All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 28, 2024 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:58:23
Bread & Circuses: The 240th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is in fact, the 240th live stream of the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
I don't know where in history we are, but it certainly isn't boring.
It's not boring.
We're excited to have this be our first episode with Jen as our new producer, Flying Solo.
We are so grateful to have you here, Jen.
We're going to talk about some of the moment in history that we are in.
That one.
Both more broadly and personal to us.
But first off, please join us on Locals where we've got a chat part watch party going on now.
Lots of great stuff there, and as always, we're going to start at the top of the show with our three sponsors, whom we have carefully chosen.
If we're reading ads here, you can be sure that we are actually truly vouching for these products or services.
In this case, it's all products.
So, our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
It's Manukora.
Manukora honey is rich, creamy, and the most delicious honey you've ever had.
Ethically produced by master beekeepers in the remote forests of New Zealand, Matakora honey contains powerful nutrients to support immunity and gut health.
All honey is excellent for you.
Scientific research has indicated that honey has antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-immunogenic properties, as well as being excellent at expediting wound healing.
And that's hardly a complete list of the benefits of honey.
Manuka honey is even better.
All of the health benefits attributed to regular honey appear to be even stronger in manuka honey.
From fungal infections to diabetes to gastrointestinal tract infections, manuka honey can be useful in treating the problem.
Bees that collect nectar from a leptospermum scoparium, also known as the manuka tea tree, in New Zealand and some parts of Australia create honey that is three times the antioxidants and prebiotics than average honey.
In addition, a unique antibacterial compound, MgO, comes from the nectar of the Manuka tea tree.
Are you trying to interrupt?
No.
No?
Okay.
Well, you said up top, ethically produced by expert beekeepers, was it?
Yes.
But they don't credit the bees.
They don't create the bees?
No, credit.
Ethically produced by expert bees.
I looked, and that is in fact how it's done.
Alright, I take it back.
I think it was implied.
Yeah, I think it was implied.
So, monocora honey is delicious, packed with nutrition, and the quality control is amazing.
It's rich and creamy with a complexity in its flavor profile that is unmatched by other honeys I've had.
If you're already making the switch away from processed sugars, towards things like maple syrup and honey, go a little bit further and try monocora honey.
You'll be blown away.
With monocora honey, the bit of sweetness that you crave can be satisfied without putting your health at risk.
I sometimes enjoy a teaspoon of Manukura first thing in the morning, letting the creamy texture melt in my mouth and coat my throat.
This honey has superpowers and it's so good.
Manukura honey is a game changer.
All you need is one teaspoon each morning to get the most out of the amazing bioactives in Manuka.
Now it's easier than ever to try Manukura honey.
Head to manucora.com slash darkhorse to get 25% off the starter kit, which comes with an MGO 850 plus manuka honey jar, excuse me, five honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon, and a guidebook.
That's manucora, M-A-N-U-K-O-R-A dot com slash darkhorse for 25% off your starter kit.
A honey guidebook?
Yeah, it doesn't come with a bird though.
No, that's a pity.
Maybe in the future.
I don't, I doubt it somehow.
Are there honey guides in New Zealand or Australia, I wonder?
I mean, I think honey, so, a little biology inside baseball here, honey guide is the name of at least one species or clade of birds in Africa, I believe, so named because the local people, which might be the Sun?
Bushmen?
I'm not sure.
Local people You know that the birds go to where the bees are and so the people follow the birds who get the people to the bees and then the people take the honey from the bees.
The birds are called honey guides.
It is a mutualism where the honey guides get a benefit by guiding the people who can extract the honey of which the birds get a take.
Get a take.
Yes, exactly.
So I don't know if honey guide is just an ecological description of birds that people have figured out do this, or if it is a particular, just this particular African species, in which case, honey guides won't know anything about Manuka honey or Manukora.
They might have read about them.
They probably did.
Birds being birds and all.
Exactly.
Our second sponsor this week is ancient, has nothing to do with birds at all, has to do with mammals.
It's Armra.
It's colostrum.
Colostrum is the first food that every mammal eats.
It is produced the first two or three days of an infant's life and is nutritionally different from the milk that comes in afterwards.
Colostrum serves many vital functions, including that of protecting and strengthening the mucosal barriers of infants before their own barriers mature.
Modern living breaks down your mucosal and immune barriers, and Armra is the superfood that builds it back.
Armour colostrum protects and strengthens your body's barriers, creating a seal that guards against inflammation and everyday toxins, pollutants, and threats.
Armour concentrates colostrum's 400-plus living nutrients into their most pure and bioavailable form.
According to a review published in the journal Clinical Nutrition Open Science in 2022, bovine colostrum has been used to treat cancer, AIDS, polio, heart disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.
It is a general anti-inflammatory, and its use in adults is known to increase lean muscle mass, improve athletic performance and recovery time, support healthy digestion, and reduce allergy symptoms.
Armour starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass-fed cows from their co-op of dairy farms in the U.S., and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed.
Unlike most colostrums, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, Armour uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing casein and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability of any colostrum available on the market.
The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free.
Benefits of Amra's colostrum also include clearing of blemishes, shinier, thicker hair, stabilization of blood sugar levels, and acceleration of fat burning.
And colostrum has been shown to significantly improve fitness endurance and significantly decrease recovery time after intense exercise.
I had a fancy smoothie from Air One in LA earlier this summer, and I was tickled to see that it had Amra in it.
Armor is the real deal and word is spreading.
Armor has a special offer for the Dark Horse audience.
Receive 15% off your first order.
Go to tryarmor.com slash darkhorse or enter darkhorse to get 15% off your first order.
That's 15% off your first order.
That's t-r-y-a-r-m-r-a dot com slash darkhorse.
No bird angle there.
No bird angle at all.
Nope.
All mammal.
Probably a mite angle, but that's a long story.
Yeah, always a mite angle.
It's always a mite angle.
Yes, our friend George taught us that.
He studied mites.
Our final, third, and ultimate sponsor this week is Dream Recovery.
Dream Recovery is a company dedicated to improving the sleep of its customers, and we believe that it can do just that.
Dream Recovery has a trio, that's three, of products that are fantastic.
Sleep masks, silk pillowcases, and sleep tape.
Sleep masks are so valuable if you live in a place where you can't control your light environment at night, or when you are traveling.
For years, when we travel...
For years, when we've traveled, we have taken with us a little roll of electrical tape for which we cover up the infernal blue lights that blaze out of a myriad of devices and obstruct sleep.
But for far longer than that, we have always taken sleep masks.
Dream Recovery has two types, one classic shape and the other molded eye cups, so that your eyelids get no pressure at all.
And both are hypoallergenic and latex-free, made from silk.
They are fantastic.
Speaking of silk, if you've tried sleeping on silk pillowcases... No, that's not what that says.
Speaking of silk, if you haven't... I missed the apostrophe t.
Right.
Which came right before them.
So it's, I missed them together somehow.
Starting again.
Speaking of silk, which we were, if you haven't tried sleeping on silk pillowcases, you should.
See, that makes sense.
It does.
Yep.
Dream recovery is... And if you have, you should continue to do so.
Right, if that wasn't clear, it is now.
Dream Recoveries mulberry silk pillowcases are, well, silky smooth and soft.
They are also infused with silver ions, which enhances your anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial... enhances their anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial...
I mean, presumably it enhances yours too indirectly, but it enhances their anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.
See, dyslexia is a lot more fun than people give it credit for.
Oh, it's a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Especially if you're allowed to make fun of the dyslexics in your life.
I mean, if they can't hang with that, then they're not the right dyslexics.
And the smooth silk reduces friction, which helps prevent hair splits and breaks and reduces wrinkle formation as well.
Finally, Dream Recovery's Dream Tape is their answer to Sleep Tape.
It is manufactured entirely in the U.S.
And is manufactured entirely in the U.S.
period.
See the period after S in U.S.
is doing double duty here because it's both an abbreviation and the end of the sentence.
Sleep tape.
Yes?
Do you remember Saturday morning cartoons?
Oh yeah.
I don't know when they kind of became not a thing anymore, although I assume they're not a thing anymore.
Our children didn't do Saturday morning cartoons.
Anyway, Saturday morning cartoons in the '70s included-- George of the Jungle.
I never watched George of the Jungle, but the grammar gods, What was the, not the Grammar Guys, the Conjunction Junction?
Conjunction Junction, yes.
It was like an interlude.
Oh, it was, what was that even called?
Schoolhouse Rock.
Schoolhouse Rock.
So Schoolhouse Rock actually taught a bunch of Gen Xers parts of speech.
Yes, it did.
It was better than anything we ever got in the classroom, at least my classrooms.
It seems like you needed some kind of a punctuation version of that.
You're acting like you've never run into periods before.
No, no, it's just that... See, here's the thing.
You may be reincarnated as a dyslexic and then you'll understand that you normies would have caught on to the fact that the capital letter on the beginning of the next word indicates that that period is doing double duty.
Well, better that than a flat word.
I'd rather be reincarnated as a dyslexic than a flatworm.
Oh, I thought you were suggesting we started using flatworms as an indication that the preceding period was doing two things.
No, there's no universal symbol for flatworm that I know of.
That's true.
Sooner or later we'll get an emoji.
Maybe even a pregnant flatworm.
I don't think that's the thing.
Well, neither are pregnant men, but there's an emoji for that.
Well played.
Yes.
All right, I'm going to return at the beginning of that sentence that we've talked so much about.
It begins.
Dream recovery.
Sleep tape helps train Oh, there's an error in the sentence.
I'm gonna fix it on the fly.
You'll never know it's there.
Sleep tape helps train you to sleep with your mouth closed, which reduces snoring, prevents dry mouth, and tones your jawline.
What's the mistake?
It says sleep tape helps trains.
Helps trains.
It does not help trains.
No, apparently I need to go back to Schoolhouse Rock myself.
Exactly.
Yes, I didn't know how to raise this, but now that you raised it, I concur.
Um, hmm.
Tones your jawline.
In some of the hundreds of five-star reviews, users of DreamTape report having their sleep transformed and are amazed that they no longer snore, drool, or grind their teeth after using DreamTape.
Our son Zach has been using it for a few months, and it was one of a few items that he made sure to pack in his Dopp kit when he left for Europe this week.
Sleep is the foundation of health, and there's nothing better than waking up feeling refreshed and ready to attack the day.
Use code DarkHorse for 20% off your order at dreamrecovery.io.
That's DarkHorse as in DarkHorse at dreamrecovery.io.
Find sleep masks, silk pillowcases, and their special dream tape, and look forward to better sleep soon.
All right.
Survived the ad read.
That was onerous.
See, it's onerous to you, it's perilous to me.
Yeah, I don't feel your pain.
That is kind of what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's obvious, I can tell.
I want to start by showing the texts that I've been receiving.
From various Democratic operatives.
I believe I have been receiving similar texts.
Yeah, I wonder.
I know many, presumably tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, maybe.
Maybe not hundreds of millions, but many, many people must have had their phones blowing up these last few months.
With texts claiming to be from some kind of Democratic something, but they're almost all coming from different phone numbers, right?
Claiming that a win is practically guaranteed.
If only... I'll contribute now.
They want my thoughts.
Am I with them?
Surely I'm with them.
If not, why?
How could I possibly not be with them?
I'll also give them dollars.
But I don't think actually the ask for dollars is the main thing.
I don't think that's the Point here.
And I'm going to show you 10, 11 of these texts that I've been getting, and I'm sure they're mostly the same ones that you've been getting, and maybe the same ones that most of you have been getting.
I don't think it's about the money.
I think it's about the sense of momentum that they are creating in the people who get these things, where if you don't know these people and suddenly your phone is blowing up with the assurance that things are exciting and, you know, full of joy, So much joy, really.
So much joy.
No policy, but a lot of joy.
Well, actually, the joy is lacking, too.
But they say that there's a lot of joy.
And if you just keep getting these over and over and over again, no matter how much you might dismiss it at first, it does get into your head.
And, you know, we've talked, I can't remember if last week we mentioned What we talked about a lot before, Matthias Desmond's excellent thinking about mass psychosis, but this feels like a mass hypnosis that is being attempted, right?
Wherein people just...
Come to understand that this is a thing that we're going forward.
You don't want to be on Team Loser, do you?
You want to be moving forward with the people who are going to win.
So let me just show you all some of these that came into my phone.
So first, some from earlier.
This is hardly a complete representation of all of the texts that have come in since the end of July.
But here, occasionally, things come in from the same phone number repeatedly.
So, huge 700% match to stand with Kamala.
This is a major moment for you to get in this fight.
Dem Congress.
Few days later, Kamala is surging, but with 100 days until Election Day, we must act.
Seven times match to boost Dems to victory.
Dem Congress.
And actually, the URL is different on that one.
It was Democratic Congress and now it's Dem Congress.
A few days after that, a week after that, live survey.
Do you endorse Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?
No response marked as Trump voter.
Okay, so you're being—you certainly, if you don't respond now, you will be marked as a Trump voter.
You don't want that, do you?
And that's, I mean, that's one of the few places where they reveal what they know to be true, which is that actually almost no one can come up with a reason that they are for Harris, because there is no reason to be for Harris.
They can come up with reasons that they are against Trump, and therefore the only option is Harris.
So I will just add, I saw one I think yesterday in which, of course, they often masquerade as personal communications.
So, oh, you've got one?
Yeah, from yesterday.
Yeah.
So let's just continue on through these.
All right.
So all of the next eight, I think, came in during the Democratic National Convention.
These aren't the only ones that came in during the DNC, during the Democratic National Convention, but these are eight of them.
On Tuesday, Obama is about to take the stage.
If we can raise $100,000 before he finishes, we can crush Trump.
Give $3 now.
So, you know, $3 isn't going to change much.
They want to be able to report on how many people, but they also want to give you the sense that this is happening.
Uh, the next day, two from the same number.
Michelle Obama just took- Oh, actually, that was from the same day.
Michelle Obama just took the stage at the Democratic Convention.
Rush!
A 700% match donation ASAP.
The next day, wow, Tim Walz just gave an amazing speech at the DNC.
700% match your Democratic donation tonight.
So a lot of these are just claims that they hope to become what people believe to be true, absent any other evidence.
On Thursday of last week, the final day of the Democratic National Convention, there are a number that came in.
Kamala is here.
Are you ready?
Give $3 to help us raise $500,000 before her speech and surge Dems to victory.
Before Kamala's speech, Dems get an 800% match donation.
Highest ever!
And then they do the math for you.
Except, um... Matched, I see.
Okay, so $5 becomes $45 because you get 8 times that added to your 5.
And, uh, etc.
Um... Kamala is almost on stage.
If we raise $250,000 before she finishes, we will end Trump's campaign.
Give $3.
Really?
we will end Trump's campaign, give $3." Really?
If they raise $250,000 before she finishes, they will end Trump's campaign.
That's just patently unknowable.
It's a little bit like safe and effective, actually, in that regard.
Please, they actually are begging now.
Before Kamala Harris takes the stage at the Dem Convention tonight, rush a 800% match donation.
Kamala Harris was on fire, was she?
If we raise $100 million tonight, Trump is done.
Donate to Progressive Turnout Project.
So again with a new URL, and all of these are from different phone numbers.
Wow!
Kamala Harris just gave an incredible speech at the DNC.
800% match your Dem donation tonight.
So they're all using the same numbers, but they're all coming from different URLs.
This one is House Majority.
Then, yesterday and today from the same number, we got this, and this may be the one that you were about to refer to.
Input needed.
Hey there, it's Diana, the Research Director here at the DSCC.
I've got some big news.
We've selected you to represent your area in a Democratic strategy interview for today, August 27, 2024.
Did you also get one of these?
I ain't seen that one.
I thought I was special.
So I am special.
You are special.
Awesome.
I hope no one else out there got this because I was feeling special.
Only a select few of our most committed grassroots Democrats were chosen for this incredible opportunity.
So you, that's me, have a rare chance to help shape our 2024 Senate strategy and defeat Republicans this year.
Today's survey closes at 1159 p.m.
and we won't have a complete data set without your response.
So please click this personal link to enter your Democratic strategy interview by taking the survey now.
There's one more.
Let me just get to the one more.
From the same number—this came in just this morning, which is why I was prompted—actually, before I show it—which is why I was prompted to just put a bunch of these together and show them and read them today.
This morning, we have a picture of Kamala with a bunch of confetti flying as if she's just won.
Team—or maybe this is supposed to be after her acceptance speech last week at the convention—Team, Kamala Harris has made a historic entry into the presidential election, and Democratic enthusiasm is surging.
But to win in November, we need voters across the country to confirm their support.
And right now, we have no response on file from you.
Please respond by 11.59pm to be counted in our official records.
Will you vote for Kamala Harris?
Yes or no?
So let me just say one thing before you tell us about the one that you saw that came into you yesterday.
Kamala Harris has made a historic entry into the presidential election.
Yes, well, that is true.
That is certainly one way of putting it.
Unprecedented, even.
Unprecedented.
And really not according to any of the rules that the party established for itself.
And, you know, following directly as a result of effectively a coup in which the sitting president was told that he would be removed from office unless he allowed her to take his place as the heir apparent, which means, of course, that he should—and we talked about this a couple weeks ago when Seymour Hersh first put out this piece.
Revealing that you actually can't invoke the 25th Amendment as a threat.
It is either appropriate to invoke, in which case it should be invoked, or it's not appropriate to be invoked.
So a couple minor corrections.
One, palace coup, not a coup.
Two, she didn't, as far as we know, threaten him with the 25th if she could not replace him.
In fact, there's a strong argument to be made that... Wait, what do you mean, she did not threaten him if she could not replace him?
I just don't know what... That was not the threat.
I will invoke the 25th if I can't replace you on the ticket.
I don't think I said that.
That's what apparently happened, based on our best evidence, is that she threatened if he did not step out of the race, which arguably would have allowed the Democratic Party to install somebody else in that position or to go through some sort of primary process.
And so there is conjecture that Biden may have delivered a fuck you to the people who shoved him out of the race by embracing Kamala.
So that's not in the Seymour Hersh piece.
Right.
That's not in the Seymour Hersh piece.
But all I'm saying is we don't have any evidence that the plan involved her taking over the position.
One of the things that may be going on here is that she's an incredibly awkward candidate because she doesn't speak well.
And when she has been in a position to speak, she's been very unpopular.
So why was she the choice in the first place?
And the answer is it may be that the palace coup involves some payback, or it may be that this was the plan.
That's, as far as I know, that's entirely conjecture that I haven't seen any, and I haven't even seen that conjecture except to hear that here from you, whereas the Seymour Hersh piece who, you know, we, I read from that, we discussed that because he is a well-known journalist who has done such excellent work in the past, and so when he is reporting, A conversation with someone who is telling him that thing, someone whom he can't name.
And so you might say, it's an anonymous source who, you know, who knows?
Right.
And we have heard some pushback, like, how, you know, how dare you, you know, report on something that some rando journalist is saying when it's an anonymous source?
Like, you know what, that's often the way journalism works.
And I don't know that we would have talked about it absent it being Hirsch, you know, one of our, one of our longest standing, you know, remarkable journalists.
Prize winning.
End of his career, has no reason to put it all in jeopardy by making stuff up.
Right.
So, you know, that's the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which was then not, which was apparently used to strong arm the sitting president, but was then not invoked, is clearly an illegitimate use of power by whomever was doing it.
Harris, as it turns out, ends up being the recipient of the glory on the other end.
Yeah, she's the beneficiary.
So, one other correction before I get to the... and it's not really a correction, but it's an observation.
You said the DNC referring to the Democratic National Convention.
Yes.
This is the place that I am most likely, of all of the positions I'm taking, this is the one that is most likely to be the product of pure paranoia on my part, rather than analytics.
But I believe that there has been a shift in how likely you are to call the convention the DNC rather than the Democratic Convention or the Democratic Party Convention.
Now I did establish that there is some precedent for people calling it the DNC, but the problem is The Democratic Party is composed of two things.
One, in my opinion, is effectively pure, concentrated evil.
That's the Democratic National Committee, right?
That's the elites who steer the thing, decide who the nominees are, presumably are essentially the same thing that is Operating as president, while Biden is not.
So the DNC is something that we need to be able to refer to.
And the initials, the Democratic National Committee, that has been what it has been called for a very long time.
Yes.
And the DNC has been the shorthand which everyone has used to refer to the Democratic National Committee.
Right.
And now it's become almost impossible because when you say DNC, it brings up all of this stuff about the convention.
And the convention is, yes, partly the Democratic National Committee and partly the vast rank and file of all of these people who you're arguing, and I agree, are behaving as if they're hypnotized.
But that's very different.
Those aren't the people who are setting the course.
Those are the people who are chanting the things that they're told to chant and believe that they're doing the right thing for the most part.
So losing the ability to refer to the Democratic National Committee in a way that people recognize it as, oh, it's that entity again, is a problem.
And I wonder, it's exactly the kind of thing that strategists who are trying to, you know, to the extent that the DNC has suddenly Crossed into people's awareness and people are like, oh, yeah that evil entity.
That's not the Democrats I know that's you know, Hillary Clinton and her friends Behaving in ways, you know, it's it's arguably the face of the deep state the political face whatever it may be So there was a case and I don't know whether it has any truth to it at all, but there was a case in which At least a year ago
Elon Musk joked on Twitter that he was going to buy Coca-Cola in order to put the cocaine into it.
To put it back, right?
And this was haha, very funny.
But then people started talking about why he would have made such a joke.
And one possibility was that by creating a barrage of discussion over Elon Musk and cocaine that lands on a joke, You bury any implication that might be discovered by a search blah blah blah blah blah.
And so the idea... I don't get it.
Let's say that there was some story, mind you, I don't care one way or the other, but let's say that there was a story that was a hazard that involved, you know, maybe it's a false story of Elon Musk and cocaine.
And he knows the story's coming, and the idea is, oh, I want to bury it in the search results so that people can't even find it.
If they go looking, they find nothing.
So the point is, I'm going to create a relationship between me and cocaine that involves a joke about purchasing Coca-Cola, and the point is, floods the search results.
So, in the same way, I have the sense that three weeks ago you could refer to the DNC and people who were paying careful attention to the expanding tyranny knew what you were talking about, and this week it's almost impossible because there's so much talk about the DNC as the convention.
Yep.
No, and I think, I mean, in that vein, names are powerful.
Names, you know, the words that we have for things have often been mistaken for, you know, the thing itself.
You know, we've talked about this in evolutionary terms before, right?
That you have We often have names for clades that are based on their most significant trait.
Mammals have mammary glands, and tetrapods have four legs.
And yet, while there is no mammal that has evolved away from mammary glands, it could, and it would still be a mammal.
And there are tetrapods that have lost their legs, like whales and snakes, and they're still tetrapods.
Just because we call them tetrapods, four-legged things, four-footed things, does not mean that the four-footedness is inherent to what they are.
It means that that thing was there at the origin of their being, but they will continue to evolve.
And if that thing changes, they are still part of that history.
And so, go on.
In this case, we biologists, in order to be able to navigate that, have the word tetrapod, which refers to this group, most of which still have four legs, but not all of them.
It's a historical descriptor.
It's a historical descriptor.
And we have another descriptor.
When we want to say that this creature has four legs, we say quadruped, right?
Quadruped does not refer to that group, it refers to creatures with four legs.
And there could be quadrupeds that aren't tetrapods.
I don't think there are, but... Must be.
Right.
But so, one of them's an ecological descriptor.
Like, what do you actually do?
And one of them's, in this case, quadruped.
And one of them's a phylogenetic or a deep evolutionary descriptor.
You know, from where do you come?
What is your lineage?
And that's tetrapod in this case.
And Needing to be very careful about keeping names straight and recognizing that the names are social constructs, even when the things that they describe are not.
But then we also have names for things that are themselves social constructs.
This is part of what we get into when we talk about what a woman is.
Right?
Like, the word is a social construct.
All words are social constructs because people created words, right?
Inherently, right?
But a woman is an adult, human, female.
And adult is not a social construct.
And human is not a social construct, although it's a human construct because ipso facto.
And, you know, female is not a human construct because it predates, you know, everything else on that list.
So, Just because we have a word that only applies to humans and that only we wield, it doesn't mean that it itself is a creation of humans.
The word is, but not the idea.
Whereas the Democratic National Convention and the Democratic National Committee are both, both human constructs.
And they can be strategically moved around so that the one that people were beginning, maybe not beginning, but a lot of people had a sense of like, the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, that is where the power is wielded, that appears to be who's actually in charge in the country, now gets muddied.
We get so much muddying of the waters with the strategic use of words.
Right, and this brings us back to the point you were making about the texts, which is, what really are these things?
And I actually think what really are these things is a fascinating question, because for one thing, they make a claim, a financial claim, that I don't know what the rules are with respect to texts, but here's the thing.
First of all, every time I see one of these 700% match or, oh my God, it's up to 900% match, my thinking is, how dumb are the recipients of these things?
Because it raises an obvious question, right?
You know, you're, it's 700% match.
You're going to give, um, you know, Whatever, you're going to give $10 and you're going to get $70 added to that for $80.
And the people who want the Dems in that much, who have that much money to spend, really just aren't going to give it if you didn't give your $10?
Right, like what is the logic to this?
So I actually put out a tweet, I forgot to find it in advance of this, but I put out a tweet asking, does anybody know what... About these texts?
Yeah, what this is actually, because it seems to me that there are several possibilities... Recently?
Yeah, in the last week I think.
Let's see if I can find it.
So there's several possibilities for what these matching numbers can be.
One of them is that it's total bull, that there is no match.
In fact, it's even possible, to my way of thinking, that these texts don't have anything to do with anybody supporting the Democrats.
This is just a way to get people to cough up money, which would be an amazing fact if these things were being sent to anybody and everybody's phone and they were collecting presumably, you know, tens of millions of dollars.
and it wasn't going to these people.
I mean, but you would think the Democrats would themselves be irate if that were the case.
I think it must be going to, you know, PAX or whatever.
Yeah.
But then the question is, well, what are the rules if these people lie?
Right.
If they say 700% match and it's deceptive and you give 10 bucks, you know.
Yeah.
Oh, here you go.
Yeah.
So you want to put that up?
Yeah.
I'll share my screen here if you would, John.
You've got, yeah, one of these 9% match.
Nine times match.
Sorry.
Nine times match.
Sorry.
Nine times match, which...
That's interesting.
um you So they're saying nine times match and the same offer was phrased as an 800% match, which is the same.
But this sort of pitch to blue team voters has been going on nonstop since campaigning began.
It's clearly a scam of one sort or another, but I'd like to know what sort.
Is it a pure scam where there is no match and the solicited money doesn't reach the campaigner or lined pack?
The money goes to the campaign or PAC, but the match is bullshit designed to excite the little donors.
Three, the match is real, but the match money comes from a murky origin like Ukraine war money or some other illegitimate source that needs this mechanism to find its way to the campaign or PAC.
Four, the big donor money, which was headed to the campaign or PAC anyway, is divided up and turned into matches in order to motivate and thereby increase the number of little donors.
Five, I'm going to go with something else?
Question mark?
Yeah.
Oh, did I put four twice?
It's the earlier point regarding dyslexia and bad editing.
But in any case so to me there's a big question here if you did this through the mail yeah rather than over SMS then you'd be potentially running the risk of Being criminally prosecuted mail fraud is a serious federal crime SMS I don't know what the rules are so I don't know how how Honest they have to be I mean obviously
Again, from the 70s, you know, we used to get a lot of unsolicited, you know, Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes stuff in the mail that made out, you know, remarkable seeming claims.
Did you ever read the fine print?
I did.
Oh, you did?
But yeah, I used to, I used one of the things that I did as a child, because I was a strange child, was recreate these with totally fictional offers.
Did you put the fine print in?
I think I did.
You did?
I don't, I wish I should go find some of those.
That is surprising and yet not that surprising.
But what fine print are you referring to?
Well, what I'm referring to is that there's something always buried in those things, so that technically they've sent you the truth.
Nobody's gonna get to it.
And if you did, you probably wouldn't understand what they were saying.
So I did face one of these- But what was the truth?
So the truth- The truth doesn't have to tell you what your odds actually are.
Right, so in the case of Publisher's Clearing House, I actually know a little bit about this because somebody I knew in college had briefly been a grunt and had seen what it looked like on the inside, but So you have a bunch of people sorting these, was it magazine subscriptions?
I think so, yeah.
Something like that, and it's supposed to not have any bias in favor of people who subscribe to something.
In fact, you're supposed to be able to enter without subscribing to anything.
I think there was some legal requirement.
Of course.
You don't have to purchase to compete.
Exactly.
Because if you have to purchase to compete, then it's gambling or something like that.
So it has to be enterable.
But the mechanism for entering, if you didn't subscribe, didn't work because the grunts behind the scenes knew they were supposed to throw it out or something like this.
But it doesn't really matter.
The point is, I chased another one of these down once where somebody had Offered some quite valuable prize.
I think it may have been camera equipment or something if you entered their blabbity blabbity blah and If you read down way into the fine print you Discovered that it wasn't that whatever the camera shop was was giving away one of these $3,000 cameras.
It was 40 unrelated retailers, all of which were compiled into one sweepstakes in which one of these cameras was being given out.
So you're- Oh, your odds were way less than you would think.
Yeah.
Because you're like, oh, it's, you know, it's Sammy's cameras or something in LA.
Yeah.
I don't know if they were- It wasn't, but it was some camera shop and it just, The point is, you had no chance of winning this thing because you were just going to completely misunderstand how many people were actually going to enter.
So the point is, if you were doing this through the mail, you made very sure your lawyer told you, is this technically true?
Right?
Right.
Does anybody have a claim if they challenge this?
And they don't.
But I mean, I think, again, this is, um, what you're talking about is messing with the perceived odds without having made any claim about what the odds are, but implying that this is your local camera shop.
Anyone who's thinking sort of statistically, population level, mathematically, um, at that level will sort of do a back of the envelope, back of the head, you know, calculation and be like, Oh, actually my odds are pretty good at this.
I think I'll go in.
Yeah, I could use a new lens, actually.
Exactly, exactly.
Misleading, but not a lie.
But not a lie.
And I do wonder, it feels to me like And I don't know for sure if this is true, but it feels to me like the amount, the degree to which Americans are innumerate has increased.
And this includes the sort of what our former colleague Jack Longino referred to as Population level thinking.
Yeah.
Right.
This, this refers to just being able to think in terms of, well, if there's a group of certain size, and there's, you know, a 5% chance of me winning, and there's a group of 10 times that size, and there's a 5% chance of, of me winning, like what, how does that change the calculation?
Yeah.
Or, you know, only five people will win, and if it's five percent, it's five percent.
Whereas if you say there's five people and the group size changes, that radically changes your odds of winning.
And most people, they see numbers now.
And this was always something that was said.
About people, but I think it's more true now that people glaze over.
They just go like, oh, that's for the experts.
I'm going to assume that if there's numbers here, the person writing the article did the right analysis, and I don't have to pay attention to the numbers.
And frankly, one of the things that became Utterly apparent during COVID was how much the people who were writing the articles, not the scientific articles, although that may be true as well, but the articles and like, I mean, the perfect example during COVID was The Atlantic, which just revealed itself.
It had like this team of three, four or five, I think, all-female pseudo-scientific reporters who just put out one awful piece after another, and they were Filled with misunderstandings or misportrayals, depending.
I don't know if they were actually stupid or intentionally misleading their audience with regard to what claims, what numerical claims meant.
Yeah.
And in fact, I would argue the purpose of such articles is for people who don't really know how to evaluate the evidence to basically say, no, this is true.
Yeah.
Read this.
Right.
Right.
And the point is, you know, it's people who aren't, it stands in place of an argument that you might deliver.
I did want to point out in the vein of enumeracy.
Yeah.
A major gaffe by Kamala Harris on this front where she claimed, I think her claim was 250 million Americans had died of COVID.
Oh dear.
Yeah.
I mean, and it was just such, it's, it's so many orders of magnitude off that, you know, it's like how, I mean, there's a numerate and there's a numerate.
This is shocking.
That's like most Americans.
Um, so.
This place does feel emptier these days.
Yes, a little... not that empty, but anyway, so these texts raise a question because they're making it... So I don't, let me just say, I don't know the incident you're talking about and it should be well apparent I'm no fan of Kamala Harris, I'm not interested in defending her either ideas or her speech, but if it's what
I can't imagine saying that and not immediately recognizing it, but people do misspeak.
Yeah, I now, because I didn't know we were going to talk about it, I didn't chase it down.
But earlier, when I looked at it, my thought was, yeah, everybody, I look at stuff that I've said, it's like, whoa, yeah, that was not what I meant to say.
I think, but like, I'm like when we were on Belmar, I think at one point I said virus rather than vaccine or the other way around.
Yeah.
You know what?
I know the difference.
Right.
Oh, great.
My brain went to the V word and it meant exactly like the exactly wrong thing.
Everyone listening with with fondness would know what I meant.
And I sound like an idiot.
So, I have no confusion about the difference between transcription and translation, but you put me on camera, I get it wrong half the time, interestingly.
So, you know, it's like you're... the part of you that thinks about these things is different than the part of you that speaks about them.
But anyway, I don't think that this... I looked at it and it was like, oh, that actually is compelling that this was just some... it was big number, insert big number here, and whoa, really?
That's a...
That's a stupidly big number.
Well, maybe she only wants to be president of the, like, the 80 million remaining Americans.
That's an interesting conjecture.
Yeah.
But maybe only the 80 million remaining are eligible to vote for her.
And presumably a lot of those are under 18.
I mean, it just seems like she just lost the election.
If there's actually 250 million Americans who died.
700% match.
Yeah.
There is a question about what these things are.
If they are not actually part of either official democratic strategy or PACs that are affiliated who are potentially guilty of egregious crimes, then there's a question about what they are.
And I do think it was just a A stand-in, but one way, I mean these people cheat in every conceivable way, right?
Am I saying they stuff ballot boxes?
I'm not, I don't know, but they cheat in every way they can, which we will get back to later, but...
The question of maybe, one possibility here, I think it was three on my list of possibilities, was that there is some pool of money, like imagine that there's a racket in which the money that is being poured into the unaccountable hole in the universe called Ukraine, right?
Billions and billions of dollars are going to Ukraine.
This is lining people's pockets, right?
It's doing stuff we don't know.
What if the idea is, hey, one way, you know, anybody who's profiting from the war profiteering or the absolute theft of tax money and the using it for bribes or whatever, whatever that money is doing.
Anybody who's profiting from it wants to keep it going.
How do you keep it going?
Well, you keep the people who are doing it in power.
How do you do that?
Well, you donate to their campaign.
How does the money get in without it being foreign influence, right?
Well, maybe you launder it through some mechanism where it takes on a category name because I gave 10 bucks and it was matched, you know, with, you know, 80 bucks more that come from some mysterious place so maybe the match is real and the point is it's actually a an influence that is illegal in our election and in fact being financed maybe the taxpayers I mean, yeah, if it's that, it's taxpayer money.
Right.
So that is blatantly illegal, the regime taking taxpayer money and funneling it through some mechanism back into their own election effort.
And the thing is, do I have any evidence that that's taking place?
I do not.
What I have is a mystery of text messages that are claiming something that doesn't make any sense, which is donors, as you point out, who are willing to give huge amounts of money, but only if somebody gives a tiny amount of money.
In what universe does that make any sense?
I mean, I remember, I remember, uh, what, like NPR campaigns from back in the day, the 80s and early 90s, um, where they would say, actually, you know, we need a hundred people, um, to do any amount.
And if we get the hundred, then we'll get this, this big match.
So the matching technique is an understood thing to get people inspired, but not when it's coming in like this, not when it's over and over and over again.
And some of them don't have a cap, Some of them do.
It just, it doesn't feel like the same thing as those, those did from, you know, little local NPR stations.
Yeah.
Those, I mean, yeah, those had, they were weird, but you know, the most you get is you get PTBSD from that.
Do you?
Yes.
That's, you got it?
No.
PTBSD?
PTBSD.
Yeah.
Go for it.
Post tote bag stress disorder.
Oh, yeah.
Post.
You know what I'm talking about, former NPR listeners.
All right.
I don't think we ever got a tote bag from them.
How did we dodge?
I think because we actually never donated to them.
That's possible.
We listened to NPR all the time.
Yep, we did, we did.
All right.
But never actually donated.
But okay, so some big question about what these matches are.
Anything from pure fiction, corruption, you know, just there's no connection to the Democratic Party.
It's just somebody taking advantage of gullible Democrats.
To, holy moly, there's money coming in here from some weird source that's being matched to actual donations from actual voters and there's bound to be a story.
But nobody's talking about it.
I haven't heard a discussion about this.
So that's interesting because it's constant.
But the other thing is... It's constant and it's new.
I've never seen it before.
The personal one that I got the other day was something along the lines of, I've texted you seven times to find out if you're in fact committed to voting for Kamala Harris or not.
And at some point, you know, blah, blah, blah.
So your intonation adds the sadness, the disappointment, right?
I'm reaching out to you here, buddy.
Right.
Like, I know you're with us, but could you just respond to me?
It was jarring because it...
You know the idea that I'm on some list and I'm getting automated texts right that that matches my understanding of the universe perfectly, but the idea of You know like we've all had communications from somebody that we weren't real thrilled to be interacting with right and The idea that there's actually something on the other end that is hurt by our failure to respond is manipulative of a whole different circuit.
Yes, it is.
Anyway, it actually brings me to something else.
First of all, there is a whole science...
To how to manipulate people in the electoral context that most of us are not familiar with So one thing that has made it to public consciousness is something called a push poll Right a push poll is where they call you up ostensibly to get information about the mood of the electorate blah blah blah But the real point is the phrasing of the questions the fact that you're on the phone with somebody who's asking you questions is
It enters your mind in a different way and it pushes you into backing yourself into a corner that then affects the way you vote or fail to vote or whatever.
So push polls are a strategy that once you understand it, it's like, oh, I didn't just get polled.
That wasn't the point.
Yeah.
The point was I just got manipulated by somebody who may not even know they're working for a con artist, right?
The person delivering the call doesn't have to know.
They're just reading a script.
So yeah, I see where you're going.
These are push texts, which, you know, much as I said, I don't think they need the three bucks.
Sure, they'll take the money, but I don't think that's the actual point.
This is not what it appears to be.
It may be more.
It appears to be a request for money, but more to the point, it serves the, hey, look at how much we're winning.
You want to be on the winning team.
We are filled with enthusiasm and joy, and the momentum is unstoppable.
And even the fact of text messages.
Text messages are, you know, the number of people who reach you by text is small.
Right?
It's a subset of the universe.
To the extent that somebody can figure out how to send you a text, it kind of makes you feel involved in the election in a way.
Right.
And that it's coming from so many different phone numbers.
Right.
And this is, you know, what I just showed today was merely 10 different phone numbers, and that wasn't by any means, you know, a complete sample of the number of phone numbers I've received just this summer.
Yeah.
From Democratic operatives of some sort.
Yeah.
So there's something about that.
And now I want to connect it to something else, which isn't about text messages, but also struck me as very interesting.
Struck a lot of people as interesting, actually.
You want to show that 538 projection of the election results that came out this week.
Remind us what FiveThirtyEight is.
So FiveThirtyEight, can we make that a little bigger?
FiveThirtyEight was Nate Silver's fancy Democratic-affiliated polling company.
It had a great reputation because it had made a great prediction at one point.
It predicted something that was not expected by others that turned out to be right.
And I can't, I no longer remember which of the famous electoral outcomes it was.
But anyway, it had a great reputation and then it stumbled very badly in the last election.
Well, I think it stumbled in two consecutive elections actually, but don't quote me on that.
I've now forgotten the exact history.
But anyway, I don't think Nate Silver is involved in it anymore.
I think it's been sold.
But in any case, this is from now?
Can you scroll down to see the date or scroll up?
Oh, yeah.
August 23rd.
Yeah, August 23rd.
So this is this week and it projects a chance.
Here, go back to the top.
Chance of winning, Harris 58%, Trump 41%, and then an electoral count they're projecting, 287 for Harris, 251 for Trump.
Among other things, one of what I notice here is that they identify what presumably are well understood to be swing states, and in none of their swing states is it close.
So wouldn't you expect some of the swing states to actually be close?
Yep.
That's what swing state means.
So there's something so far off about this.
It's just preposterous.
But again, to reference an earlier discussion that we had back in the day, meaning the before times 20 years ago.
Polling was done in person.
Actually, 20 years ago isn't quite far enough because already we were beginning to have reason to worry about our elections in the form of die-bold polling machines that were...
Well, hanging chads is a separate question, but the Diebold polling machines were made by a ferociously partisan company, Diebold.
I feel like the Diebold stuff happened the same election.
I feel like those two things came to consciousness in 2000, in the same election in Bush Gore.
Yeah.
So anyway, it raises all kinds of questions because, I mean, and I remember my initial freak out over electoral integrity was that Diebold claimed that they could not produce a voting machine that produced a paper record of your vote, which would allow it to be analyzed later to make sure there had been no electronic shenanigans.
Now, my thought was, What did you just tell me?
A company that makes ATM machines can't come up with something that prints a paper record reliably?
My impression is that ATM machines do that very well, right?
Yes.
And that because banks depend on them, they're very good at the production of the stuff and the counting and all of the things that you would want an election machine to do.
Creating physical evidence of your transaction.
Right, exactly.
And so There's a long history of electoral shenanigans, but back in the day prior to, let's say, the invention of electronic voting machines.
You had a polling place.
Yes, you could vote by mail, but it was very rarely done because it got counted much later.
And so from the point of view of most voters, you went on election day to a polling place and you engaged a physical object where you, in general, I think, used something or other to punch holes, which is where the hanging chads come from.
In a paper something or other and then you put it in a box and basically we all understood the technology because it wasn't sophisticated.
It all happened on the same day so there wasn't some weird calculus about early voting starting in some states and this that and the other and most important of all you had exit polls.
Which meant... I'll also say that it actually felt exhilarating.
Yeah.
There's something amazing about going to your local school or firehouse or wherever your polling place was And seeing your neighbors, many of whom you don't know if you live in a place with any kind of population density, and seeing everyone going out to do the same thing.
You don't know how they're voting, but you're all voting, which is like the most American thing that you can do.
Yeah.
No, there was something important to it and I will say that the next administration, I hope, will actually confront the question of how to create elections that are essentially impossible to gain and that would involve, and there is a constitutional question because you don't want to boss the states around, in fact you can't, but how do you get the states aligned so that we don't have the madness that we have where You have no idea what's going on.
But back to the exit polls.
As you and I discussed, I think last week, exit polls were A check.
It was hard to commit fraud because the exit polls would reveal it.
If the exit polls were way off of the poll numbers, then the question is, well, something happened here.
Did we have an outbreak of lying?
Maybe.
But it at least said, hey, look here, something happened in this county because the exit pollers got this number and the actual result was this.
Something's off.
And now we don't even have that, which means that from the point of view of manipulating the electorate into believing that this happened or that happened, loading them up in advance of the election and saying, oh my God, 538, which don't you know, has an excellent record of predicting surprising results, believes that the has an excellent record of predicting surprising results, believes that the chance of Kamala Harris winning is, what was 58%.
Yeah.
And so the point is, it creates the impression of futility in voters who are going to lose.
It creates the impression of momentum for a candidate that, frankly, shouldn't be generating any because there's nothing exciting about her.
So all of this, when you talk about the hypnosis, the question is, well, how many different channels are the signals that are causing people to be hypnotized coming in on?
And what are we being hypnotized into believing?
I mean, that poll caused You know, everybody who is against the blue team to roll their eyes, for sure, but maybe we weren't the target of it.
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so, and you know, we're not the intended target of these texts that we're getting now.
Presumably, you know, we're not alone in that, but that there are a lot of people who are getting those who are the intended target, and whether or not they care or not, or are, you know, thinking about how their phones are blowing up with these texts from Democratic operatives all the time, it is getting into their heads.
It's changing their sense of what is happening in the country and what is likely to happen.
And thus, if, you know, if Harris falls, do win, half the country is unlikely to be surprised by it.
They're going to be like, that's, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, as it turns out, I wasn't, you know, Ridley, I don't really know what Harris stands for, but, you know, Waltz, he's a pretty good guy.
You know, he's a veteran and, you know, like, you know, I'm really glad that they're still in office because, you know, whatever it is, you know, IBF.
So it's almost like a virtual victory.
That we are living in, you know, there is a democracy and the democracy or a democratic republic that was created by foundational documents that describe exactly how these processes are supposed to work.
And a lot of how these processes are supposed to work involves letting the states take care of things like how exactly they run their elections and all.
But there was a process.
Tightly regulated if chaotically in 50 different ways by 50 different states But there was a process and that process had to adhere to laws that gave Only a certain amount of leeway in terms of how things were done We are now living in an era in which the whole thing has been so abstracted, right?
You used to have an interaction with the national conventions of the parties in which the national conventions of the parties actually historically they've had battles, they've had surprise outcomes that happen at these things, right?
It was an actual process.
It was dynamic.
Yeah, it wasn't just a show.
Right.
And now it's pure show, but it doesn't look that different.
It still involves, you know, the great state of Minnesota casts its whatever number of votes for such and such a candidate.
But it's, I mean, we're in the era of bread and circuses.
It's bread.
It's pure bread and circus.
At the same time, what are the only policy things that Kamala has said?
It's like, I'm going to give first-time homeowners $25,000.
I'm going to give first-time parents some amount of money.
I'm going to stop the price gouging.
Not at least, but she's not talking about that anymore because even WAPA went like, nah, you can't do that.
It's not my joke, but, and you get a car, and you get a car, you know, it's that, right?
So it's become a total fiction, and actually, you know, Bread and Circus is one thing.
I think it's Ponies and Balloons, which nobody's going to know that reference, but you'll remember it because I've mentioned it before.
Ponies and Balloons shows almost no indication of having existed if you try to find it online.
The one and only place I have encountered it was the Deepwater Horizon accident.
The folks at BP ran an operation in which they would create a cleanup effort.
For the cameras, right?
Obama is going to go to a beach in Louisiana and there's going to be people in hazmat suits collecting oil, taking seabirds that have been drenched in oil and cleaning them off.
Barack Obama is going to give his speech.
He's going to leave.
The workers leave, right?
And internally at BP, they described this as ponies and balloons.
It's Potemkin cleanup.
Yeah.
It's for the little people.
This is pure show.
We know it.
Maybe Obama knows it, but the little people aren't going to know.
And so anyway, the idea that you could have a palace coup, which should raise every question in the mind of every patriotic American about what the hell is going on.
Why does one of our two major parties now have a nominee that nobody voted for?
Right.
How did that happen?
Was there no option or did they run out the clock until there was no option?
And then they run a and then they run a convention, which should have been the place at which angry Democrats registered their dismay at the fact that the DNC is really just installing people, which it really did with Biden and very clearly did with Harris.
Right.
This is the place that angry Democrats should be Demanding a redress of grievances over their disenfranchisement.
Right.
I think, I mean, she has literally never even run in a primary.
Ever.
I know she was in the race back in the day, but she dropped out before she ever ran.
Because nobody was going to vote for her.
Right.
She's literally never been on a ballot as VP for Biden.
So were the Democrats, were the rank and file Democrats not so busy being hypnotized and waiting for the 700% match to become a 900% match to throw money at, you know, this campaign, they would be irate at being disenfranchised.
They ain't.
It didn't show up at the convention.
It was pure show.
So, I mean, I'm having a very hard time understanding.
What people who are saying they're enthusiastic about her are actually experiencing.
And, you know, I've seen various attempts to get answers to that online.
I haven't seen it in person.
But, like, without saying Trump, without invoking Trump, without talking about it can't go there, like, why are you here?
Why are you excited about this here?
And I have I am trying, I really am trying, I've been talking to you about this, like, I'm really trying to get into the mind frame of people to understand, like, and no, I'll be honest, like, I don't have the sense of like, is there something I'm missing?
Like, I'm not there, but I do want to know, like, how you get to where so many people apparently are, where they are not, they, People really have understood their own hatred and disgust for Trump as a love and enthusiasm for Harris.
And yet I can't think of another case where if you say, OK, but why do you love her so much?
People could come up with nothing and yet still be undeterred in their love.
I think the answer is reasonably clear and almost unsayable, right?
It follows on from what we discussed in our last live stream.
The enthusiasm is about taste and fashion.
It is not about substance.
And the enthusiasm is therefore in a strange way real.
But it is enthusiasm about the way that thing looks on the screen.
Right?
Am I proud to be supporting this person?
Absolutely!
Because for one thing, you've been berated for how long if you're a white person for being a racist who isn't doing enough.
And here you are once again proudly championing somebody who is not white.
And that makes you feel good, right?
So I believe it is parasitizing this desire to bend over backwards to prove that you're doing your very best to make this country better.
This is sort of, you know, Blue Maga, right?
This is how are we going to make this place better?
We're going to put that woman in the office.
You watch.
First woman president, woman of color, right?
And the point is, Okay, you're really talking about pure symbolism and You can't do that just as DEI is now arguably playing a role in airplanes Falling out of the sky or nearly falling out of the sky maybe playing a role in you know space astronauts being trapped on the space station Right?
DEI, and we said this, I think this is one of the things that we get big credit for, right?
We said, look, the bridges aren't going to fall down right away, right?
They're going to stand up because they were engineered to stand up.
But if you keep infusing this other stuff in the place of competence, they will start falling down.
Yeah, we're going to queer the bridges.
Yeah, we're going to queer the bridges.
And you know what's going to happen when you queer the bridges?
It's not going to be that they become colorful.
It's going to be that they become rubble.
right so that's where we are and we are now watching it take over a party that has been overtaken by this uh the worst kind of feminine energy yeah and so i mean obviously this we are still to some degree mourning the loss of the party to which uh we in which we came of age and to which i guess you still belong i don't anymore um but
Okay, who are we?
Our names aren't Kennedy.
Yep.
But Kennedy's his.
And he made this incredibly forceful, impactful speech in bowing out of the race and in endorsing Trump this last Friday.
And you happened to be about to go live on Patrick Bette David's show right then, and so you were able to talk about this within minutes of his speech ending.
Many people in his family, who also have the name Kennedy, responded with outrage and disgust, saying that he clearly has lost his way and doesn't understand what his father and uncle stood for.
And I would ask them, as I would ask all of the Democrats who were backing Harris-Waltz, How does this party look like the party of the Kennedys in the 60s?
In what way is it still the same party?
I don't see...
Almost anything, honestly.
So just because it's still got that name, we're back to the question of names, right?
Like, just because it hasn't changed its name doesn't mean it's not a fundamentally different thing.
We know this happens to parties, right?
Like, we know this.
So why do we assume that we are living in the only moment in history in which everything has stopped, everything is static, and the party from 60 years ago still stands for all the same stuff as it does, as it did then.
It doesn't, patently.
In fact, the party has already gone through this, famously, right?
This used to be a very racist party.
Precisely!
Right, and then it went through a period of being a champion of civil rights, right?
That's the party of, you know, John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.
And it's still making claims about the Republicans are a bunch of racists.
Like, well, okay, you know, it was the party of Lincoln and it did get pretty racist and you know, it seems to be changing again.
Right.
So these things are always changing.
These things flip.
And so, you know, are you really alleging that the party is the inverse of the one that you signed up for?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
It's the inverse.
Yes.
On every fricking front.
Um, now that is, I believe the way that that happened without people registering that it has happened, or the rank and file, the people who are still there, is a slowly boiling frog phenomenon.
Right.
That it happened incrementally in ways, you know, at what point exactly did it become the party of war?
My sense is that's actually quite recent.
Yeah.
Quite recent.
Right.
But in any case, the...
So you've got a lot of people who are hypnotized.
You've got this evaporative cooling phenomenon, which is a lot of people bailed on the party at some point in the last couple of decades, right?
It just went one step too far and a lot of people bailed out and a lot of the people who bailed out ended up in MAGA, right?
They're being falsely portrayed as something that they are not, but this is really labor that has been cut loose by the Democrats.
But Those who are left are those who are least sensitive to the signs that the party has transformed into something awful.
This is true.
Right?
So there's a selective force.
Right.
And once you do that, once you distill down to the people who just will not accept any evidence in front of their eyes that this party is not the one that they thought it was, you get something that is easily hypnotized.
Right?
It's very susceptible to it.
And That's that's that is true so there's kind of a kind of a stabilizing selection in a way it's not exactly that but but also you have a move which you know the the Democratic Party of the 60s was emphatically not a technocratic party right like this Kennedy Was JFK was actively waking up to yes, the military industrial complex, right?
And was, you know, became aware of it and was was moving in the right direction and was killed.
Right.
Modern Democrats, more I think than modern Republicans, have great faith in expertise, in technological solutions to problems, and in quote-unquote, the science, which most of them not being scientists at all, mistake for reductionist, static, absolute, certain conclusions about what is right and what is not, and what you therefore should do.
Which, you know, science never offers that.
And so it's a bastardization of science.
But also the idea of, like, Democrats as technocrats?
That's one of the big changes, I think.
And frankly, like, why?
What happened to all the hippies, right?
Like, how is it that all the people who, when we were growing up, one of my friends, her mom, you know, only, you know, they only ate from home, they cooked food, they grew in their little garden in the back of their house in LA, and I think they were vegetarians before that was really a thing, and, you know, only used natural soaps and You know, in my family, we didn't eat fast food, and we didn't have cola.
And you know, we didn't we didn't have those things.
But it was curious.
And it seemed quaint.
And it seemed like something from a bygone era.
And you know, the 70s was a nadir for things like farmers market and local food and organic food.
And so even though in my family, like in yours, we ate better than the average American at the time, we weren't doing that.
And those people were like the iconic core Democrats.
And, you know, so was my mom, but like that thing where you focused on, honestly, a self-sufficiency and being one with nature and understanding that the state was not going to come and help you, but you wanted the safety net in case you needed it.
That was what I associated with the Democrats that I knew growing up.
And I know that some of that will sound to people like, well, those are always Republican values.
But that also points out how much more intermingled the values of the people in the parties used to be.
Like, there was tremendous overlap.
You could be, you could say, you know what, I'm interested in self-sufficiency.
I absolutely, you know, you need to ask yourself first what you can do to help yourself before looking for handouts.
That used to be common, I think.
Yeah.
At least insofar as the people I knew between the parties.
And that seems like, you know, the opposite now of what the Democrats, the rank-and-file Democrats are looking for the state to fix problems before they themselves fix problems.
Well, I've argued for a division between the party as a functional entity that drives policy and directions for reasons that it knows and we don't, and the rank and file who have really two jobs.
The rank and file are supposed to vote for the blue thing.
And they are supposed to rationalize what the blue team wants for its private reasons publicly, right?
So they explain why they will demand that we feminize our military, right?
Yep, we are sick and tired of trans people being excluded everywhere and we are going to get them into all of the places that they have been kept out of for so long, blah blah blah blah blah.
They give some sort of rationalization for why you would do that.
Is that the Chinese deciding, hey, you know what we'd really like?
We'd like that military feminized.
It would be less frightening and we could go about more of our business in more parts of the world if that military was incompetent.
Yep.
So, you know, you need the rank and file to deliver the votes and you need them to rationalize the policy.
And the point is the policy that's being rationalized, the rationales that are offered are so thin they don't make any sense.
But this is the problem.
The Democrats function now as like a social club that watches the soap opera of party politics and rolls its eyes at the, you know, the outlandish behavior of the things over on the red side.
And, you know, it rants and raves about the terror that it has over the orange guy.
And, you know, the point is, It's a social phenomenon.
It's passive.
They are consuming politics rather than participating in it in a meaningful way.
And that social fact, I mean, you know, the science thing you're talking about?
It's science fashion.
Yeah.
Right.
I want to be read as a science person.
Right.
I want to be understood.
R-E-A-D.
Not red.
Yes.
The color red.
Right.
Right.
No, I want to be understood to be sciencey in my orientation.
Right.
I absolutely fucking love science.
Well, I mean, it's one of the strange ironies of the modern Democratic Party, that it simultaneously wants to claim the mantle of science, but it's running entirely on emotion.
Like, it doesn't understand analysis at all.
It's innumerate.
It's a-analytical, if not actually anti-analytical.
It is, you know, it's trotting out, it's manipulating through emotion, through fear, through claims of joy, which it patently has none of, while putting up lawn signs and window signs that say that it's the party of science.
And, you know, it's responding to One real thing, which is that more people who say religion is absolutely important to me, and it is one of the cores of my life, if not the core of my life, such people are more likely to be Republicans and Democrats.
But I'm sorry, you don't understand what science is.
It's not like Christians versus science.
That's not how it works.
There are lots of scientists who are Christians, and apparently it looks like most of the people who are claiming to have no God also don't have any idea what science is, what they're looking for.
They've got that religion-shaped hole, and they've filled it with something that they're calling science but isn't science at all.
Right, I mean, and the irony of it is, as you and I have said many times, the one and only value of science, the thing that makes it beat all other competing modes of figuring stuff out, is that it will tell you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear.
And so the point is, if you were really devoted to science as a method, then you would have to accept all the evidence that what you're saying is full of shit, right?
You are interested in portraying yourself as interested in science, so you don't have to explain why you're ignoring everything in front of your eyes, because the science told me I have to.
Really?
Right?
That's just simply not the case.
There is a world out here, whether you're interested in participating in its existence or not.
But I do think there's something to the idea It's a social club that has now, it has become consuming politics and reacting to it like an audience of politics rather than as participants.
Yes, yes.
So I wanted to take notes.
I did not expect you to stop talking.
Oh boy.
You have a bunch more stuff that you want to say.
Yeah.
So okay, so shall we switch topics slightly?
Do what you want to do.
You mentioned that I was on the Patrick Bet-David podcast the day that Kennedy made his announcement embracing Trump, and I was literally on minutes after that finished, so I was sort of juggling things listening to it as I was in motion.
You do not need to have watched that podcast in order to understand what we are about to talk about.
But in that podcast, Patrick Bet-David asked me a question, which in retrospect, I flubbed.
And I thought about it a lot in the aftermath and realized what I should have said.
So what he asked me is, why did I think that Kennedy had Gone to Kamala Harris in advance of this move.
The way the news reported it, he had gone looking for a cabinet position or something and the Harris campaign wouldn't talk to him.
I don't think that's what happened at all.
I think he did approach them for a conversation.
And that leaves a mystery as to why he would have done that in light of the fact that, broadly speaking, I think he agrees rather precisely with what we've been saying about this party.
It's unrecoverable and despicable in its essence.
It's not that the voters are despicable.
They are hypnotized.
But what this party is doing to the country and to the world is unforgivable and reckless as can be.
So why would he talk to Kamala?
Or why would he attempt to?
That's the question.
And what I realized after that podcast was over was that actually this dovetails with a trope from fiction that I have always been very fond of.
And the trope, you'll recognize it from many narratives that you've encountered, involves the hero of the story confronting the villain and giving the villain the opportunity to come on to the side of what's right, knowing full well that it is not in the villain's character to do so.
The villain will not take up the offer, repent, and come on to the side of what is good and decent.
But, this precedes the hero of the story destroying the villain.
And it is done not to waste anybody's time, but the point is actually the right to destroy the villain requires this.
You have to have given somebody the option to do the right thing in order for them to deserve what comes next.
Yes, it's more than that.
But there's but there's an element of of mercy and allowing for repentance.
Yes, it the point is, it's not you that you are savable, just as funerals aren't really about the dead.
They're about the living.
Right?
They're formally about the dead, but they are some they're a necessary process for the living to do what the living must do.
And so, you know, the dead are involved in them.
In this case, the villain has to be offered this opportunity in order for our humanity to persist, in order for us to live by a code that is unspoken.
And that code is a very important code.
And so my guess is that what Kennedy did was he gave, he did not want to be guilty in his own mind of not having given her a chance because he knew that what he was going to do was deliver a hopefully fatal blow to this party.
And the fatal blow, or the potentially fatal blow, In my opinion, is strategically quite brilliant.
It's better than I initially understood it to be.
I was initially confused by it, actually.
But what he did was he took himself off the ballot, or attempted to take himself off the ballot.
There's a wrinkle to this, but he filed to take himself off the ballot in swing states.
Yep.
In your mind, just run the thought experiment of what would have happened if Trump had won and Kennedy had remained in the race.
The blue team would have crowed about how Kennedy had done this to them, right?
Even though, for those of us who exist in this milieu, we don't know people who, Kennedy having left the race, are going to go vote for Kamala.
That person almost doesn't exist, right?
So, the fact is, he wasn't drawing votes from Kamala that would have flowed to her if he had left the race.
He was drawing votes from Trump.
So, the point is, if they really believed that he was hurting them, if the blue team did, then they should be grateful for this move.
But, in fact, what it does is, in reality, since he was drawing votes from Trump, it actually enables, it adds fuel to the Trump campaign.
Now, that's an interesting thing to do, in light of the fact that he is now formally teamed up with Trump, it makes a great deal of sense that he would do it.
But I would also point out that it is evidence, we got a text message from somebody we know pretty well, who told us that Kennedy was an obvious narcissist.
And our reaction was, no, that does not appear to be the case.
We know him.
We've dined with him.
We've broken bread.
He appears to be a very genuine, decent guy who's paid a hell of a price for doing what he thought was right.
Now, this move, taking himself off the ballot only where you have a swing state, is actually quite selfless.
Yeah.
Because the reason he left himself on the ballot in the states that are not in contention is because he's actually trying to reach a certain amount of the electorate.
He wants to gain enough votes that he gets, you know, federal funds, he gets status as a party.
He's trying to accomplish things and he could accomplish those things better if he stayed on all the ballots.
So the point is he's actually Crippling his own effort, right?
Whether it will be fatal or not, I don't know.
But he's crippling his own effort to do what he thinks is right.
And in this case, what he thinks is right is the same thing that you and I have argued for.
He's going after the blue team because it has become that rabid dog that cannot be saved.
And so... Anyway, the whole thing...
was quite carefully strategically arranged it was artful in the sense that if you're telling a bullshit story then it's you know then you're welcome and if you're telling the true story then uh screw you right because that's that's what he delivered and which brings me to my last point here i realize i've been going on and on but
It occurred to me before this all happened, and it only reinforces it now, that Donald J. Trump is, has played a role in history that I believe in the end, we will all be profoundly grateful for.
He has done something that was nearly impossible and that needed to be done.
We've talked before about the fact that he destroyed, he decapitated the Republican Party.
So yes, the Republican Party is looking strong at the moment, but it's not reminiscent.
It's not recognizable.
Yeah, it's not the Republican Party that you and I remember.
It's in fact a big tent.
It's an interested... It's an actually big tent.
It's an actually big tent.
It's interested in liberating people.
It is interested in environmental concerns.
Is it?
Yes, quite actually.
It was a very good discussion.
That's the one place I don't... The thing I may care about more than anything else and I don't see that.
Yeah, well, it's there.
First of all, what Kennedy announced in moving over to the red team is that we are all suffering from the pollution of our environments and that this is going to become a focal point and
Trump is saying that he wants this to be his legacy and in any case there's a there is a large Environmental component and of course the environmentalism over on the blue team while you might argue that the blue team is environmentally obsessed It's obsessed with one and only one issue which it misportrays so Anyway, the the red team has been transformed into something different right it now has the renegade the renegade billionaires from Silicon Valley and
Coupled with the refugees, the labor refugees from the blue team who have been embraced over in the Republican Party, it just looks different.
I'm not saying that it's not going to be captured by evil forces and returned to something.
But at the moment, it's a party that has been liberated and it was liberated by exactly one person.
Right.
Now, here's the question.
I think he's in the process of destroying the other party.
Right?
This was the force that seems to have broken the duopoly, not just by capturing one of the parties, but by leveling a credible threat against the other one.
And that is a very interesting role to have played in history, even if nothing else were true.
If he succeeded in breaking the back of these two heavily corrupt parties so that they could become something different.
Or in my hope in the case of the blue team, I'm sad to say, is that it fails utterly and is replaced by something new, different, and excellent.
That will be a remarkable accomplishment.
Yeah, well, let's see.
Yeah, let's see is right.
Let's see.
I don't really have anything I don't know.
I have no idea if that will happen or not, so I don't really have anything to add.
And the other thing I wanted to talk about doesn't really segue from that, but maybe I should just do it.
Yeah, I think we'll recover the connection.
I know where you're headed.
Okay.
I wanted to just share, sort of in keeping The connection to what we were talking about before is this, I've been thinking about this emotional appeal that seems to be the only appeal by which the Democrats are collecting people, which is hate that other thing, fear that other thing, but we are the party of joy.
And it's been much mocked, but that's because it's easy to mock, because where is the joy?
And frankly, you know, joy is a wonderful word, but the only other place that it has been really sort of popularized in recent years is trans joy.
Which, whenever the trans activists talk about trans joy, it almost seems like they have to be parodying themselves, because these things are never coming with pictures of people who look delighted in any way.
They look miserable.
And so this invocation of joy with the Democratic Party feels very similar to that.
In contrast, so we are experiencing something that is not joy this week, but is important and is deep, and it is that both of our children left for study abroad on the same day at the very same time.
This last Sunday.
So, you know, we didn't have twins, but they both left at the same time.
And, you know, parenthood brings such deep joy and meaning.
And I wrote about it for Natural Selections this week, and I'm not going to read the whole thing.
I, as always, appreciate when people do read what I write, so I will, of course, link to it in the show notes, but you can share my screen here.
I call it, Tiny Specks in the Universe, Are There Words That Can Do Justice to Motherhood?
And I just want to read the last few paragraphs because I think it is, in part, this last bit is a response to the sense that I have, and that is very much part of the Democratic Party at this point, that parenthood is something to be controlled and evaded, if possible.
And, you know, when we celebrate it, it's really only through the most technocratic means.
And so, you know, like I mentioned before, it's very curious to me that IVF is playing such a giant role.
In the messaging from the Democratic Party.
Part of what that raises for me is why is it that so many people who want to have babies are having to resort to IVF at this point?
Shouldn't that be the question?
Shouldn't that be the thing that we're asking ourselves with regard to Like, what have we done to our environment, to our food, and to our environment that so many people who should be fertile and they should be easy aren't able to do it on their own?
But so in light of that, at the end of this piece, I share some pictures, incidentally, of our boys the first time we took them to the Amazon.
Here's Toby and Zach eating lemon ants off a tree.
They are ants, they're not lemons, but they taste like lemon.
Toby, Zach holding the first and I think still the only piranha that he ever caught in the Rio Tipitini, which is a um tributary of the amazon and toby with one of many uh butterflies that alighted on him after a hike through the forest and his skin i think we what we concluded is that when you when you hike in the amazon you sweat a lot and your skin um gets sweaty and these lepidopterans moths too
but during the daytime it's mostly butterflies um will cover you uh and and taste you and drink the drink the now dried sweat off of you so that's some of our children from a long time ago that's 2013 so that's 11 years ago um here we go This is just the end of the piece.
I've heard people say that having children is bad for the planet, or will get in the way of their having the careers they want, or just doesn't suit their lifestyle.
They are certain that they do not want children.
And I've seen some of those people completely change their minds, their partners baffled and hurt, their trust breached.
The thing is, it shouldn't be surprising that people change their minds on this subject, especially women.
As a society, we've become fanatical in our pursuit of never having a sad or unpleasant moment.
Do make sure that everything is comfortable and easy and causes you no concern.
What we forget in our quest for comfort and ease, with nothing else to strive for, is that comfort and ease quickly become dull, banal, and generic.
They are inherently uninspiring.
The people who have successfully created a life for themselves that is only comfortable and easy, as opposed to one that pursues engaging comforts in between challenging work, become Graham and Gray.
They are the blank-eyed drones, easily coerced and easily convinced, so long as their comfort and ease do not go away.
Having children will make you less comfortable.
It will not be particularly easy, and it will rouse you and remind you that you are not all that there is.
You are but a tiny speck in the universe doing your best, and now, with this beautiful child, you are more than that.
You have another speck to care completely about, someone with whom you will be bonded forever, and ultimately, when you have succeeded, that someone will become independent and free.
So this is a bittersweet moment.
And that's not the right word because it's not bitter.
Yeah.
It's not bitter, but it is sad for us.
And yet it's exactly What was supposed to happen.
Yeah.
And the people, more of whom are on the blue team than on the red team, who are convinced that having a child is either selfish itself or beneath them or nothing they could possibly think of because it will get in the way of their own personal desires.
I start the piece by describing some of what I had done before we had kids and I was, you know, we were, you were 35, I was almost 35.
We're only a couple months apart in age, but when we had our first child, we lived full, amazing, exciting, exploratory, productive lives before we ever had children.
And, um, I know there's nothing like it.
If I had to give up all of the rest of it and keep our children, obviously that's what you do.
So, I've never proselytized for parenthood.
If it's not what you think you should do, then maybe you shouldn't do it.
But the idea that it's chic now, it's the hip thing, it's the fashionable thing to eschew parenthood, to say family isn't important.
Well, also down that road leads, you know, schools taking over for parents and children becoming prey to people online who say, if your parents disagree with you, then they're the enemy.
Like, family is what it is, what it's about.
As someone who didn't think about motherhood when I was a kid, didn't particularly want kids, I didn't not want kids, it just wasn't, I didn't have those fantasies.
It wasn't part of how I grew up.
I wanted to do a lot of things in my life and And yet once we got together, we knew that we would want to have had children, even though it never felt like the right moment.
And then it, as I write about in this piece, I just, it happened.
It happened, and it was the most extraordinary thing and remains the most extraordinary thing.
And how, again, just to take it back, and I like, I don't, I don't really, I don't want to keep talking about the blue team, but how could they possibly be the party that is talking about joy?
When they are the party that would have you betray your family and be really excited about never having one of your own.
I can't match those two things together.
There's nothing about it that looks joyful to me.
A couple points.
One, it has been about family for our species since long before our species was our species.
Long before there was language.
This is simply inherent to what we are and the idea of subordinating it or dispensing with it altogether is beyond radical.
What's more, it has a kind of predictable consequence for something like a political party that is experimenting with this being the new sophistication.
Which is, I sometimes say, kids will destroy your life and they will replace it with a better one.
I really mean this, right?
Yes, that life that you have become attached to, you can't live that life anymore once you have kids if you are doing right by them.
But what you get in return Very hard to explain it to somebody who hasn't been there or hasn't been embedded in a family in which it was all around them.
But it is, it is the meaning of existence, right?
The fact that we full well know that the right way for things to work out Is for these children who we have invested so much in to continue after we're gone.
Right?
Just even the very fact of caring about what happens after you're gone is so fundamental to properly governing anything.
That a party that is embracing some radical new way of thinking about yourself in which it is not... I'm not arguing that everybody has to have kids and certainly there are people who shouldn't.
Right?
Absolutely.
most people this is what life is about this is what the striving is for and to the extent that you have some idea about replacing it with something else should you have that right yes but should you expect that that should be normal and that it will not require you having to do a whole lot of extra work to figure out what What your life is for and what your obligations are to the rest of us if you don't have kids, right?
Kids cause the maturing of the mind in a way that it really needs to mature and is essential to the idea of governance.
It is a matter of planting trees in whose shades you will never sit, that kind of thing.
It forces a kind of wisdom that I don't know can come about via any other means.
And I think that's becoming less automatic that there's a false story about parenthood that, you know, lots of stories about, you know, the.
Whether we like the story or not, you know, you can't do that much about how smart your kids end up because, don't you know, those genes are so very important, which causes parents to think that they are babysitters, that they are effectively waiting to watch what the genes that they've put into a zygote mature into rather than know actually what you do with your kids has everything to say about what kind of people they become.
So anyway, you're just breaking the entire story and you don't know what you're going to replace it with because what the best you could do is replace it with something that has not stood the test of time and you will have no idea whether or not it's sensible.
Well, I mean, this feels, honestly, this feels completely consistent with what we were talking about before, with regard to the embrace of a kind of scientism, you know, a thing that looks like science to people who don't really know what science is, but absolutely is not.
It's this reductionist, like, oh, I know, we've got this thing called DNA, don't you know, and it's genetic, and therefore it's unchangeable, and therefore you have no role here, and therefore you can just relax, parents, because it wasn't really about you anyway.
And, you know, this is abuse of our understanding of what the informational molecule that, yes, is behind everything else about organic life on this planet, but no.
No.
Of course parenting makes a huge difference in how smart your child ends up, and how capable, and how kind, and how moral, and all of it.
And, you know, It is evidence of the failure of education, and the failure specifically of science education, that so many people are willing to accept it's genetic as an answer and move on.
And why do they do it?
Because it frees them from responsibility.
Invoking genes frees a person from responsibility, and that is part of what we are seeing across the board.
People are looking for an excuse to get out of being responsible for their actions, and genes is one of those things.
Basically, I would ask that people, every time genes are invoked, people question it.
Are we sure?
Is there a giant uptick in the thing that you say is genetic from 100 years ago?
Then think about generation time and think about how fast that could possibly change.
It's not going to be genetic.
That rapidity of change across three human generations, four, five at tops, not genetic.
Yeah.
In fact, everybody who's looking for an excuse blames genes because nobody understands enough about it to falsify it.
But many of these things are just transparently false.
Transparently, but like, no one has explained, like, take it and, you know, maybe, maybe that's on us in part.
Like, we used to do this with our classes, but we haven't, I feel like maybe this is something we should start hitting.
Like, actually, all of these things that you say are genetic, most of them can't be, or at least not primarily so.
Yeah.
I wanted to return to something and I hesitate to introduce it here because, you know, the poignant fact of our kids flying off on the same little airplane, you know, is it's an important moment in and of itself.
And I hate to bring in politics, but you raised this question of joy.
Yeah.
Now, I don't know.
I may be a strange person in this regard, but I actually have a, A weird response to hearing joy as the sort of central theme of the Democratic Party.
I'm not sure how often I even use that word.
I don't think almost ever.
I don't have a relationship with that word.
I know what it is.
I can appreciate that somebody else is feeling joy, but I almost feel like as a reasonably well-adjusted straight guy, Joy is not, it does not have a meaning to me that is deep.
It doesn't resonate?
No.
And lots of things do.
I mean, I have a similar relationship with the word happiness.
It's like happiness is an instantaneous measure of something.
Yes, I'm happy at this instant, but it doesn't really mean anything.
Fulfillment means something, right?
So it's not that I'm not interested in feeling good about stuff.
It's just that happiness is so fleeting and trivial that I just don't even think about it anymore.
Joy is kind of, I'm wondering, it'll be interesting to see whether other men respond to this, but my feeling is, I mean, first of all, Joy is a name.
It's a female name.
And I'm wondering if this is not actually a heavily gendered concept and that that might not be why a political party that has Become so fundamentally feminine in its essence, you know in the worst sense Has embraced this as this concept I mean because you're right when I look at I see the opposite.
I see a joyless party Yeah, pretending to feel something that might be called joy to which I do not relate right, so You think I mean no, I think I I I agree and I'm trying to think I
I don't know if this is the right angle, but the kinds of retail stores that you are unlikely to go into as a man, but that I went into back when we lived among retail stores.
It's not entirely fair, but...
I have, as you know, a fondness for handmade papers.
I make things.
I make lamps and boxes and stuff out of handmade papers and collect papers.
And so I go into stores that sell paper, but also sell things like cards and wrapping paper and stationery and just paper goods.
And I, in fact, worked in a card store for some months after we dropped out of college back in the day, so I have a sense of how these things change over time.
It's also a way of doing a little bit of sort of sociology on the changing culture, like how do these particular stores change over the decades?
And I think that, and maybe because it's so pithy, because it's such a short word, I think that joy shows up On cards, on like wrapping paper, on notebooks that mostly women buy, more than other words.
And, you know, this in a milieu that also, you know, birthday cards, you know, birthday cards next to joy will say, you know, will have like, oh, for your birthday, I hope you, you know, have Another glass of wine.
It's about the escaping and the stuff, and maybe that's just what birthday cards are, but it's very much a striving that is purely material and escapist and not productive and not creative or analytically interesting.
So I do have an association with that word from, and I want it like, I don't know that I've even ever seen a piece of needlepoint, but I feel like it shows up on pillows, right?
Like because it's short enough that it could.
So it's all consistent with what you're saying.
Shows up in joy to the world, right?
Well, and that's, and that's not, that's, that's a beautiful song.
Right.
I love that, Carol.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
I get it.
But here, here's what I think I'm... And that, but that feels, that's awe.
And that's, that's a bigger thing.
It's also about something.
Um, how can I say it?
So it's not offensive.
The point is it is a moment of mythologically distilled goodness.
Right?
Mm-hmm.
Well, so that in Joy to the World, I think it is.
I think what I was just talking about from like retail space, it's the opposite.
Of course, but my point is, let me flesh it out a little bit.
The thing about joy that does not resonate for me, and I don't think it's just female, Children.
Oh sure.
Right?
We talk about children and you know your child gets a gift that they love and you just see pure joy.
Yeah.
What joy is, is a completely un-complex emotion.
Right?
It is simple.
And I can't relate.
Oh this makes me so happy.
Right.
It's like I have just left the realm of calculating anything, of thinking about implications.
My to-do list is gone.
Right.
It's not like, it's not like, oh my God, what a wonderful thing has just happened such that we can now accomplish.
It's none of that.
It's just like a distilled loveliness, which is just not, I cannot relate to it as an adult.
Right.
It just does not make sense to me.
I mean, you have moments like that.
I don't think you have a relationship with the word joy.
I'm not claiming that.
Yeah, yeah.
Like you have, you have, I mean, you enjoy, which is the same root obviously, uh, you know, an excellent piece of steak or cheesecake or the sunrise.
Yeah, yeah.
Or Fairfax rolling around exposing his soft underbelly.
So, you know, but Again, I may be a weird person.
You are.
Thank you, I think.
But when I see a sunrise that's really transcendent, which we see a lot of around here, which is cool.
But when I see a sunrise that's transcendent, it does It causes me to feel profound gratitude for being there to see it, for the fact that such things still exist.
It causes me to become aware of how precious it is.
It's not, it's not uncomplex and Well, so I think there is a thing, a part of this that you are missing.
And I am not meaning to defend the use of the word.
I do not see joy in what the Democratic Party is doing.
But just as you cannot stand to even consider meditating, and I remember what would have been some wedding anniversary of ours back when we were living in Olympia.
I know exactly what you're going to reference.
I got us like parallel experiences in those like anti-sensory vats.
Sensory deprivation tanks.
Sensory deprivation vats, tanks.
And it was like 45 minutes?
Something like that?
You're like, it was eight years.
And you know, I never did it again and I didn't love it, but it was, it was mildly interesting.
And you almost pulled your fingernails out.
Like, you could not take it!
The funny thing is, I was sort of excited.
The idea of, like, real sensory deprivation, like, what will that reveal?
It will reveal how long a second is, you know?
Right, but, I mean, this is... Look, I'm not arguing against the concept of joy.
I think joy is an adaptation, no doubt.
A Buddhist you ain't.
Well, you know, I'm not an intentional Buddhist, but I keep arriving... But you can't, like, sitting...
Still, without input and trying to empty your mind of the ticker tape that's always going.
There is real value for many of us who aren't vapid in that.
Yeah, but when it comes to Buddhism, I'm still practicing.
You're not, though.
You're not trying.
No, I'm not succeeding is what I'm doing.
But anyway, back to the point.
I'm not arguing against joy as a concept, and it's not like I'm thinking that joy is in general Humans have a long history with joy.
I don't question it.
The question is, why is this party landed on that?
And what does it actually mean?
And the fact that when I check in with it and I hear, oh, this is the party of joy.
A. No, you aren't.
And B. What strategy session landed on that concept and why?
And I do think it has to do with this Female in the worst sense ethos that has taken over this party.
No, I agree with you.
I think that that is at least a piece of it.
Add to that, like, so far I have not heard them claim that Kamala is a good speaker.
Like, that's coming, I'm sure.
But so far, no one at least has claimed that.
But she does smile a lot, and she's an attractive woman.
And like, put aside her laugh, people love to make fun of it, whatever.
But, you know, there's lots of sound off, you know, video clips of her looking Full of joy.
So it seems to be a match for what thing she is conveying since she can't convey ideas because apparently she doesn't have any or she's not allowed to have any or something, right?
So, you know, there's at least like a phenotypic match for what thing she does present to the world.
Okay, that's good.
I hadn't thought about that, but you're right.
If you were going to try to rationalize her as a spokesman for some... What does she look like?
I don't know what she's laughing about, but she looks happy, I guess.
Yep.
Yeah.
He does look like somebody who is experiencing joy at something that I wish they weren't experiencing joy at.
Or could you just do that, like, elsewhere?
Right, yes.
Joy at having dispensed with democracy entirely.
Right?
Yeah.
All right, well, all interesting.
Certainly a shame that our discussion of our children heading off into the world has landed on Kamala Harris and the inexplicable joy of her now bewildering party, but... Yeah.
Yeah, it's possible I should have just read the whole thing, but maybe we should stop there.
Yeah, I think we might be there.
All right.
Yeah, let me see.
Is there anything?
No, I think maybe we should stop there.
Maybe we're done for the week.
We will be back next week with same time, same place, and then, and again the following week, but then things start to get weird, which I said last week, and you're like, start to get weird?
You know, just in Dark Horse Schedule land.
Dark Horse Schedule land is going to get weird.
Yeah.
Um, but, um, and in part because September 29th, we're both going to be in DC for the rally, uh, which I'm not going to say the name of.
Thank you.
Rescue the Republic, which you can find information about at jointheresistance.org.
Yeah.
Consider coming.
It's going to be amazing.
And join us on Locals.
We've got lots of great stuff there.
And our website is darkhorsepodcast.org where you can find links to our store and all the other stuff.
Reminded that our sponsors this week were... I've now forgotten.
That was terrible.
Manukora, our new sponsor.
Excellent Honey, Armoura, and Dream Recovery.
All fantastic.
Until we see you next time, Please, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
▲
Export Selection