In this 187th 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 why we are sitting outside: Covid does not transmit outside, and this has been clear for well over three years now. Then we discuss story and storytelling, paths diverging in a wood, and the need for all stories within one universe to reconcile. We discuss narrative, gender ideology, male an...
Well, I was told it was 187, but I thought it was 188.
That's how I got confused.
You will all note that we are outside today.
We will explain why we are outside very shortly.
Let us get through the business of the beginning of the podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And we are broadcasting today on Rumble.
If you want to join the watch party, you will find it on Locals.
Please join us on Locals.
We really appreciate it.
It helps us out a lot.
And there, on Locals, you will find a lot of great stuff, including the watch parties during the live streams.
We are releasing all of the guest episodes that Brett hosts, having conversations with an amazing array of people one day early on our Locals channel before they're released publicly to the rest of the world.
And we are also, beginning this month, doing our private Q&As we've been doing at my Patreon.
Since, gosh, summer, early summer of 2020, we're moving that to Locals as well.
So lots of reasons to join us at Locals.
Please do that.
We appreciate it.
Helps us out a lot.
Also, please consider subscribing to the channel on Rumble.
That costs not a bit, but it does help us out as well.
I'll say one other thing.
I did an Ask Me Anything experiment on locals.
Went very well, with one exception.
They were building in a new video feature that we tried out.
It didn't work so well.
Apparently the kinks are being ironed out of that.
But otherwise, the Q&A was a tremendous amount of fun.
That just sounds so wrong.
What?
Kinks being ironed.
The kinks being, yes, that is, all right.
No, you wouldn't tend to iron them out.
You'd probably go for a little talk therapy or something.
It really depends, actually.
It really depends on what your goal is with the kinks.
Yes, I guess so.
Yeah.
So 187, not prime.
Of course not.
The factors are prime, though, 11 and 17, which is kind of cool.
And isn't there a name for a non-prime whose factors are prime?
Yes.
Excellent.
I'm relieved to hear that.
I don't remember what it is.
I'm sure we will be told.
All right, we're not doing a Q&A this week.
We're going to talk about lots of stuff, like why are we outside?
What is the Cartesian crisis that's going on?
What does Philip Pullman have to say about storytelling?
And what is going on with mammals dispersing alcoholic fruit anyway?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's some of it.
We're going to talk a bit more about other ways that you can find us and find out what we're doing and support us and stuff at the end of the episode, which apparently is behind us.
I don't know.
But first, we do have our sponsors, for whom we are very grateful always.
We have three sponsors for you this week.
Please consider, if any of these products sound like they would be relevant to you or appealing to you, do try them out.
They are all vetted by us or, in the case of our first sponsor this week, by someone whom we trust if the sponsor happens to make a product that is not relevant to us.
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It's going to be like that today.
If you're trying to fill your gas with car, you've got bigger problems.
How much does it cost to fill your car with gas these days?
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Alright, now I'm going to try out this reading thing you're so fond of.
See how I do.
You got this.
What?
I've got this?
You got this.
Wow.
Your confidence is lovely if misplaced.
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It sounds like you're supposed to heat mold your feet.
No, no.
I mean, I wrote that.
I tried that.
That's my bad.
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And I wouldn't heat mold your existing shoes.
Definitely wouldn't heat mold your feet.
Did you go back?
Yeah, I did.
Just trying to support you, man.
I see.
Alright.
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Heather was going to read this ad.
We're going to get to the reasons.
So this is Heather's voice.
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Like, if your feet were fully customizable using an oven, I could have probably avoided that whole surgery thing back in the 80s.
Your feet are customizable, but it takes a very long time.
That's one of the lessons of morphological evolution.
Yeah, but soul gets you there faster.
Exactly.
Yeah, it compensates for the hyper-novelty of the surfaces you're walking on.
Boom!
And the sheer time it takes for evolution to work sometimes.
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Which is faster than you'd think, but not fast enough.
Yeah, but when we're talking about osteology, it takes a while.
When you're talking about going to dinner, it's just not fast enough.
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See, reading is... reading may be fun.
Reading is fun, but it's very difficult.
You don't believe the first part of that.
I am just simply repeating what I have heard from experts.
They used to say this.
There were public service announcements on television.
Riff.
Reading is fun.
Riff?
Yes.
Adults actually thought... See, I paid no attention to the public service advertisements on television.
You know why?
I was reading.
Well, right.
It was a precursor.
They were lying to the children who weren't reading to get them to read, and of course it didn't work.
The children who weren't reading might not have found it fun, and the children who were reading didn't need anyone to tell them that.
It was a perfectly worthless slogan.
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All right.
Nice to be done, man.
You know, let's put it this way.
It's not the first B minus I've ever gotten.
Oh.
Yeah.
Well, I was thinking while you were reading, too, about one of the other advantages of sleep for those of you who didn't respond to that, what was it, RIF?
RIF, yes.
Yeah, the RIF PSA, the Reading is Fun PSA, is that while you're asleep, you don't have to read.
Right.
Although, if you are dyslexic, you may find yourself having nightmares about reading.
I recall more than a few of those.
Good Lord.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Well, it's traumatic, especially when people ask you to do it publicly, like was done in school, in order to find the dyslexics.
And shame them.
And shame them.
Yes, exactly.
That does seem to have been what the purpose was.
It felt very much like the purpose.
Yeah.
I'd say I, having been successful at public reading, but I never particularly understood the value of it, especially for those who clearly were traumatized by it.
Right.
And yeah, I wasn't the only one.
There was a couple of us in every class.
And we saw this later when we were professors, right?
Presumably, you never asked people to do that, nor did I. Nor was it ever my idea to, but I sometimes had teaching partners who really wanted us to try doing this.
The fact that I would let anyone who wanted to opt out of such things actually made one of my students cry later.
He was so grateful.
It had just driven his...
I think this is a stupid way to say it, but he's driven his blood pressure through the roof.
Yeah.
He'd just gotten so, so anxious.
Yeah, it's a common form of trauma for children, which some carry into adulthood.
Yeah.
Anyway.
All right.
Here we are.
Here we are, outside.
Why are we outside?
All right.
Here's why we are outside.
Heather, that's you, Dr. Heine, also Dr. Heine, same person, has come down with a respiratory ailment that we strongly suspect is at least what is being called the current variant of COVID.
Well done, yes.
Thank you.
And let's just update people on where we are with COVID.
You tell me if this doesn't match your sense of things.
But our sense is COVID is very definitely not a highly deadly disease and people were spooked into all sorts of dumb behavior.
With the false impression and in fact the cultivation of the impression that it was deadly including by treating people in ways that made them more likely to die and then counting those deaths as COVID deaths rather than a atrogenic deaths.
Right.
But that said, COVID is not a nothing from our perspective.
We've had it.
We've had it a couple of times.
I don't know how many times because the tests are unreliable, but we've each had it a couple times at least.
And the negative effects are both substantial during the disease.
And I don't know if you can hear, you probably hear that one.
Airplane going over.
The effects are substantial during the disease, and everything that I know from my work on telomeres tells me that the damage is not just occurring and then over when you get better.
Not only are there holdover effects from COVID, but there is also the long-term degradation of your capacity to repair whatever tissues are under attack.
Yeah, so when you say, not as deadly a disease by a lot as we were led to believe, you are also implying, but it's not in that statement, something that you said very clearly somewhat early in our live streams, which is that just because a thing doesn't kill you doesn't mean that it doesn't bring death closer.
Right, and in fact, almost every disease, even presumably something like a cold, does this so trivially that it's negligible in its impact.
But the point, and you know, if you have a bunch of damaging diseases and then you die because you don't look both ways and you get hit by a bus, obviously it didn't hasten your death.
On average, you die from the failure of whatever organ is essential and collapses first, or you die of a cancer.
That's basically the two general ways to die naturally.
And in the case that you die from organ failure, each organ has a capacity to repair damage and do maintenance, and that capacity is finite, and anything that does damage reduces, it borrows from that account.
And so, you know, if you do a lot of damage to, let's say you do a lot of damage to your kidneys early in life, and then you wise up and you stop doing damage, you know, you can compensate a bit.
You can't buy back anything you lost, but what you can do is you can reduce the rate of damage to below average, and you can sort of catch up.
But all of that's there.
You can do that better in tissues that actually have some repair capacity, and not in, for instance, the heart, as we have talked about, a lot.
Right.
Even though your behavior should be the same.
Right.
You can't recover that capacity by, well, I guess you could reduce the rate of damage of your heart by being super vigilant of new damage to your heart.
But yeah, the heart doesn't repair in a classical sense.
It scars over, which is still much better than having an open wound in your heart, which is a lethal vulnerability.
Anyway, this is a bit of a digression.
We treat COVID seriously, even though we don't fear that we're not going to get through a case of COVID.
We just don't want to hasten our demise or decrepitude or anything like that by allowing extra damage.
So anyway, when one or the other of us has this, and you know, we do this for other ailments too.
We might not do it for a cold, but for any significant other Uh, disease, we tend to isolate.
And in this case, um, we needed to do a live stream.
And as there was, I want people to think back to early in our live streams, we spent a lot of time pointing out that the advice, the directives that we were being given, the policy changes that we were witnessing made no sense.
The bulldozing of sand into ski parks.
Right.
The stopping people from running on beaches and from surfing.
The closing of parks.
This was some of the earliest, most obviously completely wrong-headed COVID policy that was, frankly, part of what opened the door and opened many people's eyes to, well, if they're that wrong about those things, what else are they Yeah, and let's just put it to you this way.
Wrong isn't pointlessly wrong.
The fact is, to the extent that there was some disease that we were trying to not catch, go outside was like killer advice.
Go outside, right?
Oh, your life is being disrupted.
You're facing psychological torment.
Go meet your friends outside.
Too cold and rainy?
Figure out how to do it.
Right, so in any case, we are outside today because although you haven't had it very long, we treated too early of course.
I went on prophylactic treatment.
Now you and I were in close contact as you were beginning to come down with it and so it's possible that I got it and I will Manifest symptoms it's also possible I got away with it or it's possible because I went on what we think is prophylactic treatment that my symptoms will be so mild I won't even notice it but in any case I thought it would be interesting in light of the fact that we are broadcasting from outside solving a problem which is how do we do our job
While you may have a still active and contagious infection, well, okay, this isn't perfect.
The lighting's not great.
It's a little hot.
There are airplane noises.
It's very nice to see you.
It's great to sit next to you.
The last time we saw each other, when we had to curtail a short trip that you had planned for us, was on our 25th wedding anniversary.
Yep, 25th wedding anniversary, and it was a delightful trip, and I really wish it hadn't been cut short.
But anyway, that is the reason that there was nothing to be done, so I was exposed to it.
But anyway, I wanted to read this.
I thought it would be particularly salient.
I interrupted you before you got to explain what it is.
This, you will all recognize, is our book, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
And this book contains an afterword, which I am now going to read.
What?
This is not how you treat books.
It's not how you treat books.
OK, well, after the live stream, we will have a short tutorial on how we treat books.
No, no, no, we won't.
OK.
All right.
This is the Afterword to Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
And I will do my attempt to read it.
In January of 2020, we went to the Tipitini Biodiversity Station in the Ecuadorian Amazon to finish our first draft of this book.
When we emerged from our isolation, as our phones came alive for the first time in two weeks, we were confronted with a barrage of news, mostly trivial, of which we had been blissfully unaware.
But in that onslaught, there was one ominous report.
A case of a novel coronavirus in Ecuador.
The pathogen came from horseshoe bats, had jumped to people, and then spread rapidly, first in Wuhan, China, and then beyond.
As the two of us tried to make sense of these first hints of a pandemic, it quickly became clear that there might be more to the story.
Wuhan, we soon learned, housed a BSL-4 laboratory.
It was, in fact, one of our planet's two main centers for the research on bat-borne coronaviruses.
These viruses were being studied in Wuhan and in North Carolina because of fear among scientists that such viruses could jump to people and, without very much evolutionary change, cause a dangerous pandemic.
If nothing else, the fact of the pandemic having begun in one of two cities where these viruses had been under intensive study seemed a particular coincidence.
As of the writing of this note in late May 2021, the consensus in the scientific establishment, including national and international regulators and the mainstream press that follows them, has finally shifted to one of grudging acceptance of the obvious, that SARS-CoV-2 may well have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the COVID-19 pandemic might therefore be for humanity an entirely self-inflicted wound.
The strength of this hypothesis is something we have been discussing on our podcast, Dark Horse, since April of 2020.
Those discussions caused a great deal of derision and stigma to be directed at us, and it is a bewildering relief to watch the world suddenly come around to the plausibility of this well-supported, if unfortunate, explanation.
But no matter what humanity ultimately concludes about the pandemic's origin, there is a deeper truth hovering just outside our collective awareness.
COVID-19 is a product of technology, no matter what path it took to humans.
Consider this fact.
From the beginning of the pandemic, the virus showed essentially zero capacity to transmit outside.
Put another way, COVID-19 is a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains, and airplanes.
More than 99% of the Earth's surface is a COVID-safe zone.
Even in your own backyard, the virus will struggle mightily to infect anyone.
It has no meaningful impact unless you caught it before you walked out.
In the park, on the balcony, at the beach, we are, at least for now, immune.
The dependence of the virus on enclosed spaces also means that had humanity agreed to avoid vectoring environments for a few weeks, the pandemic could have been quickly brought to a halt.
But this scenario, in which we free ourselves and lock down dangerous environments instead, is little more than an idle thought experiment.
Even though, in evolutionary terms, these dangerous environments are all brand new to humans, the idea of humanity staying outside them, even for just a few weeks, is unthinkable.
Many individuals could do it, but a majority would be at a total loss even though we evolved outside and despite the fact that most of our ancestors would have spent every hour of their lives in what we now strangely call the outdoors.
We have forgotten the skills we once knew so well.
That knowledge of and comfort with our natural environment has been replaced with a different skill set, one tuned to pursuing value and avoiding harm in a synthetic environment of our own device.
Our cognitive software has been rewritten and we have forgotten too much to ever again be what we were.
The result, we are condemned to battle this pathogen in bespoke environments in which we and it have both grown to depend.
That's the view from the ground, but the human dimension of this pandemic is even clearer from 30,000 feet, or more accurately, at 30,000 feet.
For it is, excuse me, I am now reading in the shade here.
For it is the way we have begun to travel that really sets us up for the pandemic disaster.
SARS-CoV-2 crossed oceans in hours, and it didn't pioneer some ingenious new mode, where once an epidemic might have been held back by barriers that limit human travel, humans now regularly transmit communicable diseases from their continents of origin to every corner of the globe.
Much as people thought little about washing their hands prior to the germ theory of disease, we give no thought to the scale of misery caused by a given person transporting a new and nameless cold virus to some continent that was free of it the day before.
Novel coronavirus took advantage of that nonchalance before the pathogen even had a proper name.
The COVID-19 pandemic is itself a symptom of another disease entirely.
The pages of this book, we call that disease hyper-novelty.
It is caused by a rate of technological change so rapid that transitions in our environment outstrip our capacity to adapt.
You will not find the COVID-19 pandemic specifically dissected here, but you will find a full exploration of the hyper-novelty crisis that left us vulnerable to this virus.
A virus so weak that it could have been cured with a bit of well-coordinated fresh air.
So I thought that revisit was worthwhile in light of the fact that we are still all dealing with the consequences of this.
The people who have decided it's no big deal that the world is over COVID and they're just not going to think about it.
They're not going to do anything special.
And the people who still treat it seriously, as you and I do, and the people who still panic over it and are wearing their masks outside as they walk around.
We still see these people occasionally.
The answer is there's actually a loophole with this disease.
The fact that it doesn't transmit outside was a loophole and a properly run planet.
A planet in which experts weren't just simply idiots who held a high position.
Would have told us, here is how you go about not disrupting your life.
Try to figure out how to do as much as possible outside and we can retain as much normalcy as we can arrange.
But they didn't tell us that.
No, they told us exactly the opposite.
Yes, they told us go inside, go home.
Go home, get the people you love sick, if you're sick, and don't come back and see us until it's close to too late, at which point we'll inflict our worst harms on you.
Yeah, we'll put you on a ventilator and give you remdesivir.
I don't know when that started.
That was a little later, but, you know, since replaced with Ex Lobid.
But none of the solutions, so-called, have been actually solutions.
And that, of course, as we have said over and over and over again, raises questions about why.
To what degree can we imagine that they were actually intended as solutions in the first place?
But here we are in a summer where for a lot of people it's been too hot, it's been too smoky, there have been too many fires to go outside much, that being usually the season when people go out and Re-up their vitamin D and such.
Still, you should be trying.
And, you know, everyone's in a different locale, but your particular situation, personal, social, social-emotional, should not be the one driving whether or not you should be going outside.
If there are reasons that you can't be outside because of fires, because of storms, whatever, that's something different.
But really, The more time you spend outside, the more time you spend moving your body, being active, getting every part of you moving, the healthier you're going to be.
Absolutely.
All right.
I think we've covered the outside COVID loophole and the reason that we are broadcasting from outside, which is both nice and a little hot, I admit.
It's a little hot on our backs.
Yeah, we're backlit-ish, top lit.
We're totally lit.
Yeah.
Which would you like to do next?
Would you like me to talk a little bit about stories and storytelling in tropical forests?
Sure.
Or that's where you want to go?
Yep.
All right.
So let's see.
I've been reading A book, as may not come as any surprise to those who've been listening so far.
It's this book.
It is by Philip Pullman, called Demon Voices on Stories and Storytelling.
Philip Pullman is the author of the trilogy His Dark Materials, which I forgot to look up the names of those three books.
Shouldn't they be listed here?
Oh, well.
It's the so-called fantasy, although he objects to that term, trilogy that follows the development and wisdom enhancement as she grows of Lyra, a young girl who is in a world with demons, where you have basically a familiar as a child that changes
form as you're a child and then at some point cements in place as a particular form.
And so that explains the title of this book.
So anyway, this is a book about writing, about story.
And it's a series of essays that Pullman has given places and quite compelling in many regards.
And I wanted to share a section from an essay that he gave us a talk called The Path Through the Wood.
And this was a talk that he gave in, I'm sure I can find it, I'm not as prepared as I might be, in 1999 at the FinCon Science Fiction Convention at the University of Turku in August 1999.
So he says, Some of you might know that Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken, which I think was used as the title of a book not long ago.
He talks, Frost talks, about coming to a fork in the road through a wood and having to choose which way to go.
And the poem ends, two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
This incidentally was also kind of the adopted tagline of the school where we met.
And it's fantastic.
Yes, the adopted tagline and the reason that the school is named as it is.
Yes, indeed.
So, again, two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
So, this is Pullman again.
Here we have two ideas.
The wood and the path.
The wood, or the forest if you like, is a wild space.
It's an unstructured space.
It's a space full of possibilities.
It's a space where anything can happen.
There are monsters in the wood.
There are lifeforms unlike any others.
There are quarks and neutrinos and virtual particles.
It's full of charm and strangeness.
It's non-linear.
It just grew.
The path, on the other hand, is a structure.
And it has a function.
It leads from here to there, or from A to B. It's extremely linear.
Even when it doubles back and crosses itself, it does so with an air of purpose.
It says, I know where I'm going, even if you don't.
It was made.
I expect you can see where this is going.
Each novel or story is a path, because it's linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end.
That goes through a wood.
The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being.
It's the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them.
It's the notional space where their histories exist and where their future lives are going to continue after the story reaches the last page.
Parenthetical.
This is the point, from Pullman.
This is the point where practitioners of literary theory will throw up their hands in disgust.
Characters don't have histories.
They would say the only life they have is that in the words on the page.
They are not real people.
They are only literary constructions.
To mistake the characters in a novel for characters in real life is to make a fundamental category error.
It's naive to the point of stupidity, etc., etc.
To these ladies and gentlemen of theory, I say, thank you very much.
Now go away until you can tell me something useful.
End of parenthetical from Pullman.
So the wood or the forest is the sum of all possibilities.
And he goes on and on and on.
I'll stop there with the reading for now.
Excuse me.
And so he talks, for instance, about Cinderella.
And the story of Cinderella apparently exists in many traditions throughout the world, which tells us, if those are truly independent origins of that story, that there is something universal there.
There is something that truly speaks to humanity and is not particular to a particular time or place.
I think that's true even if it isn't independent origins.
If it persists.
If it spreads to multiple cultures, that means it's resonating.
It's resonating.
It may not have been critical enough to have originated there, but yeah.
Convergence versus, you know, is the origin due to the common ancestor or to convergence?
Either way, if it's persistent, it tells us something about the importance to humans, to humanity.
But there are things in the story of Cinderella, with which we are all familiar, that aren't in the story, in the path, as it were, but are clearly in the wood, that are clearly in the universe that is Cinderella.
Which is to say, for instance, you know something about how the house is heated, in which she is put to work effectively as a scullery maid, because she ends up with coal dust all over herself.
And therefore, you know that they don't have central air.
Not that they would, coming from when the story originally does.
But to this point, Pullman says, you know, he wrote a story from the Cinderella wood, from the world that is brought to us through the path that is the story that is Cinderella, but about one of the other characters in it, about one of the rats that was turned into a I don't remember what.
One of the people opening the carriage that was a pumpkin in an earlier life for Cinderella.
And, of course, there is a famous version of this in the form of Hamlet, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
So Hamlet's too.
Fairly insignificant characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Tom Stoppard, brilliant playwright, pulls up out of obscurity and turns into the lead characters in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
So he's borrowing from the Hamlet wood, as it were, the world, but the wood, and creating a different path through it.
I think the Stoppard example is interesting because in some ways Stoppard is, he's sort of going beyond what Pullman is saying.
Because yes, every properly constructed world in which a story takes place, all of the other features ought to be explorable.
Nothing ought to not add up.
But what Stoppard is in some ways saying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is that I, Stoppard, can even do this with two characters who are, it's a rare case in Shakespeare's situation where they're pure plot device.
Yeah.
They're not real characters.
They were necessary to the story.
And so they were just kind of invented up for that purpose.
And Stoppard takes them and he's like, well, what if they did have depth and a story?
And, you know, it's obviously a marvelous piece of work.
But anyway, it's the fact that inevitably a story, no matter how short,
Suggests a world or a set of worlds in which it would it would be necessary for those worlds to exist in order for the story to happen and that There's no reason not to explore other trajectories through those those habitats is a great idea exactly and this is you know, and here we get into questions of cognitive dissonance versus reading something where your brain is constantly throwing errors where the story is
is inconsistent with the path that you are reading, is inconsistent with the wood in which it exists, and you've been told enough about the wood that the path keeps breaking its own rules.
Whereas being asked to believe, for instance, in a world in which there are humans like Lyra who have demons, who have associates, who have Who have affiliate animals who are born with them and change shape until they become adults and then are fixed in terms of their organismal form and they die with them.
It doesn't take that much to leap to that.
We are never under any impression that that is actually what is true.
And this, of course, is one of the problems with modern understanding of, for instance, gender ideology, right?
That you can read something in what is patently an untrue situation and get something out of it, get something metaphorical out of it.
But it is a mistake to leap to, therefore that thing is literally true.
Therefore I, a human woman, can change into being a human man.
Therefore I, Who adore my cat so much, have him as my demon, and could not live if he went outside of a sphere of some number of feet.
Both of those things are not true, but they come from worlds that are compelling and metaphorically instructive, but literally not true.
So there's, as you know, something very deep in your point about the connection between something like the new gender ideology slash nonsense and violation of proper if unstated rules of narrative.
Right.
And I would just put it this way.
You and I have each made the point that there is nothing wrong, even for those of us who are scientific materialists, there's nothing wrong with a story that uses magical realism as long as it is self-consistent.
As long as it is not asking you to continue to adjust your level of what you will believe.
Right.
You ask once.
This is a world in which there are spells.
It is not that you just say the words and they happen, but you have to learn to cast them, for example.
This is a world in which to get between worlds, you have a knife and you can cut holes into different worlds.
And wow, can that happen?
No, that cannot happen.
But in this world, it can.
You need the subtle knife.
This spacecraft has a single violation of physics in the sense that the outside does not constrain the inside.
Bigger on the inside.
Yeah.
So there's nothing wrong with these things.
And even for us scientific materialists, they're fine.
The problem is when you keep throwing new levels of even wilder exceptions, then the point is, well, no, you already told me how magical this realm is.
And now you're just being, you're being sloppy.
You're not even sticking to the rule that you told me you wanted me to accept.
So anyway, that's sloppy and not very interesting and it's not the stuff of great writing.
But the problem is when this happens, when an author has told you how magical the realm is and then they up the ante by 50% and it's like, that's annoying.
They are violating the rule of the universe they sold you.
Yes.
When gender activists try to sell us on the idea that a man who says he's a woman simply is a woman, and we say, okay, from the point of view of how this person should be treated, yes, up until the point where that becomes a problem for the universe I know I live in, and their point is, nope, that universe just changed.
This is a transubstantiation that actually changes what a person was such that Chelsea Manning is the person who gave the documents to Julian Assange.
It wasn't Bradley Manning, it was Chelsea Manning because she was Chelsea Manning the whole time and the fiction was Bradley Manning.
No.
You just told me I live in a universe I don't live in, and you're insisting that I accept it.
And that same annoyance of, we can talk about how to treat each other.
Sure.
We can do that as adults who recognize that there are tensions between competing claims on rights.
We cannot pretend that there is a truth so sacred.
It was born five minutes ago, and it's so sacred that anything about the actual universe that it violates now has to change.
That is upside down, backwards, and offensive.
And it is the reason that we are now in the pickle, where people like you and me, who are interested in a world where everybody is as free as possible to be whoever they are best at being, bridle at the very suggestion of these things because of the retconning of the universe that we know we actually live in, of the universe that you and I professionally studied and understand something about.
We're being told we have to change what we know about the universe in order to be kind to people.
And the people who are telling us that aren't being kind in the slightest.
I think it plays on some sort of nascent, latent, in some cases explicit, good-hearted, frankly, libertarian instincts that most people have in a sort of a mid-20th century and later world in which libertarian instincts that most people have in a sort of a mid-20th century and later world in which many of the winds of liberals have been
Where you can know for sure that as another human being, you share a certain number of experiences and ways of understanding the world, but you cannot ever fully understand what it is to be in someone else's head.
This is a large part of what we do as humans.
We engage in theory of mind, and those of us who don't try to are dangerous, frankly.
Are dangerous and at best deeply unpleasant to be around.
Anyone who is not actually trying to figure out what the experience of other human beings is, is unpleasant at best and dangerous often to be around.
But one of the things that I think the vast majority of us came to understand, you know, for us this was all happening sort of before we were born and as we were growing up, but is if someone says to you, actually that's not my experience, I had this experience, it is often valuable and interesting and respectful to say, oh, tell me about your experience then.
Right?
That doesn't mean that I don't get to have an opinion about what it might be like to be someone I'm not, but it does mean that I know that I have not had the experience.
So that is true.
You will never be a woman.
You will never be a black man.
You will never be, I don't even know what the correct word is to use now, a small person, Dwarf, I guess, is one version of that, right?
And yet, you have engaged with, both in reality and through narrative stories, as have I, that include such people, and read history, and we can try as much as possible to put ourselves in the position of others.
So then we have the weaponization of this lived experience thing into not only can't you know, but you're not allowed to voice an opinion.
You're not allowed to, if you're an actor or actress, play that kind of person.
You're not allowed to borrow from the experience of, which is of course, it's an anti-human statement, the idea that you're not allowed to borrow, right?
You're not allowed to steal.
But the idea that borrowing is inherently theft is juvenile and it's self-dangerous, right?
So we end up with this gender ideology, which frankly, Some amount of it tricked me.
And I remember, I did not expect that we were going here today, but I remember at some point when I was teaching animal behavior back in the mid-aughts, going to have been 2008 or 2009, and I said something about Sex.
And some students said, don't you mean gender?
I said, it's the same thing.
It doesn't matter.
And I have kind of, you know, we've said a number of things about gender is sexual and gender is the software of sex and gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex and all of this.
And gender is more fluid than sex and sex is binary and gender is bimodal.
And I still think that that's useful because we do have different, there are other organisms that are hermaphroditic, either sequentially or simultaneously.
And that do have, once they change sex, a change in their sex roles as well.
But that's not us.
And that will never be us.
That's not what humans are.
And so there's this simultaneous like borrowing off of the good and sort of libertarianish instincts of people to say, Oh, is that your experience?
Tell me about it.
Or I'm just I'm not going to question it.
If that's your experience, you do you.
And then there's the, oh gosh, I didn't mean to offend.
Okay, I won't say anything about your experience.
And then we jump into this, actually, them to us.
What you think is true about reality is just a sign of your Fill in the ism here.
You know, it's the patriarchy.
It's the misogyny.
It's the TERFism.
It's like whatever it is.
And so we pretty quickly decay into name-calling, which is really the only recourse of those who would deny reality.
And yet somehow, in many circles, they're winning.
And so, you know, let us remember the wood and the path of any particular story.
And when we read fantasy, for instance, that does play around with sex and gender, like, for instance, Octavia Butler does.
She's fantastic.
Her worlds, her woods, her worlds are fantastic.
And she has, I don't remember which book it is, but she has one in which there's a third sex.
That is necessary.
They're humanoid.
They're like human.
It's as if they're human, but there's a third sex that is necessary.
I think, if I remember correctly, they're humanoid.
And you read it and you learn something about how the two sexes in humans could be interacting that maybe we aren't doing.
But you never forget that this is a world that is not ours.
It's a different world.
It's a fictional world.
All right, three points.
One of them is pushback.
I'll try to remember all three.
One, it strikes me that your exercise... I'm trying to remember what the name of the Beatles that you... The Fraternity.
The Fraternity of Beatles.
So Heather used to have an exercise that she would give students.
One of my take-home exam questions.
Yeah, it was one of the more advanced exercises where she switched up some biological facts And then had the students figure out what the world of the creatures in which these facts had been altered would have been like.
In this particular case, yeah, they had to figure out, they were haplodiploid, but the sexes were reversed.
So unlike actual... I'm an octopus, ants, bees, and wasps.
Sorry, I gotta go a little inside baseball here.
It was the males who were diploid and the females who were haploid, and so I asked them to first calculate all the degrees of relatedness between close family members, as we can do for ants, bees, and wasps, and then predict the social system based on those very strange sets of relationships between the fraternid beetles, you know, named with a wink to those who might need a little help figuring out what the relationships might be.
And this is not, this is a very difficult exercise, actually, because you can't just simply say that, well, we're just going to call males females and females males because the maleness and femaleness remains intact.
And that has an unfudgable characteristic.
So anyway, great exercise.
And it strikes me as consistent with the idea of, you know, let's explore Let's create the universe implied by this important fact that it has to be consistent with.
Alright, second point is, we need to have, it doesn't have to be the term gender, but we need to have the idea of the hardware of sex and the software of sex being different, even in humans.
And the reason that we do is because cultures are so different.
This is not an arbitrary fact.
In humans, a huge fraction, more than in any other creature, a huge fraction of the evolutionary information has been offloaded by the genome into the software layer.
That creates some vulnerabilities and it creates a massive opportunity for rapid evolution that can therefore be highly precise to particular environments or particular circumstances.
This is the magic of humans.
And that magic of humans means that sex roles do change.
They are not completely flexible.
Another excellent lesson that you were fond of was the going into the anthropological literature and looking at the patterns that are violated where, you know, sexes arbitrarily do certain jobs, but a lot of jobs are not arbitrarily distributed.
A lot of jobs are not arbitrarily distributed.
We're talking about things like everything from hunting marine mammals, to gathering of vegetal foods, to basket weaving, to carding of wool and making of rope.
And the interesting finding there is that, yes, there are many jobs, especially because you've excluded there the anatomically and physically mandated things of gestation and lactation.
There are a number of jobs, like hunting of marine mammals, that in a culture where it's done, it's done by men.
But there are also a number of jobs, and we talk about this in the Sex and Gender chapter of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, that are highly gendered, but which gender does it varies strongly by culture, which tells you that it doesn't actually matter.
This isn't a manly work.
This isn't a womanly work.
It's just valuable for there to be division of labor.
And that's a huge thing that the whole gender ideology is missing.
It's like, you know what?
Division of labor has been done terribly many, many times, but there is value in division of labor.
And it doesn't need to be done by sex, but that's an obvious way to split us because we're about half and half, and all humans throughout history who have left descendants have been male or female.
Which raises some really interesting questions, and this is another... In addition to a bunch of the evolutionary, the adaptive feature set of human beings being offloaded to software, which creates this flexibility, it also creates a potential to have an adaptive culture set that fits a particular environment, but it also allows a particular culture to change over time.
And so we are in a position, it was for all cultures, that war was the province of men.
It is not inherently true that that should remain the case if you are going to be a fighter pilot.
There might be certain things in which the strength advantages a man has are necessary, but it is much less obvious that a woman cannot be a fighter pilot in combat.
There are excellent, highly capable female pilots who are going to be just as good or better in combat.
Now, It doesn't mean that it makes sense to be in combat.
People will raise the question about what happens if a woman gets shot down.
She has vulnerabilities that a man does not have behind enemy lines.
Is that enough that we should forbid this?
Is there a value to a division of labor that isn't about such concrete issues?
You know, you point out that in places where What sex does a job reverses when you move from one culture to another.
It's still done by one sex.
There are presumably adaptive reasons for that.
Single-sex culture is different from cultural interactions with two sexes.
Right.
And actually, so I think, this is my personal belief, I think that the fact that women have So thoroughly and effectively broken into the highest levels of science is a great triumph of liberalism.
However, there's a question.
Men and women interact differently.
And there's a question about when women were excluded from that environment, unfair as that was to women.
The culture of men, where men by their very nature push each other around, is a scientific modality, or is at least one of the components of a vibrant scientific modality.
That the desire to find what's wrong with what the other person is saying is a core of how that job is done well.
And the idea, one will find much more frequently, that women find an obligation to be supportive Mm-hmm.
And obligation to be supportive in a scientific environment may be exactly counterproductive, and so- No, and I actually, I wrote about this in my, the piece that was published, it was invited for, I think it's the Archives of Sexual Behavior, on the different kinds of competition that men and women engage in, and the different modes.
I decided to talk not just about, not about science so much, but about business.
And finance and said, you know, look, it may be that a female approach can be effective here.
But if a female approach is more likely to be cryptic and not direct, and as part of being cryptic, not public, it's going to take at best longer to get things done.
And it's also likely to lead to more confusion And make those people who are looking for direct instruction direct, like, did I do it right or did I not?
Do you think that that was well done or did you not?
Leave them bewildered and not sure how to go about things.
And, you know, there are places where spending time meandering and thinking through all the possibilities and not getting to the point where we make a decision and get something done is useful.
But we have to recognize that these are different styles which are, broadly speaking, stereotypically sexed, and that in a world where what you need to do is make a decision and do it and then not look back,
That is much more of a male kind of approach and something like war or any kind of combative interaction, as some business interactions will be, is much more suited to a male typical style of engagement.
Yes.
And in the case of the lab situation, There is, I'm sure you'll agree, and I speak professionally here, the correct thing to do that recovers the maximal gains available is not to exclude women from that environment, but to expect the male mode to be learned in the same way that we expect
That everybody in a scientific environment should understand the scientific method and therefore be able to figure out when they are in violation of it, right?
When they're projecting a hypothesis back on a data set that they didn't have before they collected that data.
We expect people not to do that.
And so anyway, the point is, I would want to know exactly what is meant by the male mode.
I'm less compelled that in science, precisely, that male versus female modes, which we would have to define very precisely, are inherently better.
Not saying, not being direct about a critique of an idea is a problem.
And so if that is what you are putting under female mode here, which certainly could belong there, I would say yes, that's not appropriate.
Actually, when you think you have something, when you have something to say or a critique of something that has been said, you know, Be respectful.
I was about to say be kind, but that word has been weaponized.
Be respectful, but also be as direct as you can be.
And it is harder for women to do it.
It's not just about conditioning.
Yeah, but this is what I'm saying, is the instinct to... Yeah, but.
What but there?
This is a reflection of a male mode that functioned in a laboratory context that is inherent to the scientific exercise.
the instinct to falsify, for me to find flaws in what the person who is speaking is saying and to point them out publicly, that mode is fundamentally that mode is fundamentally scientific, and it is natively male.
And just as you would not... So I object to that final piece of this, but I think we're well in the weeds here.
I don't think we're in the weeds.
Who is female, in an environment where the battle is technological, and therefore female is not a disadvantage, is expected to take on a combative, a killer instinct, rather than a peacemaking modality.
A peacemaking modality is counterproductive on the battlefield.
Sure.
So, my point is this is, it doesn't matter... But science isn't combat.
No, it's not combat, but it is...
Antagonistic.
I don't think so.
And I do think this is just ultimately a semantic discrepancy in which, you know, I would ask that you go back and look carefully at what I have described as male-typical and female-typical kinds of competition.
And without having those definitions on the table in front of us, we're just going to be going back.
No, no.
I remember what you wrote and the undermining is not scientifically helpful.
It does not do the job of being antagonistic.
It's not that there's not an antagonistic mode in the female typical, but you describe it as cryptic.
And my point is that within a lab group, let's say, Right, so undermining is like combative, right?
Like that's the toxic version of the two, right?
So overt versus covert, right?
Public versus cryptic.
If we are keeping the models, the male model of competition is what I'm talking about, and you're sort of extending it into all interactions.
More public, more direct, more overt, and female models being more cryptic, more covert.
When in front of someone, I think, in order to determine whether or not what they've got is actually as good as it seems, a more direct, a more public response is warranted.
However, There is a lot that is done through thinking and through giving written response, for instance.
And so just as a female typical model is more likely to be comfortable with the written word, that having, you know, what I used to do for my students and what I used to do in grad school as well was go back and forth a lot in writing, which what I used to do for my students and what I used to do in I was very direct, but there is a time delay and it doesn't require a face-to-face, I think you're wrong and here's why.
And I would do that, but I didn't always have it.
I didn't know it necessarily.
And that doesn't mean that I was hiding behind something female or that femaleness was less good.
There is a different mode that I think is potentially just as appropriate and just as effective, but can manifest in a different way.
I agree.
And in the mentoring context, sure.
But I want to point out how this has played out in recent history.
And I think I think this will make it clear.
The problem with the written critique mode, where critiques are leveled, but it's done in, you know, it's not done overtly in the open.
It is overt, but there's a time delay.
Let's look at what happened with COVID origins.
A debate was had.
We didn't know a debate was had.
Debate was had over email, written critique.
People did hold each other to account.
Power won out.
Power decided what the scenario was going to be.
And the very people who knew exactly the things that made the position unlikely fell into line before it emerged into public.
And it was presented as a consensus.
Okay, so you are responding to a grabbing and a weaponization of what is a mode that can be very effective and many men are excellent at it, but women may be slightly more likely to be excellent at it because of On average, greater female capacity with words compared to, on average, greater male capacity with numbers.
Just lay that out there.
Gets weaponized as a way to obscure, to hide, to lie, to pretend that we had the discussion.
And we didn't have the discussion.
That's entirely clear.
And so you are arguing for an ability to, at the point that it seems like something is being done out of view, and we are being told that it is being done in view, an ability to pull a ripcord and say, now is the time.
Now is the time that we need to go back into an historical mode that is not time-delayed, that is real-time, very direct.
Here we go, let's talk, and you're going to respond to my critiques as we sit here together.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I don't know how to get something like that to implement, and obviously you've had You've had any number of people say, oh, you know, Brett's wrong.
And you say, OK, let's talk.
Oh, God, no, I can't.
I've got to go cut my hair or something, you know.
And, you know, I'm much less likely to say, OK, let's go.
But I'm certain that the response would be the same.
Right.
But yes, look, imagine that all of these things had been done just simply in the open.
And it is the difference between... I'm just like, I'm just objecting to the in the open part.
I know in this case, there was a bunch of stuff that was hidden, but then it pretended that it was in the open.
Well, let's put it this way.
So there is a way to do critique with a time delay that is still actually transparent.
I'm not saying that that has been the case in science for maybe ever.
Okay.
I want to make two points.
We are in a perilous situation.
In a perilous situation, meeting for coffee isn't meeting for coffee.
I don't know what we're talking about yet.
You will, in a sec.
There are people that you might only be willing to meet in a public place because it is protective of something that is an actual danger.
Right.
My point is, scientifically speaking, that's where we are.
I don't want any more fucking private discussions of anything because we have seen that private is the space in which Somebody decided to paint you and me as kooks for saying things that they privately believe.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Wow.
Well, that is so that is so far beyond the pale that I don't want any more of that.
I want public discussions because those public discussions are the place you can't pull that shit.
Right?
So that's an already broken down situation.
But then they'd have lied visibly.
Right.
I mean, they would be all along in the position that they are now in that we have seen their emails.
But what were the chances we were going to see their freaking emails?
So my feeling is, you know what?
If you're going to play this game by your own rules, if you're going to do this as Mean Girls, then we're going to do this in public so that your Mean Girls stuff comes back to haunt you.
Fair enough.
OK.
But I want to point out that the idea of vigorous, public, often instantaneous critique that I'm suggesting is more male in nature doesn't have to mean that we are all out to embarrass each other publicly.
And I want to point out... That shouldn't be the goal.
Right.
It should not be the goal.
Sometimes people need to be embarrassed, but in general it shouldn't be the goal.
In a proper scientific culture, it is exactly the inverse.
And I want to point out that inside of a laboratory, Right.
Inside of a lab, in Dick Alexander's lab, in Arnold Kluge's lab, people held each other to account.
Yes.
It was not considered disrespectful.
It was not understood to be mean.
And in fact, the real proper understanding of it is it makes me stronger for you to throw your best stuff at what I'm presenting and see if what I'm presenting stands up.
I will find out what's wrong with it if you point it out.
If I go out into the world wearing a bunch of gold stars and I don't know how to think, that makes me look stupid, but it also makes the lab I came out of look stupid.
It's bad for everybody.
We all get smarter together if we hold each other to account properly, and we do it respectfully, and it's not mean.
It's mean to let people think that they're doing great when they're not.
That's what is mean.
The height of respect is to deliver proper critique, because you're honing somebody else's weapon.
So anyway, that's all I wanted to get on the table.
I feel like we did a good job.
Yeah.
I feel like that was two things that you had three things to respond to.
Yes.
I know what the third one was.
The third one was this issue of lived experience that has been weaponized.
There is a way, there's one context in which this came up repeatedly before any of this modern stuff.
And so we know something about how it's properly navigated.
It used to be, five, six years ago, 10 years ago, that you and I would encounter people who had a religious perspective on how the stuff of the universe came to its current state.
In some ways, if you look narrowly at those claims, they just simply violate what you and I understand to have taken place.
And so it could be an intersection at which there's no resolution.
But you and I have done very well interacting with people who have such a worldview.
And when they present, hey, I actually spoke to God.
I had an interaction and I wasn't expecting to, but God spoke to me and I spoke back and etc, etc.
You don't hear that as, oh, this person is deranged.
You hear it as, that was the person's lived experience and I know what universe that lived experience can exist in that also is consistent with the one that I've studied and thought deeply about.
And it's one of metaphorical truth.
It is one in which the mind has mechanisms and they may be read this way or the other because adaptation has built us to use metaphor in order to solve problems that we're not in a position to analytically, you know, take to bedrock.
Whereas the new atheist types jump to, you're deranged.
Right, you're deranged.
That is inconsistent with the universe.
No, it's not.
Yeah.
No, the universe in which you exist is one of adaptation in which a person might very well have the experience of having talked to God, even though a literal creature of that nature does not exist.
It does not mean that that belief is not an important one.
A point we've both made many, many times.
But look at how well the people who have those beliefs are doing compared to those of us who don't.
Right.
So all I wanted to get at was there is a way to deal with lived experience that does not pretend that it is nothing and does not elevate it to the status of unimpeachable.
It is a fact of a universe that certainly appears to be material in nature, that appears to abide by laws.
Yes, there are things we cannot explain.
Perhaps there are things we will never explain, but there's no reason to think so.
If there is reason to think so, it's not a certain reason.
So all I'm saying is, like everything else, this isn't as hard as it's being made to be.
It's being made artificially difficult.
And it's being made artificially difficult by people who do not want us to resolve these issues because they are engaged in a cryptic exercise of power.
Well, I thought this was going to be an easy segue, but we kind of went way far away.
A reminder of the end of the Robert Frost poem.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
When I read to you that section from the Pullman book, which began with that bit from the Robert Frost poem, one of your reactions was, It's like, I don't know if you want to say it or you want me to say it?
Sure, I'll say it.
It's like the question of how do you teach somebody to think about a tropical forest?
I preferred what I heard you say the first time, which is it's like being in a tropical forest.
You know, forget teaching.
Forget pretending that we already have the stuff.
But it's like walking into a tropical forest.
It's like walking in the sense.
And discovering not the actual path that you may or may not be on and may lose and all this, but starting to say, oh, oh, there's there's that.
And there's that.
And there's and I don't how do I make sense of this?
And as you know, as we say, actually, in the foreword to the book, Our very first, not our very first trip into the tropics, but our second trip as biologists when we were working there as graduate students with John Vandermeer, one of our professors.
He walked into the rainforest in Costa Rica and said, you know, look at all the questions.
And my response was, I just see a lot of green.
I don't see any questions here at all.
And they started showing up.
They did, they did.
But it took a while because it's so much because the wood in that case is an actual wood.
It's an actual rainforest and it's so complex and it changes so fast from like one foot to the next foot.
And I'm talking about like measures of distance rather than actual feet.
I mean, if you're trying to teach it, you can have a path in mind of what it is you're trying to teach.
But it's all still the wood, and it's so complex.
Right.
Well, the reason I would make the point in the way you like less is...
A, just be aware this conversation takes place in the context that we do not know very much about how tropical forests work.
They are so complex that it is a very difficult puzzle to sort them out.
And so nobody here is pretending that we understand them well enough and that we are teaching the students to understand them well also because that's not the state of play.
The question of how you start.
You walk into a forest and you could start by thinking about it in terms of canopy layers and what creatures live in each of these canopy layers.
You could start thinking about it trophically.
The energy is captured by the plants in the form of sunlight turned into sugars and starches and cellulose by photosynthesis.
There are a lot of ways you could do it by the biomass of different kinds of organisms.
You could do it by phylogenetic systematics.
None of them are correct.
None of them are complete.
None of them are the correct way.
None of them are THE correct way.
If done properly, they are all correct and hopefully self-correcting.
And as we say, I think, a couple times in our book, all true narratives must reconcile.
All true scientific stories must reconcile.
And that's where we come full circle with Robert Frost here.
So the point is actually you have to get comfortable.
If you're dealing with something like a tropical forest, you have to get comfortable with the fact that you are picking a literal path through it, whether that path is analytical or physical, that path is not.
It is a kind of the map is not the territory.
The path is not the sum total of the forest, but anyone will do actually.
Yes, any path will reveal something that is consistent with any other path, if the path is true, within that wood, right?
And the little bit of research that I want to share here is actually I'm reminded, with regard to the wood and the path, of being in Madagascar the first time, where we went after we graduated from college.
We were in Ankarna, in the far north, and it's a strange and magical and strange place.
There's very little surface water.
Mostly, you have to go deep into these caves, and you can walk underground in these caverns into these pockets of forest where the limestone karst has collapsed.
You've got these pockets of forest that are connected to the outside world.
If you're a bird, you can fly in, but if you're a lemur, You're there for life, or you have to go through these caves, and they don't, presumably.
But anyway, I was sitting there in one of the few places where surface water exists on Ankarana, with a little stream, watching crowned lemurs, which are beautiful.
Lemurs being these relatively basal primates that are only in Madagascar.
And I was watching them eat the fruits of tamarind.
And I thought, I don't think tamarind is from here.
And I had no way to know that then, but once we came back, and this was between college and we were going to be starting grad school that fall at Michigan, and I looked into it and went, yeah, tamarind, it's an Indian fruit that was introduced by humans to Madagascar who liked, who were cultivating it.
And so my hypothesis- Because it's super delicious.
It is delicious.
It's weird.
It's also, like Ankara, it's a weird fruit.
It is.
And, you know, you have to have a taste for it, but it's delicious.
And it's very much kind of a mammal fruit where you have, like, it's got this thick husk and you have to work on it with your thumbs.
So it's probably, you know, very good for primates in general.
And then you end up with these big seeds that you have to kind of suck on and chew on for a while to get all the good fruit pulp off.
But I thought, huh, I wonder if my hypothesis became that primates in places that coexist, non-human primates that coexist with humans, will prefer the fruits that are under cultivation or were brought by humans and therefore the native fruits We'll be getting slowly less common in places where there's fruit under cultivation.
That human cultivation effectively, even if it doesn't directly compete against native fruits, will indirectly compete by basically by having the same sensory experiences and preferences as some of the fruit dispersions in the forest.
So fast forward to our first summer in grad school, and I decided that I was going to test that hypothesis in a new world forest, in a rainforest in Costa Rica.
And this is exactly the same forest where John Vandermeer spread his arms wide and said, look at all the questions, and all I saw was green.
And when it came time to spend the several weeks doing the research that we would then be presenting for our preliminary exams in the fall, I couldn't find any monkeys.
No monkeys at all.
There were no monkeys, and I still to this day don't know why there were no monkeys.
But I was out in that forest every day, not all day, but certainly every day from dawn to noon, and then often again in the late afternoon.
There's no point in going out in the hottest part of the day, usually, unless you're doing a particular kind of question.
Never found the monkeys, but spent so much time that I stumbled upon a natural experiment that was happening in front of me, and it was with poison frogs.
And I'm not going to go into that whole story now, but I pivoted because I couldn't exactly test my hypothesis on primates preferring fruits that humans have brought in if I couldn't find the damn monkeys, could I?
But the story that the path that I pivoted to is totally consistent With the hypothesis that is still, so far as I know, not tested, but is still active as a possibility in that forest.
And that actually kind of brings us to this research that I want to say something about.
But you had something you wanted to say?
Well, I just wanted to say that we don't know if the reason you couldn't find the monkeys is because they were at the market because they preferred humans.
That's right.
They were buying up all the mangoes.
I don't think they were buying them.
That doesn't sound like monkeys to me.
No, they were not.
They were stuffing them in their cheeks and other orifices.
All right.
That got weird fast.
They're monkeys.
I mean, what do you expect?
All right.
Fair enough.
I mean, they don't have suitcases, do they?
Backpacks?
I don't know.
That's where my backpack went.
Yes.
Quite possibly.
No.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
Okay, so there's this cool research that came out in The Journal of Royal Society, Proceedings B, which is the biological stuff, it actually came out a little while ago, but not too long ago, called, Seed Dispersal Syndrome Predicts Ethanol Concentration of Fruits in a Tropical Dry Forest.
And to just translate that right off the bat, tropical dry forest here is Guanacaste.
It's a Costa Rican dry forest.
It's not a rainforest like what we were just talking about.
It's a seasonal dry forest, but where there is definite seasonality of when things are fruiting, as there is anywhere, but it's distinct there.
We spent a little bit of time in Guanacaste ourselves.
And what they mean here by seed dispersal syndrome is they are characterizing mammals and birds as the two major groups of classes, clades of organisms that tend to be dispersing fruits, which to say plants have an interest in having their seeds dispersed and fruit is a lure and a gift to those animals who would disperse that fruit.
And of course, some animals cheat, and they eat the fruit and they leave the seed where it is, or they don't do what is expected.
But in general, whereas pollinators are often smaller-bodied organisms, often insects, some bats are pollinators, some bats are dispersers.
But here we're talking about mostly larger-bodied mammals and birds.
I'll read this little bit from the introduction here.
When that stops beeping, perhaps.
This never happens in Guanacaste or the Amazon or Santa Piqui.
Yeah, you may not get COVID, but you will have to endure the backup beep.
Yes.
Two prominent groups of vertebrate seed dispersers, birds and mammals, differ in their typical activity patterns and the sensory systems they rely on to find and consume fruit.
Avian frugivores tend to be highly visually oriented, with tetrachromatic color vision based on four cone types and excellent visual acuity.
They also commonly swallow fruits whole, Fruits with bird dispersal syndromes are correspondingly characterized by small size, absence of a protective husk, and high visual contrast.
Alternatively, frugivorous mammals, including primates, bats, rodents, and ungulates, are typically dichromatic , although monochromacy is found in some nocturnal species, and trichromacy characterizes some primates. and trichromacy characterizes some primates.
Additionally, mammalian frugivores often have sensitive hands and mouths, complex dentition, and large olfactory bulbs and olfactory receptor gene repertoires.
Reflecting these anatomical features, mammalian frugivores rely less on vision and more on olfaction and manual buccal haptic sensation and processing during fruit foraging.
Indeed, fruits with mammal dispersal syndromes are typically duller and less visually conspicuous, but more odoriferous.
They say odiferous.
I always say odoriferous.
I'm going to go with odoriferous even though that's not what they wrote.
And can be covered by thick husk that requires manual or buccal processing to remove.
Okay, so that's a cool setup.
So they're basically going to go in and say, in advance of measuring any fruit for ethanol concentration, we are going to describe the fruits in terms of what they just said and say, is this going to have mammal dispersal syndrome or avian dispersal syndrome, or is it some combination?
It's not perfect because, as they allude to here, primates have actually moved away from the typical mammal mode.
Lemurs less so, but in the new world here, there are no lemurs.
It's all simians.
It's all monkeys and us.
And we've become once again more visual.
Our olfactory lobe has become our forebrain and is the site of processing of memory and future planning.
And we have frontation where our eyes have moved to the front, so we have binocular vision.
And the sizes of our noses have shrunk, so we're more bird-like in this way.
So you might expect primate fruits to have an intermediate kind of dispersal syndrome to bird and mammal fruits because they might be higher contrast and less odoriferous or odiferous if you want.
So if I may have my screen back here for a moment.
Zachary, thank you.
I'm surprised you can hear me.
He's like way over there.
I know.
He's listening to my mic, he says.
So they then, they characterized these fruits as such, and then they went out into the field and they measured the ethanol content in a bunch of them.
And they indeed found basically what you would expect.
So there's some good Yeah, that's too complicated.
I'm not going to show the phylogeny, but I will show this, which is a range of percentage of ethanol concentration, that's percent alcohol by volume, of ripe fruits of species sampled in Guanacaste.
By seed dispersal syndrome, the birds are on the left.
The bird-distributed fruits, as far as they've assessed, are on the left.
The mammal-distributed fruits, as far as they've assessed, are on the right.
And what we see with these box plots at the bottom is how much ethanol each of them have.
And with the exception of a couple of the what they think are bird-distributed fruits, there's not much ethanol at all, whereas a bunch of the mammal-distributed fruits have a lot of alcohol in them.
Including, including, that's not a word, including your favorite and mine, Spondyus mamban.
Oh, Spondyus is good.
And you know what?
And so you can smell the alcohol when after, after it's dropped and you're just walking across a field of Spondyus, man.
And that's really the only way you're going to get Spondyus because it's a canopy tree.
Yeah, yeah.
The fruits are 75 feet up, but it is a very tasty, tasty fruit.
But yeah, it does quickly lean over towards, you know... It's getting a little buzzed.
Yeah, I'm after five kind of a fruit.
After five kind of a fruit, yeah.
This is consistent with their hypothesis, and there's a lot that we could say here, but I really just wanted to point out here's a path that is kind of related to that path that I thought I saw those many years ago watching crowned lemurs eat tamarind in northern Madagascar.
But a slightly different path that is consistent with our understanding of mammals, frankly as lushes, and birds not so much, and of mammals appearing to prefer, and it's, you know, there's no way to know, you know, what was the first thing, but you've basically got a positive feedback through selection scenario here where
If mammals going after fruit that tasted good to them had a slight preference for alcohol in their fruit, then those fruits that had a little bit of alcohol in them got their seeds dispersed more and on and on and on and on.
So did they have a pre-existing hypothesis about which fruits were going to have more ethanol and a rationale?
Just that they thought that the mammal-distributed fruits would have more ethanol.
Because they're treating the ethanol as a reward distinct from sugar?
Yes, exactly.
And there's a number of reasons for that.
There's a lot of chemistry here and it's still very unclear.
I think we, science, doesn't really know fully what's going on here.
You get twice as many calories from the sugar and alcohol as you do the sugar and sugar.
And while there is clearly a toxicity associated with high alcohol, there may be a benefit at low alcohol levels.
So you might indeed find that this is not a binary like alcohol good or alcohol bad, but a little bit of like no alcohol, not as preferable for the I wondered also about the protecting the reward.
a lot of alcohol good, a lot of alcohol not so good.
And I think I may have gone. - I wondered also about the protecting the reward.
If you're gonna put a seed, if you're gonna wrap a reward around a seed and that reward goes bad so that the disperser won't eat it because they might become sick or because it doesn't taste good is how they would perceive it.
That alcohol might prevent the growth of certain things that would tend to take over a fruit and therefore become something that, if a mammal can process it, They would be willing, you know, and like I say, I've eaten plenty of spondylus fruits that were a little past their prime, and they do have that alcoholy kind of sense about them.
Yes.
And it's not terribly off-putting.
It's not as good as a perfectly, exactly ripe spondylus.
Yeah.
But it's not bad.
Yeah.
No, and I actually, I found myself foraging for blackberries yesterday.
I went on a walk, since I wasn't allowed to go into human company, so I went on a beautiful walk and certainly tried a couple of blackberries that weren't there yet, and had a couple that were perfect, and a couple that felt a little bit past their prime.
And just a little, little, little fermented.
It was just a couple more intriguing little nuggets.
Which is interesting, that's bird fruit.
Um, blackberries?
Yeah.
I mean, for one thing, the growth habit of the plant makes it very difficult for anything that can't fly to get them.
Deer eat them.
Yeah, around the edges.
Yeah, no, deer eat them all the time.
That's true.
Yeah, I mean, and then the Blackberries that are here are introduced, they're MLA and mostly so, you know, there's all sorts of layers of like, what was the intention here?
But I'm not, I would put Blackberry at an intermediate.
It doesn't have the husk.
It's not giant.
It does have tiny seeds, so it does fit the avian model to some degree, but they also do have a delightful smell, especially when the sun is hitting them.
That's true.
I accept that this is a generalist.
People don't talk enough about generalist syndromes.
Usually syndromes isolate you to a clade of dispersers or distributors.
Well, and I think, I mean, with a blackberry, with any of those, that clade of berries where it's a, is it a droop?
No, I can't remember what the category is.
But lots of tiny little seeds that are inherently unextractable from the fruit.
That you swallow.
That you swallow.
You are going to be taking this.
Like they don't, like these fruits are not interested in toilets.
That's a loss for them.
Yep.
But for everything else that's eating them, as long as they don't have a digestive tract that's, you know, a centimeter long and it doesn't come out right away, they're going to be dispersing the fruit somewhat.
So unless there's something that the blackberry is benefiting from in the gut of birds or the gut of mammals that is, you know, scratching it up and making it more likely to germinate, I think they're pretty generalist.
Here's a couple of other fun things from this paper, which just went tiny on me.
No, no, this is from the discussion.
Notably, the metabolic pathway yeast used to ferment sugars and produce ethanol emerged in the early Cretaceous, at approximately the same time that angiosperms shifted from producing small wind-dispersed fruits to large, fleshy, vertebrate-dispersed fruits with fermentable sugars.
That's cool.
The timing is convergent.
And then, some forgiver's mammals, including African elephants, squirrel monkeys, pigtail macaques, and aye-ayes, are sensitive to ethanol odors, as they can smell them.
Interesting that aye-eyes is on that list, and it shows up on this final list.
Some mammals, including humans, African great apes, and IIs, exhibit a mutation in their ADH7 gene that yields a 40-fold improvement in enzymatic efficiency for ethanol metabolism.
And these animals may have significant exposure to dietary ethanol.
Humans, African great apes, and IIs.
What are IIs doing on this?
IIs are this crazy clade of lemurs that, again, are only on Madagascar.
And insectivorous.
And, well, insectivorous, but they're eating gums.
They're using that long finger of theirs to dig out stuff.
And so what is happening there?
But it does seem that we have a particular ability to deal with alcohol and therefore, and add to that, although they don't say it here, I suspect that we humans are also sensitive to ethanol odors.
We can process it better.
Enzymatic efficiency for ethanol metabolism.
Enzymatic efficiency for ethanol.
And we can sense it better.
And once you have those two things, you're probably going to seek it out some.
If it has some value, again, at low doses, but not at high.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Yeah. - Okay.
Okay, that's my path through dry tropical forests for today.
Alright, cool.
You were interested in finishing up by talking about the Cartesian crisis is what you said.
The Cartesian crisis is what I wanted to point to.
And I will try to keep this brief, but I think it belongs on people's radar.
I have alluded to it a number of times, but the Cartesian is obviously referenced to Rene Descartes.
The point is that Rene Descartes arrives at his famous Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am, as the solution to a problem.
And I will claim that it's not really a solution.
What it is, is a license to not solve the problem.
But the problem is, Descartes realized that he could establish personally almost none of the things that he believed to be true.
Doesn't mean they were false, but it meant that they could be false, and because he didn't establish them himself, he had no way of knowing, and that's a frightening condition to be in.
And you can laugh at this, you can imagine that he's worrying over nothing, because How much do you really need to establish, you know, in order to know that that's a wall, I am assuming that photons are real, that they are bouncing off it in a way that the lens in my eye can resolve them on the retina and my brain can process the images and I can establish none of these things, but you know what?
It's a wall.
So that's why I think therefore I am is good enough.
It's like, look, don't worry so much.
Do you exist?
Yeah.
How else would you be thinking, right?
It's not a proof, but it's a tautology that allows you to move on to things that are liable to be more productive.
But I think Descartes' concern about that which is not established by you personally is actually a very real feature of the landscape that we exist in.
That the destruction Of all truth-seeking modes, of every institution in which truth might be established on the basis of some rules that we might agree on, science is a good way of establishing truth.
But you know what?
Science is being done in universities, and those universities are corrupt at a level that is hard to fathom.
And so the things that they say are true might be, but they're not likely to be true because they're being said there.
In fact, you can find universities are now Binding on to gender ideology and claiming that men can become women, and they are tolerating mathematicians who think that 2 plus 2 doesn't necessarily equal 4, and they are absolutely refusing to call out nonsense when it emerges.
In fact, presumably a product of universities, but in, I think it was JAMA this week, there was a new paper that claimed to scientifically evaluate misinformation that was being distributed online about COVID when the misinformation that they were talking about turned out to be true.
So anyway, you've got a situation in which it's worse than having nobody seeking the truth.
You've got people who are the official truth seekers who are systematically avoiding their job.
They are...
They what's the term for it?
They soft quit.
They still are in the roles.
They're still getting paid for it, but they're not seeking the damn truth.
Quiet quit.
So, okay, that's the era we're living in.
And what it means is Your newspaper isn't reporting the news.
In fact, I made the argument that newspapers now report the news only when it becomes sufficiently embarrassing for them to avoid it, like LabLeak.
The truth that lab leak was at least a likely possibility was evident from early on.
Newspapers finally got around to reporting it late when they couldn't not report it and still look like a newspaper.
So they were embarrassed into it.
Likewise, universities only teach lessons that the students sign off on being something that they will tolerate.
So that's the world we're living in.
And it creates an artificial darkness.
Even those of us who are absolutely interested in figuring out what the truth is are denied a data set that we can even go to independent of anybody.
The data set is itself polluted.
And this problem, I believe, you can see it with respect to COVID because we now have enough of these cases where we have embarrassed the authorities into grudgingly acknowledging that there was, you know, the FDA now says, oh, yes, doctors do have the right to prescribe ivermectin.
Always did.
Really?
No, you actually got in the way of it.
You blocked it at the pharmacy and you couldn't convince the doctors that it didn't work.
And then you blocked it at the pharmacy.
You started confiscating it at the border.
It's working, though.
They're convincing people.
Sure.
But my point is, OK, you see it in COVID.
You can see the level of bullshit that we are drenched in by the so-called authorities and truth seekers.
The problem is those fools who did this to our truth-seeking mechanism have invited an absolutely unholy disaster that we are now beginning to see.
And I want to point specifically to the Lahaina fire in Maui and the hypotheses of various conspiracies that are now circulating.
I don't know.
I have watched a certain amount of this stuff and I find it very, very spooky.
On the other hand, the problem is when, what am I to think?
On the one hand, do I, would I put it past certain members of society to start a fire in which people would be burned alive in order to make bank on a real estate land grab?
No, I know there are people who are that demonic.
In fact, I watched them during COVID deny people treatment that would have saved them.
That's why I called the Pierre Khoury episode The Crime of the Century, because we literally had a medicine that was safe and effective, and it was being denied to patients who we were told it was our obligation to protect.
That's incredibly cynical, and it resulted in a huge amount of human suffering that was totally avoidable.
So I know there are people this bad.
Do I think they wouldn't do it over real estate?
No.
Do I think they wouldn't do it in Hawaii?
No.
So, do I think they couldn't do it?
In this case, maybe I do think that, but...
I wouldn't put it past them, and if I wouldn't put it past them, and maybe I just haven't thought hard enough to figure out how it would be accomplished in this case, maybe I'm missing it, and maybe I'll be persuaded next week that it did happen.
But the point is, the right way to deal with the complexities of a world like ours is to have truth seekers who are rewarded when they're good at it.
So that we get better and better at figuring out what the truth is, no matter how bizarre it is, no matter how unpleasant it is.
And when you sabotage truth-seeking because you've got some private opportunity that depends on nobody being in a position to call you out, you create a dark age.
This isn't an accidental falling into a dark age.
This is an artificial dark age in which nobody, in my opinion, assuming the conspiracy theories are wrong, and I don't think All of them will be.
But there's a question about, you know, is the fire organic?
I think so.
Did these people whose religion seems to be let no crisis go to waste?
Did they immediately recognize that there was an opportunity and jump on it?
And so that's why all sorts of things seem conspiratorial?
I don't know.
Here's my point.
We don't have truth-seeking because it was sabotaged.
It was sabotaged by people with narrow interests in selling shit or making political gains that they wouldn't have been able to make if we were able to figure out what was going on.
So the reasons that truth-seeking was sabotaged are not hard to find.
The degree to which it's been sabotaged is pretty shocking.
But if you paid attention during COVID, it's undeniable.
The truth, the truth was absolutely hidden.
And the only reason that we now have a decent grasp on a bunch of it is that a small number of people refused to go along with it.
They were top notch in many cases, and they were able to bring these through a mechanism like podcasting that was sufficiently unregulated that even the attempts to shut down these discussions didn't work.
That's not the way truth seeking is supposed to be done.
But if we have to do it that way, so be it.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating that
The focus on misdisc and malinformation, by which we and many others have been censored, sometimes silenced, shut down, demonetized, all of this, shows up at a moment of this quickening, this quickening in terms of the breakdown of Cartesian reality.
Because it is exactly at this moment that those who are still believing what they're told, what comes out of the box from their favorite anchors on the networks that have existed for many, many decades, and how could they possibly be wrong now?
The people who believe that complain is so loud, so very loud.
I'm going to start talking again now.
now yeah they flew off yeah um those people are being fed "I'm not going to be a good one.
Stories about how anyone who doesn't believe the talking heads on the networks that have existed forever are engaging in lies, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.
And it's perfectly timed.
And there are a lot of things that are perfectly timed these days.
And maybe it's just because everything is happening at once.
But it is beyond alarming Disconcerting to say the least.
Beyond alarming to watch natural disasters and have one of the first thoughts be, what is actually happening?
What is actually happening and how could I find out?
So we have to figure out how to Progress in an era where we cannot possibly establish things that our well-being depends on utterly.
Obviously, folks in Maui have a serious question on their hands about whether or not there is something afoot.
That something afoot could be Of many different levels.
It could be people taking advantage of a crisis.
It could be incompetence at an amazing level.
It could be a conspiracy from the get-go.
And the idea that anybody, people will mock them, of course, for leaping to conspiracy theories.
But the problem is, whose fault is that?
It's the fault of the people who destroyed proper truth-seeking.
It's the fault of the people who destroyed journalism.
And the the problem is that in a world, you know, whose fault is it that I don't want to use the term anti-vax because it's obviously a weapon in and of itself, much like the term conspiracy theory.
But whose fault is it that so many people are now wildly skeptical of vaccines that they weren't skeptical of three years ago?
Well, it's the vaccine manufacturers.
That's whose fault it is.
And even if the vaccines that people are now skeptical of are what they claim to be, you can't fault people for wondering when you've lied to them about something else you called a vaccine.
We have had somebody cultivate a blinder that they have put on society.
And it is resulting in every kind of madness.
And I want to connect one last piece of madness here.
In tweeting about this live stream that we were going to do today, I said something about us broadcasting from outside our comfort zone.
And I was really just joking about being outside.
But some, Which is exactly our comfort zone, but not where we usually podcast from.
Right.
But in any case, some folks showed up and speculated about whether or not outside our comfort zone meant that I was going to address the JQ.
What's that?
Oh, I believe that's the Jewish question.
You remember, like, whether we Jews are to be tolerated?
Seriously?
Yeah.
So here's my point.
I don't really want to go after these individuals, but There is no Jewish question.
There is a question called lineage.
There are patterns of history.
Seeking the truth of these patterns and understanding what their implication is for the present is what we are supposed to be doing.
Treating this as some lineage, which is suspect in some people's minds, in a completely predictable way, Right.
This is a feature of history.
There's a reason that people go after Jews when history takes a certain turn.
We will come back to this in the future.
But my point is that that Cartesian crisis that was created presumably by cynical, powerful people who enlarged their slice of the pie at the expense of the total size of the pie, who externalized harm onto others in order to make a profit.
Those people are now exposing us to all manner of dangers.
Truth seeking is what allowed us to navigate, and they are now exposing us to everything from the inability to navigate a public health crisis because our public health authorities are obviously on the take and unreliable to a revival of anti-Semitism.
And we all know where this goes, right?
What is the Jewish question, right?
That is that is now being discussed as if we're all supposed to be pondering it as if it's a real question.
So anyway, it's dangerous times.
It's dangerous times.
And the final thing I will say is, on the narrow question of what took place in Maui, what things look like on the ground, I am going to do a live podcast later today.
I think people will want to tune in.
We have a special guest that I think is in an excellent position to help us address this question, and we can do our own private truth-seeking because The official truth seekers have gone fishing.
Great.
When is that going to be?
I believe it is three o'clock Pacific time.
Okay, we currently believe it is 3.30 Pacific Time today.
Livestream today on all the usual channels, or on locals, or how are you doing it?
It's going to be Rumble and YouTube.
Rumble and YouTube normal livestream.
Cool.
All right.
Great.
That was a surprise to me.
Well.
It's awesome.
Outdoors is a very surprising place.
I've noticed.
Full of blackberries.
Yes.
All right.
Well, somehow we haven't melted, although we may find that our pants are stuck toward bears here.
It got hot.
Although it's not hot compared to how it is elsewhere.
Yeah, no, no, it's actually, man.
Summer's here, so nice.
Maddie can tell we're about to be done.
She's like, it's time to throw the frisbee, isn't it, Maddie?
Yes, she does not throw it very well.
No, no she doesn't, but she chomps on it well.
All right, so that's going to happen.
I was going to say lots of good guest episodes coming out now, which is true, but live stream coming up later today.
Another one.
Check out Natural Selections this week because we were going away for our anniversary.
I just linked to some stuff that had drawn my attention this week about medical researchers being shocked that the thymus might turn out to be useful after all.
Whoa.
I know.
An excellent David Samuels piece on Barack Obama, an interview with Obama's biographer.
And a little thing from 1950s women's magazine on how to find a husband.
So it's been all sorts of useful, useful advice.
Totally.
I know you're not in the market.
No, neither am I. But for those of you who are in the market for a husband, yeah, you might check that out.
OK, so again, we're moving lots of stuff to locals.
Please join.
Please join us there.
If you're if you're watching now, right now, you may be in the chat on locals.
We're going to be releasing whenever there's a recorded guest episode.
It's going to go on Locals first for 24 hours on Saturday, and then it'll be released to the public a day later on Sundays.
And we're doing our private Q&A on Locals.
So if you've been on my Patreon, go there, check out...
Check out a way to get into Locals, and if you're not on my Patreon already, subscribe on Rumble, go to Locals.
There's lots of ways in, and we encourage you to do that.
Alright, couple more things.
Yeah, a few more things.
Check out the Umberto Maduri and Paul Maric episode of the podcast.
People have had a really profound reaction to it in many cases.
It's a groundbreaking story broken right here on Dark Horse.
Well worth a look.
Also check out the Web3 podcast.
So both of those are recently out.
I wasn't done talking about Locals yet.
Oh, sorry.
Can we just go there?
Yes.
You also get access to the Discord server on Locals.
Not quite yet, but it's going to happen before the end of the month.
So, lots of good stuff on Locals.
I might have more, but no.
No, no.
I'm wherever I need to go.
Okay, okay.
We've got great stuff at darkhorsestore.org, where you can find things like PsyOp Until Proven Otherwise.
So much is now.
Seems to be.
Yes.
PsyOp Until Proven Otherwise.
We also have Epic Tabby.
At some point, we should do PeopleWolf.
I think it's time for PeopleWolf.
PeopleWolf.
Yeah, we should get PeopleWolf up there.
Pfizer, The Breakthroughs, Never Stop, all that stuff available at the store at darkhorsestore.org.
You can find that book, which is buried underneath the laboratory notebook.
Yep.
Oh, wow.
This book, available everywhere.
Books are sold, including Darvell's.
New York Times bestseller.
New York Times bestseller, despite their attempts to claim, oh, we don't have any copies at all.
Plum out, the publisher.
Nope.
No.
Still.
Still.
Made it to the New York Times Best Seller list.
We still do have our Patreons open.
We're trying to shunt people into locals, but you're having great conversations at yours as well.
Discord I already mentioned.
Okay, so our sponsors this week were MD Hearing, Seed and Soul, I believe.
All awesome.
Consider going there.
There'll be links in the show notes.
And remember that we are supported by you, our audience.
So, join us on Rumble.
Subscribe on Rumble.
Join us at Locals.
Consider coming over and joining me at Natural Selections.
Lots of good things to be found in all those places.
And share.
Share what you find with people who you think it might educate, entertain, irritate, but not so much that they have to try to destroy your social standing because you shared such a thing.
Or, you know, you decide for yourself what the threshold is.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
