One Bit Psy-Op: The 237th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 237th 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 choice of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, as VP for the Democrats. Is he correct that Democrats are the party of freedom, respecting one’s neighbors, and minding your own business? (No.) Also: Covid at the Olympics—they’re not done with us yet! Consider how nuts it is that we are s...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number two.
Yeah, well done.
Seven?
Yeah.
Okay, good.
We are your Dark Horses in Residence.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying, as always.
Um, it is, uh, I don't know.
We fell off our timeline.
You and I fell off our timeline in 2017.
A lot of people have joined us, roughly 8 billion of them.
And, uh, we are now hurtling along this trajectory, trying to find our way back to something sane.
And frankly, it's not going very well.
I don't want to go back.
No, not back, back to the trajectory, the timeline where a certain number of things just simply made sense.
Yes, I would enjoy a sort of a lateral move into a perhaps parallel universe, perhaps one that is not quite so parallel as this one, that has things in which you can both know what is true and reconcile what you know to be true with the other things that you're being told are true.
I remember when it used to be that way, at least a little bit.
Is there any chance... Yes.
This is just a hypothesis.
Any chance we're in a perpendicular universe?
Is that what happened?
Well, this is C. That was my implication there.
I don't think it's perpendicular, but I do think that we are not entirely parallel.
I'm wondering about... We should at least falsify the idea that it's perpendicular, because that would explain a lot, you know?
Ninety degrees off.
Alright.
An infinite number of perpendicular universe... Versailles.
Yeah, universes.
Right.
Exactly.
Sure.
All right, we're going to talk about some of the things going on this week, and coming up on Sunday we have one of our private Q&As, so join us on Locals where you can also be watching the livestream and enjoying the watch party right now.
But we are going to start, as always, with our three ad reads right at the top of the hour, and then get into it.
All right.
So, without further ado... Get into it, including the skeletons in our closets.
Not with the ad reads.
No.
No.
Our sponsors have no skeletons that we are aware of.
That's actually not true.
Maui Nui.
But yeah, they don't keep their skeletons in their closets, I would bet.
So yeah, you know, they've escaped that accusation by that much.
Indeed.
Okay, so our first sponsor this week is Maddie, who you can see if you are watching down screen on the right.
It's her absolutely favorite sponsor.
This is Sundays, of course.
The name does not rouse her from her half slumber, but if we had some... She lifted an eyebrow, which is an amazing feature of dogs and especially Labradors.
Which I don't think their wolf ancestors had.
I think that has evolved in response to people.
The single eyebrow lift?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's pretty conspicuous.
It is.
And I've never seen a wolf do that.
I haven't spent a lot of time watching wolves, but you would imagine in all that video you would have caught an eyebrow raise.
You wouldn't have been able to ignore it, and I ain't never seen it.
Maybe.
Although it may be like, you know, one of the distinguishing features of humans is that we have whites of our eyes, right?
So we can actually visually signal to someone that there's something going on in a different place without making any noise across some distance, which might have been useful, for instance, in bands of hunters who were
And I wonder if wolves don't have, like, the facial fur phenotype such that they could show an eyebrow raise, and so you would expect that the showing and the capacity would at least co-evolve, or perhaps it already existed, but it went unnoticed until the faithful purr... Now, wait, wait, wait.
This is good, and I realize we're deep into ad-read territory, but it's too interesting to pass up.
Yeah.
I like this.
Are you arguing that in lieu of the whites of the eyes that wolves have another system of silent communication at a distance?
Is that what you're arguing?
Yes.
All right.
Well, that's cool.
And it's a great hypothesis because it makes a, an obvious prediction, which is that wolves do have the musculature to raise their eyebrows.
And well, we had to be able to figure that out.
Specifically what I was hypothesizing is that the people wolves, you know, the, the, the, the, That the forms of wolves that have been selected by us to be our friends and companions have this capacity, and I don't know if we can see it in this.
So you said, I don't think wolves do this, right?
Yeah.
Or you don't think they have this capacity, right?
I don't think they have the capacity.
I haven't been involved in the 30,000 years since domestic dogs have been partnered with us in one way or another.
And so there's a question about, there's two things that might be necessary.
And actually, with the whites of the eyes, you actually have the same two things, right?
There's a visual indicator, which is what we talk about, but in order to do a lot of movement with our eyes that would be at all compelling, you need a bunch of extrinsic eye muscles.
And we have more of them.
We have many more facial muscles than our nearest relatives do.
And so you might predict that the domesticated wolves, the people wolves, such as we have behind us, would both have more musculature in the eye region and have the, in this case it's not white to the eyes, but sort of the fur distribution to show.
To highlight it.
Yeah.
Actually, I think that's liable to be right.
I agree.
The more likely hypothesis is that all of that musculature has evolved for communication with humans.
And that would include the, you know, coloration that would allow you to see the eyebrow rays at a distance.
And maybe it's even being used as a, uh, an alternative to the whites of the eyes that allow you to, you know, the dog sending a message to you.
We really don't need dogs evolving eye whites.
That would look so creepy.
No, you would sit there on the couch and be like, dude, you're freaking me out.
I mean... All the time.
All the time.
Yeah.
Right.
The eyebrow raise, you're just like, yeah, all right, that makes sense.
The dog raised its eyebrow at me.
Yeah.
But if it had whites of its eyes, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Should we return to the content of the ad?
Yeah, let's.
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So, really, the best diet for Maddie, we found, is Sundays with an occasional raw chicken carcass.
So, when you make your famous grilled chicken, you'll take the meat off the bone, and then sometimes we turn that carcass into stock for us, and sometimes we turn it into more dog.
They don't know about my famous grilled chicken, but I guess now they do.
Now they do.
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Okay, Maddie knows about it because it's her... I'm gonna say co-favorite with Sundae's.
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Test it on your spouse today.
I did not test it on you.
No, you did.
I did self-test.
Yeah.
I didn't even know you'd done it until after you said so.
Right.
I confessed.
And it's good because otherwise I'd been looking for changes.
We have a deal.
We have a deal with our audience that we won't vouch for stuff that we don't have reason to know is good.
And how are we going to know?
So I had no choice.
Eyebrow raising, all this.
And the dancing and the spinning.
All right, there's that.
In this case, I don't think we were obligated to test Sunday's or so.
See, she's leaving now.
She's just left through the dog door.
We'll see you when it's dinner time again, Madison.
It's hot.
She's never done that before.
No, she walked out on us.
Well, her favorite ad read is over.
Well, I mean, you know, actually, it's kind of cruel.
It's like people talking about some delicious meal that they had when they're not serving anything.
Yeah.
Have I mentioned the elk ossobuco I had this week?
You did.
Yeah.
It was really, really good.
Okay.
I was trying to see if you would get up and leave through the dog door.
I have also tested the dog door.
I don't remember why, but I had a good reason at the time.
Well, she resisted for a long time.
I think you were trying to demonstrate.
I was demonstrating the dog door.
That is exactly what I did.
I eat your food, I go through your door.
Right, exactly.
We're buds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
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It's the perpendicularity of the universe that makes it hard to read.
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Oh, wow.
That has already been included in the script?
Here I was ad-libbing.
I thought I was doing so well.
Let's find out what the script says.
Stop it.
I think you can do better than what's there, but yes.
Okay.
This feels very timely.
It's very timely.
Maybe I'll just even skip that paragraph.
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So, yeah, I wonder about that.
I almost I took I considered taking out that word increasingly because I don't know that the rate of bumbling incoherence is increasing at this point.
I feel like you think, well, I don't think it's peak suggests a point.
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We've plateaued at Max Stupid.
I'm going to bet against that just because I've been schooled every time I've said something like that.
I know, I know, but I'm hoping for Plateau Stupid.
All right, well, I mean, I think it's a metaphorically true belief that you're better off believing that it can't get dumber, even though it's definitely going to.
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Does it seem to you that October surprise season came really early this election cycle?
I mean, it seems to me it arrived in July.
Well, so no.
Okay.
I mean, there are.
Obviously there is a lot going on, but as you actually cautioned at the point that the debate revealed things to people that they hadn't seen before in all sorts of directions, and then the attempted assassination on Trump caused a lot of people to see him in a new and improved light, honestly, it felt It felt almost inevitable that he was going to win, and you said there's a lot of time between now and November.
Yep.
So, that's the only reason that I sort of resist your, it's October surprise, like there's still, it's August now, but there's still a lot, it's still three months we got.
All right, so maybe we haven't gotten to October surprise season.
I don't know when it's going to come, probably earlier than usual, but nonetheless, it's still ahead of us.
What we are at is the August, yes, we were trying to tell you that season.
Yes.
Yes.
That's where we are.
Yeah.
No, and I still, I mean, I still hold.
On to the belief—I don't know what weight I would put on it in terms of the probabilities—that there will be some massive upset revealed.
And maybe even those in charge don't yet know what that will look like at the Democratic Convention, which is still some weeks away, I think.
Yeah, I have to say everything that's going on on the blue team side is now so far off of any plausible connection to the Democratic Republic that we all thought we had signed up for that, you know, it's it's sort of interesting as theater Yeah.
But it is just completely divorced from the reality.
The horror is that governance is tied to some kind of theater that isn't even pretending to be democratic anymore.
Yeah.
So actually, given that we're here, can we start by talking about Waltz?
Sure.
As you know, I happened to be in Minnesota this week.
For several days, I was mostly in Rochester, which is about 80 miles south-southeast of Minneapolis, where, of course, all sorts of crazy things happened beginning on May 25th of 2020 and throughout that summer.
the chaos there effectively started and facilitated chaos, the meltdown of several American cities.
And in the city that we were living in at the time, Portland, a place that I still love, and I was just there recently and reported out on the Pride Parade there.
But what happened in Minneapolis paved the way for, and it seems quite possible that what happened in the other cities wouldn't have been possible without the facilitation of what was going on in Minneapolis.
And of course, the Democrats' VP pick.
I resist saying Harris's VP pick, just as I resisted saying, you know, Biden thinks this or Biden did this.
Harris is in Possession of what faculty she has.
I don't think there is a decay in those faculties the way it was clear with Biden for a long time.
But there's no reason to imagine that she's in charge or that she will be in charge, right?
So the Dems have picked a VP for her, presumably.
And it's the governor of Minnesota who was the governor at the time and was therefore Participating in making decisions that Spun out into the rest of the country.
All right one minor correction.
Yeah, but I think you know we've seen so much horror unfold around the abuse of terminology and it is very important for where we are to distinguish between
The power brokers of the Democratic Party, who presumably chose Waltz and assigned him to Kamala Harris, and Democrats who, at this point, ought to frickin' know better, but the rank-and-file Democrats who are the subjects of a cave wall psy-op I mean, of course, but no one thinks that the rank and file Democrats chose Waltz.
Right.
But I just want to be careful with the term.
As we find ourselves tripping over things like, you know, the COVID so-called vaccines and every so often slip up and just say vaccines because it's the term that everybody uses to say the Democrats conflates these two things.
And so, well, the DNC.
I guess in this case, because it's really clear that random Democrats on the street didn't pick this guy, I don't think it's critical.
And in the same way that over in evolutionary biology, we come to you shorthand because it's impossible to get a point across if you have to every single time explain that of course the genes aren't conscious.
Of course they're not trying to do anything.
Of course there wasn't any forward intention on their part.
And so we use the shorthand and, you know, every so now, every now and again, we sort of pull out and say, of course, this is shorthand.
We don't think that there was intentionality there, but this is how we will speak.
Especially in this case, like Democrats on the street didn't choose him.
Yeah, but here's the reason that actually does matter.
Okay.
We've got an election coming up.
You know what?
It's gonna be a squeaker somehow.
They always are now, right?
So we can talk at some point about why they're always squeakers.
That's a completely unnatural phenomenon.
Yes.
But What we need is for a bunch of people who are watching that particular cave wall, the blue team cave wall, to wake up to the fact that they didn't sign up for this.
And to the extent that something has now assigned a VP, we want those people who are on the cusp of waking up over on that team to say, wait a minute.
To actively remember that this wasn't their choice.
Yeah.
Wait, what just happened?
Yeah.
Right?
A highly unpopular person is now at the top of the ticket, right?
And then something unfolded behind the scenes that assigned this other person clearly, right?
I don't know what fraction of the Blue Team rank and file are capable of seeing what's going on at this point, but whatever fraction, it's time to wake up.
It's past time.
So anyway, that's why I would be careful about it.
You just do not want You don't want to speak as if this is somehow normal.
My point that I was making is that it's not normal.
Right, but it's not even normal.
I thought that presidential candidates who had, you know, yes, been vetted and tested and presumably there were party shenanigans behind the scenes from, you know, longer ago than 8, 12, 16 years, but forever, which nudged some forward and killed off other candidates, but that once
Once thus vetted, that the candidate actually had agency in choosing who their VP was going to be.
And I don't see... I don't assume anymore that the top of the ticket is actually making such decisions really in any way.
Well, I think actually this is the key point, is what happened with Biden.
Is it became obvious that the actual machine, the blue machine, didn't care that it had a figurehead, right?
It was so comfortable with the machine being president that a puppet, a figurehead was okay and all it needed was a story enough to keep the faithful pretending like this person was president.
Yeah.
And the weird thing that's happened here is that was not an aberration.
That was not a George W. Bush is kind of a yokel and he's president, but, you know, really when it comes to brass tacks, you've got a team of people you probably don't like who are behind the scenes doing the analysis.
Right.
This was just flat out theater and the flat out theater.
In that case, uh, also his VP was one of the power brokers.
Right.
Absolutely.
And, you know, and I didn't, I didn't like either of them at the time at all, and I haven't actually revisited it, but I suspect that I would come to some different conclusions now.
One of the people that had nominally been elected was clearly, and everyone knew this, was clearly part of who was actually making the decisions behind the scenes, as opposed to what we have now.
We have no idea who's making Yeah, I mean I I wouldn't I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but I don't think that the view on Cheney Changes much.
I've paid it enough attention to think that the I meant more on Bush Yeah on Bush's case.
I think he was the affable Front end of something and you know he may be a decent guy behind the scenes he was you know he was the figurehead that You know that shielded ghastly things yes, so that's a that's a criminal thing in itself.
You know at least morally speaking but but nonetheless what what we see here in the shenanigans at the end of you know Biden's candidacy and the jump-starting of Kamala's candidacy this year yeah is oh We were right all along The man wasn't president.
There was something whose address we don't have, whose name we don't know, that we can't call in front of Congress and question it.
That somehow, does it even have a phone number that it can be woken in the middle of the night to decide what to do about the incoming possible nuclear attack?
We don't know, right?
We've now, we've run off the end of the tape.
The relationship between our constitution and whatever form of government we have is, um, it's, Purely thematic right we're gonna have an election.
We don't know what it means.
We've got a president We don't know what that means.
We've got a top of the ticket You know favorite maybe in the race even I'm not sure I buy any of that crap But we're being led to believe that she's now you know Neck and neck or better.
So anyway, it's the comfort.
Maybe you've said this on air before, but it is one of the big losses, or maybe this is around the dinner table, one of the big losses of in-person voting is no longer being able to have exit polls.
We had our primary yesterday and it's all mail-in and I looked at the results online today and I think I don't know.
How would I know if that's actually the will of the people as they voted?
There's no way to match up except for what I can see in terms of the small number of people that I talk to here, right?
Yeah.
And exit polls were informal and explicitly not binding in any way, but they gave you a way to do a kind of fact check on what then happened.
At least you knew when you had something to explain.
Right if the exit polls didn't match the election results.
It's not to say that the election results weren't fair It could be that people were ashamed of who they voted for and so they lied to the exit sure person That's possible or that they you know the people who voted for one person Because they were ashamed to dodge the exit poll verse a person and the methodology wasn't very good right who's to say but The problem is, if they match, then the point is, hey, that was probably a fair election.
Right?
If they don't match, then the point is, hey, it's which thing happened.
We are now entitled to have that conversation.
And it just so happens that the exit polls started to depart from matching elections at the point they also stopped being done and then couldn't be done because of this massive shift in the way that we vote.
Yes.
And the point is, okay, two possibilities.
One, life's crazy, technology's changing everything, the way we vote's changing, the exit poll's hard to do properly, yadda yadda yadda.
Change happens, live with it.
Right, maybe it's something like that.
On the other hand, Were there to be something like, oh, I don't know, a deep state and were it to view elections as a, you know, quaint holdover of some other system and it to feel entitled to some continuity of government bullshit in which elections were threatening because you never know who's going to take over all of the power that it has amassed, right?
Were there to be such a thing, what would it need to do?
Well, you'd need to get rid of the exit polls or make them invalid by making some huge fraction of votes come in some other way so that the exit polls would be dismissible.
So, you know, obviously we're two people.
We don't know what happened.
But this would be, if something was going to cheat in an election, it would have to make that move.
It would have to get rid of exit polls as a reliable mechanism for just simply So, I don't know if we'll end up talking about why I was in Minnesota, but let me say just a couple of words before I want to show, while it's talking, having been picked by the Democrats to be second on the ticket, and then just show a number of
tweets both of his and of other people about what his record is, and then finish by telling a story about a conversation that I had while I was in Minnesota.
So I was honored to be giving a keynote on the evolution of the body at the Word on Fire conference, the Wonder Conference, which is a Catholic group organized, spearheaded, led by Bishop Barron, whose podcast we were on led by Bishop Barron, whose podcast we were on a couple of years ago to discuss our book, Hunter Gathers Guide.
And this was just an extraordinary experience across the board.
I have a number of things that I'm thinking about and I may write about and we may talk about some here, but it's not really the point here.
But so I was in, you fly to Minneapolis, Twin Cities, which is where, of course, George Floyd died four plus years ago.
And then went south 80 miles to Rochester, which is the home, the founding home of the Mayo clinics.
So, you know, Mayo is the giant thing that is there.
And the conference, the Wonder Conference for Word on Fire, was right there in downtown Rochester.
As it turns out, this is country that is familially relevant to me.
Like I was closer in Rochester to the farm in Northeast Iowa where my father grew up, than I was to Minneapolis where I flew into.
So this is upper Midwest, corn country, now soybean, most of the crops being grown are corn and soybeans.
And it's early August, so it's pretty hot, pretty humid.
And the people are, and I remember this when we went to Michigan to visit, when we were thinking about going there to grad school, which is of course where we did end up going.
How much friendlier people are than on the coasts, right?
People are just inclined to be polite and to show you their humanity in a way that is less common in at least the West Coast, and I think maybe even more so on the East Coast.
So, I had really a remarkable time there, and I've been thinking a lot about what the Midwest is, and stemming from a number of conversations with people, mostly religious people, because of why I was there.
But I also wandered around, I found two different live music venues, including there is this Korean-American guy from Kentucky who is a bluegrass artist who was doing a thing in the park, and there was just like a lot of great music and fantastic food.
Well, you would expect a Korean-American guy to be doing bluegrass in the park given the white supremacy that so thoroughly characterizes this nation of ours.
Yeah, and especially Minnesota, right?
Especially.
Especially Minnesota, yeah.
Um, the children actually at that concert, um, children, um, running around freely with no, except in a couple of cases, no obvious parents overseeing them, you know, running around this like this concrete grassy thing.
I think it was a war memorial and, you know, children who didn't know each other before, you know, mixed age groups, both sexes, multiple races.
Just looked like childhood and, you know, an American situation that was honest and honorable and wonderful.
You know, a bunch of adults out to see live music in the park, free concert.
There were some food trucks.
Kids are just running around playing.
It just all looked awesome.
So I think the announcement about Waltz being picked for the number two spot on the ticket came either as I was in transit back or it happened at least near the end of the trip, if not after I got back.
And so I started thinking about who he is.
And I guess let's start, Zach, if we would, with the video of him with Harris in the background speaking about what his values are.
Some of us, some of us in here are old enough to remember.
I see you down there.
I see those old white guys.
Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom.
It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor's office.
In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make.
Even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves, there's a golden rule.
mind your own damn business.
These guys are after my heart chanting, mind your own damn business.
That feels good, so thank you.
Look!
Yeah.
I literally do not have any idea what he is talking about.
I know.
That seems like the absolute inverse of reality.
Does it not?
Yeah, it's reality to the negative one.
What is he honestly talking about?
Yeah.
He is, I think what he's talking about, my guess, given I'm going to show you a bunch of these things, sorry, my computer changed the size of everything, so I'm just going through.
I think what he's probably talking about is refusing gender-affirming care.
I'm still struggling, even if that's what he is talking about, and it did not occur to me that he might be.
One place where the Democrats are still very interested in making sure that your doctor can do whatever your child says they want.
I'm still struggling, even if that's what he is talking about.
And it did not occur to me that he might be.
I still can't make it work with what he said.
You want to make it?
He implied that the blue team is all about leaving you free.
Medical freedom.
That's what team blue stands for.
Medical freedom, guys.
So how, just tell me out here, I know it's right in front of me and I can't see it.
What is the connection between the insane position of the blue team relative to so-called child-affirming care or gender-affirming care, child-destroying care, gender-affirming care?
It's, yeah, it's, you had a child and then you end up with a gender.
Because the hateful bigots in states like Florida and Idaho would restrict you and your child from stopping their puberty and giving them cross-sex hormones and butchering their body, even though it's really important to them that you let them do that.
I get it.
I get it.
So, okay, okay.
Look, I'm gonna be mean, but nonetheless... They have earned it.
They have earned it.
Yeah.
Okay.
There is...
If we go back to the reproductive choice rights debate, which I believe is a very complex realm, actually, as you know, I believe you think the same thing.
And having just been at a Catholic conference, I heard nuances in the position that I had not considered.
Yep.
I don't think there is a person who holds a position for which you cannot deliver them a serious problem scenario.
Okay.
Yes.
It is.
And the only position that I think is really pure is this is all God's plan.
Who are you to interfere with it?
But even such a thing.
But there are a lot of us that don't have that position.
Right.
And so.
I don't have that position at all.
We are faced with.
But even that one.
We are faced with the really stupid banal sounding, well it's complicated.
Right.
Right.
But even given that one, right?
Even if that is what you believe, right?
If you believe that there are such things as genes, for example, and a woman has been raped and, you know, is at the beginning, you know, is at implantation stage.
Well, you do not want, as we've talked about before, you do not want to open up a conduit for rape to become a viable reproductive strategy, because it will be elaborated by evolution if you do that.
So, in some sense, every position, even the ones that are clearest and based on assumptions that I think are incorrect, but nonetheless simple and have direct implications, there is no position that doesn't cause these paradoxes.
If we look at what the blue team has defended, and you start extrapolating, you know, there's this, in my opinion, mind-numbing claim, my body, my choice, right?
The reason that that's troubling is that it sounds perfectly intuitive, but if you extrapolate from it, it causes horrifying breaches of long-standing moral norms.
I mean, Is it my house, my choice?
Right?
My body, my choice suggests that if it's mine, I get to choose what goes on inside it.
No, but that's a straw man.
Well, it's not.
No, no.
My body.
No, but my point is, if the claim is that when something is mine, I get to do the choosing, then where does that stop?
On the other hand, I think the actual medical freedom movement is speaking to the idea of actually, I have autonomy here, I have agency, you can't force that into me.
Right.
And believe me, all I'm saying is these things have to be dealt with.
We have to agree on what the objective is.
But even more importantly, if my body, my choice is the thing, and let's say for some reason we exclude houses because my doesn't make the same case, No, again, that's a straw man.
You're talking about this one phrase.
You can't expand it and then say, oh, well, maybe we'll randomly exclude something.
No, no.
But the phrase makes a logical claim.
Because it is my body, it is therefore logically my choice.
And my point is, But you, but we are, and this was indeed one of the, this conference that I was speaking at, the theme, the reason that they invited an evolutionary biologist to talk about the evolution of the body at a Catholic conference is that the theme was the body, right?
And so we heard, you know, pretty much everyone else was talking from a theological position about, you know, what bodies are and how Catholics understand bodies as these transcendent beings that have things that are more than the material.
And that was, of course, not where I was speaking from.
But what is absolutely true, what religion, at least the religions with which I'm familiar, including Catholicism and evolutionary biology, utterly and completely agree on, and there is a lot of overlap, is that we are fully embodied.
There is no way to disembody a human and still have a human.
That you can't, like, brains in jars aren't still humans.
Like, the brain is not where the humanness is any more than this finger is where the humanness is.
We are our embodied fully sensory beings and that is inextricably what we are.
It is not like, oh, I have a body and maybe I was born in the wrong one.
It's like, no, this is all what you are.
Okay, but Let's put aside the house issue.
I don't feel that it's a straw man at all.
I think my body, my choice is a logical argument and it makes the point that because this is so logically true that there's therefore no basis to challenge it and therefore we are liberated to extrapolate and it results in extrapolations that make no sense.
But let's take something more local to the body then.
The human body is constructed in such a way that birth happens at effectively an arbitrary moment in development.
It's not a moment at which this child can survive on its own.
And the apparatus that keeps it alive goes from a physical cord to a port, right?
Like a refueling port on a jet for in-flight refueling.
The mouth.
The mouth and the breast.
Okay.
So the point is, this is not an independent being.
The connection isn't a cord that never breaks.
It's a facultative connection, but the dependency is every bit as much after birth as it is before.
And so the point is, well, are you allowed to starve your child because it's your body that's producing the milk?
No.
So, this argument is about, I think, the fuzziness of boundaries, even when the categories seem really clear.
Even when the individual, and again, this is another piece that I was talking about to the Catholics, like, what is a body?
And, you know, if I had been speaking to a scientific audience, I would have framed it as, like, what is an individual?
Like, what makes an individual an individual?
What is a body?
Well, we can delineate several of the parameters that make a body a body, and that a bacterial mat is not one, but a starfish has a body, and a bison has a body, and you have a body.
But even then, even though we can clearly delineate your body as distinct from mine, There are fuzzy borders.
Yeah.
And, you know, just as, you know, is alive alive and dead dead?
Absolutely.
When is the life starting and when is the death starting?
Oh, okay.
Well, we have we have metrics.
We have things that we measure.
Are they necessarily the only things we could measure?
Right?
So all of these categories, even the best ones, the most inalienable, the ones that really work, tend to have both spatial and temporal borders that aren't as clear as we would like.
So this is exactly what I'm saying, is that the claim that the right emerges from something so obvious and simple is just nonsense, because there's something that has to be navigated that has deep moral content and over which society has some right to discuss.
And anyway, my point is that this idea that the right to destroy your child's capacity to reproduce uh is you know an obvious one because we want the government staying out of this that or the other right i'm not arguing i don't want the government involved in you know telling me i have to take gene therapy obviously so i certainly get the part of this that's like hey stay out of our business but that claim is weird because what they're doing with it is obviously
Effectively saying, yeah, I'm old enough to remember, you know, when we wanted the government to stay out of our this, that and the other, therefore children are fair game for, you know, an industry that wants to change their sex.
And that's even a euphemism that doesn't belong here, but that's what it claims to be doing.
So anyway, fascinating that he would say that and fascinating that an audience doesn't have the same head scratcher kind of response.
Like, wait, what did he say?
So actually, because what follows is in sort of direct counterpoint to what we are now seeing he is presenting to the world, would it be easy for you to show that again?
So again, this is Waltz in the first Harris-Waltz press conference after he's been announced.
Some of us, some of us in here are old enough to remember.
I see you down there.
I see those old white guys.
Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom.
It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor's office.
In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make.
Even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves, there's a golden rule.
mind your own damn business.
These guys are after my heart chanting mind your own damn business.
That feels good, so thank you.
So mind your own damn business, he says to a cheering crowd of adoring Democrats.
If you can show my screen and play the video that happens, this is from Tim Walz's That's totally fine.
I won't speak over it.
But let me say first, before you start playing, that this was what is being called appropriately the Snitch Line that he set up during COVID.
And this is June of 2022.
Let's listen.
Do you want to be able to hear it?
If we can.
Yeah.
Hello, you have reached the Department of Public Safety stay-at-home hotline.
The information you leave is considered public information.
At the tone, please leave the following information.
Your name, your callback number, how the stay-at-home order is being violated, and where the stay-at-home order was violated.
Thank you.
Record your message at the tone.
When you are finished, hang up or press pound for more options.
Yeah that's, I had heard this too and it is stunning at so many different levels.
Yeah, it is stunning at so many different levels.
I have just a number of things that he has done.
Some of these are screenshots of tweets.
Many of them are Chris Rufo's appropriately snarky takes on the original tweets from Waltz, and I've just left the Rufo commentary in here as a hat tip that that's how I got there, and I'm not including any of the darn
So we have Waltz Now explaining that what Democrats do is honor the integrity of you and your relationship with your doctor, and that what we do is mind our own damn business.
We've heard the snitch line that he set up so that neighbors could tell on each other if they were disobeying stay-at-home orders during COVID, and not just during COVID, but over two years after COVID had first caused the government to initiate lockdowns.
We have him signaling his wokeness with regard to Pride.
This is in 2019.
Happy Pride, Minnesota.
Proud to be flying the Pride flag at our home.
I will always keep fighting to ensure all Minnesotans live free from discrimination.
#LoveIsLove In 2021, Governor Walz tweeted, "To all trans youth in Minnesota, you are loved and valued." Are they though?
Because, uh, in 2022, he said, big news starting this month, families who get their five to 11 year olds vaccinated can get $200.
That's cash in your pocket for starting the year off right by protecting your child from COVID.
Love is love.
Except when it's big business wanting to get into, into your children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's all right.
There's a lot.
Yeah.
Keep going.
Back in 2019, this is before COVID, so this isn't even COVID dollars, Waltz wrote, at least 50% of the angel tax credit funding goes to minority businesses or greater Minnesota businesses.
And this is just indicative that he was well up on his, as Rufo says, Kendi, it's anti-racism, and D'Angelo, whatever her insane book was called, White women hate themselves?
I don't know.
What was it called?
I can't remember.
Trying to remember.
Something?
What's that?
Yeah, it wasn't.
I mean, I'm sure I remember.
I don't know.
Whatever her insane book was called.
As Rufo says, he knows that the only way to defeat discrimination is through more discrimination.
That's why he bravely downgrades and excludes whites from government programs.
Okay.
Waltz in 2021 said, Today, on the one-year anniversary of his death, we honor George Floyd.
In the days following his murder, Minnesotans raised their voices in a call for change that spread across the world.
This year, on May 25, 2024, he established George Floyd Remembrance Day in Minnesota.
On George Floyd Remembrance Day, we honor him and every person whose life has been cut short due to systems of racism and discrimination.
My administration remains committed to deconstructing generations of systemic racism and inequities in our state.
The document associated with that tweet, which is a little hard to read here.
But now, therefore, I, Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, do hereby proclaim Saturday, May 25th, 2024, as George Floyd Remembrance Day.
I feel like there were probably other people who deserved remembrance more.
Yeah.
Okay.
And on Twitter, Dr. Ben Braddock points out, Tim Waltz is directly responsible for the summer 2020 riots.
They started in his state on his watch, then they spread to our states.
If he had nipped it in the bud, people wouldn't have known that they could get away with literal murder.
He refused National Guard coming in for several days.
He celebrated what was happening.
And he This is six days after George Floyd died in 2020, May 31, 2020.
in 2020, May 31st, 2020, he said, "We have reason to believe that bad actors continue to infiltrate the rightful protests of George Floyd's murder, which is why we are extending the curfew by one day." So, Rufo's analysis here is, he knows that BLM didn't burn down Minneapolis.
That was the Proud Boys, white supremacists, outside agitators, the same people who got Jussie, Jussie Smollett, right?
The famously completely fraudulent claim that white supremacists attacked this hapless actor of color on the streets of Chicago, which never happened.
The same people who screamed, this is megacountry, that's who he's fighting against.
Hate has no home here.
So Rufo being snarky and cute and accurate, right?
So this struck home for me in part, and I think you can take off my screen now if you want.
I think I don't have any more.
This struck home for me in part because I had what at the time was a truly baffling conversation in Minnesota.
So, I think this would have been on August 1st, so less than a week ago.
flew into Minneapolis and it's 80 miles down to Rochester and so the conference had hired a private car service for me and I spent the whole time talking to the very lovely man who has, you know, grandchildren ranging in age from grandchildren ranging in age from the 20s to toddlers and a religious man, a white man.
And And he said a number of things that were interesting to me about how he views his state.
And after he had been talking for a while, and he was, you know, I was like, you know, what's that growing?
He says, that's soybeans.
Almost everything that's being grown here that's plants now is corn and soybeans.
And then of course, you've got, you know, hog farms and cattle farms and such.
But he also said, I asked him because he was talking about the health care system and how terrific Mayo had been during during COVID.
And I, from other people, heard somewhat other things, although I think that they were legitimately quite prepared and then just didn't have the expected number of hospitalizations, as we have heard from many hospital systems across the country, that what we were told to as we have heard from many hospital systems across the country, that what we were told to expect, the bloodbath that
But so he was talking his family in healthcare, and so we had not talked yet about the summer of 2020.
So I asked him, were there repercussions on the healthcare system from what happened in Minneapolis after George Floyd died?
And And he became visibly angry, actually, this man, and he said, that was all overblown.
Really, nothing happened in Minneapolis.
Uh, and he paused and he said, but, um, to the extent that anything happened, you know, the, the, the break-ins and the vandalism looting, that was white supremacists.
I know, because I saw it.
They were in the black, the black faces and the black outfits, and it was white supremacists and that's who did it.
And anyway, nothing happened.
So, you know, he's got two positions that aren't the same, that aren't, um, that can't go together.
And he has said it's the white supremacist because he saw it on video, but he describes the uniform of Antifa.
The people he's described are Antifa.
We know because we've seen Antifa on the streets in Portland.
We know what they dress like.
White supremacists don't wear those white, those black masks and the balaclavas and dress all in black.
So somehow this smart, caring, religious family man, who's been in Minnesota all of his life, and has been shown video by presumably the mainstream media that is real, has had one bit flipped, which is those people that you see doing that, they're white supremacists.
It's not true, but that has changed his entire outlook of what happened.
And it hadn't occurred to me until then that that was one of the things that was happening.
I thought when Waltz and, you know, in Portland, Mayor Wheeler and our governor and the mayor of Seattle and the mayor of Atlanta, like all of the people around the country who are making excuses for what was happening.
We're doing so in a way that really couldn't possibly be compelling to anyone who still was thinking for themselves.
But if all you had to do was say, those people that you see there wreaking all the havoc, they're white supremacists.
And they don't have any way or inclination to fact check that.
I mean, it surprises me that it hadn't occurred to this man, or presumably to the now, I think, probably hundreds of thousands, millions of other people who believed that, that like, actually, that's never what white supremacists have looked like.
That's not how they dress.
That's not what they do.
Right?
That is one of the ways that the Cartesian crisis is being enacted.
And I didn't know that.
I think you're on a very important thread here.
There's something, maybe we should call it the one-bit sci-op.
Yeah.
And the idea is you can engineer a narrative with minimal surface area.
What you're doing to engineer the narrative is minimal because the point is, oh yeah, you saw exactly what you think you saw, but that's not who we've been told it was.
It was the other guys, right?
And my guess is, sounds like, especially the fact that the guy got angry, he is experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance.
He knows, some part of him knows what actually happened.
Some part of him knows something.
But it's that part is now it's got an immune reaction.
I need to keep you from saying too much because the thing that allows me to be comfortable with this is is fragile.
Well, and in fact, one of the other pieces of that conversation that followed as I tried to navigate like what.
What all could he hear, right?
He said again.
He said it was all overblown anyway, like I'm sure it was in Portland.
Which was interesting in and of itself, because I had never mentioned Portland, because I don't live in Portland anymore, so I don't know if he actually did know who I was and he was pretending not to.
Like, I don't know.
But he said that, and that gave me an in to say, well, no, it was not.
Actually, it was not overblown in Portland.
That is not to say that there weren't then and remain still parts of Portland that weren't affected directly in terms of You know, no Antifa marched down the streets, no vandalism happened, no looting happened, no one died, right?
But Portland as a city was devastated and remains devastated and that was due to the failure of governance and allowing the criminals and the opportunists who became criminals to destroy a beautiful functioning metropolis.
The 1BitSciOp functions with respect to Portland in an ongoing fashion.
Yeah.
If you watch the Portland subreddit, you see it.
You see people who will take a picture of a beautiful, serene scene or some nice corner where, you know, people are engaged in, you know, enjoying summer weather.
And they will say, as you can see, Portland was utterly destroyed.
Blah blah blah.
And so the point is, look actually, we called this out at the time.
Mostly peaceful is an insane claim, right?
World War II was mostly peaceful because almost everywhere at almost all times there were no bullets flying, people weren't dying, right?
People continued to make dinner.
Right.
All sorts of normalcy was the average thing.
It just, you know, kicked balls around.
Right.
Okay, fine.
This, that, and the other.
But so anyway, there's something about the way this works is to feed people who are going to do most of the work on their side at the cognitive dissonance level, to feed them the thing that allows them to conclude Uh, you know, and this happened with Biden, right?
What shocked people when they saw the debate was that they had been told that the things that they actually had seen, the video of Biden fucking up again and again and again, that that was selectively edited, that it was out of context, that it was some right-wing conspiracy to portray the man as demented.
And the problem was, the debate didn't allow you... Oh, was the debate edited?
That seems unlikely, right?
They intentionally put his worst foot forward?
Right, and wasn't it on CNN, I guess?
So, the point is, no, none of the one-bit PSYOP failed at the point that you actually had the man on a stage for an extended period of time where you saw the whole thing, and it was like, oh my god, the president's gone demented!
And it's like, no, that's been happening since he was elected.
Right?
Since before then.
Um, so anyway, I want to, A, I want to try to remember that the one bit PSYOP is a lot of how this works, because frankly, if you were going to engineer something, you would do it at as few bits as possible so that your fingerprints didn't end up on it.
Yeah.
And that really was, I mean, I didn't think one bit PSYOP, but I really did think in talking to this guy, like it's just one bit.
You said it.
You said one bit, and it was one bit flipped.
But I want to go back to Waltz, who, frankly, I was paying zero attention to.
Right.
Of course.
I had to look him up at the point that he got the nod with that insane setup of a phone call.
Oh, God.
Well, OK, there's so many things wrong with this, but cell phone calls suck.
But I mean, this is now what they're doing, because they did it with the Obama's calling to congratulate Harris as well, right?
But my point is, it's very relatable for the little people, because the little people don't have landlines.
But if you were actually going to stage a phone call in which, yes, we all understand there are cameras on both sides of this phone call, it was all planned, but it's at least a real phone call, you would use a frickin' landline so that it wasn't like, wait, can I call you back?
This, you know, the connection's no good.
Was that I am or I'm not?
Yeah, so anyway, the whole thing is just ridiculous, but I want to go back to this guy and the obvious inconsistencies and all, but...
Well, actually, the screenshots that I showed present a totally consistent front.
It's only his most recent appearance with Harris that makes him appear to be a totally different guy.
I think really the only thing that I can come up with that he could possibly be meaning is trans-affirming healthcare, which is abhorrent.
So what we see is a rebranding, right?
There was something locally useful in Minnesota and now we have, he's a champion of freedom and keeping the government out of your relationship with your doctor, blah, blah, blah.
I don't care.
Okay.
These people are phony as can be.
He wouldn't have been picked if he wasn't phony as can be, but notice a couple of things.
He's actually a pretty good speaker.
Yep.
Way better than Kamal.
I mean, just not would be.
Well, I do want to leave open the possibility.
Kamala sounds like a flat out dummy.
She can't be.
She can't be a dummy.
I won't say can't, but I don't think she is.
I believe something else is going on.
And one of the things that might be... She's been told she's not allowed to have any positions.
It's not even not... No, I think she is a...
Amoral, totally strategic creature.
And it may be that she's incompetent at speaking.
It may even be that she's incompetent at rational thought.
But I don't think so.
An amoral, completely strategic creature who had oration skills would not make it so clear that she was never saying anything.
Oh, she's not a good speaker.
Yeah.
She's not a good speaker.
But part of her not being a good speaker may be that she is staying away from content for a reason.
Right.
Content is not her friend.
No, it really isn't.
I know.
It's going to result in us having something to talk about.
That's why I said she's been told she's not allowed to have any positions.
But it's not even not allowed to have any positions.
It is way better to have those of us who are, you know, jaw on the floor over the appalling nature of the Democratic choice for the nominee and the undemocratic-ness.
It is far better to force that entire group of people To be talking about the apparently feeble logical skills of this woman of color, right?
Because the point is that is easily painted as motivated by bigotry rather than motivated by a reaction like, who did you just nominate?
Yeah, exactly.
And many of the trolls on the right are going into places that they really should Frickin avoid right, so they're getting disgusting and mean and stupid and and and clearly displaying just the worst of humanity Like you don't need to do that.
She's incompetent.
That's clear for everyone to see right But there's no good way of doing this because the point is even if people were disciplined and you know How could they be for one thing to the extent that they were?
Disciplined you'd introduce a bunch of undisciplined people to make it look right racist, right?
So so It is a successful trap.
It is going to lead some people toward their worst instincts.
It is going to be portrayed as a racist attack.
Of course, you know, a woman of color is going to face certain obstacles on her way to achieving the presidency.
First of all, it is uncommon.
In fact, I'm not sure, maybe somebody will come up with a good example of this, but if you were to do a race blind and sex blind, it's impossible because voices connote these things, but if you were to do a blind audition with these two people for the job of vocal leader, Waltz is He sounds like a politician.
He knows how to speak.
No, no, not even a politician.
He's actually good at it, right?
He was enjoying standing at the front and back.
Yeah, he was comfortable.
He was comfortable.
He was reactive.
It wasn't all teleprompter crap.
He got his little racist jab in.
Yeah, he got his little jab.
No, he's a guy who's very at home in that environment and pretty good at it.
And I don't like him one bit.
So my saying pretty good is, you know, he's technically adept at this realm.
He's a compelling candidate.
He's a compelling candidate.
And Kamala isn't.
So how weird is it?
You do not, you know, there's a reason that bridesmaids dresses are ugly.
Right?
Am I wrong?
Probably not.
Don't want to outshine the bride, right?
That's somehow built into the architecture of humans.
Here we have a bridesmaid who is leaps and bounds better than this, you know, multiple firsts, right?
If she wins, she'll be the first woman, first Indian-American at least.
So the point is, odd in a world where this is all about scripting something that allows power to be handed off behind the scenes, that you would pick a VP who outshines.
But how good a match is it in the Democratic Party of 2024 to have a subordinate male doing the battling here?
A subordinate male who is competent doing the battling for the person on the top of the ticket, whose demographics appear to have gotten her there, who is incompetent, which frankly suggests a deep frickin' misogyny and racism at the heart of the party.
Because I guarantee you that there are competent women and competent people of color who could be president really extraordinarily well.
Yeah, and she's none of them that is exactly that is exactly what I'm getting at is that this party which has taken You know male feminism turned it into a badge of honor weaponized it and then taken compassion a Female leaning virtue and turned it into a you know a battle flag That is used to upend every value that we have in civilization.
This is It perfectly describes, this ticket perfectly describes that Blue Team utopia.
And I think it's just historically unique, right?
There's a reason that VPs don't outshine the top of the ticket, right?
It's not the natural order of things, but something, you know, we are not in Kansas anymore.
This is a whole different cave wall that abides by different rules.
Absolutely.
Yeah, now the Dems like to let their freak flag fly, but they're gonna push all their misogyny and racism under the carpet.
Well they, and you know, everything is to the negative one, right?
They're gonna dress up their authoritarian medical garbage at their The Medical Freedom Movement?
Like...
And they won't use that phrase because the medical freedom movement has been like, we got that, right?
And that existed before COVID.
I wasn't really aware of it.
I had heard vague intimations, but that is a thing which so long pre-exists the current moment that they won't claim medical freedom, but they're going to do everything but.
You know, we're the party of keeping our hands off your bodies and your decisions and your relationships within your family.
And, oh, by the way, we're probably interested in taking children away from their parents if their parents don't think that they should cut off their healthy breasts.
Yep.
And the ethos, I mean, it really is like upside down world.
And, you know, your point about George Floyd is well taken, too.
Even if you are of a belief that this was the murder of a man, the murder of a man in police custody by a cop, which is not the belief that I hold.
I don't think it's the belief that you hold.
That's right.
That would have to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
And there's so much reason to doubt it based on his medically compromised condition at the time, post COVID on drugs, et cetera.
That's what the court concluded in a charged environment where you weren't allowed to think freely.
So that was I called it out before he had been convicted.
And I said, this was the problem is there was no conceivable fair trial.
It was going to happen because what was going to happen if this police officer was exonerated?
That would have been an impossible outcome.
Right.
So anyway.
If you ran that trial now, maybe.
But even let's, let's give the devil his due, right?
Let's say that actually George Floyd was murdered and that that was clear beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's still a hell of a person to valorize, right?
You can't find somebody who is more deserving of that adulation and remembrance than this guy who, you know, Before police arrived, was passing off phony currency, was high on drugs, had violently attacked a woman in a prior situation and been convicted of it.
This is not... You sound like a racist.
I sound like a person with eyes and ears and the ability to process basic information, unfortunately, which I mean, if that's now racist, I can't be terribly shocked.
But but anyway, yeah.
So, you know, George Floyd is, you know, the iconic figure of what white supremacy is doing.
No, in fact, I would argue that the fact that you can't come up with a better figure is evidence that that thing that you're claiming is dominating our system can't be real, right?
Surely you would have a dozen examples to choose from that were clear examples of some innocent person suffering this fate and, you know, but we're stuck with George Floyd as the icon.
Yes, we are.
I would also just like to I'd like again, you know, I showed all those all those screenshots and every one of them reveals something that should be a deal killer with regard to you want this person at the, you know, the second most important position in the country by some by some measures.
He was bribing parents to get their five year olds vaccinated with mRNA vaccines, so called vaccines.
against a disease that doesn't hurt healthy five-year-olds.
That doesn't hurt healthy five-year-olds.
Messing with children that young is actually going to do them harm, even if the mRNA platform and its particular instantiation here didn't do any harm.
But by killing off the innate immunity that young children have, it will make them more susceptible to other diseases.
He was proudly bribing parents to inflict harm on their children, and he's the one who is now saying that we keep the government out of your personal decisions.
I can't believe how opposite world we're in.
To the negative one, however you want to say it, right?
It's just, it couldn't be less like reality, what he is presenting himself as.
Yeah uh it's not a fully formed thought but you know how you uh if you take a lens and you've got a bright scene and you shine it on a dark wall it comes out upside down?
It's like that's what the cave wall is it's the upside down version of reality.
Yeah um and well it's easier that way because you don't have to create a whole lot of thing you know like lies are easier if you just if you stick as much to the truth as possible you just But they can't stick as much to the truth because they're so wrong on so many things, so let's just do a complete inversion.
And that way we know, I mean, just like it became useful, as you started saying, and as we talked about on Dark Horse a lot, it began to be useful to listen to the CDC, if you weren't otherwise doing your own original research, and just do the opposite of what they were suggesting, because they were exactly wrong.
Over and over and over and over again.
So this is, you know, this is probably easier for them to do.
Just like, we're going to start presenting as the exact opposite of what we've been.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The only place where you don't want to do the opposite is, uh, Nancy Pelosi's stock picks are very high quality.
So you want to do... Oh, with regard to the insider trading, they got this now.
Oh man.
Yeah.
I don't know that it's insider trading.
I think she's just gifted that way, but, um... She's very powerful and skilled.
Um, but anyway, to complete the cave wall thing.
It's not an experiment that will ever be run.
No, somebody will have run it with animals.
I don't know what we're talking about yet.
If you imagine people who developed, they were born into the cave, they saw only the cave wall and it was upside down.
They would develop a brain architecture that made that completely normal.
They would be incapable of understanding a right side up world, right?
They would fight you.
In fact, Plato's cave would play out exactly as that original story does, which is somebody who said, actually, guys, guess what?
I've been outside and everything's flipped on his head.
They'd kill him.
Yeah, and if they did ever find themselves outside, they'd have a tendency to, you know, fall off cliffs and then they try to figure out who to blame.
Right, exactly.
All right, are we there?
I think this is changing the order of everything, but it makes sense, I think, to go from the insanity of Walz's COVID vaccine, so-called vaccine policy, to the question of the Olympics and the outbreak of COVID there.
Do you want to show the video that I sent you, Zach?
It's not surprising to see athletes being infected because...
As I said before, the virus is circulating quite rampantly in other countries.
What's very different now is the impact.
We aren't seeing the levels of impact like we saw in 2020, 2021, 2022.
And that's because we have therapeutics, we have better testing, and we have protection because of past infection as well as vaccination.
Governments need to be strengthening their approach to using COVID vaccines, especially ahead of the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere.
Okay, so, right, so we've got an outbreak of COVID apparently at the Olympic Games.
On the one hand, didn't surprise us, right?
People coming from all over the world, there's rampant COVID apparently in many different places.
Well, also, it's the one thing that we have tests for and a name for.
Right.
Probably people brought lots of stuff in.
No doubt.
We don't have names or tests for it.
So that's a sampling bias issue.
Yeah.
But It is strange that this is circulating in the summer.
And I want to just point out a number of things that are true here.
First of all, you have to evaluate what is being said now.
First of all, the World Health Organization Is very concerned that there is COVID at the Olympic Games.
That is because they pretend to be an organization that is very worried about global health issues.
It's kind of what they do.
The who?
Yeah.
It's not really what they do.
They're actually more like a trade organization for vaccine manufacturers masquerading as a public health institution.
But nonetheless they put on this masquerade and it's fairly compelling.
They've got the right fonts, they've got beautiful governmental seeming graphics, and it does mislead a lot of people.
But do you remember being told that actually at this point we now have a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Do you remember hearing that a hundred different times?
Do you remember Joe Biden getting angry at those of us who refuse to get these damn inoculations?
Saying that his patience was running out and that they were going to force us to do this.
Yeah, and our collective fear of needles and he had to take a back seat.
Right.
Now what we have here is the Olympic Games and we have something like 40 positive tests amongst athletes.
Those athletes are going to be almost universally inoculated with these vaccines because that was the nature of these athletic leagues and the nature of the pressure that was applied.
If they are repeat Olympians, and they will be because it was required, you'll remember that Djokovic couldn't compete in 2020 because he refused vaccination.
Exactly.
So how did that argument pan out?
Well, it turns out I can't say that people who are unvaccinated are not getting any COVID at the moment.
But I have to tell you, it is very clear to me in talking to various different people who are having this thing in the present, that um you are much more likely to get it if you had these so-called vaccines and you are much more likely to suffer from it at a greater level so it is hard though to separate with regard to that um Maybe not.
So, there's at least three groups, right?
There are the people who are unvaccinated.
What is their experience of getting COVID?
How often do they get it, and how bad is it when they do?
There are the group of people who are vaccinated but, for whatever reason, have either woken up or changed their opinion and are both not getting boosted and unlikely to take the so-called therapeutics, like Paxlovid, that are being pushed by the same pharma people.
And then there are the people who are all in.
even if they're not getting boosted anymore, the people who will take the pharma accepted therapeutics rather than get out in the sun and up their zinc and magnesium and see and consider ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. - Right, this is one of the points I wanted to get to is what they are saying this is one of the points I wanted to get to is what they are saying about what this implies, this outbreak Yes, OK, people are suffering less from COVID.
You know what they're going to attribute that to?
All the things that they made people do.
Oh, that's the result of the fact that we now have good therapeutics and, you know, that people got vaccinated and this, that and the other.
No, this is a demonstration that that shit didn't work, okay?
Second of all, the idea that they are going to advocate for people now to get serious about, you know, reinvigorating the vaccination campaigns.
In fact, I've seen in another place that plummeting vaccination, so-called vaccination rates, are being blamed, right?
Why is there an outbreak?
Oh, because rates of vaccination are being plummeted.
Now, Didn't we long since, didn't they long since acknowledge that it doesn't stop transmission?
Doesn't stop transmission, exactly.
It's a logical impossibility.
Not only that, so they're still saying this even though the point is like if you have, you know, Slightly above average ability to do logic and access to the information.
What they're saying doesn't even make sense, right?
Right.
Oh, people are suffering less, but the fact that there's an outbreak means that they've got to go get this inoculation.
Why?
What are you telling me?
How many of them were you going to get in a life?
Do you know what the impacts of those things are going to be?
You do not.
What's more, Okay.
You've got an outbreak that shouldn't be there.
They're saying, Oh, people need to get their vaccines before winter because winter, this is a winter disease.
No, it isn't.
That's one of the anomalies here.
That's so interesting is that this thing is completely indifferent or almost completely indifferent to what season it is.
Um, which I would argue is selective pressures from building it in a lab, probably something like that, something like that, but it, okay.
The IgG4.
Uh, result.
Remind us.
There is a very terrifying pattern that multiple inoculations, I believe the number is actually two, two inoculations with the mRNA-based COVID so-called vaccines triggers the production of a subclass of antibody, IgG4.
Ig means antibody, immunoglobulin.
IgG is a major class of antibody.
IgG4 is a special case of that class.
IgG4 has a physiological purpose to the body.
It is the signal to turn down immunity.
That's what it does.
When your allergist tries to get you past an allergy by giving you a little bit of the allergen that you're reacting to, they're trying to trigger IgG4 so that your immune system will stop reacting to whatever it is.
Stand down.
Stand down.
So these maniacs are recommending an inoculation that they know full well if you get multiple instances of it triggers an attenuation signal in response to an antigen on the very disease they claim they're trying to control so The expected consequence of these inoculations is reduced immunity to this disease which is now a pretty good match for what we're seeing.
They are recommending more of the toxin in response to the exact thing that we now know is a consequence of the toxin.
So The level at which this is madness, if you were trying to, A, why are you inoculating anybody from a disease that is no longer causing significant damage at the level of, you know, deaths, for example?
Why are you inoculating them?
So one of the ways that SARS-CoV-2 did follow a predictable historic pattern is that it became less virulent over time.
I think so, because for one thing the delta wave seemed to be particularly virulent, that is virulent means does harm to the body, and we, you know, Omicron and the later variants seem to do a lot less.
It's hard to establish this totally because, you know, at first The protocols that were used were actually deadly in and of themselves.
And so, you know, there was a certain amount of death attributed to COVID that was really... Ventilators.
Yeah, it was ventilators and other such things.
So it's not clear how much of this is the evolution of the virus and how much of this is the Natural accumulation of medical insight into how to deal with this.
How much of it might be that, you know, as much as they have still managed to convince people that things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don't work, people maybe aren't acknowledging that they're using it, but they're quietly using it because, you know, because we've managed to reach people with the information.
But so anyway, what they're saying Doesn't make a whit of sense.
Even if you just took them at their word for what they think they're seeing, what they're telling you to do about it does not make sense based on what we know.
What's more, as you point out, we have drugs that work.
Drugs that are actually quite safe.
Right.
Comparatively.
And, I mean, the over-the-counter supplements, which is a big part of how you should treat this, are, you know, they have been Concluded to be safe enough that they're available without you vetting your decision to take them with a doctor in any way shape or form, right?
That's what over-the-counter means.
Yep.
Not to say that there couldn't be errors, but you know, D, C, magnesium and zinc, these are not complex molecules that humans created.
These are, you know, these exist in nature in something very akin to the form that you can find them in pill form at your pharmacy.
Yep.
Now, I have started to make headway with people who bought the PSYOP, especially on ivermectin, with the following argument, which none of this is new.
But when people I know are getting sick with this, and I say, have you taken ivermectin?
They say no.
I say, look, Ivermectin works with almost all, or maybe it's all, RNA viruses.
It would be surprising if it didn't work for COVID.
But even if it didn't, the benefit that comes from simply, at the moment that you become sick with something that is likely to be caused by an RNA virus, hitting it with this stuff, which dramatically reduces the length of the course of disease and the amount of damage that it does, is a good precaution.
Right?
The number, you know, even little colds and things are often RNA based.
Right.
Um, so it is the, you know, it's the opposite of the one bit PSYOP.
It's the one bit insight.
The insight is, look, you are living in a world in which there are lots of RNA viruses and they happen to react to ivermectin for reasons that we don't yet know, but you don't need to know.
The drug is safe enough that you probably ought to take it as a precaution at the point that you find yourself getting sick.
Because if you can reduce the amount of sickness, you reduce the amount of damage, the amount of time that you're sidelined from your life.
Yeah no I mean it's actually it's a silver lining of all of this that a drug that many of us had not considered before now keep on hand because it's useful against so many things and it's so safe.
Yep now of course people who knows people vary maybe there are people for whom it has a negative implication you should proceed with cautious caution and if you have a doctor who's not insane you probably ought to consult them but But nonetheless, the idea that there is a tool in our toolkit.
That they are not recommending that is much safer than anything they are recommending.
And frankly, you know, Pax Lovid, my God, this is like a biological nuclear weapon used in lieu of a fire extinguisher, right?
The disruption to normal biological processes is so great.
And the idea that you would go after a virus that look, I'm not going to underrate the problem of this virus, because even if an individual case tends to be mild, I mean, we've been saying this from the beginning.
There's something weird about the number of times people are getting sick with the same thing.
Right.
Right.
That is not normal.
And frankly, from my work in graduate school on telomeres, that has a direct implication.
And it's obvious.
Every time you get sick, you are burning some of your lifetime capacity to repair your tissues.
Right.
You may get sick from anything.
You're not talking about COVID specifically, from anything.
Anything.
Anything.
And so the point is, let's compare it to flu.
Okay, let's say that COVID is on average a quarter, a case of COVID is on average a quarter as bad as a case of flu.
I don't know if that number is true or not, but if you get it 10 times for every one time you get the flu, it's way worse because the amount of cumulative damage that you're doing is more.
And so when we talk about this, people are so interested in moving on.
They think the question of laboratory origin is ancient history.
They think ivermectin is a Done deal it's an it's a battle that's you know over and the answer is no you're not done getting this thing Where it came from is therefore very important because frankly somebody seems to have released something into the world From which you are going to spend you know months of your life Sidelined unless you override their advice not to take certain very safe highly effective anti RNA virus drugs so
You know, this couldn't be more live, right?
If COVID had disappeared, if the phenomenon was gone, then I would understand people's resistance to investigating this stuff.
But in light of the fact that it is apparently alive and well and circulating on planet Earth and has people sick in a season when typically people are not sick, right?
Wake up and realize, you know, the advice you are being given sucks completely and all you need to do is a small amount of research to see how far off it is.
That's right.
I think the phrase you used with me when you were beginning to talk about some of this affair was, excuse me, they're not done with us yet.
Yeah.
Right.
And the fact that it's coming up at the Olympics.
I mean, of course it will.
And as I said, when you first introduced it here,
It's the one... I mean, yes, there are major diseases that if there was an outbreak, we would have a name for it and there would be testing, there would probably be isolation and quarantine and all of this, but it's the one sort of common, increasingly generic disease that there is... it is named, there are tests, they presumably still suck badly, but it's also, in addition to everything that you and me just talked about, become a sort of like, get out of jail free Pathogen.
Because it's the one thing that if you can invoke it and get out of your commitments.
I can't go.
I can't travel because my cousin who I saw two days ago just tested positive.
And I know, but I can't because I don't want to put you at risk.
So like this, this thing that was being weaponized around like, how dare you not get vaccinated?
Do you want to kill grandma?
Like the inverse is now useful as this arsenal for people to get out of social obligations and professional obligations.
And I'm not saying that it's not, I mean, as we talked early four years ago, like that we, we do owe each other the respect of not getting other people sick with anything.
Right.
And there has been too much, too much.
Acceptance of like, yeah, I've got, you know, I'm just getting over the thing, but I'm just going to go anyway and sneeze in a room full of people where there's no airflow.
Like, you shouldn't do that.
Like, exactly as you just said, it takes some of our repair capacity away, and there's never going to be a way for us to track like, well, that's when Joe gave me that cold.
That's why, you know, this system is failing 40 years later.
And that's when Jane gave me this one, right?
But, you know, we both owe each other more respect with regard to not getting each other sick, but this particular one has become the thing that we get to use whenever we kind of don't want to do a thing.
Yeah.
The seriousness of the individual case of the disease is out of phase with the overall damage done by the disease.
But also, I mean, I said this at the beginning of COVID, it was the first time I have ever heard a quality discussion about the way we spread disease around in modern life.
There was actual discussion where it was still like, is it fomites?
Is it aerosol?
Right.
You know, does, you know, and we talked a lot about the volume of the air in a room, effective volume and, and, uh, circulation.
But there is a, we don't have a societal agreement on at what point are you sick to a level or with something that it should stop you.
Should you cancel a flight because you have a cold?
We've never had that discussion.
Right.
Okay.
And I'm not arguing that you should.
But it's not obvious to me either the idea is actually do you know what the sum total if you get on an airplane and you transmit a cold to a city where it doesn't exist and a hundred thousand people are sidelined for three days right the cost of your getting on an airplane is absolutely huge now maybe it's impossible to keep it from getting to every city every time but we have to have that discussion about what you're supposed to do and then the mechanisms have to be there for you to do it
If the idea is, hey, you should never go to a conference if you have a communicable disease that is still plausibly within the range of time in which you can transmit it.
Right?
That's one rule you could decide on.
Well, now you've got to reorganize your conferences.
You've got to make it possible to cancel.
Right.
On the other hand, if we're going to say actually, no, if you are sick with anything cold level or below, you should continue with your plans as normal, whether it's a dinner party, blah, blah, blah.
Maybe that should change if you're going to the house of somebody who's immunocompromised.
I don't know.
But.
I'm annoyed that we don't have that agreement on what the thing is that, you know, you are supposed to alter your plans over and what set of stuff we're just simply going to allow to flow around because the cost of attempting to, you know, protect people is so high and the benefit so low or the futility so great.
So anyway, I would love to hear that discussion, but it's...
Not going to happen in a world where public health has become an excuse to administer unnecessary, dangerous treatments for high profit.
That's right.
All right.
Oh, I just want to say one last thing before we get away from that.
The idea that this outbreak is the result of, yeah, is the result of plummeting rates of vaccination.
Did she say that on there?
I don't think she, I don't think I've, I haven't seen that said.
I have seen it reported that the WHO said that.
She didn't say that.
I just want to point out, A, At best, if that were true, it's the result of the absolutely cruddy quality.
Let's put the safety of these inoculations aside for the moment, even imagine that they did no harm.
The fact that they are ineffective at preventing people from getting and transmitting the disease Is why a plummeting rate for people who were vaccinated recently is a problem, right?
These things didn't work.
They didn't create durable immunity, period, the end.
So the idea that you're going to recommend more of them as the solution to this, which you're effectively doing, is saying this is a lifetime subscription service.
Of course.
What's more, you're abusing the idea of correlation.
This is a place where correlation does not imply causation.
Let's imagine that these shots had been inert, right?
Imagine that they had just simply had no effect whatsoever on immunity.
You would expect That people would stop getting them because they would quickly get the idea that their having gotten them didn't alter in any positive way their health and so why take any risk and why go through the effort, right?
So you would expect a bad vaccine, one that doesn't have any positive effect.
For rates of people's getting it to plummet.
That's what they would do and then you can't then assume that every time that Disease starts circulating that it's because the rates plummeted right in this hypothetical.
It was an inert substance right you would get plummeting rates of Use at the same time you got the disease circulating they would have nothing to do with each other right so anyway It's just the construct designed to sell a product that doesn't work.
And that's why, you know, they are using the failure of their own product to tell you that actually you need more of it.
Right?
And it's like, you remember when people were getting injured and other people were saying, you know, Oh man, I got the inoculation.
I was in bed for three days.
Well, that's how you know it was working.
Right?
This is the, you know, well, the fact that this is circulating at the Olympics, The fact that you've got a outbreak of this circulating at the Olympics is how you know this shit didn't work in the first place, right?
And the idea that they're going to recommend more of this shit, you know, of course, they're companies, they make money when you buy it, and even more money if the government will buy it for you and not tell you what they're spending and hide the harms and all of that.
All right.
I'm off my soapbox.
So I don't know what all you else you want to do.
I don't want to spend as much time as I had planned to because we've already gone for a bit and I think you have a few more things you want to talk about.
But I did want to point out one of the things that's going on else at the Olympics with regard to these
What seems pretty clear, and I will link in the show notes to Carol Hoeven's excellent analysis of why it seems like this is what is going on, that we have male athletes who have disorders of sexual development, who are, as babies born, appearing to be female, and who go through completely male-typical puberty.
There is one androgen that they do not manifest, but the testosterone, which is not that androgen, I don't know.
is fully sufficient to create fully male puberty, such that you have these boxers who, you know, you look at their passports as female because at birth they appeared female.
And so that is what was put down on their birth certificate, doesn't make it right.
So it's funny that like we're now on the other, it appears to be the other side of this issue, right?
that the languaging of the of the woke trans crowd is sex assigned at birth as if sex is a social construct which it is not but There are disorders of sexual development which can cause a doctor to to
Observe something that does not turn out to be true and I want hold on that is a really deep point Well, but it's the inversion of that claim about sex assigned at birth This is the I mean, so just one more point.
This is the only point that I want to make here You can show my screen here.
This is just the AP For female athletes of color, scrutiny around gender roles and identity is part of a long trend.
Yeah, because, like, Leah Thomas suffered this because he's black.
No, he's not.
He's also not a woman.
Right, so the AP, of course, is bringing race in, because that's what we're doing, is we're hating on Algerian women.
Nope.
We think that cheating is not OK.
And people are like, oh, it's not cheating because, you know, this person really did, you know, think they were female.
That's fine until puberty, at which point this guy and everyone around him knew that he wasn't female anymore.
Right.
But the AP deep in this insane article says Semenya.
So now we're talking about Castro Semenya, not the current the current person who's being talked about so much.
But Semenya was identified as female at birth.
Identified, right?
So usually, and the word that I have been using forever is observed, because you are observed by the doctor according to the external phenotypic indicators of what sex you are.
And sometimes that observation, as in the case of people with disorders of sexual development, will be in error.
And therefore in need of a correction and hopefully a lot of, you know, careful and honest and integrity enhancing, you know, medical and or social intervention of some sort.
But no, sex is not assigned at birth and no, sex in this case was not identified at birth.
Sex is observed and the vast majority of the time that is an accurate observation and very occasionally it's not.
Um, but here we have the AP being political with its use of verbs by, you know, normally they would be using the word assigned here.
Nope.
They're using the word identified as if there's greater truth.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting inversion.
I totally did not spot it.
Um, I would also just, there's something that's been bugging me about this story.
Um, the, The scuttlebutt was, and a lot of people did, react as if this person was trans and had entered the women's division.
And that's not the story.
You have a genuine disorder of sexual development, which is a very different story.
And it belongs in a separate category.
On the other hand, there's something about If you were a man, if you had gone through this scenario as this person did, there's something about the choice not only to take up sport in the women's division where you have an endogenous advantage because... Because you're male.
Because you went to male puberty.
Because the gender rules surrounding sports divisions don't anticipate edge cases and anomalies, right?
But not only do you choose sport where you have an advantage that allows you to be a winner, even though maybe you're not extraordinary other than because of the disorder of sexual development, but you choose pugilism against women.
I imagine that having such a DSD, disorder of sexual development, is excruciating and probably makes a person very, very angry.
Yep.
And maybe you get to take out a lot of your anger by beating up women.
Women who I can imagine feeling that they had gotten the easy deal because... They're actually women.
Yeah, exactly.
So anyway, there's something very, very odd about the choice to take up a sport where you get to hit women in this case.
And I also think the focus of this story has just been wrong.
The focus is on the individuals.
And the answer is, in order for a women's division to mean something, edge cases have to be excluded.
Is that bad, occasionally, for an individual who has done nothing?
Probably.
But, you know, the fact is, there are excluding Details for all of us that preclude us from competing in some kinds of things.
Yep.
Right.
And so the answer is, you know, I remember a case where There were these bathrooms, they now exist in Europe, self-cleaning public toilets.
Yeah.
And New York had put in a few of them and apparently they were great.
They were removed.
So it's like these self-enclosed autonomous pods.
And after it gets used, it basically gets sprayed down on the inside with isopropyl or something.
Yeah, it washes.
So everyone who walks into one has a clean bathroom.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, it was an innovation, a good one.
And I remember, I think I remember the 60-minute story on these things where they were good.
It was a test case.
They'd installed a bunch of them.
And not only did they not install more of them, they took the ones out because they couldn't be made.
ADA compliant or whatever the equivalent was at the time.
And the idea was, OK, you've prioritized fairness to people who have admittedly gotten a raw deal.
You know, people in a wheelchair are as entitled as anybody else to have a bathroom.
And, yes, you shouldn't make bathrooms that exclude them.
But they didn't get a benefit from other people not having a bathroom.
And so, anyway, it's the question of, look, you've got to pay a cost somewhere.
And the obvious thing to do Is to keep the borders of the categories that allow us to have sport that, you know, that brings women, for example, into the ability to compete at an international level by virtue of the fact that they compete only with other women, right?
That's the thing that needs to be protected.
Now, in this case, the I think it's utilitarian suggestion that we do what we do for the greater good is the right instinct.
Yeah, it's the right instinct and you know what?
It is going to be unfair to a certain number of people as being short is unfair to people who dream of playing professional basketball, right?
There's a lot of unfairness in the world and mostly you play the cards you're dealt and the idea that you get to play your cards in some way that allows you an advantage over everybody else playing cards in that same game That's not cool.
That's the opposite of sport.
The whole idea is that, you know, we're going to create a level playing field and then we're going to see, you know, who is more talented and more dedicated and, um, you know, all of those things.
Yep.
All right.
Um, next thing I wanted to talk about was a, an event that happened that was shocking to pretty much everybody except maybe arguably me.
Um, I know that sounds weird, but I'm going to, I'm going to defend it.
The event, you want to put up the image from, uh, Northern Ireland?
So what we had was, this is not the greatest image to show this.
There were actually, uh, hundreds, maybe thousands of people involved in, uh, co protesting.
Um, but I couldn't find an image or a video that made that clear.
It just looked like a bunch of people.
Um, it was not, it was not clear.
Most North Americans probably don't know what these flags are.
I know what you're about to talk about, but I wouldn't necessarily recognize.
So what happened was, people will be aware that there has been a massive outbreak of protests, much of it violent, in the UK, starting with the murder of It is an anti-immigrant and anti-immigration protest in which you have... It was British girls who were murdered.
Yep, British girls who were murdered and you now have pro-immigration factions and anti-immigration factions clashing across the UK.
What happened here is that Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants joined together in protest, which.
Most people- Against immigration.
Against immigration.
And this is almost unthinkable because the feud between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants has been so longstanding and so violent that this is, you know, this is oil and water.
It is imagined that these factions could never be joined because they are so fundamentally about their hatred of the other, etc.
Now, the reason I say that this didn't surprise me is that actually a few days before this event brought these two factions together, I was in a phone call, which unfortunately was not recorded, though the other members of the phone call remember it the same way.
And I was using an example to illustrate the concept of lineage selection, which is going to be central to a project that I'm working on.
And the example that I chose to illustrate how it differs from other evolutionary hypotheses of collaboration and conflict
As I said, if you had a room in which you had an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant hating each other, and you had an Indonesian immigrant walk in, you would expect, under the theory of lineage selection, you would expect the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant to find common ground.
Now, there's nothing about Indonesia in the story of immigration involved in the protests in Britain, but the point is you need An understanding of human collaboration and conflict that is capable of addressing the dynamics so that you do not assume that because person A and person B are not closely related that they will always be at war with each other.
There's a context in which we can predict, I believe, almost exactly who is expected to align with whom that has, frankly, frightening implications, right?
It's not that this All kumbaya because you have people who've been at war with each other deciding to, you know, bury the hatchet.
They remember where the hatchet is.
Yeah, they remember where the hatchet is and we can describe the context in which we would expect them to go right back to feuding.
So anyway, the point is there is an evolutionary model that does address this and it predicts behavior with enough precision to have nailed that unity Which, if you look at your news feeds, you will discover is causing everybody to scratch their heads.
Whoever thought they would live to see Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants joining hands over anything, right?
So, um... Yeah.
Fascinating that you used that example a few days before this.
When I saw it, I was like, Oh, this is so strange.
And I couldn't remember.
I'd had a couple conversations and I was like, which conversation was that?
So you went back to the people you were in conversation with?
Yeah, I did.
And, uh, yeah, they remember it the same way.
So anyway, that is to say lineage selection is a not only valid hypothesis, but one that has now succeeded in making one very interesting prediction.
And, um, Again, the important thing is, well, if that hypothesis makes predictions, then you need to take seriously all of the other predictions it makes, because some of them are downright frightening, and they force us to take it seriously, to figure out what to do to prevent the harms that it tells us are probably coming.
Yeah.
Is there one more thing you want to do?
Yeah, we could do that.
Don't blame me, man.
You got the props there.
Well, it's a question about how long we've gone on, but I guess it's more timely this week than it will be later.
It's about two hours at this point, but you know, there was a lot of ad stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't think I, well, you could put it up, I suppose.
Sure.
So, uh, there was an event earlier for people who are unaware of it where, um, the, I believe it was the New Yorker magazine.
had gotten a hold of a story quite an extraordinary story and Bobby Kennedy released his own version of the story he said flat out that his purpose was to get ahead of the New Yorker who he knew had gotten a hold of it and was going to use it to slant reality And so he decided to tell the story himself, and it was quite a remarkable story told in kind of a remarkable context.
Here he is talking to Roseanne Barr and explaining the odd circumstances surrounding, um, a, uh, Heather and I have slightly different reaction to this.
The four of us, we had dinner with our sons the day I got back from Minnesota, and I felt more negatively about this story than any of the rest of you.
Well, it's not that I don't feel negatively about it.
I recognize the negativity, but so let's just say the basics are that Bobby Kennedy was apparently driving in upstate New York He happened on the scene of an accident where I think a woman had hit a bear.
I think it was a bear cub.
And the bear cub had died.
And Bobby Kennedy, this is as he represents the story, and I haven't seen The New Yorker, I don't even know if it's come out.
But what he says is that he knew that you could get a permit to dispose of a bear carcass to eat the meat, and that he wanted to do this, and he put the bear carcass- I have no objections to collecting roadkill.
Of course you don't.
That is not- Of course you don't.
Bobby Kennedy took the bear carcass into his car.
As one does.
Drove to New York City and then found himself.
Actually went for a day of hawking first.
He went, well, as one does.
So he went to New York City intending to process, to get the permit and to process this carcass and ran out of time.
Several times.
Yeah, ran out of time, and so he was stuck in New York City with a bear carcass in his car, which was presumably going to... was going to become... More fully expire.
A frightening mess pretty quickly, and he was sober by this point in his life, but apparently not all of his friends were, and somehow...
it was agreed upon that the proper thing to do, not the proper thing to do, he doesn't represent it as the proper thing to do, that the right, that the...
What they would do.
What they would do, the narratively necessary thing to do, would be to take the carcass and put it in Central Park.
And Bobby Kennedy apparently had a bicycle that was also expired that he was planning to dispose of anyway.
And so what Bobby Kennedy did, and does not defend as the right thing to do, what he did was staged a bicycle accident in which the bicycle was left under the carcass of this bear in Central Park.
Now, I am not arguing that that story does not indicate terrible judgment.
Not long enough ago to be defensible.
He wasn't a man in his 20s.
No, he was not a man in his 20s.
So that is not my argument.
So you want to put my tweet back up?
Before you go on, let me just say to all of the people who hate me now for suggesting that this is in any way an irritating story.
As I told you at dinner, whatever it was, two nights ago, one of the reasons that I think RFK Jr. is is so awesome is that he is really, clearly, undeniably, in every way, an environmentalist.
His entire career has been in environmental law.
That's how he came to begin thinking about vaccines in the first place.
He really does care.
And when he was in our home, in Portland, his interest in, for instance, the monkey skull that we had, that we had found ourselves and that we had on one of our shelves, and he was immediately able to tell us what species it probably was, given where we had it.
His knowledge is dense and heartfelt and real.
Putting a bear carcass in Central Park is guaranteed to get everyone's attention, who is paying any attention at all, because there aren't bears in Central Park.
And so he acts in his telling of the story, which is charming in the way that he is, and I think honest, but he acts surprised to wake up the following morning to find that all of the newspapers are reporting that a bear was involved in a bicycle accident in Central Park.
And this feels like a betrayal of what I know to be his deep environmental understanding, which in this case is just a basic biogeographical fact of, like, actually we've long since killed off all the bears in Central Park and we didn't do it with bicycles.
Yeah.
I mean, look.
I'm not disagreeing with this.
I do think this is a massive, if pretty funny, lapse of judgment on Kennedy's part.
Did you put my tweet back up?
So what I said here is when Kennedy announced his run for president, he cautioned that he had a good many skeletons in his closet.
Given the unusual nature of the man, no one should be surprised that one of those skeletons is a bear.
Personally, I think the story makes a good case for his candidacy, but in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you I also have a bear skeleton in my closet.
Now, my point here is First of all, Kennedy was very clear about the fact that his record was not spotless.
Yeah, you're gonna find stuff on me.
You're gonna find stuff.
And, you know, he in fact joked at the time that he had enough skeletons in his closet that if they could vote, he'd win for sure.
But the real question is, look, you have to compare people as you find them.
All of the characters we are dealing with in this election are larger than life for better, for worse, sometimes mixtures, right?
The question is at the point that the New Yorker gets a hold of this story, which is not hard to portray as way off, right?
It's, it's pretty remarkable.
This is like, you know, this is Kennedy scale, larger than life.
Yep.
Prank gone wrong.
Right?
At the point that you discover that The New Yorker has such a story on you, sitting down with Roseanne Barr to tell the story as it actually happened, being fully honest that the next day he was frightened that he was able to see in the video on his television that the police were dusting the bicycle for Prince and that he had not anticipated that things would get to that level.
Right.
This is actually this is what a person with a record that isn't perfect, who is fundamentally honest.
This is what you would hope.
You would hope for an honest accounting in which the public could really evaluate, well what does this imply?
And as you point out, This is somebody with as deep a relationship with nature as anybody we know, right?
This is somebody who loves nature.
It's also somebody who is terrifically skilled, also A bit in love with risk.
And this is somebody we've seen handle rattlesnakes.
This is somebody we've seen backflip off of cliffs, right?
I haven't seen these things.
Well, I have.
So this is kind of a larger than life character with larger than life hobbies like falconing.
And this was a larger than life prank.
And believe me, if I, you know, if my kid had done this, right, I would know exactly how to lecture them All of the reasons that one should not engage in this.
On the other hand, as I hint in the tweet, I'm not without a story that is somewhere, at least phylogenetically, in the right ballpark.
So anyway, first of all, there are features of the story that I don't... So I'm now trying to figure out which story you're thinking of.
Sure.
Right.
Right.
It's not as good a story.
It's not as good a story, but I do have, I do have a bear skeleton in my closet as, as you will quickly remember.
Um, but I will point out there are things about the story that are a little weird, right?
He says he was late for a plane and I obviously couldn't take the bear with him.
Yeah, a couple of different things he just went on too long because he was really enjoying them.
It was Roadkill.
The carcass of Roadkill doesn't inherently deserve respect, but the idea that, well, what else were we going to do?
It's like, actually, you made a number of decisions throughout this where you could have been keeping an eye on the time or had one of your people keeping an eye on the time, but actually, we either have to get to the freezer or dump this thing because We're going to run out of time.
Right.
You have the barrier.
It should become a priority at that point.
Also, he says he couldn't take it on the plane, and it's not obvious to me.
He couldn't take it as checked luggage, but he could have taken it as carrying luggage.
All right.
In passing, I think it's a worthy point, but, you know, and when else are you going to get a chance to make that pun, right?
When else?
So, all right.
Oh, dear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a rough one.
It's a rough one.
I would also point out, again, you're dealing, all of the people running for president are Larger than life.
Their errors are larger than life.
These are unusual people or they wouldn't be in this spot.
I mean, you know, Kamala Harris had an affair with Willie Brown.
What?
That's incredible, right?
Oh, yeah, I know this.
OK.
OK.
Oh, believe me, there's that's the thing is you're you know, OK, this is an American election with larger than life characters, with bigger than life flaws, all of this stuff.
But there's another way to look at this, too.
This, as much as this shows a severe lapse in judgment, you and I both agree, severe lapse in judgment.
You should not be putting bear carcasses in Central Park and you certainly shouldn't be staging bicycle accidents and all of that.
Okay, that's bad.
On the other hand, here you have a presidential candidate.
Who has single-handedly solved a decade-old cold case and gotten a full confession from the perpetrator on video.
Name another presidential candidate who has ever done that.
I mean am I wrong?
That's unique.
That is a skill that you might want in a president and here we have a guy who has demonstrated that capacity I mean, I feel like you're asking for trouble here.
Am I?
Because all that requires is a public confession to any crime committed by a current candidate.
All right, I like my portrayal better.
Okay, so let me remind you and tell the audience the story.
I'm actually not frankly sure I haven't told the story on Dark Horse before because when we were in Portland, where our at-home studio started as COVID began, we had this object On the desk for quite some time.
All right.
This is a seal skull.
Now, Heather knows, and the rest of you will require some convincing or reminding one way or the other, that seals are bears.
They're heavily modified by selection, but the way natural selection works, the way phylogeny works, once a bear, always a bear.
Seals are modified bears.
They're also a fish.
Therefore also a fish, absolutely.
But the other thing is, if you think that that's cheating, here is a bear skull that we also had.
This one was, this is your bear skull.
You have your own skull, but this, to the extent that you've owned a bear skull.
Yeah, no, I've never used that as directly as I use the one I'm using now.
And it is possible that this skull has a story that goes with it, too, in terms of A friend, the husband of a colleague at Evergreen, had collected this in Alaska, is as much as I remember.
Right, and that's the question, is there an awkward story that surrounds the collecting of this skull in Alaska too?
There may well be because... A grizzly, he said.
I think this is a black bear.
Yes, I have not done the work that either you or I could do to figure it out, actually.
Yeah, I think even those teeth tell the tale though.
Um, but in any case, the thing to understand is, well, first of all, this is just an interesting fact of mammology, which is that a bear skull and a seal skull are almost impossible to tell apart until you get to the teeth, right?
That this animal has been reformed on the outside in a way that you just show here.
Like they really look very, very similar.
This way, I'm trying to, like, they really look very, very similar.
There's more, there's more sagittal crest on, on the seal.
Sagittal crest being the attachment point for the muscles that operate the lower jaw.
Yes, suggesting, interestingly, usually the simple suggestion there on this, I can't see what I'm saying, in my right hand here, boing, the bigger sagittal crest suggests a larger chewing glass, a larger masseter, but obviously bears Do a lot of chewing.
Yeah.
But then you flip it and you show the... I'm going to have to... I'm going to pick them back up.
It just would have been nicer to have a map here.
Um, but the, but the teeth on these guys, um, you know, obviously the, the bear here is missing a bunch of his teeth.
Um, oh no, no, actually it's the seal that's missing a bunch of his teeth.
Um, they would have looked kinda canine like, even though they weren't canines, right?
Uh, there's much more shearing teeth in the seal.
So the seal, so all mammals have the same, four types of teeth that we have: incisors, canines, premolars, molars.
But they're modified tremendously.
And what you have in your bear is what your cat or your dog looks like, right?
Like, so he's missing his canines and his incisors.
They've fallen out, but you've got all of these, all these teeth back here that look a lot like that of your cat or your dog.
But in the marine form, uh, you have, do you remember what the incisors look like on a seal?
Uh, I think, um, trying to remember.
Yeah, they were, Are they also kind of pointy?
Is it just, does a seal basically have a mouth of kind of pointy teeth?
I'm trying to remember.
I don't remember what the teeth look like.
But in any case, so let me tell the story about how I came by this skull.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, this is my, the bear in my closet.
Um, I was on a field trip early in my teaching career at Evergreen.
And I think I was on a field trip, um, It wasn't that early actually, we were teaching together.
I just wasn't there because I think I'd gotten sick.
Oh god, there's bear dust all over my computer now.
I think it's a different, it's a different field trip than you're thinking of.
But in any case, um, I was on a field trip and two students approached me.
They were just mentioning in passing that they had been down, uh, one of the beaches near the place that we were staying and they had encountered a dead seal.
And I love skulls and I asked them, well, did it look intact?
Was its head intact?
Because I would love to have a seal skull.
And they said, yeah, it looked fully intact.
And we, Agreed, the three of us agreed to go back to the location at night when the activities of the field trip were over and anyway and we could manage it.
We decided to go back to the scene of the death of this animal that had either died there or washed up after it had died and to try to procure the skull and What I recall this is a long time ago now, but what I recall was, you know It's 11 30 12 o'clock at night.
There are three of us that have beaches in Washington you are allowed to drive on the beach and we had taken one of the students trucks out onto the beach and we were standing there and
In the headlights of this truck it is beginning to rain and we realize that the knife that we have to remove the head of this animal is woefully inadequate for the task and that the grisly process of removing the skull has created a scene almost exactly like what you would imagine in some
Drama, where there's a body out in the desert and people are trying to dispose of it.
Anyway, the removal of the animal skull was eventually accomplished.
You didn't go get more blades?
No.
You just used the one.
Just used that one little blanket.
Man, is the head of a seal stuck on pretty darn well.
Yeah, you don't find them just popping off.
Yeah, they don't just pop off for a reason.
So I now know a lot about why that is.
You know, that involves a lot of... I feel like you probably could have gotten there just by kind of thinking it.
Probably could have.
But anyway, so anyway, this is the bear skull from, well, both.
Yeah, this is the the bear skeleton in my closet and, you know, the fact is it also reveals a certain amount of terrible judgment.
It is not legal to remove the head of a pinniped Even long dead.
Even long dead.
And as I when I brought the thing back and word got out to other students who were some of them were scandalized for reasons they couldn't quite put their finger on.
Other ones were scandalized for reasons they could put their finger on, which I still remember.
A student alerted me to the fact that by leaving a headless carcass of a seal and there was no way of pushing this carcass back into the sea where it would have gotten taken care of by sharks or anything.
That we were potentially creating a trauma for anybody who should happen by and not be able to explain what it is that they were.
Did you consider putting a bicycle at the scene of the crime as well just to make it more interesting?
It's so long ago that I don't remember, but I didn't have a bicycle I was willing to part with.
Oh yes, that would have been the issue.
Anyway, that is that.
But anyway, point being, I do think that Bobby Kennedy's story reveals bad judgment, as I think Bobby Kennedy would tell you.
Yeah.
Does it strike me as remotely disqualifying?
Of course not.
No.
And you know, I think the fact is human beings One learns a lot in life.
One learns where their own limits are.
One, you know, I have a favorite aphorism, actually, which is good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
And in any case, I think that the way that Kennedy handled the story and just simply told us the story in all of its embarrassing detail, It is an argument that this is actually a guy who can handle the office and not because you know, he was Born as the most upstanding human on earth.
This is a person who comes by his upstandingness As the result of a life that is extraordinary in all regards all right, I Think that covers it Yeah.
I think we got there.
We did get there.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we will be back next week, but in the interim, we're going to do a Q&A on Sunday, this Sunday at 11 a.m.
on Locals Only.
There'll be another Q&A after our podcast next week and another one the following Sunday at 11 a.m.
So we've got a bunch of Q&As coming up.
Join us on Locals to ask questions, to be part of the watch party, to see the Q&A, all of this.
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Before we're done?
No, we said a lot.
We did say a lot.
Yep.
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