Keep Unity Weird: The 245th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 245th 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 Rescue the Republic rally, after the fact: who was there, what it meant, and how it manifested in the world. Also discussed: the VP debate between Vance and Walz, and a new X (twitter) valuation.*****Our sponsors:Sundays: Dog food so tasty and healthy, even husbands swear by it. Go ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 245.
You and I, I being Dr.
Brett Weinstein, you being Dr. Heather Hying, have just returned from Washington D.C. and the Rescue the Republic rally, which we are going to discuss today on this episode.
It was fantastic. Met a lot of great people.
So many. Yeah.
And just had a great time overall.
So that's a lot of what we're going to be talking about today.
But first, a little business.
Join us on Locals. The Watch Party is going on right there, right now.
Lots of other great stuff on Locals.
And we'll talk about various other ways that you can find us or connect with us at the end.
But as always, we have three sponsors right up at the top.
We only lost one sponsor for being into Unity.
Yeah, that Unity itself was the reason the sponsor for that.
Only the one was like, oh my god, that's a bridge too far.
No thank you. But the three sponsors, as the vast majority of our sponsors, are not scared of Unity, as it turns out, including these three that we have for you today.
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There could be a certain amount of pedantry.
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All right.
Heather, you will recall that we were just in D.C. for the Rescue of the Republic event, which was spectacular and seems to have come off without a major hitch, which...
Yeah, extraordinary work on your, Angela McArdle, and Matt Toon's part, the three organizers of the event, just truly extraordinary.
Thank you. It's a little hard, having now seen it in the flesh.
It all came together remarkably.
The presentation worked.
All of the speakers and musical acts and comedians showed up.
You know, it really couldn't have come off better, I think, from the point of view of something as complicated as that event was.
Yes? Question. Yes.
Our younger son. You remember our younger son.
I do remember him well. So I was in contact with him this morning, only by text, because I had to go quickly.
And he said to me, apropos, we've been talking about steak, as one does.
He'd sent me a picture of a steak he'd received in a restaurant in Italy, where he was.
And I couldn't tell if he had admired it or thought that it wasn't good enough, and I had to talk him down.
He wasn't sure you could eat really raw beef, and I assured him that you could.
But anyway, in that conversation he said, so is it saved?
Oh, the Republic. Well, yes, as it turns out, he had been thinking not just about steak all weekend, but also about the Republic and whether or not it had been saved.
All right. So let's address that question.
The short answer is no, not yet.
But the longer answer is actually, I think we made some significant gains in this direction, which was not guaranteed.
Simply pulling off the event without a major hitch was, you know, it's sort of the...
The table stakes, as it were, you have to pull off the event, but then what does the event do?
And there's a lot to be said about this.
Certainly there's the experience that we had on the ground, and you can tell me if you heard or saw anything different than this, but my experience was that every single person who participated, and I think I talked to just about everybody after the event was already at least well underway, Was ecstatic about how well it was going and the energy that surrounded it.
That's the participants. I also talked to probably a hundred people who had traveled there, were there for the event specifically, about what they thought.
And the energy was tremendous for those people as well.
Everybody was very excited about not only the feeling of gathering with like-minded people from all over the country and indeed the world, But also they were ecstatic about the quality of the presentations, the insights.
They were ecstatic about having it mixed, having music, comedy, and these presentations interspersed.
They said it was a very long event.
It was seven hours long. Not including the pre-show, which made it even longer.
Right. But people, you know, and for reasons of security, people didn't have things to sit on.
So that could have been way too long.
But people were energized by it and did, you know, did not feel put upon by the amount of content there was.
So the event was very successful.
If you were on the ground, I think it was very clear that it was an important moment.
I also think that it successfully broke January 6th syndrome.
That there was a lot of concern amongst people about coming to Washington for this event because people were concerned that they would be portrayed as participating in something dangerous.
And the fact that we didn't, there was no incident during the event, I think the point is, hey, we went to the Capitol, we spoke our minds, we called out power structures that are behaving in an un-American, And we live to tell the tale.
So I think that's a very positive thing, even if we had accomplished nothing else, which is certainly not the case.
That said, it is interesting that there was, of course, Almost no reflection of the event in the mainstream media save one article written by the Wall Street Journal.
Molly Ball, I believe, is the author.
And this article portrays a version of what took place that it's hard to imagine how anybody who actually witnessed the event could have come away with this interpretation.
Do you want to show it?
So this is the piece published, I guess, the day of, actually, in the Wall Street Journal.
It's got a still from Bobby Kennedy.
When he was speaking, Coalition of the Weird mobilizes for Trump.
The crunchy and the militant unite at a D.C. rally of the political fringes.
And I think just that subtitle actually sort of summarizes the...
Bafflement, be it organic or otherwise, like real or otherwise, that people are claiming about a unity movement that brings together people who have been described as at the extremes.
But when you actually talk to these people, I include myself among them.
You find no extremist at all.
You find a recognition that what we have come to adopt as the status quo is what is extreme.
The expectation that we shall be surveilled all the time, that is extreme.
The expectation that we aren't eating real food, that is extreme.
What we have been forced to adopt and adapt as part of our normal lives, that's the extremist position.
And because it is being preached by The major party that is currently in power, it has been accepted as the norm.
And so we have like an inversion of what is actually true.
Yeah, an inversion.
And it's interesting.
One thing you find out when you participate in something like this or organize it, in my case, is you find out that they don't really have anything useful, right?
Who doesn't? Our opponents, those who would misportray us.
I don't know that you discover that by participating in the event.
You discover that afterwards.
Well, you discover it when you go to an event that energizes people like this and then you find out that the epithet that they're going to use is weird.
Like, this is petty schoolgirl stuff.
And it's not even obvious that weird is negative.
Obviously what they've done is they've, I don't know, they had a brainstorming session and they were trying to figure out how to say deplorable without using the term deplorable.
And so weird, okay, darn, you got us, right?
You know, like the collection of people who were there.
Their decency to each other and in general, their insight and dynamism.
What difference does it make?
Even if weird made some sort of sense, it's not obvious that there's a critique to be made in that.
And in fact, really what it does is it portrays the sterile, processed, Both of those are obviously Written so as to discourage you from wanting to join any such group.
But my experience, so I spent about an hour talking to people in the audience before it started during the pre-show.
And so the crowd was small.
It was, in fact, only a few thousand strong at that point.
It grew a fair bit larger once it actually started.
And then another almost two hours After my talk at the end of the day.
So I spent several hours out talking to people, which for me is a great appeal of such a thing.
It's one of the main things that we've both lost from not being professors anymore.
It's just getting to talk to people and find out who they are and where they're coming from.
And in this case, why are you here?
It was just so marvelous and actually diverse, and if there was one—I guess the word is demographic—that I would say was most represented among the people I talked to, it was Kennedy supporters.
There were a lot of people there who had been working for the Kennedy campaign, which has transformed itself into the Maha movement, Make America Healthy Again.
You see that on the— We're good to go.
As do we. That what has become of the Democratic Party has no relationship to what it used to be.
And you can find lots of people who will argue, it was never what you said it was, you were wrong all along.
I don't care, right? Like, that's not where most of the people in this crowd are.
I'm sure there are plenty of people there, I'm sure, who are about to cast their third vote for Trump and plenty of people who are about to cast their first vote for Trump and some people who may not vote at all.
I doubt there was almost anyone in the audience who's going to vote for Harris.
Yeah, I don't think so.
So, But let's recover a couple things from this.
One, you know, the Wall Street Journal portrays this as a Trump rally.
First of all, it wasn't a political rally at all.
It was a gathering of the unity movement.
But To whatever extent you want to cast a valence on the thing, it was not Trump in nature.
It was this huge collection that couldn't possibly be more politically diverse of people from the far left to the right.
And don't know anybody from the far right there, but there were certainly people who were solidly on the right.
But that group of people is politically homeless and they are in search of something.
And to portray it as if this was a Trump gathering is preposterous.
Well, but I guess... So just one more line from this.
Right-wing libertarians mingled with left-wing peaceniks, tie-dyed long hairs, and camo-clad beardos mingling peaceably under the cloudy sky.
These attempts, of which there are several in this article, these attempts at counterpoint.
Look how weird these fringe groups are, and oh, I guess we are impressed that they can talk to one another.
And I would say, actually, that exactly as has been your argument since Unity 2020— And is a point that I made in the talk that I gave there, and is patently true if you start talking to people, that we all actually share much more than we disagree about.
And if all you're doing is doing the identity test, like the identity purity test, and you're like, well, you certainly look like someone with a lot of guns in your house, or you certainly look like someone who probably makes your own granola.
You must not have anything in common.
You've missed the humanity.
All you're doing is playing identity games, and that is in part actually what we're objecting to.
It's not the biggest thing. Frankly, I think the biggest thing is the First Amendment.
But all the rest of these egregious assaults on democracy and on the American Constitution and on the United States itself are downstream of the assault on the First Amendment.
That's exactly right.
The First Amendment is the critical thing, and it was the absolutely unifying theme of the entire event.
I would point out, in some sense, they've created insight into what that deplorable business was in the first place, right?
Deplorable makes it sound like that's some sort of defect in the people who are being discussed.
But actually, the point is, okay, you do deplore us.
That's kind of on you, right?
You deplore us because we refuse to tear each other apart over our political differences.
It's an object statement, not a subject.
Right. This is why I used to use for students who were high potential, but not a good fit for school.
I used to call them misfits, and it's a category I include myself in.
And the point is, you can hear misfit the way the system wants you to hear it, like that person.
They're no good. But the real meaning is they don't fit, and that can be because the system sucks, right?
And in this case, you've got this machine that wants to declare people deplorable, and that's really a signal you're supposed to hate those people.
But it's not a signal about anything in their character, because frankly, these people, other than being willing to donate their time for this cause, Weren't unified by any particular belief, right?
This was a truly diverse group.
And so anyway... Well, I mean, that's another point too, right?
The people calling us varied and unexpected, perhaps.
It's not in the article.
Varied and unexpected misfits and weirdos and all of that are exactly the ones who are supposedly preaching about diversity.
Right? And their form of diversity looks to me like what it results in is sort of like the human reification of brutalist architecture.
You end up with just one massive grey wall of identical everything, and maybe some skin color differences, and maybe some funny colored hair.
Who cares at that level, honestly?
If that's the only thing you know how to change to distinguish yourself from other people, you need to go deeper.
Like, you need to get outside, you need to go travel, you need to read some good books, you know, explore, take risks.
Because really, if the only kind of difference you think there is in the world with regard to humanity is what kind of hair dye you use or what kind of skin color you were born with, you're missing a lot.
A lot. So I wonder if we shouldn't bound the neo-deplorable movement.
Because the idea I mean really at some level what we want is for people who are trying to figure out how to live in this era who are hearing that mind-numbing pre-digested blue team garbage right and are thinking well that I can't possibly join the other side and the answer is well maybe don't join the other side maybe join the unity movement it's not a side these are just people who stand for basic values that are foundational to the west Yes,
they're going to deplore you, but is that the worst fate in the world, being deplored by people who suck?
This is one of these places where men and women are likely to have a slightly different or maybe a very different set point in terms of where their at least starting position is likely to be.
Where the higher average agreeableness of women is likely to have women If they don't think about it too much, and most of us don't think about these things too much until push comes to shove, well, of course I'd like to be liked.
Sure, right? Isn't that the thing?
But no one should aim to be liked by everyone because that's a failed position.
Well, but there's this other aspect to it, which you and I have talked about many times, which I have called the painful upgrade.
And it actually is troubling because of a defect in our cognitive models as humans, a well understood one called loss aversion.
So loss aversion is the tendency of a human being to overvalue the loss of something.
When you're trading, when you have to give up this in order to get that, when you're moving from one city to another, you tend to overvalue the things that you won't have anymore and undervalue the things that you're picking up.
And so you can have a net positive move that still feels unpleasant and frightening because of what you know you won't have anymore.
And what we've discovered again and again, having been...
Ejected from multiple social entities as we stood up for things that were obviously true but not considered honorable in those clusters is that you lose people that you thought were your friends.
And your community may turn on you, but that each time this has happened for us, we have ended up in a community and a friend group that is bigger, richer, brings more to the table.
And so, you know, would I trade our current friends for our former friends?
Like, it doesn't even make sense.
These are people, the people that we have ended up with are courageous, they'll stand by you, they No interesting things about the universe.
And so anyway, that painful upgrade is what happened here.
And this is the people from the prior world basically sneering at us for having discovered that they weren't all that.
Yeah. I said in the wake of Evergreen blowing up on us, and it's been true a few iterations since then, that while it will no doubt, and was for us, very painful to lose particular people as you...
As they reject you, or you realize that you cannot remain in their sphere and also be speaking what you understand to be true, it's far better to know.
And if you don't think it's far, I mean, that is what the red pill thing is, right?
It's far better to know.
And I think some number of people in the US now are just so overwhelmed That they feel like, I know, I know, I've got these glimmers at the edges of my consciousness.
I can tell it's not what it seems.
I don't know what it seems.
I am certain that I can't do anything about it.
So, rather than keep on trying to twist my head around and get a clear look at that thing, whatever it is, which I know is going to be more complex than I'm going to be able to make good sense of, and even if I can make good sense of it, I'm not going to be able to do anything about it, so what's the point?
That does seem to be the blue pill choice that a lot of people are making, right?
But then there are a whole lot of other people who say, whether or not because I'm just...
Like, because of who I am, I can't help but keep on looking for the thing at the edges of consciousness, or because it came for me, right?
Because I said one thing that actually didn't even seem that important in, you know, in a meeting, in a lab meeting, or a staff meeting, or I saw something and I made a film about it, like, whatever it is, like, okay, now I can't unsee it.
Because once you do, it's very, very rare, actually, that people do the thing that happens in the Matrix.
And they're like, I see the whole thing, and I just want my steak.
That's actually the rare move.
It's much more common that people say, I know there's something.
I don't know what it is.
I know I'm too little to do anything about it.
Please let me just live my life.
But it's gray.
It's a gray and unforgiving life.
And if you don't think that that beast, that that Goliath, will end up coming for you when it wants you to, then you're really not thinking about it carefully enough.
Yeah, you're right. It's going to eat you alive.
You will postpone it, but you will not avoid it.
And people do not understand that that's the bargain that they are making.
I wanted to point out that somebody I had never encountered before, I certainly knew of her from The Sopranos, but somebody showed up on one of the Twitter spaces that we did in advance of the rally, and her name is Drea De Matteo, who played...
Christopher's girlfriend? Christopher?
Yeah, Christopher's girlfriend.
She showed up and I had no idea that she was wide awake and active in the unity movement.
So anyway, I heard what she had to say about it and she talked about the fact that indeed she had paid a huge price in her career and that she effectively Couldn't really act anymore because she was outcast and it became clear in the Twitter space.
You know, people were unclear on what that meant and she clarified it for them and she said, look...
I'm much more interested in A-list humans than I am in being in A-list circles in Hollywood.
There it is. That's exactly it.
You pointed out that Hollywood is a toxic place and so anyway I was delighted to discover that She is with us and ready to continue to speak out publicly, even though she's paid that price, because she is also experiencing the painful upgrade.
It's not like the cost of it isn't huge, but the benefit is even bigger.
And I hope that people will get that message.
They will ignore The Wall Street Journal and The Spectator, and they will pay attention to the real message here, which I want to make.
I want to try to make this clear because there is a question about how many people showed up and all of that.
I will say the rally felt very full and alive.
There was no part of looking out from that stage that felt like this was disappointing.
It was just energizing.
That said, it wasn't a huge turnout as sometimes happens on the mall.
And there's a reason for that.
And I don't know, maybe there's more than one reason, but at least one reason is that it became clear as the date of the event approached that That lots of people didn't even know it was happening.
In fact, I had several people tell me that they followed most or all of the speakers at the rally on Twitter, and they still didn't know that there was an event two days before it happened.
So, clearly, there are ghosts in the machine.
They didn't want this well understood, and that has an impact on turnout, as does the fact that DC is a heavily blue city.
So, given that there was clear suppression of just even the information that there was a rally, I'm thrilled at the turnout.
And not only the number of people, but the energy of it.
So that was a stunning success.
But it's nothing compared to what happened online, where there was also suppression.
But in spite of that, apparently, and, you know, these aren't numbers I have access to directly, but according to Mario Nafal's team, who broadcast the thing, This was the largest rally broadcast in the history of Twitter X. So we were talking about an audience in the millions.
I think there was a million and a half, at least a million people who watched live.
And then we've been tracking the number of people who've watched replays.
And it was broadcast on multiple channels, including my Twitter feed.
Bobby Kennedy had it broadcasting live.
Including our YouTube, but YouTube took it down.
Yeah, YouTube did take it down, oddly.
They took it down because Skillet violated the copyright on one of its songs somehow.
I'm not sure how that works, but anyway.
Playing their own song. Yeah, playing their own song, which you would think that even if they don't own the copyright, which I guess they don't, you would think whoever does would want Skillet playing that live in an event being watched by millions of people because that would be good for them financially, but I don't know.
That's not what it's about. I guess not.
But anyway, the point is, you cannot stop this.
People want to participate in this.
They're interested in it because they need a home for their sense that something is very wrong with the world, that it is a threat to their civilization, and that somebody is fighting for them.
So... You know, once again, the message, as in so many of these things, the beating that we took during COVID and the fact that we came out of it actually having broken their narrative.
And they can say, oh, you know, discredited crank.
They can throw these epithets at you.
And it's not like it doesn't have a cost.
But what comes through and overwhelms that cost is the fact that people aren't buying this bullshit anymore.
Right? They're gonna go, and frankly, the thing that they're gonna do is they're gonna do their own research.
And sometimes doing your own research just means listening to people who have said the thing you're not supposed to say, paid the price, and then they're free.
And the point is, that's really what's on offer here.
And it is actually strikingly close to how it is portrayed in The Matrix.
And I know I lean on that movie a lot, but there's a reason for it.
The deal for you, if you take the red pill, is not that life will be fun.
The deal is that you get to be free of that oppressive portrayal of what the world is that it absolutely isn't.
What you do is you get to see reality.
And what that means for me, what is directly downstream of that, what is inherently also true then, is that you get to explore and discover reality that maybe no one else in reality even yet knows.
It's not this static choice versus this static choice.
The blue pill thing is static.
It is a creation.
And, you know, the bread and circuses will change.
It won't look exactly the same over time.
But it is being created for you.
You can do nothing to discover anything new in that world because it is a fiction in which you live.
Or you can live in reality, which is.
And, you know, here is a place where I think, you know, we, evolutionary biologists, secular folk, and the religious, with whom we share a ton and who were well represented at the rally, fundamentally share the belief that there is still much to be discovered fundamentally share the belief that there is still much to be discovered in the world and that it is full of wonder and awe and that what we should be doing is recognizing how beautiful and expansive it
And being free to find out more about what is true.
Yes.
And you raise a point about the religious fact that exists in this movement.
And I want to address something, because there's been a lot of scuttlebutt about it.
And very often, actually, people who are unity-minded have looked at the overt religious messages that come from some within the unity movement, and they've been put out by it.
And I don't think they should be.
I think it has to be clear that this is not some sort of requirement to be part of it.
In fact, you know, you and I are readily embraced, as is Matt Taibbi, as is Walter Kern, right?
So the point is that there are lots of us who don't share that worldview.
What we do share is a willingness not to be thrown by what's on the other side either.
There's clearly, and I've said this in many places, I've seen that people with a religious orientation, I think quite understandably, are more likely to have courage in the face of Goliath.
They just do. And maybe that's not the only way there.
So, cool.
Well, it clearly isn't. But it may make things a little simpler in terms of, or it may reduce the activation energy required.
It reduces the activation energy.
And frankly, if you've been paying a lot of attention to us over the years or read our book, you know that this is why we believe that that thing evolved, right?
That thing being an impulse towards that understanding of the universe.
Whether or not there is a literal reality there, there is certainly a utility and I would also point people back to the conversation that you and I had with Jordan Peterson before the event and then the that was on his channel and then I also did one with him on Dark Horse and in I think both of those conversations we talked about You know,
his developing understanding as somebody who does have a religious orientation to the world, in which he's increasingly understanding these things as internal psychological phenomena, which, to my way of thinking, is converging on the way we see it.
You know, am I put off when people invoke religion in this context?
I'm not in the way I might once have been.
Certainly not a requirement.
But the amazing thing is the religious people and the secular people in this movement are not troubled by each other's different metaphysical understanding.
It's not an important fact because we all are jeopardized by the same thing.
And I think the What the Wall Street Journal is calling weird, that idiosyncratic distinction between all of these quirky individuals who somehow have stared down some sort of threat and found themselves prominent in this movement, those people would, of course, have both a diversity of highly idiosyncratic views and a tolerance for others who do also.
If they didn't have that, they wouldn't have been there.
Yeah, and I think, actually, I should ask Jordan the next time I see him, but openness is one of these characters of the Big Five that doesn't differ between men and women, on average, but does historically differ between liberals and conservatives.
Liberals have greater openness, and that fits with A traditional understanding of what a conservative is.
Like what has been, you are comfortable there, you believe it to be good, honest, and true, and you see no reason to explore beyond your boundaries in the future.
And so you have extraordinarily important and valuable concepts like the precautionary principle and Chesterton's fence emerging from that kind of perspective.
Positions which we have had forever, even as we have called ourselves liberals, and both are extremely high in openness.
And I don't see any evidence that any of the people, and you know, most of the people I think that I was interacting with in the audience, in fact, I asked many of them, are disaffected Democrats.
Like, these are people who think of themselves as liberals or have been all of their lives.
But I certainly talked To a certain number of conservatives as well.
And I don't see any lack of openness here.
And I think the lack of openness actually is higher.
I don't have the evidence to back this up, but my sense is that it is highest in the party diehards, maybe on both sides, but certainly among the Democrats.
Like, this is what I've always done.
This is what I'm going to do. They're going to be the ones who protect my X, Y, or Z. You know, the climate, reproductive rights, whatever it is.
It's the only way forward.
It's like, can you just take off the blinders a bit and, you know, put your head up and look around, like stretch maybe, and feel what it feels like to be a human and go, huh, maybe actually there's more than what I've just been doing the whole time.
Maybe this canalization that I've experienced because the party has I wonder if this historical distinction between liberals and conservatives with regard to the psychological trait openness isn't now quite different than it was.
On that subject I keep now running into people that I would have in my mind categorized as just straight down the road conservatives of the same sort that we've known our whole lives.
I keep finding amongst those people a tremendous amount of openness to Evolution, to a secular way of thinking, to us as liberals, all sorts of stuff that even in 2017, I don't think that openness was there.
Everybody seems to have recognized that the threat requires it.
And you know, actually, one of the things that distinguished Vance in the VP debate last night was his apparent and, I think, legitimate openness.
He appeared...
I don't assume that anything that happened there was entirely unforeseen by either side, right?
Although clearly Vance did extraordinarily well.
But his, not just willingness, but it seemed to be like almost an eagerness to discuss things which have historically been the very topics around which the Democrats have rallied their base into not voting for Republicans.
He was willing to go there and in fact seemed genuinely human doing so.
And it looked like an openness that is exactly, should appeal to a traditional liberal voter.
I agree. And there was some, I think, quite healthy discussion today about what the meaning of what Vance displayed was.
And, you know, I think we should shift to this topic sort of generally, that the debate is well worth a bit of consideration.
So here are some things that I think are worth our discussion.
One of them is both people came off as Capable of interacting with people on the other side in a way that was decent.
Now, I happen to believe, based on some other things I saw on this trip, including a talk given by somebody who lives in Waltz's state, that in Waltz's case he's putting on a false front.
Um, I can't say that for sure.
He did a decent job of showing himself to be willing to interact and to, you know, there was a lot of both parties stated that, you know, well, this part of what Vance is saying, I agree with this part of what Walt's is saying.
I agree. So there was a certain tenor that was unfamiliar from recent debates at this level.
I guess, maybe this isn't fair, I guess they're both Midwesterners, I guess.
But the upper Midwest, Minnesota, sort of like, aw shucks, don't pay me no mind, I'm just a fool, thing was something that Waltz is hiding behind.
Like, what was his word? A knucklehead, right?
The one time that the girl boss...
What are they called? Moderators.
Moderators. Actually challenged him at all and continued to because he refused to answer the question.
Yes, he did lie. And he didn't say, I lied.
I'm just a knucklehead. And that seemed very in character for an upper Midwesterner who is accustomed to never being called out on his bullshit.
Yeah. So when he first emerged, I really knew almost nothing about him.
And I took him to be dangerous because I think he's actually kind of good at this.
He's good at the game, right?
He's good at portraying something.
And I read him as being nakedly ambitious and completely without...
Moral scruples based on some of the lies he's told and his embrace of positions that surely he understands are dangerous and things like this.
But nonetheless, I think it's very important to separate the performance that happened, that is to say what other people are likely to see, and what one suspects is running based on the model you have built of the person.
I could be wrong about the model.
It's obviously based on thinner evidence than what just simply took place at a factual level.
But I did get the sense it was if you were somebody who was capable of accepting the blue team's word for anything at this point, then I think he did pretty well.
Which I'm not happy about, but I think he did pretty well.
He didn't do nearly as well as Vance, who I think radically changed how a lot of people view him.
That the frame that has been put around him or his own failings that have led him to be understood in a particular way was quite changed by this event, which I think for most people was probably the most concentrated exposure to Vance that they got anywhere.
So again, I'm increasingly seeing the blue team as It's like a highly processed food.
The Twinkies of the 21st century.
Right. But here's the thing.
My understanding of junk food has changed over my lifetime.
Junk food obviously existed in the world that you and I were born into, and it exists today.
But the food itself...
And my understanding of it have changed.
Whereas I once saw it as food that was essentially low value in everything other than calories, right?
I now see it as full of synthetic, dangerous, uncertain stuff.
And the analogy is almost too good for what the blue team is putting out, right?
It's a highly reliable, processed good that carries dangers most people cannot see or taste.
How about this? So we had a couple of very interesting Uber drivers.
And one of them, a former cop, a 20-year career cop in D.C., a black man, was telling us lots of cool stuff.
Well, one of them, actually, which is not where I'm going here, but...
When we said, you know, who are you interested in this election?
And his first reaction was, the first thing he said to us was, they're all liars.
Every last one of them is a liar.
I don't want to vote for any of them.
Everyone lies. And in continuing to talk a bit, when one of us said, you know that Kennedy has thrown his support behind Trump, he's like, really?
That I didn't know. That may change something.
So the idea that he didn't know that is important to get out there, right?
But then he was also talking about his former love of Chick-fil-A. He said, I love Chick-fil-A, and then I ran into this experiment.
I don't know if he said his friend did it or he ran into it online.
I think he said his friend did it.
No, it was his friend. It was his friend.
Okay, so he said his friend was concerned about what was actually in the Chick-fil-A sandwiches.
So what he did was he got himself the ingredients that you might use to make sort of a replicant of a...
Not a replicant, not a Blade Runner, but a replicant of...
Of a Chick-fil-A sandwich.
You know, the chicken and the bread and everything.
And, you know, cooked it just right.
And he got a Chick-fil-A sandwich and just left it, both of them, on a shelf in the pantry next to one other.
Shared a pretty good experiment, right?
In of one, but like, you know, sample size is low.
But after a month, he went back.
I don't know whose home he did this in, because I wouldn't know.
But he went back, and of course, the Chick-fil-A, except made with actual food, had become disgusting.
It had succumbed to mold and to bacteria and, you know, to all of the things that happens to real food in the world, right?
And the Chick-fil-A sandwich looked like you could just take a bite and it wouldn't have changed.
No, no, he said it looked like it could have been used to make a Chick-fil-A commercial, which That's right, that is what he said.
It looked like it could have been used to make a Chick-fil-A commercial.
This again, this is one of my drumbeats now, I know.
When you are presented with a static view of the world, or when you are presented with something that is so static, it's something that you are eating, and what you are eating should rot.
Unless it's salt, it should rot, right?
The food that you take into you should rot over time.
You need freshness.
If it is so static that it doesn't, you shouldn't be eating it.
If the worldview that you are being handed is so static that it never changes, you shouldn't be adopting it.
You're going to need something that will rot, which means you're going to have to be nimble, you're going to have to change, it will change with you.
All of that means there's a certain amount of uncertainty and change will happen.
It is inevitable. That is a sign that there's reality there.
Yes, and that actually is what frightened me about Waltz's presentation last night.
Because the thing that he is good at, which is really the core blue competency at the moment, is portraying themselves as very concerned about the well-being of Americans.
And having a plan as for what they're gonna do to increase that well-being, right?
And so when they present this, I now know, because I've been watching these people my whole adult life, That they couldn't possibly care about regular Americans.
They just simply don't.
There's no way. I mean, the lack of helicopters in the air to address these people stranded in the path of the Hurricane Helena These people don't care about regular humans, or they would take the resources that they quite obviously have, and they would deploy them, and the deployment wouldn't be perfect, and it would make errors, but you would see them very actively trying to help people.
And the fact that they don't tells you that they've got some other calculus running about some other thing.
They didn't forget that they had helicopters.
I'm sorry. 18 years later, Kanye was right.
He's still right. Right.
And the point is, that's the duopoly.
And you're looking at the duopoly, which now is resident in the blue team.
It's still resonant in the red power structure, but it does not appear to be the content of the rank-and-file red team, which seems to have...
Radically transitioned around labor, effectively.
Labor was abandoned by the blue team.
It ended up taking refuge over under the red banner.
And so now you have this confusion about...
It's labor and middle class. It's the two big economic constituencies that are being dismantled.
Right. And actually, I wish I had it at my fingertips, but Bobby Kennedy tells the story very effectively by describing what percentage of wealth was held by blue team voters in the last election versus red team voters.
And the red team voters are dwarfed by the wealth held by the blue team at the moment, which is amazing and interesting.
In keeping with that, I believe this came out in the debate last night, although I didn't have time to find it.
Vance mentions both Kennedy and Gabbard as having thrown their support behind the ticket that he is on.
And who does Waltz mention?
Dick Cheney. That tells you right there that...
There's been a strange, it's like a Mobius something.
It's not just upside down.
It's upside down, inside out, and not like anything we've seen before.
Dick Cheney is nature's way of telling you something.
He always has been.
But I want to point out that the context in which Dick Cheney came up is especially telling, especially in light of what we were doing this last Sunday.
So, I mean, maybe my brain made this up, but I'm pretty sure this actually happened.
I believe that Waltz invoked the term unity, describing the unity coalition that has emerged around Kamala, and his exemplars were Dick Cheney, Bernie Sanders, and Taylor Swift.
Right, right, right, right.
And so the coalition, the coalition, and they're also the ones defending democracy, because the First Amendment doesn't matter so long as you don't have feds encouraging people to break into the Capitol on January 6th.
Right. And so I would just say, look, if you want to, you know, who's weird?
I don't care. Who would you rather, if you needed people with some know-how and insight to get you out of a jam, because by the way, we're in a jam, right?
Do you want Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders and Taylor Swift?
Or do you want Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and Jordan Peterson?
Well, I mean, say what you want about Dick Cheney.
He does have skills. Right.
He does have skills.
But, you know, let's put it this way.
Darth Vader was a pretty good analogy for the man.
Also has skills. Right.
Exactly. I'm not calling Darth incompetent.
I'm just saying is that if you were trying to get out of a jam, right, rather than turn the universe into a jam.
Do you want...
Well, with Taylor Swift, you can also jam.
So, you know, just jam all around.
Right. But, okay.
The question is, and this is now deja vu for me, because as you will recall, in the last election, as I was trying to jumpstart the Unity 2020 movement, which ended up being quixotic, but nonetheless, you know, faced massive online suppression, including having our...
Twitter account shuddered under false pretenses and all kinds of madness.
But anyway, at that point where Unity 2020 actually captured the imagination of a bunch of people, suddenly it was on Joe Biden's lips.
He tried to capture the word unity, right?
And he kept talking about it. It's like, what are you even referring to, right?
You're not about unity.
You're about division.
You're about calling people out based on the color of their skin.
This is the opposite of unity.
But This is now the second time, I think, that the blue team is understanding that there is tremendous energy around the idea of unity.
Why? Because that is exactly what you would expect in an emergency, where we're all trapped because of the same idiotic plan being deployed by people who obviously don't like us, right?
You would expect that to unify people, and so you would expect those very people to deploy the concept of unity.
And you can just tell which the real unity was.
Take a look at the live stream from Rescue the Republic and then think about the coalition of Bernie Sanders, Taylor Swift, and Dick Cheney.
So where is the whole live stream?
So we've clipped all the pieces except for the skillet piece and put them up on your YouTube channel.
But is there an entire live stream still up?
I believe the entire live stream is back up now.
On our site? I believe so.
That may or may not be the result of some intervention by some powerful folks on our behalf with the folks at YouTube.
I do not know whether that had a consequence or it was a coincidence that it went back up.
And you can find it also if you go to my Twitter at Brett Weinstein.
Brett has one T. There is a Brett Weinstein with two Ts and he does not need any more of my mail.
He's been pretty patient.
He's been great. But if you go to my Twitter and you find my live stream of the event, it's still up and it has one defect which is that at six hours Twitter cut off the stream and so the second part is in a reply.
But you can see it all there in its entirety and you can also look at the clips on our YouTube channel and I'm going to put up some clips on my Twitter as well so people can look at it there.
Alright, was there anything more to the debate that we should talk about?
I saw a comment, and I don't...
I saw a comment on Twitter, which I probably won't be able to find here, that...
And I had already thought about these, the moderators, as...
You know, it's a little bit...
It's a lot dismissive, as girlbosses, because I have long hated the concept of girlboss, because it is...
Frankly, it's what Kamala is.
It's sexist. It's...
You're either involved or you're not.
Well, except it's like embracing the incompetent part.
It's saying, like, this is what you would look like.
It's almost a recognition of this is what it looks like when incompetent women arise.
And there are plenty of incompetent men who rise, and we don't really have a word for it.
And that's, you know, there's a lot of history to that thing, where, like, when incompetent women rise to...
When women do something badly, we come up with a name for it quickly.
And when men do something badly, we're slower to come up with a name for it.
Fine, that doesn't matter.
But I saw someone, and I won't probably be able to...
Say it? No, here it is.
Ah, here. This is a...
Don't show my screen. This is my email.
But you must understand...
Actually, you can show my screen here.
If you want a John Doyle, I don't know who he is, you must understand the degree to which middle American men will identify with calmly executing their jobs while being nagged by retards and girlbosses.
That... Obviously, I'm not a middle American man, but I did have the sense of J.D. Vance sort of in there with like a sword, just being like, I'm here to do a job, guys, and I'm smart, and I'm competent, and yes, obviously he had been...
Presumably all of the people on the debate stage have had a lot of tutoring.
But he knew his stuff.
He knew how to speak correctly to avoid the traps that were being laid for him at every step.
And, you know, I wouldn't tend to use the word retard, but we know what he means.
Waltz came off as simply being way undercompetent by comparison to Vance.
And at the same time, there were these, you know, People, women as it turns out, who were like trying to puppeteer the show, trying to control the marionettes.
And Vance is like, get off of me.
Like, that's not what we're doing here.
We're trying to actually have a conversation that will reveal to the voters which direction they want the country to go in.
And why are you getting in the way?
Why do you not want that conversation to happen?
Yeah, it was...
He displayed a characteristic, and I don't mean to...
It's a little bit fraught because my sense is they have a tremendous amount of information.
They have gleaned a tremendous amount about President Trump and how to fluster him.
Oh, okay. The blue team and it's...
So, they did fluster him in the debate.
They did not manage to do that to J.D. Vance, despite a tremendous amount of effort.
Now, they presumably have a lot less to go on in his case, because he just doesn't have as much stuff in the world for them to analyze.
But he did a great job of sidestepping the landmines, which was impressive, right?
That's not an easy thing to do under any circumstances.
So it was significant.
I did see something that initially had me scratching my head this morning.
John Robb, who I quite like, who is a military analyst who, I'm trying to remember, something rather guerrillas.
He puts out a newsletter about basically strategy from 30,000 feet.
Anyway, his tweet today said that Vance had blown President Trump's assassination insurance, which I initially took to be very perplexing because Vance did very well in the debate and John Robb certainly would see that easily.
Yeah. But then it became a little clearer what he meant.
And what he meant, I think, and he's welcome to contact me and let me know that I've got it wrong, is that Vance, by being so good at navigating a minefield set for him and navigating the relationship on the stage with Waltz in a way that diffused charged stuff...
Made it clear that he is somebody that the establishment could work with.
And that was not something that I had thought until I saw that tweet.
But given who John Robb is, he's excellent at this, it is certainly worth our thinking about whether or not he did not send a signal, intentionally or otherwise, that the establishment might have picked up as actually, you know, that guy's not the end of the world.
So I'm not sure what to think about that, but I do think it's worthy of analysis.
Well, it's inherently a challenge.
I don't know that it would be possible to simultaneously try to communicate to the electorate that I am a smart and likable guy who is actually interested in seeing what you need and want and helping you get it, and simultaneously communicating to the establishment, I am a smart and likable guy who is going to be really disagreeable anytime you come for me and I'm not going to do what you want.
So you sort of have to simultaneously split yourself in order to communicate both.
And it seemed to me that he had either organically or, you know, been advised by what he—he must have a team of advisors who helped him prep for the debate— You know, bombastic, aggressive, argumentative is not the road.
That is not what you want to do.
You want to be you and honest and appeal to people who are having a hard time wrapping their brain around voting for Donald Trump, but with a measured approach as his second-in-command might be able to see their way to doing that.
Yeah, I agree. And there's no way, you know, if you pay attention to every cost you're going to pay, then you're going to end up with just a muddled strategy.
I think that may be an inherent, an unbreakable trade-off.
That's what I'm getting at.
I think he didn't have a choice but to win the debate, as I think he clearly did, at whatever cost might come.
And, you know, hopefully, whatever it is that was Protecting Donald Trump to whatever extent it was is not terribly, deeply connected to an understanding of Vance that required him to be unreasonable or something like that.
So, anyway. All right.
Have we covered everything we were hoping to?
I think there was one other thing you wanted to talk about.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Sorry, this is an unusual lapse of memory.
So I hadn't seen it, but it was something about Twitter evaluation.
Right! That's it!
Okay. I don't know.
That's all I know. Okay, so here's all you need to know.
I think the audience may need to know something.
Yeah, I'm gonna tell you.
Fidelity released a valuation of X, formerly Twitter, that was $9.4 billion.
$9.4 billion Compared to the $44 billion that Musk paid for it would be a reduction in its value by closing in on 80%.
Now, my point is...
This is obvious nonsense.
This is an obvious attack on the value of X. In other words, this is not a report on what X is worth.
This is an attempt to drive that value down, which is not something that a ratings agency is entitled to do.
But it's Transparently wrong.
And I just want to point out how anyone who's trying, you know, I'm not in the valuation business.
How would I know? Maybe it has dropped to $9.4 billion.
First of all, it's a dishonest analysis because it is well understood that Musk paid a premium for X when he bought it.
So even the initial number that they're comparing to Is inflated because, you know, because he had an objective in purchasing it that caused him to buy it for more than it was understood to be worth at the time.
Now, you can make the argument that it was worth whatever he paid for it.
And so, okay, let's call it $44 billion.
But the idea that the platform has been compromised so that it is only worth a small, a tiny fraction of that initial value Doesn't make any sense.
And the reason it doesn't make any sense, I'll give you two reasons that it doesn't make any sense.
One, it has more users spending more time on it than it ever did.
Now you can argue that those users aren't as valuable or whatever, but there is nothing, if Musk were to sell it tomorrow, there is nothing that stops you from putting it back the way it once was.
And that means that its value, if it was $44 billion before, is some large fraction of $44 billion, because what you effectively have is the conversion cost to put it back as it was and restore the value that it had, right?
Maybe it would have lost some for reputational reasons, but the idea that it is so damaged by anything Musk did, in spite of the fact that it has a larger user base of now people who are paying for it, Is nuts.
It's just simply impossible.
But the other reason, even more important in my opinion, is that, so my claim is, if he were to auction it, and he were to set the starting price of the auction at $9.4 billion, he would have a long line of people ready to join that auction who would bid it up from there.
Among those people, Would be powerful members of the blue team.
Right? Now the reason for that is because Musk has created something that is actually a threat to them.
We can tell by the amount of time they spend slandering it and going after Musk's other properties.
Right? We know that they detest this thing.
And we know why. Which is...
I don't think it is a free speech platform, but it's a lot closer than anything else we have, which means that a lot of narratives that we find now break out into the world happen only because we're able to discuss them on Twitter.
So, that being said, the blue team has a racket that the revenue is in the trillions.
Profits are in at least the hundreds of billions a year.
For them to take it out of existence would be worth a huge fraction of what they will lose because X is now a place where these things can be discussed openly.
So you would imagine that...
Let's imagine for a second that Musk was a completely cynical player who doesn't really care about free speech.
He's done a brilliant job of creating a credible threat to the establishment.
That credible threat could now be converted into dollars, right?
The ability to silence it for money means that he now has something of high value that he could trade.
Now, I'm not saying that that's who I think he is.
I don't think so. I think he is interested in free speech and that's why he's done this.
And I am... Very hopeful that he will not ever make that trade, but he could.
And the value of X is partially contained in that threat, which, if anything, is way larger than what he paid for it.
The threat to their racket is so large that they would pay a huge price to get rid of it.
And I want to point out, can we just play that clip of that guy who bought Taylor Swift's guitar at auction?
Look out.
No, he wasn't joking.
We don't need the wall hanger.
That's sufficient.
So anyway, my point is, this is somebody who's bought Taylor Swift's guitar at a premium in order to destroy it.
The blue team would do that to X. I don't think that's the route they would take because, of course, it's a property that has a value and could be used for something else.
But the point is... The premium on X is now high because the threat it poses to the elite is so great.
And so for that very same elite to deploy an attack on X that claims its value as a tiny fraction of what it was even, you know, a year ago is clearly a cynical political move.
So why did you want to show that?
To demonstrate that this is something that people do.
That the right to destroy X would be worth a lot to this team that resents its existence.
That's a human instinct.
And here you see it deployed.
It's not a good part of humanity. I'm not arguing.
This is the blue team.
I'm saying that they would... That wasn't the blue team.
Right. But they would torch it for the same reason that somebody would pay $4,000 for a junkie guitar to hit it with a hammer.
Right? Taylor Swift's guitar only cost $4,000?
Yeah. I don't think it was a very nice guitar.
And she probably has a lot of them.
But anyway...
I don't know anything about that story.
I have nothing riding on Taylor Swift.
I don't even think I would recognize one of her songs.
But... Destroying a functional thing of some beauty because you hate the thing that it stands for seems to me like just succumbing to the basis of human instincts.
Maybe not the basis, but I see nothing in any way honorable about that.
I totally agree. And in fact, there is a song that I'm quite fond of.
I'm trying to remember who it is.
But anyway, the song is called Perfectly Good Guitar.
And it is a reference to rock stars destroying perfectly good instruments that somebody could make good use of.
That's different, though.
I mean, like the Who did this, right?
Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey did this.
I never thought it was awesome, but doing it as part of a show from...
Pointed anger and hatred at an individual, be it Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, that riles people into a kind of ecstasy is not just not honorable, but I think it's dangerous.
Of course. Of course. I'm not defending what that guy did.
In fact, I'm analogizing it to something that I think the blue team would do to Twitter just simply to declare victory.
You know, it's a Pyrrhic victory.
They would spend billions just to kill it.
Yes. Which means it's valuable.
That's the point. Is a true valuation, a real valuation.
And I don't know how you get a real valuation.
For one thing, when you're talking about an asset worth as much as something like Twitter, the number of buyers is tiny.
Therefore, it's very hard to put a number on it.
So these things are suspect to begin with.
But the idea that that number is low is preposterous in light of the fact that it is capable of doing things over the objection of the elite.
That's my point, is that there is value even in that threat, even if that threat is cynical.
And so that doesn't show up in Fidelity's analysis.
So Fidelity's analysis is a purely political attempt to change the value of X and maybe to drive people away from it.
I have nothing to add.
I have no idea how valuations are created or work or anything about it.
We can certainly find endless evidence that there are political conclusions being arrived at that shouldn't have political information in them at all.
What do you mean we know how this was arrived at?
They pulled it out of somewhere that the sun doesn't shine, I think, is what happened.
Yeah, there's some anoxic sludge there in some way.
Yeah, it did have that stench to it.
All right, I think that's it for today.
Really? Oh, okay. Wow, I would have queued some more stuff up.
So next time, I got a bunch of stuff, but I thought we were going to be doing this for longer.
Yeah, we'll save the...
The American Psychological Association.
We cannot save the American Psychological Association.
Can we save remdesivir? There is no saving remdesivir.
How about folic acid for pregnant mothers?
I have to look into it.
It might be salvageable.
No, I don't think so. All right.
Well, so when are we coming back?
We're coming back in a week and then, yeah, we're going to have some strange schedule coming up, but that's it.
All right. Join us on Locals.
Check out darkhorsepodcast.org where you get updates and find our store.
We saw some people wearing some of the Dark Horse merch at the Rescue of the Republic rally.
It was great, including someone holding up a sign.
It wasn't merch, but holding up a Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply sign.
I wasn't planning to affirm or comply, but it's good to have the reminder.
It's always useful to have the reminder.
Some people really need it.
Really, really strongly need it.
And I guess I want to say just again how great it was.
Thank you and Angela and Matt for putting that on and having such a great lineup.
We didn't really talk about the musicians or the comedians, and I missed some of the very early and almost all of the end, unfortunately.
I was torn between these three things.
I want to watch, I want to be backstage talking to people who have been invited there as well, and I want to be talking to the audience.
And I did the least of talking to people backstage.
But one person I did get to talk to backstage, because I had so enjoyed his performance, was Tennessee Jet.
He and his wife were both there, and they are awesome people, and his music was fantastic.
I highly recommend people finding that, his clip of what he played, and seeking him out as well.
Yeah, there's some great music at the event.
Yeah. Tennessee Jet, this is the first time I got to meet him.
Five times August, Brad Schistamus was there.
He, of course, has been on Dark Horse, and he's a tremendously lovely human and did a great job.
So, yes, there's lots of good stuff in that.
Check out the live stream, which we will put a link to in the description of this episode.
Indeed. And...
Yeah, I guess until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.