In this 198th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode we discuss the West, the West West, and the West West West. Following recent travels in Prague, London, and Denver, we talk about how Prague seems to keeping the embers of the West alive—through noble subversion, shared knowledge of musical traditions, cobbled streets, and more. We discuss anti-semitism—its ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 198.
No chance it's prime.
We are back after a long hiatus that we had no choice but to have because we were in motion across the globe and visiting various places, which we will talk about during today's live stream.
We're going to spend some time, I've written about it a few times now on Natural Selections, but spend some time talking about our time in Prague, and then London, and then my time in Denver, from which I just returned yesterday, and you got back from London a few days ago.
So that's going to be what we do today.
We're also going to have a live Q&A after this on Rumble only, Please join us on Rumble if you're watching this live, even if you're not.
And join us on Locals, where there's a watch party going on right now.
And the Q&A, you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We're going to talk about various other things like our cool merchandise and Jake's Micro Pizza.
Oh man, is that stuff good.
It is tasty.
New flavors too.
Did you say flavors in pizza?
flavors um toppings styles themes themes new new themes of jake's yeah no it's um it's selling like hotcakes i mean you just uh you can't get enough i mean pizza is a kind of a hot cake isn't it i guess technically but um but uh but you can't get enough That's my feeling about it, having been delighting in a good deal of Jake's micro pizza over our travels.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
Available now at DarkHorseStore.org.
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And I think you were first.
Wow, that's new.
Okay, I'm on it.
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Not all of that was on the page, but much of it was.
Yeah, you sort of slid past one of the really important things here, which is that they are always sold in pairs.
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We are there.
We are there.
So.
So.
Well, I mean, I would like to start by pointing something out.
You and I are obviously in a slightly giddy mood, which is something that happens now and again, and we are in a slightly giddy mood at a moment where the outside world is full of no shortage of dire revelations.
And I would just point out something I've noticed in a different context, which is, you know, if you go to a funeral, It does not look like what you would imagine.
There are moments that look like what you would imagine and there are moments in which people are laughing and talking about things that are not exactly related to the loss that people have suffered.
Humans are a very interesting creature and the ability to laugh in dire times is A very important tool because of course laughter is tied to some deep circuitry that is not especially well understood evolutionarily.
It's been something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and let's just say our understanding of it is not perfect.
But in any case, we bring the tools to bear that are useful and the idea that, you know, you would imagine that, you know, a world at war, we are not globally at war, at least not yet, but a world at war would not be a world in which People were laughing.
You know, if we think back on the Depression, we see it in sepia tone.
If we think back on the Holocaust and World War II, we don't think of people experiencing anything other than the constant horror of that chapter of history.
But of course, that's not the way it is.
You reminded me of a wonderful film that made this point.
Yeah, while we were in Prague.
Yeah, called Life is Beautiful.
And I've forgotten the name of the Italian actor who did such a brilliant job in it.
But in that film, it's a fictional story, but a father in a concentration camp Um, takes great risk and goes way out of his way to provide as much normalcy for his son as he possibly can, including a great deal of humor.
Um, it's, uh, Robert, Roberto Benigni.
Benigni, right.
Who also directed it.
Oh, I had forgotten that.
Anyway, so, I don't think we should make any apology or be at all embarrassed about the fact that all of the features of life continue through all of the chapters of history, and that's simply the nature of being human.
It's even better than that?
Whoa.
I know.
No, I think we need to.
I think we absolutely need to.
And in fact, the piece that I posted on Natural Selections yesterday makes this point in two domains, but I think it applies to humor, to sport, to a number of things.
Outside of what I talk about, which is music and dogs, which is to say that maybe especially, but certainly during a time of mass upheaval and dissonance, both cognitive and otherwise, what are the things that will actually bring us together, remind us of our shared humanity and the shared fate that we have by virtue of being on a single gorgeous planet together and having nowhere else to go.
Let us re-find our connection, and music certainly helps us do that, and maybe we'll talk a little bit, but I wrote about this experience we had in this pub in Prague, and dogs bring us together as well.
And I've been watching since, I mean forever, but I specifically started noticing as the lockdowns began to ease a little bit, and then of course they came back on the west coast of the United States over and over and over again, but Maybe mid-summer 2020, when people were finally coming out of their homes again.
I mean, I've been walking in these parks, I'm seeing no one for a while, and, you know, people finally started coming out.
And people were still mostly... had been convinced to be scared of one another.
That humans are the enemy.
Other humans are the things that will, you know, give... infect you and... and... and, you know, kill you or your loved one as a result.
But people with dogs were able to make connections, because dogs... dogs don't care.
Right?
And dogs, despite everything that we are doing, are on our team, and if we let them make the connections for us, even if we are too scared or uncomfortable or anxiety-ridden or whatever to do it, then we might actually find new connection with people.
Yeah, I of course agree with this point, and I would also point out that there's an online version of this, which of course anything online is a What is it, a lower dimensionality reflection of the same principle?
But the way, you know, if you look at the way people react to, it's not just dogs, but dogs especially, animals, you know, where somebody will post a video that will reveal That an animal has some kind of cognition that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
You know, I saw one the other day of a dog dragging its own sled up a hill and then sledding down and then taking the sled back up the hill.
And anyway, the way in which all of the usual things that cause us to detest each other do not show up in those discussions, right?
You could have, you know, White supremacists and Jews or blacks in the very same conversation, having the very same reaction to the very same animal, because what it does is it brings out the humanity in people and... Well, and so does music.
So does shared music.
So maybe this is...
I wrote about it, and you haven't seen what I wrote about it, but I'm curious to hear, without us having discussed it, how you remember our experience in the pub in Prague after the book baptism.
So, we were in Prague for the launch of our book in Czech.
In the Czech Republic, a book launch is called a book baptism, and they literally pour some champagne over the book.
The Institute H21, a fabulous organization, published our book and invited us to come out there and we met both the founder and philanthropist behind the Institute and spent a lot of time with the director and several of the research associates there and, you know, to a person they are extraordinary.
And after, we did several podcasts while we were there, and some interviews, and also spent some considerable social time with Adam, the director, and Carol, the founder, and Suska, and Eva, and many other people there.
And it was all wonderful, but a particular night after the book baptism in which several people who had shown up for the launch, Czech people who either knew us from before or who had heard about this book and came to the launch, went to this pub.
So I'm now curious.
You want me to describe it?
Well, I've just written about it, so it'll be interesting to see how our reflections Sure, I'd be happy to, off the top of my head.
And if there's any points of disagreement. - Sure, I'd be happy to off the top of my head.
Anyway, there's a lot to say about Prague.
And so just, we will come back to this.
And in fact, almost everywhere we went, we walked a lot, not even just in the historic district, but out of the historic district into the parks that the Czech people frequent and all of this.
And almost everywhere we walked was cobbled almost the entire way.
Not just the roads, but the sidewalks, and not all of it was old cobbling.
A lot of it was new, and actually this raises some interesting points.
So it looked to me like that's expensive.
And I talked to some Czechs.
Do we call them Czechs?
Some Czech folks, I know I can get it.
Czech people?
Yeah, Czech people.
Yeah, I don't know how we deal with citizens of the Republic in plural, but in any case, I talked to some of them and their point was no, actually it's cheaper because you can get to the stuff underneath it and then repair a little piece.
It's like carpet tiles, but far classier.
Far classier, but also I don't know what damage we are going to discover we are doing to ourselves by walking on extremely flat, extremely hard surfaces like concrete everywhere, but just the amount of normal feedback that removes from you is substantial.
And the cobbling, the slight wobbles and raised bits and all of that makes walking a much more lively experience.
But imagine... See earlier point around Vivo Barefoots actually.
Exactly.
I was thinking exactly that.
But anyway, we came in at night after the baptism, which when I first read that there was going to be a baptism, I assumed that somehow, because the champagne was mentioned, baptism and champagne don't go together as far as I know, so I assumed that it was going to be a christening in which somehow a bottle was broken, but nope, nothing like that.
Anyway, we went to the pub down the cobbled street.
The ceilings in Prague are very often not like the ceilings here in the US.
They are not flat.
They are domed with interesting edges.
We sat down at a big wood table.
It's noisy and boisterous and all of this.
And Adam, Being the unusual creature that he is, had brought his guitar with him, thinking that he would play some Czech songs.
He specifically wanted us to do campfire together, and it had started to rain during the baptism, so we couldn't go outside and have campfire, but he still had his guitar with him.
And I should say, there is something very interesting to be said about the fact that the Czech language is only spoken by the people of this one country, and so... About 10 million strong.
Yeah, so it's not a huge language group, and it's not an easy language either.
It does mean that all of the young people seem to speak English, which made life easy for us, because Czech isn't useful.
So they're all bilingual, which makes for an interesting culture.
But anyway, he had brought his guitar, and he'd been talking to us about Some prominent Czech singers, actually singers who are widely known but have become controversial as a result of having been steadfast about certain principles, having acknowledged nuance where, I don't know, interesting stuff.
So anyway... During pre-1989, during the time that Prague, that the Czech Republic was still Czechoslovakian behind the Iron Curtain.
Right, and so I think the story, if I remember correctly, about one of these people was that His name had showed up on a list of collaborators with the Soviets.
Which did not necessarily mean that he had actually done anything, because what it apparently took to end up on one of these lists was effectively nothing.
But nonetheless, after the Iron Curtain fell, and then the Czech Republic became independent of the Slovaks, this was viewed dimly.
So even though the songs are universally known by people who still sing them, there's some deeper story.
But anyway, we're sitting around this big table with these people, some of whom we have known reasonably well over the course of a week, had a lot of conversations, some of them are new to us, and Adam breaks out his guitar and he starts playing these Czech songs, which are fascinating, but of course we have no idea what's being said.
But it was interesting that people at the next table over started joining in and they were singing along with Adam's playing and Adam's playing became very vigorous because of course now there was this great sense of community in the pub.
And then a part of the story, which I still cannot quite reconcile, suddenly Or other instruments came out of nowhere.
Somebody was playing an accordion, there was an accordion, there was a violin, I think, and I'm missing an instrument somewhere.
That's all I remember.
I remember the violin first and then the accordion, and there were three instruments and all the voices except for ours.
All the voices.
Everybody who spoke Czech in the room was singing these songs, and So I should say I've forgotten one piece of the puzzle, which is that, and we will get back to what the meaning of all of this is, but the Czech people, because of their long history and maybe especially because of their resentment of the Soviets during the period of the Soviet hegemony over Czechoslovakia, are
um nobly subversive by nature right these people they're not these are not anarchists these are people who um defied soviet rule in many little ways um right under the nose of the people who were were oppressing them and this is just sort of built into their character and actually um the analogy of the shire was um actually invoked by several people
um that there is kind of a you know these sort of independent idiosyncratic folks um uh some of whom are up for uh heroic adventure um but anyway Okay?
So the pub is uproariously singing these famous Czech songs and the barkeep
had apparently had a complaint or was in fear of a complaint and he walked over slightly sheepishly to Adam who was playing his guitar and told him to keep it down and at the point that he finished his sentence Adam reached the chorus and bursted directly into his face and then instead of being angry at this or something he kind of rolled his eyes like
Yeah, if I wasn't working, I'd be on your side singing as loudly as you are.
And so anyway, it was a beautiful little vignette of the subversion of this, you know, very small culture in which You know, people had their instruments, and we were told this was not a common phenomenon.
It wasn't like this was every time you go to the pub.
Yeah, some of them were joking with us.
Yeah, we staged this for you because you wanted music and you wanted campfire.
Yeah.
And, you know, obviously it was not staged, but truly, you know, this is a pub with lots of rooms, sort of a Warren-like situation.
And there were three big tables in the room that we were in.
And the fact that every single one of these tables had an instrument at them with people, you know, the violin to be pulled out first.
And then for an accordion, the accordion came out, and I was like, where'd she even pull that out from?
How do you cryptically carry around an accordion?
Yeah, how do you suddenly produce an accordion?
But, I mean, also we had heard, and certainly we had heard before, and what we heard in the pub that night with the music was consistent with The claim that all Czech people and you know presumably it's not absolutely all but certainly everyone there that night knows something like 30 or some people said oh it's more than that Czech folk songs that they can sing that and are interested in doing so when conditions permit.
And so there's something about having a shared culture, and specifically shared music, that, you know, when you sing together, you come together.
And, you know, it's very, very rare for Americans sitting around to actually all know the lyrics to a single song of any note, you know, aside from the totally banal.
In fact, you and I, Discovered how rare this is in taking students on field trips and attempting to find a song that everybody knew in common that they were willing to sing around a campfire.
And my recollection is unless you specifically assigned people to find such songs, which was not easy for them, You know, to provide lyrics for the people who didn't know it, that sort of thing.
Unless you specifically did that, there was really only one popular song that students of, you know, these were millennials that we were teaching, that they all knew and could wrestle forth some shared version of, which was Wagon Wheel, which is funny because that's not It just somehow became the song that evergreen students on field trips knew.
Right, it was.
But the degree to which people don't have anything else to resort to, because however much in love with music they are, it's some very independent version of music.
Right, we have such diversity.
Which in some ways has made things more interesting musically, but it means that it's much harder to come together around music.
And so I guess I'm going to say, but first I want to say, you alluded to it, but on my first study abroad to Ecuador, all the students There was lots of work that we were doing together, but one of the pieces of work that doesn't sound academic at all is that I assigned all of the students in advance in small groups certain types of work that would enhance the trip in ways that had nothing to do with the formal academic goals of the work.
And two, I don't remember if it was three or four students, I said, you know, you, I want you to basically, you know, Solicit from the class what songs or what kinds of songs they would be interested in singing together because I knew that a couple of my students were bringing instruments.
I encouraged them to do so on the trip.
And then you will produce lyric sheets and you will have copies for everyone and everyone is going to have copies of these lyric sheets No one's ever going to be required to sit around singing.
This isn't a music class, but there will be many opportunities when we could be doing so, and this will mean that no one has the excuse of, oh, I don't know the lyrics to that song.
Some people may not know the particular song, but once you hear it a few times, you should be able to remember the tune, and if you have the lyrics in front of you, you can do it.
And it was wonderful.
It was definitely the most musical of uh any of my study abroad um yeah any of my study abroad or even other field trips.
So I want to say one thing before we bring in Zach's point here which is um I have suggested not just with respect to music but also with respect to literature that there is a Question about, is it more important that what you're engaging with is of the highest quality or that it is shared?
And I am no longer convinced that the sharedness of it is in any way secondary.
That if you were all reading the same books in common, or some subset of the books you were reading in common, That it creates a very different kind of ability to comprehend each other, which is maybe fundamental to moving ahead through time as an actual people, whatever that… You've rediscovered the great books curriculum.
Well, the question is, are the great books the great books, or are the great books frozen in time, and there are other things that should be read, but… The canon may have to evolve, but is there value in having a canon?
Right, and I actually, I would have suspected this about music, but having watched a pub full of Czechs who didn't know each other erupt into song together, and watched the camaraderie, and I think we even felt the camaraderie, not having any idea what the content of these songs actually was.
So seeing that, I mean, you know, it's one of the things that we quietly, I don't even want to say we did away with it.
We allowed it to be destroyed because we didn't understand.
It was a Chesterton's Fence issue, right?
And I would say couples dancing and It was like a Chesterton's line in the sand that you didn't notice.
It wasn't even like, oh, we'll have to dismantle this.
We just let it go.
We just let it go without imagining the depth of the value.
And anyway, it's a mistake we should not repeat if we manage to get ourselves through this rather dire time.
Indeed.
I think this is less true in my generation, actually.
That there are a lot of songs that I can end up around a campfire with people I don't know particularly well, and everyone knows.
Really?
It's not even just like two or three.
It's a lot, a lot of songs.
So, and songs that not...
Not music that you would find banal or uninteresting music that you guys listen to or have listened to.
Interesting.
Do you care to provide any examples or is that not relevant here?
Not going to be that great, but Wagon Wheel was the first one I was going to come up with.
Chasing Cars, Riptide.
Dad, you may know some of these.
Anything by the Lumineers, pretty much.
There are a lot of them, though.
And obviously it's not like every single person will know every song, but there are a number of them that actually pretty much everyone will know.
Interesting.
Well, I have a little anecdote for you.
I was teaching a class with Rachel Hastings and I For whatever reason, I wanted students to think about what song might represent their generation in some way.
And I actually... Let's just be clear, this is a person, one of these crazy people with a double PhD.
So PhDs in mathematics and linguistics, which was the point of connection for you teaching with her, right?
So you were probably doing like evolution of like communication and language and such, right?
Yeah, it was evolution of language in one way or another.
It's cool teaching with linguists.
Yeah, it is.
It is cool teaching with linguists, and in her case, I forgive her for having somehow pursued two PhDs, which ordinarily I would consider an indication of a mental disorder, but in her case I think she was just being thorough.
But anyway, So I proposed a song.
I've forgotten which one it is exactly, but it happened to be a Lumineers song.
So again, these are Millennials, not Gen Zs.
I proposed a Lumineers song that I thought more or less got at the ethos that I detected from Millennials.
They absolutely hated this suggestion.
They detested it.
So they knew it and hated the song?
Absolutely.
They couldn't stand the idea that it might represent them, and maybe it doesn't, but what they came up with instead was Gangnam Style, which I did not have a deep relationship with.
I had in fact heard it, but didn't really even understand what it was, and they explained to me what it was.
What did they say?
Well, they said that it was actually a send-up of this very tawny Korean neighborhood Tony.
Tony.
Fancy.
Yeah, super fancy.
I'm like caramel colored?
I don't.
English is not my first language, just remember that.
But anyway, this very Tony Korean neighborhood, you know, I'm imagining something Beverly Hills-y.
And so the point is the song mocks the style of this neighborhood while seeming to present An argument for embracing it or something like that.
So it's sort of a dripping with irony, over the top, very... I don't know if you've seen the video for it?
I have not, no.
Oh, it's pretty wild.
But anyway, so they thought that it was sort of... they were very tuned... so the Lumineers are...
Pretty earnest.
And I think the problem was that I had suggested something earnest, and they were much more in touch with their cynicism, and Gangnam Style represented their cynicism.
That may be the description of the generation right there.
Rejection of earnestness, embrace of cynicism.
Yeah.
Of the millennials.
And not to say, like, again, we happen to teach exactly, we had lots of students who weren't traditional age, but if all of our students have been traditional college age, we taught the millennials.
Yeah.
Almost to a person, our students were amazing.
But I do feel like the generation understood itself to be, you know, post-earnest.
Post-earnest.
Post-earnest and pro-cynicism.
Yeah, pro-cynicism, which raises my little principle that no matter how cynical you are, you're still being naive.
The whole damn generation was still being naive, no matter how in love with their cynicism they were.
Yeah.
Indeed.
So I guess the one other thing that I would just put out there, as I already have in writing on Natural Selections, but about that evening at the pub, was that a couple of the people who we'd just met that night, who had been there for the book launch, the book baptism, There were two men who were basically polar opposites politically.
And, you know, we heard them discuss Trump and what was going on in the schools and guns and they had, you know, they just they could have easily been Americans on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
And they were sitting next to each other, they were drinking together, they were laughing together, they ended up singing together, and, you know, they're not going to be best buddies.
But they disagreed, and the world did not end, and neither of them thought that the other one was an evil human being or a naive idiot, you know, depending on which way it might have gone.
And it felt like something that would be very, very hard to find in the U.S.
Yeah, it was remarkable.
I had forgotten that piece of it, but you're absolutely right, that watching people who vehemently disagreed over consequential things, but it was not personal, was a reminder of how things are in better times.
So, I mean, I guess as long as we're this deep in the discussion here, we should talk about the model we were sort of playing with, about why this culture is where it is.
And let me just say a couple more things about that.
You and I were not necessarily expecting to find what we found in Prague.
In fact, we were concerned, based on where things are historically, about going to Europe at this moment.
Because Prague was our first stop, but London was our next stop, and we were concerned about being in London in particular.
Yep, and we will talk about the comparison.
But what was striking about Prague Was that it appeared to be a version of the West that functions far better than any other version that we have recently seen all of the versions, you know, whether it's Australia New Zealand Canada Germany All of these places are now severely messed up surrounding the very values that once galvanized them as, you know, the West.
So, when we found that Prague was quite the opposite, that there seemed to be a deep commitment to what we have called cosmopolitanism as a Stark contrast to multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism being you keep your own culture and you live side by side with people keeping their own culture, whereas cosmopolitanism, yes, you can keep your traditions, but the point is you're part of an agreement to move forward while de-emphasizing lineages and all of that.
This appeared to be alive and well in Prague.
And what we started to consider was the possibility that the Iron Curtain had actually, so the Czech people have an uncomfortable relationship with whether they are West or East.
Because being behind the Iron Curtain, people assume that they are of Eastern Europe and they don't see themselves this way.
And that's true because what, you know, the Soviets were protecting themselves by Collecting satellite states as a buffer to prevent attack.
And so effectively Czechoslovakia got trapped behind the Iron Curtain with a good deal of westernness to it.
And the hypothesis that you and I were playing with was that the Iron Curtain actually protected it from what has destroyed it in most of the what the Czechs called the West-West-West.
Well, one guy during the Q&A was a book baptism, and I think that was charming.
The West, West, West, and then the West, West, West, which is like out here in the frontier in the West Coast of the U.S.
where we went crazy first or something.
Craziest of all.
But anyway, the idea is that the Iron Curtain, and I would argue that the thing that destroyed The Western values in the West-West-West was the relationship with the market, which does not mean that I am anti-market.
Long-time viewers and listeners will know that I'm extremely pro-market, but I do not... I draw a distinction between allowing markets to tell you how to do something.
No tool is better than a market for getting you to producing something that does a job well.
But markets should never be allowed to tell you what to do, because they will find every defective human character and exploit it, and you will end up with a dystopian nightmare if you let markets drive.
But anyway, that force, which seems to have destroyed our values in the West-West-West, was basically held at bay by, you know, communist authoritarianism, which is not a good thing, but nonetheless it protected it in some ways the way
The way the embargo and the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union protected Cuban music from what the music industry did to music across the rest of Latin America and the world, really.
Yeah, I think that analogy is fascinating, the one to Cuba and its musical tradition and perhaps cuisine as well.
With regard to the Czech Republic, of course, that raises the question of, well, what about all of the other countries that the Soviet Union was using as buffer that were behind the Iron Curtain?
And the Czech Republic has, you know, we are not historians, but you know, a number of things that are unique and we say this as people who have not been.
I had been in Prague once before in 97 and then a friend who I was attending a conference with in Prague and I went around Hungary together.
So I have been in Hungary, the countryside of Hungary and Budapest and Prague once before, but 25 years ago.
And you had not been in Central Eastern Europe at all before.
So the Czech Republic, you know, why does the Czech Republic seem to be doing something rather different from what Hungary is doing, for instance, or Slovakia, or, you know, or any of the other countries that were not fully Soviet, but effectively being used as buffers?
by the Soviet Union.
Well, in part, the Czech Republic is right at that edge.
And so it had borders that were not that it contained the border that was the Iron Curtain effectively.
And so it had greater proximity, there must have been some sort of cultural osmosis across osmosis across that border.
But also the history of the Czech people in particular, which you mentioned the language being so distinct, so difficult, and so intact, has meant that throughout a very long history of effectively occupation, like, you know, Hungary was in charge of things for a long time.
The Czech, you know, the Czech people were under the boot of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they were under the boot of the Russians, and then the Germans, and then the Soviets, and before the Austro-Hungarian Empire, presumably it goes back farther in time.
But over and over and over again, the noble subversion and the being able to communicate just among themselves and retaining things like folk songs and cuisine that was like, I didn't go in there expecting anything, but the cuisine was really good and unique, distinct,
There's just a lot of very distinct parts of Czech culture that would suggest that it would be distinct from also other countries that were behind the Iron Curtain, because that wouldn't be a sufficient explanation.
Right.
Yeah, I don't think it is sufficient.
It is that something of the West got trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and that I think that there is a contrast that we are going to find between Hungary and the Czech Republic.
And interestingly, you and I raised this point with all of the people that we were meeting after we had started to detect this, because it was a real question.
What has happened here?
Why, you know?
For example, we had walked some very long distance one day and we came back through a neighborhood and families back and forth, strollers, you know, fathers holding their children's hand, walking down the street.
It was just so normal.
So many children.
Right.
It's rare that you see almost any children in American cities now.
Yeah, and there was just no evidence of the nonsense to having forgotten what men and women are, and any of this.
It just looked like a time capsule.
So, I think the thing is, there are a couple different ways to resist whatever the market, or whatever force it was if it wasn't the market, did to the values of the West.
One of them has to do with, unfortunately, embracing a kind of primitive lineage against lineage notion, which I think is, you know, we haven't been to Hungary, you've been there once, but we haven't been there lately, but this is sort of what we hear, that, you know, that that is sort of the, it's, you know, a kind of reversion to a pre-cosmopolitan approach.
Now, if that's unfair, I'm interested, but my guess would be that there are two ways to resist this.
One of these is the sort of backward-looking Hungarian way, and the other way is to actually, the Czech way, the cosmopolitan way, to protect that instinct towards this Western value and figure out what it is that threatens it and somehow corral that force so that cosmopolitanism can go on because, frankly, That's the only way we as a planet are going to make it.
We're too well armed to go back to isolating ourselves by lineage and fighting.
As dumb as it would be to do that because it makes a much less pleasant world, it's also suicidal.
I guess one other thing worth noting, because we didn't know what to expect with regard to how Prague was looking in the wake of October 7.
And we knew we were going to London next, and there was already, you know, real explicit protest and worse that was pro-Hamas.
And we really saw the opposite in Prague.
And in fact, we saw one and I, on an independent walk, saw another of these, you know, long wall of these flyers that have been being put up from people who, of people who were kidnapped on October 7th from Israel by Hamas.
Which, if you've been online at all, you have heard that in many places, in London, in many American cities, there are people going around tearing down these flyers.
Really, no matter what you think, people being kidnapped from their lives and being held hostage is an act of barbarism.
And in Prague, these flyers were immaculate.
There were long lines of them.
They weren't being guarded by police.
They were on public streets where they easily could have been defaced or vandalized.
Instead, what I saw when I ran into one set of these when I wasn't with you, was that people who were walking, you know, on their way somewhere, Czech people, We're actually pausing in front of some of them to look at some of them that this was this had become part of sort of the background understanding of this is part of what's going on in the world and we're going to reflect and respect this truth by observing it and then continuing on.
I don't perhaps that is happening elsewhere I hope it is happening elsewhere but to have seen that response to these flyers in person was extraordinary.
Yeah, we'll maybe get to this a little later in the discussion, but the outpouring of anti-Semitism that has been seen around the globe means that whatever latent anti-Semitism was there is suddenly activated and on the surface.
And so I was expecting
Absolutely expecting that we would see some of it and maybe it would be less or more who knew But I was not expecting to detect its opposite and by its opposite I mean and I'm not arguing that there was never anti-semitism in the Czech Republic there clearly was but what remains there seems to be a genuine sense of affinity and in fact a
A culpable sense of regret over the Jews who were liquidated by the Nazis from what would have been Czechoslovakia.
And I did not expect that at all.
I did not expect it.
But that is the feeling.
And also just interacting with people.
There was no... There was nothing to feel, right, people?
It really was this cosmopolitan feeling.
So anyway, that's heartening that somewhere is not beset by this.
And I will also say that The feeling, only one part of this has anything to do with anti-Semitism, but the feeling of safety walking around Prague was also unusual.
A stark contrast to any American city at the moment, which is shocking.
And not just safety, but at one point we were on a long walk back from actually the day that we were invited to do the cold plunge with a couple of our new friends in the river.
And then we went and had lunch, and then we walked back some number of miles back to the Airbnb where we were staying, and walked back through a number of neighborhoods we hadn't been in before.
And we're at some very busy sort of pedestrian mall.
I don't like that word, but a large area with no traffic except for the trams that were going through, the streetcars are going through one place.
And we just stood there for a while watching people.
And after 10, 15 minutes, you said, there's no drama.
No drama at all.
And this was a pretty diverse setting, like there were some tourists among the Czechs who were not, you know, somewhat homogeneous with regard to their ethnicity, but this was, you know, young, old, black, white, you know.
Presumably very well off and not so well off.
And families, single people, old people, couples, and no drama.
Zero drama.
People would occasionally bump into each other.
Just nothing.
Everyone was just doing their thing, living their lives, being nice, being friendly.
Some of them were clearly not in fantastic moods and some of them were in amazing moods.
And neither of them tried to infect the others with whatever it was that they had.
Yeah, in watching, it occurred to me that they just weren't focused on each other, right?
They were not obsessed with what other people were going to think of them.
They weren't being performative.
Yeah, they weren't broadcasting their politics, right?
They were just being, and it was such a relief.
They weren't just not focused on each other, they weren't focused on their own identity.
Right.
So, as you said, they weren't broadcasting, this is who I am, you have to know who I am at all times, Like, no, they just are.
Right.
They just are.
And it was, you know, you and I have talked many times about the strange culture shock that you get, not necessarily when you go someplace really different, but when you come home and you can see your own culture briefly for what it is.
This was a reminder of a state of being that I, I just haven't seen in so long.
Yeah.
People just, just being and not, you know, I don't even know how else to describe it, but you don't know that that's not what's going on in an American park until you've gone somewhere and watched it happen, and it's like, oh, that's 25 years ago, right?
The last time I saw that is 25 years ago.
So what the hell happened?
And you know, obviously... Why did we let it go?
Yeah, why did we let it go?
There's also, I mean, one additional piece is that there appears to be no opioid crisis.
Yeah.
And really almost in all of Europe we are told, but definitely not in Prague.
Yeah, tiny amount of homelessness, no obvious... Yeah, but you know, whereas in Portland, you know, I actually asked someone, I was like, where are the people lying in the street with their pants around their ankles?
Half-joking, but seriously, in West Coast cities, that's what you see.
And people in Prague thought I was joking.
Yes.
You also, and who knows what has to do with what, but you also, in watching people either in the park or in this, yeah, mall is a terrible descriptor, but yeah, some shopping district with no cars in it.
With a guy who was making fire out of his mouth.
Yes, from Poland.
The fire wasn't from Poland.
He didn't say.
The much reduced obsession with phones.
Yeah.
Right?
People are obviously using their phones.
They have the same phones the rest of us do.
They're connected to the same internet.
But, you know, the people walking around were actually living their lives rather than physically present but mentally elsewhere.
So that was interesting as well.
And, you know, what does that have to do with them having become not performative and not being obsessed with what other people think of them at every moment?
Probably a lot.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
All right, you have more to say about... No, I think we've done a pretty good... I mean, we'll probably return to it, but something interesting is going on there, and a It was a delightful departure from what has become the new normal.
A delightful and unexpected departure from the new normal at many different levels.
It was, you know, I didn't know that Czech food was a thing.
But Czech food, while not being, you know, a stunning cuisine, was Delicious.
Every meal, they were not things that you would necessarily encounter elsewhere.
The whole thing was pretty eye-opening.
And we had Chexican food.
We did have Chexican food.
One night, it was late, and the one Czech restaurant we went to, it was going to be a long wait, and so we're like, Somehow we ended up in a Mexican restaurant, and having grown up in LA, that was probably a stupid move.
Like, you just don't go eat Mexican food if you both grew up in LA and have also spent a lot of time in Mexico and actually like real, like, Mexican street food.
But we did it, and it was not a mistake!
It was in retrospect, it was definitely a mistake on the front end, because why are you doing that?
But it was pretty darn good.
I mean, I've never been served tacos with gravy before.
Right, that's not... It was actually really, really good!
And when we mentioned this to Eva, I remember one of our new friends the next day, and we had said, you know, is it Czechmex?
Like, what is it?
No, it's Chexican.
Chexican, yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
Then we went to London.
Yeah, then we went to London.
Things are different.
Things are different.
I would say London felt still much more functional than the major West Coast cities.
Yeah.
We did run into some protesters, there were a couple of massive protests while we were there, and we ran into people, you know, proudly displaying Palestinian flags, wearing them in fact, on the tube.
Yeah, one guy draped in a Palestinian flag being filmed by his associate.
Yeah, which, you know, under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't think twice about it, or maybe I would think twice about it.
It's weird to be draped in a flag.
Yeah, it's weird to be draped in a flag.
But I guess the point is, you know...
It's the West, right?
You do you.
You do you.
On the other hand, the fact that these protests appear to be supportive of the worst barbarism in recent memory is obviously very striking.
We worried before we went about whether we would feel safe, and I don't think If we had run into one of these massive protests, you know, at Big Ben or the like, it would have been different.
So I was on the tube on Saturday.
Went to get an eye appointment because it's easier and cheaper to do that in London than it is in the United States.
That tells you something about our health care system because theirs is not in great shape either.
But I was on the tube alone and then you were going to be meeting me out there and very crowded and I didn't know then that I think it was crowded precisely because the line that I was on several stops after I was getting off was going to Westminster and this was going to be the massive protest and there were several people who got on with big unfurled banners in Arabic wearing keffiyehs and such and that's
Had I gone to Westminster instead of getting off at my stop, I think I might have felt a little different, although not being Jewish.
I think I would have been utterly fine, but people who were in the middle of it had a different experience.
To be sure, I do think this all brings into stark relief this distinction between multiculturalism and the cosmopolitan West, and that, you know, what you're looking at in Europe
is a disagreement over what it means to live together and the I don't know how it is that one advances the right idea.
My feeling is I'm cool with anybody who is up for figuring out how we get along and put aside the racial stuff.
Doesn't mean forget where you came from, it doesn't mean give up your traditions, but the point is either we're going to get along and we're going to be productive because we're not focused on that as a delineator of who is tolerable or worth collaborating with or not, or we aren't.
And the problem is that multiculturalism Sounds like a synonym for cosmopolitanism, but it is in fact the opposite.
And I think this is something we have to increasingly be concerned about.
That one of the ways that the label doesn't match what's in the box is that something is disguised as its opposite and that causes people to either just not pay attention because it's too complex to figure out what the hell's going on.
You know, the Patriot Act was very unpatriotic, right?
Multiculturalism Sounds like, yeah, I take multiculturalism.
You know, I love Indian food and I sure have enjoyed traveling in Latin America.
Multicultural is the next guy.
Nope.
Multiculturalism is about insulation.
And that is why it is so dangerous.
Because the point is, if you, you know, if we're supposed to live together, but you're going to retain your obligation to some other thing, then the point is, well, we're not even really a nation, are we?
And I'm not arguing that this is in any way a simple question.
It's really not.
Because for one thing, let's take, for example, Asian minorities in countries of the traditional West.
These folks often live in enclaves that take on the cultural attributes of their homeland.
Is that something to be worried about?
I don't think so.
You're talking about like Chinatowns.
Right, Chinatown or Japantown, whatever it is.
Because I think what's going on, if I understand these places correctly, and I've certainly been to dozens of them, The immigrants retain their culture in these enclaves, but they don't expect their children to live within Japantown and to, you know, to not be of their host nation.
The point is, it's a transition period in the same way that When two people who do not speak the same language find themselves working the same field, having to coordinate with each other, they develop what's called a pidgin, a linguistic pidgin, which is not a complete language, but it allows them to exchange enough information to function.
And the point is, a pidgin is not, aha, we've arrived at, you know, the intersection between Swedish and French.
The point is, it's a stopgap measure.
And immigrants, you don't expect immigrants to suddenly be of their new culture, especially if the gap between cultures is big.
But the question is, is the commitment?
Actually, I do.
I'm moving there because I want to be of that place.
That's why I'm going through the effort of moving, is that I actually think that that place is the place for me and my family going forward.
That's the cosmopolitan view, even if it takes a temporary stop as, well, the people who've come from that culture are going to live in the same place because they speak each other's language and they know how to get things done.
But that's the real question is, you know, are you going to keep your children separate from your new culture?
Right?
I don't mean just teach them the traditions and feed them the food of the homeland.
I mean, is your priority to keep them from becoming part of your new culture?
That's the issue.
There's presumably a distinction for people who are seeking to go to, say, the United States because they understand the United States to be a place where they want to be, as opposed to needing to, whether or not the need is merely felt or absolutely true, escape from the place that they are from and finding the United States, or wherever it is, a place that they can go.
And so I would certainly expect the people in the first group would be more encouraging of their children to both hold on to the cultures of their homeland and also become American.
Whereas the people in the second group, while perhaps having some gratitude for having found safe harbor, Yeah, I agree.
be nearly as excited about actually having any members of their family become American because, you know, they don't feel like it was a choice.
Like, you know, they were forced out of the place that they wanted to be and it still feels like home to them.
Yeah, I agree.
And again, I don't want to pretend that there is any obviousness to how one addresses these distinctions, but there is a distinction between effective refugees, right, who are Who aren't moving by choice.
They're getting out of the way of something.
Which is, of course, perfectly understandable.
And I would point out that one of the things that we learned about the Czech Republic is that it had absorbed a large number of Ukrainian refugees.
Huge number.
A population of 10,000 Czech... 10 million Czech people.
They apparently accepted 500,000 Ukrainian refugees.
Right.
Interestingly, there was no, there was a little detectable tension over this.
There had been concern that there might be tension, but the fact is this functioning culture had absorbed a huge fraction of refugees and had done so in a way that had not been massively disruptive or had not caused a cultural crisis.
Now, the Ukrainians and the Czech people are not so distinct from one another.
Not nearly as distinct as some of the cultures that are coming into clash with one another as refugees come into countries.
True.
But I do think, unfortunately, we have become unwilling to discuss the difficult issues surrounding things like patriotism.
It doesn't make, you know, and I will just remind people, this is one of these terms I've redefined for myself because it needed redefining in order to do precise enough work.
So what I mean by patriotism does not inherently apply to a nation.
Patriotism is a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of something bigger and more important than you are.
A nation is one such thing, but it's not the only such thing.
But in any case, the idea that a nation has a right to wonder whether or not you are actually hostile when you move into this new homeland...
Or aspire to be part of it?
That is an obvious question.
Yes.
And to the extent that, you know, the open borders folks, for example, right, open borders sounds so lovely, you know, oh, there's an open border between Washington and Oregon.
That's just, that's how it should be globe wide.
Well, maybe one day but not while people are hostile to each other in a way that the border is the place where you take those folks who bear ill will towards you or to some fraction of you and exclude them because it's the good thing for the nation to exclude them at the border, right?
Once you're inside then obviously the questions of equal rights are fundamental but At the border, that's the place where a nation, you know, wouldn't it be wonderful if cells didn't have to have membranes, right?
Well, this is what I was just thinking, you know, like, to what degree can we go reductio ad absurdum on this and say, you know, all borders, all fences, all categorizations are wrong?
And I do feel like in some academic classrooms that is where this goes.
I think there was an argument, and at some level you could say that sex is a construct, and male and female are all in your mind, is perhaps a logical, if insane, downstream consequence of this kind of thinking.
Yeah, it's one of a million failure modes downstream of Marxism.
The basic point is, well, okay, the cartographic version of from each according to his ability to each according to his need is borderlessness.
The point is you go where you want, you take from them, because if they've got more and you've got less, then obviously it's their obligation to just hand it over.
The point is, no, no one has ever come up with a coherent mechanism for actually doing this in a way that it leaves a society tolerable.
The only way to make it work, since it punishes those who contribute more and rewards those who contribute less, is with the iron fist of authoritarianism to keep people from rebelling against it.
So, obviously, you've got to have a border, you're responsible for setting the rules inside of your border, hopefully you do so in a way that it enhances the lives of the people inside of that border so they become safer and more secure and liberated and all of those things but if you if you don't have a place where you stop the influx of people who are not on board with your rules, then it's, you know, not shocking when your rules come apart because of incoherence.
So anyway, I don't know.
I don't know exactly where that leaves us, but I do think Recognizing... there's been a trap set for us, and it's always the case, isn't it?
When you hear about multiculturalism, and you think it's like peer review, right?
Oh, of course.
Who doesn't want their work reviewed by peers?
Of course I'm in favor of peer review.
You know, is my medicine evidence-based?
Oh, you betcha!
Right?
These are all... Is the science data-driven?
Right, data-driven.
Gosh, I mean, that sounds so very empirical.
I'm going to follow that data.
Oh, follow it to the end of the earth.
Yeah, it just sounds like these are things the mind so quickly assumes it knows what these words mean when placed together in this way that it does not ask any questions, because to ask any questions would be to evidence that maybe you're not fully on board with empirical science, are you?
Right?
Maybe you don't want your work scrutinized because it can't take it.
That kind of thing.
And so anyway, multiculturalism is one of these things.
Yep.
Almost everybody of the West has sort of just accepted it because they know that they like some cuisine that isn't from their homeland, and so they aspire to multiculturalism, not realizing it's a Trojan horse, right?
What they're really aspiring to is Western cosmopolitanism, which, you know, People can't see that these are opposites, and we have to if we're to go forward.
So anyway, I think I've more or less said it, but wow, what a tragedy that we are this confused about these issues.
Indeed.
So we were in London largely to attend the ARC Conference, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, about which much has been said.
I don't know that we're going to say that much here, but do you want to?
Yeah, I mean, let's say, I think like the rest of the world, we became aware that there was going to be an art conference before it was named that, when Jordan Peterson mentioned his intent to build such a thing on Joe Rogan's podcast.
And it sounded like a tremendous opportunity.
And indeed, what they put on It was, in many regards, quite stunning.
It was as high a production value conference as I've ever been to, and it wasn't small.
You would imagine the highest production value conference would have been a tiny one, and no, this one was huge.
Yeah, something like 1,300, 1,400 people.
Yeah, it was really quite something.
Followed by an event at the O2 Arena, which is a big sports arena, with Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray and Bjorn Lomborg and Jonathan Pageau and a guest appearance by Ben Shapiro.
So anyway, this was quite the cultural moment.
And, you know, it definitely had a bent to it.
They were presenting a particular perspective, and it's one about which there's a lot to be said, both positive and negative.
But anyway, interesting that this is being attempted.
Yeah, and I will say two positive things about what we both saw.
I won't speak for you, but I think you and I both were impressed with a focus on art, that the spoken word poet, whose name do you remember?
I'm in contact with him, but I've forgotten it.
Yeah, who did a couple of spoken word poems was outstanding.
Truly outstanding.
And I've also forgotten the name of the artist whose paintings were a little hard to decipher.
They were large paintings on either side of the stage, hard to decipher when you were far away from them, but his presentation on the various ways that art speaks to us.
And also there was a composer who spoke about the role of creativity in uniting past, present, and future.
Understandings.
All of those I found very, very compelling.
So that thread, that focus on art, I thought was important and necessary.
And I also, I mean, I'd heard the term before, and I'm certain you knew a lot more and still do, about this than I did, but I had never actually heard anyone present on fourth-gen nuclear before.
So there was this one little segment on energy, and there are a couple of short presentations that were terrific, including a description of fourth-generation nuclear, which made me wonder.
As I have wondered before, but now much more sharply, To who wins by conflating second-gen nuclear with fourth-gen nuclear?
Why is it that we're still talking about nuclear as if that's a thing, when what that immediately calls to mind for almost everyone is dangerous and outdated and, and toxic.
And there is a totally different thing that is that is soon to be possible that is under active development.
And it's somehow under the same umbrella and who wins the current the second gen nuclear industry.
Right.
Now, the funny thing is, you know, it's new and it's cutting edge and it's only 50 years old that it's actually been possible to do, right?
But we're not doing it yet.
It actually has been done and I believe, I don't know, but I believe that basically there were a couple of reactors that used this technology that were then shut down and so, you know, the uranium folks are in charge still of the nuclear industry.
But we will see.
Now, there's also A lot to be said about what we don't know.
Fourth-gen nuclear looks to be a great deal safer and more reasonable from the point of view of burning spent nuclear fuel from uranium-based reactors, for example.
Melting down to a safe state rather than a catastrophic failure.
But the question is, what don't we know?
Right?
You know, uranium is the devil we do know.
I don't know of anything that suggests that 4th Xen would be similarly destructive and hazardous.
I guess these are discussions for another time that we should definitely have, but it was interesting to see that.
Also, there was a fascinating presentation on a cactus biomass proposal that, frankly, I mean, that sounds No, it's awesome, actually, and the awesome guy behind it sent me some pictures of him at the cactus farm, but it looks like it could actually do a tremendous amount of good to basically turn, I think it was the cactus pads, into both feed and biofuel.
Both, like feed for cattle and such, and biofuel.
Yeah.
Basically taking apparently non-useful land, non-arable land, and what did you call it?
Sustainable solar.
Sustainable solar.
Yeah, I think this is the way to think of it, because of course, you know, as Michael Schellenberger, who was present, has pointed out, Solar is one of these technologies that if you just pay attention to the fact that something that you stuck out in the sun is spitting out electricity, it looks beautiful.
But when you consider what it takes to make one of these photovoltaic cells, what it takes to dispose of it, what its lifetime is, right?
This is not as good a technology as you would like.
I'm still very favorable to solar, of course.
Cactus is a great technology.
And it's solar.
The point is, it's solar done in a way that you don't have to do anything because it's self-renewing.
It's already figured out all the glitches.
Yes, it's already figured out all the glitches, and actually this was one of the excellent points made by Chris Martinson in the podcast that we released a few weeks ago while we were away, where he points out that effectively nature is the only one doing these things sustainably and that wind farms and solar, these are rebuildable.
But they're not sustainable because they don't maintain themselves.
Only plants do that.
So anyway, I'm going to be thrilled and tickled to discover that cactus was the solution to some big part of our problem.
I'm rooting for that for reasons that are not, you know, just about energy.
Yeah, totally.
I think it was Opus.
I'm going to look it up and put that in the show notes as well, so people can find it.
So, while you've been gone for a while, should we talk a little bit about what I was doing in Denver, or should we save that for next time?
Should we do that now?
That's your call.
Michael, does Zach have an opinion?
No, he does not.
Okay, we'll do it now.
Okay.
Are there a bunch of questions?
Well, I'd like to ask the audience, but you can't respond.
They can.
They can shake their fist at the screen.
How about this?
How about I just preview it, and then we'll come back to it.
Okay.
So, from London, I flew to Denver to give a talk at the GenSpect conference.
Genspect is an organization set up to talk reality about sex and gender and to promote non-medicalized responses to people with issues of gender.
And it was, boy, hopeful and heartbreaking both, which is the phrase I think I used in my natural selections piece yesterday.
One of the sets of things, so there are, I don't know, I'm guessing 300 people, 250, 300 people in attendance, and a lot of parents of beloved children who have come to believe that they are the sex that they are not, a lot of therapists, a number of medical professionals, not people who are actually
People who are trying to resist the ideology and not prescribe hormones and certainly not promote surgeries for these kids and young adults.
And maybe I'll save talking about sex equity for infant care.
Until next time.
That's a little teaser.
But I will share, one of the parents I talked to sent me a document that she is anonymized enough that she said I can share on it, but I don't want you to show my screen, Zach.
I'm going to read some of it, but do not share my screen because I'm not sure to what degree it is, the visuals have been anonymized.
So the mom sent me this saying – so she and I had talked before the manifesto of the trans-identified shooter had been released by Stephen Crowder a day or two ago.
And this mom and I had talked a day or two before that.
And she sent this to me and said, in light of that, um, and she's left out all identifying characteristics.
So the exact, the exact reason that she felt compelled to send this to me is not utterly clear, but let me just share some of what she, she had to say.
Again, this is, this was written by a mother.
Names and some identifying features have been changed.
Marla's daughter, Belle, has suffered from depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and defiant behavior since the age of 11.
Therapy and medication has had only limited success.
A year and a half ago, shortly after her 16th birthday, she left home and moved to a city five hours away to live with her aunt.
At that time, Belle came out as transgender, took on a boy's name, cut her hair, started wearing boys' clothing.
Her aunt, who was supportive of her transition, bought her chest binders and enrolled her in the local high school as a boy.
Against the urging of Belle's therapist, her aunt was in no hurry to continue Belle's therapy.
She believed that there was nothing wrong with Belle's mental health and that all Belle needed was a supportive environment, unconditional love, and to be accepted for who she was.
This is the affirmative care model, right?
Let me say that one of the speakers, a remarkable young woman, a detransitioner, spoke at the conference about the distinction between affirmation and validation, and was arguing in favor of validation, which sounds like, you know, what's the difference?
But the distinction that she made, so this is a natal female who lived as a man for some years and has now detransitioned, and is coming to be comfortable again in her female body.
She said, validation is, I validate that you are having the feelings that you say you are having.
And affirmation is, and your feelings are real and true.
Your feelings are a reflection of physical reality.
Yes.
And so validation of, yes, I have no, if you tell me you are feeling those things, you are feeling those things.
Um, but affirmation takes that a step, an illogical step further, and says, um, your feelings are reflective of reality, which some feelings are and some feelings aren't.
It is certainly not true that all feelings are.
Um, so here we have Bell's Aunt So I have the distinction.
It's affirmation versus validation.
Yeah, and the affirmation affirmative care model is what is being pushed as the only appropriate model now in medical and clinical and therapeutic settings, where you must affirm.
You must affirm as reality whatever anyone says when they come into your office in terms of what their identity is.
So that's... It's affirmation.
And validation is, okay, you're having those feelings that doesn't make them reflective of reality.
The words aren't different enough to necessarily remember, but it's memorable that we can say, I hear you, I believe that you're having those feelings, without then taking the extra step and saying, and therefore your feelings are reflective of reality.
Yeah, it's unfortunately a little bit like cosmopolitanism versus multiculturalism in the sense that the terms could be swapped and you have to remember which is which.
Okay, so back to this, um, this mother's story, um, where Belle is the 16-year-old who has, uh, gone five hours away to her aunt's house, and her aunt is saying that she's going to provide unconditional love and to be accepted for who she was, and so she's now, um, effectively helping her niece trans in, um, socially, um, and, uh, ultimately chemically.
Belle's aunt cut off almost all contact with Belle's parents because they were not supportive of her transition.
She feared that they would try to fix Belle.
She believed their views were abusive and the cause of Belle's problems.
She believed that she needed to protect Belle from her parents.
This too is a theme that we hear over and over and over again.
The system decides, with the affirmative care model, the system decides it is the parents who know their child and who love their child deeply and who want more than anything to support their child and and be close with them again and protect their child.
The system decides that if they do not go along with a sudden change of identity that they are the biggest risk to the child and even the cause of the child's problems which is it's just despicable.
Last week, Belle was picked up by police under a special warrant and forcefully taken to a locked psychiatric unit.
Over the last few months, she had been hospitalized twice for manic episodes and had developed an obsession with guns, knives, and violence.
On her Tumblr account, she posted pictures of death, gore, and suicide, some of the vilest images on the internet, posting up to 100 pictures a day.
In her diary, her aunt found something so terrifying, she called the police.
Marla, the mom, prepared a letter.
I'm actually going to skip this part because it goes on for a while, but she prepared a letter to read at the Risk Assessment Committee of Bells High School, but in the end she decided against presenting her letter to the committee because the school board supports the current transgender ideology, and if she'd read the letter, she knew she'd be viewed as abusive and blamed for causing Bill's problems.
Instead, she sat quietly and answered their questions, being careful to refer to her daughter using the new boy's name and male pronouns.
After the meeting, the principal commended her for making the effort to accept her daughter for who she was and to love her unconditionally.
Actually, presumably it was for who he was, right?
Because it's the delusional principle saying this.
Marla's sister, the aunt who helped this teenager transition, will not allow Belle back in her house out of fear for her own safety.
So the aunt helped create a monster out of someone with known mental health problems and now is washing her hands of the whole thing.
So Belle is now homeless, living in a city five hours from her home, in a city where the only person that she knows is her aunt who will no longer let her into her house.
And the final paragraph is, Marla, the mom, sleeps with a little bag packed, ready to leave at a moment's notice.
She's waiting for the call, from whom she does not know.
The hospital?
The police?
The school?
She does not know, but she knows it will come.
And so she waits.
It's terrifying.
This mother is having a very particular and individual experience.
And this experience is repeated with slightly different details, with largely different details, over and over and over and over again because of what we are letting happen.
Because we have principals and school boards and therapists and doctors who say affirmative care model is the only thing
and if you feel like a donut today you're a donut and of course if you said donut it wouldn't work but the only way this the only one that they believe is i feel like the sex i am not and you know as is obvious as i said in the talk that i gave here as we have said many times there is very little that is binary in biology there is very very little that is binary but sex is the exception sex is binary and in our lineage
Um, you cannot switch what sex you are.
We have chromosomal sex determination, and the sex that we are is the sex that we are.
And we can play around gender norms as much as we want, honestly, um, but that doesn't change the sex that we are.
So, um, at the point that Belle, uh, became focused on violence... Yeah.
What was the level of her so-called transition?
I believe, it's not in this letter, but I believe from talking to her mother that she was on testosterone.
So there's a, it's obviously implicit in what you described, but the idea, I mean, let's just first be clear about the biology here.
Your parents are the best shot you have at somebody who is truly on your team at the highest possible level.
And the reason for that is because each one is 50% genetically related to you.
And while that is true, statistically, of your siblings as well, your full siblings, They are also your competitors, in a manner of speaking.
And that is not to say that siblings do not overwhelmingly have each other's interests at heart, but it means that there is a well-understood conflict that comes from the fact that resources are limited in any case.
Your parents are also a generation removed Which basically their hope of getting their genes deeply into the future, which is of course what they are wired to do whether they know it or not, goes through their children and then their grandchildren.
So while you cannot be certain, and there are lots of bad parents out there, your parents are the best shot at having somebody truly on your team until you sign up with a partner.
And if you do it right, then that person becomes truly on your team because their best shot at getting their genes in the future depends on your partnership.
So what is happening here?
Is that the state is participating in a rebellion against parents that liberates people who are not in a position.
I mean, these are people who are specifically going to be unwell by their own definition.
If you're born into the wrong body, that's not well.
So the point is, if that's what you think you are, you're telling us that something is way off.
So the state is emancipating people who are in this precarious state.
The chemical fact that somehow in emancipating people that the state is participating in requiring affirmative care, another label doesn't fit what's in the box, is going to result in a disruption of people who are unwell.
In a direction that at least some of the time is going to lean towards things for which this person has no developmental capacity to control them because they're not native to that person.
So it's not surprising at all that this would be a result.
Doesn't mean it's universal, but it means it's certainly on the list of possibilities that you would expect to see.
Further, and I think you were very early on spotting this, The degree to which there's a standard pharma ploy in here.
The idea of, hey, we can define something that is commonplace.
Let's say gender dysphoria.
We can define it as a malady for which we just happen to have a chemical treatment.
And what we need is an immunity from the consequences of administering this super weapon.
That is not targeted, right?
We don't know enough about biology to intervene post-development to change your sex, even if we understood what that meant, right?
We just have blunt tools at best.
But the idea that pharma is going to create a pathology, right?
Why do I say creative pathology?
Because we know that most people who have gender dysphoria as young people grow out of it.
So why aren't we letting them grow out of it?
Because we're obligated to help them become who they really are, as if that makes any sense.
And if you transition and do not desist or detransition, You are a pharmaceutical customer for life.
Right.
You are a patient for life and a pharmaceutical customer for life.
And that is a win for the pharmaceutical company and a lose for you.
Yeah.
It's a kind of chemical brand loyalty.
And the idea that you have a mother who represents presumably many such mothers looking in horror at the fact that her Emancipated child has now been interfered with, is now a danger to herself and others, and is in no position to do anything about it, because the fact of that emancipation means that a parent in a very difficult situation doesn't have the tools to address it.
So, you know, what is the obligation of society to the potential victims that this person might go after because of their delusional violent fantasies.
Right?
Those people at this moment are walking around unaware that there's a ticking time bomb out there without a home, having violent fantasies.
I mean, this couldn't be more obvious.
And yet, we're going to continue to do it.
It felt at this conference, and I will come back and talk a bit more about some of the more hopeful things that I heard on our next live stream next Tuesday, but it did feel like the tide is turning a bit.
As much as we heard public presentations and I heard many private stories about the The grief and the wreckage that is being done in the name of science and medicine and equity and inclusion and I don't even know what.
It does feel that many, many people are waking up and seeing it.
At the same time that Courts in many places are still, school districts and therapists and medical professionals and courts in many places are actually holding children hostage, allowing one parent to destroy a child even as much as presumably those parents don't think that's what they're doing.
But one parent to destroy a child while the other parent fights fiercely to not let it happen.
But because now the default assumption is If your child says they're trans and you say they're not, you are wrong.
That has become the default assumption and that is horrible.
Yeah, I must say I think part of the reason that people are waking up is that the blue team, which cynically went along with this stuff, has decided to distance itself from the woke revolution that it created.
And this is obviously one of the major themes of that revolution.
But I also think What happens exactly when all of these people who have been led halfway through such a story are abandoned because suddenly the team that did this is pretending that they have no responsibility to these people who they have to differing degrees destroyed?
What comes next?
Because those people have every right to be very angry and There are lawsuits.
The lawsuits are beginning.
And that's that's a good sign, too.
It is a good sign.
But I guess my point would be there are too many people who have been compromised at too high a level.
And I think what we're going to see, unfortunately, is a rerun of the battle over people dying suddenly.
Right?
People dying suddenly.
There is an absurd campaign to portray this as normal or the result of some mysterious thing that we haven't figured out, but it's nothing to worry about because, you know, it's either not happening or, you know, kids get strokes.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's true, right?
That thing, these people are now going to be gaslit.
That's the point.
And what happens when you take a bunch of people that you've chemically destabilized and you gaslight them over whether or not they were harmed?
Yeah.
Now, at the moment, the detransitioners are ignored and rebuffed and belittled, but the transitioners, at the point that the tide turns, are going to be gaslit.
They are going to be gaslit, and even worse.
Think about the various factions that owe them something.
So many.
You've got Pharma, which is going to be very focused on its legal liability, so it's going to have a massive campaign to prevent anybody from connecting dots that are sitting right next to each other.
Well, and I'm sure that there were a lot of things signed by people in desperation to finally have all of their problems solved by just taking these cross-sex hormones and that that Releases liability.
I'm sure those documents are in place.
Whatever tools they could arrange, they will have arranged.
Those folks in the community of trans folks are going to reject these people at the highest possible level because, of course, detransition has always been the greatest crime.
The people who went along with this garbage are going to play the middle ground scramble thing, right?
Where they're gonna, you know, find some mechanism for evading their own Failures and responsibility.
And so, you know, all of these people are going to be gassed and cut adrift from all of these people who owe them something.
And, you know, it's an unthinkable nightmare.
It is.
It really is.
Okay.
I will come back on our next live stream with Something that ends up just being so ridiculous that we have to laugh.
Sex equity for infant care.
Let's say democratizing breastfeeding.
You know, I'm prepared to laugh at it, but less so now that I know that it's the infants demanding it.
Yeah.
Yes.
Now they are up in arms, and actually since they're unable to walk, up in arms and legs over the inequities of breastfeeding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll go there next time.
In the meantime, we will do a Q&A shortly.
We'll come back in about 15 minutes and do a live Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And here's just a little bit of other things about places where you can find us.
Join us at Locals.
We've got so many benefits and more all the time.
We do We put our guest episodes that Brett has with awesome people up 24 hours early there.
We do our private monthly Q&A there on Locals.
We did not manage while we were in Prague or London together to do anything, but we do occasional impromptu Ask Me Anythings.
You've done some.
Zach and I did one.
Maybe we'll do that again.
That was fun.
And you can access our Discord server there.
You can still access the Discord server on our Patreons, but we're encouraging people to move over to Locals.
We've got Oh, Dark Horse Store, where Jake's Micro Pizza is, the t-shirts advertising Jake's Micro Pizza are available.
You know, I will put on my mask when I'm done eating.
You just can't see that I'm eating because the pizza is just that small.
It's very small.
It's very tiny, but delicious.
So good.
Yeah.
Yeah, so good.
Hypoallergenic.
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
Cheese-free, wheat-free.
It's not cheese-free, man.
We use only the highest quality cheese, but no wheat.
I thought it was cheese-free.
I thought you were encouraging me to have some.
Oh, we have a cheese-free version.
Yeah, it's done with cauliflower.
All right, we'll get our ducks in a row on Jake's micro-pizza here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because we just did the baptism of our book in Czech, it bears mentioning, Hunter Gaither's Guide to the 21st Century is now over two years old, but it's available in lots and lots of languages.
Including Czech.
Including Czech now.
It's a bestseller in the Czech Republic.
We didn't mention that.
I probably have the page up somewhere.
It's awesome.
Institute H2N1 also published Nadine Strossen's most recent book in Czech.
So we are in good company.
Lovely to discover a publisher that is actually so deeply involved in the work that's publishing it because they care about it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And what else?
Maybe that's it.
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