Science, Myth, and Madness: The 241st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 241st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss food, science, and myth. Research out of Tufts University three years ago created the Food Compass—a new guide to what is healthy that rivals the Food Pyramid for sheer lunacy. Advising us that Froot Loops and Pringles are healthier choices than meat and eggs, the authors of that resear...
I was going to get there if you gave me long enough.
Sure, you were.
Well, you were giving me a look I would have realized.
It can't be too far above 240.
I would have guessed one, so.
Crime.
Prime.
Yes.
So don't, don't waste your effort trying to divide things other than 241 and one into it.
Cause you'll get nowhere.
You'll get nowhere.
As long as you're working with integers.
Yes.
Thank you for being here.
Oh, thank you.
If you are joining us on Locals for the Watch Party, that's awesome.
And we encourage everyone to join us there.
Should we upgrade the Watch Party and call it the Golden Watch Party?
No.
Right?
I mean, I'm glad we had the discussion, but... Yeah, I feel like it was efficient.
Remarkably so, yeah.
Maybe a little too efficient, but all right.
It's not the Golden Watch Party.
Yeah, you were always one of those people who just liked to spend endless time talking about things in meetings.
Oh, meetings, man.
I love a good meeting.
How about the G-Shock Watch Party?
Also no.
I have no idea what that means, actually.
Well, had you been a boy in high school... Which I wasn't, you'll remember.
You were not.
I do remember vividly.
You would have had a G-Shock watch.
Remember the part in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where... Now you're talking about it.
Right, where he's describing human beings and one of the characteristics he uses to get people on board with what a human being is, is that they still think a digital watch is a pretty cool idea.
Is this Ford Prefect talking?
I can't remember, I can't remember, but in any case, the G-Shock watch was like, instead of the fragile watch that you as a boy would break to of a year, it was like armored and it had some like stopwatch-y kind of features and things.
So you would have one of those and it would get scratched all to hell, but it wouldn't break and anyway, they were cool.
But the scratched all to hell was kind of like scars, right?
Yeah.
Battle, battle evidence.
Right, exactly.
You used it, you know, you weren't sitting at home video game and you were out like, lifing.
Yeah, at the arcade.
All right, there was a certain amount of that, but um, but yeah, anyway.
All right.
I probably still have one in a drawer somewhere.
Oh God, you probably do.
I probably do.
At this point it's probably in a bin with a lot of other things, including receipts from 1997.
I wonder how far off it is at this point.
Probably the battery's dead, but...
Ah, yes.
Oh, you meant far off.
Yes.
All right.
We're going to start top of the hour with our three ads, as we always do with sponsors whom we truly, truly vouch for.
And then this is going to be a relatively short episode this week, but we'll be back next week with not one, not two, but three episodes in rapid succession starting a week from today.
So if this isn't enough for you, hang on.
We'll be back soon with more.
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Oh, one of these is not an ad.
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I have... I have... You were doing so well.
I was, and then I just started... You're doing so great.
Yeah, I threw myself off.
You're just ad-libbing.
Yeah, it's a premium... When there's punctuation involved, you probably shouldn't ad-lib.
Isn't there always punctuation involved?
Well, when it's written down.
All right.
Yeah.
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It's possible I just screwed up the punctuation in that sentence.
I don't know.
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Well, not right now, but maybe sometime after the podcast.
Right.
It occurs to me.
Yes.
Very, very angry with you.
Yes.
And also... Hard to imagine, but okay, as a hypothetical.
As a hypothetical.
And have become a very spiteful person.
Yes.
Which I don't think I am.
No.
Most people aren't spiteful because spite involves hurting, being willing to hurt yourself in order to inflict harm on others.
And so this would require that I become spiteful.
But the way to enact my anger on you would be to write a script that was peppered with errors such that you just could not get through it at all.
Because I think... Game on, Hyne.
I have never, I won't, etc.
But, you know, there's occasional errors and, you know, I can sort of read through them, but... Right.
Now, here's the thing.
If you do that, I will leave the reservation.
We will probably lose the sponsor, but I'm gonna find a way through that thing.
Oh, you will?
You'll see, yes.
Alright, well, hopefully it doesn't come to that.
You're setting your jaw, like, okay.
Well, now that I see it coming, what am I supposed to do?
Okay, so you think... occasionally I get very, very angry with you, but you think I'm gonna go spiteful at that level?
No.
So you have to set your jaw.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Consider it unset.
Consider it unhinged.
Okay.
But don't consider me unhinged.
Many people have made that argument.
Yes.
And that's an inside joke.
Nobody else is going to get the unhinged jaw reference.
Oh, okay.
Well, I mean, I feel like we've talked about cranial kinesis here before.
Have we not?
I mean, undoubtedly we are the most popular cranial kinesis podcast on the internet.
I think so.
I think so.
So let's just, just go there briefly.
I mean, I, I would, uh, I would like to give an entire course on cranial kinesis, honestly.
Of course you would.
And I used to talk about it a fair bit when I taught vertebrate evolution, but there are a number of clades of tetrapods, no, not even just tetrapods, including the actinops, the ray fin fish, that have a substantial ability to move the bones in their skulls beyond just the flappy flappy that we have at the, you know, Where our jaw hinges here.
But you actually said unhinged.
So I'm trying to think.
Yeah, actually, then it's just gonna be the snakes and not all the snakes, but some of the snakes that everyone's seen pictures of like rattlesnakes taking in objects that are bigger than their head.
Right, unless it's like the trope, like, don't eat anything bigger than your head.
Unless you're a viper.
Unless you're a critilot, like a pit viper.
I think the other vipers can as well, because they have an ability to basically open up their jaws to eat things that are in fact bigger than their heads, because they're not attached in the way that mammal skulls are.
Maybe that's all I'll go to for now.
Shorebirds also do some really fascinating stuff.
Well, if you ever do a series, it should be called something like Hying Unhinged.
Yeah.
I just think... Do I get to rant?
Of course!
Yeah.
Irresponsibly.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm going to look after Douchers and Dunlin.
Short words.
All right.
Yeah.
We're back from our tangent.
We are.
We are back from our unhinged tangent.
And I could start or you could start.
Why don't you start?
Why don't I start?
All right.
I am going to...
Start, let's see, I want to talk about the Food Compass.
So the Food Compass is a, well actually you can just go ahead and show my screen here, Jen, and we'll keep it up as I move between various things.
So the Food Compass, this is an article, a piece of research published in 2021, I believe.
Yep, October 2021.
I think we've mentioned it before, because it's kind of like the New Food Pyramid.
It's just as, well, unhinged, if you will, but it is being promoted as the, you know, scientific, data-forward, metric-heavy response to the question that everyone asks, what is it that we should be eating?
It is the New Food Pyramid Scheme.
It is the new food pyramid scheme.
Very good.
Thank you.
No, I like that.
I like that.
So here's the original paper published in 2021 coming out of Tufts University with the lead author Mozaffarian and a number of other people.
The title being Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods.
Well, that sounds promising, doesn't it?
Here, just a little bit from the abstract.
Nutrient profiling systems, NPS, aim to discriminate the healthfulness of foods for front-of-package labeling, warning labels, taxation, company ratings, and more.
Existing NPS often assess relatively few nutrients and ingredients, use inconsistent criteria across food categories, and have not incorporated the newest science.
That means we're going to get the newest science.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
The newest and the best, I presume.
That's where health comes from.
The newest science.
Yeah.
And if it's newest, it must be the best.
Here, we developed and validated an NPS, the Food Compass, to incorporate a broader range of food characteristics, attributes, and uniform scoring principles.
We scored 54 attributes across nine health-relevant domains.
nutrient ratios, vitamins, minerals, food ingredients, additives, processing, specific lipids, fiber, and protein and phytochemicals.
The domain scores were summed into a final FoodCompass score ranging from 1 to 100 for all foods and beverages.
And then just the end of the abstract: On the basis of demonstrated content, convergent and discriminant validity, the FoodCompass provides an NPS scoring a broader range of attributes and domains than previous systems with uniform and transparent principles.
This publicly available tool will help guide consumer choice, research, food policy, industry reformulations, and mission-focused investment decisions.
And we'll get back to that investment decisions soon.
Mission-focused investment decisions.
We'll get there.
Yeah, we'll get there.
But first, so actually, just keep it on my screen while we're doing this.
We'll get there.
But first, let's I'm not going to spend a lot of time delving into exactly what they did, because it's exactly as sort of, you know, reductionist and metric heavy as they acknowledge.
And for them, that's that's a positive.
So here's one of their figures from their paper.
This is, I got small again, this is figure two, the Food Compass score was zero, their lowest healthfulness foods at zero, their highest at 100, and just to give you a broad sense, here I'll make it a little bit bigger again, well, you know, water doesn't have an entry, which is good because it's water,
um but but you know it looks like they got breads down here um you know high variance but you know a lot um fairly low um a lot of the carbs here in the middle though that's a little odd um but then they have like okay pickled vegetables show up high that sounds that sounds good i mean you can ask questions here but this is not the place where we're going to spend time yeah i know but i i don't even get it like breads and go on i'm just trying to figure out why
Breads, rice, and breads and rice and pasta end up so different.
Is that because they're averaging the amount of extra stuff?
So different from one another?
Yeah.
Well, part of what I found in looking through this, and let me just point out like cured meats way at the bottom, most meats lower than, you know, breads and pastas and such, and animal fats super low, plant oils higher.
Hey, look at that.
We're going to show you, I'm going to show you some of their specific numbers here, but you know, there's some stuff here that seems to make sense, but not a lot.
and um sorry um in their discussion they say our findings indicate that the food compass is a credible transparent tool for science-based assessment of the overall healthfulness of diverse foods snacks beverages and mixed dishes and that is part of where the answer to your question is is that um almost everything that they looked at was a food that's already been already had value added it's already been processed they're looking at very few uh very few raw foods and in fact um
Let's see.
I'm going to go to my substack this week in which I talked about this, and I will read from this in a moment, but most of what they are reviewing in this food compass is not food that just came out of the ground or out of an animal.
Yeah, it's not an ingredient.
It's not an ingredient, and they only have their so-called uncorrected scores with regard to some of the ingredients.
So a lot of the numbers I'm going to be showing you here are the so-called uncorrected scores, because that's their corrected scores.
The basis by which they want you to make healthy, supposedly, decisions, food decisions, are based on their corrected scores, which are entirely these value-added products, it seems.
So just a little bit from what I wrote this week on natural selections.
Reviewing this movie, Unfrosted, which is a Jerry Seinfeld, his directorial debut about a fictionalized, zany send-up of the history of the Pop-Tart.
And there's a lot in this movie that is troubling, and it caused me to wonder what the connection is between Big Food, Hollywood, and the Democrats.
And so that's what this piece is about more broadly, but here's just a little piece of it.
What is the relationship between Big Food and Hollywood?
Kennedy is right.
The failure of health in our country can be attributed to many things, but the severe decline in our diet is central.
I'm of course talking about Bobby Kennedy's reference to the chronic disease epidemic.
Yes, there you go.
And his new tagline, Make America Healthy Again.
So Kennedy is right.
The failure of health in our country can be attributed to many things, but the severe decline in our diet is central.
And that decline can be substantively explained by the rise in big food.
That rise, in turn, has been supported by federal subsidies and regulations, which make it particularly hard to be a farmer who wants to grow food for people to eat, as opposed to growing food for companies to process and devaluated gunk.
And that rise in big food has been facilitated by the academic corporate government complex, which produces insane research like the Food Compass, exactly the research we're talking about here.
Emerging from Tufts University, the Food Compass finds that, for instance, it's healthier to eat honey nut Cheerios with a Food Compass score of 73, Or restructured lightly salted potato chips.
I think that means Pringles.
Restructured potato chips.
I think that means Pringles.
Pringles get a 59.
Then it is to eat scrambled eggs, 32.
Or roast beef, 33.
Yeah.
In this upside-down world, Froot Loops Marshmallow, 46, are higher than eggs or meat in dietary virtue.
Pop-Tarts are sadly missing from the mix, but General Mills' Lucky Charms earns a 60.
And somehow if you eat Lucky Charms chocolate instead, your Food Compass score goes up to 69.
So twice the food virtue of scrambled eggs or beef.
And then here's a table.
So I pulled all of those numbers from the supplementary materials of Table 8 of the research, which I link here in the sub stack.
And this is a table that I haven't fact checked everything, but it offers a slightly better visual.
It offers a visual on this where you see the things that they want you to ...are encouraging in your diet include things like, sure, watermelon and kale, but frosted mini wheats, unsweetened almond milk, non-fat frozen yogurt, orange juice with calcium, honey nut Cheerios.
To be moderated, things like skinless chicken breast, egg substitute, Lucky Charms, whole wheat bread, whole milk, almond M&Ms, ice cream cone with nuts, and definitely minimize the whole egg fried in butter, the cheddar cheese, and the ground beef.
So, this is backwards land it's upside and this is what i called it my piece something like it's an upside down world and you're living in it right like this i'm stunned you're right anybody even if you were just on the take and looking to launder nutrients or whatever the idea that you would put this that you would submit it with frosted mini wheats encouraged like Sure, yeah.
In 2024?
Yeah, well, 2021.
Is anybody buying this?
Apparently yes, so this is this is the thing so Now we're gonna go back So this is I just want to show you some of their actual like what's in their supplementary information from the original published work This is supplementary table 8 With their listings of some just just let's look at fats and oils Yeah, so we got canola soybean and sunflower oil coming in with a food compass score of 90 whoa, uh-huh olive oil Pretty high.
I mean, lower than the seed oil, sure, but pretty high, actually, with an 85.
Margarine, stick margarine, unsalted, with a 58.
Margarine-like spread, reduced calorie, about 40% fat.
Here in 28 territory, definitely like you want to be avoiding these things, does include things that you do want to avoid.
Uh, butter, margarine, blend, tub, but also cream, heavy.
Okay?
Okay, but we haven't gotten to the lowest part yet.
19, lard.
No, actually lard's good for you.
Uh, animal fat or drippings at 11.
Butter at 8.
Coconut oil at 4.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's bonkers.
This is bonkers.
So this, this is their supplementary material that was published with, um, with their research and it's, you know, 208 pages of supplementary materials.
Uh, and like you, they might say, and I haven't seen them say it like, Oh, you know, the tables are misrepresented, but they're not.
They're just not like, this is what their, what their research comes up with.
And, And frankly, now what they've done.
So remember where we started?
We started with the abstract for this research in which they say, this publicly available tool will help guide consumer choice, research, food policy, industry reformulations, and mission-focused investment decisions.
Mission-focused investment decisions?
What?
Well, here we go.
Following year, the same group with a slightly different order of Order of Authors, but you see the third author here, O'Hearn, is the lead author on this piece, Perspective, published in another Nature property.
This is the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, but it's one of the many peer-reviewed scientific journals that is owned under the umbrella of Nature, one of the supposedly most Best.
Glossiest.
Glossiest scientific journals on the planet.
Perspective.
The time is ripe for ESG plus nutrition.
Evidence-based nutrition metrics for environmental, social, and governance investing.
So let me just share a bit from this paper.
So wait, this is the new LGBTQIA.
They're just going to start adding stuff to ESG?
Well, sure.
No, actually, they're going to claim, I think, that this is social.
They're going to claim that this just is embedded within the social.
But that's probably what happened with LGB for a while.
Like, they probably, the Q was enough, and then they just started adding more stuff, right?
So, yes.
Nonetheless, it has an eerie ring to it.
Yeah, for sure.
The globe, they tell us, faces a nutrition crisis.
Actually, the globe doesn't, but we'll put that aside.
The people.
On the globe, face a nutrition crisis.
Suboptimal diet is the leading cause of poor health worldwide with devastating social, environmental equity, and economic consequences.
In 2018, poor diet quality was estimated to cause 12 million deaths due to non-communicable diseases globally.
In the U.S., treatment of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancers accounted for one in four dollars in health care, an 18% higher spending than in 2009.
Remember who's writing this?
the global health and economic burdens and nutrition-related disease must reimagine and reform the food system, including new approaches to influence the private sector, which plays a critical role in supplying and influencing food choices, nutrition, and health outcomes of consumers.
Remember who's writing this.
These are the people who said the seed oils are top of the list of things you should be eating in abundance, and coconut oil, butter, cream, and lard should be avoided.
That's just a few more things from this insane paper.
A proposed framework for objective, valid, and practical ESG plus nutrition metrics.
We propose a framework to develop objective, valid, and practical ESG plus nutrition metrics across four domains.
One, healthfulness of product portfolios.
Two, wait for it, equitability.
Affordability, accessibility of product distribution across diverse populations, three, marketing strategies and practices, and four, corporate governance and other strategies related to nutrition.
Corporate governance and other strategies related to nutrition.
We believe the initial focus should be on consumer-facing food and beverage businesses, food and beverage manufacturers, food retailers, quick service and dining restaurants, and contract catering and food service, and later consider other food related sectors, for instance, agricultural production and supply chains.
Yeah, they're coming for your food at every level.
We're gonna wait until we go for the agricultural production, but we're coming, is what they're saying here.
We believe ESG plus nutrition should also assess marketing strategies, including spending on different products and population targets, adherence to international standards, and message alignment with the latest science.
Frankly, I think message alignment with the latest science is one of the most apocalyptic phrases I have heard.
And if everyone doesn't feel that way after what happened during COVID, message alignment with the latest science.
You wouldn't understand what the latest science actually is, how it got there, but here's the result.
Eat more canola oil.
It's good for you.
And we're going to do everything possible in marketing, which Obviously often means not just billboards, but much more scurrilous forms of marketing to consumers to make them feel that the worst things possible they could be eating are in fact the best things possible, thus perpetuating the absolute health crisis that everyone on the planet with a Western diet is experiencing.
Because Western diet no longer means meat and potatoes, it now means Tiny Net Cheerios and Frosted Mini Wheats.
So I want to remind the audience of what we concluded in our previous ESG discussion.
So ESG, that is Environmental, Social and Governance scores that are supposedly there to incentivize corporations to be better citizens of the planet but actually function in exactly the opposite fashion.
are effectively social credit scores in the Chinese style, but applied to companies rather than people.
Yes.
And the importance of this is it creates an opportunity for what I would call something like incentive tyranny.
So you now have a mechanism- Incentive tyranny, that's good.
Somebody's proclaimed that they've got a rubric for figuring out what's healthy.
Now mind you, these people have to be flat-out monsters because they are writing that poor diet is one of the leading causes of death, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they are recommending seed oils.
So, you know, how...
How nuts do you have to be not to put those two things together and realize that, oh, I'm actually a villain in that story in which I'm recommending something that's going to result in people's deaths and I'm apparently comfortable with it.
So you create a metric.
And the point is, oh, what we're going to have is the latest science to figure out what you should be putting in your mouth.
And that's going to be open to the highest bidder.
You've got a corrupt scientific apparatus.
And if you want your garbage, deadly food to be recommended as actually a healthy choice, then you can get in on the action.
It's not cheap, but it's worth it in the end.
And what we're going to do is we're going to enforce message discipline, right?
If you're not in line with the latest science, then you're, you know, you're making disinformation or whatever.
Right.
And in this house, we believe in science, right?
Right.
Exactly.
So the point is they are just co-opting the exact mechanism that you would use to get out of a health crisis.
What is going wrong?
Why is there so much chronic disease?
Could we actually just study that question with no perverse incentives, figure out what's making people sick so they can just choose not to do that thing anymore?
Nope.
We're going to capture your, you're going to, we're going to capture your scientific apparatus.
So it becomes our PR apparatus instead.
Right.
And they're going to, We're also going to fail to educate everyone such that even, maybe especially, those who think that they are most highly educated but aren't in the sciences, and many in the sciences as well, but if you're not in the sciences and you think you're highly educated, you are particularly prone now to say, oh goodness, well I don't know, but I know that there are people who do, and I know that I should trust the experts.
Yeah it's you are displacing people's correct trust in a method that is self-correcting and what you're doing is you're taking the method out of it and you're using its costume to take pure corrupt authority and have it speak.
It's a science suit.
It's a science suit you know or sometimes it's a doctor suit but so I It dawned on me earlier this week that the failure of doctors to alert you to the fact that they have a financial incentive to get you to vaccinate your children is a violation of your right to informed consent, which, as we pointed out here before, in 1945 was a hanging offense.
Right.
We hang seven doctors after World War Two for violating informed consent.
And here we are, your doctor saying, oh, you really need to vaccinate your child for hepatitis on day one of their life.
But they're not telling you that they've got a reason to say that that's financial rather than medical.
Yep.
Right.
So.
And furthermore, that the advice that you just gave is legal advice, not medical.
No, sorry.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Different.
Different.
Different topic.
But but nonetheless, we It's the same game across every domain.
If you have a natural inclination to feel good about science and reluctant about the alternatives to it, then you're in big trouble because you just told them what the route is to get you to do anything in the market that they want you to do.
It's nuts.
And you can, I mean you know the seed oils, it's just a slam dunk, right?
Here we've got an industrial lubricant that was dressed up as a health food, vegetable oil.
Well it's not vegetables, it's seeds, and seeds don't want to be eaten.
Nature puts poisons in seeds to keep animals from eating them because when an animal eats a seed, that seed doesn't germinate, that is bad for the plant.
So plants Do their best fanciest poison chemistry for their seeds.
Yep.
So that means that in order to make that vegetable oil vegetable oil Non-toxic you have to get the poisons out which is a whole bunch of fancy industrial chemistry, too So, you know the idea that the people who are so concerned about those dying from a health crisis Just so happen to be recommending seed oils tells you who they are and what they want.
That's right.
It's pure corruption.
It's it's pure corruption and It is, of course, an open question as to what percentage of them really believe that they're doing scientific work.
And who knows, because they're getting paid directly from the people who want one answer and one answer only, that what they're doing is not science.
But either way, it's not good science.
Maybe if I show my screen again here, for people who are appropriately concerned about seed oils, And who want to be able to dine out sometimes and avoid seed oils as much as possible, check out Seed Oil Scout.
It's an app available on your phone.
So, you know, I've just pulled up the website here, but it's not really desktop ready.
It's an app for your phone and it's great and it's growing.
Like so many of The useful things that have emerged from us all carrying little computers around in our pockets as opposed to the very, very many things that are not good.
The more users of the thing, the better it is.
Yep.
And so it allows you to find restaurants near where you are that are either 100% seed oil free or it basically tells you what the situation is and it's useful.
Well, it's actually, it's the...
I'm going to use the term organic in a way that's confusing here, but it's the legitimate and organic alternative to ESG.
If you want people who are actually using the ingredients that you should be ready to eat to continue with those choices, they have to be able to profit by it.
If there's no advantage because nobody knows they're avoiding seed oils, then the point is it's more expensive, so they will make less profit.
So if you want them to succeed, A, you need to be willing to pay a little more, as you should, because you're not eating poison.
But B, you should want it to reflect well enough on them that it is not only the right thing to do from the point of view of your health, but it's also the right thing for them to do business-wise.
That's what you want, the alignment of those two things.
And I will say, I have been experimenting.
I'm now alarmed enough about seed oils that I've been experimenting with asking, what do you make that with?
And often they don't know because it's not unlike wheat allergies.
It's not like gluten where somebody knows where it is, right?
They're like, oh, I don't know.
I'll go ask the kitchen.
Right, and then if the kitchen doesn't know, that tells you the food is not being made on site, and what are you doing?
Right.
Like the amount of food that you can get when you eat out that isn't actually made on site is absurd.
Right, but I find now that when you ask, actually, there's often a way, right?
Like if there's a salad dressing issue, and you know, all the salad dressings have seed oil, all the pre-made ones.
All the stuff, yeah.
All the stuff on the shelves.
But they very often will have some balsamic vinegar and some olive oil and they'll give that to you.
And it's like, wow, would I rather do that than some seed oil based bottle dressing?
Absolutely.
So asking about it will also alert them that, hey, there's a market out there of people who are concerned about this.
So all this is the the real ESG involves, you know, looking out for your health by trying not to eat things that are actually poison.
And that chart, there's a pretty good guide to what's actually poison if you flip it on its head.
Uh, the, uh, the one that I showed you on my stuff.
Yeah.
The one where eggs are bad and seed oils are good.
Yeah.
This one.
Uh, yeah.
I mean, watermelon and kale is fine.
It's noisy.
Yeah.
It's a little bit noisy.
And that's, I showed you, um, first, um, I don't know.
their graph which again it's like pickled they like pickled vegetables okay yeah you know and and but you know i don't actually know i don't know what all of these people who were doing this kind of work like i've decided that cured meats are absolutely the enemy more than even more than all the rest of meat rather all the everything else and i don't exactly know what that's about if they're just if it's a conflation and so they're looking at like hormel brand that's got all the additives you know the nitrates and the nitrites
and you know all of that and it might be that but otherwise You know, why do cured meats always show up lower than fresh meats?
Because it's a preservation method.
Yeah, well, the question is, there are obviously tried and true preservation methods.
Right.
And then there's industrial.
And Harmel's not doing that.
Right.
But I mean, it may be that just like with seed oils, they're everywhere, even in, you know, organic food and things like that.
And it may be that the awakening to the danger of those things needs to force a reversal into traditional ways of preserving.
Smoke, salt, drying, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, all those things.
So anyway, I'm not prepared to say that I think the cured meats aren't a problem, but it won't surprise me if that's a false connection.
And it won't surprise me if it's just the industrial version that has supplanted a version that's perfectly healthy and we don't know about it.
Yeah, I will say just looking at this again, so I showed a bunch, a number of different visuals, and this one again is not, I didn't make this, nor did the researchers make it, and I haven't fact-checked every number on this against their supplementary table, which I did show you some of.
Um, but assuming this is right, you know, this isn't a flip it on its head because, you know, ice cream cone with nuts, which they think is healthier to eat than a whole egg fried in butter, cheddar cheese, or ground beef, um, is not the thing you should eat next after you get your meat and cheese and eggs.
Right.
right?
And you know, sweet potato fries or chips, if fried in, you know, something like tallow, that's probably pretty freaking good for you.
And that's kind of high up on their list.
But there's just a whole lot here.
There's a whole lot of what they looked at that frankly, frankly, you should treat it as a zero.
And this I was talking to our son, Zach, who used to be our producer, who's in a big city in Europe, and he was talking about the difficulty of knowing what all is in his food, and how at the food service, the dorms where he is, all the food that comes at him looks pretty complicated.
And he's like, I guess I'd forgotten how simple my diet had become.
He'd become amazing.
He grilled beef and pork a lot and sliced it thin, and he had sweet potatoes and, you know, he was trying to bulk, so he had orange juice and stuff, but, you know, rice.
And he gets this food and goes like, I just don't...
It doesn't remind me of food.
And that reminded me of, you know, my childhood where, you know, I never had fast food because, you know, it didn't remind my father in particular of food.
And so we never stopped there.
And so, because I never had it when we started going out, um, and you know, you'd had a little bit, you'd had a more typical American childhood.
It wasn't your childhood.
It was rare, but we definitely had it.
You definitely had it.
And, you know, we'd be on a road trip.
You're like, you want to stop?
Like, that's not food.
Like, I don't, I don't, I don't see that as food.
There's no food here.
Right.
And, you know, that's the thing.
Not this, like, oh, maybe sometimes, like, train your palate.
And, you know, I am— I've never regarded fast food or soda as food and so I don't eat it, but I love sugar.
And so there's lots of stuff that I eat that I know I shouldn't be eating that I love and I bake well and I bake organically and all this, but sugar's a toxin, shouldn't be eating sugar.
So it's not that this is easy and you just have to be virtuous and people are perfect or not, but you can train yourself.
to have a palate that loves real food such that you don't want the stuff that that you shouldn't be eating.
And so, you know, your example specifically is gluten.
Yeah.
Where you've now got, you know, I'm now not eating gluten, either.
And I have a much more trivial, bad response to it than you do.
But but it's not a response.
And in the first several years of Uniting Gluten, I still like I love sourdough.
I just love sourdough so much, and I would eat it in front of you, but at first, like really cautiously, like, oh God, should I not, you know, it's like an alcoholic or something, like, should I not be doing this in front of you?
And you're like, no, it looks like rocks to me.
Yeah, doesn't look like food.
Which I didn't get at all, and I still don't get that with sourdough.
Actually, I don't quite get it with sourdough, with everything else.
Yeah, but like beer.
You kind of like beer, right?
You like a good IPA, and you don't...
Yeah.
You don't want IPA anymore.
That's the thing I miss least actually.
Beer.
IPA.
Yeah.
I mean, I liked, I liked beer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like a nice bitter beer or a wheat beer.
Um, but you know, I didn't like it enough to care that it's gone.
You know, I really don't miss beer.
I miss, you know.
Sourdough.
Yeah.
Sourdough.
A really good pizza crust.
A really good hamburger bun.
Um, but, Yeah, not because the hamburger bun makes the burger, but because almost all gluten-free hamburger buns fall apart as soon as you start eating them, and so you're like... Yeah, and they detract, you know?
They do.
A really good hamburger place will maybe make a make its bun in-house or something, and then the substitute is some store-bought thing because they can't afford to... So, you know, it's often a downgrade, and it doesn't have to be.
It's not like it couldn't be done well, but it just rarely is.
So anyway, I miss those things a little bit, but it's, you know, In terms of the stuff people face, it's pretty freaky.
Yeah.
I mean, actually quite literally a first world problem.
Like the first world created this problem, right?
You know, probably with the combination of glyphosate and food additives and, uh, and you know, we've all got leaky guts and adjuvants and, and here we are, uh, bringing our unhealth to the rest of the world.
That's what we do.
Yes.
It's a disease imperialism.
Yeah, fun.
Yeah.
But we're the good guys.
I guess we are.
Yeah.
All right.
You're up, man.
All right.
Well, I had two things that I wanted to talk about.
The first one turns out to be delicate, and I wish it wasn't.
I don't want people to freak out just at hearing the mention of it, but I was in transit yesterday.
I feel like I'm going to freak out.
No, don't freak out.
It's not worth freaking out.
I was in transit yesterday and so I had a bunch of downtime and I listened to what I think is Tucker's latest podcast.
Tucker Carlson.
Yep.
With Daryl Cooper who goes by the handle MartyrMade on Twitter at least.
Has two podcasts I think and a sub stack.
In any case, it was a pretty wild interview and it has created a huge firestorm online.
Okay, I haven't seen it.
I don't know anything about it.
Yep, I'll tell you.
So, The podcast is basically a historical reinvestigation of various topics.
This particular podcast covered a little bit of the Jim Jones massacre.
From which we get Don't Drink the Kool-Aid.
Yes.
And I will tell you that long before there was a Twitter, I once went down the rabbit hole to look into the Jonestown Massacre because it was a fascinating and bizarre event.
And I also found that there was a lot about that event that was not in the public mind.
So I definitely am aware that there is this Pattern of the story you think you know isn't what you think it is So anyway, the second part of this podcast the majority of it by far Was about World War two and I don't mean about the Holocaust.
It was about the war part of World War two not the atrocity part And it presented Cooper presented a radical departure from the story that we all think we know.
And I will tell you, I am not an expert on the war part of this.
I will say I have had the experience, you know, we grew up with the idea of The Americans entered the war late as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that we turned the tide, won the war, saved Europe and the world from the Nazis.
And as an adult, I know that story isn't true, right?
We occasionally force ourselves to whisper that the Russians may have helped.
Yeah.
And the fact is, Our presence in that battle was important, but it was overwhelmingly the Russians.
And that is not the way it is understood on this side of the pond.
Russians understand this very well.
So anyway, again, it's a place where it's like, okay, the story you think you know, isn't the story.
So I'm open to that thread.
I found What Cooper presented about World War II.
The thread of the history is not correct.
Right.
That thread, okay.
Yes, that there's an awful lot of history that isn't correct.
And, you know, you see this in a lot of places.
You see this with Martin Luther King Jr., right?
That story is more complex, right?
Like, I see him very much as a civil rights hero, but, you know, there's weird stuff if you dig there.
There's plagiarism in that story.
There's philandering.
So, Well, we expect the passage of time to whittle away details, and we hope that what we get is a through line that is accurate if lacking in precision.
But sometimes, you know, because it's written by the victors, etc., etc., or it's written by the people who become powerful, even if they weren't really the victors.
that the through line that we are told isn't even the accurate one.
And those two things are different, right?
Like history's tendency to lose precision and to make people into, you know, heroes or villains is well understood.
And that's okay, I think.
I mean, like, what else are you going to do?
Well, that's what I want to get to.
So let me get past the particulars of this podcast, which I can't say very much about.
I can say it was jaw-dropping.
A lot of it focused on Churchill, who is somebody that most of us educated folks would say is One of, if not the hero of that story, and we think we know why.
And the perspective that Cooper presents has him actually as a villain in the story, which caused a lot of people to react very negatively.
And I saw different kinds of reactions.
I saw some honest-to-goodness pushback based on evidence that I found compelling.
So I do think that the story that was presented to Tucker is not complete.
At least.
Whether it's wrong, I don't know.
I'm not a scholar in this area, so I'm not in an expert position to judge it, but I do think... What I want to get to is why there was a reaction and what the deeper story is with respect to questions of history.
Why they are so frequently not what you think they are.
And I'm not saying that this is that case, but I'm saying they often are not what you think they are.
And what it implies for us moderns.
And in this case, I'm not abusing that term.
Everybody's modern when they're there, and we're here.
So, okay.
So, anyway, I've seen a couple of threads in the people who are pushing back.
One of them I resonate quite strongly with, which is, wow, this is a hell of a moment to be playing games with what amounts to foundational mythology.
Even if it's not right.
The point is, A, you've got this wave of anti-Semitism like I've never seen.
And now you're like tugging at the strings of the sweater.
And that is, at this moment, as we are trying to figure out what sort of people we are moving forward here in the U.S., it's a hell of a moment to be playing games with foundational stuff.
Let me say I resonate with that.
Again, I haven't heard the podcast.
I resonate with that.
But such critique might sound very much like the critique aimed at COVID dissidents.
Yep.
2020 through 2020, well through now.
This is not the time to ask questions.
That's not the time to resist the authorities.
Just do what you say.
Sit down.
Shut up.
We'll get back to your questions later.
So that is going to be my final point.
Oh, sorry.
No, I'm perfectly happy to have it intrude here, and it's probably worthy for people to know that that's where I'm headed.
But let's just say there was a lot of, I think, Understandable concern over what unfolds in the next several months.
Yeah.
Yada, yada, yada.
At the same time, what the hell?
These are questions of history, right?
Right.
To the extent that we can figure out what's true or false, who the hell is anybody to say, don't go there?
So, I get both sides of that argument and you'll see where where I end up but what I wanted to really talk about was something that I think people may have heard me say previously that our relationship with psychology As a discipline is completely broken because psychology is two things that are called by the same name, right?
Psychology is a therapeutic art, right?
You go into the shrink's office and you talk to them about things and they help you move developmentally past something that's got you blocked or whatever.
At the same time, it's a science where we study how the mind works.
Those two things, in my opinion, have next to nothing to do with each other.
We don't know enough about how the mind works to get from there to what to do about it.
And what the clinical psychologist really is, is A refresh of what a clergy person would have done or a best friend who you'd grown up with and knew you backwards and forwards for your entire life and knew the people you were interacting with and is in a position to give you good advice.
The clinician is a helpful empathic Deep thinking, hopefully, person and we pretend and I think most of the clinicians who are good at it are not good at it because of all of the stuff we've learned about the way the mind works.
And in fact, if you doubt that or you think I'm being unkind, recognize that the replication crisis started in psychology.
Most of the results that we thought we knew were true weren't even true.
We can't reproduce them.
So, the point is, the science is broken, you know, for a lot of reasons.
For corruption reasons, for its difficult reasons, for the mind is the hardest thing to study in some ways.
There's emergence.
It's ineffable.
Right.
So, we've got two things that are both called psychology.
There are two things, not one, right?
So I'm going to claim that we've got a similar problem over here with something like what's the truth of Winston Churchill, right?
Winston Churchill is two guys.
Winston Churchill is a myth and Winston Churchill is a formerly living human being who interfaced with actual events.
Now I don't know what to do about the problem but what I think I see is that civilizations require myths in order to function but we have plugged something in that generates myths that a doesn't work and b is illegitimate on its face and this is because we have not figured out how to we're still new at this civilization thing used to be that civilizations evolved
We're now in the phase of architecting them.
Architecting them, and it surprises me to hear you say that the myths have been created, because you've said before, and we've said, that myths can't be created, that stories can be created, and when they stand the test of time, they can become myths.
But that isn't up to us.
It's a little bit like declaring that you will no longer speak this way, that language will no longer be the way it is.
Like, yeah, that's not the way language works.
It's also not the way myth works.
Yeah, in fact what I've said is you can't write a myth.
You can write a story and it can be fashioned into a myth by selection.
Either by being chosen among many stories, but also in general by being modified through selection.
That is to say the people who have the version of it that's most useful end up prospering through their relationship with a story whose relationship to the truth is mixed.
Right.
All right, all you Christians, you better sit down for this one.
Jesus is just such a story, right?
This is a very powerful story, and if you believe it, it's good for you.
But the different versions of it speak to a process that chose elements to highlight, created phenomena that presumably did not happen.
Well, I mean, just as you said about Churchill, regardless of what is actually true about Churchill, you said there's two, right?
There's a man who lived.
Yeah.
And there's a myth.
And I think with Jesus, there are many myths, right?
There are many, you know, some of which are competing myths about who he was and what he did.
But there was a man who lived.
Right.
Well, let me pull another one out of our podcast history here.
There is David.
Now, the thing that I've said is... David from the Bible supposedly fighting Goliath.
Right.
King David.
Because there are a lot of Davids out there in the world.
Right.
But King David is two people, right?
He's King David and he's the killer of Goliath.
But the real killer of Goliath, we are told by scholars, is actually a guy named Elhanan.
Why would you do that?
Why not just tell the story accurately?
And the answer is, well, selection's a funny thing.
It edits things down for various reasons to make them more transmissible, to make them catchier, to give somebody an origin story who needs one.
And the point is... To prune the narrative so that you have fewer characters you have to keep track of.
Right.
As always, the question, if it's evolution at work, the point is it's not editing for reality, it's editing for effectiveness, for modifying who you are and how you live in such a way that you are more capable of doing the job.
And ease of transmission.
Right.
Now, all of that's well and good when we can talk about David, right?
For one thing, I talk about David and Goliath, even though I know it was Elhanan, right?
Because the point is, if you want to convey a certain kind of battle to people, David and Goliath is the way you say it.
If you say Elhanan and Goliath, nobody knows what you're talking about.
Again, ease of transmission, ease of communication.
Ease of communication.
This is what names are for.
And it's elegant.
And the point is, you know, in what way is that story true?
it's metaphorically true.
Now, I can feel the blood pressure of various people rising listening to this discussion because they will hear that I'm claiming something about Winston Churchill that I'm not.
Again, I'm not a Churchill scholar.
I don't know.
But the problem, I think, stems ultimately from the capture of the narrative architecture that makes myths by something that doesn't have any right to write myths that does it anyway all the time across so many different domains.
Right?
And so what we get is myths that aren't even entitled to that status because they haven't proven themselves.
I guess the punchline here, and I will, I want to give a shout out to Brett Swanson, who's been a guest of the podcast, who I'm in a conversation, chat room conversation with, who mentioned this with respect to our particular modern stories as history is unfolding.
He was talking about the need to get it right, right, so that you don't run into this problem.
And I was thinking in parallel, more generally, that we have a right to mythologize that people have usurped for themselves.
And the problem is, if you're worried at this moment about us rethinking anything about the foundational mythology surrounding World War II, I get why you're worried, but your ire needs to be pointed in the right place.
It's people who propagandize history that make this moment dangerous.
If you didn't have people deciding to advance their cause by Not allowing a normal historical process to happen separately.
In other words, people who are mixing history and myth so that we can't have a proper investigation are causing a vulnerability where you discover that the story of Jim Jones isn't what you thought it was, right?
And we are seeing this all over the place.
The battle... Let me move one step to the left here.
We, as a civilization, are entitled to be able to explore, forensically, what took place that got us into a situation in order not to harm ourselves going forward.
Right?
Let's take the COVID version of this.
We are entitled to know who decided To tell noble lies, what they knew and when they knew it, what harm was done, right?
We are entitled to look into all of the processes that led us into self-harm so that we can fix that.
And anybody who decides, well, you know what, if you look into COVID, you know what's going to happen?
You're going to cause vaccine hesitancy for disease X and that's going to kill people.
You're not allowed to do that.
Right?
We're going to keep our myth in place.
And then the point is, well, okay, you're making it impossible for us to fix the system so that we could conceivably have a coherent response.
They're minting get out of jail free cards for themselves.
Right, and of course they would, which means that we, in the public, have to demand an apparatus that is actually dedicated to truth-seeking, irrespective of where it goes.
And if you did that up front, you wouldn't be left with giant swaths of history where we're afraid to even look into them because of what we might find.
Nothing is more dangerous than that, and I'm not arguing that this is not an incredibly perilous moment to be there with something as important as World War II, but the point is the fault goes to the propagandists.
The propagandists have made this a powder keg, and that doesn't tell you what to do with the powder keg at the moment, but it does tell you, hey, you know what we should do?
No more powder kegs.
We need a process that's actually capable of writing a coherent and, as best as it can, an accurate history of events.
Why?
Because that's how you fix a process going forward.
A self-correcting process requires you to know what happened.
And this thing that is constantly blinding us to all of the facts of our own lives, lying to us about what it's doing, lying to us about what happened, gaslighting us if we stand up and say, hey, what are you doing?
That thing is putting us all in danger constantly, which I would point out is one of the reasons that the censorship industrial complex that we are That one of our pillars in Rescue the Republic is to challenge the censorship industrial complex and the reason that we've written it the way we have includes this propaganda element and the information control element.
Those things are blinding us so that we keep doing more harm to ourselves.
All right.
I think that's more or less what I wanted to say, is you've got something that claims the right to noble lies.
I wonder about your use of that term there.
It struck me the first time you said it, because you said, we the people have a right to ask of the people who said the noble lies, what did you know and when did you know it, and other things.
But to my mind, learning what did you know and when did you know it may reveal a truth that demonstrates that those were never noble.
Oh, I don't think they were.
I don't think they were.
But the problem is that there's a category called noble lie.
There's a technical category.
And because of the existence of that category, the clever liars cloak their untruths in it, right?
They're doing their own selfish bidding and they're doing so... But it's not...
It's a category that itself is being abused.
Yes.
I was trying to figure out what term you could use.
And it's like a pathological noble liar.
Somebody who uses the apparatus of public health, for example, to manipulate people into doing something that's profitable for them.
So anyway, we're somewhere in that neighborhood where, you know, yes, noble lies It's a phenomenon, but the existence of them is an irresistible cloak for malevolent lies, which are everywhere.
Yeah, that's right.
I don't think I have anything else to add.
OK, well, I mean, I think I think we covered what I was hoping to get to, and I hope I hope people will.
Oh, I had one other thing I wanted to say, which is I think it is also interesting that myths emerge from two sources.
And this goes back to the question of How they come to be, right?
Somebody, you can get a myth that's a fictional story.
Somebody can write it and it can become an important part of the way that people think about heroism, let's say.
Um, and then you can have a true story that gets modified into a myth.
That would be the case of, you know, Jesus, for example, a real person who had a real profound effect.
And then their story takes on this, uh, supernatural characteristics that make it sticky and interesting and all of that stuff.
Um, but the fact that these two things can We don't verge at some very important category that we don't understand and haven't made our peace with, right?
We need myths in order for society to work.
Well, what are we to do with, you know, processes that are myths, creation processes that are broken, like, you know, the matrix.
The matrix is a, an important myth.
It is a modern restatement of Plato's allegory of the cave.
The problem with it is it came out of Hollywood, which compromises it because it serves two masters.
It's both a very powerful story of a fictional world and it is a profit center.
Which is why The Matrix has sequels.
Instead of ending the story where the story should have ended and where it did end, it was irresistible to shut down the process that could milk it for more money and that compromises it.
Yeah.
Or the story, uh, you know, Harry Potter.
What do we do with Harry Potter?
Harry Potter, to my way of thinking, was a brilliant And to take one example of how it can be useful, the Millennials, for whom this was such an important and resonant story, had Dumbledore's army.
And to the extent that these Millennials will be called upon to fight off a great evil, the idea that one way you do that is you might just Recognize you're over, you're outgunned, but you're going to have to meet in whatever that room was in the top of Hogwarts and teach yourself what to do because you don't have a choice, right?
Yeah.
That was powerful.
Too powerful.
So what happened to it?
Well, they had to unmake it by going after J.K.
Rowling.
So Harry Potter is now... There's a black box there I don't know about they had.
Well, I don't know that that's what happened, but I do know that it's interesting that this story that had taken on, it had started to move into the realm of powerful myth.
We had students invoke Dumbledore's army to us.
By chance, almost all of our students for the entire duration of our professor lives were millennials.
And they did invoke Dumbledore's army.
This was real and had considerable resonance.
It did, and now it doesn't, because to even invoke it is to call into question your tolerance for trans people, which is preposterous, of course.
It is totally preposterous, but I mean, your point about two different sources of myths is fascinating.
I'd never thought of it before.
It's just completely separate.
Like, you know, out of the creation of someone's mind, and yes, you're always informed by something that you heard, someone you knew, but no, out of the creation of someone's mind.
We are calling these fictional characters.
We are not claiming that any of them are based on real events, or in some cases you do, but it doesn't, like, mostly fiction or absolutely this is a true person, a real set of events, Joan of Arc.
Yeah.
And we know that.
We keep track of that, to some degree.
But the way we keep track of it is by imagining that the true people behind the myths that are about true people are actually as they appear in the myths.
That's the error that we make.
Whereas in both cases, what myth brings us is we're back to Metaphorical truth and so whether it emerged from fiction in which case it was Literally not true metaphorically true.
Yeah, or it emerged from fact in which case it might be literally true It might not be but it's still metaphorically true.
We still arrive with myth at metaphorically true and powerful and Important in terms of how it is that we organize our understanding of the world.
Yeah, right and that's I think that's the problem is Science and history all of the things that attempt to describe what is by whatever means Have a purpose, right?
It's like where the evidence comes from to improve your model of the world.
And then there's a whole realm of being a human being that's not really about that, right?
It may ultimately have dependency on it, but it's really about how you navigate the world.
And having stories that are, um, that motivate you in the correct direction is very, very important.
But the problem is when those stories overlap history, then there's a tension, right?
Like you're not allowed to talk about the history because of what you're going to do to the program for how to be.
So I wonder actually, this is a brand new thought, but maybe if there's still humanity a thousand years from now, Maybe we will have separated these things and what we will have decided is that actually the myths can't come from history.
Maybe the point is actually we need to take a brutal, unflinching look at history and try to record what it is and that... You can't do that.
I don't think you'd want to.
That's interfering with something that is most fundamental in humans.
I mean, myths from reality are far older than myths from fiction.
You know, we have characters from life before there was, you know...
Certainly written storytelling, but probably even extravagant and formalized oral storytelling.
The original oral stories are stories from what people were.
Yeah, but then we've got to make a different deal.
That's fine, but you can't unhook one of the most fundamental things about what humans are.
We unhooked it already.
That's my point.
We haven't heard something else.
Well, as soon as you empower people.
To me this sounds like, well, yes, this drug is bad for you and it'll cause all these problems, but we got a second drug for you to take on top of that.
Like, no, let's not unhook the thing in the first place as opposed to keep on unhooking.
Well, but the problem is, either you get to study history and you get to figure out what actually happened, or it gets to be the substance of myths and it gets to evolve into the most useful story it can be.
But you're acting like it gets to be the stuff of myth.
That's not how any of this works.
It becomes.
Right, but the point is, if you need myth, then you're going to end up shutting down your historian.
Part of what you're saying is that the propagandists are acting as top-down myth-makers, right?
But the way that myth has existed forever in this, to use the word you used earlier, this organic form, is not top-down.
And there's no way to stop that.
There's no desire to stop it.
You don't stop people doing what they do.
Well, but then, this is where I was saying we have to arrange a different deal.
Because then the answer is your myths have to be tolerant to the reality of the characters involved.
Right?
We can't... Yes.
So the point is... And or just recognize like okay fiction literally false metaphorically true when it's good myth that is generated from reality Unhook that causal thing there, and it's not causal, but like metaphorically, literally, true or false, we're not saying.
Based on a true story, like for all of them, it should have a based on a true story thing as opposed to Jesus was, David was, you know, Joan of Arc was, Churchill was.
But then you have to draw First of all, it's very powerful when somebody puts a version onto the silver screen that's based on a true story.
It overtakes it in the public mind, which may be fine as long as we don't mess with the ability to figure out what actually happened, which is the basis for us steering.
But I also think You know, we talked a couple weeks ago, several weeks ago, about abused principles, right?
There's this one principle, like, you should never meet your heroes, right?
They will profoundly disappoint you.
And there's some truth in that.
But maybe the real thing is don't avoid meeting your heroes.
Just grow the fuck up, right?
Understand that you're gonna find some extraordinary failings in people who have accomplished extraordinary things and we have to be tolerant of that.
If we're, you know, canceling people out of history because of their, you know, outsized errors, then the point is we've got nothing.
You have nobody to defend you because you're expecting a level of perfection.
You're expecting mythological levels of perfection from human beings, which are not mythological.
So.
Yes.
Anyway, somehow we need a new deal that handles that.
Yeah, indeed.
Okay, we got eight minutes.
We can do it in eight minutes.
All right.
Okay, one last thing.
This is going to come out of nowhere for some people.
Paul Harrell died, I think, in the last day.
Most of you will not know who Paul Harrell was.
He was a, I would say, a transcendent figure in the realm of responsible gun ownership.
He was a YouTube personality who had extensive professional experience with firearms.
We started a channel in which he explored you know various claims that people make he was quite a good shot he did a lot of shooting in his videos where he would you know people would make a claim about this or that ammunition has this or that effect this or that firearm is better than the other one based on this better you know and he would do these things and he would give his
His opinion, and he would label it very carefully, this is my opinion on which firearms are useful for home defense, which ones aren't, which things that people worry about are a real problem, which things aren't, that kind of thing.
And anyway, I ran into him.
Firearms are one of the things that I have changed my position on dramatically.
There are a lot of things I haven't, but events in the last decade Have caused me to rethink my what used to be a fairly standard left of center concern that the cost to civilization of having liberal that is permissive gun laws was so high that really it was an error that the founders had made because they hadn't understood what our modern weapons would look like.
I now don't think that I actually think the founders had a proper concern about tyranny that Caused them to prioritize this and that they didn't exactly give us the tools to figure out exactly how to do that, but they were very clear, you know, shall not be infringed is pretty unambiguous.
So anyway, I ran into Paul Harrell as I was changing my understanding and therefore having to learn something about firearms.
And the problem is there are a zillion channels.
Um, that you can learn from, but you don't know who's who and who's driven by what.
And this just seemed like a very reasonable guy, a very likable guy, somebody who wasn't driven by ego or neediness or something like that.
So anyway, a very trustworthy voice and also totally entertaining, right?
It was very fact-based.
He would run side-by-side comparisons on targets that he had built for particular purposes, and so you could see the evidence in front of your eyes.
He didn't pretty up his videos.
A certain number of shots don't go where you want them, even if you're a great marksman, and he would acknowledge that.
He wouldn't blame the weapon unless he needed to.
Anyway, he some months ago announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that he was dying.
He knew that he knew that it was fatal.
It took him quicker than he was expecting.
But yesterday, I believe he posted a video.
He had a video posted on his behalf.
Well, you want to show the so that's the video and you can see that the title of the video is I'm dead.
Now, he had given this, he had made this video, and he had given it to his brother, who has taken over his channel, with the instruction to post it.
And, you know, in it he says, if you're watching this, it's because I'm dead.
And I'd hoped I'd had more time, but I didn't.
Here's how that went down.
And, in any case, it's pretty remarkable in a number of ways.
One, Um, you know, there's a, there's a degree of class and courage with which he faced his own death that is admirable and evident.
And it sort of looms large for me the same way Norm MacDonald, uh, when he died, we all found out that he had been sick with cancer, but he hadn't shared that with anybody because he didn't want it to pollute the end of his life.
Right?
He didn't want that to take over all of his interactions.
Anyway, I raised this just because this is an important person.
If you are of a mind to rethink your view of firearms and you're looking for somebody who will be transparent about why they think what they think and be entertaining in the process, I suggest you check out his channel.
It will remain up and there's a lot of good material on it.
And anyway, I just basically wanted to Say, rest in peace or whatever it is one says in a moment like this.
Very good.
Okay, I think that's it for this week.
We'll be back next week.
We're actually going to be doing three live streams and two Q&As, all within the span of six days next week.
We'll have a Q&A after our live stream next Wednesday.
You can, as always, go to darkhorsepodcast.org, which is our website to get updates on the schedule and such, find our store, get access to Locals, which if you're watching live now, you could have been involved in the Watch Party.
What did you want to call it?
The Gold Watch Party.
No, no.
I said no to that.
You wanted to call it something crazier, which I didn't say no to.
G-Shock Watch Party.
Right.
Okay.
The G-Shock Watch Party.
Now only for teenage boys, apparently.
From the 80s.
Only for men in their 50s who were teenagers with a G-Shock watch.
Okay, great.
It's a small group, but it's devoted.
Okay.
Check out our sponsors this week, which, do I remember what they were?
Sundays, Armra, and... Helix.
Helix, yes.
And I'm reminded that we are supported by you.
We appreciate you.
We appreciate you supporting channels, coming to Locals, coming to my sub stack, Natural Selections.
Brett still has some... Oh, you're doing your conversations, your Patreon conversations this week.
Yes.
So Brad has these monthly conversations on Patreon, Saturdays and Sundays, usually the first Sunday or Sunday of the month.
Those are great.
We appreciate you liking, sharing, talking about what you're learning with other people.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
