Traps Abound: The 242nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 242nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the presidential debate: what happened, and how much of it constituted traps, set for us to fall in to? How was the magic trick done? Also: when people tell you who they are, believe them. Finally: bats bats bats bats bats. As insectivorous bats succumb to a fungal disease (White Nose S...
We are running an experiment streaming on X, I hope, for the first time.
You hope it's for the first time?
No, no.
Well, I actually think we may have failed to do that in a prior episode, but I believe it is working this time.
We will get quick word if it is not, and we will shut that down, and then you can go on over to Rumble.
But we really want you to be on Locals with the Watch Party.
The Watch Party is.
And that's where the rubber meets the road.
That's where you run into all sorts of like-minded people and have excellent conversations with them.
And, uh, you know, I don't, I don't.
So in that analogy, our audience are the cars.
What did I say?
I'm just trying to figure out how that's where the rubber hits the road.
Oh, rubber meets the road.
Fits here.
Yeah.
Yes.
I had not gotten that far, but yes, you will become a car upon going over there.
And then upon leaving, you will be converted back into the Homo sapiens that you probably go through life as.
I hope so.
I mean, we probably have.
We've heard that we have some dogs in our audience, some fans.
Yes, absolutely.
And we certainly did have some interested pets when our pets were more frequently on air.
You know, back in the early days, there was a cartoon that said, on the internet, nobody can be sure you're a dog without a randomized controlled trial.
Yeah, that is exactly what the New Yorker cartoon was.
No one knew what it meant at that point, but now we do.
Yeah.
So tonight, today, we're going to talk about last night's presidential debate, why you should believe people when they tell you who they are, and bats, bats, bats, bats, bats.
Oh, hell yeah.
I didn't know the bats were coming, but it's always a good day.
It's always a good day when you talk about bats.
There was a time there, and I'll revisit this when we get to the bats, bats, bats, bats, bats segment.
There was a time when it was hard to engage you in conversation in which bats did not come up.
I was very fascinated with bats at the time and confronted with so many species of bats at once that it was there was always something to talk about.
There's always a bat angle, as you never said.
As I never once said.
Never once said.
Yeah.
So thank you to everyone for being here.
Again, join us on Locals.
We're streaming to Rumble and to X now.
And of course, you can find us anywhere else that you would normally find podcasts.
And as always, we're going to start top of the hour with our three ads from sponsors that we truly believe in.
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There is a 50% chance that I would not have been able to spell distillery if you had not spelled it out, but... I mean, I could have, but I also had the cheat sheet in front of me.
No, you, I have no doubt, could have spelled distillery.
I mean, you never have to do the spelling for yourself when you've got your script.
No, that's true.
But when I'm writing stuff, I sometimes find there are a category of words that not only can I not spell them, which is a very large category of words, but I can't spell them well enough to get the suggestion thing to have any idea what I'm talking about.
So you would have started with like a Q or something?
If you screw up the first letter, you're cooked.
It never guesses right.
Yes, but distillery?
No, distillery I would have gotten.
I feel like you could have gotten the first letter.
No question.
Despite the fact that I used to...
effectively troll you and our children, neither of whom can spell either, by when any of you would ask me how to spell words, I would often say that it began with a silent K or a P, or increasingly I got ridiculous and began the words with silent letters that never begin words silently, but sometimes... I caught on to that trick in, you know, the early years of our relationship.
It took, you know, less than a decade.
Yeah, far, like less than half a decade.
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That wasn't bad, man.
That wasn't too bad.
Yeah.
A few little errors.
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Well, I'm in favor of anything that's primarily found in pomegranates.
I love pomegranates.
Even including, but not limited to, more pomegranate.
Yeah, that is almost exclusively found in pomegranate.
I will just, a note of intrigue.
Okay.
When I was a young pup doing my first research gig in Jamaica.
Oh, but even before the era of bats, bats, bats, bats, bats.
Well before.
Lizards, lizards.
Yeah, it was lizards, lizards, lizards.
They call a lot of things different stuff in Jamaica.
Yeah.
Right?
Like they call avocados pears and they call, uh, moths.
They call moths bats and bats, rat bats.
Um, they call pomegranates pronganut if I remember correctly.
I think that's like, that's what you told me at the time anyway.
Yes.
All right.
Anyway, um, it is what it is.
It be what it be.
Well said.
Um, shall we move on to, uh, should we start with the debate?
I suppose.
My goodness.
All right.
Yeah.
My goodness.
So we're going to talk about what happened in the debate.
Um, I can't say I watched every minute of it.
You and I were engaged in, uh, getting some stuff done and so watch most of it, but we may have missed a piece here or there, but let's just start with, um, some basics, some things that we can just simply agree on.
One, I would say, I told you October surprise season started early this year.
This was an October surprise.
And a pretty effective one, I will say.
You're going to get to what you think the nature of the surprise was.
I think I know what you're going to say.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the surprise is just, wow.
Kamala.
Well done.
She seems to be in there after all.
I mean, not just sentences, but full paragraphs.
Cogent.
Absolutely.
So Kamala did very well, especially compared to expectations.
We will come back to those.
So that's what that's, but that's the October surprise that like it was, it was surprising given that anytime she's apparently off script, uh, she is, has a very hard time being coherent or serious.
I don't think that's true, but that is certainly... But that's the nature of the surprise.
That's the nature of the surprise.
I'm talking like you're the one who invoked the surprise.
Right.
No, that is what... So is it or is it not... Was it or was it not surprising?
Oh, it was very surprising.
Okay.
Very surprising, unless you noticed one thing, which I will also come back to in the later section here.
But Kamala did very well, especially compared to expectations.
Trump clearly faced a slanted debate structure and panel.
His two moderators clearly had their thumb on the scales.
They're partisan.
They're more than partisan.
Which was, of course, to be expected, but also jarring to see how obvious it was.
And many people have focused on that slant in the aftermath, like three-on-one.
Well, it was notable, I think, in part because the Trump-Biden debate, the moderators actually seemed fair.
I actually don't remember the specifics, were there one or two, but the moderation of that debate actually seemed fair.
And it was, to me, that was noticeable.
Wow, I would have expected at this point that any moderation of a presidential debate in which Trump is one of the players is going to be slanted against him.
And that one didn't seem to be so much, but this one was clear.
Okay, but let's, you know, we're going to go down the rabbit hole here.
So we might as well start at the top of the rabbit hole and peer down a little bit.
Why the hell did they allow Joe Biden to go into a debate where he wouldn't be with a teleprompter and it was going to be a disaster no matter what?
And those of us who've been paying attention to the man's cognitive decline, could have predicted that absent some very strange phenomenon.
Your argument is we're living someone else's narrative.
Yeah that we're being... And they're not they're not writing each chapter right before it comes out.
Right, so at the time what I said was that we needed to decide between the most likely scenario being that there's a division over in the blue cabal and that somebody shoved Biden out by putting him on a debate stage where he couldn't possibly perform and that that was the mechanism which would be consistent.
With with moderators that could be fair because the whole point was Biden will embarrass himself We would like it not to look like a setup in either direction.
We just want this to do its job.
Yeah, right But anyway, let's put that aside.
Whatever happened to Biden happened to Biden Kamala gets swapped in There is plenty of expectation here that she will underperform in this circumstance and of course, that's not what happens from Faces a slanted playing field.
That's completely obvious in this case.
Now, somebody who was really good at this would have been able to work inside of that slanted playing field because, of course, it's not like there's a judge here.
There's an audience and somebody who kept their cool might have been able to, you know, call that out in real time.
Do something that would have worked well, but that's not what happened here So that's my third point about things We should all be able to agree on Trump got flustered and I can't fault Trump for getting flustered.
He's a human being and this was Not you know discovering even if it's anticipated that you are in a debate where you know everything about it is stacked against you and And I suspect he was advised to not lash out, to not do the thing that makes him look petty, and to specifically not go after Kamala.
And I think that effectively, my sense is that Team Blue, knowing that that would have been the advice he was getting, because knowing that that's one of his
You're not supposed to have multiple Achilles heels more than two, but, you know, one of his Achilles heels is that he does go personal, he does go mean, that he would have been advised specifically not to do that, and so she could push him farther and farther and farther, where he, you know, should have wanted to respond in a way that actually, you know, he could have done it without being mean, but it could have been read as mean, and so he sort of was holding himself back while also getting flustered.
Right, and, you know, I can tell you within the confines of where he was, he's not getting feedback from the world.
So, you know, if he had a great model of how everybody sees things, and he's got to have a decent model at one level because he's very good at politics, but at another level, Sometimes he just doesn't know when something he's doing is just not playing well, not playing well.
And, you know, he wouldn't find that out until the end of the debate.
So anyway, now, before we get to how I think this was accomplished, and I will call it how the magic trick was done, which I do think it was a magic trick.
How the magic trick was done, I want to take a brief detour into two things.
One of them is I just happened to catch a post by somebody I don't know this morning on X that I thought spoke to something that we need to revisit before we talk about what happened to Trump in the debate.
And here's the tweet.
It says, It's a little small for me.
I've accepted the necessity to vote for Trump to save America from Kamala Harris.
With that being said, I wish more than anything that RFK Jr.
would have been on that stage.
Kennedy, 2028.
Now the reason this struck me is we've been talking throughout this entire election cycle about the various possibilities which have been narrowed and narrowed and narrowed.
One possibility was that Bobby Kennedy was going to somehow find himself as a serious candidate.
He was ultimately driven out by blue team skullduggery.
He was thrown off the ballot in New York.
He was kept off the debate stage, which really makes it impossible to seem like a proper candidate.
And so it became impossible for him to ascend to the office by any plausible mechanism.
And so he embraced Trump and we can talk about the details of that at some other point.
But the basic idea is we've been arguing or I've been arguing, I think you would agree that the blue team fears Kennedy far more than it fears Trump.
And there are reasons for that.
One reason is that Kennedy's temperament is unflappable.
And had he been the guy on the stage last night, this would have gone very differently for two reasons.
One, he's encyclopedic in his knowledge.
Right.
He has not only a broad thinking, expansive brain, but also a memory for details.
So he can trot out the stuff that needs to be trotted out.
Right.
And he seems to do this without ego.
Yeah.
He's got one, but it does not drive him in his presentation.
And So I don't it's not like, oh, if only it had been Kennedy.
Yeah, I have that feeling too, because what happened last night would not have happened and something very different would have happened, which is, of course, exactly why they targeted Kennedy with all of the lawfare and everything else used to keep him out of off the debate stage and drive him out of the race.
But.
Kennedy does not have the secret sauce to get to the office.
Yeah.
I'm not saying it's impossible in 2028, but I'm saying Trump has something nobody else has.
He actually beat the duopoly single-handedly and got to the White House because of his political insight.
Well, and either being willing to be or knowing that he cannot surround himself by advisors that will constrain him into not being erratic.
He is unpredictable in a way that Kennedy can't possibly, to a degree that Kennedy can't possibly be.
Right, and I would argue that this is a trade-off.
The thing that Kennedy is good at makes you not good at the thing that Trump is good at, and vice versa.
And so, we are stuck with the unfortunate predicament that the person who has the ability to get to the debate stage is also flappable in a way that we needed him not to be.
So, anyway, I thought that was an interesting thing.
Just consider the alternative timeline that we would be on if somehow the universe had intervened and RFK had gotten to the debate stage.
Even if there had been three people on the debate stage, it would have been a very different picture.
Okay, the second little detour before we get to how the magic trick is done is something Oh goodness, I'm gonna have to bring it up and read it.
Something that my new friend Rob Schneider sent me that I thought encapsulated another important missed opportunity here.
Do you want me to pull this up and have it on the screen for you?
That'd be great if you could do it.
It's an Instagram post.
I can go on to Instagram without having Instagram?
I don't know.
That's a question for other people.
I'm going to start reading and you see if you can bring it up.
I don't have an account.
It's not going to let me.
Actually, you know what?
The world will be a better place if you read it.
I don't want to read off a phone.
What are we doing?
Let me find it or send the details to Jen and let her find it.
Rob Schneider who is I am Rob Schneider on Instagram says Kamala Harris says we are not going back.
And she, the Democrats, don't want to go back.
But Americans want to go back, he says, emphasized.
Americans want to go back to our country and our cities that are not being overrun with 20 million undocumented immigrants flooding our country with fentanyl that kills 65,000 Americans each year.
Our country wants to go back to where girls don't have to share the sports field and girls' locker room So, I have his account now, but I don't know where that post is.
I don't know if you want me to... Oh, yeah.
Jen's got it.
Oh, Jen's got it.
year old children are not allowed to have their bodies surgically mutilated or take repurposed castration drugs falsely named puberty blockers so i have his account now but i don't know where that post is i don't know if you want me to oh yeah jen's got it oh jen's got it yeah can you make it bigger
Yeah.
you guys keep saying something Okay.
Well, um, can you, I really can't see it.
I'll read it.
So you can't make it any bigger.
You can't.
Um, if, if not, I can read it from there.
Uh, where are we?
Should we just go back to the beginning or no?
I guess so.
Okay.
Let's go up to the top here.
I am Rob Schneider at Instagram Says.
Kamala Harris says we're not going back, and she and the Democrats don't want to go back, but Americans want to go back.
Americans want to go back to our country and our cities that are not being overrun with 20 million undocumented immigrants, floating our country with fentanyl that kills 65,000 Americans each year.
Our country wants to go back to where girls don't have to share the sports fields and girls' locker rooms with narcissistic failed male athletes.
We want to go back to where 14-year-old children are not allowed to have their bodies surgically mutilated or take repurposed castration drugs, falsely named puberty blockers, through this gender madness.
To go back to a government that doesn't violate Americans' First Amendment rights to free speech, like the Biden-Harris regime did working with tech companies to censor and silence Americans, Where federal workers and soldiers are not fired for refusing to take an experimental gene therapy.
Yes, Americans want to go back to not having forever wars and giving hundreds of billions of US dollars to Ukraine.
To go back to not pushing the world to a nuclear war with Russia.
To go back to free speech being our constitution.
Right.
Not what Not what Kamala Harris describes as a privilege.
Yes, Americans want to go back where inflation is not 26%.
26%!
Where they can afford groceries and gas and one day be able to afford a home again.
Americans want to go back to a government that doesn't tell them what kind of car they can drive or what kind of stove they can use.
A country where their leaders don't call them deplorables or systemically racist because of the color of their skin.
Yes, Kamala, Americans want to go back to a society that isn't another Marxist failure, to a country that they love more than the Democrats hate Donald J. Trump, to go back to a free America founded under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
That's why I am voting for the ticket that has Donald J. Trump, J.D.
Vance, Robert Kennedy, and Tulsi Gabbard on it.
Let's go back to the greatest experiment in freedom the world has ever known, the United States of America.
God bless America.
Love, Rob Schneider.
Excellent.
Thank you for bailing me out on the read.
So a great little screed.
Yeah, it's a great little screed.
And, you know, again, it's sort of a timeline, a timeline that we're not on where the point was, you know, we're not going back is a very powerful slogan until you actually think about it.
And then the point is actually a tremendous amount has gone wrong.
And back to where exactly?
Because there's an awful lot Is there nothing that we have lived through that has been awesome?
Really?
You don't want to go back to any of that?
To any of that, right.
And so really, you know, it's an empty slogan at best, or a veiled reference to the one and only issue, or whatever it is.
The one and only issue being exactly as Shire says, exactly as many of us have said.
The issue for Team Blue now is anyone but Trump.
Well, no, the one issue I think that drives so many on the blue team, you know, that's an actual, you know, I agree that Trump is the only argument that they use, but the reproductive rights argument is, I believe, the, we're not going back, reference in question.
And it's powerful for a reason.
I mean, it is powerful for a reason.
Incidentally, I reposted a piece I wrote in 2018 on abortion this week in Natural Selections, and rereading it, I realized, you know, my position hasn't changed.
I'm pro-choice, but I believe in limits, always have.
You know, the goal has been safe, effective, and rare forever, and used to be that for all the Democrats as well.
And I thought, having been sort of aware of and at the borders of the abortion debate for decades that once Roe fell, which it seemed destined to do, it would be harder to make it central.
I was wrong.
Yeah.
Well, back to the notion of magic tricks.
Yeah.
Because there are quite a number of them here.
So, my primary purpose here is to talk about how this magic trick was done.
Now, I of course can't be certain that it was a magic trick.
Maybe they just put Kamala on the stage after some good prep.
Donald shows up and they had the debate they had, but I don't believe it for a second.
So anyway, I could be wrong, but I don't believe it.
I believe that this was carefully orchestrated, and I wanted to talk about some of the ingredients that would be necessary in order to make it happen.
You look like you.
Oh, I just, I, my first thought, having a sense of where you're going, uh, is that I have never, if, if, if the idea is she was capable of this all along and the incompetence and incoherence has been an act, this is something that, um, that, you know, that playing dumb is something that some women do.
Some women are advised that it helps them.
There are very few things that I find more disgusting, honestly, to play into someone's assessment of your weakness in order to get what you want.
I find it maybe more reprehensible than just about any tactic that people use in trying to effect change.
Yeah, I agree.
It is detestable and there are many versions of it.
You know, there's the little girl voice and there's the, you know, pretending to be, you know, vulnerable, tipsy, whatever it is.
So anyway, we'll come back to that.
But I do think that there was a lot of... there was a lot of prep here.
And that prep wasn't just Kamala behind the scenes studying, you know, things that she could say that would sound good if she happened to run into a prompt.
Although there was clearly a lot of that because she didn't... she did not expand on any of her scripted points.
Right?
She didn't ad-lib.
She didn't.
Well, here's a key observation.
As I saw it, at least the 85% of it that I did see, she did not ad lib.
It appeared to be very carefully structured sentences designed to deliver a punch in general.
And she did not Stumble the way a normal person would.
Right.
Which I think is very conspicuous.
I mean, yes, we all do this thing where we're saying a sentence and we know where we're going, but we realize grammatically we've gone down the wrong road.
And so we, we go back to the last branching point and we go down somewhere else.
She didn't do that.
She didn't do that.
She was actually exceptionally good at avoiding it, which I think suggests one of the features of the magic trick here.
So to start off with, let's just say, let us not, fool ourselves about who we are dealing with.
And I'm not talking about Kamala.
I'm talking about the blue team.
Okay?
The blue team is clearly aligned with the intelligence apparatus.
Those of us who believe in the deep state would say that the deep state is definitely aligned with the blue team at this point in history.
These people engage, I don't want to say in regime change, I want to say they engage in regime choosing all over the world, okay?
That means that they will prop up and preserve a regime that they like, and they will take out a regime that they don't like, and they will take some regime that doesn't please them, and they will force it in a direction they do like.
This is what they do.
Now you can tell yourself, and maybe you're right, that they wouldn't do it domestically.
But I don't see any reason to believe that.
I certainly wouldn't put it past him.
So the question is, if regime choosing is what you do for a living, then what would you make of this scenario?
And how would you go about choosing the regime you wanted when you are stuck with or blessed with Kamala Harris as your standard bearer?
How would you do it?
And I want to make one correction.
It's not really a correction, but I want to add one nuance.
People will have heard me say various things that will sound like they're contradictory.
I often say that Goliath is dumb.
I truly believe Goliath is dumb.
You can outfox Goliath pretty easily, but Goliath is a composite of people and institutions and cabals and emergent phenomena, right?
And the reason he's dumb is that those emergent phenomena only are good at dealing with things that they've already learned to address.
You throw them anything new, the emergent phenomena don't know what to do with it.
And so for the longest time...
But the individual pieces can learn.
The individual pieces can be very, very smart, right?
You can be part of Goliath.
You know, Goliath can be dumb, but his right hand can be brilliant, right?
So what I think we're seeing here is an entity that knows what its job is and for many decades has been practicing and testing and discovering.
What I think we're seeing here is an entity that knows what its job is and for many decades has been practicing and testing and discovering.
And it is a highly tuned entity that knows how to deal with democracies and regimes and public sentiment and social media and all of the components that one needs to play in order to make this work for their little color revolutions or whatever they're doing.
So Goliath may be dumb, but the components aren't.
And I believe that what we saw last night was likely the result of a component that knows exactly what to do and how to do it.
And it did it very well.
And it fits with what I was talking about last week with regard to Hollywood being deep in the pocket of Team Blue.
That if this is what I believe you are, have not yet made explicit, but are arguing that this is a very long narrative that we are in the middle of.
The long con.
um but it's but i'm but that's fine but i'm talking specifically about story about narrative that um you know in the long con requires story but i'm trying to focus on bring to consciousness the idea of you are in the middle of a story and you can no more make sense of all of the pieces of a story if you assess it right now instantaneously than you can any story that you enter into
and can immediately know all of what has happened before or all of what is going to happen.
If you recognize, though, that you may be in the middle of a narrative that is crafted exactly the way that Hollywood does often so brilliantly, then you can begin to make some better sense of what it is that is happening.
Yeah, in fact, an oddball example that just showed up on my radar in the last couple days, John Stossel put out a piece in which he confronted the debate between those who say the solution to gun violence is, you know, the solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.
and those who say you know what good guys with guns almost never succeed in averting violence so that's a fantasy right now i'd always taken that at face value what john stossel reveals is that in fact um both hollywood and i believe the fbi seem biased into creating a narrative in which good guys with guns are not
Successful at averting violence almost ever and that in fact they are frequently It just doesn't get recorded that way and it doesn't get presented that way in Hollywood narratives in other words Hollywood is now presenting a story Deliberately it looks like That these things are purely weapons of random violence or targeted violence and never of defense.
And the FBI is playing a game where it records incidents in which people have been killed in these, you know, violent confrontations.
And it does not record incidents even where it is known that some good guy with a gun prevented it from happening.
I don't know the data you're talking about, but is that a matter of when no one dies it doesn't get recorded in homicide statistics, or when someone dies but it was the result of an armed Good Samaritan bystander taking out the villain that it doesn't get recorded that way?
I believe it is both actually.
Um, and it's sort of like reminiscent of COVID era stuff where look, if you were going to die, you were going to die of COVID.
And there's no level of you died with the needle in your arm from their fricking mRNA shots that would cause it to be recorded as, um, as the shot did it.
So anyway, it's that kind of bias.
I would recommend people look at the John Stossel thing.
I will provide a link to it.
It's very interesting.
It changed my opinion of this, you know, because what I've been saying forever is we pay a very high price for permissive gun laws in the U.S.
and that is incredibly unfortunate, but It is necessary as a hedge against tyranny.
What I learned as a result of this John Stossel report is we don't know whether we are paying a net cost.
I mean, it's certainly true that we don't talk about the other contributors like SSRIs, which appear to be very frequently involved in mass shooter incidents, which are the thing that looms so large in people's minds.
But in any case, this is a case where the narrative that I thought was a factual report Turns out to have been a matter of Well certainly, as you know, I believe that it's worth collecting such examples of the thing you were sure was true because it was said with such authority and it seems so simple and so obvious turns out not to be true.
I think it would be useful to actually begin compiling a database of such examples.
But I am also constitutionally opposed to, even when you tell me Oh, I saw this thing and it's like, I don't know yet.
I never accepted it from students.
I'm not going to accept it from you.
I need to go and assess the thing directly.
That's why I'm going to provide the John Stossel link and you can phase it down from there.
So, Goliath may be dumb, These components may be very very smart and very good at what they do.
They also hold all the cards, right?
You have one of these two factions in this election that has access to the entire security apparatus, it has lawfare on its side, and it has the entire mainstream media.
So that is a ferocious arsenal of lopsided tools, and that allows for Or a slant, both the kind you can see where the fact-checkers kept fact-checking Trump and not fact-checking Kamala.
But even the facts that they came up with were often suspect.
They fact-checked Trump with opinions and they didn't fact-check Kamala when what she was saying was outright untrue.
Right, and so it was stagecraft at some level.
Still, you know, somebody who was more unflappable might have turned it to their advantage, but the point is, on average, who would you expect to win in such a lopsided venue?
You would expect the person in the direction of whom it is slanted.
Right.
Okay, so I take a lot of crap for this position, but I'm very certain of it.
Traps abound.
This thing that we're up against is playing a very sophisticated game.
And it has learned the lesson that what happens out in social media space and podcast space and all of that is very important, right?
It learned the lesson of COVID where it didn't think it was important and then it turned out that what we did out here in you know on in pirate radio effectively was able to upend their garbage narrative and wake people up.
And, you know, even in the last few days, we've seen acknowledgement that it is virtually certain that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute.
It's no secret that people are widely injured by these vaccines.
We can debate about how much.
But I mean, in the debate, Harris claimed that Trump being in bed with China kept the world from recognizing the origins.
Like, that was quite a moment.
Oh, and there were, there were several of those where it was like, what planet are we on?
You're claiming that you're on the right side of that issue.
Um, but okay.
So traps abound.
And what, what are traps in this case?
Um, the internet has its own meaning of traps, but I'm going to talk about traps in the, uh, uh, Venus fly traps.
No, no.
I think traps in the standard, uh, internet understanding of the concept are, I know what, Transsexuals who show up in the dating world as one sex.
Right.
So you're not talking about them and you're not talking about Venus flytraps.
So which one are you talking about?
I'm talking about a place where there is some kind of lure that appears to be an organic observation that causes people who are in their mind partisan or rooting for one side over the other or biased to see things through the lens of one side or the other.
It causes them to rebroadcast the evidence, to extrapolate from it, and then it turns out that the evidence isn't what it looks like and... Don't we look like fools?
Right.
And so, you know, if you're going to engage in conspiracies, then a lot of garbage conspiracy theories that blow up are very effective at causing those who aren't inclined to look at conspiracies to take the conspiracy theories seriously or Well, with the starting rubric, which I think is right, which you have introduced, I wouldn't put it past them.
Yeah.
You hear these things, they're plausible.
Like, oh my God, yeah, they totally could have done that.
And if it turns out that they didn't, which they won't have some percentage of the time, especially if they are creating false narratives in order to trap you, you look more and more foolish and people are less and less likely to listen.
Yep, so you can imagine that they would set those as a matter of course, especially if they were in an election that is certain to be close and on which they believe everything rides.
So they're going to use their toolkit to greatest effect.
And I just want to point out a couple of things that I think were pretty clearly traps that were set so people can start getting the idea of what it is that they should be on the lookout for.
Um, the first one is the, uh, Biden is on his deathbed or already gone.
That's why we haven't seen him hoax.
Okay.
Turned out he was going to deliver a speech in the Oval Office.
And, um, you know, in comparison to a guy on his deathbed, he looked great.
You know, that was... As hell as he gets in 2024.
As hail as he gets in 2024, he stumbled his way through the teleprompter, you know, C minus, but God damn it.
He was not a guy on the way out.
Right.
Um, so that I think was pretty clearly a trap and it got lots of people to jump on it.
You know, there was a very good story about him having been rushed out of Las Vegas and, you know, diverted airplanes and things like this.
Um, next one that strikes me as having been a trap, there was a story.
A couple weeks back, I think, of a person who claimed, a person in a wheelchair, who claimed that her mother had died and so she was now going to tell the story that her mother was terrified of her telling because her mother was gone and it was okay now.
And the story was that she had been Hit by a drunk driver who then drove off.
The woman in the wheelchair who'd been hit?
Yeah.
And so drunk driver hits this woman, cripples her and drives off and then while she's in the hospital the next day or something like that, two men come to the hospital and she says, hey mom, who are those two men?
And the mother says, the person who hit you was a very important person.
It was Kamala Harris and It's very important that we not speak of this event.
That struck me as kind of preposterous because to the extent that they didn't know who had hit them, which in the story it did not sound like they had known who had hit them and nearly hit the mother, they were walking together.
Why on earth, if somebody was going to strong arm the victim, would they tell the victim who the driver was?
Preposterous.
But in any case, many people looked at this and given all of the rumors about Kamala having a drinking problem and San Francisco and this, that and the other, lots of people jumped on the story.
And of course, the website that the news report and you could see the news report of the hit and run.
The website had just been registered and it was an obvious hoax.
OK.
I'm glad I missed it.
Yeah.
I would say the question of the pets being eaten in Ohio, very believable.
I saw some body cam footage from an officer that certainly seemed to suggest it, but there's now doubt that that's a real story.
I don't know if it's a real story, but it has the kind of Sound of something that's irresistible.
The internet will go crazy.
Lots of AI memes with, you know, Trump collecting cats and ducks and protecting them.
And, you know, I mean, it's crazy, but anyway, maybe that one's a hoax.
Um, but I also think the, if you think back to the, the Harris Waltz interview, the one and only interview, um, there was lots of.
Discussion of that interview, but it left me scratch in my head because The idea was oh my god She is she hasn't done any interviews and now she's gonna do one and she has to take waltz to bail her out you know if she can't figure out what to say and this is totally embarrassing and The interviews 45 minutes and they're only gonna show us 18 minutes of it so that you know They're gonna do their best with the editing and then okay all of that I get
But then you look at the interview and yeah, the stagecraft is terrible.
She's seated lower, you know, waltz is seated higher.
It looks crazy, but everybody was like, Oh, that was such an embarrassing performance.
My thought was.
I didn't hear that.
I did not hear the cackling fool that we have been talking about.
I heard somebody say nothing at all, the way politicians say nothing at all, with a lot of verbiage.
Right?
It wasn't impressive, but compared to what we had... He sounded like a politician.
Right.
He sounded like an empty suit politician, right?
And that should have alarmed people, but instead they saw what they expected to see.
So I'm not sure that fits.
That's not a trap in the same way.
Well, I think it plays two roles here, but it's sort of a trap in the sense that People believed something about Kamala Harris that led them to see and thereby indict their own credibility by projecting onto the interview that happened something that didn't happen.
It was an unremarkable interview.
That's like the ongoing, that's like evidence of the trap that has long since been laid, though.
That's not a new trap, if what you're saying is true.
I didn't see the interview, so I don't, I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, okay, whatever.
It's somewhere in that neighborhood.
Maybe it wasn't a trap in and of itself, but it's sort of read that way to me.
I'm curious about the last item on your list.
You're not going to go there?
The cat thing is the pets being eaten in Ohio by Haitian immigrants, which I'm agnostic about.
I think there's a terrible story to be told about the Biden administration importing immigrants into the interior and dumping them in places that have every right not to pay a disproportionate cost for illegal immigration.
And it's all very hard to square with an administration that is actually in any way invested in the well-being of the Republic.
As an aside, and this really is definitely an aside, I don't know anything about that story, other than what I heard referenced in the debate last night, what you're talking about now.
And neither of us have been to Haiti, or Hispaniola at all.
You've spent time in Jamaica, and we've both spent time in the Bahamas, but haven't been to Haiti, so don't know.
But I've spent a lot of time on the Caribbean coast of Central America, and we've spent time in the actual Caribbean.
Before the first time that we together went to Madagascar, one of the things that I learned in my research was that in some of the 17 distinct tribes in Madagascar, people eat cats.
And I thought this was surprising and distasteful.
I didn't like it.
And indeed, there was one moment when we were in Madagascar that time, back in 93, I think, when we were walking down some dusty road in a village, some dirt road, and I saw a cat that I wanted to pet because that's what I do with cats that I see.
And as I remember it, a woman ran out of a shack nearby holding a frying pan offering to cook this cat for me.
And I thought, oh my god, it's like, no, please don't.
I don't want to eat the cat.
I just want to pet the cat.
It struck me as so extreme then because I'd never heard of any other culture in which that was the case.
And so this strikes me as extraordinarily surprising, if true, with all the caveats about, I don't know this story, never been to Haiti, don't know if Haiti or the island of Hispaniola is different from the rest of the Caribbean that way, but certainly have I never run into any culture in the Caribbean, the Caribbean coast of Central America, or anywhere in Central America where people are interested in eating cats.
Well, just my side.
I read the story in Madagascar differently than than you do.
I believe that woman would have cooked that cat for you if you had wanted it.
But I don't I don't think that's what she wanted.
And no, I agree.
I don't read that.
That's exactly how I read it.
I don't think cats are very good eating.
Haiti is a desperate place.
I don't know how much truth there is in any of this.
But It was an interesting story.
If it turns out that there's no merit to the story, then it clearly reads as a trap.
You know, an irresistible internet lure.
But anyway, traps abound.
I don't think we necessarily spot all of them, but if you were going to disrupt an enemy that was learning to think about your behind-the-scenes regime maintenance or regime disruption, You would figure out how to get them to trip over things like this.
And so, you know, I think the Biden, uh, death hoax is sort of the gold standard in the last several months, right?
It really had people, uh, buzzing about what was coming and, um, and there was a great reveal in the end that just made everybody who had, uh, spread it look ridiculous.
Even though there was a legitimate question, where's the president?
We haven't seen him, right?
Oh, we haven't seen him.
The letter in which he agreed to step out of the race had obvious hallmarks of, you know, it had been electrically signed.
It had a digital signature.
It wasn't on his letterhead.
There was lots of stuff that would cause you to think, oh my God, what's really going on here?
And then, of course, he shows up.
But okay, so if the debate last night was a trap, what was it made of?
How was it done?
How could you possibly get to a place where Kamala Harris, who we have all seen, or at least those of us who are paying attention to the flaws of Kamala Harris, have all seen endless video of her saying incoherent
Things, uh, appearing to be tipsy, perhaps, um, not, you know, not able to speak in a professional way, which always struck me as weird because this person was a prosecutor, right?
Seems unlikely that somebody who's had that much education.
And of course that sort of is trap-like too, because... Well, education isn't sufficient, but the particular job that she was doing requires public speaking and at least a modicum of eloquence.
Right.
And so, this of course lures people into saying, oh, she slept her way to the top.
She slept her way all the way to the top in, you know, positions where you have to speak, you know, regularly.
Seems very, very unlikely.
But okay, if you were going to arrange for a spectacular reveal like happened last night, and you had access to effectively anything you wanted behind the scenes that could be arranged or modified, what would you do?
And so one, we know that the moderators were heavily slanted.
We saw it.
You could effectively prove, based on just a tape of what happened last night, that the moderators were not neutral.
So if the moderators are not neutral in the process of moderating, Well, how neutral is the structure that put those moderators there?
And would it have been willing, for example, to give Kamala a, Kamala's team, not Kamala presumably, give them a rundown of exactly what is going to be delivered in this debate.
Right.
And if you had that, what could you do with it?
Point out, there is a historical reference here that many will not remember, but when Carter and Reagan faced off, there was a famous scandal in which Reagan had been given the Carter briefing book for the debate.
So this is not nearly as egregious as what I'm suggesting may have happened here, where the moderators themselves or the thing that they are part of may have shared the plan for the debate, allowing for essentially perfect preparation.
But it was a case in which the idea that the debates matter and that giving somebody a decisive edge could affect an election enough to be worth the risk of doing so and it being exposed.
The Carter briefing book scandal actually happened and it appeared that Reagan had Carter's briefing book, which meant he knew what his opponent was going to say.
Okay, so if Kamala had a rundown, even if she didn't know about it, right?
If the people who were prepping her had a list of questions that were going to be delivered to both candidates so that she would know what was coming, then that creates a tremendous edge.
Here's something else that creates a tremendous edge.
The woman has barely been seen since she ascended to candidate for president.
That is a lot of time to prepare for a reveal.
In other words, if you knew that you needed something in order to create the impression that Kamala was extremely competent, then you might spend a lot of that time, you might lure the public into wondering, why the heck is this person not showing up in public?
Why are they not doing interviews?
Are they not capable of doing an interview?
All of that time where people are working themselves into a lather, is this person capable of stringing a sentence together?
Does she have such a bad drinking problem that she can't be allowed to have an interview?
Does she need to have Waltz there present in order to do it well?
Right?
All of that frothing that happens over on the opposing team is prep time.
As expectations are being lowered for Kamala, she's getting better and better at better at delivering to not only softball questions, but questions that she may have had access to.
Well, so a prediction of that, which is different from, she was actually this capable all along and was acting.
A prediction of what you just said is that she will now disappear again.
Because she's not, she can't be that prepared with that much preparatory time in advance for any further events.
Nope.
We will get to the predictions.
That's a prediction, but I would go the other way, and I'll give my logic for it in a couple minutes here.
I mean, I feel like you've proposed two different things, and one of them is the whole thing has been an act from the beginning, in which case now she can start showing up looking competent.
But if you're relying on Part of what was going on is that she had all this time to prepare for this, then that is inconsistent with, and now she's just going to be able to do that kind of performance from now on, even for events for which she did not have that preparatory time.
Well, let's just say these are all hypotheses.
I will try to make my prediction as precise as I can.
What I'm trying to do is point out that you have proposed two different hypotheses that are competing with one another.
Not really.
I do believe that this is likely to have been a trick from the beginning.
And that does predict what we will see.
But a trick is vague.
A trick meaning she was always competent and able to do the kind of thing that she did last night.
That's where I differ with you.
No, I am trying to get from you what the hypothesis is.
I am not proposing a hypothesis.
I'm trying to understand.
It sounds to me like you've got two different hypotheses and I'm trying to understand what the hypothesis is.
Okay.
Because, again, for me, I'm not, like, I'm not gonna just sort of smile and not go like, oh yeah, it's a prediction of a vague hypothesis that hasn't been specified.
No, I'll spell it out.
So, right now, is it, she was fully competent from the beginning and the apparent, you know, maybe she had bad days and maybe she does have a drinking problem and there were some really bad moments, but she was always capable.
Or she's not that capable, but with a lot of time, they were able to make her more presentable last night, but that's not really her MO.
Okay.
This is my hypothesis.
I believe she is competent.
And has been.
Yes.
I believe that what she showed last night was actually hyper-competent.
I don't think she will be that good in a non-scripted circumstance again.
But you don't think she'll be as bad as she's been?
Nowhere near.
Okay, so that's that's that's a that's a detailed.
Yeah hypothesis that then predictions can follow I won't be surprised if they throw us a curveball or two somewhere just to falsify a Hypothesis like that if they don't throw us an event or something that reminds people and they start, you know mocking her again but my point would be her absence the Circumstantial evidence surrounding that absence that she's not good in front of a microphone
Um, that maybe there's a drinking problem that's really out of control or something like that.
I'm not buying it.
I think very likely she's competent and that with, you know, a competent person with full preparation of what's going to unfold in what appears to be an unscripted environment has a tremendous advantage.
And one of the things that tips me off to the fact that something here is not right, um, is, I did some debate.
I was 16 years old when I was no longer able to debate because I was invited to leave the school where debate was available and then I got kicked into your school where life was better but there was no debate.
That's part of why it was better.
That is part of why it was better.
But nonetheless, I have a little experience in debate.
We have an orchestra.
You have an orchestra?
I don't think so.
I don't have an orchestra.
You did a lot of debate and you were excellent at it.
You're underselling it because I do think this is one of the things that I said to you last night.
I feel like you can speak to why she did brilliantly even though A lot of what she said wasn't true.
Right.
So what does it mean to win a debate?
So I want to make two points about debate in general.
One, I was good at debate.
I wasn't fantastic, but I was good, and I was good for what I think is a pretty good reason to be good.
I was not good at the things that high school debaters, Oxford debaters, are usually good at.
Let me guess.
It's going to be the details.
It's going to be having all the... So an Oxford debate...
Um, high school students will spend, I guess it's a month or something of their summer researching the topic that they know is going to be the topic for next year and putting together large boxes of evidence cards to be broken out when your opponent delivers a... You know those boxes contain the details that I'm talking about.
Right.
Here's the thing.
You didn't have boxes.
I didn't have any boxes.
I mean, this was... You didn't have a single card.
It's such a ridiculous environment that, in fact, the excellent team, Calabasas, which was the excellent team... See, I played Calabasas in volleyball.
I didn't do debate.
But they had this trick where they would show up to the debate with not just one of these Oxford boxes full of evidence, but a stack of them.
Sure.
And they only used one.
The better to intimidate you with.
Right.
Exactly.
It was a fake.
Oh, really?
They were fakes?
Yeah.
You sure?
Yeah.
Oh.
I'm pretty sure.
I didn't know that was coming, okay.
Yeah, but anyway, the point is, it's a ridiculous environment, and to be excellent at it, who the fuck cares, right?
That is not a skill I would aspire to.
But, what I was good at... Well, so there's the power, that's where the power is, though.
I guess so, but I... I mean, what do you mean, who the fuck cares?
Clearly the people who are good at debate have succeeded massively.
The thing that's so troubling about debate is that it is a game.
And so anyway, I'm not... To your point in that hallway where history might have pivoted.
This is not a debate.
It's a dialectic, right?
Using debate to get to an answer is valuable.
Debating to win is infuriating.
But specifically, in a dialectic you are trying to unearth what is true, and in a debate you're trying to win.
And it doesn't matter if you're right.
It specifically does not matter if you're right if you can win by whatever the rules of the debate are.
And so winning a debate says nothing inherently about how close you are to the truth.
Right.
Now, the reason that I was very good, but not great at debate was that I had a trick that others were not using.
The trick was listening very carefully to what your opponent said and checking it logically and spotting the errors.
And if you throw the errors at them in real time, because what they've done is they've prepared for a debate in which How many evidence cards you have is the decisive factor.
Most people fail.
And so this meant A, I was in a position to just simply throw them off their game in a couple different places.
And it often went well for me because suddenly we're all In an environment where nobody knows what's going to be said next because it's not what you prepared for the other thing was In the debate, there's a coin toss at the beginning Well, there are levels but anyway you end up on affirmative or negative Affirmative you control the debate because you wrote the case and you start there and your opponent has to deal with it when given the choice which happens sometimes
I would often choose negative, right?
I don't need to control the debate if what I'm going to do is throw you off your game.
You don't want to control.
You don't want to be first off.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
What I want to do is watch you present your case and figure out what's wrong with it.
And boom.
So anyway, I was very good.
I was not great because to be really great, you've got to be good at that other game.
And I wasn't.
And I wasn't going to learn it either.
But the point is, what didn't make sense about what I saw Kamala doing was, except for the first answer, if I remember correctly, where she was all over the map and gobbledygook.
All right.
It was very rough.
I don't remember.
I thought it was a very rough answer.
I was in the car for the first 20 minutes or so listening, but it was cutting in and out, so I may have missed this answer.
It led me to believe that it was going to be the appalling showing that... That everyone was predicting.
That everyone predicted.
Right.
Um, and then it immediately went into some different thing where she was not doing what a normal human being does in an unscripted circumstance that's contentious, which is stumble and backtrack and do the stuff of human discussion.
This was just polished in it.
And so anyway, um, I, I think that's a red flag.
The lowering of the expectations with a long period of time where the opponents can just simply infer incorrectly from her lack of presence in public that it's just too embarrassing and that, you know, it's a rerun of Biden.
They can't let him out because if they let him out, his cognitive decline will show.
If they let her out, her incapability will show.
Okay.
The lowering of expectations and then the ability to exceed any expectations, I think, with, if you had prep, you could just do spectacularly well, better than a human can do, because you're not stumbling, because you've practiced this stuff, maybe for many, many weeks.
That seems to fit very well and it induces the overconfidence of the folks over on the red side.
And that overconfidence You know, underestimating your opponent is a terrible error, and this amounts to a public delight in underestimating what turns out to be underestimating the opponent, and therefore results in a stunning, where the hell did that come from?
Where's that person been?
That's really the question.
Where has that person been?
Also, they would certainly have had the advantage of Very sophisticated psychological study of Donald Trump.
It's not even hard.
There's a ton of material of him and you can see the questions on which he has pride that makes him vulnerable.
You can see the places where he is insecure and flappable you could see all those things and we're talking about the intelligence community being on the blue team somehow shouldn't be true but it seems to be true what could they do knowing donald trump i mean they've even worked with them
So knowing him as they do with the huge amount of evidence that exists about what his psychological state is and where the nuances are that can be played you could create in that preparation for the debate you could create just zinger after zinger that would take a person who presumably knew going into that debate that he needed to be very careful and presidential and it could just you know can happen to any of us, right?
Somebody gets under your skin and it is very hard to maintain that kind of discipline.
So that feels consistent with the overall hypothesis.
Now, Now, the final piece here, before we get to the predictions, is there's been a lot of discussion online this morning of the interesting earring that Kamala Harris appears to be wearing.
And there appears to be a Subtle replacement for earbuds in earring form.
You can imagine if you didn't want to have earbuds in your ears, but you wanted to listen to something or maybe make a phone call, I don't know, that there's some earring you can buy that will do this, and Kamala appears to be wearing it.
Now, I think this is another trap.
I do not believe that this was done with something like an earbud, nor do I think it could have been done.
And I would challenge anybody who thinks it could have been done this way to manage as much composure as Kamala showed, and the ability to deliver not just a sentence at a time, but full paragraphs of text with somebody talking in your ear.
Yeah, I didn't see, I didn't hear weird lags at all.
There weren't pauses in unusual places.
Right.
This was not somebody who needed something talking in her ear.
And so my guess for that was it was the earring or a facsimile of it used to cause everybody to go, I know how they did it.
She had somebody talking in her ear.
Right.
And I won't be surprised if there's some reveal that there's some other earring that this actually was that doesn't do that, or I don't know what it's going to be.
But, um, but anyway, again, Traps abound.
That's the thing that I think people need to understand is that we are now being targeted in order to make us jump at things that aren't real and that it is important to resist that.
It's important to think carefully about, you know, stories like the hit and run.
Does this story make any sense at all?
Like the me!
Okay, so the final point is the prediction, and we've already talked a little bit about it, but I would say the major prediction from this hypothesis is that going forward... State the hypothesis again.
The hypothesis is that Kamala Harris was competent As a politician, from the get-go, and that the appearance that she was being carefully kept out of public view, kept away from interviews because there was something that desperately needed to be hidden, that she wasn't going to be able to deliver
was cultivated to lower expectations and to cause all of the people who don't want to see her elected to fall into the trap of arguing that she was incompetent.
That's the hypothesis.
The predictions are that we will see her in public, regularly, going forward, through the election and presumably beyond, that she will be competent.
That she will not be as competent as she was in that debate, unless it is a fully scripted environment, either staged or clearly scripted by virtue of teleprompter.
But I would expect her to be good, but not that good in interactions of the normal sort that you would expect her to be in.
Well, that's really it.
That's the prediction of the model.
So, I don't know if we'll see it, but I think it is certainly worth considering, given that the power structure has aligned with the blue team, and therefore brings all of the tools to bear that they use around the world to destabilize, to buttress, and to manipulate regimes for their own purposes.
Speaking of the power structure.
Yes.
This is totally related, but not exactly the same thing.
I just want to show a few headlines, which I think, for me, fit into the umbrella heading of when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.
So you can show my screen here, Jennifer, a few news briefings.
Trump can't be trusted, says Dick Cheney as he backs Harris.
The Bush-Cheney dynasty isn't backing Trump.
There's a time that would have been unthinkable.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris.
Republicans for Harris launch features, key names, impressive numbers.
In the headline on this MSNBC article, we've had USA Today and Washington Post and such.
Given the state of the GOP, it's not easy for any Democratic candidate to pick up cross-party backing, but Kamala Harris is now backed by many Republicans.
That subheading is actually an opinion and not a stated fact.
Given the state of the GOP, it's not easy for any Democratic candidate to pick up cross-party backing.
The complete list of past GOP presidential ticket members who say they're voting for Trump.
This was in HuffPo, down a bit in the article.
We have one.
The list is Sarah Palin.
That's it.
That's the whole list.
The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee reaffirmed her support for Trump in March 2023.
But Mitt Romney says he is absolutely not voting for Trump.
Neither is former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Former Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, or presumably former Vice President Dan Quayle, or Mike Pence, who the article goes on to say whom Trump nearly got killed on January 6, 2021.
So we have, you know, all sorts of narrative exaggeration built into this.
So go there next.
At the point that Dick Cheney is backing the Democratic candidate for president, and the Democrats have done everything in their power to get rid of a Kennedy, Believe them, when what's in front of your eyes is, this is not the Democrats of old.
And there will be people who say, oh, the Democrats have always been like this.
I don't buy it.
The Democrats have, for a long time, been going in this direction.
But, I mean, this is the deep state.
It's frickin' Dick Cheney.
I'm sorry, this isn't about, oh, aren't we the Democrats now the big tent?
Like, don't we just accept all comers?
No, this is you revealing that the people who are actually interested in regime change, including at home, are on your side.
I'm sorry, in regime control, including at home, are on your side, and they don't want change.
Because Kamala can talk all she wants about not wanting to go back and wanting a new future and all this, but this will just go down the same path that the last four years have let us down.
It's the same thing as what we experienced, frankly, from 2000 to 2016.
And certainly in 2008, I thought that was a wildly different moment when we elected Obama.
And I say we because I was excited to vote for him in 2008.
So excited.
And it felt like we were finally going to be coming out of the, you know, the deep weeds of the neocons, of the warmongering defense industry favoring neocons.
That's who Team Blue is now.
And I don't think Team Red, largely, you know, the rank and file among the politicians have changed.
But the fact that Trump is at the top of the ticket means that's different.
That is that Say what you want about him, he's no neocon.
Yep.
He's a totally different beast.
And here we have all the celebration about all of these Republicans from, you know, what is it now, the good old days?
Who are supporting Harris.
That tells us more about who is actually in charge if Harris wins than anything else.
Yeah, it is nature's way of telling you what's happened to your party.
And the interesting thing is when you talk to people who are still enthusiastic about that party, about it, they of course read it exactly in the way that you would hope they wouldn't.
Right.
Which is, oh my God, Trump is so frightening that even Dick Cheney has come on over to the blue team.
It's like, no, no, no.
Your party has taken over all of the values that you once detested.
Yeah.
Right?
It has transformed.
This is something that happens in history.
And the fact that it doesn't happen, you know, during the average lifetime means you're not alert to the possibility, but... Nor do we have good histories.
And I've said this before during COVID.
I really, it's like, I want to know what this actually looked like on the ground when authoritarian regimes were changing what appeared to be You know, democratic republics.
I don't have a sense.
Our history is written without enough detail and usually without a sense of what the rank and file, what the individuals in the population were experiencing.
How did they justify making decisions that they were making?
So, yes, no, this doesn't look familiar to anyone because Almost certainly no Americans, certainly no native-born Americans have lived through this sort of thing.
But there is a reason, and we talked about this during COVID a lot, there's a reason that many people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain or escaped other failed states as they went, autocratic, authoritarian, technocratic, are seeing now the very same warning signs and worse that they saw in the places where they came from.
Yeah, and this is the thing that is so hard to articulate to people who are not awake is what you are looking at is something that is antagonistic to the Constitution and the free society that it creates.
Because they're not going to lose their freedoms, right?
This is something that is now acting hostily, and Dick Cheney and the other neocons coming over, that tells you something.
The fact that your party is now the party of war, that it's the party of racism, that it has completely forgotten what environmentalism means, and it has embraced the notion that environmentalism is somehow synonymous with Preventing climate change, which, oh, just happens to provide an excuse for a dozen different authoritarian measures.
It provides an excuse for a Chinese style social credit system in which your freedoms will be limited by a governmental structure that pretends to be concerned about climate.
These people don't care about you and You know, the blue team rank and file do not understand that they are being used as pawns.
These people are mocking them and it's exceedingly dangerous.
One last screenshot in this.
In this realm.
This is from someone I don't know, and so I'm mostly obscuring her name here.
It's Twitter.
Republicans for Harris has more than 25 GOP endorsements, including former Trump officials, GOP governors, and lawmakers.
You know what you never hear about?
Democrats for Trump.
These Republican patriots made their choice, the future of our constitutional republic.
And then they have this meme, Pick a Torch, in which they've got the Statue of Liberty behind Kamala Harris and one of these idiots in Charlottesville doing Heil Hitler behind Trump.
And Kamala Harris is smiling, looking pretty and kind and nice, and Trump is yelling.
There are a lot of former Democrats for Trump and some present Democrats for Trump.
Although, frankly, I think you're relatively rare.
I think most of us who are lifelong Democrats are just done.
I'm a former Democrat and I wish it could have been Kennedy.
I absolutely do.
But this is insanity, and this is just more of this barbaric messing with the narrative, right?
The idea, you know, put aside the silliness of the right side of this picture, but Equating Kamala Harris with the Statue of Liberty?
She's anti-liberty, clearly.
To the degree that she stands for anything, she would take freedoms away.
Yeah, she's anti-liberty.
I do want to clarify one thing.
You said you're just done.
As you know, there's no distinction between us here.
I've said that this party, which I still belong to, is like the family dog that's become rabid.
It does not matter what your nostalgia over what this party might once have stood for.
This dog needs to be put down.
Yeah.
So we are in no different position.
I've maintained my status as a Democrat because I think it gives my anger at what the party has become greater weight.
Yeah.
But yeah, why aren't there a huge raft of Democrats supporting Trump?
Because they've all been driven out of the party.
I mean, you know.
Look at Tulsi, right?
Right.
Well, but I also feel like that, that tweet that I showed, there was a, there was a smugness there, but there was also, well, these are related concepts, obviously.
There's a certainty.
You know what you never see?
Democrats for Trump.
You know, there are so When asked, you know, maybe now after last night's performance, people will think that they have reasons to be actually excited about Harris, which, in general, people have not been able to frame it any way except not Trump.
And reproductive rights, protecting reproductive rights.
Protecting, you know, Roe is gone, but There's this weird little thing that people do there where they're convinced that the party that they still think they believe in is going to protect that one remaining thing that's already gone at the federal level.
Yeah, I don't...
Maybe it's time to move on.
Bats, bats, bats, bats, bats.
You're telling me.
This showed up in my email.
I can show my screen here.
This is from Science.
I get the weekly emails from Science Magazine, one at the top.
I still say it in one of the top two scientific journals in the world, even though it's been an incredible disappointment.
But this last week, I think this was a September 6th email, so about the issue that was coming out then.
Bat loss linked to death of human babies.
Well, that's a headline, right?
Little brown bats, Myotis lucificus, are among those species threatened by white-nose syndrome caused by the fungus Geomyces destructans.
So even science doesn't know how to write scientific names, but yeah.
Why did they miss capitalizing the genus?
Yeah, anyway.
That's science geekery for you.
And yet, come on guys, if you can't get that right... Even though they had it right in the first part of the sentence, they got myotis right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So for the two of you in our audience who care about this, scientific names, the Latin binomials, the genus and the specific epithet, are always italicized, and the genus is capitalized, and the specific epithet, the species name, is not.
You will recognize Homo sapiens, Felis sylvestris, which is the domestic cat, Canis familiaris, which is the domestic dog.
The genus Canis Felis Homo is always capitalized, and the second word is never, and you might think, well, why does it matter?
It actually does, and I don't know if you experience this with your dyslexia, but for me, I can absolutely scan a paper if I'm looking for, and you know this is not as relevant now since everything is electronic and you could just search it, but I can visually scan a paper and immediately pick out the scientific names because there's the, you know, first capital and a string of two italicized letters in a stream where nothing else is italicized that actually allows you to very quickly pick it out, and it's not as easy if you don't use the rules.
Yep.
It bums me out when people screw this up, but then I think bats, bats, bats, and I feel so much better.
Bats, bats, bats, bats, bats.
Okay.
If I can have my screen back just for a minute here.
So bat loss linked to death of human babies.
That seems kind of like a remarkable, a remarkable result, doesn't it?
And I will say, in the end, this research is actually super compelling, but the way that science news, the news outfit version of science is reporting on it, is not.
So let's explain first a little bit about what the research is.
You can show my screen while we talk about this if you like.
So this is the original research article.
Actually, this is the original research article.
This is an economist, Frank.
The Economic Impact of Ecosystem Disruptions Costs from Substituting Biological Pest Control.
So the background, and I'm going to read both the rationale and the results from the scientific summary, which is not from the paper itself.
Uh, is basically, um, bats in the U.S., specifically the East Coast, uh, have been suffering for, gosh, I didn't look into it.
Dog is having an allergy fit over there.
Um, two decades?
Yeah.
Close to two decades, uh, with something that is called, um, white nose syndrome.
Uh, which is now understood to be a fungal pathogen, uh, that you can see a bat has been infected by the powdery looking stuff on their nose and whole colonies die.
I think it is, um, I don't know what the actual death rate is, but it's, it's, it's... Devastating.
It's devastating, right?
And so bats in the East Coast, and this, and White Nose Syndrome is moving West, uh, across the country.
I don't think it's gotten to the U.S.
yet, or at least it's not here much, but it's, but it's coming.
I don't actually remember if it's crossed the Rockies yet.
There may be a barrier there.
You said it hadn't gotten to the U.S.
yet.
The West Coast.
Yeah.
But I don't know if it's across the Rockies, you know?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
But in many places in the East Coast, where you have a lot of Myotis species, and you don't have a lot of species of bats in the temperate zone anywhere, but you have Myotis species, including that one that was in the picture I was just showing, Myotis lucificus, which are just Quite a little brown bats.
Little brown bats, they're insectivores.
Couldn't find a more standard bat than Myotis lacificus.
Totally standard.
A standard bat here in the far northern temperate zone where all bats are from this one family, the Vespertilionidae, and they all eat insects that they catch on the wing using echolocation.
Ecologically speaking, it's hard to be any other kind of bat here.
Right, so that we have big brown bats and little brown bats and then there are a few other species this far north.
But, you know, bat diversity is standard in the sense that it gets really high as you get towards the equator and it gets really low as you get towards the Arctic.
Yeah.
And the dietary breadth, the variation in diet, as you just said, declines exactly in step with the species diversity.
So whereas you were working on bats that were frugivores, and there were nectar eaters, there were sap eaters, there were frog eaters, there were fish eaters.
They were bats that eat other bats.
Bat eaters, blood eaters, we got none of that up yet.
They're all insectivores, and specifically they're hawking rather than gleaning insectivores, so they hunt on the wing.
And white-nose syndrome has been more than decimating populations where it shows up.
Like, you know, far more than 10% of the bats where they are are gone.
Okay, so that's sort of the background.
Rationale.
Some of this will be a repeat from what we just said, but this is from the, again, this is a new thing that is happening, where you get a research article summary before the actual article, which is actually kind of useful, but this is written by the author.
Distinctly here, this paper is written by one person, which is kind of great.
I love a single-authored paper.
Rationale.
Ecologists have established, through experimental and observational studies, that insect-eating bats can limit crop pest populations.
A long-standing prediction has been that if bat populations were to decline, so would their provision of biological pest control, and farmers would have to compensate with insecticides.
Epidemiologists and public health experts have been concerned about the health impacts of pesticides even before Rachel Carson's seminal work in Silent Spring.
The wildlife disease that is killing bats, with mortality rates averaging above 70%, began spreading in the United States in 2006 as a result of an invasive fungus species.
The gradual expansion of the disease provides a setting that approximates random manipulation of bat population levels, which allowed me, the author, to estimate how farm operations and human health change differentially before and after a location experiences a negative shock to biological pest control.
So biological pest control here is, ecological economics speak, for the bats that eat the insects.
Results.
I used annual data at the county level on insecticide use and estimated that, after the onset of bat die-offs, farmers in the county increased their insecticide use by 31.1% on average.
This demonstrates the substitution between a declining natural input and a human-made input.
Providing the first empirical validation of a fundamental theoretical prediction in environmental economics.
Let's just stop there for a moment.
So this research actually has two distinct, I think, equally important results.
The first is that he's actually found, and this is, you know, he's reviewing the literature.
He's not doing fieldwork.
He's reviewing the literature and he finds that according to, you know, the work that actual field workers had done, He is finding that when insect-eating bats decline in an area, the rate of insecticide use by farmers increases substantially.
Okay, so that's the first result that he's reporting here.
I proceeded to document that infant mortality rates due to internal causes of death, i.e.
not due to accidents or homicides, increased by 7.9% on average in the affected counties.
This result highlights that real-world use levels of insecticides have a detrimental impact on health, even when used within regulatory limits, which highlights the difficulties of assessing the public health impacts of pesticides when regularly... Great.
When regularly... I can't even figure out what that word is supposed to be.
I don't know why that's there.
It's hidden by some hovering computer thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's insane.
Okay, I can't even infer it at the moment.
Anyway, the second important result from this paper is that—okay, I've already established—the first result was I, the author, Frank, have established that when the natural biological pest control, the bats who eat the insects, disappear due to a fungal pathogen.
Could have disappeared for any reason.
When they disappear, farmers respond by increasing the use of insecticides.
Okay, result one.
Result two, in those counties where farmers increase the use of insecticides, infant deaths increased by eight percent.
And he also did a bunch of other work and found there wasn't a concomitant increase in the use of, I think it was fungicides or herbicides.
There was just an increase in insecticides after white-nose syndrome came in and took out 70% of the bats.
And following that, you have this increase in infant mortality, which explains this original This headline, which seemed a little bit crazy on its own, right?
Bat loss linked, if you can show this, bat loss linked to death of human babies.
And that almost sounds like they're blaming the bats.
It doesn't totally, but it's- I mean, it would be traditional to blame the bats.
So that's what attracted my attention in the first place.
I'm like, those are myotis.
What are they blaming the bats for now?
Right?
Yes, bats can carry rabies, but honestly, Not very often and you know basically if they're not if they're not going after your blood or anyone else's blood It's it's not that likely.
Don't pick up downed bats.
Downed bats may be downed because they're sick and most bats are not carrying rabies and Right.
They were you were exceedingly unlikely to get it if you don't do something dumb.
Yeah, exactly and I mean just like You know An entomologist, a bat specialist, can assess bats and choose to handle them safely, and a herpetologist can independently assess snakes and choose to handle them safely.
We're not recommending that you do that, right?
But it is true that bats get a really, really bad rap, and the vast majority of bats, especially all of the bat species that are present in the U.S.
Are there any vampires in the U.S.?
No.
No.
So all of the bat species in the U.S.
are extremely unlikely to end up causing you harm.
But...
That headline that I showed you linked to this science news article, which you can show here.
So this is, again, this is a piece not written by the researcher about the research that we were just talking about.
My jaw dropped.
Bat loss linked to death of human infants.
In places where bat populations crashed, farmers sprayed more insecticides and baby mortality spiked.
So that is, in a nutshell, the research that we've just been talking about.
But check out This paragraph.
Several lines of evidence connect pesticides and other agrochemicals to human health risks.
Although government regulators assess the potential dangers of these compounds before approving them and set safety guidelines for their use, farm workers and bystanders can still get exposed when these compounds drift away from a farm or end up in groundwater.
Epidemiological studies have linked certain compounds to developmental problems in infants and children, for example.
Insecticides, which are often neurotoxic, are often of particular concern.
Now, that may sound totally banal and in keeping with what you would expect science to be reporting, but to me, that paragraph reads like an excuse for the use of insecticides.
And once more, a reliance on government regulators assess the potential dangers of these compounds before approving them, and they set safety guidelines for the use.
Come on, guys.
The FDA has been in here, whoever it is, whatever three-letter agency it is, whose job it is to make sure that these things are safe and effective, they've done it.
So, I'm sure it's fine.
You don't really have to worry.
This research is a little bit alarming.
There is some evidence that insecticides can cause babies to die, but the government regulators have been there, so it's probably fine.
It's unbelievable.
I was going to say, when you started down this road, they obviously buried the lead, right?
Yes, it is fascinating that the death of bats from white-nose fungus is resulting in increases in pesticides that apparently are correlated with babies dying.
But what that means is pesticides are correlated with babies dying, and the bats are playing a secondary role in reducing the amount of pesticide.
Point one, prefer bats to insecticides.
Always.
Right.
There's that, but there's also, you know, in the spirit of Make America Healthy Again, we have a chronic health epidemic, right?
Babies dying is not a chronic health thing.
That's death, right?
That's worse than a chronic disease that follows you for your entire life.
But what is the actual price that we are paying for Rampant use of pesticides and the fact that the difference in the number of bats in an area is resulting in a measurable difference in the number of babies dying suggests that the baseline number of babies dying is high.
Right?
This is, you know, because pesticides are not being used because...
The fact, if you take the bats out of the equation, it changes the amount of pesticide.
I'm questioning your conclusion that therefore the baseline number of babies dying is high.
You mean before the bats were disappearing?
Yes, the baseline number of babies dying due to pesticides is liable to be high if an increase in the amount of... Okay, is likely to be.
We don't have any evidence of that here.
No, we do have evidence.
We don't have data that says that exact thing, but a logical inference from the evidence that is presented here, since it's not true that pesticide use happens when the bat population declines.
Pesticide use goes up.
So baseline pesticide use... Insecticide specifically.
Yes, true.
Insecticide use is causing deaths of babies, more so when there are no bats or fewer bats, okay?
That is absolutely alarming.
What it tells you is actually that that paragraph that they put in there, the get out of jail free card, is bullshit.
What it's telling you is, yes, we have all the regulatory apparatus to make sure that these things are done within limits and they're applied in certain ways so that they are safe.
That whole system doesn't work, okay?
That's what it's telling you.
And, you know, I love that bats are the hero of this story because that's very rarely true, right?
We bat specialists.
Spend a lot of time moaning and groaning over the idiotic stuff that is said about bats with respect to disease because it's really an unfair rap.
It's not that they never carry disease, but it's an unfair rap.
And because people don't like the idea of, uh, of bats, you know, people have an aversion to them, which they shouldn't.
I'll talk to you about that someday.
But, um, but the fact that people have that response as they're creepy, um, causes it to be a go-to storyline, but As much as I like seeing the hero of this story, the villain of this story is insecticides.
Yeah, white-nose syndrome is a problem and it's, you know, it's a pathogen that is wiping out bats, but that's not the villain here.
Yeah, and in fact there are two villains here, one of them unknown, okay?
One of them is pesticides.
The other is... Insecticides specifically.
Specifically, yeah.
The other one is, what the hell's going on with white-nose syndrome?
Why are the bats vulnerable to this?
Yes, and where did that come from?
I'm sorry, we shouldn't be expecting a whole raft of new diseases to have started affecting humans and non-human animals alike.
Occasionally, yes, there will be new things emerging from nature that were in some repository and we didn't have before, but the number of these things is unusual and suspect.
Yes, not only that.
So there is one way the story could be told that the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome existed somewhere and somebody transported it in a load of something or other across some boundary and suddenly it's now up against animals that don't have resistance to it.
That is indeed a plausible story at first.
But now you have intense selection for those bats that are resistant to white-nose syndrome.
Yes.
What the heck is going on?
So, is there a vulnerability that's being induced, right?
That is something that may wear out.
Well, even if the initial story is fungus shows up that the animals don't have resistance to, the question is what's the vulnerability about, right?
Why is selection not doing its thing?
Why don't we have bats remaining that are resistant to white-nose syndrome?
Right, which is the normal, the normal, I mean, you know, the story we tell.
They might bottleneck, you might have a weaker species briefly because it went down so low that there wasn't a lot of diversity in the population remaining, but you still expect selection to be able to respond to the environmental trigger that happened.
Yes, especially in a case where it's not like, oh, some disease came in and killed off everybody.
It's like, oh, 70%.
Oh, that leaves 30.
I'm imagining they have plenty to eat, you know?
So, in that circumstance, what you tend to do is very rapidly select for resistance.
Although, the 30% who remain in any area now live in areas where there's more spraying, and so the insects that they're eating are either been sprayed or are in the process of dying.
They've been exposed, so the bats are now eating the insecticides as well, and if it kills human babies, it's probably going to affect all mammals relatively similarly.
Yeah, and I think you're headed down a very important road here.
You are specifically going to see spraying where there are insects, which are places that the bats are going to go because the food is plentiful.
They would move in there, but for the fact that there's more spraying now, and the point of the spraying is that it kills the food that the bats would eat.
Yep.
And the point is not kill what bats eat, the point is kill that thing, and that is what bats eat.
Yeah, now I will point out, this has an interesting echo of the moth and the iron lung hypothesis with respect to polio, which I encourage people to read this book.
Forest Moretti.
And what that book describes It's a scenario in which, yes, the virus that causes polio does exist.
It is a virus.
It does grow in the spine and it does cause this disability.
However, it's not a virus that is inherently about growing in the spine.
In fact, it's inherently a gut pathogen that doesn't do very much damage at all.
In fact, we wouldn't have noticed it.
It causes you to be a little sick and that's it.
Yeah.
That heavy metals and pesticides caused this to escape the gut, and it can grow in neurological tissue and in children.
The neurological tissue in question, the front of the spinal cord, is laying right against the intestines of the child, which is why polio has the weird quirks that it has.
It grows on the front of the spinal cord, where the motor neurons are, not on the back, where the sensory neurons are.
So polio is a debilitating disease, but not a painful disease.
And the second thing is, why children and not adults?
Well, in children, the gut is laying right on the spinal cord.
As you develop, they move away.
So the point is, Yes, there's a virus.
Yes, you can prevent it if you had a good vaccine.
But, the real question is, why is that virus growing in the spinal cord?
Right?
That's a question of environmental toxins.
So, anyway.
So, as is almost always going to be the case, maybe always, but is laid out really clearly in this particular story, and there may be a comparable story here with the bats and White-nose syndrome and insecticides.
Is it term theory or Turian theory?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
It's both.
Of course it is.
And there will be some things, I am pretty sure, that have been attributed to some vague, we-haven't-discovered-it-yet, pathogen for which there is no pathogen.
And there will be some diseases for which, actually, pretty much no matter how healthy you are, you get exposed to this pathogen and you're doomed.
But the vast majority of time, if it's an actual illness, there is going to be a pathogen.
And if you are a healthy, healthy host, With a proper developmental background such that all of your membranes are intact, you have a far better chance of not getting particularly sick, even from the same pathogen that might kill your neighbor.
Yeah, it's a classic lesson in Welcome to Complex Systems, and the basic point is, look, the key to health doesn't solve everything, but the key to health is making the environment as close to the one that your ancestors evolved in as possible.
And a huge fraction of our disease, yes, very late in life this is not the case, but for Young people, a huge fraction of our disease burden is the result of the fact that we are in environments that are wildly different from the ones that our ancestors grew up in and developed in, and they contain differences at every scale, from the molecular scale up to the cognitive scale, and these things are all disrupting human health.
And if we were a wise species, what we would do Let's figure out, go after the low-hanging fruit first, but how do we make the environment return to one in which our normal systems function the way they were built?
Yeah.
All right.
We got so many more live streams coming up, I think we're going to stop this one at this point.
So let me just give you guys the litany.
We're going to do a Q&A 15 or so minutes from now.
Start with a question from our Discord server, which you can access through Locals, and the Q&A itself is only going to be available on Locals, so ask questions there.
And join us shortly for our monthly Q&A following the second evolutionary lens of the month.
We're also going to be doing what we call our private monthly Q&A, which is usually on Is it the first or the last?
I can't remember.
There's been so many variations on our schedule lately.
Anyway, this month it's on Sunday.
It's always on Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific and it's this upcoming Sunday.
It's a two-hour live stream and you should be able to start posting questions for that soon.
And it's great fun.
Great group of people.
Excellent questions.
It's really awesome.
Yeah, for that one, we look at the questions in advance and we're able to see the chat and interact some and respond to things going on in the chat.
But we're also doing two more of these evolutionary live streams within the next week.
So we're going to do one this Saturday, and we're going to do another one next Tuesday, and then we're off until after Rescue the Republic.
After the Republic is rescued.
Well, we're going to work on trying.
So we would love for you to join us in all of those places.
Join us for the Q&A to come.
Join us for the Q&A on Sunday.
Join us for the live streams that are happening this upcoming Saturday and next Tuesday.
And then join us in DC on September 29th.
Rescue the Republic.
It's going to be amazing.
There's a fantastic lineup and The Republic needs rescuing.
Yep.
Fantastic lineup, and it's getting more fantastic.
You'll see.
Watch the website, jointheresistance.org, and watch the lineup expand.
We're picking up some good ones.
Excellent.
And you can find out more about our schedule and find links to our store and such at darkhorsepodcast.org.
That's our website.
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Check out their stuff.
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