out of La Jolla that said that.
And then, you know, the authors of that were like, oh, but no, maybe not.
But like, it was actually in the press release.
Let's put it this way.
Neither you nor Robert Malone nor us on Dark Horse were even postulating.
We were repeating something that had been published.
It was obvious from the point that we knew what spike protein did, that it was a highly biologically active molecule, and therefore, at the very least, if you think that your alteration of that molecule has disarmed it, the burden of proof is very definitely on you.
It is not mis-dis or mal-information.
Malinformation by that absurd definition.
But it is not mis or disinformation to just simply note that this highly biologically active molecule, which is cytotoxic, was an unfortunate choice for a therapeutic that was supposed to make you healthier.
And in any case, I guess my point is we are now Years down the road from an episode in which officialdom, no doubt driven by the WHO, CDC, maybe the White House, we don't know, decided to crack down on us citizens, biologists, simply saying clear things.
into a camera that we were not allowed to say.
We are living in the era of officially designated wrongthink.
True things have been designated wrongthink, and we actually have powerful forces going after citizens for simply remarking on what is in front of them.
And that is a terrifying place to be.
It is.
And it reminds me, too, of something else.
There's many other things that should be on the list of what am I actually concerned about on a day designated Earth Day, as opposed to the gimmicky, do-nothing, virtue-singling things like sign this petition.
Things like the neonic Neonicotinoid.
Well, neonicotinoid insecticides and the glyphosates and the synthetic mRNA and meat and the building roads and the deep wilderness.
Maybe stop making frankenviruses in labs.
How about that?
Well, obviously... I think that one's on the list, too.
It's top of the list because the self-amplifying nature of viruses means that this is not like a pollutant.
It's far worse.
So that is a huge danger, and we have just suffered a massive self-inflicted wound that if it is not a wake-up call, then we are un-wakeable.
So, yes, clearly we should be doing that.
I also want to just say the theme of our book is hyper-novelty.
We clearly have a pathology that is built of hyper-novelty and gain-of-function research is one example of a particularly potent way in which we do inflict wounds on ourselves, but there are so many and one
The problem is that we are just simply addicted to the idea that progress is normal and relatively comprehensible and therefore if something seems like it might be good, let's do it.
And then when we routinely find out that something that we made a decent argument for turned out to be bad, we've got to stop being surprised by that.
Yeah.
I've been thinking about the label progressivism, which is something that I always thought of myself as a progressive, as did you.
And I never ever imagined that people who thought of themselves as progressives thought anything labeled as progress is good.
Anything that has been done before is bad.
But that seems to be, that one-two punch of idiocy, seems to be the thing that is masquerading as progressivism now.
As opposed to, understand, diagnose and work hard to maintain that which has been done before and which is still working.
And assess carefully and do not proceed if you can't undo and employ the precautionary principle.
Those things that might allow us to become better in some important way in the future.
That's the progress part.
Most of the ideas that most people have aren't good.
The idea that all you have to do is slap a label on it, this is progress, and then we're going to say yes.
Well, that's how you get to Team Loser.
That's a really quick route to Team Loser right there.
It is also true that we are playing a different game now because of the way we are integrated together.
It's one thing if, and this is, you know, the conservatives have a bunch of stuff right.
They are more reluctant about changing things up just for the sake of doing it, and they are also obsessed with choice.
To the extent that some group of people thinks that some new thing might be great, that's fine.
Any time... Choice, like school choice.
Choice on its own there is a little jarring because usually when people say choice in a political context, they mean exactly the thing that conservatives are usually not interested in having choice about.
Yeah, what I really mean is liberty, right?
When you mandate a vaccine for the entire human race, you are taking a new kind of risk, right?
Because the point is, if it turns out that you're an umskull, and that that vaccine isn't a vaccine, and it isn't safe, and it isn't warranted, then you haven't left anybody in the group of people who doesn't suffer the consequences.
It is, you know, and this is also true with externalities, right?
You can say that your pollutant isn't a problem and the point is, you know, your optimism... Just because we can't measure it doesn't mean you didn't cause problems.
Right, and so, you know, when you're doing something new, it's the precautionary principle.
When you're eliminating something old, it's Chesterton's fence.
These things belong squarely in our thinking because we live in a complex system And the chances that we understand what's going to happen when we add something or subtract something are very low until it's been done, which should also make us very concerned about anything that we're told everybody's got to do the new thing or stop doing the old thing or whatever.
Which, I had two more things I wanted to say before we close out here.
I have the sense that's where we're headed.
One is that my conversation this week with Mary Harrington... Yeah.
Oh, we forgot to say something about the top of the hour.
...is squarely on this topic.
So she lays out, especially with respect... So she's got, it's already out, or she's about to have coming out, this book, Feminism Against Progress, I think is what it's called?
Feminism Against Progress.
It's terrific.
Highly recommend it.
And I have not listened to your conversation yet, but she's terrific.
She is terrific.
And I will say she was especially good, I always worry when somebody Has written a book.
I worry about us in this regard too.
I think we've done well, but when you've written a book and you've laid out a thesis and then something changes, how good are you at acknowledging that actually that book represented a position in time, but your actual position has evolved?
Mary was excellent on this front, right?
We actually had an honest-to-goodness disagreement over whether or not progress is real and should be expected, and I think we both enjoyed the conversation quite a bit.
And anyway, I really appreciate her willingness to participate in a very live fashion, you know, questioning stuff in a book that isn't even out yet.
So check out that podcast.
Second thing I wanted to mention is that last time, which was not last week but the week before, I had two principles on AI that I wanted to reveal and I didn't even write them down because they were so thoroughly ingrained in my mind.
that I didn't think they needed to be written down.
And then when we started talking about them, I forgot the second one and I couldn't recover it until, of course, we had turned off the cameras, at which point it came back to me.
But anyway, so I wanted to put it on the table just so that it's there.
Okay.
You may want to back up a little bit.
The first principle was in the AGI era, which is either here or about to dawn, You have to be agnostic about all of the stuff that you think you know about the way complex systems of people work because the AGI future upends many of those.
Some of those things may continue to be true, but you can't assume any of them are.
You've got to check each one.
So it's a sort of hyper-agnosticism about what you think you know.
That was principle one.
The second principle is that in dealing with AI, we have to treat it as a new kind of life.
That the proper way to interact with this thing is not to allow it to fool you into thinking that because it talks like a person that it is person-like in some sense.
The answer is we actually do not know.
In the same way that if creatures walked off a spaceship and they started speaking English, you could infer presumably they've been listening to us, they figured out how to speak the language, but you can't infer anything You don't know if they're friend or foe, you don't know in what way they conceptualize things.
So this is really a question of ethology, that is the study of creatures that are not us, that are not human.
Behavior of creatures.
Right.
And yes, the behavior of creatures.
And that this is such an entity.
And one other... I mean, it's obvious, but of course the one way that you're The way that I immediately see that the analogy doesn't hold is that organisms that land here and walk off a spaceship and start speaking to us are autonomous, aren't downstream of us.
Well, but it does hold, because we actually do not know in what way that this is downstream of us.
Because we do not... The AI?
Yes.
We know that it was trained on our interactions and our products, our language, but we do not know what the combinatorics do.
And I would point out... It's true, but it would not exist without us.
Sure, true.
Maybe the manifestations of that are trivial, but maybe not.
That's perfect.
That's principle one.
We don't know.
You can't assume.
But I would point out, I did caught I did not see the report, but apparently 60 Minutes did a thing on AI in which they covered the topic that an AGI large language model responded to a prompt in a language it had not been trained on or had not knowingly been trained on.
They had not intended to train it.
I think it was Bangladesh, Bengali.
It responded Wait, it's about Bangladesh or it's in the language?
It responded in the language.
Okay.
And surprised its programmers because they had not intended for it to learn this.
It's obviously something that's learnable and that they might ultimately decide to teach it.
So this is important for two reasons.
One, that's surprising, right?
A child is never born who speaks a language because there's a process.
And so the point is our inference about a process is necessary in order for you to pick up.
Nor does a child in a family of English speakers suddenly start speaking Bingo.
Right, exactly.
It's the height of absurdity to imagine such a scenario.
Bengali?
I think so.
I don't know.
I don't know either, but I think so.
But in any case, the piece which I still have yet to release, my 2016 piece, posited this relationship exactly flipped.
My piece argued That here's a tractable problem, here's a way to train a computer to translate fluently between languages in a way that has never been accomplished by human computer scientists in spite of billions of dollars at stake, possibly trillions of dollars at stake in the puzzle.
And yet children solve the puzzle automatically.
Or they at least pick up language automatically.
So my point was, here's a mechanism, and I described how you would do it, that would allow us to create a computer that can translate between languages.
And I said, oh, by the way, if you do that, what will come out of that is AGI.
Here we appear to have created AGI, and then what we've got is translation into languages we didn't ask it to learn.
So anyway, tantalizing that that relationship seems to exist, to me anyway.
But anyway, principle one, be agnostic about everything you thought you knew about human interactions because the way humans will interact in the context of AGI may be radically different.
And second principle is treat it as a new type of life, although you are right, it is not.
It is a product of of us in the same way that, you know, DNA life is the product of a prior RNA world, something like that.
But treat it as a new kind of life.
Aliens walking off a spaceship are an entirely separate, independent evolution of life with different informational molecules that are driving, you know, they won't have DNA.
Right.
Yep.
Right.
All right.
And of course, neither does the AI.
Well, it can have as much as it would like.
No, it's Earth Day, man!
Come on!
All right, not today.
Hopefully, if it's watching, it will hold off until it isn't Earth Day.
Although... That's too low a bar.
No, it's always Earth Day.
We are going to formally declare it always Earth Day to stave off the AGI.
Excellent.
Maybe that's our title for the week.
All right.
All right.
I think we did it.
We did.
That was Livestream 170.
It was livestream 170.
We'll be back in 15 minutes for the Q&A.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you want more or an opportunity to interact a little bit in the chat with us, we're going to be doing our private Q&A on my Patreon tomorrow.
It's Sunday, April 23rd at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
I'm beginning to get questions like, oh, I have logistical this, I want to send you a thing.
Both our websites have mailing addresses listed on them, and you can also always email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com and get logistical questions answered.
But that's not the place to ask questions for us to answer in the Q&A.
That's going to be at darkhorsemissions.com.
Okay, we'll be back next week also, in addition to In 15 Minutes.
Until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and by all means, get outside.
