The Dream Team Scheme: The 207th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 207th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we sort out the strange reaction to Bret’s recent appearance on Tucker Carlson. What do all mobs have in common? What are the differences between critique and competition? We also talk about fat: from butter to olive oil to canola oil, what should you fry in? Are saturated fats bad for you? What are the ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 200 and something or other.
It is.
It's so 200-and-something.
It's hard to believe that it's 200-and-something.
And it's 2020-something.
It is 2020-something.
I'm actually reasonably confident it's 2024, and you know how I know that?
No, I do not.
Because shit's especially bananas.
Yeah, already.
And it's only just begun.
It is, in the excellent phrase of my oldest and dearest friend, looking to be a particularly banana pants year.
Banana pants, that's better.
Banana pants.
For a wider audience.
Yep.
Yeah, so it is the 200 and something or other episode.
207.
207, and I have no idea if it's prime, but I think it might be.
I didn't look into it.
I kind of think it's not, but I didn't look into it, but Zach's going to figure it out for us.
Yeah, all right.
So if any of y'all out there have factors other than 1 and 207, we're up to find out about it.
It's not prime, but I'm not sure what it is.
Okay, so apparently not prime.
It just doesn't feel prime to me.
All right, that is a case of misinformation.
An honest error.
I did not intend to mislead anybody, and it was not a truth that I was using to undermine people's trust in government, so it's not malinformation.
It was just a simple error.
Yeah, I'm wondering if attributing primeness to non-prime numbers could ever actually help a person become suspicious of their government.
I don't know.
What are the other factors?
501 and 207.
3, 9, 23, and 69.
So not only was I wrong, I was really very wrong.
3, 9, 23, and 69. - So not only was I wrong, I was really very wrong. - Yeah. - There's quite a few factors.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You are- I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I remain Dr. Brett Weinstein and will for some time to come, I think.
Yes.
Yes.
And you are Dr. Heather Heine.
I am.
Will remain so.
Hey, join us on Rumble.
That's where we are streaming to.
We'll be lots of places after that, but join us on Rumble.
Also, please join us on Locals.
After this episode, this time we're going to switch up how we do our Q&As.
We're going to do a few of them, but we are going to do them on Locals only and on, for now, the second episode of the month, which is this one.
And we're going to be taking questions through the chat, which we've never done before.
We can't see the chat during the live streams, but we're going to try that this time.
So come over, hop over onto Locals, join us there.
There's a watch party going on now, and then for the Q&A we'll actually be able to see the chat.
And bring your banana pants.
Leave your banana pants at home.
But wear some other kind of pants.
Bring your banana wine if you have it, but leave the banana pants at home.
I know.
That's good stuff.
I know, it is.
Remember it well.
It is.
So, yeah, that's basically it.
Also, if you're looking for evidence of banana pants, you can go over to our store at darkhorsestore.org and find things about Pfizer and PSYOPS and blueberries, which are not banana pants at all.
And Goliath!
And Goliath, which is memorialized at the store.
So we'll talk more about other ways to find us and support us and such at the end, but we will start today's episode as we always do with our three carefully chosen sponsors.
Know that if we are reading ads for sponsors, as we do three of them at the top of every show, it's because we actually truly stand behind these products or services.
We do not accept sponsors who make things or provide services that we do not stand by.
With that said, our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
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That's true, that is true.
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Yeah, much better, much more dignified.
I mean, it was a little badass at some level, right?
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All right.
You know, reading something that you've never read before is always a bit of an adventure with me, but you know, I got through it.
Yeah, you did.
You did.
So we got a couple of big, broad topics today.
Do you want to start?
Sure.
Why not?
All right.
All right.
I'll just promise we'll get to fats later.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So totally.
Yeah.
I mean, we will get there soon enough.
First, what you're going to talk about is the strange aftermath of my discussion with Tucker Carlson about primarily the mechanism of vaccine damage and the WHO pandemic preparedness plan that is currently hurtling towards a planet near you.
The one that you are on.
Yes, in fact that very planet is threatening to be tyrannized by the World Health Organization under this new preparedness plan which will be voted on by the member nations in May of 2024.
Yeah, we talked about the WHO plan a couple months back on Dark Horse, but I should say that we didn't know that your Tucker interview was coming out this week.
We would have said something.
In fact, we've heard from a few viewers, hey, you didn't mention this.
So you'd recorded this not too long ago, but not this week.
And so it came at least came as a surprise to me that it came out and it's fantastic and it has mostly garnered you know fantastic responses and has been has been watched far and wide like something somewhere like six million views.
Six million views in three days I don't know what it's at now but anyway it reached a lot of people and there was a lot of very good feedback From all sorts of folks who reached out, having seen it, both people that we know well and people we don't, who said that they had thought it had encapsulated these issues extremely well, and that it had woken some people up to specifically the danger in the WHO document, which, you know, as we know, is very difficult To describe.
It is intentionally difficult to make clear the hazard to civil liberties that this document or pair of documents poses because it's, you know, it's designed to be boring and it's designed to seem remote and basically like somebody else's problem.
Not very important because if there's anything bad in it, of course, your nation would never let that affect you.
That's why we have experts to protect us from problems like that.
Right, and in fact, you know, one of the things in the interview, Tucker sprung a clip of Tedros talking about the claim that this was a threat to sovereignty, and so I had never heard this.
He's responding to the claim, which he says is on social media and in podcasts, right?
Right.
He's probably responding to us and a few others.
And John Campbell, who, right, and he says that's just wrong.
Right.
What I said in On Tucker's program was that Tedros was just lying, and of course what he said was tantamount to a lie.
extensively about the document and it clearly is yeah well what i said in on tucker's program was that tedros was just lying and of course what he said was tantamount to a lie but on re-listening to it
i now see something more in what tedros said which is this is not a violation of sovereignty and then he implies the reason it is not a violation of sovereignty is because your nations in which you have nominally elected people to govern you will have signed on to it so So he is effectively acknowledging that they are going to override your sovereignty, but says, That's all within sovereignty because you agreed to it.
When will you have agreed to it?
Well, you were supposed to not notice that it was happening and then your government was supposed to agree to it in May and then the WHO is going to declare some emergency and suddenly things that you were never asked about were going to show up on your doorstep.
It's like he's making a claim of a kind of meta representative democracy in which your government is who you actually elected, even though it's now, you know, for most of us, a couple of levels deep of representative democracy.
And they are then using that proxy and saying, OK, now you get like the who gets to actually do or do its bidding on our behalf because you voted for us.
Well, there are two things that are relevant here.
One of them is you and I sometimes reference the beginning of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which there is a parallel set of disasters happening at two very different scales.
Arthur Dent's house is being knocked down by some local construction group to put through a highway.
And his knowledge that his house was to be knocked down was somehow bureaucratically buried so that he didn't quite notice that it was happening until he notices something out his window as he's brushing his teeth and it begins to dawn on him yellow.
There's something out there.
It's a bulldozer.
And at the exact moment that they're about to knock down his house, A hyperspace bypass is scheduled to be put right through where the Earth is, and so the Earth is going to be destroyed by the Vogons, and there is some back and forth.
Somebody on Earth manages to send a message back to the Vogons saying, you can't destroy the Earth to put in a bypass, and the Vogons say, well, the paperwork that was supposed to allow you To complain about this has been on file at Alpha Centurion.
The right time to complain has passed.
There was plenty of opportunity.
It was in the basement, and yes, the stairs were missing, and it was flooded, and there were crocodiles, and it was in a locked cabinet that was rusty and probably would have given you tetanus if you'd gotten near it, and all this, but there was an opportunity!
Yeah, don't say you didn't have the right to challenge this, and, you know, now that time has passed.
So anyway, Tedros is effectively- Be prepared to die.
Right.
Tedros is effectively invoking this defense that some document that you barely know is happening has moved through some channels that you're barely aware exist that is going to result in all of your freedoms disappearing.
But the point is, you can't say you didn't have the right to object through your representatives.
Now, of course, as we do object, they come back with that ridiculous response.
But the other thing that's relevant is a provision in the law, which, you know, I'm no lawyer.
I'm a biologist.
There is a provision in the law that you can't sign away your constitutional rights.
You actually just don't have the legal right to do it.
You can't decide to enslave yourself to somebody else.
But can the government decide for you?
No, it can't.
But the point is, if Tedros is saying that, well, You have the right to elect representatives, and they have the right to object to the loss of your sovereignty.
The answer is, they don't have any say over my sovereignty to begin with.
My constitutional rights are what they are.
They don't have the right to get rid of those things, so what the hell are you talking about, Tedros?
That's garbage from one end to the other.
But anyway, let's put that aside.
So this interview, this discussion between me and Tucker comes out.
I should say that the history of this discussion works as follows.
We caught on, I think, somewhat late to the fact that this WHO thing was happening.
And as soon as we looked into it, it alarmed us tremendously, right?
We, you know, it was easy to ignore it.
And then as soon as you look at it, it's like, oh my God, what are they contemplating?
As soon as we had figured out what it was, I reached out to Tucker and I said, do you know about this?
And he said, a little.
And he described what he thought.
And I said, well, you're not going to believe this.
And I told him what we had come to understand.
And he said, would you be interested in coming to talk about it?
And I said, absolutely.
That's why the thing happened.
But when it came out, in addition to all of the, um, Praise and the reports that people had been alerted to something that they hadn't been aware of.
There was a tremendous amount of pushback from people, most of whom I'd never heard of, but it was amazing.
There was like this whole layer of COVID dissidents who were enraged by this thing.
Let's just say, I think that the fact of this is actually useful.
Because as much as it is very unpleasant to face an enraged mob accusing you of all sorts of things, It does allow us to see a vulnerability in what should be the protective layer that prevents tyrannical things from happening.
And I would claim that multiple things, and in fact I put out a tweet to this effect, I believe multiple things are contributing to this.
One, dissidents by their very nature tend to be lone wolves.
And lone wolves tend not to be very good at teaming up.
Now, even my use of the word team in this discussion with Tucker enraged people, right?
So what I said, and this was clipped by some people in broadcast, was that Goliath had made a terrible error.
And Goliath's terrible error was to pick on All of the independent thinkers and drive them out of the institutions.
And so what I said is that Goliath screwed up because by driving out everybody who can think from the institutions, and what I should have said is he drove out everybody who has principles and insight and courage, right?
He just swept the institutions of those people.
By doing that, he created the dream team.
Right?
We're outgunned, but we have all of the people that you would want to fight back against Goliath.
And that was a fatal error on Goliath's part.
Wow, did that piss some people off.
And they're pissed off for a couple of reasons.
Go ahead.
Um, I am not as online as you are, and I have seen some of what's going on, but not a lot.
And one of the things that I wonder, and I don't want to derail you here, but it looks to me like some number of these people aren't people.
Oh, no doubt.
So, you know, I'm left with a decided question about to what degree, you know, there are now real people who are chiming in, but if the originators were none of them real people, or, you know, or if they were paid by something else that is not them and it's not obvious, then this discussion means something very, very different.
Yes, and the question is what do you do when you can't, you know, clearly some of these people are real, we even know some of them.
Yeah.
Very likely some of them are not real and that, you know, you would imagine that Goliath having been thoroughly embarrassed by the dissidents over the course of COVID and now presiding over the wreckage of a narrative that the public now sees through, that Goliath would love to create tensions in That group of people so that they cannot point in the same direction.
In fact, of course, this would be happening as the World Health Organization is gearing up its own tyrannical rematch.
You would want the people who fight tyranny to be fighting each other, right?
Wouldn't that be great?
So yes, I agree there's an inorganic part of this, and it may be that the inorganic part seeds the organic part.
It may be that they work in synergy.
But anyway, a number of things are going on and I think it is worth understanding this because, I mean, let's face it, everything is riding on our ability to repel tyranny at not only the national level but the international level.
We now know that.
COVID taught us this.
So my invoking the term dream team triggered a bunch of people, and yes, probably some bots and sock puppets too, but it triggered a bunch of people to react in a way I absolutely did not anticipate, right?
My saying, hey, Goliath kicked out all of the people who can think from the institutions and created the dream team caused a bunch of people to react as if I had said, hey, there's a dream team and you're not on it.
I didn't say anything about who's on it.
They also said, who are you to decide who's on it?
I didn't...
Say anything about that either.
I just said you've got a bunch of people who are now have the same enemy who have also all of the ability to think and that that's a good thing.
It's hard for me to imagine how you even come to imagine that I'm trying to impose some kind of narrative discipline.
No, I actually think that disagreement is good and it's how we got to understand as much as we did about COVID.
So Well, I mean, I guess this is part of why I don't know why it's worth engaging with people who object to words like team.
I mean, like, it's such a low-level—it's not even an argument.
You know, it's just—it's just pat-entry.
I mean, that's not even the right way—that's being too generous.
I don't even know what it is.
It's like less-than-kindergarten-level taunting.
Well, so, first of all, I did engage one of these people, or I tried to, and it sort of went superficially well, and then it didn't go well at all, and I don't know why that is.
But I do want to point out a couple things.
One, the name of this podcast is Dark Horse.
That's not an accident.
This podcast is about people that you wouldn't expect to find themselves at the forefront of an important fight, or whatever it is, who show up out of nowhere.
That is expected, right to the point that this podcast was named that before there was ever a battle over COVID, before there was a COVID.
So the point is, the idea... At least before we knew it.
Well, true.
But the idea that I or we are gunning for some elitist version of events where only, you know, people who are deemed worthy are on the team fighting Goliath is insane.
Second thing is, how crazy is it?
I mean, if we can agree that tyranny is bad and we can agree that whatever their likelihood of success, that the World Health Organization is involved in gearing up for tyranny that any dissident ought to oppose, Then you have to ask yourself the question, how much good was done by six million people becoming aware of this in three days?
Right?
whatever your problem with me might be, you have to just ask the question, what is the net effect of that level of exposure for an emerging tyrannical plan, right?
And if your point is, this is simple, look, you can challenge me on anything you want.
You can say I'm wrong.
And by all means, if you are right and I'm wrong, teach, right?
But be prepared that I may not be saying what you think I'm saying, to the extent that I seem to be adhering to some perspective that seems obviously wrong to you, maybe there's something you haven't seen yet.
I would also say that since we have both been professors and we have both seen hostility of various sorts, either because we were challenging previously held beliefs by students or they just didn't get what we were saying or whatever, Or they, often, they were certain that they had it right and we didn't, right?
And you know, this has happened outside the classroom as well, for sure, but it's easier to talk about within a classroom because everyone's been in a classroom, pretty much.
Very often, very, very often, when a student would be certain that I or you were just being willfully ignorant, were refusing to understand, the problem was actually You're not being clear.
I cannot track what it is that you are saying.
And until I can't understand what it is that you are saying, until you can put it in enough different ways that I can understand it, then no, I am not going to, which was often desired.
Like, you need to present this other view.
You've not yet clarified to me what the other view is.
There's no presenting something until it is clear what it is.
Furthermore, if we're talking about science, and we've got some hypothesis on the table, and you say, I've got an alternative hypothesis.
Okay, what does it predict?
What is the predictive power of that alternative hypothesis?
If you cannot answer that question, There will be some nuance here, but in general, if you cannot answer that question, what does your purported alternative hypothesis predict?
That it is not an alternative hypothesis to this thing that we're talking about, and therefore it doesn't deserve equal stature on the stage of discussing hypotheses.
So, very often the people who are certain, certain, A, certainty is a big red flag, that if you are certain that you are right now and you have always been right, How is that even possible?
And if you are certain that you have the alternative truth that no one else is seeing, Figure out a better way to say it, then, so that other people can understand it.
Because, by and large, when that sort of thing happens, it's... Actually, you do not have the clarity in your own head that you think you do.
And, I'm sorry, but being able to communicate it is part of knowing it.
And if you cannot communicate it, then you don't know it, and there's a good possibility that the thing that you think you know, you don't, and that there's nothing there.
Well, and it's implied by what you're saying, but the next thing for you to do is to return to the thinking stage.
If you've got a model, but it doesn't have a prediction, you need to go back and figure it out.
And what you discover in pursuing the prediction Is you will find holes in what you thought you may find the real model that you didn't see because you hadn't Given it enough scrutiny to look for the prediction.
So anyway, it's the natural part of Coming to a better understanding does involve scrutinizing your own stuff and saying, you know, if this is true Why is it that I don't have a prediction that sort of thing?
but in any case The reason I say it is a good thing that this happened is because the ability to recognize this vulnerability, it's not like this is the first dissident movement that's ever been torn apart from the inside by infighting, right?
That's a regular feature of dissidency.
If you want the dissidents to beat the tyrants, then we have to learn what this is.
And frankly, just, you know, yes, people will take it as condescending.
But if you're involved in that, then level up.
Come to understand where you are.
If you understand better than the people who are on the big podcast, okay, refine your message.
Figure out how to get it in front of us, and we'll elevate you.
You know, and I'm not saying it's our job to do that, but the point is you're looking at an organic movement of people, you know, you and I are biology professors, and suddenly we're out here on the internet.
Discussing these things in public because a in part it overlaps the skill set that we developed as biology professors in part because becoming being a biology professor was no longer tenable at the point that the administration of the college we worked at turned the college over to frankly a crazed mob that doesn't look so different than the dissidents who are currently claiming that they've been mistreated
So, anyway, I do think it is valuable for all of us to recognize, and I want to draw an important distinction here.
The dissident movement does not agree with itself about what happened during COVID.
It does not agree with itself about the priorities going forward.
There are large zones of agreement, and then there are large zones of disagreement.
There's no problem with that.
That's how we get smarter.
So there's lots of people, Dennis Rancourt, for example, Nick Hudson.
These are people with whom we have profound disagreements.
But there's no disrespect, right?
There's no inability to sit across the table from the person and say, actually, here's why I think you have that wrong.
And they can say, here's why you have it wrong.
And the point is, sooner or later, these things resolve over time.
That's the way it should work.
And I believe, I've met some of these people and not nearly as many as you have, but I believe always that there is a shared interest in figuring out what is right.
That I, you know, on the question of SARS-CoV-2, the virus, does it exist?
What I have seen suggests to me that it does.
I don't want it to.
I'm not invested in that as a reality, as an outcome.
What I want is to know if I am wrong that I am wrong, so that I can reconsider all of the other things that I think that may hinge on that basic fundamental assumption.
That is what I want.
Now we do, we will start to identify with some of our beliefs, right?
Even things that we think are factual, we will start to wear them like they're part of who we are and that is when it becomes dangerous because it is harder to back off.
But I think one of the big issues that people, as you were saying, in the dissonant community disagree about is whether or not there is actually a virus.
I know what I think based on what I have seen, and it's not important to me that I'm right.
What's important to me is that I discover what is right as soon as I can.
Now, that doesn't mean that, you know, that's my priority, because there are an infinite number of things about which people disagree.
And, you know, we are constantly, both you and I, are constantly being dragged into, or people are attempting to drag us into, like, oh, this thing I think you're wrong about, and therefore you have to focus here so that you could clarify your understanding there.
It's like, you know what?
I get to choose.
I get to choose which of the things that I am thinking about right now I'm going to focus on, and that allows me to have in the background some things which, yes, may be wrong, but this is part of why I say that certainty is one of the biggest problems, and that people who claim that they are certain that the only way to be trusted is to have been right first all along, you know what?
You're never going to be right first all along, and so if that's really your precondition for trusting someone, you're going to be wrong.
Yeah.
There's also... How can I say this?
One of the things that I think is clearly true is that Unfortunately, I don't have a synonym for the word game.
I know from taking game theory very seriously that the problem with game being in the title of it is it suggests a kind of trivial, frivolous aspect.
You and I are deadly serious about getting stuff right and standing for what matters.
Standing for individual liberty, sovereignty, informed consent, all of these values.
The ability to do that, to, to have a discussion with somebody like Tucker or Rogan, um, or to go on, you know, even worse, the worst of these are, uh, network programs where they give you three minutes, you know, maybe they tell you they give you five minutes and then, you know, three minutes before they put you on, they say it's been cut to three cause somebody went long and you're trying to keep your wits about you.
It's very difficult, but.
The thing about a big, a live to tape is the term for it, but where you have a discussion, nobody's going to edit it, and you're trying to get it right on camera.
That is much more difficult than it looks.
That is a skill that involves tensions between many different values.
And one of those values is getting it right, right?
But getting it right, if you're not clear, is not valuable, right?
And so there is a tendency for people who have not, you know, I would say, In any of these opportunities, there is some, let's call it a value.
What could be accomplished with that much time in front of that audience, right?
That is always greater than what you set out to accomplish, right?
Because you don't understand what might be accomplished.
So you've already lost some value in going to what you can imagine doing in front of that audience in that amount of time.
And then what you actually accomplish is even less than that, right?
It's difficult to do the job.
And so my point would be, if you haven't faced that situation, then you may think, you know, why didn't he say this?
Right?
Why didn't he get to that?
It's really not a fair comparison.
You need to understand that actually the job is complex and that the trade-offs are much greater than it seems when you're just watching the product.
Well, I think you mentioned that, you know, the mob at Evergreen had analogies to this mob, and that's in part because mob is mob, but it's in part also because, and you know, maybe this is in fact a relatively or actually universal feature of mobs, or of just, you know, the
Uninformed angry, which is that I'm reminded of, I believe it was Nancy Rolliman who first started pointing this out about the woke mobs, not Evergreen in particular, but these these mobs, you know, Antifa, like these mobs that just take over and, you know, what took over Portland in 2020 after George Floyd died, just night after night after night of rampant destruction, right?
And What became utterly clear, and in fact, ultimately, some of them even said it, was, we just want to destroy.
That's what we do.
We just want to destroy.
We have no ability.
They did not say this, but this was Nancy's framing.
They have no ability to create.
They are only destructive.
They only see something which they have decided is not good.
And instead of imagining a world which might be better and working towards that, they say, must destroy that which I see which I do not like.
And this feels exactly the same way.
And, you know, I see how you could frame it as like, no, I know what he should have said.
No, because this is actually a creation, a conversation, you know, either a live stream or live to tape, is a type of creation that is unlike sitting in a bar with your friends or being alone in front of your computer writing.
Could perfection be obtained?
Could you, could I, could any of us go through something that we have done and say, ah, I wish I had said that better.
Oh, I wish I had remembered, I mean, any talk anyone's ever given, right?
Like, ah, I forgot to do these two things, right?
Yep, I do it every time.
Every time, right?
No matter how good your visuals are that are supposed to prompt you, nope, you skip right over something, like some line that you had, like you just, you miss it, right?
So, it's very easy to be an armchair critic, but more to the point, it's much easier.
It's always easier to critique than to create.
Always.
And I think this is actually part of what went wrong in academia as well, which was the elevation in all of these new pseudo-fields, plus the takeover of most of the social sciences and many of the humanities as well, of criticism.
And you know, criticism is honorable and amazing and in a great art class is absolutely necessary.
And you need to expose your ideas scientifically to criticism of yourself, of your peers, of your enemies, everyone, right?
But this idea of critique as the thing that is done, like literary theory is often just critique as opposed to generating new And the fact is, that's lazy.
And that's easy, by comparison.
And that's what we've got here.
There's a whole lot of critique.
And, you know, no ability necessarily to be like, oh, let me do it.
Let me take an hour with Tucker and see how I could do it.
Like, okay, that's not actually on offer.
But the fact is, this isn't a job that you know.
And critique is easy.
Slinging mud is easy.
Well, I'm going to separate two things, and I'm going to go back to an analogy we've used before.
In ecology, ecology is a very broken field, but it's got a few useful tools.
One of them is the distinction between what's called exploitation competition and interference competition.
Exploitation competition, if you imagine that there are, if you're a hummingbird and there are flowers that are putting out nectar, Then you are in competition with everything else that wants that nectar, and by exploiting the resource you leave less of it for others, but you're not Damaging others so that they can't get to the resource, right?
You are competing by exploiting the resource at a higher rate than they are.
I think critique in this context, if somebody is angry at me because of something I've said, they want to put out stuff that shows why I've got it wrong.
Right?
Then the point is, there's a space of attention, of thoughts, and they may very well eclipse me, and that's to the good.
And then my next move, as I see this thing, and I think, you know, actually, yeah, they have a point there.
Actually, they don't have a point here.
I may respond to that thing.
That makes us all stronger, and what it does that's most important is it makes us most likely to succeed in the important goal, which is defeating whatever it is that's moving through the World Health Organization, claiming that our surrender of our sovereignty is our own goddamn fault.
So, if you want to engage in competitive behavior, and critique is part of that, by all means, do it, and do it well.
The better you do it, the better off we are.
On the other hand, if what you're going to do is go after people who are trying to do the right thing, people who are behaving in an honorable fashion, doing the best they can, trying to make things better for us, you are part of the problem.
And that's interference competition, right?
Poisoning the soil so your competitors can't grow.
That is not elevating anybody.
And what does it do?
It absolutely makes it more likely that the tyrants are going to do exactly the stuff that you don't want them to do.
That you claim is motivating your anger at me.
So, I should say we haven't mentioned lockdown specifically yet.
The reason, the most concentrated criticism that I am getting is on my position relative to lockdowns.
And I feel stuck in this case because I know what my position is and I know why it is my position.
My position has changed several times about lockdowns.
I can articulate what it is today.
But the last thing I want to do, what I, you know, if there's anybody Who has had the advanced training course in facing angry confused mobs, it's me.
I know that if I do what these people want, right?
If I give them what they want they will be enraged even further, right?
And make more demands, and at some point you will stop meeting the demands, and you will never apologize for that which you did not do.
Well, not only didn't do... I'm just saying in general, you will never apologize for anything that you did not do.
Legitimate, honorable apologies need to remain legitimate and honorable, and therefore you do not make false apologies.
And a mob that does not apologize to you when it demands one, that makes demands that you accede to, and then makes more demands that you stop acceding to because you realize it's an infinite process and you can never win, only, as you say, becomes more enraged.
I would just add one thing to that, which is you don't apologize for stuff you didn't do, and you correct errors.
If the errors were honestly made, you don't apologize for errors.
You just say, I got it wrong, and now this is my position.
And so the demand for apology is out of place in the first place, because it presumes things about motive that are just simply false, right?
It's the wrong paradigm.
So do you want to...
Yeah, it just occurred to me when we were talking today actually, excuse me, that what, 11, 10 and a half months ago, excuse me, I don't remember actually what prompted exactly this piece in Natural Selection, so you can show my screen here.
But I wrote a piece that was not exhaustive at all, but basically laying out the points that we have been making on COVID, on Dark Horse, from the beginning, and a few errors, especially early on, and a bunch of not errors, in which we were right, we were Early, we lost, you know, we lost a lot, right?
We were demonetized and lost people and such, but... Demonetized, I would point out, it's become ever clearer the more time has passed.
Our channel was skyrocketing in terms of subscriptions.
At the point we were demonetized, that stopped instantly.
Not only would we have easily had financial independence very quickly with that rate of growth, but the rate of growth was itself growing with the money that was coming in and the rate of growth was high.
And the capping of the size of the channel has effects on all kinds of things, because when you publish a book, when you try to get advertisers to sign on, everything is scaled to how big is your reach, so these things matter.
So yes, we paid a high price.
But every so often, and this week it's your interview with Tucker Carlson, people decide that becoming enraged is the thing to do.
And so I wrote this apparently with the bad guys, or don't ask permission to speak, and it got a lot of a lot of positive engagement.
And I just, well, I'll read the first couple of paragraphs here.
Were you silent on the question of viral origins before John Stewart and the United States Department of Energy told you that you were allowed to think certain thoughts?
Those thoughts were dubbed conspiratorial and dangerous and uncareful until they weren't.
Oh, maybe it did come from a lab after all.
Did it take Woody Harrelson on Saturday Night Live to point out to you that pharmaceutical companies are acting as drug cartels and that the media is in their sway?
Financial incentives drive success in business and Pfizer is nothing if not successful these days.
Huh.
Maybe Pfizer wasn't the white knight we were told it was.
These last three years, too many of us have let social coercion and fear drive what we say out loud, and even what we think.
We've outsourced our thinking to self-described experts, credentialed, well-dressed, well-spoken experts, who have been wrong, disastrously so, over and over and over again.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me three times, four times, fifty times, a hundred, what the hell?
Shame on all of us who continue to fall for these games.
I'll read a little bit more here actually.
We need to be suspect of any conclusion that arrives fully formed, especially if no questions are allowed.
In response to pronouncements from the government and health agencies, get in the habit of saying, I'm not sure about that.
It can open your mind, and once your mind is open, all manner of wonderful things can happen.
It may not keep you in good stead with your social group, but My husband, Brett Weinstein, and I have said a lot of things these last three years that have angered people.
Before Jon Stewart or the Department of Energy or Woody Harrelson had said anything publicly, we were publicly discussing, using the scientific tools at our disposal, the very real possibilities of that.
SARS-CoV-2 was the product of gain-of-function research, and while its foundations were borrowed from a bat, the final product came from a lab.
The vaccines that were developed at record speed and presented as the one and only solution to the problem of the pandemic, specifically the mRNA products, are neither safe nor effective.
Many alternative treatments for COVID exist, including but not limited to repurposed drugs with extensive safety records that are long out of patent, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
For this, we have been vilified.
So let me just say, and there's more, I have a long bullet list of various of our positions with links to where we first talked about them as far as I can find in our long list of Dark Horse episodes since May of 2020.
Here are a few of the other things that Brett and I have given voice to these last three years, conclusions that we came to through observation, checking of our assumptions, analysis, and re-analysis.
Be careful, though.
Consider these ideas, and who knows what could happen.
And I begin with what I see as two of our big mistakes.
Early in the pandemic, we thought that masks were broadly effective.
We were wrong.
First, we spoke about the importance of masks, and as new evidence came in, our position changed.
We spoke about that, too.
We also thought that short, early, and strong lockdowns had a chance of stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
We were wrong about that.
I don't think lockdowns could have worked, in part because I don't think sufficient worldwide compliance was possible to stop the spread.
And as much as I am disappointed to have landed here, I no longer trust my government to borrow any of my freedoms.
So it goes on and on and on.
So, maybe this is the point to talk about what my current position is on lockdowns and what I regret and what I don't regret.
Good.
My current position, first of all, I do not believe that given what SARS-CoV-2 is, that there was any potential to control, certainly not control spread.
And my focus has been actually driving the pathogen to extinction.
So the reason that I will not just simply say lockdowns could never conceivably work under any circumstances against any pathogen is that there, remember, I'm a biologist.
Here's what I'm focused on.
A novel pathogen that were to jump by human meddling or some other mechanism into the human population from some animal source.
that therefore starts out at some low level but has significant virulence.
So I'm just painting a scenario here.
Were there to be a novel pathogen that leapt into people but had not yet become endemic to humanity, If one could drive it to extinction in that early phase, the value to humanity would be incalculably large.
And I choose that phrasing very carefully.
The reason that it would be incalculably large is that the alternative of allowing it to run its course and become endemic is for it to continue to inflict costs on humans for as long as humans continue to exist.
There is a value to taking a pathogen that there is still the potential to drive it extinct and doing so rather than running out the clock and letting it become endemic.
So you can disagree with me that that's something to be worth focusing on, but you can't disagree with me that If one had the ability to drive a new human pathogen to extinction, that the value of doing so would be very high and would be worth a significant but small cost.
And that is why I have said short, intense lockdowns.
However, so there's that.
I do not believe there is a government on Earth today, at least not at any large scale.
Whether a city government could have some alternative scenario, I don't know.
But the idea that there's a national government or an international body on Earth today that could be trusted with this kind of power is preposterous, nor do I expect to live To see a government worthy of trust in this regard.
So going forward, I would oppose any lockdown because I regard the people who would be issuing such an order to be illegitimate and very likely up to no good.
But the point is when I have presented this idea,
I have set it as a brief, intense lockdown accompanied by high-quality testing, and the idea is, in this scenario, a pathogen that spread and burned itself out in some short period of time, and where in those rare cases where for some reason it was able to bounce around for long enough to escape that period of weeks, You would be able to find it with the testing.
That would allow, in principle, some properly organized body to figure out how to drive a pathogen to extinction and benefit humanity tremendously.
Again, I would oppose any lockdown that came from normal Earth governments at the moment, but I do not rule out the possibility that in the future you could face a pathogen that it would be worth doing.
What's more, I would point this out.
So, the folks who are attacking me have been very focused on the idea that I, in some hypothetical scenario, favor something like an intense lockdown.
And they've been very avoidant of why that is paired with short duration.
In other words, if you're looking to paint me as a villain, you would focus on the one thing and you would ignore the other, which they have done.
They have also ignored the fact that I've said that absent good testing, this would be pointless.
I'm not arguing that this is a useful way to control the spread of a pathogen.
I'm arguing that in the brief period before something becomes endemic, that it could be used to drive a pathogen to extinction, and that the disproportionate value of preventing a pathogen from becoming endemic is of a different sort.
And I would argue That reasonable people all understand that although civil liberties are sacrosanct and should be, that there are circumstances in which you make a compromise.
So, for example...
No reasonable person would argue that if you have an active shooter and they are wandering through a school, that locking down the population of that school is a violation of their civil liberties that we ought to complain about, right?
Giving the police the ability to have access to the shooter and keeping people safe from the shooter is a perfectly reasonable reason to have a lockdown.
Is it an abridgment of people's civil liberties?
You bet it is, but we all understand why, right?
Likewise, if you presumably had somebody, you know, if somebody released smallpox from one of the places where it is maintained under lock and key, and some person had smallpox, and they were wandering around a hospital, would it make sense to lock down the population of the hospital so that they didn't contact the person with smallpox?
Yes, it would.
The only reason I'm pointing this out is that even though civil liberties are sacrosanct, we can all understand that there are circumstances in which it makes sense to prioritize something else briefly, and that is an extension of the argument that I've been making.
That said, I am not favoring lockdowns.
I do not believe they were ever appropriate for SARS-CoV-2, nor was the rationale that we were given for those lockdowns the one that I'm pointing to.
The rationale we were given was some nonsense about flattening the curve and preventing the hospitals from being flooded, which was apparently bullshit from the get-go.
The hospitals were largely empty.
So I'm not defending anything like lockdowns that we had, and I'm not advocating that we should leave the door open to them in the future, because there's no government that could be trusted with it.
But is there a reason to leave the concept open for some future scenario that we cannot imagine?
Yes, there is.
Good.
Okay.
Oh, to your point about how much of this is organic.
I do think we need to ask this question.
Even the people who are actually dissidents and who are actually enraged of their own accord, they have to ask themselves how much are they being induced to see a world that isn't in order to keep us back on our heels or whatever it is.
And I wanted to point to a couple things.
And it's more energizing when you feel like you've got a lot of people who are of the same mind.
Oh.
It's why mobs are what they are.
And I guess something I didn't say when you first introduced the idea that this... when you were first talking about the nature of this mob, is there's something... mob mentality is...
Low quality.
It's amygdala-driven, right?
Yeah.
It's not your highest mental centers doing their best to figure out what's going on.
It's you de-individuating and becoming part of some thing, and it's not a thinking, careful thing, right?
But if you felt small before, now you don't feel small, and that is a source of power for people.
Right, they are tapping into a feeling of a source of power where all of these aggrieved people have pointed at the same enemy.
And ironically enough, that enemy is me, right?
Now, a friend pointed out the relevance of the work of Rene Girard to this situation, which I'm surprised I forgot to think of myself.
But Rene Girard was a philosophical thinker.
who generated a model, a hypothesis about scapegoating, that effectively one of the galvanizing forces in any group is the identification of a scapegoat and the targeting of them, and this he describes as basically the nucleating event.
that causes witch hunting right yeah good or witch either way yeah yeah but anyway so it's very odd and certainly ironic that i would be the target of these people'sire but it's not that surprising that they would find some target and you've been in the witch seat before uh it's it's a place i seem to find myself and and uh i will remind people um that two days i believe before evergreen melted down i put on the board for my students a model of witch hunting
um which If I remember it correctly, it was in every such scenario, there are a tiny number of people who will instigate a witch hunt.
There are a fair number of people who will participate in a witch hunt.
There are a large number of people who will say nothing.
And there are a tiny number of people who will oppose a witch hunt.
Those are the witches.
Yep.
So anyway, it's there is a reason that I end up in this situation and I guess I'm kind of proud of it, but Let's you want to play that little video clip So let me just say that this is some I guess Podcaster never heard of him who showed up and his stuff started being circulated against between the people who were going after me and I think it's just fascinating to me what it is so
For today, lastly, we're going to get into a little bit of contentious territory here.
I have been openly critical of podcaster Bret Weinstein.
I used to watch Bret's show.
A lot of y'all might remember in the first episode of this podcast, I specifically called out Bret for his views espousing a Genetic Jewish supremacy, let's say.
This idea that the Jewish people are genetically superior to everyone else and inherently more intelligent than everyone else.
And I've also been super vocal about my issues with his coverage of the COVID response.
And it seems like some people are starting to catch up with that.
This account on Twitter, Jessica Hockett, I don't know her.
I don't know, you know, I don't know who she is or whatever, but she recently posted this clip of Brett on somebody's show.
I guess this is Michael Schellenberger, who was a reporter.
Here's what's interesting.
Extraordinary.
Yeah.
He says that he's been critical of me for arguing that Jews are genetically superior.
Now, I know that I have never said this because I know that I believe it's not true, which is something I have said.
And this is not something about which you've changed your mind.
No, this is something I have been arguing.
This is something you've always known.
I have been arguing this from long before I was in the public eye, that the unlikeliness of genetic superiority is, I believe, a biologically important argument.
I don't know where he gets this, or if it's organic at all.
I know it's inflammatory.
It's super inflammatory.
I mean, you just have to wonder, you know, do they think you're someone else?
Are they just making it up out of whole cloth?
Well... And, you know, there's going to be things... I mean, this is... that's too absurd, right?
I mean, this is actually a topic on which you have talked many, many times, and have been very clear every time, and there's just no ambiguity.
There are others who are ambiguous, because maybe they do actually have cryptic beliefs they don't really feel like saying yet, but that's not you.
But it does reveal, though, how many such points could be made, where you're like, God, I don't know.
I don't think that, but I do have more nuance than you might think, and oh gosh, what do they think I said?
They could cause a person to spin.
Not this one, because this is too obviously Wrong, right?
But there are so many topics on which you can get people spun up.
Yeah, but this one, at this moment in history, this one is particularly useful, right?
You have a resurgence in anti-Semitism, you have a Very dangerous situation in the Middle East continuing to unfold.
And so just sort of introducing the idea that I harbor this belief and that he's been critical of me.
So at the very best, he is incredibly sloppy and doesn't know what he's talking about and has misunderstood something about my belief or who I am or whatever.
But let's just say it doesn't really matter because nobody Checked him.
Nobody asked him for receipts on that.
It was just taken to be, oh yeah, Brett sucks.
Yeah, here's another one of the things he's terrible about, right?
Okay, then he doesn't even know enough about what he's talking about to recognize that that's my podcast, not Schellenberger's podcast.
So he's completely misunderstood the context.
It's as if Schellenberger is asking me about this.
No, I sat down with Schellenberger and had this conversation.
So anyway, it's extremely Sloppy.
Yeah, you're in a space that's not your own, but that's just because you were traveling.
But yeah, it's Dark Horse.
Yeah.
But the sloppiness is extreme.
And again, a mob is not a careful thinking entity.
It is a verificationist entity.
It is an overfitting engine, right?
It is looking for confirmation of the villainy of the thing it's targeted at.
It's not looking for disconfirming evidence that would cause, you know, How often in this circumstance or any of these witch hunts does somebody say, "Oh, wait a minute.
That's a piece of evidence I didn't know about.
Maybe I shouldn't be in this mob at all.
I'll be over there while you guys are witch hunting because I now know something is off." Right?
That's not one of the features of these mobs.
But here's the thing.
Even in an actual mob, you were able to reach some people.
And so the asynchronous virtual nature of an online mob is even harder to dissuade, is even harder to dismantle.
Because when the actual mob came for you, you reached people.
And you ended up talking to people and they ended up having thoughts and questions that they never imagined that they would have.
It was real-time, you were face-to-face, and they were able to see and perceive through all of the things we don't have language for, that you were actually willing and interested in engaging them, and that what they were bringing to you, as their claims against you, were actually surprising to you.
That these were not true, right?
The things that they said were true of you were not true, and you were surprised that anyone thought that.
And that that actually goes a ways, right?
There's no way to do that when there's a bunch of people putting out content constantly that's just full of, and again, we have no idea.
Is it lies?
Is it intentional?
It's wrong.
Either way, it's wrong.
But it's much, much harder to actually take apart a mob when it is both asynchronous and there is no It's not meatspace, right?
There's no actual ability to say, oh, you're a real person, and I can actually distinguish things that you're saying.
It's only language.
Like, okay, so it's video, so we get to see how you're moving a little bit, but there's so much less.
There's so much less of what the actual signal of human engagement is than when you are in person.
That's absolutely correct.
There's also one of the tough things about our position is that we have spent so much time exploring our understanding of things and having that understanding evolve in real time.
That, you know, it's impossible to know where the things we've said are, when they were said.
And actually somebody, Zach, could you put up the tweet?
Somebody was responding and found some timestamps in a June of 2020 Rogan discussion that I did.
So here, Somebody came to my defense and pointed out that in June of 2020, on the JRE podcast, at 1.54.08, I said, in my opinion, we should have locked down severely for six weeks or something.
And then the quote continues.
And then at 2.02.20, I said, we should be outdoors.
We should not be locking down those environments at all.
So if you were paying this much attention, then you understood that there was a deeper model at work.
And in fact, you know, you and I never get credit for this, but one of, I think, the stronger early things that you and I did was come up with a model of the effective volume of a space as it affected transmissibility.
And The point was, outdoor spaces, as much as it is surprising and conspicuous, outdoor spaces were effectively completely incapable of allowing the virus to transmit, and therefore the locking of them down was an absurdity, and you and I were shouting from the rooftops, there's no way you should be locking down beaches and state parks, you should be encouraging people to go there.
What's more, In our book, the first draft of it was finished as we emerged from the jungle having completed that draft.
No, but a couple months later.
As lockdowns were hitting, the first draft was being submitted in March of 2020.
Okay.
The addendum that was written after we emerged from the jungle, when we heard about COVID for the first time, so you and I went to Ecuador and worked on the book, and when we emerged we learned about what was then called novel coronavirus.
So the point is the book was written without knowledge of the fact that there was going to be this pseudo-emergency or whatever.
We added something to the book.
And what we added was a section which we have covered here on Dark Horse.
And what it says is, as a thought experiment, if human beings could have agreed to stay outdoors for two weeks, we could have driven SARS-CoV-2 from the face of the Earth because it can't apparently transmit outdoors.
Now, I worried a lot when we used to talk about the fact that it did not appear to transmit outside, that evolutionarily it would learn that trick sooner or later.
I don't know if it has.
There is the weird fact of deer having shown a high degree of infection.
I've never understood this piece of evidence.
And it's been very hard to track to what degree they are made ill.
I don't trust those data.
There's something odd about it, that a virus that doesn't transmit between people outdoors should have reached a high level of penetrance in a wild creature.
When did that happen?
So anyway, we don't know what that means.
But the point is, if your point is, oh, Brett and Heather are pro-lockdown, when you and I were shouting about the fact that we were being driven indoors, which is where the virus transmits, and forbidden to go outdoors, and that that was an absurdity, At every level, right?
You're not seeing the full picture.
The mob should be puzzling over the fact that it's got some evidence.
Yes, I have said that there are circumstances in which a lockdown could make sense, but then we've also said a bunch of things that are completely inconsistent, and what's more, the interview in question is targeted at derailing the tyrannical capacity of the World Health Organization to create global lockdowns.
So, what the hell, people?
Wake up!
Fair enough.
I'm remembering, I was just looking through my spreadsheet of our episodes where I don't, you know, I don't have time stamps, but I have notes.
I can't remember, I think it was April of 2020, may have been May, but I think it was April, in which one of the papers that I had run across All the research coming out of China at that point, I now don't know what all to make of it, but this paper seemed particularly well done, and it purported to have looked at some staggeringly large number of cases.
of COVID and, um, tracked basically where, uh, where the point of transmission was.
And there was one and only one case, uh, which could be, uh, could be attributed to an outdoor transmission.
And it was a guy who was extremely sick, hacking, hacking, hacking, right up next to his neighbor in some contentious conversation.
Maybe I've made up contentious, but in some conversation that went on for a long time, in which he's up close and he's hacking, and that's the only one.
And so that was, you know, for me, the moment I remember going like, okay.
And you know, at the same time, they're putting danger tape up on children's playgrounds.
Yeah.
They've closed down the schools, they've closed down work, and they're locking families up alone together and not giving the children anything to do.
And, you know, this is, again, one of these bullet points in this natural selections piece.
Keeping people inside was a huge error.
Closing parks and beaches, forests and playgrounds was a mistake.
Everyone should have been getting outside as much as possible, moving their bodies with enthusiasm and abandon, breathing in the air, letting the sun shine down upon their bare skin.
For every reason.
And then the next one is vitamin D.
For psychological health reasons.
Right.
Right.
So, yeah, I mean, I hate feeling defensive about this point.
But do we make errors?
Yes.
Have we been good about correcting them?
Yes.
Are we...
Lockdown fanatics, no.
And it is very troubling that this should now be caricatured by the very people who ought to be pointed at the same enemy, which is the World Health Organization and whatever is driving it to install these totalitarian measures in advance of some yet-to-be-declared emergency.
That's the obvious enemy.
And when people say, what team are you talking about?
I'm talking about whoever is willing to fight that thing.
And if you want to fight independently, go for it.
If you want to interact with other people who are fighting it, that's even better.
But don't tear people down who are actually earnestly trying to fend this off before it is sprung on us in some future context.
Yeah, maybe I'll just leave it there.
There's lots of other stuff we could show, but I think we've more or less covered it.
The infighting is destructive.
I think it was valuable to have seen it in this circumstance where we are not in the middle of an unfolding emergency.
Let's purge this instinct and get back to fighting the real enemy as soon as possible.
Should we talk about that?
Horse.
Yeah.
Okay.
Show me a screen here for a second here, Zach.
I came across this article and I think I was pointed to it on Twitter and I don't remember exactly the source.
I apologize.
Editorial on nutrition.
Chronic non-communicable disease risks presented by lipid oxidation products in fried foods.
So we're going to explain this.
There's a lot of technical stuff that I'm not going to go into, but I will say this is published in Unexpectedly, the Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition, the Journal of Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition, And it's an editorial.
So already we're in some strange territory.
And one of the things that suggests to me is, you know, either these people are, you know, they have nothing to offer, and they've just managed to get some fringe journal to publish some thoughts on something, because there's lots of that that happens.
Or they've got a very important point to make, and they've been trying to make it through the normal channels, and no one is listening, and so they're trying some new stuff.
And that is what I've come to understand about these authors who have been publishing for decades, since the mid-90s, on exactly this.
And again, it's chronic non-communicable disease risks presented by lipid oxidation products in fried foods.
So the particular The particular thing that they're talking about is the risks of frying, okay?
Not just eating fat cold, but what happens to various types of fats when you fry them, and specifically when you fry them over extended periods of time, as we know that, for instance, commercial kitchens like fast food will use the same Is there a difference between fresh fat and old fat?
fat for, gosh, I don't even know, probably days, weeks, I hope not.
One week.
One week.
Okay.
So, you know, is there a difference between fresh fat and old fat?
Is there a difference between different kinds of fat in terms of what kinds of products they produce in the foods that you are frying and that you are then eating?
And so these authors, again, have been writing about this, have been doing research.
They are academic researchers since the 90s, and no one appears to be listening, and so they've written this piece.
But first, maybe a little background on types of fat, because it's... oh, careful!
I need my screen here.
Let's see, what did I want to show?
Okay, before... yeah, don't show my screen here.
They're talking about saturated fats, unsaturated fats, and somehow the world has already caught into the fact that trans fats aren't good for you.
So they're not even looking at trans fats particularly.
But there are four basic... and specifically they're talking about fatty acids, which I'm just shortening to fats.
And so the acronyms that you'll see in this paper, which I'll link, Thank you.
Unsaturated fatty acids, of which there are two types, monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids, and then trans fats, trans fatty acids.
And basically the saturated fatty acids are typically things like, you know, fats that have a high degree of saturated fat are solid at room temperature and they come from animals, things like butter and taro and taro, tallow and lard and such.
And unsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, fats that are high in monounsaturated fats tend to be things like olive oil and macadamia oil and others.
And then polyunsaturated fats are the seed oils, basically.
And again, all of these fats have all of these types of fatty acids in them, but the ratios are very different between the types of fats.
So, you know, anything that you... when people say vegetable oil, what they actually mean is seed oil, and that's like canola oil and safflower and sunflower and grapeseed and... or grapeseed and canola are the same thing, I think.
Is that right?
No, that is different.
That's different.
And then trans fats don't occur in nature.
Basically that's something that we've created and it's stuff like shortening that is also solid at room temperature and it was created probably because people like their butter and their bacon fat and they wanted something spreadable that felt like butter that they could use.
So I don't think you said saturated with what?
So we're about to go there.
I wish I had a beautiful molecular biology or nutrition biology textbook version.
I don't, but what I do have is a screenshot from a Khan Academy course, and I'll actually link the Khan Academy.
It's like eight minutes, and it's beautiful.
We're not going to show that here, but this eight-minute Khan Academy lecture on the difference between fats is great and I'll just do a super brief version here.
Here's the screenshot from Khan Academy in which the guy has shown saturated fats, monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, and trans fats.
So this is basically O-chem shorthand in which these yellow Yellow things are carbon chains.
Carbon always makes four bonds, and when it's singly bonded to other carbons, it has two other positions to bond to.
And a fully saturated fat has no double bonds with carbon.
There's no places where carbon is double bonded, like over there, where you've got two lines.
They're all single lines, and that means that every carbon is bonded to a carbon to the left, a carbon to the right, and then two hydrogens, because hydrogen is sort of the default position.
And then to be a saturated fat, and to be a fatty acid, it also needs to have one of these oxygen-based groups as well.
We're not going to go into that.
But a saturated fat, therefore, is basically lines of carbons that are singly bonded to other carbons and are full of as many hydrogens as they could possibly have.
That's what it's saturated with.
It's saturated with hydrogen.
And so they're linear, and this is too simplistic, but it's part of why a saturated fat is going to be solid at room temperature, is that you basically jam a bunch of them in together.
That's a pack in a way that leaves them leaves the molecules stable with respect to each other rather than sliding around as they would in a liquid.
Exactly.
So a unsaturated fat is one in which at least one In a monounsaturated fat, it's one.
In a polyunsaturated fat, it's more than one.
At least one of the carbons is doubly covalently bonded to each other, and that means that a carbon that has at one side a single bonded carbon to it and another side a double bonded carbon has only one more position that it has available, and that's going to be a hydrogen right there.
But that means that for each double-bonded carbon in an unsaturated fat, there are two fewer hydrogens than there would be if that was a single bond.
Maybe this doesn't matter at all.
Presumably, if they were acting in honesty and good faith and actually trying to figure out what was good for humans, that's maybe what the early food scientists thought.
Maybe it's not a problem at all.
And in fact, what we still have um in in nutrition science today is being told that unsaturated fats are way better for you certainly than trans fats but even than saturated fats so um that's a monounsaturated fat and you can see it's got this little kink in it it's got a bend because uh when you have a double bonded uh carbon it causes the the chain to kink
And it's just got one kink in it for a monounsaturated fat, it's got multiple kinks in it for polyunsaturated fat, and you can see the more poly it is, the more of these double carbon bonds there are, the more kinks and therefore the more voluminous this is going to be, and the less tightly packed you're going to be, and the more likely you are to be liquid at room temperature.
So, and again, saturated fats like butter and tallow and lard, unsaturated fats, things like olive oil and polyunsaturated fats, seed oils.
And then trans fats are, and this would just include this because it's included on this screenshot here, in, and this is indeed the origin of, over in gender ideology, leansis and trans language.
When you have a normal, what tends to occur in nature, double bond of the carbon, the hydrogens are coming off the same side and the rest of the carbon chain is coming off the same side.
But you can, in the lab, switch that up and have the carbon chain come off of, say, the top and then it continues off the bottom.
And that's called trans, and that's why these are called trans fats.
But what that does is produce, whenever you have these double carbon bonds, yes you don't have as many hydrogens as you should if you were fully saturated, but you don't have a kink in the chain either.
And so you end up with these relatively straight, relatively linear molecules that can be packed together like Crisco.
So that's sort of the very brief description of what the difference is, if I can have my screen back here, between saturated fats and unsaturated fats.
And again, I did not go into the history.
I don't know how it is that we came to understand that trans fats are bad for you.
Because the point you and I are growing up, everyone was cooking with Prisco, right?
Shortening was the thing.
And, you know, there were people like, I remember specifically my dad, it was like butter.
That's the thing!
We're eating butter, right?
But, you know, tubs of margarine and Crisco, like this was... we were being told that this was good for us and now somehow people know that's not true.
But, hold on, people still are convinced that the unsaturated fats are better for you than the saturated fats because that's what we were being told by everything from the American Heart Association on down.
The American Heart Association, which my understanding, I discovered this researching something a few weeks ago, which was apparently created actually to legitimize seed oils. - Right. - And so you've got a kind of a pattern of what which was apparently created actually to legitimize seed oils. - Right. - And so you've You've got a kind of a pattern of what always happens in this case.
You've got some sort of food that is natural, with which our ancestors have an evolutionary history, and therefore we tend to be pretty good at extracting the value out of it, breaking it down in a way that doesn't make it toxic, whatever it is.
It has some form factor, right?
Butterfat.
And then you have an industry that wants to deliver a product and it has laboratories that are capable of addressing issues like, you know, you've extracted Some plant oils, you know corn oil and You want to deliver it to people who are eager for butter?
But they're not really eager to pour corn oil on what they're doing so it needs to take on a butter form factor and so you can hydrogenate it and you can get the form factor of butter in something that the plant created as a liquid and To begin that though, I'm sorry if I missed it, but you have to have created skepticism of butter.
Right.
Otherwise people just keep eating butter.
Right.
So this is really, one of the things I described in that Tucker interview was the game of pharma, which we have talked about on Dark Horse.
There is a nutritional game that is exactly parallel, where something that would be profitable has to demonize some other thing, it has to demonize its competitor.
Oh, that's not safe at all, right?
Hydroxychloroquine's not safe, and you know what else isn't safe?
Butter, right?
Yes, and so you've got to demonize some product and, oh my god, that's causing heart attacks.
You know what you really need?
You need some butter form factor bread spread that is made from corn oil, right?
Because they have an easy time growing corn, the profitability is high, and so what they've got to do is turn it into A butter-like substance.
How do you do that?
You throw hydrogens at it.
That's wonderful, except it's not yellow, so you can add some coloring to make it yellow.
Now it's very butter-like.
Now you need an advertising campaign.
Ask your doctor if margarine is right for you.
And here we have it.
Yeah.
This is a 1950s ad for margarine that I used to use when I taught about these things.
The smoothest bread to put on bread.
You like margarine.
Of course you do.
It's good to eat, good for you, and good for your overworked food budget.
And you like margarine yellow.
But you get margarine white.
Why?
Because of outworn laws that place a federal tax of 10 cents per pound on yellow margarine.
Actually, if the law would allow it, you could buy yellow margarine at no extra cost.
No wonder people are riled up!
Stirred up.
Sorry, it's tiny.
Fortunately... Wow, I gotta make this a little bit bigger.
Um, oh!
Fortunately, far-seeing men in Congress are working to see that you get margarine yellow the way you want it.
Give them your wholehearted support.
Remember, the voice of the people is the voice of the lawmaker.
Fight for the right to yellow margarine.
You've got to fight for your right to yellow margarine.
Right, so... That's an actual ad, guys.
That's an actual ad for the 1950s.
From the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers.
Of course it is.
So here's the thing.
You and I grew up in the 70s and 80s in households that had been a victim of the margarine psyop to a greater and lesser degree of effectiveness.
I would say my family was fully hoodwinked.
Your father wasn't buying any of that crap because he was a down-to-earth guy who grew up on a farm.
I think growing up on a farm was the big thing.
Right.
But anyway, look, here's where the rubber meets the road on this.
You and I have studied biology.
We have arrived at a conclusion about what we call hyper-novelty.
That's largely the subject matter of our book.
There is no way that the process, the game of big nutrition, where they identify a historical food, they demonize it, they have a way of producing something that's like it that will have a much higher profit margin, they create it in the lab, they adjust it, then they run a PSYOP to get people to accept it.
There is no way that that ends up healthy, right?
That ends up causing health problems.
How many people have died of pathologies that are downstream of hydrogenated plant oils?
It's a huge number.
We'll never know, but it's a huge number and the point is it was all perfectly predictable.
Right.
This article has nothing to do with that.
This is not hydrogenated plant oils we're talking about here.
This is what I was raising my hand about a little bit ago.
I was confused because I looked up the ingredients in Grisco vegetable shortening and margarine.
It is hydrogenated.
Yes, it is.
And that's not what this article is about.
Right.
So this article is not about trans fats.
This is about unsaturated fats versus saturated fats and specifically saturated fats versus monounsaturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats.
Again, with the recognition that polyunsaturated fats are They derive from a plant, but they are really basically not possible to be pressed without modern technology.
And part of what is wrong with the way that most of these polyunsaturated fats are produced is the detergents and such that are used to extract them, which is something that Zach has actually informed us of.
Quite a bit.
All of these fats, everything from butter to safflower oil, has some saturated fat, some monounsaturated fat, and some polyunsaturated fat.
But it's the ratio that matters.
And so we can talk about butter basically being a saturated fat, because it mostly is, okay?
So I'm going to have you first just show the figure, the original figure here from the paper, and it's hard to interpret.
It's typical sort of, you know, not very clearly labeled, unfortunately, scientific.
Oh, that's, that happens.
Scientific visualization.
And I'm not going to go into most of these details, but I did prepare a better graphic based on the same thing.
But I just want to point out before I go on that the two lines on each of these graphs are about The Total Saturated and Alpha Beta Unsaturated Aldehyde Concentrations.
So we're talking about toxic aldehydes that are being generated by the frying of these fats, okay?
So this is just a clearer version of SAME and I'm about to tell you what A little bit more.
So, Figure 1.
The title is Generation of Cytotoxic and Genotoxic.
So that's cell-killing and gene-destroying aldehydic.
Those are aldehydes.
It's a particular kind of toxic molecule.
Lipid oxidation products.
That's just like all of the oxidation products that are generated in culinary frying oils.
Corn oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and butter were the four that they chose.
Subjected to laboratory simulated shallow frying episodes.
So that seems like a lot of very fancy talk, but basically they start at time zero on the x-axes and go only through 100 minutes, which is a lot less time than you're going to get in, say, a fryer that is being used for a week solid before you throw out the fat.
Yeah, this is the equivalent.
They are testing effectively pan-frying over a short period of time.
Well, a hundred minutes isn't that short.
Well, but compared to a week.
Yeah.
And on the y-axis, you have these measures of toxicity.
So again, I'm not going to go into the chemistry of exactly what those measures are, but there's these forms of aldehyde.
And you can see just right off the bat that corn oil and sunflower oil have much higher rates of the production of these cytotoxic and genotoxic aldehydic lipid oxidation products than do coconut oil or butter.
And it's even worse than you think because check out the y-axes on these things.
And coconut oil and butter have y-axes that are half as short.
And so they actually had to extend the y-axis on the high saturated fats in order to get anything that was readable, which means that this is even worse than it looks like.
And just to clarify, so I keep on saying like saturated fats, monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, these authors say, you know what?
All unsaturated fats are not equal.
The less unsaturation, the better.
So monounsaturated is actually better.
And here are their ratios of saturated fatty acids to monounsaturated fatty acids to polyunsaturated fatty acids in corn oil.
62% polyunsaturated fats.
In sunflower oil, 61% polyunsaturated fats.
Basically equivalent between corn oil and sunflower oil.
In coconut oil, 91% saturated fat.
Amazing.
With 7% monounsaturated and only 2% polyunsaturated.
And butter, I'm a little confused about this and a little bit of digging.
I couldn't figure out why the butter numbers don't add up to 100%.
It's not 100% fat.
Oh, because there's protein.
Because there's milk.
Thank you.
That's going to be it.
So I thought this was just about the fats, but that's got to be it, that they're looking at the entire makeup of the butter.
So of the portion, given that butter isn't 100% fat, I guess I'm not going to be able to do the math in my head.
But let's just say of the fat, no, of the entire bit of butter, 52% is saturated fatty acids, 21% monounsaturated fatty acids, and 3.5% polyunsaturated fats.
People can't see the 3.5%, so it's important to highlight that.
Yeah, so that's three, yeah.
Polyunsaturated fats, 3% is better.
3.5% in butter, yeah.
So that could look very misleading.
And you indeed see, like coconut oil, I was surprised by the coconut oil to butter comparison, right?
We cook with both.
I love butter.
And I would have thought the coconut oil and butter were very similar to one another just as corn oil and sunflower oil are with regard to their makeup of fats.
And no, actually coconut oil has way higher saturated fatty acid content And it generates far less cytotoxic and genotoxic lipid oxidation products when food is fried in it at these relatively short periods of time.
So I know you said it, but can you describe what the two different lines are?
It's a mess.
So no, basically.
If you want to give me my screen back for a second, Zach, so I can just make sure I go back to the right thing.
Okay, you can read it now.
It's Sigmoidal time dependence of mean plus or minus SEM, total saturated and alpha-beta unsaturated aldehyde concentrations, red and blue respectively.
So two different aldehydes?
Yeah, it's just two different aldehydes, and you know, there's a lot of all of these classes, and I did not go into the chemistry and figure out what all the differences are, and why it is that you can divide them neatly into two classes.
So that's why I did not specify much there.
And that's basically it.
This paper, actually I'll go back here, they've got one Remarkable quote in here.
I got it.
It should also be noted, oh so these are I think they're going to be British authors and so when they say chip they mean french fry, so it should also be noted these estimated 154 gram potato french fry serving aldehyde contents, so this is in a small serving of french fries in the in the typical oils that french fries are being fried in,
154 grams, not a large serving at all, are not dissimilar to those arising from the smoking of a daily allocation of 25 tobacco cigarettes, i.e.
the alpha beta unsaturated and saturated aldehydes, croton aldehyde and n-hexanol, respectively.
Wow.
From less than a normal serving of like a McDonald's french fry thing, I don't know what units they come in, but What do you call that thing?
Envelope.
Well, I said a small serving of serving, I don't know.
Basket.
Also, I'm pretty sure, obviously they say chips in Britain, but I'm pretty sure potato chip always means potato chip.
No.
Yeah, in Britain they call chips crisps.
No, I know that, but if you say potato chip, I think that's... If you read the rest of the paper, you'll see that they are consistent.
Okay.
Now, it may be that this one is actually about chips, but they've been talking about... They've been talking a lot about... Okay.
Well, yeah, actually, I'm not sure in this case.
So... So can you go back to the graph?
This one?
Or their version?
I just added some stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Either one.
OK, that's clearer, I think.
Can you show it?
So one thing that is evident from this, if we try to extrapolate from what they've shown us to deep frying.
Yeah.
Coconut oil and butter plateau.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can actually, you can, you can, it looks like coconut oil and butter, I guess, is an asymptote out.
And So what that means is, since the x-axis is time, what we're saying is that there's some level of these bad things that is produced, but it doesn't just keep going up indefinitely with more time.
It actually, you know, 40 minutes in and you've gotten almost all the way there on butter and halfway there on coconut oil.
And the numbers are tiny.
So I mean, again, the y-axis on coconut oil and butter is half as tall.
Yep.
And if you look at the corn oil and the sunflower, they do look like they're headed towards an asymptote, but the point is, A, the absolute quantity has far exceeded coconut oil and butter at the hundred minutes, and it ain't stopping.
So what this implies is that there are a certain number of molecules That will be converted into these toxic aldehydes and the time in which you fry them adjusts how far along that process you are.
And so from the point of view of either a what they're calling shallow frying, you know, if you're going to shallow fry something in a pan, At 25 minutes in coconut oil or butter, you're at a tiny fraction of what will ultimately be produced that is harmful.
So this reflects even better on those two things.
And if you were to put them in a vat and do deep frying, The absolute quantity of these things will top out in butter and coconut oil early, presumably.
And so, in both cases, so I guess my point is, how bad are these things for you?
Well, if the aldehydes ...are the measure of how toxic these things are.
Which is the measure these guys are using.
I have no idea if that's the right choice, but they're not going for it.
It's a proxy.
Maybe there's other stuff that you could measure, but it's a proxy.
And short-duration frying in coconut oil or butter is actually the tiniest fraction of what's going on in corn oil and sunflower oil, which are of course the industrial standard because they could be sourced in huge quantities.
They're not seasonal at all, and they're cheap.
Right, and so this is a classic case where the shiny reputation of vegetable oils has created who knows how much health damage.
Um, and the thing, you know, the things that have been demonized like butter, um, were better for you all along.
All along.
They were better for you all along.
And so, I mean, these authors are understandably, I feel like I read in this very staid, you know, standard academic prose, just like deep frustration at having not been listened to.
for years and years and years and uh and I probably won't be able to find it here but they say um somewhere in here they they talk about how despite the research that they and others have been presenting literally since the 1990s
Health standards continue, like recommendations from public health organizations continue to recommend unsaturated fats over saturated fats.
Yeah.
They continue to say that, and you know, okay, heart.org, which is the official website of American Heart Association, at this point I expect that, and that's exactly what I found when I went there.
But when I just tried doing a, I don't, I'm trying to figure out what I think, random Google search, pretending, you know, not to be me, not signed in as me and everything, I could not find anything that suggested that this wasn't true, right?
All of the standard, like Medline and like all of these standard sites that I maybe used to think that might be a decent starting place are exactly the wrong place to go ever.
Well, Right?
And so, like, really, the academic literature is full of garbage, but if you know how to read what you're reading, then you can at least find something.
I believe that this is actually an impossible to imagine but very clear prediction of the game theory.
In other words, if you have a system that is open to financial corruption, That work in the case of oils and fats and scientific literature?
Well, you would have industry groups fostering the production of results that favor their product.
What forces it that is supposed to prevent your academic institutions from concluding the upside-down thing if it's profitable for some industry that understands they have to demonize the healthy stuff and valorize the dangerous stuff?
Of course this would happen.
So what we live in is an upside-down world in which the experts are always wrong because the whole point is the experts are a threat to an industry that would be profitable except for their expertise.
So of course they've re-engineered the system to spit out exactly what they want spit out and this raises a question about the We are told.
We are not supposed to give medical advice because we're not medical doctors.
Right?
Yep.
On the other hand, what happens if the medical doctors are captured by a process that will cause them to give you advice that's bad for your health?
Who is supposed to give you advice to ignore your doctor if your doctor has been captured by Pharma or by Big Ag or by Monsanto or whatever?
Right?
So I'm not I'm not claiming to know the answer to that question But I am gonna say it's a question because again and again and again you're gonna damage your health listening to the experts because you're told that nobody is allowed to critique them and You know how many how many years of margarine did the world suffer through before it finally caught on to the fact that it was terrible for you yeah, and I don't know.
I honestly do not know.
And probably at this point the work will never be done because, again, somehow we won on trans fats.
But canola oil versus margarine.
I don't have any reason to suspect that margarine is worse for you than canola oil.
I'm sure that that is, like, that is... Is that malinformation?
Because probably some branch of the government assures you that trans fat is bad for you, and canola and unsaturated fats are good for you, and therefore since I'm disagreeing with the government, I'm causing you to distrust the government.
So that was probably malinformation, but I don't know.
And I'd like to know, actually.
You know, so these people could do the work.
Like, they could do that same work and also add a vat of shortening or margarine or something that they're frying stuff in.
And see what kind of aldehydes get produced, but of course aldehyde might be the wrong, you know, it may be that trans fats produce some other kind of cytotoxic and genotoxic nastiness that just isn't measurable by the same proxies.
Yeah, we're living in a dark age that has been created so that people can continue to sell us stuff that's terrible.
Yep.
Indeed.
But, um, pleased to see this piece of work.
Grootveld, Percival, and Grootveld, 2018.
All right.
In the Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition Journal, which just tickles me.
We used to get that one when I was a kid.
We had that around our house.
It's not the most exciting publication, but it has its moments.
Yeah, well, here's one of them.
Right.
Yes?
I would just like to point out the margarine is not gone.
Yeah, it's still for sale.
Well, no, no, not cold margarine.
I'm sure you can buy actual margarine.
On all of the field trips and like group things that I've been on through school and everything, there was always vegan butter as a thing that was around, which just sort of, it's because lots of people are, including myself, are allergic to dairy and so it just makes it easy if that's what you bring.
But having looked at it recently, it's exactly the same stuff.
It's yellow, apparently they're allowed to sell it as yellow now.
Because brave men in Congress, they're on your side.
Brave men in Congress.
So now there's a different rationale.
Of course, it's not that the butter is bad for you, it's now that dairy is, like they have a different basically marketing way to get it into everyone's diets, but it's still certainly around.
Yeah.
No, and I mean, margarine is actually for sale as margarine as well still.
But I do, actually, I do think that the vegan angle is one that presumably in the 50s they didn't see coming.
But, you know, they're going to convince a whole lot of people who think it's either immoral or dangerous to eat any animal products, and they're going to give them Toxic Lab Sludge instead.
Toxic Lab Sludge.
Yeah.
But it's yellow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
All right.
Maybe that gets us there.
It gets us somewhere.
It gets us here.
It gets us as far away from toxic lab sludge, yellow or not, as possible.
All right.
Yeah.
So we are going to take a break, and then we will come back for a Locals Only Q&A.
Join us there.
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We've got lots of benefits there, and this is one of them.
Check out our stuff at darkhorsestore.org.
We've got Psy-Op Until Proven Otherwise, Blueberries Because Occidents Happen, Goliath, Lie to a Tyrant.
That's good.
Our younger son is wearing that hoodie around.
Actually, you are too.
Are you both wearing that around?
Yeah, that's very nice.
Both our sons are lying to tyrants and hopefully not to us.
Right!
That would be, yeah.
I think that just indiscriminate lying is bad.
Yeah, absolutely.
You can limit your lying to time.
Absolutely.
Check out Natural Selections.
My piece this week included a small photo array from my unfortunate recent foray into Costco.
Um, which included beauty sponges brought to you by Hershey's and by Peeps.
What does that even mean?
I don't know.
Here, actually, I'm gonna, Zach, I'm gonna, you know, can you show it by screen still?
This is just the sign-off.
Hold on, I gotta find it before I plug in.
I'm plugged in, but I'm not, I haven't found it yet.
I'm not plugged in.
I'm clearly incompetent.
Okay, hold on.
Yeah, so that's the picture.
But what does it mean?
Do you know what a beauty sponge is?
No!
I don't really either, but I believe that a beauty sponge is, well, it's It's like an open cell lab sludge, just to continue with the lab sludge.
Is this food?
No.
No, this is nothing.
Oh, okay.
This is something that you can use to either to cake up your face, or maybe even if you put like some soap or oil on it to de-cake your face after you've walked through the day with your face obscured under a mat of artifice.
Now I get it.
So it's a beauty sponge.
Yes.
Which means it's like a lab sludge artifice sponge thing, But it's brought to you by Hershey's and Peeps.
So the Peeps beauty sponges kind of look like Peeps.
I don't know what Peeps are made of.
They're grotesque unto themselves, obviously.
But some of those sponges kind of look like Peeps, right?
Ish?
There's a bunny and a chicken, I think, maybe.
But the Hershey ones.
What even is that?
What are those?
Are those chocolate?
I mean, they're not.
They're sponges.
They're beauty sponges.
What is going on here?
What is actually happening?
I do wonder.
What thought process?
I mean, I'm not saying it's wrong.
It may be that people are mindlessly shopping and you can trigger their hunger circuits by showing them a familiar logo of a chocolate bar and that causes them to I don't know.
I don't know either.
So most people will be familiar with Costco.
And I hadn't been in one, thankfully, in a long time.
But so these were in the, what's the section with all the drugs?
It's the drug store.
Well, it's the drug, but they're not But there's like a pharmacy and then there's a section that you can just walk through.
So I just decided this time, because it was grotesque outside and I had time to kill, I was like, you know what?
I'm gonna do this like an anthropologist.
I'm gonna walk down every single aisle in the casket, which I think I've never done before.
So this was in that section, like in between like the Prilosec and the I don't even know what.
There's so many crazy things in that store.
So there wasn't any other food around, which may go to your hypothesis that wandering through, you know, shampoo and I don't even know.
It's so dystopian.
Everything, like, I did find myself at least in the fancy cheese aisle for a while going, like, yes, this is real food.
I like this.
Yeah, I mean, one does not want to demonize Costco specifically because Costco is better than most of these things.
They're actually humane to their employees.
Right, and a labor perspective as well.
And they, you know, some of the products are higher quality than you would find at competing big box stores.
And they've got real- I mean, the cheese is a good example, right?
They've got some excellent cheese.
That said, it does still... I can't go into one of these places and not think Earth Liquidation Center.
Absolutely.
Yep.
And in fact, I wrote about this a little bit this week on Natural Sexiness as well.
Again, I still had some time, and it was gross.
And I was like, okay, I'm just going to continue to do it.
I'm going to go into some places that I don't normally go into.
And I was like, oh, there's a It was like a Ross Dress for Less.
I'm not even sure if I've ever been to one of those before.
It was a Bed, Bath & Beyond and I got close.
Like, the Bed, Bath & Beyond has literally been liquidated.
Like, it was just empty.
Totally empty.
Like, I don't know if they were moving in or moving out or what, but the Ross off the shelves were empty.
So it's liquidating Earth at the same time that things are becoming unavailable.
Even crap.
Even stuff that you shouldn't want to have available.
Do you remember how Earth used to be when it was better?
I do.
Okay.
I know we're signing off here, but I've got, sorry, I've got one more thing to show.
This was from the Ross Dress for Less.
I did not rearrange anything, I swear to you.
Just like most of the shelves are empty, and there was one sad lawn flamingo with a Ross tag on his neck and a fire extinguisher sign in the background in case I don't know why you would need to extinguish a fire in the store at this point.
There's nothing to save.
And a bunch of rolled-up cheap carpet.
Like, this is 2024.
Welcome to it.
Yeah.
It's gonna get weirder.
Yeah, it's gonna get weirder.
So, um, do join us on Locals in 15 minutes or so for our Q&A and, uh, and Yeah, we appreciate you subscribing to Rumble and Locals and joining us there and sharing what you like and liking what you share.
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That's right, right?
And we will, oh, I forgot to say, we will actually be back on Saturday So we're going to be back sooner this time rather than later, so we are going to come back to you on Saturday at our new normal time, 11.30, but our old regular day on Saturday.
So if you can't make it to the Q&A that's about to happen, join us here again in four short days?
Three short days?
Can't even do weak math now.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.