Common Sense, Inverted: The 232nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 232nd 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 week’s episode, we discuss the 248th anniversary of the founding of the United States, with readings from Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence. Then: deep state vs. shallow state, and how it came to be that news = New York Times ^-1, and health = CDC^-1. Discussing the biggest story of 2020—the corrup...
You would think I would just check the number ahead of time.
In fact, I wouldn't.
No, you wouldn't.
You know me pretty darn well at this point, I'm thinking.
It's number 232.
Evolutionary lens number 232.
How about that?
How about that?
That's crazy.
Yeah, it's July 3rd.
It's July 3rd.
We're gonna share a little bit of the thinking from the formation of this country 248 years ago.
Pretty wild.
In today's episode, along with some thoughts about the state of the country now.
Yeah, we're going to reflect on where we are this July 4th, which arguably might be the most important July 4th ever, I don't know.
I don't know that you want to go there, but such claims are always rife with trouble.
Interesting things are afoot in the Republic, and we shall discuss.
Interesting things are afoot, and no one at home can see this, but interesting shadows are afoot in this room at the moment.
It's very odd.
Yeah.
We're also going to talk about lingerie and rugby.
Naturally.
Just at the end, a little titillating bit.
But first, we're doing a Q&A after this episode.
We just did a Q&A on Sunday.
It was great.
We talked about the debate.
We talked about what a smart, honest person might do if they are feeling the need for a career switch at this moment.
We talked about vaccines, the childhood vaccination schedule.
And what is downstream of that.
And today we'll talk about a number of other awesome things.
We'll give you a little hint of that at the end of this episode.
But join us on Locals for those Q&As and lots of other great content that we've got going on there on Locals.
My computer is threatening to shut down because it doesn't like what I'm talking about.
I mean, shut it down.
Everyone's a critic.
I don't know that I'd call that everyone yet.
I mean, that thing can't even pass a Turing test, which puts it way behind the, I don't know, the high watermark at the moment for computing.
Yeah.
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Yes, Brett.
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I am glad to see that we remember each other's names.
Yes.
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Awesome.
Yes.
It is July 3rd.
I have noticed.
Tomorrow is Independence Day in the United States.
I wanted to start us off by just sharing a few of Thomas Paine's words of wisdom from early 1776.
So he famously said, obviously the colonies struggled under British rule for a very long time, Before declaring their independence 248 years ago tomorrow.
And in January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a 47-page pamphlet, which is called Common Sense, which is widely understood to have been instrumental in curing enthusiasm for the American Revolution.
So, I just have, what, six or so of his paragraphs that I want to share some things from.
You can share my screen here, if you like.
Starting with paragraph one.
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry and defensive custom.
But the tumult soon subsides.
Time makes more converts than reason.
That is, uh, beautifully put, and, uh, Quite correct.
And you could do a pretty fair evolutionary analysis there on why, especially in light of the idea that a certain number of things are metaphorically true, which means that if you scrutinize them, you may... You take it at the analytical level, which is the first line of defense.
Like, no, obviously wrong.
Obviously wrong.
But the point is, if they have persisted for a while, then...
Uh, as with the Lindy effect, you might imagine that, you know, holding these beliefs, uh, does certain good things for you, which also gives them a kind of inertia and makes them hard to dislodge.
So if they were wrong and they were, let's say fused to something that was right, and that's why they persisted or something had changed.
And therefore the fact that it was useful to believe X and it is now no longer, it's now harmful.
You might not spot it because of the, uh, the just sort of habits of mind.
Exactly, exactly.
The customs of mind, the habits of mind.
Okay, paragraph five from Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet Common Sense.
Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them.
Whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.
The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.
The one encourages social intercourse, the other creates distinctions.
The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
He, of course, is not the first to make a distinction between government and society, and there were many in the era in which he was writing who were actively trying to tease apart these differences.
But I find this to be a very elegant and concise distinction that he is making, whereby he is asking us not to consider that asking those in the colonies To not imagine that a request for separation from the British government is a request to lose society.
It is not.
It is a request to change the government, but not to lose the society that they have.
So there's something highly resonant here for our era.
You can see in what he says about government that he describes it as... what term does he use?
It's no longer on screen.
Which society?
No, government.
Yeah.
He uses the term government a lot.
Yes, society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
Yeah.
Okay.
That is what I call political PTSD.
He is living in an era of predatory governance.
Um, I don't, I don't think inherently so.
No, I think he is arguing that we need government to constrain us.
It is not, it is, it is, it is, it is not, um, suggesting that humans are all evil or that all humans are equally evil, but that we, that we have an amorality when in groups that we need to be, that needs to be restrained.
Uh, and so I don't, I don't think that that is inherently a governmental, a bad governmental PTSD.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what he's saying.
Maybe he's saying, in modern parlance, I would say something like government is a response to our wickedness, which I think is only... Yeah, society is produced by our wants and government produced by our wickedness.
Produced by our wickedness sounds like it is wicked rather than it is required because of our wickedness.
I don't read it that way.
Well, clearly, I think you're reading it as it was intended and I'm Reading it overly literally.
But, in any case, I would draw a triple distinction.
I'd add a couple things here.
Okay.
Society is a desirable phenomenon.
It's an organized, emergent phenomenon that a good one serves the interests of the people who are participating in it.
Government is a necessary evil.
Right.
And therefore, you know, ideas that were clearly resonant at the time, like the government that governs best governs least, Jefferson, makes sense, which doesn't mean no government.
It means you don't want extraneous government.
You want government that does the job.
And it is not just restraining human wickedness.
The thing that almost certainly they did not have sophisticated language to discuss at the time was wickedness is one of the things that you want to to rule out.
The other thing is Game theoretic failures.
Yep.
Where perfectly rational people who are not wicked and would prefer to live in a better society will produce a worse society by acting locally rationally.
Yes, and I actually I think I gave him perhaps a greater scope here than is warranted at least by this bit where I said it's a response to the amorality and he's specifically saying it's a response to the immorality.
Exactly.
Although, well, Yeah, that's it.
Amorality evolves because of game theory.
Amorality evolves because of game theory, but there are two levels of failure, right?
The game theory, a predator is a rational creature, a member of your society who is supposed to be a collaborator but behaves as a Predator or a parasite is behaving rationally but amorally right immorally we should probably reserve for Those who seek to do wrong for its own sake right or at least that is evil
Amorality you should expect an amoral creature to do the right thing when the right thing is expedient and the wrong thing when the wrong thing is expedient and To draw no distinction between them and that's the primary thing that government needs to hedge out but even somebody who does not wish who would be willing to pay the price of protecting society by restraining their own behavior, but can't do it, you know in the tragedy of the commons example and
Or any collective action problem an individual who restrains their own behavior for the good of society Those who don't do it then get a competitive advantage.
And so, the point is, it may be that everybody is perfectly willing to restrain themselves in order to make the future better, but any individual who attempts it gets punished by the system rather than rewarded, and so every individual decides not to.
That's not really wickedness.
That's a recognition that the game theory Forces you to this response because the only thing you can do is hurt yourself by not participating in the feeding frenzy So anyway, I don't think that was well understood at the time, but maybe somebody will tell us that it was but the last distinction I wanted to add is
You've got governance, and of course the American Revolution sets in motion a novel, not the first, but a novel experiment in democratic governance.
Not a perfect, not a democracy, but something in which the voting public has a tremendous amount of influence over how the system runs.
It ultimately has the right to consent to the way it is governed, and that is the basis of the legitimacy of the American government, and I would argue it is the sole basis of legitimacy of any government.
Politics is the game that evolves in the context of a society built around the consent of the governed.
Right?
So the point is, it's a cynical game.
And to the extent that one may be very interested in good governance, they should be appalled by politics.
And this, we will get to this later in the podcast, but I think one of the things that we are watching unfold In real time is we are watching our way of life and our governmental structure threatened by things and everybody's playing politics over and it's ghastly.
Now that's exactly right, and that's part of why I wanted to read these four little bits from Thomas Paine in 1776, who was arguing that a new government needed to be formed because the people in the colonies were suffering under bad, and in this case remote, mostly remote governance.
So there are modern analogies to be made.
Okay, third of six short excerpts from Common Sense.
Here, then, is the origin and rise of government, namely a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.
Here, too, is the design and end of government views, namely, that is, freedom and security.
So, the origin of rise, he says, is the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.
So that's why I was remembering that.
That's why I'm saying he uses the word wickedness in that earlier paragraph, but here he expands it.
It's like morality versus not morality, which includes both amoral and immoral.
situations and actors and that what we need from government in his estimation is freedom and security.
And, you know, again, it's, this is 248 years ago, but remarkably, remarkably prescient given the limitations of, of the time.
Well, and actually it almost perfectly demonstrates what we were saying at the beginning about a, an approximate understanding of the world that allows you to, to function well within it, that then gets replaced when you come to understand at a higher level that then gets replaced when you come to understand at a And I was just trying to point out that actually there's a beautiful body of work
That suggests that humans are not unable to constrain their well, I've forgotten what his phrase was in the in the last Paragraph that you read but human beings are capable of
Restraining those impulses that require governance at small scale when you don't have something like currency that allows you to make a profit in an unsustainable realm and then to walk away and spend it in a new realm, right?
Where you can keep destroying things and come away wealthy, right?
To the extent that society is dependent on its wise management of something and you have a tragedy of the commons set to unfold, there are actually mechanisms that evolve to prevent that game theory.
And those mechanisms are housed in the narrative belief layer of the cultures in question.
So this was all studied by Eleanor Ostrom, who was responding to the tragedy of the commons, which was brought into scientific respectability or scientific prominence in the thinking on game theory by Garrett Hardin.
In 1968.
Right.
So Garrett Hardin introduces the game theory problem.
Eleanor Ostrom points out that many cultures have solved it and she discusses the preconditions that allow it to be solved.
So it's been a long time for me.
As you, as As you just laid it out, as you understand it, the two things that modern systems don't tend to have, which could mitigate the effects of what Hardin lays out,
are scale, and then basically currency, but I would say more broadly, commodity, where if you have an object that is being transferred and the history of its meaning or its value goes with it, then you're also protected to some degree from a tragedy of the commons.
Yes, it's something, it's not the currency itself, it's the ability to divorce consequences from reputation.
Which I think, and I'm well outside of anything I've ever studied at all, but I feel like that is kind of The heart of what a commodity is.
Like a commodity that can be traded, and maybe that's just another way of saying currency, but that something that you can say has a value over here and has a value over here, and those two things in those different places are disconnected.
And so I can now have you acting in these two places in ways that don't keep track of one another, whereas if you are using an object that keeps track of its own history, and that's one of the things about narrative, is that narrative inherently keeps track All right, this is good.
I think what it is, actually, it's the inverse of what has now been found in quantum physics with entanglement, right?
Where you find that objects that don't seem to have a relationship are actually inseparable despite being separated.
But we can actually separate things and that's when our problems, that and getting too big for a system, are when our problems become possibly insoluble.
Yes, and and and extinction level threats you have a kind of fiscal disentanglement of things that ought to be correlated right your money should become Disgusting to people as you earn it by being a parasite, right?
It's just money, but it's just money.
Yeah, and so it doesn't work that way and that that has created That has created many of the horrors of the moment also something that you and I have talked about frequently the Appearance of the absence of shared fate has a profound relevance here.
Yes.
That when a culture solves a game theory problem, like how do you not overfish the salmon that return to this river so that there will be salmon here for a thousand years, right?
The point is it would be dumb not to solve that problem for everybody involved because you're the Salish people, you're salmon people and You know, you can serve yourself in the short term and hurt yourself in the long term, but like all wisdom, you wouldn't do that.
You would, you would prepare for the long term.
Um, but when you're involved in 20 different industries and you're competing against a bunch of other people in each of them, and the idea is, especially if you're not local to any of them.
Yeah somebody's going to destroy that fishery and that means the you know the liquidation of that fishery is going to end up in somebody's bank account so it might as well be ours because that fishery ain't going to be here a thousand years from now.
It doesn't work right there's no shared fate and that that is a crucial loss.
Now oddly and Ironically, there's a kind of giant karmic context in which we have not escaped shared fate.
We've just escaped the sense of it, right?
We do have the one planet.
Yeah, we do have the one planet, and we are putting it in jeopardy over these stupid little games that people are playing locally, you know, both in space and time over some prize that will be forgotten.
And the point is, okay, you really want to Play nuclear brinksmanship over whatever is going on with, you know, the various entities that have figured out how to turn Ukraine into a hole in the universe in which money disappears and can't be accounted for as it ends up in different people's pockets.
Like, that's worth risking the whole planet over, really?
Apparently.
Apparently, yeah.
Okay, uh, chapter six—chapter—paragraph 61 from Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense.
I have heard it asserted by some that as America hath flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, that the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect.
Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument.
We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.
or that the first 20 years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next 20.
But even this is admitting more than is true.
For I answer roundly that America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power had anything to do with her.
The commerce by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market, while eating is the custom of Europe.
The last bit, an indication of the bounty that the North American continent was already understood.
to be producing. - Yeah.
Yes, it's sort of interesting to hear it referred to as America in this context.
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
I'm really glad you're surfacing this at this moment.
I don't think I've read it before.
Yeah, I mean, I did back in middle school, but this is the first time I've come back to it for a long time.
So next, a couple more here.
Here we go.
75 and 77.
Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offense, yet I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation that is between what he's calling America, the colonies, and Great Britain I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions: Interested men, who are not to be trusted, by which he means self-interested, people with conflict of interest, Interested men, who are not to be trusted.
Weak men, who cannot see.
Prejudiced men, who will not see.
And a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves.
And this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.
So I am thinking here of the very many people who think that they are seeing with great clarity and are certain that our institutions will save us.
Our institutions like the institutions of higher ed, for instance, that because we have relied upon them in the past, they are the only thing that is possible.
And it's not so bad, really.
And haven't we benefited from them?
And therefore, how could we possibly go forth and flourish in the future without them?
It sounds very much like that argument.
Yeah and actually um there I have even though I'm not pleased to be doing it I have taken an interest in sloppy arguments or lazy arguments which are proliferating at an incredible rate to sort of fend off uh insight or courage or something right in other words there are a lot of people
who have something to say on some topic that feels sophisticated and what they don't want is to be taken to a place in the argument where nobody where it's new to everyone because then they would have to think and um And so anyway, one of the things that we have to overcome if we are to have a sober adult discussion about where we are in history and what it means and what the most reasonable things to do would be at this moment is you have to escape that.
You have to say, look, there's going to be whatever we do is going to involve risk and it's going to be uncomfortable and uncertain.
If you want guarantees, this is not your era, right?
This is the opposite era.
Yeah well it's you know if you want guarantees it's never your era really.
Well there are eras in which things are so productive that it's very tolerant of mistakes and so you can carve out you know you can... 1950s?
Yeah, you can hitch your wagon to some rising star, and the point is you may be righter or less right, but it's not peril, you know, every day you wake up to a fresh peril, right?
That's actually not normal.
It's a sign of the failure of the system that did work, you know.
It had its very serious flaws, but it did work for a very long time.
Yeah.
And it is now showing signs of the failure to tend the important components.
I feel like I hear the chassis creaking a lot.
Yeah, so you see the road through the floor and something isn't right.
Yeah.
Yeah, the rust is spreading.
Okay, one last excerpt from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in 1776.
Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this.
But examine the passions and feelings of mankind.
Bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land.
If you cannot do all these, then are you only deceiving yourselves and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity?
Your future connection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honor, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will, in a little time, fall into a relapse more wretched than the first.
But if you say you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, have your house been burnt?
Hath your property been destroyed before your face?
Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on or bread to live on?
Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor?
If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have?
But if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover?
And whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.
Wow.
He's taking no prisoners.
He's taking no prisoners here.
This isn't his first rodeo.
This isn't the beginning.
Britain has begun to show its hand, and I am now going to say to all of you who would defend it that you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.
But this is, you know, years and years and years of, as Thomas Paine understood it, and as the founders of our country understood it, brutality and, you know, a total lack of respect for the lives of the people now living in North America who came from Britain, by Britain.
And anyone who would continue to defend them, how dare they?
And that, I feel like here, I hear, um, I hear ghosts or echoes of what happened during COVID.
Especially in, you know, in the U.S.
for sure, but especially in, well, I guess the other Commonwealth nations, right?
Not that the U.S.
ever was, but in Canada and Australia and New Zealand in particular, where people's lives were utterly destroyed.
And then relatively quickly after the, you know, the mandates were gotten rid of and the lockdown stopped and the masks weren't required anymore, The people who had gone along with it said, it's fine, look at this awesome government that we have.
And to which any external observer, or for us within the US, internal observer, look and say, yeah, actually, that government who imposed those things?
Never again.
Nope.
Nope.
And no.
No, why are you making excuses for those people?
Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm caught between two things here.
One, the colonists are obviously at cross purposes to themselves because on the one hand they can recognize the abuse that they are enduring.
And on the other hand, they're going to form a country that will have a predatory relationship with Imported people, mostly from Africa, and the indigenous populations who they will treat with disrespect.
And so they, you know, on the one hand, they are seeing their own mistreatment with great clarity.
And on the other hand, they they've got a lot of work to do to understand in what way they're actually mirroring this.
So that's, you know, that's That's how history works, I guess.
That's how humans work.
That's how humans work.
And you can also see that there's something... I would love to hear a historian explore it, but there's something about the fact that you've got... Go ahead.
Well, I think you're giving the colonists a bad rap.
Okay.
Because A, yes, we come to resemble the thing which we were fighting against very often.
People often do that.
But to the degree that you are arguing that the United States became something that has acted with some of the brutality and barbarism to other people in the world that Great Britain did against the colonists, none of the original colonists were We're part of that.
Now, there's other original sin, if you will.
I don't know.
I mean, the colonists were obviously involved in taking over land they couldn't be defended because of a An asymmetry in technological power?
Yes.
So the original sin against the Native Americans and the slavery of Africans.
Mostly Africans.
Yep.
So anyway, I do see those things as A clarity of vision with respect to the parasitism of the colonists.
At the same time, there's a blindness to their parasitism of others.
And frankly, I don't think we get out of this phase of history until we're fully honest about how we got here.
And that's an important part of that first chapter.
And as you say, that's how humans work.
It's not like this is a special defect in the American character.
Quite the opposite.
The American character Wrestled its way free of these things because it was the right thing to do it just Didn't happen all of a sudden right it took time But there's something the thing I want to know the one I want explored by somebody who knows The the evidence is it seems to me that you have Brits Who go to the new world?
for Britain and Then they become a self-sustaining population Britain Some were fleeing and some were there as colonies of Britain.
It's a mixture, right?
There's a reason that Britain has colonies, and the point is that's to serve Britain.
And there's a point at which the colonists become a thing unto themselves.
They take on a culture that, you know, picks up elements from the place that they've arrived.
They generate elements from the different subpopulations that have contributed, and they become their own thing.
And I think what's happening here is, you know, in evolutionary theory, as you well know, we very frequently just talk about in-group and out-group, right?
In-group are the people that you see as sort of an extension of self, and out-group are the people that you don't.
And we all have this within us, right?
To the extent that you can go out and you can buy a cup of coffee when there are people who are literally starving to death or being blown up,
on whom that money could be spent that is a matter of an indifference that frankly you have to have if you tapped into the suffering of every person on earth all at once you could not accomplish anything so it makes no sense it makes no sense so the point is you can't distribute all this stuff equally right so what that means is that all of us are always
Just by necessity, indifferent to most of the people of planet earth, most of the time, even if formally we are not, even if we recognize them as equally people.
And so who are the people that we don't feel that way about?
There's a lot of different reasons that you might not feel that way.
One of them is familial.
One of them is affection, right?
Familial or otherwise.
One of them is proximity, right?
You see the suffering in front of you.
You don't see the same suffering, you know, in the next city over.
And so, what I think, the point I want to make, whether it's right or wrong, is that what happens is you've got Brits who do the bidding of Britain in the New World, become their own thing, and both because there is an ocean between them and because they become special, the Brits start seeing them as other, and the predatory behavior becomes intolerable, and the colonists punch above their weight class and are able to fight back against Britain, and hence the birth of the U.S.
Yeah.
I think that last bit is accurate.
I guess I do...
I'm not sure this is right, but I find myself taking a sort of instinctive issue with the word indifference as you were applying it.
I think that a person can be utterly fascinated with and interested in the stories of all the other human beings.
Mm-hmm.
And simultaneously recognize that interest in engaging with when one finds oneself, especially with people who has never met before from cultures from which you could learn and share stories and have music and share food and all of these things.
That's not an indifference.
But it's separate from, and therefore I consider it my obligation as a human being to make sure that you have the same thing I do.
Like, no.
That's an economic argument.
And so I feel like you're applying indifference.
If you don't think that an equal distribution of resources is how you should be acting, then you are behaving with indifference.
I don't buy that.
You're hearing something that is absolutely not there.
I do not believe in equalizing wealth.
I know you don't, but I don't think that the failure to try to equalize wealth indicates an indifference towards the human being.
It's not the equalizing of wealth.
It's the comparison between my comfort and somebody else's suffering, right?
It's not that I specifically do not want to live in a world where wealth is equalized because that's a world that punishes those who contribute more.
Right, but the example you gave was the coffee.
Right.
Right, like, you know, and that's a pretty classic example, like, oh, you know, that $5, you know, every day that you get a cappuccino, you could be sending it somewhere.
That's not... No, no, there's no good mechanism, but there is a...
Luxury.
The reason I say coffee is that it's luxury, right?
It's not how I'm choosing to ingest my calories.
It's calories I don't need.
It's not calories.
It's an exotic, you know, it's an exotic seed that's been carefully roasted so that I would get a A little kick and a nice flavor and yada yada.
It's a luxury.
And the idea that I will spend on a luxury when there are people who don't have the basics for life suggests an indifference, which I'm not arguing there's any way around.
It's not that I want to see us equal, it's that I don't want anybody to be faced with, you know, if there is a child who has had no say in their own economic standing, who literally does not have enough to eat, or who lives in terror of this, that, or the other,
Right the point is that is I could become obsessed with every such case it would eat every minute of every day And there's nothing else I could do right it would be a full-time job So I'm choosing to live and you would still not make a difference of course But what I'm saying I might I could make an individual difference, but I can't make a scale right so my point is
Being a human being involves, and I understand why you're bridling at it, but it involves something that is a de facto indifference to intolerable human predicaments everywhere at all times.
So I guess, um...
I think you do know part of why I'm bridling at this, but many in our audience won't.
Because you and I have spent a lot of time in various non-First World countries in the developing world, and we have also spent some of that time with other First Worlders, and have commented in writing to each other that we are often shocked
at how Americans and Europeans treat the locals.
You could say one thing that people just in the US talk about, it's like, oh, you can tell the character of a person by how they treat the waiter.
There's truth in that.
That's another human being who is doing a job, and if you don't regard that they're a human being, that tells me a lot about other things that you believe to be true about the world.
Same thing, when you travel, if you've chosen to go someplace, and the place where you've come from feels to you like, well that's where the people are, and here I am sort of doing my, this is like Disneyland to me, and these are like, you know, I don't know, these are props.
At worst, you're Instagram-selfie-ing your way through an exotic locale, because the real payoff for you is back home with the people you care about and what they think of you.
Right.
I'm here in part because I have a fundamental interest in humans and their stories.
And a fundamental interest in humans and their stories, and therefore to some degree their well-being, does not mean, and this is the disconnect where we're just struggling, I think it's just really semantic.
Like, I don't like the word indifferent, but I see why you're using it.
I've been posting my first book, Antipode, chapter by chapter on natural selections for the last several weeks.
I talk about, for instance, the struggle that I had with Sulu, the vanilla farmer on the peninsula in northeastern Madagascar, who basically lives a cashless existence.
I bought A lot of vanilla from him for a tiny amount of money and still paid him way more than he asked for because what he asked for was so tiny I couldn't bear it.
And he asked me upon leaving, having seen me show up with my tent and my field notebooks and my hiking boots, he said, when you come back, could you bring me a pair of hiking boots?
No.
He asked for a rain jacket.
I separately was asked for hiking boots by someone else, but he asked for a rain jacket.
And my first response was, oh god, like I can't get into this kind of a transactional relationship because obviously I was, you know, I was a grad student at the time making $13,000 a year in the 90s, right?
But I had inconceivable wealth to Sulo and to pretty much everyone I was interacting with in Madagascar, and there's no way that I could get into a relationship with any of them where I could give them what they could see was valuable.
And he was a good man and he wasn't asking for everything.
Once you did it once it was going to open the floodgates because it was going to be, everybody was going to see the rain jacket.
Where did that come from?
Heather gave it to me.
Oh, and then the point is it would, it would be destructive of your ability to interact as a person rather than as a cornucopia.
Now, in this case, I did.
We did, actually, together, right?
I wrote to the maker, it was Helly Hansen, and sent a picture that you had taken of Sulu, and I think maybe also of me in the field with my Helly Hansen jacket or something, with Sulu, and said, you know, here's the situation.
And they sent us one for him.
And we took it back, or I took it back to him the next time I was there.
Um, and in that case, I was in this really remote field station.
Not a field station.
I was in this really remote spot.
So he was the only one who saw my really Hilly Hansen's generosity, right?
And so it didn't start a cascade of events.
But if it had been when I was on my usual field site of Nosy Mangabey and I was going back and forth to the town of Marnsetra every two and a half weeks to resupply myself with rice, word would spread.
And then, ah, you know, next time, you know, get in line, let's see what can be asked for.
And it's not because they're greedy, and it's not because I'm, you know, mean-spirited, mean-hearted.
This won't work.
This is not sustainable.
Right.
So, you know, the idea that, you know, that analysis on my part indicates my indifference.
No, it's not indifference.
It's just an impossibility.
It's an impossibility given the different economies in which we live.
Yeah.
I get it.
I don't think, I don't think I'm wrong here.
I think, you know, we, my point is not, look how indifferent we are.
My point is there's no alternative system that could be described, right?
You cannot tap into the suffering of all people everywhere.
Even if in principle you take it on as a formal burden, if you calibrate how much suffering there is, it will overwhelm you instantly.
Yeah.
Right.
So the point is it is, it is better To have a world in which you have the shield that allows you to buy that cup of coffee than to have one in which you are obsessed with all of the suffering you can do nothing about.
Right?
So I'm not arguing that there's an alternative way.
I'm just saying it exists in us and once you accept that even a normal caring sympathetic person carries the capacity
Okay, I think we're trying to solve different problems than you and I. And I am concerned that you're creating a problem with your use of the word, which is that the majority of, say, Americans or, you know, Western people, Europeans travel more, but mostly, you know, within the European continent, who haven't been to the kinds of places
We're talking about, or at least haven't spent a lot of time there, will hear, I think, it will be easier to hear what you're saying and say, well, yeah, I'm indifferent.
I don't care about those people anyway.
Like, it creates the possibility for conflation into one category of Two things that I think are actually so different, so importantly different with regard to, you know, why is it that I have been saying for decades, really, like the way out of your own head, your own biases, your own ridiculousnesses that we see on, you know, full display in in wokeness and DEI and the kind of
Absurd protests that became riots that were, you know, characterized the summer and fall of 2020 is to travel, really travel, get outside of the place that you know, the culture that you know.
Best if you can do it alone, best if it can be in a language you don't know.
And yes, there are risks.
And the risks are different and greater in some ways if you're a woman, especially a young woman.
But, you know, you can do this.
And then you will know a lot more about what you have and what you don't and who you are and who you're not.
And you may find out some things about yourself that you don't like, but you can change those things.
If you discover that you really don't Care about the people with whom you have come to be sharing a space because you've landed yourself in... wherever it is.
Ask yourself what that is.
Like, A, you shouldn't be there.
If you've landed in someone else's home, effectively, and you don't have any respect for any of them, you should leave.
Right?
You shouldn't be there, but you should also ask yourself, what is it about these people that I find unhuman?
Like unpeople-like?
And that's different from, oh my God, you know, these people are fascinating and I want to talk with them and I want to break bread with them and understand their culture and I'm not going to bring them up to the standard of living that I left behind because that's not a possibility.
Well, two parts.
One, Travel is not enough because it's hard.
It's a skill.
And yeah.
First world people, especially Americans, don't have a lot of time.
They don't know how to get into the place that they want to go.
So they may see somewhere on the map.
They may have heard of it.
They may have seen a little documentary and think, oh, I'd like to see that place.
And then what do they face?
They face a sea of people who want to sell them the experience, which has been carefully orchestrated so that they don't have the encounter.
That allows them to see into somebody else's humanity.
Because no one wants to waste half of their two-week paid vacation dealing with replacing their passport because they got robbed.
Right, or just the simple fact that, you know, I mean I used to say about Madagascar, if you want to spend a month in Madagascar, budget two.
Because Madagascar just wastes your time, right?
So the point is most people don't have that.
And so what they want is, can you show me Madagascar?
I want to see some lemurs.
I want to see some people living as Malagasy people do.
And they don't really get to see anything.
They certainly don't get to interact with it in a way that it's something other than a living postcard.
Yes, that is true.
So there's that.
But the other thing is, I do think that there is something philosophically profound about the experience of finding a way to experience interaction with people, often across a language barrier, so that they do become very real to you.
And then, you know, that part is wonderful.
The fact that you and I can mention Sulu and do with some regularity, though, when's the last time you saw him more recently than I did?
How many decades ago?
Yeah, it would have been 96.
96, so a good long time ago.
There's still a person, I mean as far as I know, Sulo is still alive.
We wouldn't necessarily know that he wasn't.
I don't know how we would know.
I don't know how we would know.
But anyway, he is a real person to us.
We know him by name.
He is important, right?
In some significant way.
If we heard that he died or something bad had befallen him, it would matter.
But then you say, okay, I met this guy, right?
Through happenstance.
He is real to me.
There are Billions of other real people that I will never meet and will never be real to me in that way.
True.
And maybe some of them are not worthy.
A lot of them are.
And I am formally indifferent to most of them because I don't even have a name.
Right, right, right, right.
So anyway, that is philosophically Not tiny that's a that's a significant realization that you had happenstance allowed you to find someone sympathetic and significant in one place and The most all of the the huge majority of people who could be in that category never will for you and The you know, that's the paradox of being a member.
Oh, here you go You'd show my screen yeah Here's Sulo.
With his baby daughter.
Yeah, with his baby daughter.
And you should know, just as long as we're on the topic of Sulo, that Sulo is a name given to a child, I think always a male child.
I think so.
When a previous child has been lost, has died.
Yeah.
So the firstborn after a lost child.
Right.
And you can see, you can actually, you can get a sense for what kind of guy he was and presumably still is in this picture, that infectious smile.
He was a very gentle, lovely guy.
Yeah.
But, you know.
Who hated the smell of vanilla.
Who hated the smell of vanilla.
It was purely economic for him because they get overwhelmed by it.
They have to pollinate the stuff by hand.
In Madagascar, the pollinator doesn't exist there.
Vanilla is native to Mexico, so the bee that pollinates vanilla orchids only lives in Mexico, even though most of the world's vanilla is now produced in Madagascar and also Indonesia.
Yeah.
But how strange.
I mean, it's a perfectly wonderful example of, you know, other cultures aren't just like slightly different than yours.
The idea that your identity going through life is, oh, I was born after a lost child.
Yes.
And that that comes to shape who you are, because everybody who meets you knows that instantly.
Like, we just don't have an analog for that.
No, we don't.
You know, it's pretty, pretty different.
And I wonder how much, you know, He might have been the same guy had he not been a Sulu.
Right.
But who knows how much that affected his demeanor and his gentle way.
Right.
You know, grieving parents essentially is written into his first name.
Alright.
I don't remember how we ended up all there.
Let me do just one more thing before we segue.
I mean, what we've been doing has been interspersed with sort of a setup for what you want to do, I think.
But Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in January of 1776.
And of course, the Declaration of Independence of what has become the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America.
Published July 4th, 1776, and here is the part of the second paragraph.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, convinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
So beautifully written.
Yeah.
So beautifully written.
And so, uh, the, the elegance of the thought process is so clear, right?
The, you know, those words so far don't really age.
Yeah.
The occasional half, but that's it.
You know, there's a little half, but not half as much as there might have been.
Yeah, it's really, really beautiful stuff.
And, you know, I know I said at the top of the podcast that I thought this might be the most important Fourth of July ever.
And I think there's a strong argument to be made for it because I think the peril the Republic is in and the The murkiness of the moment is... I can't... I can't see... I mean, let's put it this way.
I think the Republic is actually in danger of either failing or becoming something new and more robust.
And we are...
We are months, not years from discovering which path we will take.
So Zach has something to say.
Do you remember that we had a civil war?
Yeah.
I do remember that we had a civil war.
Um, but let's put it this way.
I mean, it's, it's a fair point.
It's a fair point, but let's put it this way.
The civil war took place in a non nuclear era and it took place in an era of human scale technologies.
So, So this may be your claim that this may be the most important one yet may be in the same vein as I think it was at the point that Trump had been elected but had not yet taken office.
You said something to the effect of, he's likely to be the worst president ever only because that seems to be the trend lately.
Every new president has been the worst president ever for several presidencies now.
For quite a number of presidents.
I don't remember saying that he is liable to be the worst president ever.
I raised it as a question.
Because you found having, I think, enthusiastically voted for Obama once.
Yep, once.
That you came to understand him as the worst president ever, having followed on the heels of Bush to the worst president ever, having followed on the heels of Clinton, the worst president ever.
Yeah, and I can make the case.
It's not a visceral feeling of dislike.
As a matter of fact, what I keep saying about Obama is that actually I'm drawn to what he says.
I don't trust him anymore.
But, you know, as he presents, I like listening to him.
I think he has a real gift for oratory.
He's highly intelligent.
He's my kind of guy on paper.
You know, actually, this is far afield, but I like listening to him, too.
I mean, still, even though I don't trust him anymore, either.
But that strikes me as just the blue side of the very thing that Team Blue, including, I mean, I don't think I ever said it, but I remember sort of like laughing along with, at the point that we were being told that Bush, too, was elected because people just really wanted to have a beer with him.
Like, oh, come on, you can't vote for a guy because of that.
It's like, at some level, Obama appealed to a different half of the country for kind of similar reasons.
Oh, he just seems like a guy I'd really like to hang out with.
Well, no, no.
You know, it's more than that, but there is something... There's a component of it, but I never...
I never dismissed W on that basis.
I think it's not, it's not a reason to vote for somebody.
And the fact that I, you know, the fact that I still, even after his, you know, second term.
This isn't about you.
I'm talking about the way that this was framed, that half the country sort of Ish.
Dismissed W on the basis that he just seemed like, that apparently he seemed like a down-home guy who people wanted to have a beer with.
And frankly, a lot of people embraced Obama because he seemed like this, you know, this coastal, you know, intellectual who people would like to have a cocktail with.
Yeah, but I think the comparison is a false one.
There's the piece that you're talking about, which is true, but it's not why I'm motivated to say it, right?
There are lots of people who I would be interested to have a drink with and a conversation with who I wouldn't want in office.
I should hope so.
The guy that Obama presents as, I think would be wonderful to have in office.
And what I don't understand is why the policy under the Obama administration was so terrifyingly awful.
And it's basically, it speaks to a facade.
Yeah, Potemkin Presidency.
Yeah, Potemkin Presidency.
And I can very easily make the argument for Clinton, for Bush, for Obama, and now for... His name's Biden.
For Biden that they were the worst You were just channeling Biden there for a moment.
I was trying to remember why I was skipping a president, and the answer is that I think, as much as there was negative stuff under Trump, Trump broke the cycle.
He was not the worst president in history, which is not about the people.
In Trump's case, it may be that he was not.
What do you mean it's not about the people?
What does that mean?
Something has seized power.
You mean the presidents?
It's not about the people who were the presidents?
Yes, it's not about the face.
It's not about the facade.
It's about the thing that is steering us.
Whatever it is, right?
And I would say, you know, Deep State is a placeholder for what it is.
And I'm going to take this opportunity Important distinction comes up.
I've discussed before the fact that deep state means two different things, the way that people use the term, and that we really have to separate these things if we're to even have a national conversation about what it is, whether it exists, what its meaning is, all of that.
Some people who say deep state are talking about a sophisticated, organized cabal That holds power despite being unelected and in large measure unknown.
We can't haul it in front of Congress because it's a mystery.
The other thing people mean, and it was actually part of, I think, a rebranding campaign.
Deep State attempted to rebrand the term so that people would not be so troubled by it, and they attempted to rebrand it as the vast sea of bureaucrats.
The continuous state.
The continuous state.
Right, exactly.
So I want to call the Deep State as the Hypothesis that there is an architecture that operates below our system that accounts for the way it behaves rather than the way it looks.
And I want to call the other thing the shallow state, right?
It doesn't mean, if you imagine that this is a question of volume, the shallow state has a fair amount of power because it is a lot of area, but it is not deep.
So anyway, I don't know.
I think that works in contrast to deep, although I actually think continuous state better evokes what it actually is.
Okay.
Shallow state is clever, but I agree that the continuous state is more evocative of the thing.
So it calls it into mind.
Properly, but either way the idea that there's an important distinction to be drawn and when somebody says deep state You really need to know which of these things they're talking about and you have to know whether they have understood that there's a distinction Right, it's possible to disbelieve that there's a deep state.
I think it's pretty far-fetched argument at this point, but It's possible to disbelieve it exists the continuous shallow state it clearly exists, right?
and anyway that That's more or less we are.
How do we get here?
We took a step from Thomas Paine, the Declaration of Independence.
We were talking about whether or not this is in fact the most significant Fourth of July, and I take the challenge that the Civil War is obviously a challenge.
Now, the Civil War could have destroyed the nation, in a sense, by dividing it.
That still is not in some sense, you know, it's the end of one thing.
But does the do the values spelled out in the Constitution continue to govern a people?
Yes, it I believe would have.
Speciation events tend to live one species relatively unchanged if smaller.
Yeah.
Now, in this case, what we face is arguably an existential threat to humanity, and I can make that case too.
Why is the United States important to the continued existence of humans on the planet?
And it really has to do with the argument I've made many times about the fact that the West was the West, the modern West, which I do not take to be a geographic description.
I do not take it to be a list of countries.
The West is an agreement to level the playing field as well as possible.
It will never be perfectly level, but to level it so that people don't, the game is not, hey, I'm going to rig the system on behalf of my people.
And if you get power, then you can rig the system on behalf of your people.
It's an agreement not to do that.
It's an agreement to create a level playing field where people can all access the market and attempt to profit by playing by the rules.
And absent that, I believe you will have a short ride to the destruction of humanity based on the power of our weaponry and other tools and the implausibility that any system that did not level the playing field could leave us in any stable relationship with each other.
In other words, you will have people using the most powerful tools At their disposal to upend their enemies to eliminate them and what that will look like is an escalation You know, I forgot who said it first but a war of all against all kind of scenario.
So we're depending on an outbreak of Western values to cause us to recognize the peril that we are in fact all collectively in and to stop Attempting to rig the world on behalf of our people or whoever our people are, right?
Whether our people is a description of a biological population or a description of an economic elite that wishes to be immune from the law, any of those things.
All right.
That argument is what it is.
People can take it for what it's worth.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the extraordinary events that seem to be unfolding and... In the wake of the debate.
Is that what you're talking about?
The debate, well, it was sort of on simmer and then the debate spilled it out into the open after turning it to a boil.
And what I think, some things that I will just say are true are...
I don't know anybody, and I'm involved in a lot of conversations, I don't know anybody who feels they have a good grasp on what is going on.
Everybody is playing with, you know, well it could be X or it could be Y, and X and Y are in totally different universes.
Right.
So just to take the most obvious example here, Biden Everyone seems to have accepted, aside from a tiny number of holdouts, had a absolutely disastrous debate showing.
Now to some of us, a disastrous debate showing was completely predictable.
It's not his worst work.
Yeah, it was exactly what you would expect if you put a date on the map that said you're going to stand at one podium and Trump is going to stand at another podium and there's not going to be a script.
And it's going to be in the evening.
Right, it's going to be in the evening and, you know, there was no conceivable way that Joe Biden was going to be prepared well enough that he was going to hold his own for two hours against Donald Trump without a script and a teleprompter and whatever drug cocktail they used to get him to fire on all cylinders.
I know this is not where you're going, but honestly, I was, I watched it two days later and unfortunately had not avoided a bunch of the talk.
I was surprised at how well he did.
Yeah.
I mean, he's not, he shouldn't be the president, but I was surprised at how well he did.
So this is, this is exactly the thing I want to focus on.
Right.
It was not newsworthy.
No.
It was exactly what you would expect to happen.
You know, I threw a stone in the pond and it sank to the very bottom.
Right?
It didn't hover?
Yeah.
Right?
It's like... We were told that stones can hover.
Stone sank right to the bottom of the pond.
Yes, it did.
Right.
Okay, so here's the question.
The thing that the sophisticated, smart, ordinarily, totally ahead of everybody sort of folks, nobody knows.
This seems to have been like a setup, right?
Anybody who was paying attention, the people who were in charge of Readying Biden for public appearances knew that they didn't have the tools to manage this one.
So at some level, this looks like a setup, right?
That seems to be essentially agreed by all the people I would trust to do any thinking on this matter.
But what isn't clear is whether everybody.
Whether this was a pivot that everybody was in on, except maybe the Bidens themselves.
But even then, how do you how do you get The Biden's themselves to agree that Joe should end up on a stage.
They know he can't manage.
How did that happen?
But okay, so it could be that it was understood that this would happen and that this was necessary and I can make an argument for why The blue cabal behind the scenes, whoever the hell they are, would have wanted to make this pivot.
It's a strange story, but we're in a strange era.
On the other hand, it could be that there is a rift.
In the land of blue, elite rent seekers, and that there were those who wished to shoo Joe Biden out of the race, it looks like.
And I'm annoyed as hell that what we're talking about is the race rather than, hey, this guy is not competent to be president.
And it's dangerous, right?
Yes.
Not immediately.
Not in January.
It's not about the race.
In fact, I know I'm going to regret saying this out loud, but If he's not going to step down, I believe it is absolutely urgent and required by his oath to the Constitution that he step down.
And if he will not step down, it is the requirement of those with the power to force him to step down to do so.
I believe that wholeheartedly, without reservation.
But if he's not going to step down, I don't think it's obvious that he should leave the race.
In fact, it might be better that he stays in because the point is whoever it is that thinks this is a tolerable condition to have an incompetent president in the nuclear codes of the place the mind Obviously goes, but to the extent that these people think that this is a perfectly fine thing to have left in place for all of these years, right, then they deserve the embarrassment that comes from this.
Maybe this will humiliate Uh, them by revealing what they're up to, to the public.
So, you know, the focus on stepping out of the race I think is, is an incorrect focus.
Now, as of, I don't know, today, it looks like Biden is saying he's staying in.
That's been sort of the, the tenor of the conversation for a couple of days now.
Oh, he's staying in, he's the candidate.
And so is that because there are two factions battling and they're actually going to run him?
In which case, if they're actually going to run him, Is that because they're intending to lose?
Right?
So anyway, the point is, this is the worst instance I've ever seen of the fog of political war, where just even establishing the basics, is the blue cabal all on board with the same plan, and we're all experiencing the theater that goes along with that plan, and the press is fumbling, trying to understand the new narrative pivot that they've been handed, right?
Or...
Is there a rift and we're watching a battle between two factions or maybe more than two factions?
And if so, what are they and what are they trying to accomplish?
How are they trying to get where they're going and how does Joe Biden fit into it?
It's increasingly implausible that he's going to win an election.
So, looking at all of this, I wanted to revisit the 2020 election and note How the battles that we were engaged in in 2020 look in the context of what everybody now knows in 2024, right?
We all now know that the president is cognitively compromised.
Only the tiniest number of people will say otherwise.
Okay, we are also now in a proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear brinksmanship that is under whose command?
I mean, we've got a commander-in-chief who can't command, you know, his own way off the stage, right?
Somebody is behaving as commander-in-chief.
We don't know who or what it is.
We don't know how it makes decisions We don't know what the plan is if you know, there's a call that has to be made on a nuclear scale or anything similar That's very terrifying.
We've got you know we've got the situation in Ukraine which does it which is against a nuclear foe and Anyway, I thought it put the 2020 election in a context.
I wanted to show the tweet.
I Think I got it Written in four paragraphs here.
So Zach's going to put it up on the screen and I will attempt to read it.
Can you make it a little bigger?
Okay.
Four years ago, we were slandered for wanting to discuss Hunter's laptop.
We were told it was a Russian trick, that Hunter's amoral behavior and apparent corruption had nothing to do with Joe, and that his dealings in Ukraine were irrelevant to the election.
And we were scolded for noticing that Joe was a shadow of his former self.
Now we find ourselves mysteriously escalating an unwinnable war in Ukraine against a foe with nuclear weapons, at the direction of a commander-in-chief who is clearly not in command of his faculties.
And the New York Times is calmly reporting that Hunter, who has obviously enriched himself peddling Joe's influence, though the Times doesn't mention that part, wants Joe to hold on to power despite the obvious danger to the nation and the world.
You would think that at this shocking moment it would dawn on the folks at the New York Times that they obstructed the most significant story of all in 2020.
and that their cynical political game put every man, woman, and child on earth at risk.
But it won't happen, of course, because these people have no shame.
We must now rescue ourselves from the international nightmare they have set in motion in our name.
Now, what I was trying to say here was that for those of you who attempted to raise the obvious point about Biden's mental decrepitude, which was quite clear in 2020, it was not nearly which was quite clear in 2020, it was not nearly as progressed as it is now, but it was clear enough that it was a problem.
And anybody who knows anything about dementia in the elderly knew it was going to get worse and not better.
And it wasn't it might not be a slow progression.
Okay.
Okay, so in 2020 we were not supposed to talk about that, right?
We were told that that was some kind of right-wing conspiracy theory and that he was just fine and that everybody around him knew it.
We were told that the laptop was a Russian trick, right?
We had intelligence officials, was it 51 of them, swearing that this was Russian disinformation.
And therefore, people felt empowered to silence discussion of it.
The Washington Post was thrown off Twitter for wanting to write about this story.
The Washington Post?
No, not the Washington Post.
Why did I say the New York Post?
Yeah.
Sorry.
They didn't want to write about this story.
No.
Democracy dies in darkness, right?
Yeah, that it does.
And nobody can hear it scream.
And then you've got this question, and you know, I hate to pick on Sam, but if you go to Sam's recent discussions, Sam Harris, if you go to his recent discussions with Tom Bilyeu, you know, you'll hear him talking about the laptop and its irrelevance and the comparison of the corruption that the laptop reveals compared to, you know, Trump University and all this.
And it's like a time capsule, right?
But it's now.
Yeah, it's like there was no update, right?
Now what we know is that A, although it is hard to say exactly what the relationship of Biden family corruption in Ukraine before 2020 and the war in Ukraine presently is, the Biden family has stakes in Ukraine.
And these stakes are not Hunter Biden stakes.
These have to do with the clear, if not perfectly explicit, peddling of Joe Biden's influence as VP by Hunter.
So not a separate issue.
So all I'm getting at is The New York Times participated in an effort to silence a story about Biden family corruption, about Ukraine, about Hunter and Joe, about the laptop which is Absolutely real.
The FBI has told us that.
So that story now holds all of our fate in the balance.
We are now involved in what happens when you don't report that story in a timely way, right?
The New York Times, which is, this is going to shock a lot of people, the New York Times, which is a newspaper No, it's not.
It is a newspaper.
That's the history.
Look it up.
That's where I do my wordle.
That's its highest and best use at this point.
It is its highest.
That and birdcages.
But the newspaper, the New York Times, not only didn't report, but participated in blocking this story by portraying it as a right-wing conspiracy theory.
And it is the most important story from 2020, not a side light or a distraction from the election.
It was the central question.
And we are now living the nightmare that happens when you don't report it in real time.
So I'm realizing that it's like, you will forgive the chicken scrawl, but it's like... You're about to show your own chicken scrawl?
I am going to.
Wow.
It's gotten serious.
It's gotten that serious.
That says the news equals the New York Times to the negative one.
Okay?
The news is the inverse of the New York Times.
That's an extraordinary thing to be true.
Right?
That's not monkeys at a typewriter.
Right?
That's highly intelligent people writing the inverse of the news.
Okay?
Where have we seen this pattern before?
Well, we can do it with this one.
Do we need to hire a sign guy?
We need a signage guy.
Yeah.
And a sticker guy who knows what damn adhesive to put on each sticker so that you don't spend hours trying to scrape the thing off.
I don't think that's a business expense.
All right.
I think that says health equals the Center for Disease Control raised to the negative one.
Right?
Yep.
How many times are we going to see the pattern where the thing that is supposed to do the job is not doing a terrible job, which could look at worst like a random job.
It is doing the inverse of the job.
The New York Times, what does it do?
It obscures the news.
Yes.
Right?
That is an amazing fact of history.
And that is in some sense why we are in such peril, because you've got a large fraction of the population that is looking at the cave wall, regarding it as if it were informative, when in fact it is being used to convince them of a world that they do not live in.
And they are therefore acting in ways that are imperiling all of us, because it's very hard To look at the New York Times and not understand it looks like the news.
It is the inverse of the news, right?
It's very hard, even for us.
You look at the web page and it feels like a newspaper because of our history with it.
Right.
I can't.
Find it now.
But one of the paragraphs that I read from Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine in 1776, prompted me to say exactly this about our trust in institutions, right?
That these institutions that Have or have not doesn't matter now, right, for this.
But have or have not been doing the work that they claim to do.
That is, what was in the package was the same as what the package said on the outside to use your framing.
Although I did that less well than you do.
They either did do that in the past or they convinced everyone they did that in the past.
Such that now you have all these people looking at these packages that say on the outside, news and health.
And there are a lot of us saying, that's not the news and that's not going to keep you healthy or make you healthy.
It's the exact opposite.
And the talking heads like, you know, Sam Harris, whom you just mentioned, Are going like, what are you crazy?
If you get rid of the news, we won't have news.
And if you get rid of the health, we won't have health.
To which we say, it's not the thing you think it is.
It may have been, or it may not have been.
That actually is immaterial for this argument, but it's definitely not now.
The New York Times is not bringing you the news.
The CDC is not bringing you health.
Therefore, the idea that we need something different is not a radical proposition.
It is the only proposition.
I think you've got it exactly right.
This is that case over and over and over again.
And I mean, I don't know if we were to just riff on it, how many examples of this we would find.
But if you think about the way Anthony Fauci was portrayed during the pandemic, right?
Anthony Fauci literally in a said the quiet part out loud, or maybe it's not exactly that, but
Claimed to be the science as if the science was an oracle right right and the funny thing is that both science and medicine actually function by well science has a formal method but that formal method is deployed by people who have an informal method in which those with predictive power argue you know people compare predictive power and over time
They discover what is actually true, wielding the scientific method and then hashing it out in a ground-up debate.
The idea that science ever came handed down from on high, I mean, in an emergency?
How exactly would the people who were handing it down from on high have any way of having gotten there?
They would have had to have had a process, a process that involved a huge number of people capable of raising objections about all of the things that were being said, so it was preposterous on its face.
So, you know, Yes, I mean, you could write the same thing, Fauci equals science to the negative one, but also anyone, me, equals science to the negative one.
Like any human being cannot be science.
That's not what science is.
Yeah.
Well, I'm wondering if it's science is Fauci to the negative one, right?
It's the opposite of that method.
Science is inherently an organic process.
I mean, of course, rather than an aura.
Mathematically, it means the same thing.
But I get that.
Yeah, I think it metaphorically, if you will, makes more sense in that in that direction.
Yeah.
And, you know, actually, we're just riffing here.
So it may be that, you know, five minutes after we're done, it's going to dawn on me why this is an insane thing to say.
But As it was deployed, medicine equals public health to the negative one.
Yes.
That public health became an excuse for all kinds of anti-medical things, right?
You are supposed to be able to walk into your doctor with a pathology that your doctor does not know anything about.
And your doctor is supposed to be able to attempt to do something about it.
He's supposed to say, I don't know what you've got.
However, it might respond to an antibiotic, right?
And then you can try it.
And if it doesn't respond to an antibiotic, you can switch to a steroid or vitamin C or whatever, whatever it may be.
And that doctor can talk to other doctors who may be seeing the same pathology and say, what do you think it is?
I think it's an infectious agent.
I think it's a environmental exposure.
That conversation is an organic, from-the-ground-up medical process that results in the discovery of both the nature of disease and the useful mechanisms of addressing it.
And what we got was, there shall be no medicine.
Why?
Because public health.
And unfortunately, I have now many friends in public health.
They don't understand that their discipline has been hijacked and is being used as a disguise for something that is not interested in making people healthier or safer for whatever reason.
Um, yes.
Yeah.
All right.
So I, and I, and I actually, I like your point about, um, Sam and his attachment to institutions.
The thing about institutions is we do need them.
Nobody is arguing otherwise.
We have not ever argued otherwise.
It is not anything short of a five alarm emergency that our institutions are failing us.
That is a desperate situation.
It doesn't make them more trustworthy than they are.
And to the extent that something has gotten into them and is using them Not only for its own purposes, but for the exact inversion of the purpose for which they were built, that couldn't be a higher priority.
Well, I mean, we've spent a lot of time talking about this in the early days of the podcast, but it's so easy to get gamed if your position is, I believe in X. Oh, cool.
Anything we call X you believe in?
Why, yes, because I believe in X. Okay.
We're going to call this a vaccine.
Well, then it's good.
Give me some.
What about if it's not a vaccine?
Well, you said it was a vaccine.
Therefore, it's a vaccine.
Therefore, it's good.
Therefore, anyone who doesn't want it is a bad person and should be, you know, dispatched with.
You can do this with anything.
If you have a position that is immovable and certain, and simply says, X is a good thing, then expect others, for whatever reason, to show up having labeled things that are good for them and not for you, X. Because you have already told them what your game plan is.
Your game plan is, I'm really bad at this, and I'm just going to accept it as long as you call it X.
It's really obvious.
Yes, which brings us to a point I was about to forget.
Which is, for a lot of people, They have now been through several rounds of feeling very, very certain of something and frankly demonizing people who disagreed with them because they thought you would have to be broken in some serious way to have another point of view.
To believe that Joe Biden was not mentally intact was a moral failure.
Right?
To believe that Hunter Biden's laptop was real was a moral failure.
Then when it became obvious it was real, to believe that it had anything to do with Joe Biden was a moral failure.
To believe that not all vaccines are safe is a moral failure.
To believe that the COVID vaccines are actually killing lots of people, moral failure.
To believe that they don't work, moral failure.
Right?
Yes.
So if you have been somebody who has been Induced to experience confidence in these positions on topics you probably are not expert in enough that you went and you Denigrated people who saw it differently and now you are finding out that the things that you were so certain of are We're dead wrong, right?
A lot of us saw this debate debacle coming.
We knew what Joe Biden's mental condition was, roughly.
There was no way he was going to do well in a debate with Donald Trump without a teleprompter and a script.
Sorry, not going to happen.
Not in the evening, as you point out.
And if it was a 20 minute thing.
There are conditions, but it wouldn't have passed as a debate.
Yeah, it wasn't going, the debate as structured was not going to work, right?
If you didn't see that coming, it's because you've been looking at the cave wall.
And if you've now had this experience, if you, if there are places where you were very certain of something and it involved, you know, Business and energy in Ukraine, right?
And it also, on a separate topic, involved novel vaccine technologies and adverse events, right?
If you've been dead wrong on those two topics and you've been demonizing people who disagreed with you and then they turned out to be right, what you need to say is, all right, There is a corruption in my mechanism for figuring out what I believe is true.
It should never be the case that you have demonized somebody over something where you are wrong, because you should never demonize anybody where there's any room to be wrong, right?
It wouldn't make sense to do so.
So the point is you didn't have room to be wrong somewhere that you actually were wrong.
You're doing something incorrectly, and I'll tell you what it is.
You're listening to other people who are claiming to be authorities, who for whatever reason have a negative, they are raised to the negative one with respect to the job that they're supposed to be doing.
And the natural thing, if you want to become smarter over time, which is the normal way that a human being should function, Then you should take any source of information or confidence that keeps steering you into awkwardness where you now have to recognize that people that you demonized were right.
Right?
If that's what keeps happening to you, then the point is anything that led you in that direction is not a source of information.
Right, whatever it's doing, not a source of information and you should not allow it to steer your instincts one bit.
And you might consider it is possible that there were in fact there were lots of people who were on various topics right for the wrong reasons.
It is not conceivable that you would be right for the wrong reasons across topic after topic, but on any given topic there are bound to be people who got it right for the wrong reasons.
But you might start looking at people who got things right that you were sure were wrong, who are now in a position to point out the pattern.
When you do that, you will get smarter because you will discover the New York Times is not a newspaper, right?
It's an inverse newspaper.
The CDC is not a source of health information.
It's a source of sickness information, right?
So anyway, that's kind of the long and short of it, I think, is we're living in a bad moment.
It is a moment at which we need institutions our government is thoroughly compromised and and I guess my my final point would be on July 4th tomorrow as you are considering the meaning of the moment realize that good people We all have the same jeopardy.
We have the same enemy, even if we don't know its name or its address.
We have to confront the thing that has taken over our system and ruined institution after institution if we are to survive as a republic and maybe if we are to survive as a species.
So what that means is that your ideological differences mean nothing.
They're going to be washed over by history.
Whatever happens is either going to be some sort of a rebirth in which we rediscover the values on which the Republic was founded, and maybe we fix the mechanisms by which they are deployed and protected.
Or we're gonna fail to do that and we are going to suffer some arbitrarily terrible fate and that ought to unite us together because you know what difference does it make whether you see yourself as a liberal or conservative there's there's common sense and there's everything else.
Excellent.
Speaking of everything else.
Yes.
One last story.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know how to set this up.
It's been a while since we've talked about trans activism here on Dark Horse, and I haven't really missed the topic.
But now that Pride Month is over, I have seen some new
I've seen this story that just showed up in my feed yesterday, but I want to start by saying that, as I've written about and talked about extensively, and we have talked about as well, trans activism is often a regressive, frankly misogynistic, set of tropes about what it means to be female, which involve being hyper-sexualized, submissive, helpless, and weak, right?
And this is a Not a step, just a pivot backwards from where we were going when we were growing up in the 70s, 80s.
And we're young adults in the 90s.
The doors were wide open for women to choose to do whatever kind of work they wanted.
And, at least in the circles that I was traveling in, it was understood that men and women on average would not be making the same choices and would not be equally good at the same tasks on average.
This was how I understood feminism.
um enter into the post-modernist nut space that we now have that is this trans-embracing world um we have actually i'm gonna here's i'm gonna start with i'm gonna start with the screenshots i'm just gonna um I'm going to show you three pictures.
Okay, we have this.
And these women are actually awesome.
These are actual women.
These are not trans people.
But what the fuck are they doing?
Okay, so what is going on here is, well actually, give me my screen back and actually you guys can be done looking at these pictures of these poor confused women, honestly.
Because while those three particular women who are rugby players for the British rugby team and will be going to the Olympics in Paris this summer, Did make a choice to be in that photo shoot.
That is not... I don't want to... That's one interpretation.
No.
The Standard in the UK wrote this story.
Team GP Rugby stars back No, it's really hard to parse this headline.
Team GP rugby stars back body positivity campaign to stop girls dropping out of sport.
So those pictures, and I'm going to just clear my screen, I mean clear my screen here again.
These pictures Once again, are apparently part of a body positivity campaign to help women understand that strength can be beautiful and to help keep girls from dropping out of sport.
No.
Okay, so if I may have my screen again.
What is actually happening here, of course, as you might, well actually, what do you think is happening?
I think they were born in the wrong underwear.
Maybe that's it. - I agree.
Maybe we're done.
Maybe we're done.
That was the last segment.
Yeah, do you have any sense of what might be going on?
Well, I mean, I have, I mean, I do think that there are a couple things going on.
there is the breakdown of rationality reason um we've got sexual chaos and that sexual chaos is causing all sorts of people to to end up in uh at cross purposes with themselves in ways that aren't even obvious because it's been a a slow departure from any normalcy
um - Yeah.
I get the feeling I'm nowhere in the ballpark of what you're imagining.
You had a second thing.
The second thing, um, let's see, the second thing, well, I mean, look, there's, there is obviously a, um, there is obviously an insane world of, you know, how to become an influencer, how to,
Capitalize on whatever you bring to the table and we've seen a million weird attempts at this and so I can imagine a small number of rugby players decided to try something out to see whether or not it was going to be sensational.
Nope.
This is not them.
They didn't do this.
Somebody put them up to this?
They agreed.
No one coerced them to be in this photo shoot.
But that article suggests it's somehow Team GB.
And Team GB, Team Great Britain, has been like, uh-uh, no, not us.
And in the article, there's a quote, some 64% of secondary school girls drop out of all sport before the age of 16, according to Women in Sport, many due to insecurities about their bodies during puberty.
Women in Sport has come out since, this is an organization, has come out since this article came out, been like, not us, we do not, this is not our campaign, we are not in favor of what is going on there.
So the article in The Standard is suggestive that there are You know, pro-sport, pro-women in sport organizations that are behind this, and they're not.
They're not.
Okay, so who's behind it?
It's a lingerie company.
It's literally funded by a lingerie company, doing what companies do, which is trying to drum up business.
And so, they, here's their campaign.
Strong is Beautiful.
Well, I'm sorry.
This is ridiculous.
This is, they're just doing exactly what they do, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you can find it, but...
Those the pictures that I showed you are absurd.
They are for any for any girl or young woman who is actually interested in sport, who is paying attention to what is being displayed about women in sport, those pictures should send them running as opposed to encourage them to be in sport.
And so two awesome women have what I view as the correct takes on this story.
Megan Murphy said, "Feminism has officially failed." And Linda Blade posted this about the story, and I'm just gonna read her tweet here, and you can put my screen up if you like.
She says, so she's a former Olympian level athlete herself, and now she's a coach, and she and I met in Denver last fall.
She's awesome.
She says, this ill-fitting lingerie is not that much more revealing than what I see regularly as a person or coach who follows various sports.
Yes, it is sexist and weird to show female players in lace to sell women's sports to girls.
But yeah, no, that's not what's happening.
The rugby ad is about encouraging men to pay attention to female players in a lewd way.
My first thought as a coach, it's not functional.
It's not practical.
It looks like the first thing that will happen when they hit each other on the field is the entire thing will rip off and they will end up playing nude.
This is only about attracting the male gaze and in the meantime undermining female sports.
It's regressive and disrespectful.
Can you imagine male soccer stars being forced to play on that orange tie sport brief of beach volleyball?
She's got a picture there.
Men don't play in these clothes, and that tells you that it's the same sport.
It's not required to play in something like that if you're playing beach volleyball.
Strong women are attractive, Linda continues.
Athletic people, male or female, are even more attractive when the uniforms fit well and look durable.
Brands that sell best in sports find a way to achieve both functional and attractive.
Everything else is disgusting fluff.
Carry on.
So that's the right answer here, and I will just say one more thing.
Bluebella, which is the name of the lingerie company that has this insane ad campaign, has, you guessed it, a DEI win.
And they've added A and changed the order of the thing, so it's the Idea Committee.
Inclusivity, diversity, equality, and action.
Let me just point out three of their bullet points for their Idea Committee.
They want to never discriminate nor judge.
Really?
Because I'm not going to do it for our viewers, but you look through their site and they're discriminating and judging because all the women on their site are beautiful and they look really nice in the lingerie, right?
They're discriminating.
They want to create products that make everyone feel strong and beautiful.
Nope.
Nope.
For one thing, those Those images of the rugby players, they don't look strong in those things, nor do they even look beautiful.
They look ridiculous.
I'm sure those women could look beautiful in lingerie, and those women are definitely strong, but they look neither in those pictures.
I don't even remember what the other one was that I wanted to point out, but the whole list is In keeping with a DEI approach to the world, and they clearly have no idea what they have done.
And again, it's not about these three particular women who presumably want to become, you know, are going to be Olympians playing rugby, but also want to, you know, have some life outside of that, and so said yes to this photo shoot.
It was an unfortunate decision.
I wish they hadn't.
But that's not the point here.
The point is that anyone thinks that putting women who are athletes in lingerie on the field is a way to keep girls in sport?
Wrong.
All right, I want to connect this up to something which, since I didn't see this coming exactly, I didn't properly prepare for it.
Okay.
But you're aware of the Caitlin Clarke phenomenon?
I don't write an S&M.
Let's make sure I have it right.
Do you want to look up Caitlin Clark?
Yeah, so Caitlin Clark is an absolutely transcendent female basketball player who is drawing a tremendous amount of attention to the WNBA because she's that exciting a player to watch, right?
She's one of those, you know, Very rare athletes that just takes the sport to the next level.
And what is happening to her is fascinating and I think quite telling.
So I don't, this is the first time I've ever heard her name, given the context in which we're talking about it.
She's a woman?
Yes.
She's a natural born woman who's excellent at basketball.
WNBA is a failure, but Caitlin Clark is turning it into a success because people who would ordinarily not be watching women's basketball are interested to watch with her there.
Great.
Should be good for everybody in the league.
But she is facing insane pushback.
From?
Uh, teammates, everybody in the league, not everybody, but large numbers of people in the league.
What's the pushback?
What's the nature of the pushback?
Well, that's just the thing is the pushback.
So first of all, she is decidedly not political.
Right.
They keep asking her about her opinions on, you know, hot button issues.
And she's like, I play basketball and I want to talk about basketball.
Right.
Yep.
Um, that's exactly what she should do.
Yeah.
Right.
If she wants to talk about the stuff, fine, but yeah, don't be pushed into it.
Right.
And so what is happening?
I mean, first of all, she was just snubbed, even though she's obviously the best female basketball player available.
She was just sidelined.
So she's not on the Olympic team for no good reason.
So all I've heard is that she's not political.
Why is she?
Why don't people like her?
She's white.
She's Gaining too much attention when there are lots of other people in the WNBA who are deserving of attention who aren't getting it for a list of imagined reasons So anyway, I think you're I could tell by the look on your face.
You're beginning to see no I I would like to fact-check what you're telling.
Yes.
So I've never heard of this person before, I don't follow WNBA, I have no idea.
um i i would like to know for sure that she's transcendent that she's patently better by the stats and hopefully by other rubrics than anyone else playing now yeah uh and that she is being um treated differently than um her peers and add to that the fact that um if the first thing is true they're not even really her peers you know if those if those two things are true then then what is happening then what is happening is
women's basketball is at cross purposes with itself because there are two um competitions going on one is One of them is basketball, which is meritocratic, right?
Like all sport.
The whole idea, what is a game?
A game is something in which two entities, be they individuals or teams, Or several entities, as in a race, face the same disadvantage and they compete for supremacy.
Okay?
So that's what basketball is supposed to be, right?
Does it matter that, you know, Dick Fosbury looked ridiculous going over the high jump bar backwards?
No, because he could go over higher than everybody else.
Doesn't matter what he looked like going over the bar.
And in fact, everybody now goes over the bar backwards.
It's not supposed to be about anything except the height of the bar in high jumping.
So what's happening is you've got... I haven't... I don't know what the other game is that you think is being played.
You haven't said it yet.
Imagine for a second that the other game is something like attention.
And that one way to get attention is by playing basketball really well.
But that the actual point of the game for some fraction of the people who are playing it is attention.
And I'm not saying that this is brand new either.
Right, it has always been true, or for eons it has been true, that one can capitalize on their own transcendent athleticism by getting a sponsorship deal from a shoe company or a breakfast cereal company or whatever.
So there's always been a pollution of sport that comes from how you monetize your own talent.
Right, but you would expect All else being equal, you would expect team sports comprised of men and team sports comprised of women to understand differently the role that competition also plays within the team.
Right.
Male-male competition.
And as you know, I've written about this extensively.
Typically is fundamentally different from female-female competition.
And male competition, male-male competition tends to be explicit.
It tends to have known rules.
And because it's explicit and public, it tends to have an audience.
And therefore also, not only are there rules known, but people can see when cheating happens.
And female-female competition tends to be implicit and covert and denied often by the people who are engaging in it.
And that kind of competition has no place in sport, should have no place in sport.
And if you're in a sport, which is inherently about explicit competition, the female team should be playing by the male typical rules of competition.
Because it's a totally naive and shallow interpretation to say, we're on the same team, we all have equal interest.
No, you still don't.
You need to put the team first when you're playing, but you also are all individuals who are coming together, hopefully, to create something emergent and recognize that you also still have your own interests.
Um, there are certainly male violations of this.
There are stars who, of course, yes, hog the ball or whatever.
But, um, what I really think is going on here is that this, there is a female typical something, an outbreak of something female typical that is totally counterproductive.
I mean, the irony here is Caitlin Clark is, Increasing the size of the pie for women's basketball.
That means there's more pie for everybody.
Even if you don't feel like you're getting your fair share, you're probably getting more pie than you would in a league without Kaitlyn Clark.
Right.
So, she is doing, and you know, it's not like she's cheating.
She's just playing basketball as well as she can.
But she's refusing to compete in the female space.
And when women refuse to compete, when other women come at them implicitly, they get punished.
This is people trying to redistribute the attention that is going to Caitlin Clarke because she's so good at basketball.
They're trying to redistribute it because it's unfair that she's getting so much attention, according to them.
And this is petty.
It's the opposite of basketball, right?
It's basketball to the negative one.
It reveals the idiocy of this because what it's going to do is hurt everybody.
You're going to end up, you know, why doesn't communism work?
Communism doesn't work because it punishes the productive and the insightful and it rewards the lazy and uninteresting.
Right.
And so any system that does that will stop producing anything useful.
It's not a productive system.
So the point is, yeah, even if it worked, you would be distributing very little evenly.
Great.
Wouldn't it be better to have a less even distribution of a hell of a lot more?
And so it's the perfect example of that.
Why is basketball suffering a, you know, a catfight over attention when it really ought to be, you know, Caitlin Clark ought to be leveling them all up, right?
You want some of Caitlin Clark's attention?
Work on your game.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Let's all get better instead of taking what other people have produced.
And yeah, we see that.
You're right.
You said communism, but yeah, communism, socialism.
Yeah.
It's some version of it.
And I will just say, in every realm, Competitors make each other sharper.
Right?
When I say work on your game, I'm not... Right.
That is the natural thing.
The point is you have a great player.
Now come up to her level and then, you know, show us what women can do in this space.
Right?
She's not preventing you from playing well.
So... Right.
When you mess up a field and you create a place where, you know, nobody's really any good at evolutionary biology or whatever else, the point is you hurt everybody, even the people who are willing to go on the outside and do the thing, because actually having really good competitors is what makes everybody sharper.
It's good for the entire discipline.
So, you know, Embrace the competition get sharper get better.
That's how we all rise and Being catty and tearing other people down because they're getting more attention than you think they should is insane.
Yeah and lest Unless what you just said be taken by the naive and un-nuanced as yet another evolutionary biologist saying competition is the only thing that matters, you're not two ways, right?
The evolution of cooperation is absolutely necessary to explaining who we are and how we are and how we came to be across many scales, many iterations, many times throughout history.
And obviously we're talking about a team sport.
So, you know, collaboration, cooperation, Which is just the term of art that is used more often than collaboration within evolution is utterly necessary.
But the even harder to recognize point here is that you are talking about using the fact of a better competitor as a way to level yourself up, which isn't even really necessarily competitive.
Doing that in lieu of taking a What I've called the toxic feminine approach to competition, which is backbiting, cryptic, and destructive of both cooperation and of honest, explicit competition.
Yeah, it undermines both of those things, which are the engine of becoming stronger, more powerful.
One other thing, I think what you said is perfect, but I want to add something for people who don't know.
Collaboration, cooperation are robust patterns in evolution.
Very common, extremely important.
But they evolve for competitive reasons.
It is not true that competition and cooperation are symmetrical things.
Competition.
Collaboration is a mode of enhancing competitive ability and therefore the idea One ought to be looking at this and saying, you know, yes, a team, a team is the natural metaphor for this, right?
A sports team is the natural metaphor.
You're cooperating to compete.
That's like just making very explicit the way this works in the rest of nature.
Right.
There's an exact analogy to be made with the Omega Principle, where genes is to culture, as competition is to cooperation.
Cooperation is downstream of competition.
It can go further than competition in some circumstances, but it still is downstream of competition.
It's not a perfect analogy, but there's something there that It is the same, right?
You can't get rid of the competition from the system, and what happens in a system where you can't get rid of the competition is that cooperation evolves.
And if you think that this is some loosey-goosey thing, this is the reason that you are sitting watching this broadcast as a collection of 30 trillion cells that don't disagree on what to do next.
Right?
Those cells are agreeing to collaborate in order to compete better than 30 trillion individual cells, you know, all, you know, every man for themselves.
So, um, this is the reason that biology looks the way it does, right?
Yes.
Collaboration is everywhere.
Every multicellular organism, every colonial organism is a collaboration.
Why did they evolve that way?
Because competition is unavoidable.
Cool.
Alright, we're going to be back next week and the week after on Tuesday rather than Wednesday.
You can find always the schedule upcoming of what we're doing at darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, which has updated stuff.
We're going to take a break here and then we're coming back with a Q&A on Locals Only.
I was going to queue up a couple of the questions that we hadn't gotten to on Sunday and tell you guys what we're going to talk about, but I forgot.
I think music theory might be on the list, and maybe cats, and I don't remember what else.
And on the Q&A to follow here, we'll also be taking questions in the chat and trying to take a look at the chat as well as it's happening.
What else?
Do we have any merch to show?
Excellent.
I saw my water flash before my eyes.
So we have do not affirm, do not comply.
That's good.
That's good.
Um, so, uh, that is available.
It probably is like a hoodie and a hat and various other things and, uh, maybe a bag.
I don't know.
Um, we will never mandate that you wear that.
Yes.
Never, never.
Um, All right, join us on Locals with our Q&A shortly.
You can find us all sorts of other places as well, but you can find out where to find us at darkhorsepodcast.org, our website.
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