Trojan Migration? The 210th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 210th 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 discuss hypotheses about the border situation. Having just returned from Panama, Bret hypothesizes that there are two immigrations happening: the migration driven by the pursuit of greater economic opportunities in the United States, which includes people from all over the world, and a lot of families...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 210.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and we are here on Wednesday, January 31.
Yep, the very last day of January.
Somehow we are rocketing through 2024, a twelfth over already.
Amazing.
In fact, a bit more than a twelfth over, if we're being precise.
No, actually, with leap date now, we're still more than a twelfth over.
We're still more than a twelfth over.
Yes, but we are also more than a third of the way through the northern winter.
More than a third?
Yes.
No.
Oh, more than a third.
More than a third.
See?
Exactly.
More than a third, which is good.
It makes the chances of us surviving the northern winter that much better.
Yeah.
No, and it's an interesting time of year because the days are often getting colder, but the day length is changing pretty rapidly at this point.
I was at our local co-op yesterday just after five and was commenting to the woman manning the cashier, the woman manning the cashier how light it was still outside, which a month ago it was well dark by five.
So anyway, it feels good.
It feels like things are looking up relatively short timescale astronomically.
I can say less about how well things are looking up right here on the planet, but that's what we're going to talk about today a little bit.
Yeah, but the planet is a small piece of the big picture.
Just keep that in mind.
It's really not helpful.
I think it's helpful.
We are Earth-based.
We are Earth-stuck.
But 2024 is going to be a wild ride.
I think people just need to realize that that's just right here.
It doesn't matter.
I think it does and my guess is there are seven or eight people out there who agree with me and some of them might be Dark Horse viewers.
So please join us on Locals.
We have had a great uptick in our local subscribers this last week since We put out a private conversation that you had with Chris Martenson at the end of your shared trip to Panama, including the Panama Canal and the Darién last week, and that's just behind the Locals Paywall, also available at Chris Martenson's Peak Prosperity channel.
And we just are putting a lot more stuff up there on Locals.
We did our private Q&A there this week, and that's still available.
And there will be more stuff coming out there reliably now.
So please do come join us there right now.
There's a watch party going on at Locals.
And to get all that content, you'd have to pay.
That's behind a paywall.
You can also just be a member of Locals.
You don't get as much access, but you will hear when stuff is happening.
And please do also join our channel on Rumble.
That costs you nothing, but it helps us out.
We're trying to hit 100,000 subscribers in the next couple of months, and we would really love your help to do that.
So if you're watching, even if you're watching somewhere else, hop over to Rumble and join the Dark Horse Rumble channel.
And while you're there, you might consider joining us on Locals as well.
Is there anything else about that?
No, I think it's great.
And I think the more people who are there, the richer the community is.
So it's sort of a self-catalyzing phenomenon.
Absolutely.
And we do do some AMAs there as well.
There's lots of good stuff there.
Drop our guest episodes early there.
Lots, lots, lots of good stuff over at Locals.
Okay, we're going to move the rest of our stuff to the end, except for our sponsors, whom we choose carefully, we vet carefully, and we are very, very pleased to have them.
So you know that if you hear us read an ad, we do three at the top of the hour, and then we don't do any throughout the rest of the show.
If we are speaking words on behalf of sponsors, you can know that we really do truly vouch for them.
Okay, without further ado, it's Maui Nui, American Heart for Gold, and Free Spoke this week.
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Now, our final sponsor, as you know, Heather, is FreeSpoke, which you also know is a search engine that we have become very fond of, and I'm going to just riff on why that is.
Do it.
So we live in a crazy era in which it is very difficult to often establish even What the facts are of a story that everybody is talking about.
You know, you might see the White House press secretary stumbling over condolences for the family of dead service members, but the question is what actually happened and where could you even go?
Now in the world that you and I grew up in, you could go to a newspaper and you could discover the basic set of facts and then you might find a perspective on them that was part of that newspaper.
Now you can't even... Sometimes even within the same newspaper!
You would find two perspectives, imagine it.
And you can't now go to Wikipedia, because it might be that they report on this story in a way that at least the basic facts can be deduced from their articles, but it has become what the kids call a risky click.
The fact is, Wikipedia is full of crap on lots of topics, including you and me.
So, what are you going to do?
Well, you can use free-spoke.
And free-spoke allows you to search a topic and then see a diversity of viewpoints that are labeled by their typical perspective.
You might find a middle-of-the-road perspective, a right perspective, a left perspective.
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Here are the things they differ.
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All right, thank you for the assistance in the end there.
I was just, I was riffing.
I could have gone on for an hour.
Yes.
I'm sure they would appreciate that.
Sure.
That we have other things to talk about.
Indeed.
Yeah.
You have a number of things you want to talk about, and I've got just a little something cool and something grotesque probably at the end.
Yep.
So I wanted to unpack a little bit.
There's some stuff that's going to emerge into the world soon, and it involves some hypotheses that are born of the observations that Zach and I and others were able to make down in Panama on this recent trip.
And as longtime viewers, we have a lot of new viewers, but they're longtime viewers who know that we are very careful about the rules of engagement, for lack of a better term, that one has to apply when dealing with scientific hypotheses.
And I want to just remind people a little bit About how those rules work, and then I want to talk about two concepts that I believe are going to become important in the dialogue about what's going on in the border crossings in Texas, the crossings that are taking place in Darien, and the migration that is happening in Northern South America and all of Central America.
The first thing I want to discuss is a hypothesis is a plausible explanation for something that is observed.
You are supposed to formulate every hypothesis that could explain a given pattern when you are trying to sort what might be there.
So to say that something is a hypothesis doesn't mean that you believe it's true.
In fact, There should be a maximum of one hypothesis for any given observation that you think is more likely true than not.
And there may not even be one of those, right?
A maximum of one which you believe in.
And you might call that my hypothesis, but that's an ambiguous term.
Or your preferred hypothesis.
Right, my preferred hypothesis, or you could separately say, this is a hypothesis I think is likely to be true.
Still remains to be tested.
But here are a bunch of other hypotheses for the same observed phenomenon.
Right.
So the fact that somebody advances a hypothesis doesn't mean they think this is the case.
And this is a place people get very sloppy, and the fact that we, you and I, are careful about the term hypothesis.
Most people, even people who are scientifically very rigorous, are often sloppy about the distinction between hypothesis and theory, and they treat them as synonyms.
And so this sort of blunt instrument that we've been left with means that we get tangled up.
We need to be able to talk about what might be going on without saying that we think it's going on.
And then we need to separately be able to say, actually, this one I suspect is probably true.
And that's a separate level of belief.
So we're going to talk about two hypotheses.
The first one has to do with the basic observation that There are a huge number of people migrating north from South America, which Zach and I saw in person.
Mike Leon showed us this migration in the Darien of Panama.
He took us into the Darien Gap, which is this gap in the Pan American Highway, 60 mile wide gap in the Pan American Highway, where the highway has never been completed on the path from northern North America to the southern tip of South America.
Southern North America to the northern tip of South America.
No, no.
The gap is at southern North America, but the road goes from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego-ish.
Approximately.
Actually, it does fork down.
They're two different routes, but never mind.
You can get all the way from Prudhoe Bay to the southern tip of South America by road, except for the 60-mile gap, which is in an area of Dense primary jungle.
A very important habitat because most of these habitats have been logged.
This one is difficult enough that it remains largely intact, but it has this large migration coming through it.
Many of the people coming through it have arrived in South America in Ecuador, in Quito, and the reason for that is because there's no visa requirement and therefore people can come from all over the world.
They can land in Ecuador and then they can migrate through Colombia and into Panama.
But the hypothesis is this.
That there isn't one migration.
That there are in fact two migrations.
Now maybe there are more than two.
But I believe what we observed was that there were two migrations that had a distinct character.
And that character looks like this.
You have one migration that has many different ethnicities from all over the world.
Places like Afghanistan, Yemen, a lot of people from Venezuela.
It's a very diverse migration, and these are people who are walking the most difficult path through the Darien, or one of them.
And then you have another migration, which is strangely separate.
I don't want to overdraw this distinction.
Just before you do that, you didn't say, so you said, Afghans, Venezuelans, I don't remember what the third nationality you mentioned just then was, but Venezuelans, for instance.
We know, we saw when we were leading a study abroad in Ecuador in 2016, I met a few Venezuelans who had been professionals in Venezuela, like High, high up, you know, doctors, lawyers, business people who had fled in the middle of the night from the political chaos that was engulfing Venezuela.
And I met them because they were now running a restaurant in Cuenca in Ecuador and talked to them and actually met a few other members of their family.
And, you know, those were the only people who I know from this story.
But they reported many other members of their extended family whom they were trying to encourage to come and such.
So To the degree that Venezuelans are among the people who are migrating, there is real political and socioeconomic conflict in Venezuela that people are fleeing from.
Presumably that is the case in Yemen as well, and in lots of places.
That, I think, is the category of the first type of reason for immigrants that you're talking about.
Yeah, no, I think there's been, we understand from those who have been watching this migration unfold, that the people who are migrating out of Venezuela have changed.
That the early migrants were often people who had significant resources.
They could afford to flee.
Like the family I met.
Right, by aircraft.
They could afford, many of them threw away their careers and they went from being doctors and lawyers and whatever else to being restaurateurs or whatever they could figure out.
Increasingly, the migration is moving down the economic ladder.
Sure, as it were.
Fewer and fewer choices, and what that is in part doing is it means that the flight is now this much more perilous one through the Darien, which is just... These are people at the end of their rope, and so they are likely to end up forced to make decisions that people with more resources would not be forced to make.
Right, and I think it is safe to say you and I are very comfortable in tropical forests.
We've been in many of them.
This is a tropical forest that you and I would not cross lightly.
We would think, I mean, it's probably not simply not safe for reasons of human jeopardy, but even at the level of the physical difficulty of this environment, it is something you would want
Someone who knew how to get through the place and you would want to think very carefully about how to equip yourself and these migrants Have none of this they're at the mercy of these snakeheads who are like coyotes they get robbed along the way and Equipment wise a they bring all the wrong stuff Thinking that they are fleeing to the other side and that they will want certain things with them They end up jettisoning all of this stuff in the dairy and yeah
And, you know, they end up sleeping on the ground without proper insulation.
They get trench foot.
It's a humanitarian catastrophe.
Yeah.
But in any case... So that's the first category.
That's the first category.
That you are hypothesizing, that you are saying that there are two different immigrations.
Two different immigrations, which are, frankly, on the ground in Panama, largely housed separately.
Oh, I don't.
is one of the things that ought to make you think carefully.
So actually, Zach, do you have a picture from the Canaan Mbrio camp?
Oh, I don't.
I think you do.
Yeah.
So there are Chinese immigrants So this is the camp called Canaan Membrillo.
And this is, I believe that is actually a Chinese aggregation in this camp, which is almost entirely not Chinese.
So there are Chinese people in this camp.
This camp, we were allowed to freely wander.
The people who are administering it talked to us openly about what was taking place.
The people who are administering it are locals who do not want the camp, do not think the migration is positive, but are stuck in a bind, which is, do they want these people uncared for, which is more destructive, or do they want to provide the infrastructure for these people to live decently, and they're clearly better off that way.
So, they're open about that.
In any case, we could take pictures, we could wander through this camp.
The Sena Front, which is the Panamanian border control force, knew we were present.
We checked in with them.
They didn't make any attempt to restrict our ability to talk to people, to take pictures, nothing.
We were completely free.
Anyway, there's a highly diverse group of people who have just emerged from the jungle.
from the other camp, so we'll come back to it in a second.
So anyway, there's a highly diverse group of people who have just emerged from the jungle.
They are recovering in these camps.
So they're at the north edge of the Darien Gap, as are you here.
You didn't come at it from Colombia, you're at the Panama end, so you have not built a highway and traversed, you have not crossed into the forest.
These people have emerged, have survived the jungle and are basically trying to find their footing before they continue on their migration north.
Right, which involves two things.
It involves recovering from the journey, you know, several days of eating food, sleeping not on the ground, whatever injuries they have, get a chance to recover.
But they also have to find money to get on the buses that actually speed them through Panama and into Costa Rica and points north.
Some of them, most of them started out with enough money to do that, but having been robbed in the Darien, they have to now find a way to earn money.
And these buses are standard Latin American buses put together by either governments or private entities in Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, etc.
Or are they something else?
It is unclear.
They look just like the other buses you would see on the highway.
From outside it's very hard to tell unless you happen to see the occupants.
Now part of this could just be standard Central American entrepreneurialism where there's a bunch of people going north they're willing to pay to do it so buses show up and the business starts and part of it may be facilitated by Panamanians by other organizations like the IOM which we saw the emblem of all over this migration.
IOM stands for?
This is the International Organization for Migration and it is a branch of the UN Which you should read their website and their white paper at the website in which they have a, at best, utterly childish understanding of the impacts of migration.
They view it as a purely good thing, you know, kind of the way naive economists regard anything you pay money for as a good thing because you're an agent who is entitled To deploy money on your own behalf and therefore it doesn't matter that you're buying heroin that results in your overdose.
It was still a valid economic choice.
It wasn't the result of, you know, circumstances that forced you into a bad choice or anything like that.
So these people believe migration is simply a good thing.
They're facilitating it.
I don't know what their role is in producing these buses.
These buses could be anywhere from organic to synthetic and it would look the same.
But okay, so you have this diverse migration that we are allowed to look at.
We talked to many people in this migration.
They all gave us the same story about why they were migrating.
Not a single person said anything about political oppression.
They all spoke about economic opportunity as the thing that had motivated them to face this journey, which means that when they come across the southern U.S.
border, they do not qualify for political asylum.
And yet that is the ostensible explanation for their being waved through with little more than their own word for who they are and what their birth date is.
Okay, so you've got this diverse migration, and then you've got this other migration, and everything is flipped on its head.
So do you want to show a picture from the San Vicente camp?
So here these folks are just outside the San Vicente camp.
That's why I can take this picture of them.
They're all Chinese.
You're not allowed to photograph in the San Vicente camp.
Absolutely forbidden.
I took this, I literally put my camera up to a chain-link fence and I did so in a place where there was something blocking the view of the border security, the center front officers, that it wouldn't be seen that I was taking the picture.
But in any case, this is a camp that is almost entirely Chinese in origin.
These people largely come a different route.
They skip most of the peril of the Darien Gap by traveling by boat.
We are not allowed into the camp.
The migrants themselves are utterly unwilling to have a conversation, though it is clear that there are those among them who speak English they pretend not to.
There is just a hostility when one tries to interact, and I also had the sense, this is obviously not something I can be certain of, but I had the sense that after trying to interact, That there were a couple of individuals who became very interested in figuring out who we were and what we were trying to discover.
That is to say, ostensible migrants who acted in a way as if they were part of an intelligence gathering operation.
I can't say for sure that that's what I saw, but wow, did it feel like it.
Zach, you want to add something?
It's also worth noting, to put this picture up now, this camp is entirely synthetic.
There was no village there before.
It's a rectangle.
It's a fenced-in rectangle guarded by Senefront, which is the border authority in Panama, and put together largely by IOM.
It's not a village that turned into a migration camp.
Right.
In fact, it's built of different stuff, too.
It's built of shipping containers, which are... I don't know that it means anything, but apparently Chinese in origin.
But anyway, it is a synthetic camp, surrounded by a fence, guarded by Senate Front, who does not allow pictures and does not allow you in.
Zach has a picture here of a patch, and this is interesting.
A Santa Front guard was wearing this patch.
He did not want to be photographed, but this says Darien no es una ruta.
It means it's not a route.
It's a jungle.
It's a jungle.
Even people in Panama who are charged with administering a camp like this are not happy about what's taking place.
I don't, you know, this border, the center front guard doesn't speak for everybody, but there was certainly a widespread sentiment that this was not good for Panama.
But in any case, the hypothesis that I want to put forward is that the economic migration that is so evident that you saw at the first camp is actually cloaking this second migration which is traveling a different route which is housed separately and which on the ground has an absolutely distinct character and is treated in the inverse way by the authorities.
They don't want it observed.
They can't prevent you from seeing it from the edge of the camp, but they do not want you getting any deeper into the thing.
They don't want you photographing it, and it's not obvious why they would have a different policy.
In fact, the opposite policy as they did in the main migration.
So anyway, the hypothesis that I want to put on the table, and I'm not saying that I necessarily believe that this is true, but I do believe it is plausible, is that the economic migration out of South America is cloaking a migration of largely military age Chinese migrants Who are motivated by something distinct from, they're not fleeing the CCP.
It's not obvious that they are concerned about the view of the CCP.
It appears that they are actually facilitated by it, that they've left China with the knowledge of the CCP and that they have joined this migration, which we now try to talk about as one thing.
But if it's two things, that will confuse things.
So I just want to go ahead.
You just just a point of clarification.
You said you kind of glossed over.
You said military age people.
The demographics.
I mean, I'm interested in the direct comparison of the demographics that you were observing, not in terms of racial identity.
You've already gone over that.
But age distribution and families and stuff at the, let's just call them like the economic migrants camps versus San Vicente, the synthetic rectangular camp, mostly filled with Chinese people.
I will say that one of the pictures that we saw there from San Vicente, there was a woman.
Yep, there was.
Masked, of course.
But I'm curious about, I mean, you've implied that there's a demographic difference, but let's start by, I want to ask you, what, you know, how many families did you see at the camps that looked like economic migrant camps that have shown up in places where there are already villages and where you are allowed to walk in freely and where the people, the migrants themselves, are actually willing to talk to you?
Families are all over the place.
There are tragedies born of this.
There are mothers walking out of the jungle without their children, and children walking out of the jungle without their mothers.
And that's not how they walked in.
Right.
So it is a dire situation.
And I will just say, for those who aren't experienced in a habitat like this, Part of the problem with it is that it takes an injury that would mean almost nothing if it happened to you.
A sprained ankle can become fatal in an environment where you need to get through in a short period of time.
I've been in the Darien once, but I haven't been in the jungle of the Darien this deeply.
But in general, in neotropical lowland forests, the mud can be so thick, so deep, that you really need not just fitness, but strength in order to get through it.
Yeah, it's a slog.
It's a slog, right?
And the Darien is worse than many of the places that you and I have been because it has some altitude to it.
And so not only are you dealing... And you're talking about relief, like up and down.
You're going up and down.
It's not just all at altitude.
The Cordillera, the mountain range that runs from the Continental Divide down into South America, runs through the Darien, and they have to cross it.
And so it's not as high as it would be in the U.S., but imagine it in super slippery conditions where thousands of people have struggled their way up some muddy hill, right?
It's just going to be, you know, it's terribly slippery.
It's also true that any abrasion, any cut, any break in the barrier that your body has, which is your skin, will take forever to heal and you're in a place where there are many more pathogens, such that a very minor abrasion can become a very major issue, at least in the low ends, less so the higher up you are.
Yeah, but there's also the added, you've got people from all over the world, and so mystery illnesses are also a feature of this.
People are arriving with some pathogens.
Right, and you know, it can be cholera, which again, if you're a first world denizen, you know, cholera is not a big deal.
It's treatable, but if you get cholera... You need access to fresh water, or else cholera can be deadly.
Right, and then you need to be treated with antibiotics if you get it.
So anyway, yes, all of these things that would be minor for us are not minor in this context at all.
They just all compound each other.
One thing at the camp you mentioned, Canaan and Braille, I believe it was a couple migrants that I talked to, and they had come a shorter route.
It was somehow they had arrived after a two-day trek through Darien.
As opposed to five or six days, which lots of people were doing.
They said that these were young men and they were shocked that the families that had made it through with them had made it okay.
They were okay.
They were torn up but fine, but they were very surprised.
And it's these things that they're reporting.
The difficulty of the terrain, and the depth of the mud, and the fact that wounds don't heal.
And the bandits.
And the bandits.
They're being robbed, and they're being robbed by other migrants.
Tragically, they're being robbed by Indigenous people.
Imagine you have all of these desperate people who've taken whatever possessions they've got,
Migrating through and so it's turning people who would not ordinarily be interested in robbing anybody the problem is It it's just a very perilous situation and It's a tragedy in many dimensions So I will say I asked exactly that question to at a different camp, but to a couple migrants Venezuelan migrants I said what was the most dangerous piece of the truck and they said without a doubt La Selva the jungle the forest
I guess that can mean a number of things.
Even though there was a huge amount of danger from bandits and other people.
And so one thing that we know that, you know, this is one of the things that I used to really try to bring home to students before I would start studying abroad trips was, you know, I know you're worried about the charismatic stuff.
You're worried about the big cats and the snakes.
And there are big cats and there are snakes that can do you harm, but it's the water and it's the tree falls.
It's the stuff you're not expecting.
you know, in longer term, you know, I was taking them into field stations, which were rustic, but they were field stations.
We had plenty of fresh water, and we had first aid kits, and we had a medic and such.
But it's, you know, things like suddenly the water is rising, and there's nowhere to go.
And the wind has kicked up, and a storm has come in, and suddenly there's cracks all over the place, and you don't know where the tree is coming from when it comes at you.
Because it's falling.
Those are the ways that people get felled by la selva, by the forest.
Not nearly as often by a viper, certainly not nearly as often by an anaconda, and definitely not nearly as often as by a big cat.
I think the wildlife is pretty much gone from... It's probably hunted out?
It's gone from the route.
Daring is huge, but...
Story for another day, but it may be targeted for liquidation, which will destroy everything, and even just putting a road through it will do that too.
Slower, but it will happen.
But in any case... Okay, so families are somehow making this trek, and some members of some families don't make it because it's beyond arduous.
And yet, still, on the other end, at the northern edge of the gap, where what you're calling economic migrants are gathering in camps like something-membrio.
Canon-membrio.
Canon-membrio.
You have people of all ages?
Families with young kids?
Elderly people?
Not so much.
Some.
I would say In retrospect, I wish I had thought of it more carefully on the ground, but in retrospect, the demographics of the mass migration are about what you would expect, you know?
No, I don't know what to expect.
Well, you don't have the oldest old, right?
There are people who just simply couldn't possibly make it.
Lots of people.
We did see old people who had come through, and in fact, we talked to many migrants who talked about the families that they were traveling with, and the families were right there, right?
These people are... So three generations, not uncommon.
Three generations, not uncommon at all.
In fact, common.
But of course, three generations when Your generation time may be 20 years.
People might not even be 50.
Yeah, that's true.
But there were some 60s, maybe some 70s.
But anyway, it looked natural in the Chinese camp.
And again, this is my memory.
So now by comparison, the demographics going on at San Vicente, the camp that you described as synthetic, it's rectangular, it is being run by the IOM, which is a sub-agency of the UN, This is not where a village was, there are no villagers involved in maintaining it, and you're not allowed in, and there's an air of secrecy.
You're not allowed in, you're not allowed to photograph, and the people don't want to talk to you.
And there's a line of buses at the edge of it.
We did actually not see anybody leave from it, but there's a line of buses waiting for people to board to go north.
Do you want to show them?
And where those, what, and so I'll have the same question for you about those buses as I did about the other ones.
Um, those look like, um, potentially very fancy Latin American buses, or something more than that.
Do we know what funds these?
No idea.
Okay.
No idea.
And it could be, it could be organic, but nonetheless, it is a measure of the flow-through, right?
Mm-hmm.
That you have these buses.
Well, I mean, just to, you also said that many of those, the immigrants at San Vicente, who are almost entirely Chinese, are coming in by boat rather than doing the forest crossing.
So they are likely not to have been robbed.
So they still have money.
So they can afford to continue north.
- Not only that, but they have-- - No, they've been through, they just go through a shorter route to the dairy.
- They go through a minimal route.
And there's actually, we don't have it to show, but there is a Chinese in origin cartoon that shows the route, and it shows them on boat bypassing most of the Darien.
But okay, so you've got this second migration.
People are not forthcoming.
You've asked about the demographics.
I do not remember seeing children there.
I'm not saying it was zero.
And you weren't allowed to walk inside, right?
Absolutely.
And who knows what, you know, There's sampling error.
It could be that just from the angle I was standing that it looked different than it actually was.
But my sense was there were women, but they were a small fraction.
It wasn't an even sex ratio.
Not an even sex ratio by far.
Whereas at the other camps, it was an even-ish sex ratio?
Or still biased towards women?
If I think back, I don't see any bias.
Maybe there is, but I didn't see it.
Among the economic, what you're calling the economic migrants, it looked like a relatively non-selected cross-section of society missing the eldest and the most infirm.
And missing tiny infants, which I'm not saying weren't there, but I didn't see them.
Fair enough.
Whereas at the camp that, I don't think we've named what this is, as opposed to the economic migrants, which is almost entirely Chinese people, you're saying, The sex ratio is wildly skewed.
There are women, but the sex ratio is wildly skewed.
And you were seeing neither children nor old people.
Yeah.
And however, caveat, you had less access to those people and that camp, and therefore it's possible, you know, all the children were on the inside or something.
But that's not usually the way of children in such places.
They would be running around.
There'd be some evidence of that.
Right.
So, This raises a question, and I do think it makes sense for people to go check out the Chris Martinson discussion.
That you can find at our locals.
Yeah, because in fact you watch this idea dawn in real time, right?
So what I realized in talking to Chris You may remember many years ago we were at Evergreen.
I wrote a piece which I was experimenting with a WordPress site.
I wrote a piece that I published on it.
I remember it was I think green and a picture of an aardvark which was an inside joke.
We can talk about the aardvark joke another time.
I think we probably should.
But anyway the point was That there is an odd paradox with the Chinese one-child policy.
And that paradox has to do with the work of a guy named Ronald Fisher, who's an evolutionary biologist who wasn't talking about people at all.
What Ronald Fisher came up with, famously one of the anchor points of evolutionary biology, is the basis of sex ratio theory.
And it's pretty simple.
What he said was that although a male in many species can produce vastly more offspring than a female, there's no advantage to being male or female because the average number of offspring tends to be the same.
For every male who overproduces offspring above the average, there are losers who underperform.
At the population level there's not an advantage and therefore you expect as that as you get askew in a population towards one sex the other that those parents who produce the sex that is now limiting will win because their children will be more more needed in the population.
And that's the key thing, is to the extent that a population has a bias, there is an advantage to producing whatever's rare.
So, I applied that to China, and I said, why doesn't this work here?
Put yourself in the mind of a Chinese couple that is going to produce one child.
If you produce a male, there's a pretty good likelihood that male never finds a mate, and that's a problem.
To produce a female, not only is that child going to find a mate, but they can marry up.
Because the point is, males need mates, and so a female is in a very good position in the reproductive hierarchy to find a mate with good prospects or whatever is desirable.
And frankly, and I don't remember if you wrote this into that piece, but societies can recover from a shortage of males much more easily than they can recover from a shortage of females, both because there's a long history of societies having to do that in times of war, And because the nature of the sexes is that one male can make pregnant many, many females.
And gestation and lactation being what it is, and absolutely mandatory until very modern technology has rendered some of these things somewhat outsourced possible, it just takes a long time for any woman to produce more than one kid.
Yep.
So the upshot of that piece from many years ago was there's something odd about the fact that in the context of a sex-biased population that it does not naturally correct by the logic of Ronald Fisher's sex ratio theory.
And what I hypothesized then was that there was a second adaptive mechanism that overrides this in the case that a population
Needs an army that effectively overproducing males naturally predisposes a society towards Confronting neighbors and That that would be a reason that a society would have a paradoxical bias in favor of the already surplus sex If it was males
Now, I remember thinking that and spooking myself because of the implications of a nation as large as China overproducing males and therefore producing something that looked an awful lot like an army, and then I let it go because I didn't see the prediction of that hypothesis manifest in the world.
I did not see China invading neighbor states with its surplus males.
And so I wouldn't say it was falsified, but it became less and less a feature of my thinking because the evidence just didn't suggest that it had been correct.
In seeing what's going on in the Darien of Panama, I now think maybe it was correct.
The hypothesis is that those males, who seem to be the bulk of the people moving through these camps, might plausibly be a fighting force that is being moved through an open border that is, as far as I'm concerned, without rational explanation.
And that they are starting in the Darien of Panama because that provides an explanation which distracts from the real one.
That provides cover.
There are several, really, organic economic migrations happening already, being funneled through this narrow point between the two Americas and heading north.
And everyone can point to real economic and political upheaval everywhere in the world, practically.
And we know that the southern border has been a point of contention forever.
So there's already real stuff going on, and it would be an easy place to have other things start to happen that get passed off as more of the same.
Exactly.
And for people who are our age, we remember similar migrations from Central America.
We grew up in LA, so we're close enough to the border that we heard from people at various moments about, oh yes, There is less, there is more.
They're trying to shut down immigration at the border, and it's less right near the coast.
The California border with Mexico is not nearly so political as in Texas, for instance, or farther inland even in the California border, but it's always fraught.
Well, it's always fraught, but let's just say there was, for most of our childhoods, there was an influx of Central Americans.
They were famously hardworking and entrepreneurial.
Doesn't mean that bad folks didn't get through occasionally, but in general, You know, the sense of people who interacted with that migration because of where they lived.
LA's economy would have fallen apart without the Mexican and Central American immigrants.
Right.
So anyway, that the familiarity of that pattern and the frankly not very threatening nature of that migration doesn't mean it was legitimate.
It doesn't mean that Americans didn't pay a price for the fact that lots of folks were taking jobs that were therefore not available for Americans.
But the scuttlebutt when we were kids was that they're taking jobs that most Americans wouldn't want.
And so anyway, it was cryptically understood to be a mutualism.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole migrant labor thing, you know, which then became politicized in a different regard with regard to getting, you know, labor Unionization, I guess, of the labor movement, but, you know, having people moving up and down the West Coast to pursue what needs to be picked out of, you know, is it strawberries now?
Is it strawberries in the Central Valley of California?
Is it apples in Washington?
You know, what needs be picked now.
These are people without any security and without any promise that there'll be work next year.
Although if the climate continues and the apples grow, yep, you show up next year and we'll pay you again.
But the conditions might be a little worse and we might not give you what you came to expect this year.
But if those same farms, the same farms with orchards had tried to hire Americans, American-born Americans, they wouldn't have been able to make a profit because they would have had to pay those people too much.
Yep.
So I don't think our current economic circumstances mirror the circumstances of the 70s and 80s.
I think this is a very different environment where Americans are struggling at a level that is new and unfamiliar.
I thought the economy was fine.
I've heard that.
I have not noticed it.
But in any case, There is a migration.
It seems to be motivated by economic opportunity.
The sheer number of people who is migrating through Central America into the U.S.
is so large that it is impossible to imagine that this is not going to be Hugely disruptive to the entire economic environment.
It is not clear what these people are going to do on arriving.
There are very frightening possibilities that these people are being allowed to move across our southern border because somebody has plans to utilize them.
in one way or another and that is a frightening prospect on its own but even if that were not true and the simple answer is that they are supposed to find something productive to do in the U.S.
there are so many of them and there are so many Americans who already don't have something productive to do that this can't possibly not be viewed as a threat to vulnerable American citizens and why are Federal government would be so unconcerned, maybe they're this week becoming embarrassed enough that they have to pretend to be concerned, but they clearly haven't been concerned.
That is a paradox of its own, right?
That just seems shocking.
The most basic duty of the federal government is, you know, to protect the integrity of the country from things that threaten it, including a mass migration of desperate people.
So, I hear a couple of embedded hypotheses, or rather, yeah, embedded within one another.
The one from a couple of decades ago that you hypothesized then was that the one-child policy, whether intentionally or not, will serve to create a standing army that will then be, you know, ready.
And furthermore, you have a hypothesis that having seen what you have just seen in Panama a week or so ago, that it feels like there are two migrations happening, and that one of them is indeed a primarily Chinese migration of primarily military-aged people, of primarily men, who are unforthcoming about what they are doing in contrast to every other person we met.
And everything, indeed, about that migration is different in some way.
And that is hard to point to, because if you're just at the border of Texas and Mexico seeing people come across, everyone looks the same.
In fact, it's a very, very diverse group of migrants, but you can't tell the difference At that point, as you can in the Darien, because the camps look different, the way they're being treated is different, the way the secrecy is different, everything is different, right?
But once you combine everyone later on, once it gets funneled, once everyone gets funneled together at the crossings, it's hard to tell.
What might be an alternative explanation?
What might an alternative hypothesis be to explain not the one-child policy, what was that about, but to explain what you saw, what you actually saw in Panama with these different kinds of camps, these different demographic makeups, the different secrecy, the different treatment, etc.
Another explanation would be that Either with a wink from the Chinese Communist Party or evading its surveillance that people fleeing China were looking for opportunity in the U.S.
and that because they have lived under a totalitarian regime Their reluctance to talk is a reflex based on having been surveilled, not knowing.
That explains a tiny piece of the difference.
Doesn't explain the disparity in wealth and organization and resources that seem to be coming not just from the people, but also from the UN.
No, it could be.
I don't think it does because I didn't feel that.
I want to hear an alternative hypothesis.
Sure.
No, I think it's a good exercise.
And it may well be, but the fact of Chinese culture being remote from not all, but most of the other cultures that are migrating might mean that just from the point of view of delivering services To Chinese people, it might be easier to organize them.
If there was a large number of them, China's a large source population, large number of migrants motivated by something like economic opportunity or fleeing oppression or whatever it was, they might end up in Panama.
They might... How many camps did you see?
Just the two?
No, we saw three camps.
And what was the, which, in which style was the third camp that you haven't yet talked about?
The third camp was actually a different style, but in terms of the demographics, it was very much like the Kannon Mambryo camp.
Economic migrants.
Economic migrants.
Varied in terms of age, structure, ethnicity, had appeared to have sprung up organically near a village, such that the villagers were helping to run it, even though they would bother that the immigrants not be there.
Absolutely, and our freedom to And you could walk in.
Talk to people.
Photograph it.
All of that matched the Canon Embryo camp and not the San Vicente camp.
Not quite.
It was a combination.
That camp that we saw, the second camp that we saw, mostly matched Canon Embryo, but there was a section of it that we weren't allowed into that was like an organized set of buildings for migrants.
Put together by IOM.
So we didn't see that part of it, but it was mostly like the first organic camp.
Okay.
There may have been a piece of it that we didn't get into, which I didn't see.
Yeah, there was.
But in terms of the demographics, it's not that there was a huge population.
No, and frankly, I'd be surprised if you were allowed to roam freely through all parts of any camp.
Why would you be able to?
I mean, that was the case in Canaan, I remember.
Yeah.
But anyway, let's finish out the hypothesis.
The hypothesis would be that the origin story of the Chinese migrants is very different.
Their economic status, the journey obviously is very different from China than it would be from Venezuela.
Although equally different from Venezuela as from Yemen or Afghanistan, both of whom you saw immigrants from.
Agreed, but it might be that economically, I mean really, money allows you to skip the most treacherous parts of the Darien.
So the Chinese migrants may be because of economies of scale, because there are lots of them and they can arrange boat travel.
I don't know.
Something.
But you could imagine a different story allows a better route.
Economies of scale is actually an interesting possibility here.
Yeah.
It is not clear why you would join in Panama.
What do you mean, why you would join in Panama?
Why you would join what in Panama?
If you can skip the Darien by boat, it is not obvious why... Why do you land still in the Darien?
Right, you've got a lot of traversing to do to get into the U.S.
Yeah, although, as you know, I did a field season on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, and then we've spent time, and I also did study abroad on the Caribbean coast of Panama, very near there in Bocas.
But the season that I was down in Talamanca, in Costa Rica, What I was hearing, it was the off-season for surfing and therefore it was the off-season for cocaine.
And that the boats that were coming, this would have been mid-90s, the drug boats that were coming up from South America, mostly from Colombia, during the season when there were lots of tourists, which in that part of Costa Rica meant surfers, were in town, the boats would always stop and drop to their local dealers and then there would be basically a coke-infused economy.
for the, I don't remember how much of the year that it happened, but those boats had a hard time.
The story, and this is, you know, this is decades ago and it was hearsay, but I was living there in a time when it wasn't surf season and therefore it wasn't coke season, it was actually dangerous because
There was still some coke around and the dealers had no one to sell it to and so they were coked up and they were not making any money and they were going on occasional shooting sprees and sometimes they went into the forest and otherwise I was the only person hanging out in the forest because I was there to study poison frogs.
And the people would occasionally, you know, band together, the people of the town would pan together and chase the drug dealers out into the forest, and then they'd be, you know, coked up in the forest with guns.
And everyone was sort of waiting for these coke boats to come back.
But during a lot of times of the year, they couldn't.
Yeah, I'm not arguing that there's obvious boat route, but the point is Panama is a funny place.
Panama does not have the lack of a visa requirement that Ecuador does.
So there's something about joining a migration No one is getting around the Darien Gap.
But didn't you say that they, I mean, they had, they, they, the expectation was had come in into Ecuador and had just taken the boat the short distance to evade the gap.
It wasn't that they, they flew into Panama and fly to the Darien Gap.
That's true.
So I have important information here.
No one is getting around the Darien Gap.
They are getting to, depending on how much money they have to spend, they're taking boats from a Colombian, uh, town to various different Colombian towns.
No one is getting past the Panamanian border on boats.
I'm not going to say no one, but the route that most people are taking, including the Chinese migrants, the Chinese are paying more to go further.
But there are like three different towns.
They're bypassing and they're also apparently using things like horses.
There's mechanisms that are bypassing.
No one's even getting into Panama.
They're staying behind the Colombian border and then walking through the Darién.
Everyone that we saw was doing that.
Even if they're taking advantage of horses or different things to make it easier.
They're all going through the area.
And that's, I mean, that actually, that fits with the story, that a lot of the jungle that you would have to miss would be in Colombia, that you can take boats a short distance, but you can't just cross the border by sea into Panama because Panama has a long history of watching out for these boats.
It was drug boats, maybe it still is, but now it's migrant boats.
Right.
Yeah.
So that all, that fits.
Fits-ish.
Yeah.
I mean, there's still something.
There's still.
There's something odd about the whole thing.
You've got a migration, which is unnecessary.
If we're going to allow people in, it's odd to make them walk through all of Central America or take buses or anything else, right?
So anyway, there is a paradox there, how exactly it works.
So the alternative hypothesis I hear has something to do with There's more Chinese migrants who, you know, maybe because they're coming from longer ways away, they either already knew each other or have had time to know each other.
They don't share a language with any of the other migrants, which would also be the truth for the Afghans and the Yemenis, but, you know, not for like the Venezuelans versus the Colombians versus... But there's some critical mass of people.
There's some critical mass of people.
They share a language, they share a culture, they share the journey up until this point.
And that economies of scale being what they are, they can join forces.
But that still doesn't explain it.
You know, unless the San Vicente camp that you saw was an outlier.
It was just like, that's the only camp that looks like that, and that's the one you saw.
Like, why is that one in the middle of nowhere?
Not organic, totally synthetic, totally rectangular, as opposed to having grown up from where people emerge from the forest bedraggled and tired.
And why is there a long line of buses there waiting?
Maybe that's because of the relative wealth of the Chinese.
But there's still a piece that feels like that The evidence that you saw doesn't explain it as well.
Yeah, that's the problem with it.
I would also say there's a part that is just a feeling.
Sure.
The hostility, I know what it's like.
From the migrants.
From the migrants.
I know what it's like when somebody does not feel at liberty to talk.
They want to talk, but they don't feel that it is safe.
That is very different than what we felt.
These were people who viewed us dimly.
They did not want to talk because it makes no sense to share information With us, right?
It's all downside.
That's what it felt like.
So there's that.
Yeah.
And, you know, I also just can't explain... Which is rare.
Like, we've run into that sometimes in our travels, but usually, if you have an openness to you, and make some attempt at understanding where you are, and the culture you're in, and the language, and just, you don't need to be anywhere close to fluent, but just, like, make some attempt to be like, hi, I'm a human being, you are too, I'm really interested in the fact that I'm in your home, And I want to know more about it.
Almost everyone has an interest in that.
Yeah, even more.
Imagine that you had decided to up and leave your home culture and you were going to America and Americans show up in Panama interested in your story.
It is not a slam dunk that you would be anything other than Fascinated by this first taste of the new culture.
And maybe concerned at first that this isn't what it appears.
Like, oh, what are you, you know, what is this?
Are you the feds?
Whatever, right?
But if not that, then interested, I would think.
Yeah, I mean, and we clearly weren't.
I mean, just our style of dress and all would have suggested otherwise.
So anyway, the thing did feel very off.
And in any case, Yes, multiple embedded hypotheses, a kind of Trojan migration is one of them.
There's a natural, organic, economic migration, and then there's some other migration traveling within it.
And here in the U.S., the point is, well, what do you think of the migrants?
Like, well, which migrants?
You know?
Yeah.
That's it.
That's the punchline, right?
Like, what do you think of what's going on at the border?
What do you think of the migrants?
What do you think of what's going on at the border?
I think there are a lot of things going on at the border.
Yeah, I think there's more than one thing going on at the border, and I'm against all of it because I'm an American and I know that it's one thing for a small number of people to enter the country.
It's another thing for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of new Americans to arrive, or de facto Americans.
Right?
The point is, it was our economy humming along so well that it can just simply absorb that number of people and not directly rob the people who are struggling in our economy already?
No way!
So, I'm against it for that reason, but I'm absolutely compassionate with respect to the fact that these people are fleeing something real.
Right?
And, you know, I'm as an American, I'm honored that they would think that America was still a good place to go.
As we're watching it collapse, you know, it's interesting that a lot of people still view it and Terms that I think frankly probably need an update but But anyway, I'm against that at one level, but it's all human.
And then there's a question of, did our enemies figure something out about this migration, either as an opportunity or did they seed it through the international community in order to cloak what they're up to?
Again, it's a hypothesis, but it's one that we really need to think carefully about.
And I would just say one last thing.
There's one more hypothesis related to this.
Maybe there are two, but there's one that I want to put on the table here.
When I did my episode with the folks from the U.S.
military who had been threatened.
Military whistleblowers.
Right.
Two episodes, right?
You spoke to several people in two different episodes about the effects that the vaccine mandates had on them.
Right.
Some of these people had been driven out and some of them were fighting to maintain their careers.
But in any case, This looked hostile to American interest to take some of our best people and drive them out because they were Reluctant about vaccines that frankly a reasonable person had every reason to be reluctant about and I said two things at the time One is I said, you know what?
That is gonna leave behind a force that is compliant to immoral orders and that's frightening but to This one way that this could come about is is that somebody could have noticed our pay-for-play political system and instead of corrupting it for some corporate interest that was bad for Americans they could have corrupted it for one of our international antagonists interests and just basically
Induced us to harm ourselves, right?
Vaccinating our entire military, right?
That wasn't a good idea.
There was no defense for that.
These were, in general, healthier than average Americans, younger than average Americans.
These were not people jeopardized by COVID, and giving them something, even if it had shown itself to be perfectly harmless in the trials, nobody knew what the long-term impact was.
That was a dumb thing to do.
Why would we do a dumb thing like that?
It's not obvious that there's a risk there.
So anyway, the hypothesis I put on the table then was that if you have a corrupt political system where it does the bidding of whoever ponies up the dough, then what's to stop our enemies from ponying up the dough?
Right?
And if you think there is something to stop them, like we have laws against that, then the point is, okay, well, where are the court cases that indicate that those laws have been applied in a way that has frustrated the enemies that have undoubtedly tried it?
Yeah.
And if those court cases don't exist, then my contention is, you'd be a fool to think this never happened.
And we don't know what effect it has, but anytime we, you know, Savage ourselves, we should ask ourselves the question of did we do it because we were confused or did we do it because we were induced to do it?
So anyway, another hypothesis.
Indeed.
Did you want to tie this in to IGG4 at all, or do you want to save that?
Let us save that until next week.
Okay.
People who are interested in diving into that discussion should check out the Locals chat with Chris Martinson.
Good.
There's some stuff on it there, and then we can do a deeper dive next week.
All right, so that was a good solid conversation already.
I got a couple little things, but did you also want to do a big conversation about a totally different topic right now?
No, I think we should hold that one as well.
Okay, I just won't even say the noun then.
Okay, yeah, we're in the state of that.
Okay, so we could talk for a while about these things that I want to talk about here, but probably better not to because we'll... Disgust everyone.
Oh no.
Yeah, okay, so something cool, something grotesque.
The cool thing is, here we have...
This is just the science news version of some new research.
Giving birth gives birth to neurons.
In mice, pregnancy results in new neurons that support recognition of pups.
So neurogenesis, new neurons, don't happen very often in the adult brain or the adult central nervous system, in mammals and vertebrates more generally.
So, whenever you find neurogenesis, evidence of neurogenesis, that is the proliferation of actually new neurons, not just new connections.
We do form new connections all the time, but actually new neurons is pretty rare.
And this is mice.
We don't know for humans, but there's this cool research.
And actually, just if I can have my screen back for a moment, I'll just show the actual paper.
I don't know why it's not going full screen for me.
So here's the original research.
Pregnancy responsive pools of adult neural stem cells for transient neurogenesis in mothers.
Note transient.
And so what these researchers think is going on is that neurogenesis, latent pregnancy in the olfactory bulb and lobe.
Yeah, exactly.
For these mammals, the vast majority of mammals, primates being a notable exception, are olfactory forward.
You can't see in the background our dog moving around with her snout like You know dogs, you know mammals.
We've all got big noses, with primates being an exception, and olfaction is a big part of what we do in order to make sense of our world.
And in fact... Blessed are the big noses.
Blessed are the big noses, for they shall smell the world.
And in fact, in primates, the primitive olfactory bulb and lobe have become the forebrain that is mostly associated with Scenario building and memory.
So, you know, thinking both backwards and forwards in time.
And it's part of why it's part of why we are so good at those things is that we have taken over our primitively smell focused part of the brain and also part of why probably smells evoke memories so effectively for people.
But anyway, in these mice, in late pregnancy, mothers have neurogenesis in their olfactory regions.
And the thought is, the hypothesis is, to explain the finding that there's neurogenesis late in pregnancy, is that this helps them immediately recognize and then remember what their pups smell like so that they will have kin recognition through olfaction very effectively through the period of time when they will be lactating and actively mothering their pups.
Pups?
I don't know if pups is the right word for mice.
Pups is a good one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
Isn't it?
So you would extrapolate from this, I would say it's much less likely in humans or even primates that it would be in the olfactory lobe, but it's not unlikely that there is a parallel process
Or it might be, and given that the olfactory lobe now is mostly about memory and scenario building, again, thinking through time, both backwards and forwards, and given that we have the longest childhoods of any organisms on the planet relative to lifespan, being really clear about, this is mine, everything about this baby, I want to know everything and never forget.
Right.
Now, there's less of an issue with respect to recognizing, especially as you get out towards humans, there's much less of an ambiguity.
Yeah, that's true.
But it's actually, it raises a question about other creatures where there's even more of an ambiguity.
Yeah, so you don't... Like bats.
Like bats!
Interesting, yeah.
Bats in a colony of hundreds of thousands or millions of animals.
The ability to recognize one's own offspring is known, but how does it work?
And you might see this even more extensively there.
Yeah.
No, actually, you can put this up.
I'm not going to explain the whole image.
So this is just from the, yeah, this is just from the Science News Report.
This is not from the original article, but they have a little schematic in which, you know, here's the brain.
Here's the mom brain going, oh, I know you're mine and you're mine and you're mine and you're mine.
And you can see, you know, this is like, is the case in most mammals, it's a clutch, it's a litter, right?
There's a bunch of babies.
But mice don't tend to, I think, do colony breeding, or do they?
Well, two things.
Yeah.
This is a hypothesis I'm going to put on the table, but I don't believe it's likely.
I just think it's plausible.
This could be an effect of the captive breeding colonies.
I'd be curious.
I don't know exactly how it's done, but it's possible that this is a... Still, neurogenesis is such a big leap.
If that wasn't happening at all... No, no, no, no, no.
I see that sort of trigger.
Neurogenesis is a thing.
There's some mechanism.
It could be triggered by a powerful evolutionary force the same way the elongation of mouse telomeres was.
Again, I don't think this is likely, but possible.
But here's the thing that I think this actually predicts.
Cuckoldry in rodents.
This would be a better prediction if the neurogenesis latent pregnancy is only in rodents.
Well, let's put it this way.
The best prediction would be that this pattern of neurogenesis would be present where cuckoldry had been a significant evolutionary force, and that this had been an evolved response to it.
Yeah.
So this is, moms really want to know who their kids are.
Part of what this is going to be a response to is moms are going to have to go out and forage, right?
And so if they have to leave their kids behind, either with no caretaker at all, or with a dad if they're monogamous, or with a helper at the nest, then when they come back they want to know for sure who they're nursing, who they're letting latch on.
But again, not a big deal if you know because they're in some pocket in a log and there's nobody else there.
But if there are other individuals that are dropping babies off because it's a bargain, then... So anyway, let's just leave that as a prediction.
If we see a paper that says, cuckoldry and... I mean, maybe there are such papers, I don't know.
If there aren't, and we see one, then we'll have a good, cohesive story as to why this would evolve.
Yeah, and I'd love to see... I'd love to know what's going on with primates, if we have neurogenesis in pregnancy, and primates, and where.
Yeah, I mean, I bet you do, but I bet you it's... let's see if we can predict where it could be...
Well, I mean, where in the brain?
A, primates have taken over so much of the primitively olfactory brain for basically our cortex, so I don't know that thinking through exactly where in the brain it's going to be is going to be all that useful.
Yeah, and as you pointed out at the beginning, it might be done through dendritic growth rather than neurogenesis.
Okay, so that's cool.
Mm-hmm.
The next thing is not.
Oh, no.
It seemed... Okay.
It's the diaper spa.
Excuse me?
Yeah.
Um, so we have our, our, we have libs of TikTok and our friend Holly to thank for bringing this to my attention, but um, Boston.com website also ran a piece on it.
Um, and here, let's just start there.
You can show my screen.
What's a diaper spa?
Writes Boston.com.
What's a diaper spa and why is it raising eyebrows in New Hampshire?
People tend to fear anything that they fail to comprehend, said the owner of the Diaper Spa, a new business that's stuck in local controversy.
A debate over a new spa is brewing in southern New Hampshire, where some residents in Atkinson are taking a stand against the Diaper Spa, a nursery-like business for adults who role-play as children and, yes, wear diapers.
Wait, what?
According to its website, the Diaper Spa is open to, quote, all diaper-wearing individuals who seek acceptance, respite, and care.
Photos on the spa's page show a space decorated with the soft comforts of a nursery, complete with toys, folded diapers, and an adult-sized crib.
Dr. Colleen Anne Murphy, the spa's owner, offers a range of services that include virtual playdates at $200 an hour, as well as a $1,500 all-day diaper B&B experience that promises rejuvenating pampering, quote, for the little one inside of you.
Okay.
So, if I can have my screw back.
Boston.com goes on to say that there's a mom, so also the location, it's not open yet, the location of this thing is right near a park.
There's a mom in the local area who's like, I'm not going to take my kids to that park, and actually, I'm going to set up a Change.org petition saying, actually, please don't give them a business license.
What the actual hell, right?
And interestingly, the particulars of the Change.org petition have now been resolved, and so it's been taken down like three days after it went up.
But Boston.com, because this is like, This is very close to Boston.
This is going to be something that the woman who's running this diaper spa is hoping to get the, I don't know, the diaper elites from Boston to go to.
Reports positively about this diaper spa.
thing, and then says about the mom who is concerned about it that her opening up, no don't, I'm looking for it, don't show my screen please, that her opening up the Change.org petition is her doubling down, there it is, Gallagher doubled down on those concerns.
So we know the bias of this Boston.com outfit, but let's just take a look, shall we, at website itself.
Okay, so this is from Reflections.
Okay, Nighttime Comfort, a guide to overnight diapering for ABDLs.
What, you might ask, is an ABDL?
An ABDL is an adult baby diaper lover.
For many adult baby diaper lovers, nighttime diapering is essential to their lifestyle, providing comfort and security.
This blog post will explore techniques and products that enhance the nighttime diapering experience.
From specific types to trusted brands, we'll delve into creating a secure and worry-free night.
OK, I think we've had enough.
I spent a little bit of time with this and I realized that I actually was not controlling the look of disgust on my face with just every Every moment of looking at this site.
So, there's obvious concerns about who the people are.
Like, there's the umbrella-level concerns about who the people are who would be attracted to go to this thing and having it next to a park and all of this.
And there's been accusations of, like, these people must be, you know, pedophiles at the very least.
They're mentally ill.
Why are we encouraging them?
All of this.
Let's be a little bit more basic, even.
What society tells people that it's okay to give up on what may be the very first item of control that we gain over ourselves?
This is the first thing that humans learn how to do.
It is utterly fundamental to being with other human beings, to being with them, In what world could you possibly imagine that looking for care, looking for comfort, is to be found by shitting in your own pants?
Yeah.
I cannot believe that we are here.
It is The natural... there's a slippery slope that involves attempting to police people's meanness.
Yeah, yes, yes.
So is it good to be mean?
No.
Right.
But once you start saying, well, Making fun of people is bad, right?
And you start policing the places where it probably is just purely bad, right?
The point is, you're opening the door to saying, well, actually, making fun of people has no place, right?
Right.
Shame has no place.
Right.
And the point is, as we make this point across many, many domains, if you have a doctor who thinks pain is a malady rather than an adaptation, Don't go to that doctor, right?
Your pain is there to help guide you.
Now, it may be that you have pain in a phantom limb.
That's a problem.
That's not helping you.
But in general, if you're in pain, there's a reason and it's trying to tell you something, right?
Same thing can be said for unhappiness.
The same thing can be said for shame and feeling humiliated.
And the idea that we are going to take away the feedbacks that allow people to develop a proper sense of what is reasonable, right?
Yes, we have people Who are saying, well, why shouldn't I be allowed to wear X, Y, and Z?
What is the reason?
And the answer is, it's not, you know, Chesterton's fence being what it is, the precautionary principle being what it is.
There are lots of things that a natural human society will train you to, that you will be better off for having picked up the lesson.
And it doesn't mean you won't have some moment of profound embarrassment in You know, childhood or your teen years or something, but the point is that embarrassment causes you to build the circuit that prevents you from doing the thing that is embarrassing you.
And so there's some stuff, you know, it's an MD who started this thing, and so of course her credentials are the really important thing here.
This is the first MD-led diaper spa, which suggests that there are other diaper spas, oh my god, but okay.
Yeah.
Her Weasel words to explain to the non-adult baby diaper-loving public why this is okay is, well, I was originally interested in this because there are people who, for physical injury reasons, need to wear diapers as adults.
They're incontinent, there's nothing to be done about it.
How dare you conflate that with this, first of all?
I imagine that those people would really rather you stay the hell away from them.
But from there, she goes to, so I got interested in why people sometimes feel that they need to.
But I want, but I want, and I'm not quoting her directly because I'm not going to go back on that website right now, but she tries to make this point that frankly sounds a lot like a point you have made over in psychedelic space around not-for-recreation.
Very entertaining, very interesting, but it's more than recreation.
And she tries to walk that line here and say, We're not... This is not a spa for people who just like to wear diapers.
This is a spa for people who feel they need to wear diapers.
And her imagined future clientele is mostly not the people who actually really do, and also feel like having their nappies changed by a woman.
This is people who have decided, just like the vast majority of people who are claiming to be trans, this is a need.
If I don't get this, I will die.
If I don't get this, you are negating who I am, what my identity is, I will not be able to go on.
This is that same conflation where all you have to do is say, oh no, this isn't something I want.
This is something I need.
And suddenly, we're not allowed to say no.
Suddenly, as soon as you change it from I want it to I need it, and there's been actually no change at all in anything except the word that you used, now we aren't allowed to shame, we aren't allowed to critique, we aren't allowed to say actually, That's not okay.
Get control of your bowels already and figure out some other way to explore who you are.
It's going to be some version of Munchausen syndrome, right?
Where the idea is there's some category that we're going to deem protected in which there's something you can do that forces somebody else to do something.
And for whatever terrible reason you find that gratifying.
Yeah.
And I agree with you.
It has a lot to do with, uh, the, um, Confrontational version of trans where people are effectively Daring others to notice that they are not the sex that they nominally are presenting as yeah, right?
So this is this is like that and It really I mean it just obviously there was a Safety on the gun, and we removed it somewhere, probably as a result of some arguably noble instinct to protect somebody from something, but it was at the top of a slippery slope.
You know, we took away the caution, watch your step, slippery slope, you know, no lifeguard, whatever the sign said, right?
And then the point is, we've been marched one step at a time to ever stupider things that we are forbidden to comment on, forbidden to view as shameful.
And, you know, look, at the end of the day, here's where we are.
We have this insanity.
If compassion is your thing, isn't it more compassionate to allow a bit of teasing and mockery in order to get people to correct their program so that they don't need to go to a spa where they can wear diapers?
Right?
Isn't that mockery actually serving their interests, even though there may be a moment of intense humiliation for them that then causes them to realize, oh, this is a program I really need to change?
Right?
That's the compassionate thing.
And you know, I mean, we've made this point before, but There is this intense fervor against bullying.
Right.
And look, bullies suck.
There's no question about it.
But if you make all, if you assume that all bullying comes from bullies, Right?
Then you're making a mistake.
Because in fact, people, by revealing, you know, even the people in your schoolyard are revealing something about what others can see that you don't necessarily know that they can see.
And they are helping train you.
And, you know, it's the same thing in a scientific context.
Your lab mates are not doing you a favor by telling you that your work is awesome when it's not.
Your lab mates are doing you a favor by telling you, hey, that point is not compelling.
Here's what I see that argues against it, right?
And causing you, yes, in that moment, it may be very unpleasant to face that question, but you need somebody to put you to that test so that at the point that your work gets into the world, you're ready for it.
So, I mean, there's three different manifestations, and I want us to be careful.
I know you're not actually synonymizing these, but an uncareful listener might imagine that you are saying that a schoolyard bully is a scientific critic, is someone who would shame those who would like to wear diapers and have someone else clean up their feces.
The
The critique of science, which is utterly necessary for science to actually do what science does, works when I've done a piece of research and I've shared it with you, and you say, oh, I get that you've already done the work, and because you're a field biologist, you already came home, and you can't really redo this, but I feel like there's a methodological flaw, so you don't actually know what you think you know.
Sucks for me.
Sucks for me a lot, but I need to know.
I mean, it's not going to go away, and I need to not publish that thinking that I didn't, that I did know something, that I did demonstrate something with the experiment that I did that I actually didn't, because I had not yet seen that there was a methodological flaw.
That is different from the, like, canonical schoolyard bully who goes, hmm, who's weak?
You.
Okay, what's weak about you?
You're, um, developmentally delayed, and that has, you have no responsibility for that whatsoever.
It's nothing you did to yourself, it's nothing you asked for, it's not, you didn't come to me asking for critique.
You're a kid who's developmentally delayed, and frankly everyone already knows that, but everyone was being polite.
And trying to include you in the things that you could be included in, and not drawing you into things until very recently that you actually had no place in because your developmental delays means that you can't actually compete equally with others in some realms.
The schoolyard bully goes, I'm going to find the weakness and I'm going to go after the weakness and the weakness and the weakness, and it's immutable and it's unchosen and it's uninvited, And it persists even after recognition.
Maybe that's the distinction, right?
That the scientific critique, you know, you need to keep hammering me if I say, no, it's fine.
Like, I definitely know what I found.
And you say, well, I know that your data say what they say, but given this flaw in the experiment, in the experiment, your methodology can't possibly have revealed what you think it does.
So it doesn't matter what your data say.
They don't, they don't mean what you think.
You actually do get to, and I would ask that you do keep hammering me on that until I look, until you figure out a way to say it in a way that I can go like, oh god, you're right.
Damn it.
But the kid who's developmentally late on the playground wasn't asking for it, doesn't need it, isn't helped by it.
And so the bully doesn't actually have any legitimate reason to keep on doing that, nor in fact did he have any reason to start doing it in the first place, because it was some immutable characteristic of some kid who didn't deserve to be picked on.
I think you have all the pieces of the puzzle that we need in that.
One is, the bully is loathsome when they pick on somebody for something that isn't their responsibility and they can't do anything about.
Yeah.
Developmentally disabled kid is just purely a victim and the bully is a nasty human being for choosing that thing.
But I'm trying to draw a distinction between bullying, which is a natural feature of childhood, and a bully who takes that on as their job and goes around.
So we need a different word or something.
Well, we've talked about the fact that very often the term we have is applied to the malignant version of something that has a normal version that doesn't have a name, right?
So shaming does feel like this is part of Right, and you know, needling is this side of shaming, right?
Shaming is more barbed.
Needling is like, hey, we can see that thing that you think we can't see, you know?
So, I mean, guys do this all the freaking time, right?
They do it all the freaking time.
Your best friends reveal the little stuff that, you know, is vulnerability.
Right, and women do it more cryptically.
Much more cryptically.
Right, or they will support each other when they shouldn't because the point is then you don't realize that You're on display and your friends didn't, you know, your friends... You have toilet paper stuck to your shoe.
I didn't tell you.
Yeah, that's terrible.
But, so, okay, so there's a difference between picking on somebody for something they can't change, which has no potential benefit, and picking on somebody in some way, needling them, or maybe slightly more, to get them to change something that they should change for their own benefit.
But it needs to be something that they can change.
Right, right.
But the other thing is, in the example, the scientific example... Wanting to wear a diaper as an adult is something you can change.
And you better, right?
You just, you suck if you're taking this on voluntarily, right?
That's something that's, the onus is on you to fix that and not put the rest of us to discussing the okayness of it because it's not okay.
Right.
And I would also just point out that this behavior is Unsanitary, and is only rendered sanitary by civilization.
So the point is, civilization, which is making it possible for you to play in this disgusting way, has a right to demand that you don't, right?
Because we're, you know, we're gonna rescue you with antibiotics, you've got a sink with hot and cold running water and soap made in a factory somewhere, right?
And he's hired someone who's willing to handle your shit, congratulations.
Yeah, so anyway, you have an obligation to cut that out.
But to your point about Going after somebody who has a methodological flaw after they've already come home and there's nothing they can do about the fact that their data is compromised.
That's a bad version of the story, but the way that this works when it works... Well, that's why I used this, like, oh, that really sucks for me, but it's better that I know now.
Then before I try to publish it, and, you know, it gets to peer review, because peer review means nothing, and then it's out there, and then, you know, the whole world who's still alive and can think goes, but, oh, wow, you published a piece of crap.
You must not be a good scientist.
Right.
But you're still zoomed in too much on the one piece of work.
And the point is, a culture of people who honorably call each other out for flaws in their reasoning produces the internalization of the critic.
Right?
One thing that is very clear, somebody can present a piece of work that looks good, right?
You find out whether they know what they're talking about in the Q&A, right?
When somebody says, this looks wrong to me, and they have the answer, and it's compelling, and the point is, oh, this person knows the flaws, or the potential flaws, and they've plugged those holes, and the work actually is what it looks like, because They're not covering.
They haven't told you, stand here and this looks good.
If you stand in the spot, you can scrutinize it.
You can push it around and it stands up.
And sometimes the answer is, yep, that is intentionally vague because here's all the stuff.
I'm going to show you a tiny bit right now that's downstream.
And that's actually a different piece of research I don't have time to go into here, but here's what you saw and the gloss of what it means.
So like some response that indicates, I know.
And even if people don't say it, if there's something in them that goes like, I'm glad, good, because I know that there's a couple of these things that I had to do a little bit of hand-waving, because you never have time to tell the absolutely complete story as you know it.
Right, but having that stuff means that you did the homework to make sure that the work actually is what it says it is.
It's not just designed to get you a paper.
Right, right.
So internalizing that critic is only something that you're going to do if other people have done the job of critic well.
Yep.
And so in any case, yeah, at the point that you've come home with data that's flawed, that's because that process was not intense enough.
Right?
In advance.
Right.
That's the reason the graduate school, when it worked, took many years, is that in your first year, you go out and you collect some data, and then you come back and you present it, and you get questions you can't field, and you realize what it is that you have to do in order to make the work robust.
By the time you have an advanced degree, ostensibly you've learned that lesson, and you know, You know about that domain enough that there shouldn't be any glaring flaws.
Yeah, but I guess, I mean, this may be much more specific to me than most people, but you and I did that a lot since we've been together, to each other, even before we understood that we were doing it scientifically exactly.
But for me, being alone in the field for many months at a time with, you know, a field assistant, but not you.
Often I had you, and then we could do it together.
The five-month field season that I collected most of the data, half of the data for my dissertation, when you were not with me.
And when I did have a field assistant, she was brilliant, but she was 10 years my junior, and mostly I was doing the thinking through possibilities and experimental design and such on my own.
Yep.
was the moment that I point to, coming back from that and then revealing it to everyone.
So poke holes in it, shoot it down, and not having it shot down.
It's like, yep.
I thought-- not even I thought so.
I mean, if I'm being honest, I thought, I knew it.
I know.
I did not know before that field season, in part because you and I had mostly traveled together and mostly done it together.
I did not know for sure of what I was capable.
And so doing...
Putting yourself at the risk of, oh god, what if there's a big flaw here?
That's a year gone, right?
Because field seasons being the way they are, you can't just be like, well, I guess I can write back on a plane.
But be ready at the point that you go to learn a ton and be like, okay, now I'm actually on my own.
And this is where the rubber hits the road.
It is.
It's remarkable.
It goes to what we say in our book about consciousness.
Yeah.
Consciousness initially evolves in order to allow people to pool cognitive resources, but then once you have the tool of being able to understand what's on somebody else's mind based on the cues that they give you and what they say, now you have a module that can have a debate in your own head.
And that thing that can have a debate in your own head is your best friend, because it can be a critic.
You can have this idea that you think might be right, and then you can have a critic say, well, but here's the ways it might not be right.
And the point is, by the time you get to an actual discussion with somebody else, you've already had the debate.
So anyway, and if we forbid criticism, you don't develop that.
And you end up with diaper spas.
I guess.
I think.
I mean, if you forbid criticism, this is where we land.
Yeah, if you forbid criticism and if you start thinking that every time a person is uncomfortable something has gone wrong rather than a person is feeling uncomfortable because that's a natural process by which we get better.
Yes.
Then you end up there.
All right, I think we're good.
I think we've done it.
I think we did it.
We will be back in a week with another live stream.
In the meantime, please subscribe to our channel on Rumble and Even if even if you mostly just listen comfort around will subscribe to the channel.
It actually helps us out and Become a member at locals where we've got some great locals only content and we're putting up more all the time and we do we did this private Q&A just this last weekend, which is still available and do some AMAs and Lots lots of good stuff there.
So those are the places really trying to encourage people to go to and I also write at naturalselections.substack.com every week.
This week I wrote about the carbon footprint of urban food versus conventionally grown food and how actually our alma mater put out research that suggests the carbon footprint of of the food that people who just want to grow food in their backyards is higher and so they should really stick to buying the crap that you can buy at the store.
It was an embarrassing piece of research I wrote about that.
I also wrote about the origin of shoulders, which the comparative anatomist in me came out.
I'm really excited about this.
You wrote about the origin of shoulders.
Are you going to do a follow-up on the temperature of shoulders?
No, what does that mean?
Cold shoulders, I'm thinking.
Oh, I mean, you want to do a guest post on natural selection?
Yes, but not about cold shoulders.
Maybe about soft shoulders.
Soft shoulders?
Yeah, I thought somehow I was thinking about roads.
The temperature of shoulders on roads.
No, I hadn't gotten there.
Yeah, no.
Okay.
And, of course, we have some cool merch at darkhorsestore.org.
Straight up just Dark Horse stuff.
We've got a nice shirt, Cut That Shit Out.
Cut That Shit Out.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
Actually, we had to send a stack of those to the... To the Diaper Spot people.
Wow.
Yeah, okay.
It's a little bit too literal though.
It's a little too literal.
Yeah.
But, I don't know, maybe they'd get the message.
On the other hand, we could be convicted of bullying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We got Jake's Micropizza.
If you're in a place where you're being asked to wear a mask, just eat some Micropizza.
They can't ask you to mask while you're eating, can they?
No, that's impossible.
You can't do it.
I mean, as tiny as Jake's Micropizza is, it does not get through the pores of a mask, so you can't wear the mask while you're eating it.
Yeah, nothing to be done.
Blueberries, because oxidants happen.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Pfizer, the breakthroughs never stop.
They really don't.
That's a good one.
Anyway, lots of good stuff there at darkhorsestore.org.
And we do still have, you have conversations at, actually your Patreon conversations this weekend.
Yes.
So that's happening.
And check out our sponsors this week, which were Maui Nui Venison, American Heart for Gold, and Free Spoke.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
