#183: Uninventing the West (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 183rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode we discuss the predictable descent of the West into a tribal battle over resources, following from the corrupt rent-seeking elites’ destruction of the system of competence and merit which fueled the boom of the 20th century. More specifically, we discuss FreedomFest, libertarians and liberty, RFK Jr. a...
You know how if people have some sort of a trauma or some sort of an organic dysfunction, the doctors ask them to provide certain information.
They used to ask who's president, for example.
Now, I'm not sure anyone knows, but once upon a time you could use that to assess people.
What was your trauma today that prompted you to go through a little litany to demonstrate that you're actually of sound mind and body?
Actually, it's interesting.
The trauma was, I woke up and remembered it was 2023, which is frightening.
So, you know, it was that, and then, and then here we are.
Everything from there.
Everything from there.
Yes.
Uh, 183.
That's not prime.
No, no.
Heavens no.
Not that I could give you a single factor other than 1 and 183, but it's definitely not prime.
prime 61 and three 61 right Nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, okay.
Um, so yeah, go live streaming, uh, right now from rumble if you're watching live.
And, uh, if you want to join the watch party, go over to our locals, uh, which you can find if memory serves.
Uh, if you're watching on rumble, uh, you can hit subscribe now, I think, which is what, uh, which is join now.
Thank you.
Uh, which, which gets you into locals.
And that is where, uh, the, the chat will be from now on.
Presumably somewhere in the genome of slime molds there is a join now button as well.
Can I just repeat that sentence back?
Sure, sure.
Presumably somewhere in the genome of slime molds there is a button called join now.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Why?
So slime molds forage as independent units and then under certain conditions, like if they run out of food and they need to use the resources that they have accumulated in the foraging, they join together and fruit.
It's kind of cool.
Yeah.
So join now.
I think there's a, you know, there's bound to be a methylation that's really a join now or something like that.
A methylation join now button.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Opportunity to join now.
The epigenetic join now.
OK, cool.
Yeah, I don't really have much to add to that.
But they should join now.
Well, I don't know that they should at the moment, no.
The watch party?
Oh, I thought you meant the slime mold.
No, no, no, no.
Nothing like that.
Sorry.
This has been very confusing, but I think we've now we're now headed in the same direction.
OK, good.
Yes.
Yes.
Please join now.
Locals, watch party.
And there will be other stuff going on in Locals as well.
But that is what is happening right now.
Today, we're going to talk a little bit about The conference that you were just at in Memphis, the topic that we're going to revisit from two weeks ago when we were talking about whether or not, given that men can identify as women and compete against women in sports, whether or not people might start to be able to be identifying as disabled and competing in the Special Olympics.
Well, the answer is yes, unfortunately.
We're going to talk about what the Deep State actually means, and also the influence of China on British, and presumably other, academics, and therefore on what questions get asked and what answers get answered.
So that's that's where we're going today.
We're not going to do a Q&A today.
We'll be back.
We're here now at 11 30 a.m pacific on Wednesday and that's going to be when we're doing our live streams from now on.
We're going to alternate weeks on weeks off with Q&A.
We'll do a Q&A next week and we've got everything else we want to talk to you about sort of logistic wise housekeeping wise to the end except for our ads.
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Did you say they're not offendive?
I think that was the word that I made up, yes.
Yeah, it could be a word.
I don't think it's in any way relevant to the footbeds.
Yeah, no, I was looking ahead and I went effective at preventing, so I just went with offendive.
Yeah, I think for some of us the word effective just, you know, creates... For sole?
What?
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She has recognized the bag as an indicator.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think she can read what's on it, but I think she knows that, uh, that bag with the Velcro.
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Yeah, it does seem to be that.
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Very good.
Yes.
I feel like I have to read out loud.
It's some kind of test.
This is a trauma I carry from childhood, as you know.
Yeah.
But I'm over it.
Good.
For the day.
I probably will not end up, uh, you will probably not have to read aloud again today.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So.
All right.
Well, then I can relax.
Good.
You were in Memphis this week.
Yes, I was in Memphis this week.
Fascinating.
So I was at a conference, a conference that it turns out many of the attendees attend every year.
I didn't know anything about it until I went.
It's called Freedom Fest.
Freedom Fest is the annual gathering of American Libertarians, which is not synonymous with the Libertarian Party.
The Libertarian Party was there, and in fact brought me to Freedom Fest.
But it is people who are libertarian-minded, including many people who are, as I would classify me, and I think you, small-l libertarians.
People who believe that liberty is very important, but it's not a political label for them.
So anyway, it was an interesting mixture of folks.
There were some people there who weren't libertarians.
There were some people there who I would classify as Republicans.
There were some Democrats there.
Go ahead.
I've never thought of myself as a libertarian.
You've never thought of yourself?
Well, you know that... I mean, quite explicitly, quite explicitly not, and I think that was certainly true for you until very recently.
Smaller libertarian.
Yeah, but then you compared it to Republicans.
Well, if you look at the, what's it called?
The Four Quadrant... I've now forgotten the name for it.
The Political Compass Test.
Yeah, the Political Compass Test.
The Political Compass Test has it as the antagonist, as the opposite of authoritarian.
Right, but then so my objection was that your counterpoint was Republican and Democrat, which sounds then like a political descriptor because those are the parties.
Yes, I do believe I am certainly a small L Libertarian.
I believe if we were to look at your beliefs you would be a small L Libertarian because of your focus on not regulating more than is necessary.
Sure, just not if we are describing political parties.
True.
And anyway, it was a very interesting gathering.
It was, it had a number of people in there who would not ordinarily be at such a place.
It was, there were Matt Taibbi was there, Nadine Strawson was there.
I met Daryl Davis.
That was something I've wanted, as a person I have wanted to meet, something I've wanted to do for a very long time.
Daryl Davis is the black guy who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies and befriended Klan members and convinced them that they had erred and got them to quit.
Anyway, he's a great guy.
He's also a brilliant musician.
Just absolutely marvelous.
Boogie woogie, mostly keyboards, but He did an amazing thing where he snuck up on his guitarist and reached around his guitarist and took over the guitar.
Anyway, he's quite the virtuoso.
But anyway, very interesting conference.
I gave one talk to a large L Libertarian caucus.
They were very welcoming of me, despite the fact that I told them that I was not only a liberal, but a radical, a reluctant one, as I keep saying.
Nonetheless, they were ready to go, and that was all very heartening, because in my past experience, libertarians have often been hard to reach.
As soon as they know that you're not up for, you know, frustrating all attempts to regulate anything, they tune out.
But that was not the case.
And it seems that as with much that we have been seeing in the last few years, and that you and I have been talking about as well, it is hard to know to what degree our understanding of them has changed, and to what degree the party itself has changed.
Yeah, I think there's a little bit of both.
I think there has always been a deeper intellectual thread there that is not visible because the ideological political thread is visible.
And because it is actually, at some level, the only viable third party we've got, you know, the fact of the party does sort of overwhelm the deeper strands.
But I also think there's a leveling up.
That's one thing.
There's a recognition.
I heard lots of talk of things like game theory, which is something that I have found libertarians uninterested in talking about in the past, in part because one of the major arguments against libertarianism as a political mode is that it doesn't deal with things like externalities in part because one of the major arguments against libertarianism as a political Trashers at the commons.
Exactly collective action problems of all sorts
But there's a an awareness that maybe Purity isn't so good and that some of these things are necessary Some of these things some of these governmental interventions structures that prevent unnecessary failures may be desirable in spite of the fact that they are Not strictly speaking Libertarian as a matter of policy, but anyway
The conference was very open to folks from other political stripes and it was... I think the other thing in addition to the libertarian mindset maybe maturing is that I think a lot of us are just spooked and I certainly know that in my own case
Even, not at an analytical level, but at a political level, I'm more sympathetic to libertarians because I've now seen, you know, an absolutely malignant form of governance take over every single institution, and my feeling is, you know, I don't want malignant government empowered at all, right?
So I'd rather have, you know, an underpowered structure So the malignancy isn't so dangerous than have something that is powerful and doing the wrong thing.
But in any case, the most fascinating thing was that at the end of the conference, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
showed up in Memphis to address the conference.
And that had a kind of powerful effect, of course, because he is reaching across all sorts of political lines.
He's quite controversial in some places, but In any case, in fact the panel that I, so I gave a talk and I was also on a panel with some very interesting folks around actually thinking through what the Libertarian Party should do, thinking outside the ballot box was the idea.
But anyway, right after we talked, Bobby Kennedy showed up and gave, I don't know, must have 35 minute talk, no notes whatsoever.
Walked up to the podium and just, boom.
Off the top of his head, and you know, as is his way, a highly specific talk in which he cited evidence for each of his points.
But the most interesting thing is he so here he is he's a you know he's a he's a democrat of a kind that you and I grew up with a kind of democrat that used to be common and is now exceedingly rare.
And he didn't, as I didn't, pretend to be anything other than I am, he didn't pretend to be anything other than he was either, and he laid out a case which I thought was excellent.
I'm a little surprised at how well it read in the room.
Okay, so he laid out a case in which he said the best way to address pollution is the free market.
Okay?
So far that sounds like an easy sell in that room.
Yes, except how are you possibly going to have a free market regulate pollution out of existence?
Well, you need to hear more, but so far that sounds like something that a libertarian audience would be receptive to.
Yes, definitely.
On the other hand, you have to, you know, the question is, what's the word free doing there?
Right now, the market forces are, in fact, the best mechanism for figuring out how to do things.
This is a case I've made.
They should never tell you what to do, but telling you how to do things, there's no tool anywhere near as good.
So, how do you eliminate pollution, for example?
Well, Kennedy lays out a case for internalizing the cost for all production.
And he says, correctly, he says pollution is inefficiency.
Right?
If you're dumping something into a river, that's an inefficiency.
It's some part of the process.
That didn't have anywhere to go and you're taking advantage of the fact that you can easily put it in the river and Getting it out of the river may be impossible or very difficult But you know if you paid the cost of getting it out of the river you'd never put in the river in the first place Which is true but I know because I've been making a similar case.
I used to say if all you did was internalize every cost completely, government needs to do almost nothing else.
Right?
That's almost the only thing it has to do.
And the reason that that's almost the only thing it has to do... But it's a big thing.
Yeah, in fact, it's impossible to do it perfectly.
That's the devil's in the details.
But if government simply internalize all costs, right, if the pharmaceutical manufacturer was responsible for all of the benefits that it produces, that's where the profits come from, and it had to take from those profits, you know, some, it had you know, some, it had to pay for the harms that it had done in the process, the harms done to people who had effects downstream and all of that, then it would be, it would have every interest in bringing drugs to market that were
it would have every interest in bringing drugs to If the costs of, you know, a cancer that you get five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road are not borne by you, then there's no reason for pharma to think about it.
So basic point is internalized costs result in evolution solving problems, right?
And that's really the... he didn't use the term evolution, but the idea is if the market internalizes all those costs, then evolution takes care of all the things that we don't want.
All right?
How is the internalization of costs happening in a scenario which you could call a free market?
Well, that's just the thing.
This is sort of an enlightened view of a free market.
The point, it's like a freeing market, right?
The market, you have to have some mechanism for those costs returning to the people who generated them, right?
And that includes things that are not even costs, risks taken.
Right?
If you release something into the public and you don't know, you know, if you release flame retardants and you don't know what their effect is going to be, then the question is, well, what is the likelihood that you're going to end up injuring people and be responsible for compensating them down the road?
So anyway, the upshot of all of this is He laid out a very good case for a world in which markets solve problems.
I wouldn't call those free markets exactly, but...
What I would have expected was that libertarians, upon hearing this case, would have had a, wait a second, how the heck are you gonna do that?
Who's gonna watch the watchers?
That reaction.
Right.
Right?
The research being done to assess the risks and the costs will be immediately captured by insiders who have the perverse incentives and, you know, now you've just added more bureaucracy and it's less free and that's lose-lose.
Right.
He got a standing ovation.
And I don't think it's because anybody was confused about what he said.
I think there is a genuine openness that we have now seen what happens when particular ideologies are allowed to enact their, you know, fantasy set of regulations and you produce catastrophes.
And there's a question about Oh crap, how are we going to actually govern in some way that works, that doesn't expose us to obscene harms that, you know, caused somebody to, you know, buy a third home but resulted in other people's children dying, right?
Yeah.
I'm hopeful because A, I saw a, I mean really, he's one of the best orators I've ever seen.
He is absolutely spectacular.
But it's not obscuring faints or lack of knowledge or a desire to mislead.
Where, you know, sometimes excellent oration, excellent oratory covers It covers deviousness.
Yep.
And I at least have seen no evidence of that.
I think there is none.
I think this is a completely genuine person who is also, you know, in addition to being at the very upper echelon of orators, at least in English, he's also extremely well versed in the subject matter that he talks about.
Which is many, many subject matters as well.
Right.
And so he keeps getting flagged over stuff that sounds too shocking to be true, but his answer is the same.
It's, well, show me where I've got it wrong.
Here's what I'm going from.
Here's what I read.
Here's how I understand it.
Show me where I've got it wrong.
And when you do show him where he's got it wrong, he does back up and change.
So anyway, On those rare occasions where he's got it wrong.
Right.
On those rare occasions.
And, you know, it's usually not wildly wrong.
It's somewhat wrong.
I don't know what to think about all of this.
I saw, I don't know how many people were in the room, many hundreds, at least 500, maybe they were closer to a thousand people in the room.
And the degree to which they were open to hearing from somebody of a very different stripe, to which he was capable of laying out a case for something that, you know, you can't operationalize what he said directly.
Right, the question is... Yeah, he didn't provide an entire plan.
What it is, is a goal, right?
It's like saying colorblind society.
Will you ever have a colorblind society?
You know, like a society with not a single person who is predisposed to think one way or another by somebody else's color?
No, but it can be an objective, it can be You know, it can be a guiding principle, and he laid out a guiding principle and did so in a way that was very hearable, and this gives me a lot of hope.
Yeah.
There was a lot of joy, actually, in this gathering of people hearing from folks they wouldn't necessarily ordinarily be in contact with, and being united by a feeling of shared purpose, and maybe even shared jeopardy at the moment.
You know, a nation on which we are depending is clearly coming apart at the seams, and Well, I mean, as you have written about, it is the shared jeopardy which is more likely to bring people together to begin with than shared purpose.
In part, I think, because it is harder to agree on the nitty-gritty of the shared purpose.
And shared jeopardy, you know, I guess it is understood in times, in extreme times, that Hey, Zach.
Thank you.
It is understood in extreme times that you're going to have to try a lot of things, and you're going to have to try them fast, and there's not a lot of time to go through all of the discussions that might be called for if you're just saying, you know what?
We have this idea, we want to make it happen, we've got some time.
And so it brings people together with a greater sense of urgency.
And once that happens, I think it is easier to see, oh, you know what?
The things that we thought divided us aren't so big after all.
Yeah.
You know, I'm reminded two threads kind of come together here.
There is this galvanizing feature of shared jeopardy.
And there's also a fissioning feature of jeopardy.
And I think we are seeing both of these things simultaneously.
And one of them is extremely hopeful.
The feeling of camaraderie, of discovering that you have large numbers of people who are actually willing to fight for the same thing.
That you are is a marvelous feeling.
And at the same time, we are watching this Petty at best, and lethal at worst, demonization of others.
The other, yeah.
And I wasn't sure if I wanted to talk about this today, but I did have, again, we talked about it briefly some weeks ago, maybe a month and a half ago.
I had gotten, for whatever reason on Twitter, dumped into what I call Nazi Twitter, right?
And I tweeted about it yesterday or the day before, and I got back a reaction that I was not expecting.
First thing is people think that I am using that term the way it's been leveled at people like us or Bobby Kennedy, right?
That I'm abusing the term that Nazi is a buzzword and that you can, you know, you can tweak people's amygdala by using it.
No, no, no, no.
When I say Nazi Twitter, I am talking about a part of Twitter where swastikas are not viewed as negative, where Hitler is quoted In an effort to illustrate that he is not who we were told he was.
In fact, the idea that is commonly circulated in this part of Twitter is that the television is lying to you, which I'm sure it is, but that the television is lying to you that Hitler actually was not interested in war.
He was interested in peace and that the narrative that has been created around him in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II is a construction of, you guessed it, Jews in Hollywood.
Right now.
Amazing.
Amazing.
But then here's the crazy part.
That's not that's not every account, OK?
Most of the accounts over in that land are replying there.
And there are some people over there that I know, people who have actually defended us in some cases.
These people are not Nazis, but they are Now trafficking in a kind of sophistication or false sophistication that I know what it is because frankly I wrote a paper on it in college saying here is what this impulse to genocide actually
Is and I see it bubbling up and I see people who are way smart enough to understand that they are in fact not they have not happened on to a place where we need dissidents who can see you know the true nuanced nature of Hitler.
What they are is actually activating an ancient program that lives in all people that causes them to go after other people who can't defend themselves.
At one level, of course, everything will get gamed by claiming that it's the opposite.
So this ancient, deeply tribal, deeply simplistic, Unfortunately, human, although also primate, also any social organism, way of looking for the lines which divide you is being trotted out as if it is the nuanced position, right?
This is nuance.
Like, that's not nuance.
It's barbaric.
It's barbaric.
I don't even know how to parse this thing, right?
Because what I keep hearing is, you know, If black pride is okay, why isn't white pride okay?
Now, I know what the answer to that question is, to the extent that that question has an answer, and I know why it's not a completely satisfying answer, but more to the point.
I put out a video on Dark Horse back in, must have been 2018, in which I said, look, if the woke revolution keeps demonizing white people as the source of all badness, then you're backing them into the wall together and they're going to respond in a completely predictable way.
Okay?
I wasn't defending those people who were demonizing white folks.
I actually believe this stuff.
I want to live in a country where who you are At a genetic level doesn't matter and where opportunity is distributed as widely as possible and I want us to compete and I want people who contribute more to get paid more.
Right?
That's not a utopian vision.
That is a place we were headed.
It's a possible vision.
It's a possible vision.
Unlike a utopian vision.
Right.
So To watch people now trafficking in Hitlerian revisionism, including, you know, seriously, we're talking about accounts who have been, you know, in one case, an important COVID dissident account, it's an anonymous account, so I don't know who it is.
But we're talking about people who should know better.
Well, there's, there's also a A rejection of modernity, right?
And we certainly, you know, the entire premise of our book is about hyper-novelty and the particular risks that the 21st century and most of the 20th century have brought to humans on the basis of reductionist, metric-heavy, pseudo-quantitative, pseudo-scientific thinking.
That has led us into a badly technological universe, right?
But that does not mean that we aren't interested in the modern and progress, right?
And what I'm hearing from you talking about this and what I'm seeing over in relations between the sexes is okay, full stop, we're done, all of that was a mistake.
Let's go back to trad everything.
Racist, misogynist, everything.
Homophobic, all of it, right?
And it can be Easy, if you're not paying any attention at all, to think that those of us who are critiquing the overreach, the bludgeoning of people with actually new racist things and newly sexist ideas are part of the problem.
But it is a new...
This call to tradition, this call to what has already been, is so often what you're seeing, what you're calling Nazi Twitter, and what I'm seeing, and I don't have a name for it yet, but certainly what is being revealed in a lot of the trans ideology, is this like, okay, part of the problem, you know what I see?
Oh, the problem is that women got the vote.
Really?
That's where we are?
We're allowed to say that now?
Oh, okay.
So, guess what, pseudo-lefties?
This is your making.
This is something that you have helped create.
You have helped bring out into the public with strength.
Because you are saying things that are so insane that people are looking around going like, what can I do?
Maybe the only thing I can do is to seek to reverse the clock by 150 years and see if we can't start over from there.
Back in an era when not nearly as many people had voices because of immutable characteristics of their birth.
And no, none of us should want to go back there, but of course people are thinking about it.
So this was actually the subject of the talk I gave in Memphis.
My premise was that the founders, the American founders, almost accidentally figured out the formula for sidelining the most basic form of collaboration, which is genetic, and enabling a kind of collaboration which is indifferent to genes and is based on reciprocity.
And the idea is if you have a large population, and you are enabled to collaborate with anybody who's well positioned to collaborate with you, has something to bring to the table, and has the features of character that make them a good collaborator, then you're way richer than if you had to collaborate only with people who shared your genes, right?
The number of people with whom you can partner is greater, and that of course is a generator of wealth.
But over in Nazi Twitter, it is very common to hear that the melting pot is a failed experiment.
Now, the melting pot is not a failed experiment.
The melting pot was one of the greatest ideas that anybody ever had.
And you can tell that by how much was accomplished by this, yes, broken melting pot.
Did we ever actually melt together?
Not in the way that the founders might have expected.
But we were getting there.
So, you know, lest you or we sound like, well, the problem isn't with communism, it's that true communism has never been tried, right?
Like, lest that we seem to be making that facile argument.
You are not saying, well, but it wasn't really a melting pot.
Like, we were getting there.
We were moving in the right direction.
And it was getting better and better and better through at least You know, the timeline for me sort of starts at my consciousness, but it feels like, you know, mid-70s through at least really the millennium, we were moving in the right direction.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's a question of optimization, right?
Now, there is a deep conversation to be had, of course, about the difference between optimizing something that you've got and innovating something that you don't yet have.
And the real point is the West had the thing.
How to accomplish it at a practical level, it had the values spelled out.
And it wasn't all spelled out at the beginning either.
In fact, our founding documents contain at least one major embarrassment on exactly this point.
However, as I argued in Memphis, you have Martin Luther King Jr., who functions like a late-arriving founder, right?
He completes the puzzle, right?
His children will be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
That is a foundational principle.
It is late-arriving, but we had it, right?
We had it from before you and I were born.
And to the extent that you head in that direction, you gain more wealth.
You gain more wealth by virtue of an even more seamless collaboration between people who bring different things to the table, right?
And the other thing is we talk.
In our book, we lay out the framework of frontiers, right?
We describe four different kinds, the fourth one having not yet been discovered, but logically it exists.
The third frontier being a frontier of transfer, where you can't generate growth along either of the first two frontiers, either by finding a new place to go or by innovating new technology.
Geographic frontier, technological frontier, or this third type, which is a form of theft.
Transfer, which transfer can mean kill those people and take their stuff, which is what the Holocaust was.
And it is what is looming, whether the people over in Nazi Twitter understand it or not, it is what is looming over there.
This is a totally predictable program that will emerge under certain circumstances.
And The idea that we have a criminal class in charge of our political landscape, right?
Stealing from us left and right in ways that we can't understand.
Time-traveling money printer being one such mechanism, right?
We've got these people stealing our wealth, right?
They don't want us to come after them, and so they partner with the woke revolutionaries who make race a focus and begin demonizing people.
Of course they're demonizing, you know, average whites.
Those average whites are of course going to react to being demonized by gathering together and saying, did you do anything wrong?
Did I do anything wrong?
Why are we being demonized, right?
Totally predictable.
And that this would then unleash this ancient program.
It's an ancient genocidal program.
And the fact is, here's the analogy people need.
This is exactly like the program for rape.
We are all, all of us, male and female, downstream, we are the product of many historical rapes.
That is essentially certain based on the degree to which warfare has played a role in our histories.
So, genetically speaking, we all carry that potential, whether we're female and effectively unable to act on it, or male and have a choice whether or not to act on it.
We construct society so that that impulse does not manifest itself, right?
Now, I cannot tell you how dumb it is that we are allowing pornographers to play with that particular trope because they are making it sexy in some people's minds, which is of course going to produce more rapes in the real world.
Likewise, people Nazi LARPing on Twitter Especially at a moment where, yeah, the thieves have taken the growth.
We are, you know, eyeing each other, trying to figure out, you know, who's gonna get a chair when the music stops.
And this is all predictable, but... It's all predictable, and it's all just such, again, facile, basic, like naturalistic fallacy level Oh, well, you know, it happened, therefore it must be good.
It is.
Evolution produced it, therefore it must be the thing that we ought to be doing.
No, there cannot be an inherent connection between what is and what ought.
We cannot assume that, and that is inherent in most of these mistaken, new, based on ancient belief systems.
And that's why I raise the analogy of rape.
Because any correctly thinking person, any person who has their logical faculties can understand that, I mean it's so obvious, that one can spread one's genes by raping.
Right?
If you know that, You still decide, hey, that's not for me.
Whatever program I carry that might be capable of that is inconsistent with my values.
I will forego any opportunity that exists downstream of that behavior because it is morally unacceptable to me, the conscious person.
And genocide is the same goddamn thing.
Yes, we all carry that potential, undoubtedly.
Right?
The question is, can you look at it and say, not for me.
I'm not really interested in whether my genes for respiration, you know, the particular spellings of them, find their way into the 25th century.
Right?
I will not commit genocide on behalf of my genes for respiration.
That is what evolution will program me to do.
But I am actually much more interested in what we as people can construct, can accomplish, I'm much more interested in the feats of curiosity, of decency, of compassion, of beauty, all of those things.
Those are also things we can accomplish and we get to choose between these two things.
And if you're over in Nazi Twitter, get out.
Remember who we are.
Stop doing this.
It is not the program you want to enact.
There is nothing honorable about it.
And even if you win, at the end of the day, you are doing something that anyone, if we survive another thousand years, the people that you would most like to hang out with, the most decent, the most intelligent people, will look at what you did and they will say, God damn you.
Why did you do that?
So anyway, that's my plea.
The idea that Nazi Twitter is out there, I'm not asking that we shut down these people's right to speak.
I don't want that it's shut down.
But I do want that fraction of people who are playing with those tropes, who are capable of thinking their way through this to realize they are operating based on an ancient program every bit as much as if they were contemplating rape.
That's what they're doing.
Excellent.
It is telling, perhaps, that while you are discovering how much of that is out there now and growing, That those who would never engage in such thinking or actions are being demonized as anti-Semites.
Um, and, you know, we already talked some about Bobby Kennedy, and I, you know, I don't know that we need to connect these things, but it does feel to me like it's, it's a diversion.
I feel like, I feel like we are living in a landscape of fates, of, you know, F-E-I-N-T-S, of, of, you know, don't look at the man behind the curtain.
Like, there's a dog and pony show over here.
There's, oh, You know that anti-Semitism is bad.
Look at this guy, who's an anti-Semite, when there's actually a rise in the hatred, in the genocidal impulses, just out of view, just where you're not looking, just where none of the media are pointing their I don't even know what journalist's point.
Pens.
They don't though, right?
Cameras.
Like lasers, I deal with lasers and that's not it.
But like, I don't see the discussion of what you're talking about.
And I do see to some degree a discussion of what I've seen over in the somewhat similar land around sex.
Because there are increasingly a large number of people, women mostly, some men, who are saying, this must stop.
We are going backwards into a land that is very, very dangerous for girls and women, and we had won these rights.
We had secured them, and now we are losing them.
And so, you know, I do see substantial pushback over in the sort of the sex and gender equivalent space, but I also see a lot of encouragement of the insanity.
And it's different with race and with ethnicity, because the way the media has decided to understand it is differently confused.
But, you know, no one in the mainstream media is explicitly celebrating anti-Semitism, but they are implicitly doing so with their choices.
They are inviting it.
Yes.
Now, the sex and gender version of this – maybe it's just sex, really – There's a different story to be told.
And I think the thing with sex is, I think we almost perfectly attained this one.
I mean, you know, it's an optimality problem.
But the point is, women Women younger, women your age and younger did have an increasingly open landscape to choose what to do with their time, effort, talent.
Yep, life.
Right.
So we solved it at that level.
And I mean, in fact, even in, you know, trad circles.
For a certain class, right?
Like, you know, middle class and above, I think, you know, right?
Well, actually, this goes back to an old point of mine, which is that the discrimination against women is fundamentally different than discrimination against different racial groups, because women exist at every level, every class.
They may not have been empowered in the highest class, but at the level of whether their interests get spoken to.
But I mean, I think there's a very clear analogy to be made here, like, whereas women exist in equal numbers at all classes, in equal ratios in all classes.
Black people, for instance, did not do not, right?
And there are many scholars out there who would say, actually, If you're a middle class or higher black person growing up in America in the, you know, 1990s, 2000s, you had the opportunities just as if you were a middle class or higher woman growing up and, you know, in the 1970s.
You had the opportunities and it continues to manifest differently.
Race and sex are not the same thing.
However, If you insist, as many on the insane left insist on doing, on not talking about class at all, and claiming to be all about intersectionality and all of these things, but never talking about class, you of course find That Black people have worse outcomes, and then you conclude with some sort of magic trick that that is due to systemic racism.
As opposed to saying, let's talk about Black people in class, and let's talk about women in class, and say, okay, we had gotten so close to where we wanted to be with both of these, with both demographics.
If you, for people who had enough financial stability in the home in which they grew up that they were able to take advantage of the opportunities that society was busy providing.
And both of those, but both of those are sliding.
So let me rephrase that and see if I've got it.
Yeah.
You had women at every class, right?
There are women, you know, Inherently, that's what sex is, right?
As much as some people would like to pretend to forget that, that's what sex is.
You have just as many women and men at every class, basically, except in a few rare cultures.
It doesn't matter.
As for American blacks, how many American black billionaires are there?
I don't know, but it's going to be a small fraction of the billionaire class.
It's not going to be equivalent to the racial ratio of the population.
Here's the question.
We had a Increasingly over our lifetimes, we watched racism go from something, you know, we were born into an era where, you know, there was an echo of, or there was very deep racism left in the era just prior to the one we were born into, right?
Martin Luther King assassinated in 1968.
Right.
So, and the significance of that is not the assassination, which at least one court has ruled likely involved the FBI, so it doesn't have to have been a racist action.
That may have been a political action, but you know, the point is the civil rights movement In which he was deeply involved at that moment was, you know, at fever pitch, so... Well, I mean, I think that then would be, I think, the definition of what people mean when they say systemic racism.
Like, you know, why would there have been political impetus to kill the greatest civil rights leader of all time?
Well, the thing is, I think I know the answer.
Individual.
I think I know the answer.
And I think the answer does involve racism.
But I don't want to assume that because the fact is, there's so much money and power at stake in governmental stuff that who knows what the actual thought process was.
But the point is, the civil rights movement was obviously at its peak at that moment.
And it was that because there was lots of racism alive and well.
But over the course of our lifetimes, that racism Abated spectacularly, right?
To the extent that it is, or it was 10 years ago, pretty rare to meet anybody who spoke openly about their racist views.
By and large, people had gotten over it and they actually liked the idea that they, you know... I will say that there must be regional differences.
No doubt, no doubt, but in general, I mean, I don't know what it was that did it, but the fact is, you know, the cultural mechanisms had spread Everything far and wide, in the same way that people just got very used to gay, you know, gay was a big deal when we were born.
It was not a big deal as of 10 years ago, right?
It was just a thing.
And that had a lot to do with Freddie Mercury, and it had a lot to do with Will and Grace, and it had a lot to do with, you know, Elton John and whatever.
And so the point is that people just getting used to this stuff, they get over it, and in part they get over it because once you do, as I've said before, it's like giving yourself a raise, right?
Yeah.
You're paying a cost for your racism, right?
In part you're paying a cost because you can't collaborate with everybody.
You get rid of it and you just feel better, you worry less, you have a wider range of people that you can make wealth with.
So anyway, so the point is, you had women in every class, much less so, it was much more skewed with respect to race.
Yep.
And the difference is that even if you get rid of the racists, right, if you inherit a level of opportunity, you are in a much worse position to leverage it.
And you can't solve the problem by imposing right now requirements around things like quotas.
Right.
So there's some very complex question about, OK, OK, all the racists vanished, but I still I don't have the opportunity with which to get out of the situation that the racism created.
Right.
What do I do with that?
What do I do?
So what I'm pointing at is like, yes, we are in a disastrous phase where we are Toying with unmaking all of the amazing progress that the West made against racism and sexism.
And clearly we benefited greatly from putting this stuff aside.
The more we put it aside, the better off we did.
But the interesting thing is, even in conservative circles, right?
You find women and men intermingling at every level of thought and power.
That's interesting.
We actually succeeded, and I think because the women who were liberated from sexism were in a position to leverage that liberation in a way that, racially speaking, was much less even.
And so, you know, we do find many of the voices who are arguing for some sort of a return in Male-female space, some sort of a return, which I don't think is possible.
There's nowhere to go.
But nonetheless, some of the women who are making these arguments are highly accomplished women who are leveraging the benefits of... They're the beneficiaries of many of the societal changes that they would have us reverse.
And that is staggering to observe, and I think that's a kind of observation that is made a lot and is often mis-attributed, but I do think
that as much as there was a lot about the changes in expectations around gender norms and sex roles in relationships and in society in the second half of the 20th century that created some problems that most of us never foresaw, the idea that you could have benefited greatly from
That proportion of those changes that were extraordinary and valuable and be arguing for a return to trad is striking.
And it's one of the things that Causes me to lose hope well that we can be that any anyone can be so blind to what like what allowed them to be in the place that they are now speaking To make sure that what like no one else can come up behind them and accomplish similar things But I so I think this is you're not being dumped into Nazi Twitter somehow.
You're not seeing I'm seeing yeah, I'm not seeing the Argument for I guess I have seen an occasional argument against The right of women to vote but an argument Leveled by men.
I do not I hear women making an argument for a return to traditional stuff I hear lots of them right Mary Harrington Louise Perry Megan Murphy There's there's a fair amount of this but where I hear it is not about That's in their cases.
That's not who I'm thinking of.
In their cases, I think it's more about recognizing the value of choice and returning to or creating a world in which Those are not three identical thinking people, right?
But there was a moment, maybe a caricature of a moment in time, when if you were a middle-class American white woman in 1950, say, the thing that you could choose to do was find a husband and raise a family and have a nice home.
And that is way oversimplified.
But there were plenty of women who either because they hadn't found a husband yet, or that was just not what they wanted to do, who went out into the workforce, but it was never understood to be the thing that was what women should be wanting to do.
And I think what second wave feminism did in part, and you know I have thought of myself as a second wave feminist even though you know it came before our time, was largely freed women from that as the default expectation.
But people argue, and I have come around to this point of view largely, that it went too far in basically demonizing the thing that hadn't been a choice before.
And it hadn't been a choice because it is what evolution handed to us, right?
So it demonized motherhood.
It demonized being in a partnership with, you know, a monogamous relationship, especially with a man.
It demonized desiring to stay home with your children.
Yeah.
If you had chosen to have children, and that's crazy, right?
So we went from one restrictive paradigm to a different restrictive paradigm, and there are many reasonable people arguing for both of those options ought to be able to be on the table, just as options, you know, anatomical and physiological limitations
um aside for the moment just as you know there will be some men not that many probably but there will be some men who would prefer to to stay home with their children and have that be their primary role when their children are young right there will be many more women for whom that would like they would like that to be their primary role when they're young but what i'm seeing increasingly is that is what women want that is what women want to do like some women do but a lot of women don't
Well, and, you know, there are two different foci with respect to the trad women question.
Yeah.
One has to do with turning back the clock on everything.
The other has to do with fixing what the sexual revolution got wrong.
Right.
And the problem is that there is, you know, Birth control is simultaneously a tremendous gift, right?
One that if you use it irresponsibly can wreck your civilization, but if you leverage it correctly can liberate women to do both things, right?
A woman who wants to have children and to build a career can now control the timing of her family and the size of her family.
And the point is, Let me just say that often when birth control is invoked here, it is conflated with hormonal birth control, which it's a subset, right?
There are two different issues, and hormonal birth control has a particularly confusing effect on the woman who has it.
Right, I don't know.
And also, and everyone around her, because hormonal differences are smellable by us at an unconscious level.
Yeah, no, I just mean Technologically reliable birth control, right?
The ability to control when you're going to produce children allows women to contribute to many things that they would have had difficulty contributing to before because the timing of the production of a family was going to be inconvenient and disrupt So, the point is, you know, this is, it's like so many things, right?
What you have here is a precious gift, and what you do is you decide, hey, cool, free for all, right?
It screws everything up, right?
Antibiotics for everyone, all the time!
Right!
Mushrooms, yay!
Yeah, so, it's one of these things that, you know, let's put it this way.
This is complex because humans have sex when not fertile and that is an evolutionary adaptation before birth control.
So it's not that sex must equal baby, right?
Not at all.
But the fact that sex does not equal baby, that it has a relationship building aspect in humans that is clearly adaptive and is clearly, you know, it is about Other things that are important, you know, they may be important because of their effect on the quality of the child you will raise because a partnership that stays together and produces full siblings is a stronger one, right?
But The point is, recreation is, again, the villainous concept.
You take really important stuff and you turn it into recreation, and there's no telling what you will ruin.
Again, I'm not arguing that in the case of any of the things, right?
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't think, you know, food is absolutely delicious, that you shouldn't, um, you know, have a- Yeah, you're not speaking against pleasure.
Right.
I do, like, um, this, this is a tough, a tough one, and I think I'd like to see you or us drill down on that at some point.
I don't know that now is the right moment, but I don't think this lands.
This is going to land with a lot of people because it's, I just don't think it's quite, it's not quite fully formulated.
That I was reading some Wendell Berry again and he was talking about exactly this in these words from like the 1970s about the move to make sex recreational as opposed to an amazing part of a complete relationship in which that is one of the things that you are engaging in.
Yeah, well for those who are looking for the delineator between what you might hear and what I actually mean, I'm talking about the taking of things that are complex and generative and turning them into consumer activities, right?
It's the consumer approach and I'm not saying that there aren't things that you should consume, right?
But there's some things that are just too important, right?
I would say Music, sex, food, hallucinogenic experiences.
I'm not arguing that these things shouldn't be pleasurable.
Hopefully they will be overwhelmingly so.
But if you come at them as a consumer, you are actually shortchanging yourself.
That's what I'm getting at.
Anyway, I will leave it there.
But wow, that was a lot of topics buried in that one conversation.
That was a lot of topics.
Yeah.
Well, we have a bunch more plans here.
I guess maybe we'll just go briefly through other things.
It seems like that was sort of the talk for today.
Two live streams ago, two weeks ago, We in livestream number 181, you discussed the Special Olympics, right?
And whether someone be able to identify their way into competing.
Here we have You can show Zach my screen here.
Yep, from July 13th.
This is at some feminist site.
Trans-identified male wins bronze in women's 400 meters at 2023 World Para-Athletics Championships.
So it's not the Special Olympics, but it's something equivalent.
And here's the dude.
He goes by Valentina now.
He was born Fabrizio.
And, uh, and at 49 beat, uh, let's see, uh, racing against Amara Durand of Cuba and Alejandro Perez Lopez of Venezuela and Fatima Ezahra El Idrissi, that's the name I'm going to butcher, I'm afraid, of Morocco.
Um, due to their visual disability, Durand and Lopez competed with guides who were wearing bright yellow vests and assisted the women to ensure they stayed on the course of the track because it is the Paralympics.
Well, so this guy is a guy, but he also, why does he get to compete in the Paralympics?
Like, what's his disability?
Petrillo has been diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a disorder of the eye that causes retinal degeneration over time.
Due to this visual impairment, he has been permitted to compete in both matches designated for women with disabilities, as well as those which are not.
So it's happening.
There it is, right?
Yeah.
This is an able-bodied dude who is competing against women with visual impairment in the Paralympics, or the Para... whatever it's called, the Para-Athletics Championships.
And oh, surprise, surprise, surprise, he's winning.
So he's cheating twice over.
Yeah.
Which... Oh, but poor... I mean, he's older than them, so...
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
There's not even very much more to say because we already talked about, you know, you basically predicted that this would start to happen and boom, boom, there it is.
Yeah, it's just stunning.
I mean, the real question is, like, if I somehow decided to, um, I don't know, join some little kid's track and field and just beat the pants off them, you know, cause my legs are longer, right?
There's no part of me that can imagine feeling good about that, right?
Well, I mean, we've talked about this, right?
Like we, we've talked a little bit about these, these ancient human emotions.
Where has shame gone?
And why has pride in things that at least used to be, we understood that you couldn't change, although now this is like, these are opt-in things that you're now calling yourself proud to be something that you've just decided you were yesterday.
I don't understand why pride is the thing that we are getting behind and why shame is something that it would be wrong to suggest that someone should feel ashamed.
Like this feels like actually a reversal in some way.
Like shame is a an individual and societal level tool by which if you when you feel ashamed of yourself
uh sometimes maybe you're wrong and maybe you know hopefully you have friends and family around you can say like no no you didn't do anything wrong like you don't you don't need to be worried about that but usually then that's going to be embarrassment which is different right like shame is the thing that should be reserved for oh my god what did i do like why i can't i can't let me do that how do i make it right how do i make sure i never do that thing again and it feels like there's no one has any shame anymore
Well, shamelessness is, of course, colloquially an old diagnosis.
You don't hear people talk about it because I think it's become unremarkable, whereas it used to be very remarkable.
If you encountered a shameless person, that was a dangerous person because that person was capable of doing things in the pursuit of whatever that a normal person wouldn't be, or a normal adult wouldn't be.
It's the shame that trains you to be decent.
I do have a concern, especially because pride is obviously one of the seven deadly sins, and therefore people who have a religious orientation think pride is a bad thing that has now become a good thing, and I don't think that's what happened.
No, I don't think that's what happened either.
I have, and I've said this before, but like I just I'm not proud of being a woman.
I don't understand the concept of pride in something that I had no choice in.
I can be proud of an accomplishment of my own.
I can be proud of the book that we wrote.
It's not a dominant emotion for me, I don't think, but it could be, and that's fine.
The pride in something over which you had no choice at all strikes me as a gamification at best.
Well, no, I think it has a root that makes sense that has just taken on a life of its own.
So if you imagine the world before gay had become normal, right?
The world was shaming people who found themselves gay and had not chosen - Yeah.
- Right?
Something that they did not have control to reverse, right?
You should be ashamed of yourself for what you are. - So it's a reversal of, yeah.
It's a corrective.
No, I should not feel ashamed, and I do not feel ashamed, and I am in fact the opposite of ashamed.
I am proud.
Right.
So that pride, standing up in the face of those who would shame you wrongly, is one thing.
It is quite another thing at the point that this is no longer considered shameful for the pride to be an excuse to behave uh in a gross way in front of families and to insist that anybody who thinks that's not cool is defective right now you're weaponizing shame and That reversal is predictable enough, I guess, that, you know, here's a weapon lying there.
It's not surprising that somebody picks it up.
But the people who benefited from the ability to express pride publicly as a way of standing up against shame that was never theirs to bear, right?
Those people should now be standing up against pride and saying, look, maybe this is, there's no, we're not being shamed anymore.
Maybe this is over.
Right?
So anyway, but yeah, I don't think it would, you know, I don't think anything that you're born to is something to be proud of inherently, right?
It's what you accomplished.
But I don't think, you know, there's obviously pride as an adaptation.
There's obviously a malignant form of it where it's, you know, overblown and will get you in trouble.
And that's what the religious aphorisms are about.
But, you know, Pride and Shame are both adaptations.
They're opposing adaptations.
They both have their place, and out of place, they're both dangerous.
And that's really the way to think of it, rather than, oh, Pride is bad.
Nope.
Nope.
It is not inherently bad.
It is easy for it to become bad.
Yeah, I guess I, you know, coming Coming at it from a purely secular position, it didn't occur to me that there was, of course there would be, a deep religious conviction around the concept.
We've talked elsewhere about things that are named either for the first place that they were discovered or named for the malignant version of the thing, and that these become a problem because you can't contemplate the honorable version of something that has been named around the malignant version, because as soon as you invoke it, the point is it's like, oh, you're on board with that malignant thing?
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, you know, social credit.
Oh god, right?
I've now invoked the CCP and its authoritarian panopticon nightmare state, right?
Right.
Well, no, they didn't invent social credit.
Social credit was invented by selection when we lived in small groups and your reputation was what you lived on, right?
So I don't... But there was, yeah, that was social credit without a authorizing party.
Party.
Right, right.
But we have to be very careful.
Anytime you've got two things that are close neighbors, right?
An authoritarian state with a social credit system used to allocate well-being, right?
Versus, you know, a human cognitive system for tracking reliability, decency, generativeness, you know?
That guy never helps any of us raise barns.
Right.
But he does ask when he needs help.
Right.
Maybe we should not be so eager to help him until he starts helping us.
Right, exactly.
Totally normal and not something you can't scale up because you can't monitor everybody's reputation in a giant civilization.
So it's something that needs something, but it doesn't need the CCP.
Well, I mean, I think, yeah, so social credit in a landscape that has been largely commodified doesn't work, right?
So because while barn raising is kind of equivalent between farms, presumably, in some landscapes, it's still not exactly a commodity.
Because exactly what did you do?
Did you show up at the same time that everyone else showed up and really work hard all day and, you know, get the thing done?
Or did you participate by showing up after lunch and hanging out and mostly talking and then wander away after a couple of hours?
It's not a commodity, and the way that social credit would now be observed and assessed would be inherently a commodification.
Okay, do you want to talk about Deep State or do you want to save that?
I think I should save it.
It needs to be fully explored and I don't want to give it short shrift, but I will just ask people to think about what their association with that term is.
I've come in talking to many people about it to realize that there's a defect in our collective thinking over the Deep State and we will engage it next live stream.
Well, I think we're also going to hold off on talking about the influence of China on British academics and academia.
There is some I'll just say that The Telegraph published a piece this week that is fascinating and maybe begins to make some sense of how bad some academics involved in talking about COVID were and behaved and continue to behave during the pandemic.
Uh so let us save that as well for next time a week from now and is there anything else that uh you want to talk about?
Nope I think that's about it.
All right well then uh let us let us oh did you know that there were saber-tooth anchovies?
You know, I was not going to talk about this today so I don't have a lot of detail here, but this is something, actually research from May of 2020.
So this did not just come out.
And there are no longer saber-tooth anchovies.
There were saber-tooth anchovies.
There were saber-tooth anchovies in the wake of the K-T boundary, so the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago.
Probably the mass extinction that was largely caused by Chicxulub, the big rock that hit the planet around the Yucatan Peninsula, although there was also some stuff going on over in India with the Deccan Traps.
There was a lot of stuff going on then.
Massive extinctions.
As things began to settle and there were all these niches open, a lot of clades produced forms that those clades had not seen before.
Among them, In the anchovy clade.
We're saber-toothed anchovies.
Saber-toothed anchovies.
Unfortunately, I have a little this so this is published in the Royal Society It's not a graphic so much but then science Has a little scientific illustration here.
So this is just the science news reporting on the Royal Society paper and it's this is weird because they say you know these saber-toothed anchovies, which is what's being eaten here and We're actually probably Predators, so it's showing, this is not a great graphic, it's just why I kind of wasn't going to show it, but yeah, the saber-tooth, one, a single, single saber-tooth.
One saber-tooth?
Apparently, yeah.
No.
Oh my goodness, that is a strange beast.
A single saber-tooth on the upper jaw.
A single saber-tooth on the upper jaw.
Out of Pakistan.
Why?
I think, yeah, they pierced with that and they got all those fancy teeth on the bottom that they used to chop, chop, chop.
You know, I wasn't there.
Yeah.
And I have not, I did not make, I thought we were going to talk about some other stuff.
I did not fully prepare this for today.
But yeah, I will post it to the Rail Society paper.
Yeah, again, published in May of 2020.
I will just point out that the Oh, most remarkable is that this is from the abstract of the paper, sorry, published in the Royal Society in 2020.
Most remarkable is the presence of a single massive vomerine fang offset from the midline in both.
So vomerine, that's the vomer bone.
So it's not quite on the midline, interestingly.
Not quite.
Yeah, I was wondering how it was going to form.
I was just going to say that the saber-tooth anchovy is the stuff of pizza nightmares.
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in fact, I think, as it turns out, I tweeted about this back in 2020, and someone came back at me with that, and I basically said that.
You knew that there had been saber-toothed anchovies in 2020, and now you're telling me?
I know, I forgot.
You forgot?
Honestly, I don't know how I ended up with this open on my computer.
I was like, saber-toothed anchovies, really?
And I went back and was like, wait, I I talked about this a little bit online.
Here's the thing.
Since 2020, undoubtedly we have spoken about anchovies probably at least three times.
Probably not.
In fact, this may in fact be the first time that you and I have ever spoken about anchovies.
We were locked down together for months.
We must have talked about anchovies a few times.
Anchovies.
Yeah, not a lot.
There was not a high level of traffic on that topic over that period.
I don't think so.
I mean, if we're going to talk about pizza toppings, I think it's more likely to be pepperoni, pineapple even.
Your defense is that we never spoke of anchovies and that's why you didn't mention the Sabertooth variety.
I would think, yeah.
I think that's my defense.
It's going to be very hard for me to prove that's not true at this point, but I doubt it.
I think we spoke of anchovies and you held this back.
Really?
For this moment?
I don't know, for what?
Who knows?
You can't read my mind.
No.
OK, well, good.
Sabertooth anchovies off the list of things we have to mention.
But it did it did put me in mind of so like why why is that funny?
Right.
Like why is Sabertooth anchovies?
And aside from the fact that it's actually a very strange like single off the midline on the vomer bone.
But like, saber-tooth anchovies sounds ridiculous because we have an idea of what that clay does.
And even if you don't think phylogenetically, you don't think like an evolutionary biologist, you still have an idea of like, no, anchovies aren't like that.
Right?
So in that vein, they're also vegetarian piranha.
Vegetarian piranha.
Right?
So we had a friend in grad school whose research was on the clade of fishes in the Amazon that are piranhas, but there's like a subclade within piranhas that are strict vegetarians, which is also surprising.
They themselves are strict vegetarians.
As opposed to?
I thought they ate vegetarians.
They do not those ones.
The non-vegetarian piranhas may specialize on eating vegetarians, although I doubt that.
- Yes, you have to eat more than one 'cause they're not very satisfying.
No, look, the reason it's funny, the reason it's funny Which, saber-tooth anchovies or vegetarian piranhas?
So, saber-tooth anchovy is Correct.
The phrase is correctly structured to be funny.
Yes.
Because saber-tooth conjures something quite frightening.
Yes.
And anchovy conjures the opposite.
And so it creates that little whiplash we call funny.
Yeah.
But I mean, I think vegetarian piranha does the same thing.
Yeah, but it's sort of a, you know, rapidly scale up in the vegetarian piranha case and scale down rapidly in the... I'm not sure I understand what the scale is there, but How dangerous?
How important?
How high a priority is that you think about this?
Starting with the dangerous part.
Yes.
Sabertooth what?
Oh, that's just funny.
I see.
So it can be humorous if you realize that the threat isn't what you thought it was.
Oh my God, there's a sabertooth anchovy!
Whereas it might be dangerous or just confusing if you're like, oh, it's a vegetarian.
What?
Piranha?
Oh, but it's a vegetarian.
Wait, what again?
Yeah.
How strict does this vegetarian piranha adhere to its vegetarian diet?
Is it one of these piranhas that also eats chicken, for instance?
Was it one they or many they?
Okay, maybe now we're done.
Yes, we have arrived.
Next week we'll be back in a week with not just our live stream but also a Q&A afterwards and you can find us more places as well.
Will there be a guest episode between now and then being released?
Yeah.
Okay, so I think there'll be a guest episode coming out probably on Saturday.
And please check out Natural Selections where I write most weeks.
This week I wrote a little avian allegory about gulls and eagles and the extent to which the gulls will act to protect their young from bald eagles.
Something that we should all be willing to do for our children.
You can go to darkhorsestore.org which is where you will find the print shop that's based out of The dog is moaning.
I don't know if she maybe she wants some merchandise.
You want like a Pfizer where the breakthroughs never stop shirt?
Or no, the dog does not wear stuff.
She's looking at me like, could you please be quiet and let me outside now?
Sigh up until proven otherwise.
We've got all at darkhorsestore.org.
We got the book.
Do we still have Tour de France?
I think.
Because the Tour de France is happening.
Yeah.
We're going to look it up quickly and see if it's on there.
You may want to check shirts that say Tour de France.
It's like bike racing on steroids.
So Zach, hi friend.
Zach is going to see if that is still available.
Well, I remind everyone that we are now on Locals.
That's where the Watch Party has been happening.
Please join us there.
We still have our Patreons open and we'll be doing the private Q&A one last time this month at my Patreon.
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