Can the West Be Saved? The 238th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 238th 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 why there is a regressive backlash against women, and how to Rescue the Republic, and Join the Resistance. On the former topic, we talk about #MeToo, Olympic athletes that aren’t what they seem, and candidates for high office who are useful only for their immutable characteristics. On t...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number something or other.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
We are ready to rock and roll.
Yes, we are.
Number 238.
This is the 238th live stream.
You can remember that because two cubed is eight.
Yes.
All right.
I don't see how that helps me remember much, but yes, I'm with you so far.
Yep.
No.
Oh, good.
And it's been a while, so probably you'll just keep on Keep on keepin' on.
Keep on keepin' on.
Yeah, that's kind of, I mean, it's sort of a prerequisite to everything else.
Keep on keepin' on, yeah.
Keep on keepin' on.
Wow.
Yes, here we are.
We are doing a Q&A after the livestream today.
All of our Q&As are on Locals only now.
Please join us there.
We had one last Sunday as well.
We're having one this Sunday.
This is a week of Q's and A's, and we encourage you to join us there.
Lots of stuff going on at Locals.
It's a watch party right now.
Please join us there.
Cool stuff to talk about this week because the world is just a merry and joyful place.
It's a very fascinating place in which we are all going to find meaning and maybe even more significantly purpose very shortly.
Excellent.
Awesome.
Okay, but as always, we start at the top of the hour with our three carefully chosen sponsors for whom we read ads.
Uh, you can see it.
You can be assured, if we are reading ads here, that we actually truly do vouch for these products or services.
So without further ado, here's the three.
All right, our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
It's CrowdHealth.
Health insurance in the United States needs to be reimagined from the ground up.
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So a few months ago, I got fed up with our health insurance.
We had it just in case of an emergency, an accident, or a bad diagnosis.
But for a family of four, we were paying close to $2,000 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work.
Probably some of you have had similar experiences.
Tens of thousands of dollars paid out over years for no benefit whatsoever.
I went looking for alternatives, and I found CrowdHealth.
CrowdHealth isn't insurance, it's better.
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That's a third of what we were paying for bad health insurance.
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You pay the first $500, and they pay the rest.
I didn't expect to know how well crowd health actually worked for a while, but our son Toby broke his foot in July.
We went to the ER, he got x-rays and the attention of several doctors and nurses, plus crutches and a walking boot.
He broke his foot, surprising no one who knows the boy.
When he was very young, we referred to him as the boy who bounces because he would launch himself off things and just, you know, bounce right up and walk away.
But yes, in this case, he did actually suffer an injury and we know he broke his foot because we went, I took him to the ER and I saw the x-rays and it was his navicular.
You can't see x-rays, but never mind.
Alright, I'm nitpicking.
I'm going to stop.
For fuck's sake, dude.
It's not helpful.
I'm going to start over at this paragraph, because I'm really excited about this sponsor, and it's not actually about Toby at all.
It's about CrowdHealth.
I didn't expect to know how well CrowdHealth actually worked for a while, but then Toby, our 18-year-old son, broke his foot in July.
We went to the ER, he got x-rays, the attention of several medical professionals, doctors and nurses, crutches, a walking boot.
It wasn't cheap.
Not only has CrowdHealth paid our bills, but everything about the interaction has been smooth.
Their app is simple and easy to use.
The real people who work at CrowdHealth are easy to reach, clear, and communicative.
And with CrowdHealth, we are part of a community of people who have interests that are aligned rather than the antagonism that is inherent with the insurance model.
Here's the weird part.
It turns out that CrowdHealth had approached us about being a sponsor a few years back, but I didn't get it at the time and I rejected them.
It just felt complicated to switch things up.
I didn't understand.
I was wrong.
So, independently, I rediscovered them on my own and benefited directly from what they were doing and went back to our amazing ad broker.
I was like, you know, these people, maybe they'd be interested in sponsoring us.
And he said, my God, they were interested.
And you said no.
So all of these amazing things I have to say about them comes from before they were actually a sponsor.
So, with CrowdHealth also, we are part of a community.
No, I already said that part.
I can say that CrowdHealth is the way to deal with medical expenses.
It is really outstanding.
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All right, one observation, and then a question.
Observation, Toby was able to keep the foot.
So that's good.
So that is a testament.
Yeah, the last I saw, yeah, he has the foot.
Crowd Health works, and in this case, the doctors work, he kept the foot.
We're all good.
Our experience with the actual health care system, which Crowd Health isn't part of, was actually very good in this case.
Yeah, which is great.
How often does that happen?
Rarely, I think.
But you said Byzantine paperwork, and I'm wondering how much of a problem paperwork actually was in the Byzantine Empire.
Yeah, I am not good on a lot of things history.
You know, you go far enough back to when it wasn't humans we're talking about, but I'm pretty good on that.
No, I'm talking about like... Way prehistory, pre-human.
Origin of frogs.
Oh, wow.
Yes.
There's no paperwork, I can assure you.
No paperwork.
And this is part of why frogs are so bad at paperwork.
They just have no history with it whatsoever.
I don't know about the Byzantine Empire, if it was even an empire.
If it was even an empire.
I'm definitely looking that up after the podcast.
But I think it may have been.
No, I'm gonna try to remember to look that up, because then next time I invoke the Byzantine Empire, I will know that that's what it was.
Yes.
All right.
Your turn.
It is my turn.
I am reading the middle ad, which is not something we do.
And this is going to be a test of how far I have come from my dyslexic self.
Terrified to read out loud.
We'll see.
All right.
You ready?
Nope.
Second sponsor this week is, once again, Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
We love these guys and their olive oils so much.
Extra virgin... I feel like telling people that we... Alright, several points.
I feel like telling the audience that I just used some of this lovely olive oil in a salad last night, but I fear that that has been written into the script somewhere and that I will end up repeating myself.
We'll see.
Second thing, extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
Now what the hell does extra virgin mean?
It seems to me you're either a virgin or you're not but anyway extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
I think it's in this case I mean it's it virgin doesn't really have a place here right but I think it's like the it's it's the first pressing as opposed to like the pressing 2.0 which still kind of sounds like counts as the first pressing.
I may be totally wrong on that.
It's like these people who think the first time didn't count.
I get it.
It's like the people who declared in whenever it was the 1940s that we were now in the modern era, not realizing that time would continue to advance.
Yeah, yeah.
They may have been on to something.
They were a little early, but time not continuing to advance is a distinct possibility.
Yes.
Now, I do think these folks, it's up to them.
They could sell a lot of olive oil if they Declared that extra virgin meant a spare virgin because I think a lot of people would be into that.
I think you just lost us a sponsor.
Did I?
Let's hope not, but I'm gonna finish this anyway because it is good oil.
It's really good.
Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious, whatever it means.
No, really.
There are all sorts of health benefits that we can mention from being heart healthy to preventing Alzheimer's to being high in antioxidants or high on antioxidants.
This says in, so I'm going to go with that.
But you, but you've been living on this.
Wow, this is a complex sentence.
There are all sorts of health benefits that we can mention, M-dash, from being heart healthy to preventing Alzheimer's to being high in antioxidants, second M-dash, but you've been living on this planet so you know these things.
Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets and it's used in everything.
If you've ever had excellent fresh olive oil, however, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
If you've never Yeah, I found it.
In fact, the sentence didn't make sense, but this is what I do.
I go back and I find out why it didn't make sense.
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of T.J.
Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter.
He, that's a cool name.
He brings the freshest, most flavor... I'm doing that Trump thing again, aren't I?
Oh my God!
I had never thought that you did that Trump thing, but kind of now, yeah.
Let's see, now when... Although, the thing is that you started with a script, and it's not clear to me that he ever does.
Right.
He's off script.
No, he's just like, it's a script.
Oh, all right.
You know, like, amoral.
A script.
A script.
As opposed to a script.
Oh, right.
Off-script refers to a script.
A script acknowledges that there never was any.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right.
Back to the olive oil, if I can find my place.
You know, the joy, the laughter, may be due to the amount of olive oil that you put in that salad last night.
This may be a direct result.
It could be.
Yeah.
Right.
So we were discussing T.J.
Robinson, also known as the olive oil hunter, which I had mentioned.
He brings the freshest and most flavorful nutrient rich olive oils from harvest to your door.
When we tasted T.J.' 's farm fresh oils, we couldn't believe how delicious they were.
There are several varietals with noticeably different flavors.
We've used them all and in unusual ways.
light dressing on a compress usual ways just like you're about to read a list of things people would be like that's not unusual at all you people are so normal right light dressing, compressi salad, marinated grilled chicken Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Topped with carrots and this awesome vinaigrette you made last night.
Awesome vinaigrette last night.
Okay.
Yep.
And I've also made an orange olive oil cake.
That's me quoting you.
Yeah.
Saying I've also made an awesome orange olive oil cake.
As somebody who has consumed that cake, I can attest to it being fantastic.
It's really good.
A recipe sent by Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
and that is extraordinary it is you will not yeah this I see that my em dashes are confusing I'm a big fan of them as you know but I like them too but I like to know they're coming you will not believe how good this olive oil is and how many uses there are for it so colon olive oil is a succulent delicious food What?
Like cactus.
Yeah, I thought you were going to claim it was a succulent, which it isn't.
I grew up in a house that had an olive tree.
It's not a succulent.
But olive oil is a succulent delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh.
But most supermarket olive oils but most but most supermarket olive oil sit on the shelf for months or even years growing stale dull flavorless even rancid the solution is to have fresh pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to your To you, not your, to your house, but to you, because you live in your house, after each new harvest.
When the oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak, that's when it should be shipped to you.
I'm totally blaming the olive oil for this, because we're sober.
We are sober.
I think it's the middle ad spot that's stirring me.
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Did it!
Survived.
Nailed it.
I wouldn't say that, but survived.
Gimme.
I'm going to take that from you.
Before I do more harm.
Before you read again.
Yes, all right.
Yeah, okay.
We do have one final sponsor, as always.
I don't know if this is going to be as ridiculous a read as those last two, but let's see.
Our final sponsor this week is Timeline.
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Now, you said the damaged mitochondria accumulate in joints, and I'm imagining some kind of a seedy, dark, low-energy bar where mitochondria are barely able to stay on their bar stools.
Backs up to an alley.
Yeah.
That isn't cleaned very often.
Maybe some crimes happen there.
Yeah, every so often the mitochondria throws another out the plate glass window, that kind of thing.
Right into the platelets.
Whoa.
That got physiological fast.
I mean, you had us in mitochondria pub land.
I guess I did.
I guess I did.
All right.
I want to start this week with a reading.
Some people detest it when I do this, but a lot of people enjoy it, so I'm going to go with the people who enjoy it.
I read an article this week in The Guardian, an op-ed that I'm going to just read you the first couple paragraphs from, and I had enough of a response to it that I wrote that response for Natural Selections this week.
And people are really resonating with it.
You haven't heard, you don't know what it's about even.
So I'm sharing this with you for the first time and then we'll discuss.
Assuming I don't storm off.
You're not going to storm off.
For one thing, I've glued you to your chair.
Thanks for warning me.
Uh, let's see.
Okay, so, we're gonna start, um, I'll just show you, um, you can show my screen now.
Um, uh, this, The Guardian, An Opinion, um, in the category Women, uh, by a woman named Van Battam.
Uh, the title is Girls Ignore the Sexist Rhetoric, Revel in Everything That Upsets the Haters.
The Preferred Model of Femininity for the Yelping Far Right is the Homebound Tradwife, Let Them Cry and Keep Boxing.
And for those of you just listening, there's a picture of Algerian boxer Ameen Khalif looking as feminine as I've ever seen him look as the headliner for the article.
The first two paragraphs of the op-ed read, The saga of the Algerian boxer Amine Khalif at the Olympics.
The explosive Times feature about the tradwife Hannah Nealman.
Whatever has happened to the Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D.
Vance to make him once insist that a coven of vengeful witches—sorry, childless cat ladies—are hexing ruin on people's lives.
They're not news stories.
They're concurrent threads in the dystopian nightmare being woven for Western women by the kind of far-right political forces you wouldn't want near you to darn your damn socks.
And it continues in sort of that vein.
And so I had, as you might expect, a response to this piece.
And I use in my piece a different picture of the same Algerian boxer looking rather less feminine, which is easy for him because, of course, he's not a woman.
He's a man.
Here it is.
I'm going to read it.
I'll make it a little bit bigger so that people can see as well.
I call it an open letter.
Why have the sexist tropes returned?
Dear Miss Badham, I read with interest your recent opinion piece for The Guardian, the one titled, Girls, Ignore the Sexist Rhetoric, Revel in Everything That Upsets the Haters.
Like you, I am a Gen X woman.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, lucky both in when I was born, but also in where and to whom, for I had no doors closed to me on account of my sex.
Like you, I despair when I see the resurgence of sexist tropes, all sparkly like knights in shining armor, here to save womanhood and return us to our rightful place on the domestic altar, spatulas and brooms close at hand.
I thought that we had long since gotten past such aggressive fantasies.
Like you, I would have women be proud of our educations, love our careers, and have families that are shaped by love and by choice.
I am, I do, and I have.
And yet, despite those similarities in our experiences and worldviews, I think you've gotten just about everything wrong.
It is not the hard-earned successes of women that have caused a regressive backlash against us.
No.
Having benefited from our predecessors who fought for the right to work outside the home, buy property, make legal decisions for ourselves, and receive equal pay for equal work, to name just a few past wins, many women seem to have forgotten how much we have won, and how equal the playing field has become.
All too often now, the demands being made are for a decidedly unequal playing field, in which women get all the benefits and pay none of the costs.
Demanding everything, while pretending that we have nothing, is neither a stable nor an honourable game.
We should not be surprised that people are beginning to notice.
Too many women have gleefully taken power from men and wielded it as indiscriminately as men did when they had it.
We are suffering an epidemic of toxic femininity.
Remember Me Too?
It had the potential to reveal to men, the vast majority of men who are good, that the vast majority of women have had run-ins with bad men.
It won't be obvious to good men, who presumably mostly have friends who are also good men, that the small minority of men who aren't good managed to have a disproportionate impact on women.
Most women have been on the receiving end of toxic male behavior, even though most men would never behave that way.
The good men deserve to know this, and they want to know this.
But instead, Me Too turned into a nasty, vengeful movement in which obvious truths, like Matt Damon's observation that an unwanted pat on the butt is not the same as rape, were met with outrage.
Instead of being heralded as a good man who is aware of the different social realities that men and women live in, he was told to sit down and shut up.
It was not, he was told, his turn to speak.
Past injustice is no excuse for injustice in the present, though.
That response to Matt Damon and others like him?
That was women being bad to men.
And the societal response was to celebrate the bad behavior of the women who scolded him.
Of course people are angry.
I believe that much of what you are defending in your piece is part and parcel of what got us into the mess that we now find ourselves in.
Third Wave Feminism embraces sex positivity, in which everyone pretends that young women didn't always have access to all the sex they wanted, while desire for lasting commitment or emotional depth is seen as a flaw.
In short, women get the privilege of acting like men at their stupidest.
How awesome for us all.
Some confused versions of feminism want men and women to be not just equal, but the same.
We're not.
And while I would not suggest that being a parent should be required in order to hold high office, it is a modern oddity that so many people who are deciding our fates do not have children of their own.
Being a parent changes you.
This is especially true for women.
There is no love as fierce or as fearsome as that for one's child.
While women, on average, are more agreeable than men, more likely to affirm others' choices and comply with the will of the majority, mama bears are a force of nature.
Mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened.
Except when they don't.
Those same traits that make women, on average, more likely to be compassionate, to care for the weak and the powerless, to go into healing professions rather than destructive ones.
Those same traits that help mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened, can be weaponized towards demonic ends.
Mothers are being convinced that the playful fantasies of their children warrant hormones and surgery.
Mothers are being convinced that telling children no and resisting their tantrums is bad parenting.
After women led the calls to defund the police across American cities in 2020, the resultant crime waves and accelerating urban decay should have come as no surprise to anyone.
Many people could see the problems with the policies that were being proposed, mostly by women.
And yet city councils and legislators enacted the policies throughout the land.
Why?
In part, because in today's environment, telling women that their ideas are bad is a kind of hate crime.
The power grab and biological confusion of modern feminism doesn't resemble the feminism that we Gen Xers grew up with.
It really doesn't.
And then there's this.
The amazing knots that you tie yourself into, you along with so many other women, as you try to make real concerns about actual biology out to be exclusively the ravings of angry young basement-dwelling men.
Are there men who are spewing bile on the internet, enraged and hurt that no woman is interested in being with them?
There are, to be sure.
But there are also a large number of people, myself included, who are concerned about what happened in the Olympics because we care about women's rights, about sport, and about reality.
I happen to be a biologist, but it doesn't take one to know what a woman is.
I can attest that Mayim Khalif, the Algerian athlete who took home gold in women's boxing, is not a woman.
I am not part of what you call the, quote, let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe, and exist on this earth brigade.
In fact, here I laid out, linking to another piece of mine, precisely what I understand to be possible for women.
The answer is nearly everything.
Girls can aspire to be astronauts and mothers, chefs and CEOs, athletes and mathematicians, and the women they will become might well become any one or more of those things.
Why?
Because the one and only universal thing that girls do when they grow up is they become women.
You also suggest that those who complain about Ameen Khalif's conduct in the Olympics are doing so because Khalif refuses to, quote, portray herself as an aspirational, sports-illustrated swimsuit model, end quote.
In this sad world that you are positing, the only reason for people to have concerns about the legitimacy of athletes who present themselves as women is that they don't satisfy male fantasies of womanhood.
That's not it at all, of course.
What I and many others are objecting to is that Ameen Khalif is a man competing in the women's category.
Ameen Khalif is XY, and almost certainly has one of several well-understood disorders of sexual development.
This means that, when Khalif was born, he appeared to be female, and lived as if a girl until puberty hit.
But male puberty transformed his external appearance into that of a man, which is, in fact, what he now is.
Just as girls become women, boys become men.
It can't be an easy thing to believe yourself to be a girl, and have everyone around you believe that you are a girl, only to have adolescence reveal that everyone was wrong.
But as much compassion as we might have for the younger Khalif, who no doubt went through a baffling and painful puberty, we owe the adult Khalif, a man who takes pleasure in beating up women, no compassion at all.
Would that Khalif were not encouraged in his delusions by a world of people who have forgotten how to say no.
There again is the misplaced compassion of women being weaponized against their own selves.
Meanwhile, over in Olympic Beach Volleyball, we saw two different ways that women are objectified in the world.
Would we have women covered like walking corpses so that no man might catch a scintillating glimpse of flesh, as the Egyptian women were dressed?
Or do we prefer the wedgie bikinis of the Spanish team, who seem to be preparing for future careers on OnlyFans?
Surely we can agree that both of these are failure modes.
Neither is a win for women.
And neither can be blamed on the yelping far right that you invoke as responsible for the trials and tribulations of modern women.
Nope.
Finally, you write, Vote for a woman not because she's a woman, but because she's the best at the job.
Amen.
But wait.
Surely you can't be speaking of Kamala Harris here.
Perhaps it's just my American bias to think that, but just in case you are, back in the day, before Harris was chosen to be Biden's VP, he vowed to choose a woman for Vice President.
The immutable demographics of his future pick meant more to him than her skills.
She wasn't chosen because she was best, but because she was a woman.
Even so, we should still vote for who is best, even if our candidates were not chosen because they're the best.
I do not believe that anyone with a basic understanding of the English language or with an interest in any policy that a President of the United States might affect could believe that Harris could be best at that job.
She has no stated positions, has accomplished nothing, and can barely speak in coherent sentences.
What her ascendancy tells me about those who gave her the path to power is that it doesn't matter to them that she is incompetent.
It just matters that she looks the part.
You might have us vote for the person best for the job.
They just want us to vote for a woman.
Any woman.
In fact, it is a reasonable read on the situation to suggest that the choice of this particular woman means that the powers that be, in this case the Democratic National Committee, may actually believe that this is the best a woman can be.
They're wrong, of course.
You know that.
I know that.
But the world is beginning to forget.
Push enough incompetent people to the top because of their immutable characteristics, leaving analytically and creatively talented people in the dust, and you will find that some people start to pine for the old days.
The days when those silly women would stay home and tend to the only work they are suited for.
Step aside, ladies, and let the men do the work of the world.
Extremely powerful and it gives voice to something that I You have been all over this issue, but there is a position that needs to be articulated and I think you've done a very
a marvelous job here which is that we can't go back there's nowhere to go back to and we can't continue with this madness yeah um and so the idea that actually there are a lot of things that we're doing wrong that we can just stop doing but the relationship between the sexes has changed inherently it will not go back to what it once was and that means that Taking and choosing tropes from some past world is going to be fraught with its own problems.
You're effectively being postmodern if you don't have a model of why those things were the way they are and which of those things are still relevant.
So, we are going to be in new territory.
And, um, that, you know, therefore we have to be looking at what is possible and what is desirable and choosing that way rather than mocking those who see the traditional stuff as valuable and therefore embracing the insanity of the present, which is every bit as bad.
You know, it actually hadn't occurred to me until you were just talking that there is an inherent argument in pieces like the one I'm responding to here that are very much like something we've talked about before, and we haven't really arrived at a good name for it, but it's not exactly the, I've recognized a problem and here's the solution, and if you don't agree with my solution, then you must not recognize the problem.
It's not exactly that, but it's Oh.
We're here.
There's that other thing.
And those are the only two options.
So if you're not with us, then you're with them.
Yeah.
So there is this inherent, like, dyadic, binary tribalism assumed in the argument.
And, effectively, what I think the Guardian op-ed is doing, and what so many people on the, for lack of a better term, the woke left are doing, is saying, the trad wife thing is a fantasy, and it won't work for any number of reasons, and we're not into it.
Therefore, all of these things that we're doing now are the thing to do.
And if you don't agree with us there, then you must be into the trad life, or whatever it is.
And no, just no.
As I begin the piece with, and as we've talked about a lot, both on air and off, We were going in the right direction.
I really did.
I know that I was lucky both in when I was born and where I was born and to whom I was born, as I say.
The combination of those, being born Gen X in LA to awesome parents who didn't think that I should be restrained from whatever my interests were based on the sex I was born as, meant that no doors were closed.
Increasingly, we find people constraining people based on their sex on both supposed sides of the political spectrum.
We're going backwards in every single possible way.
It's one of the great triumphs of liberalism.
And the problem is that it was like we got just almost exactly to the place we needed to get to.
And as you point to in your piece, you benefited from being right there at that moment where nothing was off limits to you.
And then the train just didn't slow down.
It just blew through the station and it was like, no, now how do you phrase it?
I want to go back to the traditional?
No, I wanted to go back to the station where we had busted all the... It's the last branching point and continue on to see what, you know, to get to, you know, greater parity of opportunity.
Of opportunity.
You make with it what you will.
Without pretending that we are the same.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And
You know ironically in this moment where traditionalism is making some kind of a comeback and it's not that I don't recognize that there are a lot of values in our history that we need to protect because we do so there is this thread of conservatism that very naturally rises at a moment where you've gone too far but the point is you know all of the people who are making the point about the traditional values are actually the female ones are really demonstrating
What you've demonstrated and what you've spoken to here, right?
You know, Megyn Kelly, for example, is a marvelous example of a highly successful career woman.
She has a family.
She speaks to the traditional values without having, you know, surrendered to the world where, you know, men did the cool stuff out in the world and women are back home, right?
So, you know, she, Mary Harrington, we could probably go all day naming women who have demonstrated what has been possible.
And the question is why, you know, anytime you're maximizing stuff, you're screwing up, right?
Maximize any value and you're just going to crash the rest of them.
And so, you know, uh, I mean, that is there are multiple ways we could describe the failings of a communist mindset.
But the idea that, you know, if equal opportunity is good, equal outcomes are better.
No, quite the opposite.
Right.
Equal opportunity is the thing.
That's the station.
Now stop.
Right.
Equal opportunity really has to mean, oh, there's no bar to you figuring out how to produce wealth and get paid for it.
And yes, the more you do, the better off you should be.
And there's also, I think, implicit in what I've written here and explicit in many of our conversations, the point that the isms aren't all the same, right?
The ways that people imagine that, you know, men and women are different and therefore, you know, really different in what they should be doing in the world and what their capacities are, is different from the racism that people have when they imagine the different races are really different and really different in their capacities and what they should be doing in the world.
Because every single culture has always had a roughly, for, you know, solid reasons, equal ratio of men and women, and division of labor has made sense from before there were men and women, right?
And the particular ways that we divide labor are changing, but some of them are immutable.
You know, gestation and lactation is not going to become a male activity.
And, you know, no man of wishing it were so is going to change that.
But you got something?
I do have a couple somethings, but I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, no, no.
Trying to not forget them.
Yeah, yeah.
There are some points that are crystal clear, straightforward, but so subtle that it is almost impossible to make them and get them heard.
They get misheard almost automatically.
And two of them come up here.
One of them has to do with the distinction you say, the isms aren't all equivalent.
Yeah.
And you're absolutely right about this, right?
Sexism and racism both suck, but they are very different levels of difficult to deal with, right?
In fact, one of the reasons that we did so well, that we did get to the station where women were effectively free to do whatever it is that they wished,
And that we still have massive disparities between races which are not inherently the result of modern racism Some of it is but a lot of it is not a Lot of it is owing to historical racism that gets built into things like zip codes that continue to exert forces Even though there may be no racists enforcing it but There's this biological point which you will of course know as well as I do which is that
Most of your genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in female bodies and they don't know which body they're going to be in until the zygote is formed.
That means it doesn't make sense for a kind of genetic sexism to get built in.
Boy genes don't gang up on girl genes because most genes are both, right?
So you don't get a genetic bias.
You get a division of labor which then may be very unfair to one sex or the other or maybe unfair to both.
I mean women have Men have suffered from having a hell of a lot less choice about what they do in life, but men have suffered from having a hell of a lot less choice about whether they get sent to a foreign battlefield and get their heads blown off.
So, you know, neither of those is great, right?
So anyway, we did succeed with sex.
It is a demonstration of what is possible, and it is also a demonstration of the fact that you need to know what you're aiming for so you do stop at the station.
So that distinction between race and sex because one of them actually unfortunately can be built into our genes and we need to be very deliberate about thinking how we avoid one group's genes from ganging up on another's.
You don't have in-group out-group dynamics between the sexes.
Long-term they're not written into the genome you may get temporary stuff But it's that it doesn't make any sense for the boy genes to rig the world against the girl genes because the next generation The genes that were in the boy have a 50% chance of being in a girl, right?
So a truly difficult point for people to get if you haven't thought about the genetics Underpinning these two bad patterns and what can evolve and what wouldn't make any sense to evolve the other one of these really difficult points Has to do with what you're calling the two failure modes.
It's very easy to look across At the divide and see the other failure mode and see you know burkas or the beach volleyball Modification of such a thing and to see This yeah, I want to show it to say to see people being oppressed and it's not wrong there's an oppression there and
On the other hand, you know, a world in which girls are, uh, you know, brought into the expectation that everything is going to, you know, be, you know, only fans adjacent, right?
That's not a healthy world.
It's not good for women to see that and, and to, you know, to see that this is the expectation that this is a market force.
This is the pornification of everything.
Right?
And we can argue about whether OnlyFans is better or worse than some commodified video, you know?
But it's bad for girls to have that expectation.
Imposed upon them.
And so, once you realize that, first of all, not only are these both failure modes, but how does it look from the culture that has, you know, women covered up at some extraordinary level, right?
They look across and they see our culture and they say, well, you know, exactly what are you accusing us of?
Look what you're doing, right?
And, you know, not a wrong point.
Okay, that's all I had.
I think this is a really beautifully written piece and it makes an incredibly important point.
Glad to see it.
Thank you.
I thought you had more notes from before that you were going to go to, but yeah, maybe that's it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, it turns out that the next thing that we are going to discuss, of course, follows from the same set of concepts.
We are going to discuss the Rescue the Republic Rally, which I and Matt Toon and Angela McArdle have put together, which is going to be held on September 29th on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.
The exact location is between the World War II Memorial and the Washington Monument.
It's a lovely spot.
It's obviously a very important moment and the event is shaping up to be, I think, very powerful.
What we've already got dialed in and in ink is going to make for an epic event.
And there are other things that we are on the verge of locking down which will make it even better.
You and I are both going to speak there.
Matt Taibbi will be speaking there.
JP Sears.
We have comedy.
We have music.
We have a really what will be an excellent program.
But of course the most important thing is the mission that has us going through all of this effort to produce this event.
And we have gone through, as you would imagine, a lot of rigmarole trying to figure out how to frame the event so people will understand what it is.
We've talked about the concept of Rescue the West, of Defending the West, and in the end, Although everybody who sat down to hear what we had to say about what the West is was favorable, the initial reaction that people have to the invocation of the West is complex and troubling because most people don't have, they only have a loose sense of what the West might even be, right?
It's either unclear to them what it means, or it's actually divisive, which seems impossible for us to understand, having been defenders of the West.
But for many people, the West does not evoke warm and fuzzy feelings.
Right.
Yeah, they have connotations about particular historical facts, which definitely accompany countries that are associated with that term.
But just to put it simply, so that people who have been hearing me or us talk about the West, defending it, rescuing it, are not confused about what that refers to.
The West is not a geographic distinction.
It's not a list of countries.
And the places that we think of as the West sometimes fall down on their obligations and they don't behave like the West.
And then other times you find places living up to a Western ideal that you don't expect.
So, you know, we saw that in in the Czech Republic when we were recently traveling there, where the spirit of the West seemed to be alive and well, although, you know, Central Europe is not typically what comes to mind when we use that term.
But the flame is very much alive there.
Yeah, very much alive.
And I've now seen it in a couple of other places, too.
It seems to be, especially in places that were behind the Iron Curtain, that there is a kind of resistance to the things that are disassembling the West in the countries that we usually think of.
And they've spotted it, and they're not having any of it.
When you're at risk of losing a thing of value, you come to understand its value.
Yeah, yeah.
Would that Americans would begin to wake up to that as well?
Yes, there are a number of lyrics that speak to this.
Big yellow taxi, but it'll take me a little while to come up with them.
I won't detain us.
So anyway, let me just lay out the very basics of what the West is and then talk about Rescue the Republic, which is the name of the event.
Rescue the Republic, Join the Resistance.
So the West, as we understand it, is an agreement on a level playing field.
It is not a claim that the playing field has ever been perfectly level.
It is not a utopian idea that the playing field can be made perfectly level.
But it is an agreement not to rig the world on behalf of your people.
Right?
If you are on board with the idea that the world should be fair, maybe you think you're going to do really well in a fair world because you believe you have what it takes to compete, great.
But if you want to rig the world in favor of your people, that's not the West.
That's the opposite of the West.
The West, as enshrined in our Constitution, for example,
is an agreement that everybody should have access to the market and that we it's not an end to competition we should compete rather than fight and we should not rig the system and it is also an agreement therefore not to redistribute the productivity of civilization but to distribute opportunity as widely as possible and I hope people can glean that distinction.
That there is no argument, I have literally never heard an argument, for why it would be better to have opportunity anything other than perfectly well distributed.
If you believe in the market, then the point is you also believe that the market succeeds better in generating wealth when everybody has access to it.
The more you limit the access to the market, the less we actually accomplish.
Well, what I hear and what I think is legitimate critique, but not exactly of that point, is you can want equality of opportunity, but you will never get completely equal opportunity without doing some social engineering that no one wants, right?
Because children born to different families inherently have different opportunity, and you would not take from those children or their parents the work that those parents put into providing their children as much opportunity as possible.
The idea of what you just said, perfectly equal opportunity, we can't get there, nor would some of the social engineering that would be required to get us closer be honourable or good.
No, and I think a sophisticated understanding of this recognizes that even to the extent that you see a suboptimal leveling of the playing field that might be amenable to some kind of social engineering, that in general social engineering comes with a whole bunch of unintended consequences.
And so you would have to have a really clear path to improving something without a much larger risk in order to even contemplate doing it.
So what is perfectly level playing field?
It's an imaginary place that we can't get to.
But what should we be shooting for?
We should be shooting for a playing field that is level enough that anybody who dedicates themselves to it can take themselves out of where they are and by productively contributing to the world better themselves and end up in a better spot than they've been.
Yeah.
So, anyway, that's the West.
Don't rig the world in favor of your people.
If you're rigging the world in favor of your people, I don't care what flag you're flying, I don't care, you know, how well you sing the National Anthem, you're not really in on the project.
If you're willing to unrig the world, You know, you're in no matter where you are, no matter what color your skin is, no matter what flag flies over your country.
So that's the basics.
Now, obviously, rescuing the Republic is a little bit of a different project.
I see them as so closely related that, you know, in order to rescue the West, we can't have America fail, right?
America is a key element of this project.
America sometimes falls down on its obligations.
Uh, to unrig the world.
Sometimes it's, you know, it's rigged the world.
Um, but that is the objective that we patriots are signed up for.
And the Republic is in serious jeopardy.
Um, it's in serious jeopardy for reasons that will be obvious to many and are apparently invisible to others.
I've started hearing a I started hearing trial balloons of a particular, what I think is a pseudo-sophistication, actually being said by some people I quite like.
I will leave them out of it.
But the trial balloon, which I think is going to develop into a refrain for some large number of middle grounders, right?
People who are trying to avoid the fray for various reasons.
Is, you know what?
Both sides think the other side is a threat to democracy, to the West, to the world.
It's going to be fine.
Right?
It's always fine.
And the answer is, there is a pattern of it always being fine.
It's always been fine enough.
But if you really think that the threat to the West doesn't exist here, and that this is just some kind of natural ebb and flow, you're not paying attention.
And it hasn't always been fine.
Well, it depends on what time frame and what narrow context you're talking about.
You know, has the American experiment in the 20th century ever completely failed?
No.
Right.
Okay.
So if you want to constrain it that way, sure, it's always been fine.
But there's been plenty of loss and revolution and destruction throughout history when things did not turn out to be fine.
Yep, and I think that this is kind of the point.
The more you zoom out, either in space or in time, the more you recognize that what actually keeps the experiment functioning is fragile and is not completely understood.
Right?
To the extent that you have a system that works, you don't necessarily know which are the essential pieces.
It's like a biological system, right?
It doesn't come with labels on everything that functions.
You don't understand what happens, you know?
What happened when birth control liberated people to choose when to produce families and how big to make them.
Well, you got a huge burst of liberty, right?
And then you got a whole burst of other stuff that was confusing because it took the incentives of the system and it jumbled them and it left some of them in place and it took others away.
And then we pretended that there were no other effects except for the burst of liberty.
Right.
And then it reduced the birth rate radically.
Why?
Oh, that one's actually predictable, right?
It's predictable because even if people all decide to have children, if they decide to have children late in life, you're reducing the rate of population growth.
So now we have a problem where our economic models are based on the fact that a population was going to show up and it turns out that we've got a burst of antinatalism on top of a long-standing trend of producing families later.
And so the point is it's cascading unintended consequences.
This is fragile.
Nobody understands it completely.
And to the extent that you have a fragile system that is as productive as our system is.
I'm not saying fair.
As productive as our system is, you've got to ask really difficult questions.
Like, okay, let's take people who are badly treated in our system.
People who really got the short end of the stick.
Are they better off than having a fairer deal in a vastly less productive system?
Most of them are.
Right?
That's a tough thing to navigate because what it means is really you should push towards making the system distribute opportunity more fairly, which is frankly a multi-generation puzzle.
But the idea of upending the system because you're galled by the degree to which it's unfair is preposterous if you don't have a baseline to compare it to.
Well, I mean, this raises the question of We've talked before about what happiness is, and you have pointed out that it is in relation to another state, either a state of someone else or your own state before, right?
Better that you compare it to your own state before, but even so, it can't be a static thing.
You can't just be like, I'm going to be happy, and once I attain that happiness, I will just be happy forever after.
That's not how happiness works.
It is inherently comparative.
Wealth, like, The ability to have the things that you need and potentially grow in a system, which is what civilization seems to be in the business of helping us find, can be an absolute measure.
Put inflation aside for the moment.
Obviously, you can't really, but there is an amount that $5,000 buys in the world.
There is an amount that $5,000 buys in the world.
And the fact that there were people with $500,000 to spend and you only have $5,000 to spend may be jarring.
But if there are goods that are available for $5,000 and your neighbor, presumably not your neighbor at a difference of that much, but your neighbor who has 100 times the amount to spend can buy 100 times the stuff.
But if $5,000 is actually sufficient to get the stuff that you need, then the fact that your neighbor has more is secondary.
But what...
What socialism would have us do and what much of the woke left would have us focus on is, but do you have what you deserve when you compare yourself to others?
As opposed to, have you worked hard to get what you need and can you continue to work hard comparing yourself to yourself and to your own work ethic and productivity?
So, it's absolute versus relative measures that are often confused, I think, in these economic analyses and these lay economic analyses.
Like, well, I may have enough, but look at how much more these other people have.
It's like, well, the growing disparity in wealth is something that we should be concerned about.
But noting that other people are making more and they are working harder is actually not an argument against them making more.
Yeah, and ironically the system of Long ago, I realized that happiness was a problem because it was a thermostat.
Um, so what others have called the hedonic treadmill, um, the idea that, you know, you think X is going to make you happy.
I'm not talking about the platform.
I think some, something that will be symbolized here by X is going to make you happy.
And then it does when you get it.
But the point is.
No one thinks the platform X is going to make you happy.
But yeah.
It's not stable, and there's a reason it's not stable, and that's because a satisfied critter does not find opportunity when it's right in front of them, right?
So the point is, evolution didn't build a satisfiable creature, and that's not a bad thing, right?
You can look at it and you can be horrified and you can think, well, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could be?
But the idea is the striving is actually the point and it's not that you know there's there's a dumb version of it's about the journey and there's a smart version of it's about the journey.
You know we're none of us are getting out of here alive and the point is what can you make of your opportunity while you're here Well, it just so happens that that need to strive that causes you to pursue things you think will make you happy that do but only temporarily and then you're on to the next thing that keeps you finding the opportunity and then there's this really weird thing.
You produce kids.
And if you're properly wired and you've raised them so they're properly wired, as they take over this job and they start finding opportunity because they're not satisfiable either, their successes contribute to your happiness.
Ain't it weird that we're structured that way?
No, it's the obvious way, given what we are, right?
In retrospect, it makes so much sense.
I'm this is a little bit of a non sequitur but I'm reminded of I just heard this so I haven't even chased down I think what I'm about to report is true but apparently Simone Biles the the gymnast who I guess took home a lot of gold again like I both of us didn't watch the Olympics this year it was so Disgusting on so many fronts.
But, you know, we know her from past Olympics.
She's awesome.
But apparently she had something to say to the media after winning one of her medals this time.
And it was One of the questions that you always ask us, you have to stop asking us, right?
As we've just come off the podium, or about to go onto the podium, and the question is, like, what's next?
And, you know, her point is, like, let us enjoy this.
Let us be in this moment, which we have been working towards for, you know, years in many cases, and I think she's going to retire.
So, in some cases, like, this is the pinnacle Do not force her off that pinnacle sooner than she has to go.
Everyone knows that, you know, having just won the big game or having just earned the big medal or having given the right speech or, you know, whatever it is, that that moment is extraordinary and that no one can take that that happened away from you.
But the longer, the more time elapses since then, the more it is not the main thing in your life.
And, you know, Everyone will have had something that was actually the best moment, and...
Is that sad, you know, that maybe the best moment is behind you?
And maybe you can recognize that at least athletically the best moment is behind you?
Maybe.
But certainly don't push a person off that sooner than they need to go.
Right!
But I mean, this points to, like, yes, there will be another thing.
And, you know, there will be a shift and I will do something new and you'll see me again.
But for right now, this is what I'm doing.
Like, this is the thing.
So it's a dumb example, but it's the place where this sort of clicked for me.
Um, I can't remember where or when, but, uh, you and I were at a party, uh, where our friend Gary was and, uh, Gary had finished his drink and I said, do you need another?
And he said, I don't know.
I'm kind of nursing a buzz.
It's like, You're still getting the payoff from that one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why would you ask somebody who just had one of the great triumphs of their life?
What's next right?
It's like, you know, this ain't gonna last forever.
Let me let me enjoy it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah So, alright, let's talk a little bit more about why?
We have this beautiful imperfect It's a fragile system that we are very foolishly putting in huge danger.
And I don't think it's just us putting it in danger, but because we don't value it enough because it still works well enough that most of us enjoy the benefits of it without understanding, you know, what those creaking noises mean about the structure of the ship.
But, so let's talk a little bit more about why we need to ignore and maybe persuade the people who are about to tell us, oh, you know what?
You're freaking out over nothing.
Yes, whatever happens, it's going to be fine, right?
No, you don't know what time it is.
You really don't.
And the examples, I want to just pick two examples that I think are resonant in the moment and make the point crystal clear.
One of them relates to something we talked about on our last live stream, which is the situation in Britain.
And I want to focus on a different piece of it.
We talked last time about the fact that you have a... I think they've now calmed down, though frankly it's very hard to know what is happening there because of the restrictions, which are going to be my central point.
But the...
We talked last time about the odd fact of in Northern Ireland Protestants and Catholics joining forces against what they perceived to be as an unacceptable influx of immigrants.
So riots broke out in the aftermath of some murders of some girls by apparently I think the status of the immigrants in question is a little bit questionable, but nonetheless it resulted in this pent up anger over immigration bubbling over into riots.
But the truly distressing thing above and beyond the immigration crisis and the riots is the British government.
instituting rules about whether or not you can even discuss what is taking place and in effect what I know from my British friends is that you are now in jeopardy of going to jail based on things that you post on your Facebook page or your Twitter feed
Um, even things that you email to somebody or privately discuss across some electronic medium puts you in jeopardy.
And if that wasn't terrifying enough, the Brits are actually threatening to extradite Americans and lock them up in British prison over such things.
Now, there are a number of things going on here that I think are beyond alarming.
One it is certainly true that the Brits do not have an industrial-strength Constitution with the First Amendment protecting free speech rights in the way that we do so they are much more vulnerable to this stuff But as I've argued many times here the Five Eyes Alliance Sometimes when I count them I get to six, but the Five Eyes Alliance is
Is an agreement between nations that are understood to be Western and to value freedom.
It is an agreement between these nations to violate the rights of each other's citizens.
Because the founders did not anticipate that you would be able to farm out surveillance of your own citizens to some foreign country and thereby skirt the protections in the Constitution.
They didn't write in a way that protects us from it.
So by joining this alliance, All of these constitutions, and whatever functions in their stead in other countries, have been greatly weakened.
And here you can see just how weak they are.
That the US citizens are being threatened by the British government, or discussing events in Britain, openly, in America,
Tells you that something is desperately off because what should have happened is Joe Biden, who is nominally our president, or whoever is actually our president, whatever committee that is, should have fired back through whatever mechanism a president fires back.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You're going to imprison American citizens?
No.
Right?
We fought you once, we'll fight you again.
Right?
But instead, they're partnered.
Right?
Yeah.
They're partnered.
And so, that is a terrifying hint of what actually lies in store for us.
The deep state isn't a state.
Right?
It's now supranational.
It has an instantiation that is big enough to infringe all of our rights because if your rights exist here, they don't exist there.
That is a really frightening situation to be in, and the fact that it did not get an immediate rejection by something on this side of the pond tells you, actually, this is for real.
Right?
We are now accepting that free speech doesn't exist because the Brits can prosecute you for it, even if we can't.
Okay?
Terrifying.
Now, the other thing I wanted to point to is on this side of the pond, and it's a story that I've only just become aware of.
It's apparently been circulating for a number of weeks, but there are three whistleblowers who have emerged.
Wow.
Maddy, our Labrador does not like whistleblowers.
No, she should like whistle.
I think she doesn't like what happened to the whistleblowers, which she intuits.
So we've got three whistleblowers from the Customs and Border Protection Service, which is a subsidiary department of the Department of Homeland Security.
And they have come forward with some shocking claims with a bunch of evidence and it implies terrifying things about what's taking place in this country and interestingly on a related topic to the one we just discussed.
This all starts with illegal immigration.
So isn't it interesting that Europe Both continental Europe and Great Britain have a massive influx of immigrants that challenges the very notion of what it means to be a nation.
Presumably there is some rate of immigration that makes it hard to remain a people.
That rate of immigration is presumably higher if the people who are immigrating want to be there and are eager to join your society.
It's presumably much lower if they aren't interested in joining your society.
They are just interested in being physically present in your borders.
Which appears to be a lot of what's going on both in Europe and Great Britain on the one hand and in the U.S.
But we have a problem.
A massive influx of immigrants from all over the world, frankly.
Some of them are Latin American, but many of them are not, as viewers of Dark Horse know from Zach and my trip to the Darien Gap with Michael Yan and our reporting on it.
We have this massive influx of immigrants, but what these whistleblowers have pointed out is that there is a law, a 2005 law, which very clearly states that the Border Patrol should be taking DNA from people who end up in their custody due to illegal immigration.
They should be taking a DNA sample from all of the people who they end up taking into custody.
And the actual rate at which they are doing this is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent.
So most of the people coming in the country and it is not... I'm sorry, this is legal and illegal immigration?
No, no, this is illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants who are who are stopped by American Customs and Border Service people are supposed to be taking basically genetic data, so presumably so that if they are seen in the system again, it is clear that they've been seen once.
If they're, you know, let's say that you have a series of crimes and there's evidence and it shows one person's DNA is involved in several crimes, you know at least that you're looking for a person, right?
Whereas if this person has never had their DNA taken, you don't know how many criminals are responsible for this particular
set of crimes because you know nothing and what Zach and I learned in our trip to to Panama is that the Process of illegal immigrants coming across the border is that at most They are having names taken that aren't even established with any official documentation in fact documents are often jettisoned at the border and people just simply claim to have a name and they are
You know, logged by that name, true or false, and then they disappear into the interior.
Sometimes they are transported into the interior by assets of the federal government.
So it's a shocking breach of our national sovereignty, clearly.
It is clearly being facilitated, not just allowed, but facilitated by the Department of Homeland Security.
Secretary Mayorkas, in fact, had visited the very camp where the central entry point for Chinese immigrants coming into Panama.
Mayorkas went there, he enlarged the camp.
So this is all happening with the awareness of the Department of Homeland Security, with their facilitation, and now we find out from these whistleblowers that when people Come into the country illegally and are captured.
They are supposed to have their DNA taken and it is systematically being avoided.
And what has happened to these whistleblowers tells you something about the true dimension of this story.
Which is these whistleblowers have been ruthlessly punished.
And in fact, there's an internal memo that they were able to get, not because they were given it, but because they were actually able to obtain it through legal discovery.
They forced this thing loose so that they could look at it, which acknowledges that they've been punished with... they've been, you know, given...
Unenviable desk jobs.
They've had their service weapon taken from them, which is a symbolic humiliation.
You'll remember from the Evergreen story that the protesters wanted to disarm the chief of police.
This is a symbolic slight.
And in fact one of them was told by a superior that the the intent of the department was to To ruin their reputations to bankrupt them and to drive them Potentially to suicide that they would die or commit suicide And that that was that was what was being done to them now
Why this would be done to people who are simply pointing out that a law, a law passed with bipartisan support, I would point out.
This law was passed by both parties who wanted this DNA evidence taken.
When we have a massive influx of people, is that influx of people all likely to be law abiding, hardworking immigrants?
No, because of course, if you have an open border, You're going to have hostile nations are going to dump problem people onto your open border?
Of course they would.
It's a bargain for them, right?
And it's not the first time it's happened either.
Cuba did that many, many years ago.
So we should expect Such folks.
We should also expect folks who have poisoned the well at home.
People who are, you know, just bad.
Right?
And this is the reason that we have a distrust in our, you know, narratives of drifters.
Yep.
Right?
Because people who have no attachments and who show up.
Yes, they might, in this case, be hard-working people looking for opportunity, and I'm sure many of them are, but many of them won't be.
They'll be people who are looking for, you know, new marks, who aren't familiar with their game.
Some of the people coming across the border are criminals.
Yeah.
The obvious mechanism to make sure that if somebody comes across, you're not going to necessarily prevent a crime, but you can at least follow up on it and, you know, catch this person.
So I'm, I'm rambling, but the larger point is the sovereignty of the U.S.
is under threat.
The Department of Homeland Security appears to be beyond complicit.
They're making this happen for reasons that are entirely unclear.
Well, that's the big question, isn't it?
Who wins?
Who benefits from this?
And we don't know.
I will say there is something decidedly anti-patriotic about the behavior of the blue team.
Why it is anti-patriotic, I don't know.
Some of the people, many of the people involved presumably think they are doing something good, but I don't think all of them are.
And, you know, the number of places where I've seen Secretary Mayorkas's name show up in inexcusable fashion, right?
In this case, apparently Secretary Mayorkas is well aware of the failure to apply this 2005 law.
And does nothing about it.
At the same time, he's in Panama facilitating this massive wave of immigration.
So, you know, that's him showing up twice.
His signature is on the the denial of Bobby Kennedy's request for Secret Service protection.
So a lot of people do bad things thinking they're doing good things.
I wonder if Mayorkas is in a different category.
Yeah, slightly lateral point, but remind me, when you and Zach did your Panama reporting in, I think it was January of this year, and you went to a couple of different camps, and they were of two distinct types, right?
One of them had a lot of Latin American people in it, and as I remember it, you reported seeing families, like a sex ratio that looked normal according to what a population looks like.
Certainly closer.
And at the other type of camp of which you only saw one, which was also strangely almost or actually temporarily shuttered the day you were there.
It had greatly reduced flow.
Yeah, and has since apparently, you know, reopened.
It reopened and then strangely had a fire that appears to have burned the records, but The point here is that I'm trying to get to is about the sex ratio, and I don't know what it means, but separately, I don't want to be focused on it, but the demographics in terms of where the people are coming from.
As I remember it, what you reported at that other camp, was that it was not mostly Latin American people who plausibly could have, you know, put all their belongings on their back and walked with their families out of a place where there was no good life for them and were trying to make it to a better land.
which was of course the story that we heard about the immigrants that we interacted with in LA when we were growing up, right?
The Mexicans and the Central Americans who would come with their families to- - And we have run into that very same thing in Ecuador with Venezuelan refugees. - Absolutely, yes.
And so, you know, when, when families come to a place, when families emigrate from a place, they are generally fleeing something bad.
They are leaving, they are maybe leaving from war.
But when it is, as I believe I remember you reporting that mostly what was happening in this other camp was not an even sex ratio, didn't look like families, it was mostly young men.
Men don't flee from war alone and leave the women and children behind, right?
Men go to war alone and leave the women and children behind.
So what war are they coming to?
What war are they coming to create?
Right, and I will remind people this is speculative and delicate, but The history, the recent history in China following the one child policy created a heavily biased sex ratio among young Chinese due to selective abortions of female fetuses.
As I described when we got back from Panama, that is a very surprising Fact in light of a long-standing and well-understood piece of evolutionary logic, which is that when you have a deficit of one sex, the sex ratio tends to correct to 50-50 because the evolutionary payoff for producing the rare sex is high.
So the question is why, when you have a massively biased sex ratio, when everybody's producing sons and nobody's producing daughters, why wasn't there a, why were not daughters prized because they would be able to marry up?
Right?
If you produce a daughter in a population that's heavily male biased, then not only is she sure to find a mate, but she is going to be able to choose.
If you produce a male, he's very likely not to end up with a mate.
And so the question was, is this a presumably evolved preparation for battle?
Do populations ever produce excess males who will be sexually frustrated and can be pointed in the direction of an enemy and given a weapon?
Is that a property of human biology that has been triggered Or is it some other kind of oddity?
And so yes, seeing a heavily male-biased, you know, military-age male-biased population at the San Vicente camp, which is exactly where Mayorkas came, where the
The HIAS organization, which is a non-governmental organization of which Mayorkas was a... I've forgotten what his position at HIAS was, but that was his position prior to being the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
They have their office right at the gate of the San Vicente camp.
So the question is, again, why is Mayorkas showing up in all of these places where the sovereignty of the United States I can't explain it, but the pattern is unmistakable.
What follows in his wake is an amplification of the problem that we face, not a, you know, a solution for that problem.
I can't explain it, but the pattern is unmistakable.
So I would take these two examples, and there are many, many more, of course.
But if you take the British example of the threat to speech, even against Americans who are speaking on their own home territory in ways that are protected by their own constitution, and you take the strangely related through a massive wave of immigration story of and you take the strangely related through a massive wave of immigration story of these border patrol who blew the whistle on the failure
These are telling you that there's something That is jeopardizing the fundamental structure of these two nations, and we could find examples in all of the others, that it's an all-hands-on-deck moment, right?
That's what this is.
And so the Rescue the West, Join the Resistance, Rally, I said it again, didn't I?
Rescue the Republic, Join the Resistance Rally, September 29th on the Capitol Mall between the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial is going to be great.
If you can come join us, please do.
If you can't come join us, watch it on the stream.
There will be one.
And spread the word, right?
The resistance is going to be vast.
We're hoping to have a huge number of people show up and I believe with the lineup of people that we are building there will be a huge number of people but the true resistance is much much larger than the number of people who will be able to physically get to Washington on that day.
So please spread the word and that will also help us.
We've got a number of Uh, really, um, people in their, uh, fields, disciplines, comedians, musicians, uh,
Rebels of all sorts and we have a number of them in pencil trying to rearrange their schedules so they can come if you will spread the word and make it so that Rescue the Republic is a powerful force.
You increased the likelihood that we will be able to bring them there.
So it's going to be a great event no matter what, but please help us out.
Do you want to show the website?
Did you already, you already just did show the website.
So the website is at jointheresistance.org.
All right.
I think that's it.
Cool.
Um, all right.
It's so, it's, it's in one way so much less important and so much more banal.
But I want to talk a little bit about the New York Times.
I remember the New York Times.
Yeah, I remember the New York Times, too.
They published a piece today that's a nothing, a nothing piece, as presumably they do every single day.
It caught my eye, and my first thought was, what I've written here is, it continues to impress with its un-nuanced inanity.
But it's useful, they make the same kind of logical errors that they were making during COVID, and presumably it's continuing to confuse people.
And so I think it's useful to just point out examples when the stakes aren't high, when we're not in the middle of some crisis, you know, on topics about which presumably no one is going to make life or death decisions, and just show the same kind of logic that the New York Times tends to employ.
And so, Let's see this is full screen.
Yeah, so you can show my screen now here.
Scam or not, it's called.
Five health trends we debunked this year.
So right away you kind of know that they were kind of looking for material because the year isn't even close to done and they're like reviewing their own work and you know putting some of their What they consider their best work up here, and then for each of them, there's the article that they wrote that was longer, and I am going to finish by talking about one of those longer articles.
Five health trends we debunked this year, the New York Times says.
Apple cider vinegar, pimple patches, under eye creams.
Do any of these actually work?
Doesn't matter, doesn't matter.
Here we go.
The claim.
Apple cider vinegar is a cure-all.
You've probably seen the videos.
People drink a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar swirled into water with the hope that it will give them a slimmer waistline, clearer skin, a settled stomach, and less drastic blood sugar spikes.
Apple cider vinegar has been used as a folk remedy for thousands of years, and a few of its health claims do have a little science to back them up, but for many of the promised benefits, there's no research at all, experts say.
That's it.
That's it.
That's the analysis.
Remember, the title of this piece is Scam or Not.
They are debunking all of these.
They are claiming to debunk all of these.
Apple cider vinegar being the first one.
They say it's been a folk remedy for thousands of years.
Right there, your default assumption then should be it's doing something that's probably valuable.
That is one of the main lessons of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Like, you know, the test of adaptation, you know, is it long lived in the culture or in the case of non-cultural adaptations in the body?
Is it persistent?
Is it complex?
Am I forgetting one?
Expensive.
Expensive.
And in this case, obviously taking a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar is not expensive, but making apple cider vinegar certainly is.
Certainly is, right?
So it's been a folk remedy for thousands of years.
And a few of its health claims do have little signs behind them.
OK, we'll give it that.
But for many of the promised benefits, there's no research at all, experts say.
This is exactly one of the points that they confused people with during COVID.
Well, people say this thing doesn't work, but there's no research to say it doesn't work, therefore it must work.
That's not the way that works.
That was with regard to the vaccines.
People were not being allowed to either do or publish the relevant research, and then the lack of available research was used as evidence that the things were safe and effective.
Right.
I mean, you know, the more I scrutinize that claim... It's amazing, right?
The more ridiculous it is, right?
There's a little science.
So that makes it sound like the science suggests there's a little benefit, but that's not what that says at all.
It says They've looked into it, and yes, it does appear to have benefits.
Could use some more science, figure out what those benefits are, how great they are, how, you know, how best to access them.
But the point is... But the experts say there's a bunch of claims that haven't been scienced up.
So you've got two things competing in that one little paragraph, right?
You've got the science, which says, yep, apple cider vinegar has benefits, and you've got experts who say it doesn't.
Gee, I wonder...
I wonder which I should go with.
Yeah, who are those experts?
Yeah, we've got thousands of years of history and some science that suggests it's for real, and then we've got some experts, and I'm betting they have PhDs.
Doesn't that sound like PhDs to you?
Oh, it does, it does, it does.
OK, so we are going to go back to the full story, the apple cider vinegar story.
I don't care about the under-eye creams.
I care about the pimple patches.
We're not going there.
Oil pulling.
You know what oil pulling is?
Yeah.
So for those who don't, oil pulling, and before I show, Oil pulling, and they say even using things like sunflower and safflower oil, I guarantee you that people who are pulling oil are not doing so with seed oils.
What I have only heard is coconut oil, but presumably you could do it with olive oil or something.
It's kind of gross, at least at first.
You put a wad of oil, and apologies to the people who actually do this.
Both of us tried it for a while and sort of don't anymore, whatever.
My description of it is not going to be exactly right.
You put a wad of this stuff in your mouth, and you swirl it around your mouth for a long time.
If I remember correctly, it's like 20-30 minutes or something.
You pull it through your teeth.
You pull it through your teeth, and you don't swallow it.
You don't want to swallow it, because part of what you're doing is basically moving it through all of those crevices and orifices that don't normally have stuff pulled through them, so as to pull out crud, including bacteria.
You don't want to be swallowing that.
You want to then spit it out when you're done.
And so that also, there are cultures where oil pulling is a regular part of dental hygiene.
What does the New York Times have to say about it?
The claim oil pulling can improve your oral health.
But scientists and dentists say the evidence is lacking.
And if you do it improperly, the practice could leave you with an upset stomach and clogged pipes.
So again, experts say that we don't have research that says whether it works or not.
That's again, they didn't say the research says this is bad for you or the research says this doesn't work.
Experts say that evidence is lacking means, again, as if the experts have anything to do with this.
Anyone could look through Google Scholar or whatever database you want, if you have access to a better one, and find out whether or not there has been actual good research on this.
And if you find, oh, actually, the research hasn't been done, That's no information.
That's not information against.
No information is done.
It's not a negative result.
It's a negative search result when you look for the information, but it's not a negative scientific result.
And then, and if you do it improperly, the practice could leave you with that.
Okay.
Yes, there are a lot of things which if you do well can help, and if you don't do well might hurt you.
Yeah.
That's not an argument against the thing.
That's an argument against not doing it well, as should be the case for everything.
This is another completely insane supposed analysis.
Although they left out the fact that if you do it blindfolded while driving it can kill you.
It's true.
Yeah.
And others.
Innocent people who didn't even sign up for it.
Oil pulling can kill innocent people.
Heard it here first on Dark Horse.
Yeah.
Again, the weakness of the claim, right?
Scientists and you're not even, nobody's even putting their name on it, right?
Well, so in each of these cases, they do follow with a, you know, the longer story that they have, they have written.
And there are a couple, I mean, the New York Times has its like stable of experts that it goes to who get their name in the New York Times.
And most of these people probably belong in stables.
I don't actually know what they're doing.
They're not, you know, they're not doing good, good thinking.
Yes.
I will also just point out that there is a, I don't know about these scientists, but the dentists unfortunately have a perverse incentive.
Right.
Which is true across a lot of these things where the experts happen to have an interest in Um, you availing yourself of their services and you might need fewer of their services if these things work.
And so there's a reflexive, I'm not arguing that a particular dentist is, uh, you know, lying, but what happens is the field rolls its eyes, uh, over some remedy that it has no
Possibility to profit from and that threatened, you know, I mean look at what happened to Mike Mew over his claim about Malocclusion yep, and teeth right his claim is oh That comes from something it comes from an alteration of the developmental environment of your child There's remedies for it.
You can either give your child the right thing or if it's too late because your child already has mal occluded teeth you can exercise and all of this and the point is Well, if that's true, then almost all of orthodontia can go away.
This is the last claim in this piece that was published today in the New York Times.
The claim, dieting can help you lose weight for the long term.
There's lots of problems with diets, of course.
We've known this for a long time.
You seesaw, you wreak havoc on your metabolism, on homeostatic processes, etc.
But check out how this starts.
Remember diets?
Those strict eating plans we used to follow before drugs like Ozempic and Monjaro came along?
Wow.
Amazing.
This isn't like the wellness branch of the New York Times.
At some level, I don't even know how to respond to that, except that here we have, this is going to seem like a non sequitur, but I'm going to go to the, is apple cider vinegar really a cure-all piece that they were referring to with regard to their first one, and it has been said to help with weight loss.
Well, let's see.
Let's see what that's about.
Scroll down, scroll down, scroll down.
Some studies suggest that vinegar may slow the movement of food to the digestive tract and interfere with certain enzymes that break carbohydrates down to simple sugars, resulting in lower blood sugar spikes.
Slowing the movement of food to the digestive tract is, if memory serves, and it does, the mechanism of action by which ozempic works.
Unlike ozempic and its friends, apple cider vinegar is an ancient ferment that humans have been using for, by the New York Times' own admission, thousands of years, and is therefore safe.
Yes, but health?
Darling, it does not come from things like food.
It comes from things like pills and injections.
Apparently.
More research is needed to show that apple cider vinegar is safe and beneficial for long-term use, says Paul Gill, a researcher at Monash University in Australia.
I think that Paul Gill should probably find a new line of work.
No, no.
Paul Gill just needs to catch up on the latest research that says that apple cider vinegar, if taken while driving and blindfolded, can also kill you.
Can kill you.
And innocents, as well.
Well, no doubt.
Here we have another.
Given the lack of robust data and the short time frames of the studies, the studies about apple cider vinegar, Beth Cherwony, probably mispronouncing her name, a dietician at the Cleveland Clinic said that she did not recommend that her patients use apple cider vinegar for weight loss.
Gee, I wonder what she does recommend.
If vinegar does indeed help people lose weight, it may do so by slowing digestion, which can make you feel fuller for longer, she said.
So, I... Right.
I can't even with these people.
It is completely nuts what is passing for scientific analysis and what, for most readers of the New York Times, this is the closest they're going to get to science.
The people who read this and think this makes sense are the same people putting those fricking yard signs up that say, in this house we believe that science is real.
Well, you don't, because if you think this is science, you have no idea what it is.
So I think one of the things, the painful lessons of COVID was the wholesale capture of everything by pharma.
And actually I've now forgotten what the story was.
It crossed my, my desk several days ago that reflected some, a hypothesis that we deployed here, which was that in fact, We were all just way behind that pharma always has the same problems, right?
You come up with a drug, it's more dangerous than you would like it to be, it's less effective than you would like it to be, and there are competitors that work better than you would like them to.
But you've already sunk so much into it.
Yeah, and it's not even that.
It's just like, OK, here's the drug.
What are its obstacles to becoming an amazingly profitable drug?
Well, we're going to have to deal with the competing drug that's better.
We're going to have to deal with the safety issues that are, you know, potentially ruin us, and we're going to have to make it look more effective than it is.
So it's got like a toolkit for this, right?
It's like, OK, well, you know, the efficacy is going to be farmed out to contractors who are going to run experiments that those Contractors know the experiment has to come out positive for efficacy or they're not going to get hired the next time and so we'll leave it to them to figure out how to create the impression of a functional drug, right?
Similar blah blah blah for the, you know, the safety of it.
Well, what we're going to need is we're going to need a really sick placebo group, you know, So it's just like, it's a basket of tricks.
Okay.
It's a basket of tricks and it's going to be the same.
And you might even say it's a basket of deplorable tricks.
It's a basket of deplorable tricks.
Absolutely.
Um, but point being, okay, what are its other tricks?
Well, we don't want anybody digging into the basket of tricks.
Well, how are we going to arrange to avoid that?
Well, what we need is tremendous influence over all of the places where the kind of people who might dig into such things are going to be employed.
Newspapers, broadcast media.
How are we going to get that influence?
Well, we'll just These drugs are so profitable, we'll just buy so much influence over the entire network, we'll put ad after ad after ad, and what those ads are is not really intended to persuade, it's bribery, right?
You're bribing these, you're subsidizing these news gathering organizations so that if they even think about burning you, suddenly they fall on hard times.
Yeah, the persuasion happens by the journalists.
Who are compelled to be persuasive because their paychecks depend on it.
The persuasion is not as we imagine in the ads themselves.
Right.
And so, OK, if you run that program, what do you get?
You get a New York Times in which everybody knows on which side of their bread the butter falls and poorly said, but what the hell?
But anyway, the point is, you know, the editor knows we're not going to burn Pharma and the editor knows that, you know what, Pharma, you know what causes them to be happy and to smile on us financially?
When we run debunk articles on stuff that doesn't pay them, right?
Let's talk about how unsafe and ineffective apple cider vinegar might be.
Like, I mean, it's like, it's about as stupid as ivermectin.
Like, like, oh, it's so unsafe.
But it's, it's, it's worse than that.
Because on the one hand, they didn't say anything extreme.
They just, Just be cautious.
The thing is, apple cider vinegar is acidic.
I don't know if you've noticed that.
And so it can be harsh on the esophagus.
Like, I didn't read the whole piece for you guys.
And so you don't, you might burn your throat.
Yeah.
And so it'd probably be safer just to take some pills.
And what if on the way to burn it, you say that because you were unsure, you didn't want to burn your throat, you actually got it in your eye.
That hurts.
That stings.
Absolutely.
And it's driving again.
Well, but if you're blindfolded, you probably won't get any.
It's a good reason to be blindfolded, which explains why you were.
Innocence keep dying.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, point being, nothing in that article, it's so wishy-washy in what it actually says about apple cider vinegar.
But the point is, no, actually the real payoff of that comes when the, you know, dutiful Reader of the New York Times, right?
Goes to the cocktail party and somebody says, you know, I've been using apple cider vinegar for weight loss, right?
And I've lost five pounds.
And the person says, well, you know what?
It actually, the experts, they don't think so.
You should look into the research.
And then, so the point is it spreads this notion, just even the fucking word debunk.
Yeah.
Right?
Apple cider vinegar has been debunked.
Really?
In what way?
Well, there's not enough science that says it works, even though the science we have does say it works, but there's not enough science.
That's how it was debunked.
That's a debunk?
I mean, so that's a classic COVID move, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's why I bring it up here.
It's like, Probably people will be turned off apple cider vinegar, which is a shame, but it doesn't matter that much except to the people, some of whom are awesome, who make apple cider vinegar.
But it doesn't matter that much globally the way it did when they used exactly the same kind of insane backwards logic to get people to do exactly the wrong things during COVID.
Apple cider vinegar has been debunked.
Someone recently forwarded me an article in which intermittent fasting was understood to be dangerous.
Yeah.
Physiologically dangerous.
Oh, it is.
So anyway, the point is we want to just cast doubt on all these things.
You know that people who don't eat end up dying.
It's true.
It can be fatal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even without driving.
Even non-drivers can die intermittent fasting if the period of intermittency is long enough.
But You get a general sense of ineffectualness of things that actually... Oh, I wanted to point this out.
All of the stuff we saw on Ivermectin.
Right.
How many of the, there was a bunch of different strategies, but one of the strategies was this mega blah, blah, blah shows that it didn't work.
When, if you look at the mega blah, blah, blah on RCT of some kind, it actually shows that it did work, but it didn't reach statistical significance, which of course, why didn't it reach statistical significance?
Well, it didn't reach statistical significance because you gave it too late.
You gave it in low doses.
You gave it to a population in which the placebo group had had it too.
So it did work, but it was masked.
A bunch of different ways.
But the point is, you and I know, because we happen to have gone through the training program that tells you how statistics works, that there's all the difference in the world between saying, we saw a trend that didn't reach significance and there wasn't a trend.
But these morons are going to... It's not even that here.
They're not even like, well, the results were inconclusive.
There were no results, therefore it doesn't work.
Or there were results, but not enough of them.
In this particular case, there were no results?
No, I thought there was, um, there wasn't, there was a little science that said it worked.
That's a football reference.
You don't often get hit on dark.
No, it's an SNL reference, which you also don't normally get here, but it was a good skit.
Yeah, it was a good skit.
So, a few of its health claims do have a little science to back them up, but for many of the promised benefits, there's no research at all, experts say.
The conclusion is, therefore, nothing to see here.
Move on.
Nothing to see here.
Move on.
And so what most people will, you know, look, we all read, and for a fraction of an instant, the entire sentence that we've just read is resident in memory, and then it decays away and we get a kind of impression of what we've read, right?
Right.
You know?
And so the point is, You know, I read.
No benefit at all.
I was reading this very interesting article in the New York Times in which they debunked some of them.
I mean, you know, I didn't really believe in the pimple patches.
I don't even know what that is.
But, you know, apple cider vinegar.
I actually thought I was seeing some benefits, but it turns out it's been debunked.
Right.
And so anyway, what happens?
If you have the physiological misfortune of being a New York Times reader and they've debunked all the stuff that works and you think that the seed oils are good for your heart and that apple cider vinegar doesn't work and you know that you know the real... Remember the bad old days when you restricted your caloric input instead of taking Ozempic?
Right, right.
The bad old days before we discovered this wonderful drug that it's going to take us 30 freaking years to figure out what's wrong with it.
Right?
Oh, we already know a lot of what's wrong with it.
Well, we know what's wrong with it, but we have no idea.
Yeah.
I like your framing there.
What did you say?
The physiologically unfortunate people who happen to be New York Times readers.
I didn't know you had it better than that.
Yes, if you have the Who have the misfortune of reading the New York Times.
But the point is, what are they going to be left with after these, you know, these pharma-useful idiots have browbeaten them over everything that works, right?
They're going to have the sense that there is this vast collection of experts, as if they haven't just learned that the experts are morons, right?
The vast collection of experts who've debunked everything that their, you know, their health-wise friend has told them is actually useful.
And they're going to go to the doctor and say, doc, what should I do?
And the doc's going to say, well, it just so happens that we have this marvelous drug and you'll come in once a month and we'll inject you and it's not a big deal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you know, you can already see where it's going, right?
I mean, you know, it's SSRIs, it's statins, it's, you know, erythromycin.
It's, it's all of the things that we were told were safe that weren't.
Right.
It's just that we don't know exactly in what way this is unsafe yet.
We know some, but we don't know all of it.
We know some of it.
Yeah.
All that.
Yeah.
All that.
All right.
So.
Yes.
We're going to rescue the Republic and the West from that too.
Yeah, I think so.
Better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they're going to be free to say it.
Who is?
These morons.
Free to say what?
Whatever they're gonna say.
That's part of it.
That's part of the deal.
They have to be free to say it, and we have to be free to ignore it.
Yes.
Yeah.
Advertising should look like advertising, as opposed to influence peddling, which is cryptic and appears to be journalism.
Well, pharma, you see.
Yes.
Should not be nearly so profitable as it is, right?
You should not be making money by destroying wealth, which is what they're doing.
Destroying health in the meantime, but destroying wealth is what they do.
It's what that basket of tricks is about, and it should not be profitable.
So anyway, that is one of the things.
If you check out the webpage for Rescue the Republic, Join the Resistance, the website being jointheresistance.org, you will discover that these people are squarely on our sites.
Excellent.
Well, I think that takes us to the end for today, unless you had something else?
The end of the podcast, not the West.
I hope not.
Good.
All right.
Yeah.
But we are going to have a Q&A shortly in 15-20 minutes, and that's on Locals only.
You can ask questions there.
We have a number of questions that we will also be answering from our last Q&A, which was last Sunday.
We have another one this Sunday.
All of those are available on Locals and only on Locals, so please Please do join us there.
You can see our schedule and find our store, which has great merchandise, and find ways to access the various other things that we do, like my writing and natural selections, at our website, darkhorsepodcast.org.
Darkhorsepodcast.org has the schedule of upcoming events and various things, and I'm being looked at by Zachary as if I'm saying something very, very wrong.
Nope.
Okay.
All right.
And reminder of our sponsors this week, which are CrowdHealth and the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club and Timeline.
All awesome.
I have last week's sponsors listed here is why I was pausing because What's listed here is not right.
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