Deadly Serious Games: The 212th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 212th 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 how to build your own boot camp, with principles including the courage cascade, flak over the target, recognizing the distinction between signal and noise, random vs systematic error, “the room is not the room,” OODA loops, and keeping separate track of analytics and morals. Also: how a new an...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 212 if I am not mistaken.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Maddie is on the couch.
She is not a doctor of any kind, nor does she play one on TV, oddly enough.
It's true.
It's true.
She does not.
So here we are.
It's Valentine's Day.
It is Valentine's Day.
Happy Valentine's Day.
And to you, love.
Thank you.
And yep, it's Livestream 212.
Please come join us on Rumble.
We are trying to grow those numbers.
We appreciate you joining us on Rumble.
Subscribing to our channel there and there's a watch party going on at Locals right now and after this episode we will do a Q&A only at Locals so come become a member at or become a supporter at Locals and we will do a Q&A where you can ask your questions right there and we will answer as many as we have time for.
We're doing a second Q&A this week as well on Sunday, our usual monthly What we've been calling the Private Q&A.
We've moved it up a week this month for scheduling reasons.
We'll be doing that at 11am Pacific as well.
So we've got lots of good stuff going on at Locals.
Join us there.
And we have some interesting things to talk about, including a story that may rival Diaper Spa for levels of disgust it will produce.
You know, I am still traumatized by the diaper spa story.
It's like one of these things I understand it's our obligation to talk about these things.
It may tell us where civilization is headed and that's an important thing to know and to think about.
But it's just it's like one of those an image that you can't unsee.
Well, I have another one like that for you today.
We talked about it a little bit, and we decided that I would not tell you in advance.
I did not even give you the two-word soundbite, which I will give you as we talk about it and see if you can guess.
Yeah, I'm concerned that this one is going to be not only a once-you've-seen-it-you-can't-unsee-it, but once-you-hear-it-you-can't-unhear-it, and there's a point at which you're just out of senses that you can No, exactly, and you know, there's only so much room, memory being to some degree zero-sum, and usually we, you know, start, I don't want to say sluice, but that's not the right word here, but sloughing things off.
But some of these things just stick.
They got like epoxy levels of stickiness, and you really don't want to fill up your memory with all of these.
On the other hand, if it's what's going on, and we have a chance of raising awareness so that it can stop, I think it's valuable.
Yeah, there's also the issue that at some level you get better at handling these really appalling things that you rather were not in your head.
Pathologists are famously terrible people to have lunch with because they nonchalantly talk about things that are just incompatible with eating because they're People would say the same thing about biologists.
They would.
And, you know, I would also say that, you know, as a biologist, as an evolutionary biologist, you and I were both confronted regularly with questions about sex, right?
That often verge into discussions of things that would cause a normal person to blush and cower.
And, you know, you just get used to talking about these things.
And so anyway, maybe the answer is that if we instead of Yielding ourselves from these terrible things that you cannot unsee or unhear or unthink about if we just get used to it so that they are a minor issue and we can move past them back to what was once normal life.
Well, yeah, I don't think, that sounds, I know this is not what you mean, but that sounds like a call to normalize.
No, no.
What I mean is, I see how it could sound like that.
What I mean is, if we are to fight against these terrible things, then we cannot be in a battle with ourselves like, I have to fight, but I don't want to think about that thing.
You have to get to the point where you can just simply fight it, right?
And that means being able to think about it without it throwing you.
And at the moment, I'm still thrown by the diaper spot, was it?
Yes, indeed.
And you will be by today's little story at the end of the hour as well.
Perfect.
Before we get there, though, we have, as usual, three awesome sponsors to bring to you this week.
We have three ads right at the top of the hour and then nothing else is paid content throughout any of our live streams.
And we're going to start now.
And I see, because I am a professional, that this says our first sponsor, which naturally leads to the extrapolation that I'm up.
Our first sponsor this week is Maddie's all-time favorite, Sundaes.
It's one of our favorites too, and if you have a dog, it's likely to be one of yours.
When you make your dog this happy while giving her amazing food that is good for her, what's not to be thrilled about?
Sundaes makes dry dog food, but it's not standard issue burnt kibble.
The standard high-end dry food that we We're feeding Maddie seemed to please her.
She's Labrador and labs will basically eat.
She's licking her lips over there.
She's listening to you and she's looking at us.
She just woke up started licking her lips like I can't believe that she would recognize it by the name of the dog food.
But she's about to sneeze which calls into question what physiologically is going on over there.
I will say when we first started having Sundays as a sponsor and we were feeding her the food and there is this obvious difference in how she Behaves.
And, you know, the right thing to do is to think, what's really going on?
Is she really?
Is it that different to her?
But it obviously is.
I mean, I don't know how long we are into the sponsorship, but it's been a while.
It is clearly different.
And I know she reacts to the Velcro on the bag.
And so maybe she, I mean, you know, they're dogs.
They do know a lot of language.
It's possible that she has put two and seven together and come up with something approximating nine.
I mean, that is the strength of Labradors.
It is.
Up above 10, they have a problem.
Sure, sure.
9, but 10, it gets murky.
All right.
Back to the app.
Yeah.
If I can figure out where I am.
Yes, Labradors, as we were saying, will eat basically anything, but it turns out that Maddy does discriminate.
She loves the food that Sundays makes.
Seriously loves it.
If we run out of Sundays and give her the previous high-end kibble instead, she is clearly disappointed.
We should be giving her Sundays, and she knows it.
We also know it.
Not only is Sundays Maddy's favorite, it's also far better for her than standard burnt kibble that comprises most Alright, we are not giving her an antihistamine.
That would not be advised.
It's dusty over there, I guess.
She's got feathers up her nose.
We've all been there.
We have all been there.
Alright, you're going to have to take our word for it that the dog is sneezing up a storm just off camera.
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In a blind taste test, Sundays outperformed leading competitors 40-0.
And our own little anecdote, Maddie, our Labrador, supports the result.
She bounces and spins and leaps in anticipation for a bowl of Sundays.
I think she has to be in anticipation of a bowl of Sundays, but grammar has never been her strength.
And she does so way more than for her previous food.
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We, and I should point out, that is phrased as if your dog is female, which may or may not be the case, but we are not suggesting that you need to transition your dog.
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Yes.
Doesn't help with the sneezing, but helps with everything else.
Yes, does not help as traditionally applied with the sneezing.
Yes, maybe if she wants to roll in it or something.
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Yeah, again, grammar.
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So she's off having a sneezing fit in the corner.
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I do find the story that the economy is perfectly healthy and that inflation is not a serious concern itself.
It's like every single how out of touch do you have to be not to detect what happens when you go to the market?
I talked to what I believe to be a true blue Democratic voter, still true blue, blue no matter who, someone I don't know, but who I found myself standing in the market with in front of an array of meat.
And she was just shaking her head.
And I ended up talking to her and discovered what I think her politics to be.
And I said, and yet, right, and yet the price is here.
And she said, yeah, this is a place I really don't understand how they can be claiming what they're claiming.
And I've said this before, and I've written about this in Natural Selections on my Substack, but over and over again, I find that people will say, oh, the economy is just fine, and then say, but the prices, but the mortgage rates, but the availability of goods, but the ability, but rents, rents and house prices.
And they'll say, yeah, actually, I don't know on what basis the economy is doing fine.
And then many people will rally internally and be like, oh, but it must be.
But it must be because we're told it is.
What is the economy then?
The fact is, we know for certain that there is a tremendous amount of power that changes hands or fails to change hands in a major U.S.
election based on who wins.
That's why the battles over it are so intense.
And we know that voters are persuaded Profoundly by things like how far a dollar goes, right?
Inflation has a big implication.
That tells you this is certain to be a place where your information stream is going to be polluted because to the extent that you can be persuaded not to believe what you experience at the cash register, There's a value in it.
So people should be discounting the official explanation of where we are, and they should be... I mean, and this actually has a large relevance to what we're going to talk about today, at least in part, but there's a question about which information streams to pay attention to.
If you've got one on which an election is potentially going to hinge, Then you should expect those with control over what is going to be used to, you know, to evaluate the level of inflation, you should expect that to be gamed.
And so what that means is even though, yes, your interaction with your shopping cart and your cashier is bound to be noisy, it's at least real information, right?
Nobody gamed your shopping cart.
Now, they may game your gas pump, right?
They may put the country in jeopardy, draining the strategic oil reserves in order to artificially depress the price of fuel.
That one might not be so useful.
But across many different products at the supermarket, you do have a sense, if you're paying attention to what it costs to shop for a week's worth of food, you should be able to detect this yourself.
And you should be able to say, look, that actually means I'm not paying attention to that number I'm being told really represents the rate of inflation, because I I can falsify it myself.
Right.
And, I mean, furthermore, at least people in or near the relevant industries know that the gaming will happen, right?
So, I have for 6-12 months been thinking about how we can get a loan.
And the rates, the prime rate is just stupidly high.
And so I've talked to a few different possible mortgage brokers, and to each of them I've said, you know, there's no urgency here.
I'm going to wait, and I feel like if there's flexibility, like if you'll be able to move when I'm ready to move, I'm kind of thinking, you know, September, October of 2024 is likely to be when the rates come down.
And I don't really expect them to stay down, you know, depending on what happens in the election.
But I'm feeling like everyone's going to feel a lot better about the economy in the month or two before the election.
And that will have been gamed.
Yep.
And increasingly, this goes to... Oh, I'm sorry.
And to a person, each of these like three different mortgage broker people I've talked to have been like, yeah, that's a good bet.
So the degree to which we normies out here in the economy are suckers and actually probably the wisest thing to do is to figure out how much information we can get on what the higher-ups are likely to do and think, that tells you how much our entire predicament is nestled within a racket.
Yeah.
Right?
To the extent that, look, I don't know what to invest in in the market, but I want to invest in whatever Bill Gates is invested in.
Not because I think Bill Gates has insight into the market, but because he behaves an awful lot like a guy with a ton of insider information.
And if I could just piggyback on what he seems to know, probably it's going to turn out to be, I don't want to say wise, but it's going to turn out to be prescient.
Yeah, and that choice on the part of, you know, us, third party normie, as you say, looking to someone with insight versus looking to someone with insider information, it plays the same.
Right, right, exactly.
So anyway, this is the stupid game we find ourselves in, right?
We're being misled with what looks like evidence, data, that is being tinkered with, which is a famous game.
It's not different than what happened during COVID.
It's being used to persuade us of things that just ain't so.
And anyway, figuring out how to live in such an environment is a trick.
Yeah.
And, you know, nobody does it well and, you know, there are layers and layers and layers, which brings us really to the first topic that we're going to talk about today.
And it's something that I've been thinking about.
I was actually spurred to think about it by seeing Kat Lindley, who's somebody I'm very fond of, who has been way out ahead on the World Health Organization pandemic preparedness plan and international health regulations.
And when I talked to Tucker Carlson about that topic, We then quickly thereafter saw Tedros, the head of the World Health Organization, saying publicly that the pandemic preparedness plan was in trouble, and he specifically blamed misinformation, etc, etc.
And we talked about it a little bit here, and Kat She reached out and warned me.
She said, I think this is misleading.
I think that they are portraying, they're using the idea that misinformation spreaders are jeopardizing the treaty to motivate people to rally behind it.
And my feeling was, I fully believe that that's likely, but I also believe that the sense that the treaty might be in trouble has to be at least partially true.
If it wasn't in trouble, then why is Tedros out there in public talking about the fact that it might be in trouble in order to motivate people?
He shouldn't have to, because it was going to sail Through ratification Without any trouble he could have just been quiet So the fact that he was saying there was trouble meant there had to actually be there was no reason Strategically for him to do it if there wasn't at least some truth in that so more recently in fact today, I think Kat Lindley Put out another tweet if you could put it up Zach
And it basically reflects the fact that we are continuing to have an impact.
So she says, this is Katlin Lee, said pressure from people works and we should continue it.
Nothing that opposition to the international health regulation amendments and pandemic agreement is creating awareness and chatter.
Two things the WHO Director General seems to hate.
So you want to scroll down.
I think she has a I think there.
So she has an article from Children's Health Defense, The Defender, their publication, who is exhibiting signs of desperation as New Zealand and Iran reject amendments to the international health regulations.
So, What all of this says, I think, is something that is taking place is having exactly the right effect.
For people who have been paying attention to Dark Horse, you know that we explored the World Health Organization's pandemic preparedness plan Actually, late.
We became aware of it later than some other folks, including Kat Lindley and Meryl Nass, who have been way ahead on this issue.
So it took actually looking at this very boring stuff to realize how Truly alarming it was in terms of the scope of what was being proposed.
And, you know, we lent our voice to it and we explored some of the details of it, which shocked a lot of people.
You know, it resulted then in Tucker wanting to talk about it, which obviously brought it to a much larger audience.
And so anyway, the reason that This started to make me think about the game theory is that it seemed rather hopeless.
In fact, the whole thing was portrayed as hopeless.
It was so certain that this set of changes was going to sail through the World Health Organization, be signed on, and then we were just simply going to have it sprung on us when the WHO decided to declare a pandemic of some kind.
That it seemed like there would be no point really in challenging it, that it was just the only thing you would get out of it is the ability to say, I told you so, when the next round of tyranny unfolded.
But that's not what is happening.
What we're discovering is that as much as we are led to imagine that things are a fait accompli, that we don't have any power, that we actually do have power, and it therefore behooves us to understand The nature of the very deadly game that we accidentally find ourselves having to play.
Right?
So, um, I had two anecdotes that I wanted to introduce this with.
One of them is actually has nothing to do with tyranny or anything like that.
It has to do with a dolphin that I read about, uh, from the amazing Twitter account, uh, Massimo.
If there's going to be any social organism out there that also engages in tyranny, it might be dolphins.
Ah, this is the opposite.
This is a dolphin.
I know.
I know what you're going to show, but I'm just saying that it might be possible in them.
Let's just put it this way.
You've got an incredibly intelligent, highly social, long-lived creature with generational overlap.
To beat the band.
And so anyway, all of the conditions that lead to very complex games are there.
So anyway, if you'd put up the Mossimo tweet.
I'm going to try to read this.
Yeah, if you could make it a little bigger, that'd be great.
OK.
So, Massimo says, the story of Kelly, the sassy dolphin who was so clever she outsmarted her own trainers.
Kelly the dolphin lived in the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, and all the dolphins were trained to hold on to any litter that fell into their pools until they saw a trainer when they could trade it for fish.
In this way, the dolphins helped keep their pools clean.
Trainers at the Institute rewarded dolphins with fish when they collected trash from their pools.
Kelly liked the reward system.
But wanted to maximize her reward, so she began to hide large pieces of trash under a rock.
Then she'd break off small pieces of the hidden trash over time to collect more fish.
Kelly's sneaky plan meant that one piece of trash paid off multiple times.
As clever as Kelly's tactics were, Kelly didn't stop with the trash initiative.
Another way for the dolphin to earn fish at the Institute is to alert trainers when birds land in their pool.
Once again, Kelly figured out a way to game the system.
she began hiding fish to lure additional birds to her pool so she could collect even more fish.
That, by the way, suggests wisdom because it suggests, as I've said many times, wisdom is very close to synonymous with delayed gratification.
And the ability to put aside a fish and use it as bait to get more fish is pretty damn wise.
Yeah.
And as a cherry on top, she even taught her calf and other dolphins to hide fish too.
So anyway, I love that story for lots of reasons.
For one thing, um, we're talking about a dolphin living in captivity.
The dolphin presumably doesn't know what a game is.
But it doesn't mean she's not built to detect the rules of a de facto game.
So when we say game, as in game theory, we often throw people because it sounds frivolous.
Right?
But in fact, we are caught in deadly games.
And understanding the rules of those games is the way to decrease your chances of getting dead.
Yeah, I mean, I think the word does confuse people.
The word makes people think of explicit games with explicit rules.
I'm reminded of an interaction I had back in college with a friend group, and the guys and I played a lot of games, chess, cribbage, and such.
And there was one young woman associated with the group who was not really, she was kind of dating but not really dating one of the guys in the group, and she was just messing with him.
And none of the rest of us liked her because she was just messing with him.
And at one point someone came over who didn't know and said, oh, you know, why don't you come play with us?
And she said, you know, like chess or cribbage or whatever it is that we were playing.
And she said, oh, I don't play games.
Good move.
I feel like all the rest of us looked at each other like, well, that's an interesting use of that word because obviously you're the biggest game player in the room, but she was right.
She didn't play games with explicit rules, right?
Games for which she would be accountable to others to play by the same rules that others were playing.
Ah.
So which Brings us really to one of the key things about games, which is that the formal games that you're talking about, cribbage or chess or whatever, you know, a football game.
Right.
These things are Formalizations of an informal process, and they have a hallmark to them, which is unlike the games that mostly we have to think about in order to navigate a very dangerous world.
The games that are formalized are ones that neutralize many of the advantages going in, right?
The playing field has to be level, right?
And so anyway, that's done so that the things that really distinguish people can emerge.
And in fact, there are, you know, fun, extreme examples of this, right?
Most car races, the vehicles in question vary a lot, right?
And so that's part of what is actually being explored, right?
There are trade-offs, and somebody banks more on this than that, and it results in, you know, them winning a particular race.
But there's one race, the International Race of Champions, in which everybody has the same car.
Which I always thought was cool, because if you want to figure out who's the best driver, giving everybody the same car would be a good way to do it.
And then there are weird examples like... And bike races have the same problem.
Bike races are a total shirt show.
I don't know if there are kids watching, but anyway, bike races are a problem, and you can't actually really solve the problem perfectly.
You could limit... Because different bodies actually will ride different bikes better and worse, and so you cannot equalize the competitor by putting all the competitors by putting them on the same bike.
Right.
You will give some people an advantage But it's an impossible – that one is an impossible thing to make totally neutral.
Right, you can't make it totally neutral, because if you mandated a specific geometry, it would cause, you know, toe-clip overlap for people with big feet, right?
I couldn't have come up with that phrase, but sure.
Well, if you think about steering your front wheel, your toes are actually pretty close to the swing of your front wheel, and because neither you nor I are a huge person.
Overlap means, like, the front wheel running into your toes?
Yeah, exactly.
It's not like overlap so much as smackdown.
Toe Clip Smackdown is the new name for this pathology.
But anyway, so the point is, either you're setting a de facto height limit by picking a geometry, or you have to let the geometry expand and contract.
But then the question is, well, what What happens when people do get advantages out of this?
So anyway, you can't totally neutralize it in bicycle racing.
Obviously, horses are interesting in the sense that you can handicap a jockey, right?
To the extent that the jockeys vary in weight, you can equalize it.
You can just put more weight on a horse and do things like that.
Well, I mean, I think horse racing is... I don't know that I've ever watched a horse race.
That's probably not true.
But that's interesting, because you effectively have two organisms that are competing as a unit, as opposed to... Why would you try to equalize the jockey?
The jockey is part of the event.
Well, yes.
Yes.
But I mean, I'm... I would be shocked if that had ever been a proposal.
Oh, it's been done.
Equalizing the jockey weights?
Yeah.
I mean, maybe I'm imagining, I don't know a lot about horse racing, but I'm virtually sure that that is a thing.
Zach's going to figure this out for us.
But anyway, so let's just say this, though.
In common parlance, the connotations that come along with the word game are largely taken from the formalized games, which are actually second in the evolutionary chain.
It occurs to me right now, this is a mirror for what you and I say about consciousness, right?
We think of consciousness as an individual phenomenon.
That's the thing that gets the focus.
But it makes much more sense for consciousness to have evolved collectively and then individual consciousness to be an epiphenomenon that then takes off as an adaptation because it's so darn useful to be able to have an argument with yourself.
Yeah.
So anyway, the formalized games ...are the secondary thing.
The game, whatever a game is called, a natural game, doesn't get spotted initially as a game.
Okay, but so, bizarrely, the four of us in our family actually watched the Super Bowl, I think for the first time this week, from three different locations.
And the whole thing was weird, right?
And what I noticed, and I think I put into like the group text, because the boys were having a Super Bowl party, which is hilarious, because I don't know how many hours before they even knew who was competing.
Sorry, guys.
What I said was, the only thing that makes sense in what we're seeing is the actual play.
Like, I have not watched much football, but my dad was a football fan enough that he took me to a fair number of football games when I was a kid, and it was often on on Sundays.
So I would wander into the – I saw enough football that I know what the game is, and I was like, okay, I can make sense of the game, but the shit on the sidelines and what they're showing us in the stands and the ads and the halftime show, and like, That's where the game is that is actually funding this.
And in the case of the Super Bowl, we are led to believe the exact opposite of what you just said, which is that the explicit game is really the reason you're here, and all the rest of the stuff is just kind of like surrounding things.
But no, the explicit game, once again, is actually kind of secondary.
Oh, okay.
I totally grant your interpretation of what happened.
And for some reason, I don't know if this is a reliable figure, but I assume it is.
This was the most watched program since the moon landing?
So, what the hell happened that A, we all found ourselves watching it?
Right?
Separately.
It's not like one of us said, you know, I'm putting the game on this year.
We were in different places and we, you know, we were, that's crazy.
So three, we had three TVs between the four of us watching this game.
Is that?
Apparently.
Okay.
And two of us had to like buy access because we don't have cable.
Right.
So, OK, somebody played a game on us in Civilization that somehow got everybody to watch this Super Bowl, which actually, if you were going to watch a Super Bowl, this one was pretty exciting.
I mean, one in the very last seconds in overtime.
I mean, that's if you were going to end up watching a Super Bowl.
I don't know.
You couldn't have told by the first quarter, though.
No, it was a sleeper.
But nonetheless, so somebody played a game that I think involved Taylor Swift, which got this discussed in advance more widely than it would have been.
I wasn't watching for Taylor Swift.
Which polarized people way more than they would have been polarized otherwise.
And that part I totally get, because by the end of it I was rooting so strongly against Taylor Swift.
And you know, I recognize that is a moral defect, right?
Hopefully that's about the extent of my moral defectitude and it's manageable, but I really did not want her to win.
And I think her boyfriend is an idiot, right?
I came away with that impression.
Because of what you saw?
Well, first of all, he's a Pfizer shill.
So he's got to be, he's at least a terrible person or an idiot.
He's one of the two things.
We are finally going to get thrown off YouTube.
Okay, well, that's the game, I guess.
But okay.
I don't know anything about him.
I don't know he's a Pfizer shill.
I don't know.
Oh, he's a Pfizer shill.
Okay.
Yeah.
But, you know, yes, I resented, as Megyn Kelly clearly did, resented being shown Taylor Swift every time something happened because her reaction matters for some reason.
I mean, you know, this, it just was maddening.
So anyway, somebody pulled a game on Civilization in which Taylor Swift's presence in this story and her ridiculous, you know, romantic entanglement somehow made the Super Bowl, you know, what typically would happen to me with the Super Bowl is I would kind of probably not know that it was happening, Right, or if I did, the thought of like, how am I going to even watch that would have been, um, would have resulted in me not seeing.
But anyway, I digress.
Point is, long ago, right, long ago, Games were formalized for a reason.
Yep.
They were formalized because they actually were training environments for something that mattered.
You know, in the case of something like Ulama, the Central American ball game, right?
Presumably that has something to do with warfare.
So, formalizing games makes sense.
And then as you point out, the formalized game of football now is not the central game.
There's an economic game surrounding a particular formalized game of football that is much bigger than the game of football.
And so it's, you know, we've seen a couple of reversals.
There are natural games.
Then there are formalized games, and then those formalized games end up embedded in economic games, and that's all a pretty interesting environment.
Oh, and of course, Kennedy, Kennedy, right?
That thing shows up in the middle.
That was great.
I thought it was awesome.
I thought it was awesome.
But the point is, oh, there's a political game that's going to intrude here.
And in fact, it intruded several times, right?
Did it?
Yeah, there was a Biden thing.
Oh, I must have been afraid for that.
Much like Biden, probably.
Biden.
Well, hopefully I just imagined this, but I think what happened is that Biden griped about the fact of containers becoming smaller, right?
Thereby effectively acknowledging inflation.
Okay, but this was an ad during the Super Bowl?
I think so.
Was it?
Zach's going to find out.
I know what you're talking about.
I don't want to say it was an ad during the Super Bowl.
I didn't see that.
I know he's done a lot of explaining that inflation isn't his fault because the company is blaming it on him.
Okay.
And then there were some Jesus people who put out an ad, so there was games layered within games here.
Oh, yeah, but that's not politics.
No, it was.
I don't know what that was.
The Jesus ads, that was weird.
And many a Christian thought so.
And you couldn't tell.
When that first ad came on, I went looking for the organization.
I was like, yeah, who are these people?
Yeah.
Can't tell.
Well, one answer is that they're not actually Christians.
They don't even claim to be.
Well, but that's a step before.
The point is, there's no names.
You can't tell who it is.
Oh.
She Gets Us is the organization.
What's that?
Yeah, but you can't tell on the website who's doing it.
So, anyway.
Games within games.
Let us just say that at the bottom of that entire category, there is the fundamental, which is that just as business is not fundamentally The product of what is discussed in an economics curriculum?
Economics is a natural phenomenon, and the study of economics is a formalization of that process, and even currency is a formalization of barter that facilitates new kinds of exchange, etc., indirect exchange.
So anyway, what we've got is that same phenomenon, right?
People exchanging stuff because they end up both wealthier if they trade, you know, if I make sledgehammers and you raise cattle and I trade you a sledgehammer for some beef, we both got richer, right?
That's why it happens.
That thing then has manifestations that ultimately result in micro-trading, right?
But it's one continuous line all the way back to the original natural thing, right?
The creation of wealth by the exchange of goods or services.
Yep.
And so that's what I want people to think about when we talk about game theory.
There's an underlying thing that we are trapped in that has importance to our lives, and in this case it has It has immediate importance in terms of how free we are to live meaningful lives, and ultimately it has implications for whether or not our descendants live or die, right?
So this is the deadliest of games, and understanding it is a very important thing to do, and I've now... There we go.
So, second story I wanted to tell is...
An episode from my graduate career.
The point after I had written the Telomere paper with Debbie Ciesek, and we had published it.
Dick Alexander, my advisor, member of your committee, and all-around great guy and important evolutionary biologist.
Member of the National Academy, too.
Member of the National Academy, who actually came out of retirement to battle so that I would end up with my degree.
He's now dead, but he was a wonderful guy.
Anyway, after my paper had come out on this topic, I was frustrated because the content of the paper should have caused an important reaction with respect to the mice that were broken, that prevented other people from having figured out what was going on with telomeres, senescence, and cancer, right?
So the accidental discovery that there was this problem with the mice that everybody was using to do science had huge implications for what we know about cancer, what we know about wound repair, what we know about mammals, and most importantly, what we know about drug safety.
It biased the system in favor of making drugs look safe that weren't and probably is the reason for the Vioxx scandal and the similar patterns that we saw with Seldane, Fenfen, erythromycin, and numerous other drugs that turned out to do quote unquote heart damage, which is really and numerous other drugs that turned out to do quote unquote heart damage, which is really body-wide damage that you notice Very similar to the myocarditis that comes out of the mRNA COVID shots.
Same pattern in my opinion.
But anyway, I was expecting because I was a A young and naive person that pointing this out was going to result in change.
That they couldn't possibly ignore the error that was messing up their own work.
I didn't think that they were better people than they were, but I thought...
The fact that this is causing them to do science that's cruddy will mean they have to do something to fix it because they don't want to continue publishing papers that will ultimately turn out to be wrong based on bad mice.
And I was shocked to publish it and have no reaction.
Crickets.
Yeah, crickets.
And I was Explaining my frustration to Dick at one point, and he said, look Brett, here's what you got to do.
Okay, I know this game.
Here's what you got to do.
You've got to keep publishing that thing, right?
Change it up a bit, publish it in different places, different journals, you know, look at a different angle of it.
You've got to keep publishing that result.
And I remember I wasn't angry at him, he wasn't the kind of guy I got angry at, but I was angry at what he was telling me, right?
You're telling me that you do the right work, it reveals something important, you publish it, and then something about your decibel level or how many times you've said it is relevant to whether or not people will ultimately address it?
You're telling me that the... You're telling me that science needs a marketing branch.
Right, and you're telling me that this thing that I've chosen to do with my life doesn't exist, right?
If decibel level matters, that's not science, right?
And you know...
I also, I mean, unfortunately he's, it seems like he's right.
I don't think he did that.
No.
He didn't do that at all.
Well, but he was very clear with us, with both of us, as I recall it, that the science that he had joined was all but dead.
And in fact, I truly believe this is why he did come out of retirement to do battle on my behalf is that he saw a throwback to a previous kind of science, which is the only kind he cared about.
And so it was like, you know, I mean, I was kind of a mess as a graduate student.
But the point was, well, at least you know how to do science.
So he wanted to fuel that.
But anyway, the point is there was a game inside of science that they don't tell you When you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and you sign up to go study a discipline, they don't tell you that, hey, you're gonna have to get good at this other game, which is publish something a dozen times, you know, figure out how to change it up so you can put it in journal after journal, so eventually enough people will see it that blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right?
I didn't sign up for that game, and frankly I couldn't stand it, and I'm glad enough to be outside of that realm, because for one thing, What we do out here is true to the science that we studied, but it also has implications for things, right?
I've been more successful at raising the point about mouse telomeres on the outside of that scientific system than I ever was inside of it.
So that's the question.
What the hell is the game we're in and how is it played?
So, where I wanted to go was, there's a developmental process.
If you look at somebody who does parkour, right?
Somebody who goes to a shopping mall.
I saw one a couple of days ago.
Guy is trying to impress a girl and he's in a shopping mall and he throws himself off of a landing, a long staircase that has a landing in the middle.
And he throws himself off and he drops, he flips in the air.
It's just him?
He doesn't have wheels or anything?
Nothing.
Okay.
He literally runs, he jumps over the rail, doesn't touch it, and does a flip in the air and rolls when he hits the ground.
Alright?
On flat ground or on stairs?
on flat ground but hard, like shopping mall hard ground, and he's completely uninjured because he understands, A, he understands how far he's going to fall.
He knows how far to rotate.
He knows how to land, right?
The point is there is no amount of study in the world that could teach you that, and there is no way that you could start at that level.
What he did depends on the fact that he generated a developmental program, presumably for himself, in which he did many versions of this that started very basic, and he built up to the ability to do that.
And the point is, when we see this person for the first time do this amazing thing, A, you realize, ah, that's apparently possible, right?
So there was a girl there?
You said he was trying to impress a girl.
That was the presentation that I saw, you know, that yes, there was a girl there.
Do I know that that's really why he did this?
I don't, but let's just say... Was it just the two of them?
No, it was a shopping mall full of people.
No, no, no.
I mean, like, was he and a bunch of guys who were also doing other moves?
Nope, I think it was just him, but I don't know.
The thing is... Well, I was just, when you were saying, like, what, the original games.
Yeah.
Like, what are, you know, the original explicit games, because there's games around everything at the Basel level, but you mentioned war games, but then there's also mating games, right?
And those have these back and forth, and it sounds like it could have been that.
You know, that she's going to give him an assessment and maybe he'll go and do something else.
Try it, you know, try something different or or he won or, you know, I don't know.
I'm just curious about what what else was going on here.
Right.
You said he's trying to impress a girl.
Games embedded within games.
Yeah.
And, you know, and there's there's some implications, actually, in the in the mating and dating version of this whole thing.
It is very there's a an asymmetry And the example I usually hear and also use involves a cat that's easily spooked.
Right?
A cat that is easily spooked and hides under the bed when strangers come over does not learn the lesson that actually the strangers are not dangerous because they can't falsify the idea that the reason that they survived the visit was that they were hiding under the bed.
Right?
Right.
Worked again.
Right.
A cat who is bold Uh, would learn the lesson.
If the strangers were dangerous and the cat survived an interaction, they would learn the lesson that they were making a mistake.
Yeah, most behaviors create positive feedback.
Well, the cat that is too bold and the strangers don't like cats can hide under the bed next time.
So it's an asymmetry.
But the cat that hides under the bed... I thought you were referring to most cats and most strangers do or do not care particularly about cats, but it's fine.
Like the cat is fine.
It's fine.
Right.
So you get the cat gets bolder.
Like the cat is less likely to go under the bed the more times they don't hide under the bed.
But the cat who does hide under the bed is more likely to hide under the bed more.
And so in both cases, you have positive feedback.
You do, and one of the lessons is much easier to learn than the other, is the point.
So there's an asymmetry in there that applies to many things, and in the mating and dating context, right?
A shy guy has to overcome his shyness in order to discover that Women like boldness, right?
It's a hard lesson to learn because you have to go counter to your instinct in order to get evidence that actually tells you that your instinct sucks, right?
So, and you know, and think about the current environment.
In the current environment where masculinity has been declared toxic, men don't discover that women like masculine men.
They think, because they hear from a lot of very vocal women, that behaving like a normal man is Bad is morally defective, so a lot of them default to being timid, which doesn't work, right?
And so anyway, and of course that means that the bold guys, many of whom just simply don't pay attention to that stuff, have an even easier time.
They have less competition because the guys who are actually trying to be decent are listening too much to voices that say decent is equivalent of timid.
So anyway, it's another great place to see how game theory is everything.
But anyway, the parkour guy, he developed a bootcamp for himself, right?
He figured out how to do things that wouldn't be impressive if you saw them off of things that are small enough that when you screw it up, you know, you don't get hurt or you get hurt minimally, right?
And he worked his way up to something that when you see it, it's like, holy cow, that's incredible.
And we, in all realms, are in the position where things don't become newsworthy until you see the impressive version.
And then it's like, well, how the hell did anybody, how did, how did anybody figure out how to do that?
Right?
And in fact, before Parkour was discussed online, Right.
You didn't know that people could, you know, run up the side of a building and flip over backwards and land on their feet and walk away.
I mean, you know, but now everybody knows that cause we've all seen it.
So the question is, what is the, what is the bootcamp?
Oh, I'll take one more example.
Um.
You look at somebody like Pablo Escobar, right?
Terrible human who figured out how to effectively capture a power structure.
And if you looked at the boldness of like, you know, confronting the police and expecting them to back down, it's like, well, how does anybody survive?
Experimenting with that, right?
And the answer is some sort of a boot camp, right?
At first, it's, you know, it's one police car and Plateau Oplomo, you know, for one police officer.
And the point is actually the game theory of Plateau Oplomo, you know, silver or lead, right?
Do you want to be bribed or would you rather die?
Right?
That game theory is so simple.
Graft or grief.
Right.
Graft or grief.
Exactly.
So that game theory is so simple that the point is, oh, well, of course it works.
So anyway, I was hoping to begin the process of figuring out what the bootcamp is that teaches you how to play the game that we unfortunately find ourselves having to play against would-be tyrants who are controlling the flow of information and trying to maneuver us into a corner that we can't get out of.
Before you do that, with regard to Escobar and other cartel leaders, well, I actually don't know about others, because as I understand it, in many places where the cartels exist, the populations are terrified of them, and rightly so.
But Escobar also did a version of Plato-Oplomo with the population, where he effectively bought their allegiance by making their lives better in his presence.
And so, you know, he, he, I believe not not just with food and safety on the streets, but even schools and and building churches and I don't know, but he built churches, but like, you know, he actually he really improved the lives of people in neighborhoods where he and his people had a big presence such that When there were calls by politicians to clean up the cartels, the population was like, well, no, our quality of life is higher and we're safer and we're doing better.
We'll stick with the plateau.
Thank you very much.
Right.
And this is actually, it's one of the things that's easiest to get wrong about these situations.
And it's one of the...
important points about why they work.
It's why organized crime... And it's part of why what is working in the United States is working right now.
That we are being told, and many of us don't believe it anymore, but we are being told, you're doing great.
We are taking care of you.
You keep on voting this way, you keep on doing this, and you're going to keep on having the awesome stuff happen that's been happening to you.
And so really, at this point, it's just claims.
Well, but I think those claims, you know, there's a hidden part of the game theory with the claims too, but I don't, and we can get into how this stuff is held in the mind, but I think most people, you know, if you ask them how the economy is doing, and they're blue no matter who's, they'll tell you actually surprisingly good, right?
If you ask them what has your experience been at the supermarket, Right?
You'll get complaints about things that seem impossibly expensive or unreliable to source or whatever.
Yep.
So I think those things live together and they actually imply something that is an important insight about the actual game that we're in and a leverage point potentially, which is one of the ways That the game, those who would play games on us, those who would take advantage of us and then juke the stats so it looks like the that inflation is lower than it is, is they deny you a plausible alternative, right?
And so if the idea is Well, you know, the reality is Biden, or whatever Biden actually is, is not managing the economy in your interest, or is failing to manage it in your interest, or whatever.
But yes, your buying power is being eroded, and that directly impacts your quality of life in a negative way, if that's the reality of it.
But then the point is, well, if you notice that reality, what do you get?
Well, you could vote for Trump.
You voting for Trump?
Kennedy?
You want to vote for Kennedy, the anti-vaxxer who's going to spoil the election and deliver it to Trump?
Right, so the point is, if you just play through the game that they've put in front of you, and you say, well, I have, let me count them, no good moves.
Right?
Any move I make is probably going to make things worse, according to the people who are controlling the information I see.
And if it doesn't make things worse, it's still going to result in me being cast out for having jeopardized The thing that's better.
So that lesser evil thing is the core game of American presidential elections, right?
Nobody wants these people.
The obvious thing to do is to vote for somebody else who we do want.
So why doesn't somebody else who is likable and interested in doing the right job and competent, why don't they just run and beat the people who aren't likable and don't care about us and are incompetent?
Um, because they will get, they will end up holding the bag and anybody who votes for them will end up holding the bag with them.
So that's the game.
So you have to break the lesser evil, um, paradox in order for an American election to be functional.
And that we're going to be fighting about it again this year.
But, okay, back to the idea of generating your own boot camp.
We have accidentally been cast into a role that we didn't expect and we didn't ask for, but it has taught us things in the same way that somebody who Somehow knows there's some parkour to be done with a wall and, you know, starts practicing.
Discover.
So what what have we discovered?
And I thought I would just run through a few of the things that I think are crucial because exploring them empowers us and everybody who is on the same team, which basically I see is the patriots of the US or the West more broadly or humanity.
Those people all have an interest in defeating tyrants.
And so knowing the rules is All right, so the first thing, and again, this is not an exhaustive list.
Even in just generating this short list, it was amazing how many principles could be wrestled to the surface.
So we will undoubtedly revisit this.
But the first thing is that there's some sort of a cascade effect.
And we've seen it with respect to courage, right?
There are some people who are naturally very courageous.
And there are some people who are positioned so they can afford to be courageous, right?
It doesn't really matter which of those two things or what combination of them results in you behaving in a courageous way.
If you behave in a courageous way, you A, model the behavior for other people so that they see, ah, courage is survivable, and I like the look of that, so I want to do that, right?
So that means that if you have an example of courage, that that example of courage tends to be contagious.
It is also true that to the extent that somebody engages in tremendous courage, that they become, they draw the fire of those that are opposing courage, which means that it creates the ability for people who maybe couldn't afford courage to afford it because they aren't the tip of the spear.
And so the idea, if you look, Back in 2017-2018, I kept saying that we had an epidemic of cowardice, right?
Throughout the Academy, nobody was standing up.
All sorts of people who knew better just wouldn't stand up.
But if you Manage to arrange some sort of stepping out in front, you create a shield effectively for the next layer.
And that layer creates a shield for the layer below it.
So, there's a snowball.
As you might point out, positive feedbacks are everything in game theory.
If you can trigger one, An effect you don't see coming remains to be unleashed.
And so anyway, just knowing that the fact that you see a complete epidemic of cowardice doesn't mean that you don't have a lot of people ready to behave courageously who are hovering just below their threshold for green lighting.
Right?
So knowing that they're there, it's like, it's like pressure, courageous pressure in the system that you can't, that you can't detect.
All right.
Second thing is the flack over the target principle.
If you are engaged in fighting against Goliath, fighting against tyrants, You could monitor how you're doing based on how many times you get wounded.
But the question is, what's the lesson to draw from it?
If you draw the lesson that, well, if I'm, you know, licking my wounds at the end of the day, I must be doing something wrong, then A, you create an opportunity for your enemies to disincentivize you from doing whatever is most useful, right?
Flak is a reference, of course, to these flak guns, anti-aircraft guns, that were used to defend important targets.
And so the point is the, you know, holes in your airplane that come from the fact that you're flying through shrapnel Could be an indication you're doing it wrong, but they are actually an indication, typically, that you're in the right spot.
The flak goes up when you get near a target worth dropping a bomb on, and so it's paradoxical.
And, you know, even just the ability to say to people, you know, if somebody's complaining that they've taken a lot of hits for saying something that they didn't expect to cause trouble, The point is, flack over the target, right?
Just even knowing that it's a paradoxical thing, that in some ways the more injured you are, probably the better you're doing, is useful.
Yeah, I mean, it is, but of course there's risk of error there, right?
Like you, that, that, observing that that is, can be true, makes that a gameable observation.
Totally.
And that's, that's part of what we're talking about here.
Increasingly, when I hear people say, oh, flak over the target, you know you're in the right place.
No, you really do not know that you are in the right place because you're receiving flak, unless we drill down on what the flak is.
Because increasingly, there's flak everywhere, and there are trolls and bots and sock puppets and just ill-informed or mean-spirited people all over the place who are going to shoot at you whenever you show yourself.
And if you get shot at, also when you're wrong, you should not respond to that with like, ah, therefore I must be close to right.
It's like, no, actually, I'm going to get shot at some, no matter what.
Ah, you're gonna get shot at some, no matter what.
If you take flak over the target as a religion, right?
If you take flak as the indicator, then your enemy just has to send up flak in some place where there's nothing to bomb, and they own you.
So you have to be able to detect, hey, this is anomalous flak.
There's no target here.
And yet I'm getting hit.
So that is certainly the next layer of the game.
If flak over the target becomes a commonly understood thing, then it becomes a route into misdirecting you.
But actually this brings me to another... two of the other points on my list.
One is people have to think more carefully about signal and noise.
We talk about it here fairly regularly because it comes up in many different contexts.
Signal is the thing you're interested in, right?
What your enemy is actually doing and Noise are the distractions of the fact that, you know, let's say you're trying to accomplish something and so you're putting a message into the world and you trigger something in a Twitter algorithm that causes your message to be amplified for reasons that have nothing to do with what you're talking about, right?
It's just that Twitter saw something that it thought was useful.
You could take that as an important indicator about what you were saying, but in fact it's noise.
Some other pattern.
It's a real pattern, but it's not the one you're interested in.
So we've got distinguishing signal and noise, but the key thing is that not everything that is misleading is noise.
Some of what is misleading you is false signal, right?
And so the flack being in the wrong place would be a false signal.
And there's a distinction Again, it's something we've talked about in a very different context.
There is a distinction in science between random error, that is noise, and systematic error, which is false signal.
And the problem is that random error is easy to overcome by just generating a larger dataset.
Noise gets swamped out by signal if you survey a larger population.
A systematic error doesn't do that, right?
A systematic error, an error in the way you are studying the process, will actually scale with your experiment.
And so, it will continue to mislead you, and you will have the sense, well, I drowned out the noise, so this must be signal.
And the point is, it may be that you've built a self-defeating experiment or something like that.
So, one of the tricks that are Our enemy uses is false signal to mislead us.
And so to just give an example, if you are involved in, let's say it's spreading information about what the World Health Organization is up to with its pandemic preparedness plan.
You may get a very concentrated response that leads you to feel like the reaction to my talking about this was bad, right?
Because immediately around you there's a like a concentrated badness.
That may have nothing to do with the actual reaction to what you did.
So you can imagine if Tedros and his cronies are feeling threatened by people in podcast world saying, hey, this really boring document is incredibly dangerous.
You need to take a look at it because it's boringness is causing you not to worry about things you will care deeply about years from now.
If that's working, Then the point is, oh, they don't want you saying it.
So what has to happen to you when you do say it?
Oh, suddenly people are mocking you for all kinds of things.
And it's just like, ah, well, whatever I'm doing must be wrong.
Nope.
Okay.
So that false signal is a flack over the target issue.
But it is so that the demonstration of it would be maybe you are seeing a reaction.
But people who are not directly connected with you aren't seeing that reaction, right?
So anyway, that would be one way to detect that what you're looking at is false signal.
Now, in thinking about this, there were two connected points that I wanted to outline.
One of them has to do with what I'm calling no news is bad news.
We are denied a mechanism to just even check the basic facts of what's taking place in the world, right?
You have to have a method for even deducing that stuff because you can't do what you could once do, which is just go to a newspaper and even if the newspaper had a bias, the basic facts were we all agreed on, right?
That's not even true anymore.
And so what that means is that you are There was an explicit separation between the news and the editorial sections.
There was.
And even if the bent was there, the basic facts were not.
Every publication has a bias.
Every individual has biases.
That is what the scientific method is supposed to help us get rid of in our analyses.
But we still, in doing them and making decisions that we are making, have our biases and we can't escape them.
Papers had separate divisions.
They understood that they had two distinct roles, and if they were choosing to only have one distinct role, that of opinion or editorial, that was a different kind of publication.
Yeah.
That's not a newspaper.
Right.
There's an op-ed page in a newspaper, but that's not the newspaper.
The newspaper had an obligation to report facts Now, you're left with a conundrum over the most basic stuff, and I'll just give one example here.
And, you know, it really was like that.
It was never perfect.
It can't be.
But it was real.
Now you're left with a conundrum over the most basic stuff.
And I'll just give one example here.
Turns out that Secretary Mayorkas was impeached.
Secretary of the Interior?
No, he's a Homeland Security guy.
So anyway, now I had not been paying close attention to Mayorkas three months ago at all.
The travel to Panama and the witnessing of the major migration has elevated Mayorkas in my thinking quite a bit because he is strangely involved.
He was He was present on the ground, not when we were there, but he was present on the ground at the San Vicente camp where the Chinese migrants are so heavily concentrated.
In the Darien in Panama.
In the Darien in Panama.
That camp was expanded in the aftermath of his visit.
He, it turns out, was a board member of an organization that I'd never heard of before, the HIAS.
Zach, do you have that?
This is the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society.
So Mayorkas, who is Cuban, is actually Jewish on both sides of his family.
I'm not sure that's relevant, but he is Jewish on both sides of his family.
He was born in Cuba right after the Cuban Revolution.
His parents fled to Florida.
Anyway, He was a board member at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society before he became the Secretary of Department of Homeland Security.
And anyway, so he's in some strange position where he's part of this organization.
That image that Zach just showed was not there when Zach and I were in Darien.
This is Michael Yan's picture.
We did walk through this very gate.
And so I didn't know the first verb there.
It means welcome.
So welcome the foreigners, protect the refugees is what that means.
Yep.
So this is one of the international organizations that appears to be convinced that migration is an inherently good thing, and they are facilitating it at the San Vicente camp.
I don't know why the sign was gone when we were there, but nonetheless...
I know where that is, and that building is... we walked right through their front yard.
In fact, we walked right through that gate.
But in any case, somebody who was a board member of an international organization that is proudly facilitating this migration is now the Secretary of Homeland Security, which is failing to make the homeland secure.
And there was an impeachment.
There's another piece of the story which appears to be disconnected, but documents have just emerged which reveal that Secretary Mayorkas personally decided against giving Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Secret Service protection.
Right?
Now this I find diabolical.
We're looking at a secretary in the executive branch refusing to give Secret Service protection to an obviously vulnerable candidate who is making a surprisingly powerful bid for the presidency against Mayorkas' boss.
So, in any case, he was impeached.
There was a failed attempt to impeach him, I think it was about a week ago.
Because there is no newspaper that one can go to reliably, it's very hard to actually figure out what has happened here, you know, what changed, what was he impeached over, etc.
Now I will recommend it, we are not being paid to say this, but Free Spoke, the Search Engine, which endeavors to provide both sides of a story, I've found very useful in looking this stuff up.
So I would recommend, there's a free app, you can download it, and then you can just plug in whatever you want.
You can plug in, you know, one of the things that threw me was, why was Mayorkas in a position to decide whether Bobby Kennedy gets Secret Service protection, isn't the Secret Service in the Treasury Department?
Well, it turns out it's no longer in the Treasury Department.
It certainly was, but it's no longer in the Treasury Department.
And so Mayorkas has authority over it, which explains how it is that he was in a position to nix that protection.
But in any case, the point is, Because we don't have a reliable source of news, because what we have are multiple slanted sources of news, and therefore it is not a simple matter to just establish what has happened, right?
You can discover that Mayorkas was impeached on Twitter, but it's hard, it takes real work to use Twitter to find out that he was impeached after a failed impeachment attempt a week ago.
So that lack of any source that we all agree on for facts is a big setback in our battle.
I will say that Twitter did not establish itself as a search engine.
Right.
So, the fact that it's hard to establish these facts on Twitter isn't much of a statement.
No, no.
What I would say is there are many of us who, because you can look at a lot of different people's perspectives, use Twitter to understand a story, right?
Sure.
And this is what Freespoke formalizes, is they look at multiple sources and allow you to deduce what the real story is because here's what a left-leaning source says, here's what a right-leaning source says, et cetera.
So yeah, this isn't Twitter's purpose.
I mean, frankly, I don't know what Twitter's purpose is.
I mean, it's the craziest idea for a product anybody ever had.
And yet, a lot of it, you know, I mean, I remember when...
No, I've got a crazier one.
It's coming up later.
All right.
I'm going to come up with some more rules.
Maybe we won't get to it.
But anyway, you know, yeah, Twitter is weird.
You know, the fact, you know, when we started on Twitter, the idea that you could explore scientific ideas was openly mocked by people, right?
It was like, this is not a serious platform.
Why are you starting on Twitter?
I was coerced in the wake of Evergreen in 2017, at which point A lot of scientists were on Twitter at that point actively exchanging ideas.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Okay, so we are denied a source of information.
You have to work to overcome that in order to even know where you are.
And the reason that knowing where you are is so important, it doesn't come down to this, but there's an important principle.
I believe John Boyd is the guy who came up with it.
He was a military theorist.
He'd been a fighter pilot But anyway, it's something called OODA Loops, which if you haven't encountered it... Zack, do you want to put up the OODA Loop graphic?
This was originally generated in a military context, and the idea is OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
And the idea is it is a loop.
In battle, this is what you do.
You observe where you are, you orient to it, you decide what to do, you take action, and then you go back to observing in the aftermath of whatever action you took.
And the point about it is you can imagine a lot of things that impinge on a battle and who wins it and what they win, but you need to understand that there is an underlying dynamic, an inferior opponent, if you look at, let's say, the power of its weaponry.
That is more agile, if it's good at observing, orienting, deciding, and acting, so that it can iterate more changes more quickly than its opponent can very often win, because it is simply, it is more responsive to the realities of the battle, the opportunities and the hazards.
More appropriately responsive.
Right, it's more appropriately responsive.
And so the point is, look, if you're not thinking in terms of OODA loops, you're missing something.
Now this is a place where we actually have a tremendous advantage over Goliath.
Right?
Goliath is a big dumb giant.
He's composed of a bunch of things that one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.
Right?
At the very least, Goliath, he derives his power from being huge and having all of these things grafted together, but he's not agile.
Right?
He's a big dumb giant.
And we can be agile, right?
If we are David, you know, I'm not saying... I'm saying we, whoever is fighting Goliath, we are emergent David.
We are smaller and more agile and therefore capable of iterating many OODA loops, or every single one that Goliath can pull off, and that is tremendously important.
And capable of taking more risks because any given action can be foreshortened, can be stopped more easily.
You're not invested in a project which is going to, you know, you can turn on a dime.
You can turn on a dime, which then goes to the question of the OODA loop working in your favor depends on you actually being able to observe, which is part of why we are seeing so much battle over, you know, throwing misinformation spreaders off this, that, and the other, right?
What's the problem?
Well, they're giving you information you need, and if you can throw them off so that there's nothing but noise or false signal on these platforms, then OODA loops don't help you, right?
Being fast doesn't matter if you're wearing blinders.
So bootstrapping a mechanism in which we figure out how to determine what the facts are is key.
And FreeSpoke is great.
Twitter, if you can figure out how to source information from people with different biases so that you can correct for those biases, it has value.
I would love to see somebody do this brilliantly where they employ Some kind of active Bayesian percentages, right?
So that you're not just, hey, here's a thing I believe, or here's something I don't believe.
But it's like, hey, this one, you know, this went from 60% this week to 75% based on this piece of information.
And you could track somebody's belief.
So anyway, maybe our friends at MOPTU may end up doing that.
I've tried to convince them that this would be a way to make their product more useful.
But Figuring out how to extract signal from an environment full of noise, yes, and also full of false signal is a big part of the game, and it's why the sense-making podcast world matters.
Yeah it is.
I did not expect to go here because I have not fully assessed this document but what you just said reminds me of a line and you can just show my screen here.
It's a new document from the Center for Countering Digital Hate called The New Climate Denial and right away that should throw an error for you like what does climate denial have to do with digital Hate.
What is hate there, okay?
How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading new forms of climate denial.
And again, I do not claim to have full understanding of what this document is saying, but the basic claim used to be people who were denying climate change was real would say things like, but it's warm, or, you know, but it's colder than it's been, and, you know, winters are harsher.
And now people are, frankly, more sophisticated.
And what this What this document is claiming is clearly just denial, but keep on my screen here if you would.
And so I'm just going to scroll through here.
They got a little introduction.
They got contents.
They got a case study.
Jordan Peterson's output of new denial spiked in the last two years.
You know, he's like the Chairman of the New Climate Denial, somehow.
YouTube makes up to $13.4 million a year from channels posting denial.
There's never an analysis, of course, of what is or is not true.
They start from the assumption of, we know what's true, therefore we're going to, you know, and they frame it in terms of hate.
But here's the, so in this introduction, I found this line staggering.
In this enlightenment battle of truth and science versus lies and grief, Those on the side of science appear to succeed, yadda yadda yadda.
Enlightenment battle.
Truth and science, lies and greed.
Those are the options, which do you choose?
There it is.
Well, this perfectly matches with the next rule I thought that we should talk about.
All right.
Which has to do with Keeping separate accounts for people making analytical errors and moral errors.
And what I'm getting at is this.
We have already talked about the fact that we are forced to fight in a very muddy informational environment, right?
That guarantees analytical errors.
Right?
You will think something's a fact and it's not and until you purge it from your model you will have conclusions that are affected to one degree or another based on the fact that you've accepted something that you shouldn't.
Your deductive logic will fail because one of your assumptions is off.
Yeah.
It's a classic and it will happen a lot in an environment where your sources of information are at best highly noisy and at worst misleading.
Therefore, when somebody makes an error If you accuse them of making an error because they're a terrible person.
Or deceitful and greedy.
You at least need something to explain why you have leapt between categories.
Analytical errors are to be expected.
Expect a lot of them from everybody who's actually trying to figure out what's going on.
You should expect them.
Now, I'm not arguing that moral errors are not present, but these things are so fundamentally different, right?
You, Zach, Toby, I trust you morally.
Absolutely.
I don't trust any of you analytically.
I don't trust me analytically, right?
Because I know that analytical errors are baked in.
Yeah, but I don't think you mean that.
You trust us analytically more than you trust other people, and you trust yourself analytically more than you trust other people, so you just presented this binary that isn't what you mean.
Let's put it this way, what I really mean, you're right, I didn't say it the way I meant it, what I really mean is I don't trust anybody analytically completely, right?
And I don't trust anybody's judgment completely, right?
Trusting that somebody wants the right thing, that they are a patriot of the family, a patriot of the country, a patriot of the West, that they want to liberate people, that they want people to live better lives rather than worse lives, that they want everybody to have access to the goodness of society, those things, I can trust you completely.
But, judgment-wise, I'm going to expect error after error on everybody's part, and the basic point is, hey, when somebody, you know, and this is, the rationalists seem to have gone crazy, but one of the things that they had right was this understanding that the point of the exercise is not to be correct.
It is to be less wrong over time, right?
That getting, you know, I mean, frankly, That's exactly how we describe what science is trying to do.
We're seeking truth, and we may never get there, and we may never know if we've gotten there, but we can tell that we're getting closer by virtue of being... by our methods, which include trying to falsify all of our most cherished beliefs.
Yep.
And what it gives you is a model that has greater predictive power over time.
That's how we know we're doing it right.
And greater predictive power does not mean perfect predictive power, right?
It just means, you know, so it's not like truth doesn't matter, but the point is, it's an asymptote question and we need to understand that.
But anyway, my point would be, well, what do you make of the fact that you've got these two kinds of value that need to be kept separate in order to do the job right?
You need to rate people's analytical errors differently than you rate their moral failings, right?
Their moral failings, frankly, if they're significant enough, they're a deal breaker, right?
You don't want to partner with somebody who gets that part wrong.
Analytical errors.
You don't want somebody who's just making error after error and not correcting them.
That's not helpful.
But somebody who is making fewer errors, correcting their errors better, you know, that is, you know, that's par for the course.
So anyway, my point is, there are a large number of people now making this error, right?
Where the point is, ah, you were wrong about this.
Therefore, you are working for the enemy.
Oh, that's an interesting conclusion.
Frankly, that's a failure on analytical grounds, and it means that at least you're a hazard, right?
If you're going to be dragging your moral claims in as a result of analytical failings, then I don't know why you're doing it.
Maybe you suck at logic.
That's possible.
It's also possible that your values aren't what you represent them to be and that actually your purpose is, whether it's clicks or whether you've been hired by somebody, I don't know.
But I would just say it's a red flag when somebody is not maintaining a careful distinction between these things and doesn't explain it.
You know, sometimes you do see somebody who appears to be creating chaos.
As their purpose, right?
Then you are, you know, the fact that it's error after error, you know, the errors have a pattern.
That pattern suggests something that's potentially moral.
But the point is, if you're going to breach that boundary between these two distinct things, you need to know exactly why you did it, which means that it's an analytical reason to breach that boundary, which means it's also fixable if it's incorrect.
Um, all right.
So I think that's as far as I want to go here.
These are just basic rules that I think, uh, or basic principles in the game environment that we find ourselves in and that being explicit about them as at least one way to, uh, level ourselves up, build our own bootcamp so that we can be more effective.
All right.
Can we talk about ants now?
I mean, what else?
Yeah.
This is not the story that's going to fill you with concern about the future of humanity.
I am temporarily very relieved.
Yeah, this is not that.
That's next.
But yeah, this is some very interesting sort of big-scale landscape-level ecological analysis that is prompted by an unfortunate thing.
But basically, the short version is there's an introduced ant, Pheidole megacephala, the big-headed ant.
in the African Savannah, which is forcing the lions to switch how and what they hunt.
So I skipped a few steps there, but if you bracket it, if you go like, what happened first and what are we seeing is happening now, those two things seem to be causally related, which is remarkable.
We don't think of ants and lions having much to do with one another.
So I'm going to just read the abstract for this article.
And why is that there?
Why?
Thank you.
Disruption of an ant-plant mutualism shapes interactions between lions and their primary prey.
This is published in...
I forgot, oh, it's Pollution Science just last month.
Mutualisms often define ecosystems, but they are susceptible to human activities.
Combining experiments, animal tracking, and mortality investigations, we show that the invasive big-headed ant, Pheidole megacephala, makes lions, Panthera leo, less effective at killing their primary prey, Plains zebra, Equus quagga.
Big-headed ants disrupted the mutualism between native ants, Chromatogaster, and the dominant whistling thorn tree, Vitellia diprenilobium, rendering trees vulnerable to elephant, Loxodonta africana, browsing and resulting in landscapes with higher visibility.
Although zebra kills were significantly less likely to occur in higher-visibility invaded areas, lion numbers did not decline since the onset of the invasion, likely because of pre-switching to African buffalo, Syncerus kaffir.
We show that by controlling biophysical structure across landscapes, a tiny invader reconfigured predator-prey dynamics among iconic species.
So wait, wait, wait.
So yeah.
And you can give me my screen back here if you would.
So first of all, I've not heard this story.
I know some of the players, sort of, and know congeners of them.
Right.
Let me see if I've got this straight.
Yes, let's walk through it.
Okay, so mind you, when Zach and I were in Panama, I was having a conversation with Matt, who was a member of our team, and I was explaining to him that the New World Bullthorn Acacia, which is a congener of the African Acacia, Acacias are Gondwanan in distribution, that is, the ancient landmass Gondwana, which includes the modern landmasses of Australia, South America,
Africa, Madagascar, but I don't know if there are acacias in Madagascar and India and Antarctica.
A tropical Gondwanian distribution means that you have acacias in Australia, South America, and Africa for reasons of taxonomy and systematics that are not anything that almost anyone in our audience would care about.
Acacia, as the genus name, has just been pulled From all of the African and South American species.
So only the Australian species get to be called formally acacia anymore, but they're all closely related.
Okay.
So what I was telling Matt was we were talking about leaf toxicity.
I no longer remember why.
And I was telling him the standard thing, which is that almost all leaves are full of secondary compounds that make them Unpalatable to most herbivores.
So herbivores that eat leaves often have to move between leaves or be specialized to be able to detoxify what's ever in a particular leaf.
And that this results in almost all leaves tasting terrible.
Now I was mentioning... This is part of why young leaves tend to be targeted because plants haven't yet put many of their secondary compounds into the young leaves.
Right.
Yummy.
Yes, exactly.
And I was telling him about exceptions.
One of the exceptions was young leaves, and the other exception that I mentioned was bullthorn acacia, which exists in Panama, so he would be familiar with it and he could go test what I was about to tell him, which is something that we learned when we did our first study in Central America with John Vandermeer, which was So the bullthorn acacia is an acacia tree that has evolved hollow thorns.
Those thorns are, they house ants that live inside them, and those ants ferociously attack anything that tries to eat this plant.
It also cuts vines that climb these trees, so it has an animal symbiont.
The ants do.
The ants do.
Yeah.
I believe the bullthorn acacia, this is true as well, but at least this is the whistling thorn acacia that we're talking about in the African savannah, offer the ants two things.
They're called swollen-thorn domatia, but domatia is the same etymological root as domicile, domestic.
These are the homes for the ants, so these acacias are providing little homes for the ants and their thorns, which are hollow, which the ants live in.
And also extrafloral nectar.
So they've got these nectaries, these little balls of nectar that the ants eat as well.
And in exchange... Well, hold on.
In the New World version, the Bullthorn Acacia, there are two rewards given.
And I'm trying to remember, there's like a nectary at the base, and then there's a little fatty... You mean two food rewards?
Two food rewards.
One of them is, I think, largely protein, and the other one is fuel.
Yeah, I don't remember.
That may be right.
That's not the case with the whistling thornacaceas.
But in any case, the point is, the whole structure, amazing as it is, is there because the plant gets an advantage by housing the ants, which take over the job of fending off things like herbivores.
And the punchline of the story, which I told Matt, is you can take the leaves off the bull thornacacea and put them in your mouth, and they taste like lettuce because they don't have the secondary compounds.
They just simply don't need them with the ants.
Right, but if you stand too close to a bullthorn acacia, if you've backed into one and you've been careful not to back into something that's toxic or spiny or whatever, bullthorn acacias are somewhat, and you don't notice, you will quickly be covered in ants who are interested in teaching you a lesson.
Yeah, they pour out of them.
Why would a plant give food and shelter to ants for free?
Well, it's not for free.
They've outsourced their defense Instead of spending on creating chemical defenses in the form of toxins and leaves, secondary compounds and leaves, they've enticed ants to come live with them, they've given them some sugar, and in exchange the ants go out and do their bidding.
Right.
And the ants, of course, have an interest in maintaining this plant.
It's not that the ants are not doing a job they don't care about.
They actually have an interest in maintaining this plant because it's their home and their food source.
Exactly.
Now, hold on.
Just to tie it to this particular story.
These whistling thorn acacias are apparently where they exist on the African savannah.
And it's vast swaths of African savannah.
They are from over 70 to 99% of the biomass of woody stems.
It is effectively a monoculture.
And it's not because it's been created by humans to be a monoculture, they are just, they are the, like to say dominant is understating it, like they are the plant there.
The woody plant there.
And elephants are big, and they eat a lot of food, and when they go after acacias in environments where this big-headed ant hasn't yet invaded, The chromatogaster, the native ants that are in mutualism with the acacias, swarm out into the elephant's noses, drive them crazy, and the elephants leave.
Right.
And they do not eat the acacias.
That's what I was gonna guess here.
Or I guess I'm inferring from the abstract that the defense is sufficient to fend off the elephants and thereby if the other ant drives... So the other ant, does it live in the Acacias?
No, but the other ant eats adults' larvae and pupae of the native ant.
So it has what would be called interference competition with the native ant.
Therefore, this plant... It may actually live.
I don't think so, but it doesn't matter.
It takes out the other ant.
It takes out the other ant, which means that this plant that has a massive advantage enough to make it the dominant short tree competitor in these environments... Not short, I mean all tree.
It's the dominant tree competitor, but the point is, its competitive superiority exists with the ant, and it becomes wildly competitively inferior Absent the ant because it doesn't have the defensive compounds, and that means that elephants are going to prefer it, right?
Apparently elephants break acacias at five to seven times the rate in invasive ant territory acacia trees than they do where the native ant, the chromatogaster, is defending by swarming into the elephant's noses.
So, okay, so then the elephants... So that's a piece of it.
So elephants are doing better, in part because a food source that was off the menu or that they had to avail themselves of at a very limited rate is suddenly on the menu.
They're at least having an easier time of it.
They're having an easier time, and that is changing the camouflage environment for the zebras.
The trees are failing.
They're taking out five, so breaking trees at five to seven times the rate that the elephants do in areas where there is no invasive ant.
So you go from a landscape that has a lot of trees to a landscape with very few trees.
Right.
So there's just no cover.
But how is that, so the lions have shifted from zebras to... So the lions hunt zebras by, I mean I guess it is camels, but it's cover, by using the cover of the trees to... Oh, I thought it was going to be the cover of the zebras.
The lions are... The lions are using the cover.
Got it.
Yeah, and the lions are using the cover To hunt zebras, which is, in areas where there are a lot of acacias, a dominant piece of the lion's diet.
Buffalo are more dangerous.
Successful buffalo hunts by lions tend to always involve lions, not just lionesses.
Lionesses do almost all the hunting except a very dangerous prey, and now the zebras are much harder to catch because they're always aware of the lions.
These lions in these areas are having to do more buffalo hunts, which means the lions are having to do more work.
The lionesses aren't hunting on their own anymore.
So interestingly, a zebra's just a striped horse.
It's a very fast animal.
So the lions get an advantage.
They sneak up on the zebras such that they get the jump on them.
But if they can't get the jump on them because there's nothing to hide behind, then they have to go after a less favored prey item.
These are cape buffalo?
Buffalo.
Why is my computer not responding to my requests?
African buffalo is what it says.
So my guess is going to be that's Cape buffalo, which is an animal that is not going to outrun a lion, but it's a well-defended animal.
So that's a fascinating story.
And I will tell you, we should dig it up somewhere, but Darwin argues for cascades of effects like this, right?
He didn't see this one coming, I'm sure.
He argued that the alteration of one critter in an environment was going to have major effects landscape-wise.
And we've also seen a story, I think you and I may have covered it some time ago, about wolves altering the landscape of Yellowstone.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
So actually we can just show a couple of the figures from this paper to demonstrate, you know, this is their Their version, what is going on in A here, this is figure 1A from this paper, where there are still a lot of acacias because the chromatogaster ants are defending the acacias against browsing by elephants.
You have lions being able to basically hide out and hunt zebras.
And zebra kill occurrence is up, lion activity is up, zebra density is down.
After the big-headed ant comes in in figure 1b here, high visibility scenario, everyone can see everyone all the time, the zebra density is going up, lion activity is down, zebra kill occurrence is down.
Yeah.
And one more figure, as long as we're here, here are actual pictures.
So you can see what a difference.
This is almost entirely these acacias in the uninvaded savanna, uninvaded by the big-headed ant savanna.
And after the invasion by this ant, the trees are largely gone, and you can see that it would be very much harder to be a lion trying to hide from zebras.
And yeah, maybe I'll stop there.
That's awesome.
I mean, it's Ain't it crazy that biology makes that much sense?
Yeah, it's beautiful.
I would just like to point out our Complex Systems.
Yeah, welcome to Complex Systems.
That's on the store, that's darkhorsestore.org.
That is, that is, and we don't say that enough anymore.
Welcome to Complex Systems.
Yeah, it's perfect for this story.
Yep.
All right.
All right.
I am, uh, I'm now sitting down in preparation for the next thing you're going to tell me.
Are you?
Yes.
Hmm.
Okay.
Well, um, here, let me just, uh, I'm going to have to pull it up.
I didn't want it.
Um, here, don't, don't look yet.
Don't look at, um, okay.
Uh, the soundbite, the two words, microbeef sushi.
Uh, well, I think I know what this is.
Okay.
This is a competitor with Jake's Micro Pizza, where somebody who doesn't understand sushi very well has decided to enter the market.
Right.
Tiny cows.
Or tiny sushi.
I don't know.
It's got to be tiny sushi.
Micro beef sushi.
It could be micro beef, micro sushi.
I mean.
No, that's not, that's not the sound bite though.
Micro beef sushi.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say that almost no matter what's going on, whatever this is doesn't have a deep grasp of sushi.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Okay, here we go.
Show my screen here.
Rice covered in cow cells aims to provide nutritious, sustainable food.
These people.
Microbeef sushi costs about the same as plain rice.
Oh good.
But how does it taste?
I don't know if you color deficient guys here in the room can tell that that is vaguely beef colored rice.
Like vaguely blood colored rice.
It's not appetizing.
So the actual article this is based on, I do have the graphical abstract that I will show you momentarily, but is behind a paywall and I think that And I will share with you a line from the summary, but this article kind of does the trick, so I'm just going to read this to you.
Scientists in South Korea have come up with an out-of-the-box idea for providing the world with nutritious sustainable food.
Coating rice grains with cow cells.
The Advance, reported today in Matter, aims to provide an ever-growing human population with tasty meals while preserving land that would otherwise be needed to raise livestock.
To make the microbeef sushi, as the scientists call it, they first created an edible coating for rice grains from fish gelatin.
That gave cow muscle and fat cells something to stick to.
Then, they incubated the grains with each type of cell.
The final result, steamed hybrid rice, pictured above, contained more carbs, fat, and protein than ordinary rice.
According to the researchers, eating 100 grams of hybrid rice is nutritionally like, wait for it, eating 100 grams of regular rice plus 1 gram of beef brisket.
The gains are astounding.
Perhaps more importantly, the researchers estimate the cost of their new rice could be only three cents more per kilogram wholesale than ordinary rice, and its production, they claim, would emit less carbon than the equivalent amount of rice and beef, largely by offsetting the need for carbon-intensive livestock operations.
But the real question is, how does this hybrid rice taste?
According to the researchers, it has a quote, rich flavor.
The mussel rice had beefy and smoky notes, and the fat rice was sweet, buttery, and creamy.
Would you try it?
All right.
That is not the question.
That is not the question.
You don't want to show the picture of microbeef sushi once more, Zach?
It's pretty awesome.
All right.
The question, actually, is what the hell are they talking about?
If these are cow cells, one of several things has to be going on.
Either, this does not reduce the need for cattle because you're using the cells in some other way, right?
Or... Or they've got some totopotent strain in the lab that they're just using to produce... That's what I'm wondering, is if this is... Cows, cells, which is probably what they're doing.
What we've been predicting forever, which is, hey guess what?
Your lab meat Is going to be gross.
It's going to be really gross.
Oh, well, okay, we've got this, all this investment in lab meat.
Maybe what we can do is we can put it in a thin coating on rice, right?
So bad.
Yeah.
So I don't know that that's what they're doing, but either... I mean, this is the graphical abstract, and frankly, it's not all that clear.
This is the graphical abstract from the actual article.
Uh, where they've got fish gelatin and some unspecified food grade enzyme.
Again, I didn't have access to the 50-page, uh, original research, so I don't know what they mean by food grade enzyme.
Then they add either, and it's, you know, um, bovine myoplasts, that's the muscle tissue, or bovine ADMSC, uh, which is fat cells, um, to make cell-organized rice grains, uh, in which the resulting cultured meat rice, and boy, doesn't that look like a bowl of disgusting, um, has, uh, Notice how they've changed the measures here.
They've got carbs in grams and protein and fat in micrograms to make it look, or milligrams rather, to make it look like there's more of them.
But look, either they're using Either they're pulling a chicken nugget thing, where they're taking a bunch of parts of a chicken that you can't actually sell to people because they'll be grossed out, and jumbling them in a way that you can pretend that it's a piece of chicken.
Yeah.
Right?
Either they're doing that, they're using a byproduct, and they're turning it into a coating, right?
Which does not have, there's no good argument for this over cooking rice in beef stock.
Which has the same effect.
Using just a little bit of tallow even.
Right.
Like something.
Yes.
Like an actual ingredient on an actual food.
That's called cooking.
Yeah.
Right?
Right.
So this wizardry that they're doing is either about using a byproduct and making a profit out of it by pretending it's food.
Or it's about lab meat, in which case they've got a source of cells that might in some way be superior because you're growing it in a lab and you don't have to house a cow.
But a lot of us are not up for this and they're not saying it.
Yep.
Or this is not the solution to any problem because they're using food grade beef and I mean, I think we can agree here, just between you and me anyway, and Zach, that this is not the solution to any problem, regardless of how they're getting their beep cells.
Yeah.
We barely even say it's a solution to a problem.
You would have to, I mean...
Well, here.
So let me put on my screen one more time.
This is all that's available publicly at the moment from the actual paper.
Rice grains integrated with animal cells, a shortcut to a sustainable food system.
So that's what they're claiming is sustainability.
Let me just read the last sentence here.
Two last sentences.
The rice grains are transformed into a hybrid food with animal nutrients by containing organized bovine cells.
We discuss the food properties and production value of this rice-based meat to evaluate its potential as a sustainable food that guarantees safety from food crises and global warming.
Guarantees safety.
Guarantees safety from food crises and global warming.
That is how we will save the world with microbeef sushi.
I get what they are saying, but A hundredth, you know, one gram per hundred grams.
So if you want to have a steak, you could have 500 kilograms of rice.
Well, as an MRE, I get it.
That would be a really big steak.
500 grams.
That would be a somewhat large steak.
How much?
How much?
That would be about a pound.
I guess that's a large steak.
But regardless, you get the scale.
Okay.
Do you remember in the movie Brazil?
Mm-hmm.
There is a dining scene where they go to what would be a fancy restaurant if it were not in a dystopian film.
Is this like the mom?
Is this the plastic surgery mom?
The plastic surgery mom and her son Sam.
And Sam is trying to convey something important and the mom and her friend who are going to ultimately die of Plastic surgery in the movie, um, are interested in their, their lunch out.
And, but the, the restaurant basically involves a menu in which it proposes some delicious things that you might order, but all of the things are basically a scoop of mush that is presumably flavored differently depending upon which number you had to say the number.
Remember that for some reason, the waiter required you to say the number, right?
You couldn't just point.
To the thing that you didn't really want.
But anyway, this lumps of proteinaceous mush, properly anticipated by the movie Brazil.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Microbeaf sushi, soon to arrive at stores near you.
I will say, as one of the two proprietors of Jake's Micropizza, I do not feel that this is a threat to our business.
No, because even as small the amounts that you would have to eat to maintain the value and thus not have to put on your mask, even in such small amounts I would feel like most people would just want to stop.
Right.
And then?
And then you've got to put the mask back on.
Then you've got to put your mask back on.
Exactly.
So, yeah.
I think business-wise we're safe.
Well, that is a relief.
Yes.
We are going to do a Q&A with our locals today.
Yes, we are.
We're going to do another one on Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
For that, we're going to be inviting people to ask questions for the Q&A on Sunday, any moment now, on Locals.
But for the Q&A that's about to come up, you'll be able to ask questions in the stream.
I don't know any of the right words to use.
In the locals' chats, not the stream, the chat.
In the locals' chat, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And can I just ask that people please sign up for our locals' community and sign up on Rumble.
These things matter to us, and anyway, we really appreciate it when people do.
Indeed, we do.
We're trying to have 100,000 subscribers on Rumble by early April, and Yeah, it's climbing, but it's climbing slowly.
And that doesn't cost you anything, so we appreciate it if you can join us there.
I write on Natural Selections most weeks, you can read my stuff there.
And on Dark Horse Store you can get, among other things, Jake's Micro Pizza, blueberries because oxidants happen, welcome to Complex Systems, and cut that shit out.
Cut that shit out, yeah.
Which, that shirt in particular makes a great gift.
I think so.
Yeah.
Not necessarily to someone you hope to continue seeing, but... No, to somebody who really needs to, you know, cut that shit out.
Yeah, yeah.
I would hope that they would indeed do that.
So, we'll be back in about 15 minutes on Locals Only.
Join us there.
Oh, and actually we'll be coming back to you with our next livestream a day early next week.
We'll be here on Tuesday rather than Wednesday of next week, so that'll be February 20th.
And at some point here, you've got a cool guest episode that you've recorded that's going to come out.
I don't know when, but hopefully soon.
And yeah, lots of good stuff.
And as always, that comes out early on Locals as well.
So come join us there for the Q&A we're about to do.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
