Black and Blue: The 247th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 247th 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 “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” being proposed by Kamala Harris—from legalizing marijuana to enacting price controls on food and rent to regulating crypto. Then: why the ascendant Right needs the traditional liberal left, and a discussion of positive feedback, and why it has beco...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
Apparently it is number 247, which I know in advance, which is not my usual, but I know this time because I asked you about four seconds before we went on.
You do. So I'm getting better.
How prime is it? I'm going to say not very.
Not very, but closer than most.
Closer than most. Because it is the product of two primes.
Right. Yeah. Product of two primes.
13 and 19. 13 and 19.
Yeah. Closer than most strikes me as not very consequential.
It's a real category though.
Yeah. Are you in fact, are you prime?
Are your only factors yourself and one?
Or do you have two other factors and they themselves are prime?
This is a real category in the universe, whether or not you care about it.
Degrees of primitude. Yeah.
Yep. Primacy even. Better.
Yes, that's an actual word.
Well, but it may not mean anything here.
All right. Well, we're gonna use it that way.
It sounds sophisticated.
I like it. All right. We're gonna talk about a number of topical things today, including what is going on as we Here in the US, we ramp up to the presidential election, which is less than three weeks away.
And of course, what with all the relatively recent changes to how we vote, some people have already voted.
And many of us will not even have the opportunity to go to the polls.
But still, it is nominally less than three weeks away, and things are afoot.
Yeah, I actually, for just simple psychological reasons, never mind the ability to cheat and all that, I detest the idea that we don't vote all at once.
I do too. Find out at the same time in short.
And just the civic experience of going to, you know, often it was a school, I feel like, but, you know, there are a number of places where polling places were, and seeing your neighbors, seeing neighbors who you otherwise would never meet.
Seeing the same people who you might see at the grocery store or the pharmacy or the gas station, whatever, is important and valuable.
And it's a little bit like, and you know, this is by far not the most important thing about it, but one of the reasons that Digital search totally replacing physical browsing in libraries is a loss.
It obviously expands our opportunities tremendously, but it also causes a loss of the serendipity of, oh, I didn't even know I was looking for that, but that book that is adjacent on the shelf turns out to be a thing I didn't even know I was interested in.
Similarly, the physical act of going to vote has value.
about our asynchronous world.
There are definitely problems that it solves.
You know, it's useful for two people in a relationship, for example, to be able to exchange a note where you don't have to, you know, connect on the phone at the same moment.
So there's that, but the asynchronous election is cognitively so disruptive.
And I even think it just breaks the sense of being one nation.
Of course it does. Yeah, we're not all on the same anything anymore.
We're not on the same trajectory, even with regard to an election, which, you know, has the capacity to change a lot of things about all of our worlds.
And we're not even on the same timeline with regard to that, which is a huge loss.
I think it primes people.
The whole idea that we know ahead of time that the election is going to take a lot of figuring in order to figure out who won, which of course leaves open the room for all kinds of cheating that a synchronous immediate result election Would not.
But the idea that the delay in finding out is built into early voting, so a lot of the public is just sort of already in the mindset of, oh, it's going to be a while before we even know, means that the reaction to, wait a minute, again, another election where we're not going to find out on election night?
I mean, you remember the first one of those was...
2,000. Yeah, 2,000.
It was like, wait, we're not going to find out?
Yeah, I remember we were at Friend's House in Ann Arbor.
We were still living in Ann Arbor at the time, and we were at Friend's House, and we had all, you know, there were six or eight of us there.
Definitely, I remember six of us, and I think it was maybe just six of us there, who fully expected to know.
And then, of course, it ended up being weeks and weeks and weeks and hanging chads and all of it.
Court battles and strategies for acquiring the White House emerging after the election and all of this stuff.
Yeah, I remember actually explicitly walking out the front door and through the gate.
Of our friend's house? Yeah, because at some point we had to make a call.
The assembled group had to make a call and it was like, I guess this isn't going to happen tonight.
It's late and we've got to work tomorrow. We're teaching.
We're in grad school here.
I guess it's not going to happen. So, all right, that's new.
But now it's like, oh yeah, we know that's going to happen ahead of time.
Oh, do you? Yeah.
You know, really? Yeah.
No, it's like we're actually going to an election night party and the idea of like, huh, well, I'm thrilled to be going, but also knowing that there's not going to be a resolution, like what is that then?
Right? Right. But I do think, you know, something is training us for a delay in which it will do things that we will never find out about.
Holy... I'm not going to curse this early on the podcast.
I swore that I wouldn't, but holy moly, how did we get here?
Yeah, how did we get here?
Well, we're going to talk a little bit about some of where we are and some of how we got here after we do a little bit of business at the top of the hour here.
So we're actually going to be back with another live stream this Saturday and another next Wednesday, and then we're going to be off until after the election.
Not that when we come back, we will know who won yet.
But we also have our private Q&A on Locals this Sunday, and there's a watch party going on on Locals right now.
Please consider joining us there.
Our Discord server is accessible there.
Lots of great stuff. And of course, we always start near the top with our three sponsors carefully chosen.
This is the only time in the episode when we have ads.
And you will know that we are reading sponsored content when you have that green perimeter on the screen.
But you also know for sure that we carefully vet our sponsors.
And if we are reading ads for someone, it is because we actually truly admire and stand behind the products or services that they offer.
Okay, given that, our first sponsor this week is Brain.fm.
Attention is one of our most precious attributes.
Even the language that we use around it reveals some of the depth of relationship that we have with it.
We can get someone's attention, give someone our attention, standard attention, pay attention, so many ways to be engaged.
And of course, there are nearly endless ways to be distracted.
Nearly nobody can actually effectively multitask, and yet here we are in modernity, so often trying to do two, three, seven, fifteen things at once.
Our focus is broken in so many ways, by the pantry and its contents, the messiness of the living room, the oiling of the lawnmower before it is put away for the season, the weeding, the grocery shopping, the laundry, the appointments to be made and kept, all of it.
And we haven't even gotten to the notifications, texts, likes, shares, emails, new content.
Thank you.
No, the people behind Brain.fm.
The brains of the people behind Brain.fm, I think.
Indeed. Have created music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better, if that is what you want to do, or relax more deeply or even sleep more easily.
Brain.fm's music demonstrably and quickly helps you find and stay in a state of flow.
So one of our listeners, this is the second time we've had Brain.fm as a sponsor, and the first time was about a month ago.
One of our listeners, who's also a friend, had an incredible experience with Brain.fm, and after she wrote about it publicly, several of her readers wrote to say that they had had similarly spectacular results.
Here is some of her testimonial.
I signed up for Brain.fm before Heather finished reading the first endorsement.
I have been addicted to distraction, which served as a means of managing a serious anxiety disorder for a very long time.
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I got up this morning and deleted the Amazon Prime video and YouTube premium apps from my devices.
I don't need them anymore.
I am free. She writes.
And that's considerably cut down from all of what she wrote, which we just don't have time for here.
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That's brain.fm.darkhorse for 30 days free.
That's an awesome endorsement.
I had not seen it, but that is powerful.
Yeah. You're not next.
Yeah, I'm not next. It's not your turn.
You could use some Brain.fm. All right.
I could use a little... I mean, it would be awkward now, but...
Yeah, we're not going to put it on now.
Our second sponsor this week is...
I read ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous. Our second sponsor this week is Delicious.
You read ridiculous, I see.
Our second sponsor this week is delicious and nutritious.
It's Manukura. Manukura honey is rich, creamy, and the most delicious honey you've ever had.
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All honey is excellent for you.
Scientific research has indicated that honey has antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-mutagenic properties, as well as expediting wound healing.
Monocora Honey is even better.
And I have this as one of these ads that I put footnotes into, so I've got a couple of references here that I vetted that really do demonstrate that I'm making.
Only podcast in the known universe with footnotes in its ads.
Yeah, with the primary research that's been peer-reviewed, but that's not enough.
I actually read it and assessed that these were good actual...
Sources. Yeah, I can't believe I just did that.
I don't do that normally. But anyway, Manukura honey is even better.
All of the health benefits attributed to regular honey appear to be even stronger in Manuka honey.
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Sure up. Sure up.
Sure up. Which may actually be my favorite continent.
Sure up? Sure up. Yes.
Our final sponsor, Heather, this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, which you probably saw coming.
Love these guys. It says that right here.
We love these guys. And they're olive oils, so I mean, it's an authentic reaction, so it's not surprising that you wrote it and said it.
Yeah. Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious.
No, really. There are all sorts of health benefits that we could mention, from being heart healthy, to helping prevent Alzheimer's, to being high in antioxidants.
I almost read high on antioxidants, which I don't think is a thing.
But you have been living on this planet, so you know.
Olive oil is, of course, a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, and it's used in everything.
If you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, however, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of T.J. Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter.
That's a cool nickname.
He brings the freshest, most beautiful...
Never had a nickname.
You've never had a nickname? I don't think so.
Dude, why would you say that like that?
Momentary lapse of judgment, obviously, but anyway.
Here they come. Oh yeah, I'm going to regret that.
But I won't lose hope because one can always fake one's own death.
But the Olive Oil Hunter, J. Robinson, has a nickname and it's awesome.
And so is the product that he brings to our home and hopefully yours.
Which involves the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from all.
Let's get to your door.
Momentary lapse of total reason.
Let's put it this way.
How long has the podcast been going?
That's the low ebb of judgment and the podcast.
I mean, you know, so we're years in.
We're not doing too bad. When we first tasted TJ's farm fresh olive oils, we couldn't believe how delicious they were.
You are doomed. Yeah, I'm gonna have trouble getting through this.
We were sent three varietals with noticeably different flavors, which is important.
So many olive oils don't really have a flavor, but these have excellent flavor.
Different flavor, different smell, different, different viscosity.
Well, I don't know about the viscosity, but different look, different color.
Yeah, you can tell.
You open the bottle and smell them, you can tell.
We use them all in the usual ways.
A light dressing on a caprese salad, marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots and coarse sea salt before roasting.
We've never been disappointed.
And we just got another three bottles.
All different. All extraordinary.
I drizzled. This is actually now Heather speaking.
I drizzled just a little on one of the season's final heirloom tomatoes last night.
Added a few flakes of coarse sea salt and a sprinkle of apple cider vinegar.
Wow. So good. Was that tomato nut?
It was fantastic. Yeah, it was really good.
I mean, a lot of that was due to the tomato-ness of it all.
Oh man, it was so good.
And you know what it says here? It says, so good.
And what about that orange olive oil cake, which is so fantastic.
I gotta make another one of those. You gotta make another one of those.
This is even a gluten-free olive oil cake.
You would never know it was gluten-free.
You have nailed the gluten-free thing, incidentally.
And olive oil, next level.
Even the recipe was sent by Fresh Press Olive Oil Club.
It's extraordinary. You will not believe how good this olive oil is and how many users there are.
How many uses, it says on the paper, there are for it.
So... I guess I have had a nickname.
Not highly relevant here, but homonym man.
That was a nickname that only you used for me.
Yes, homonym man. I did.
The combination of no ability whatsoever to spell and the spell checker, which does not recognize when you've got the wrong version of some word.
So when I would be, you know, we both edit each other's work sometimes, and when I would be editing your piece, you would send me into paroxysms, if you will, of laughter early on before I knew to expect the level of homonymity that you would provide.
Homonymity, yes. And your parents made merciless fun of me when I thought that Ferris wheels were named for the metal from which they were constructed, which turns out not to be true, which any good speller would know, apparently.
Back when they were living in London, and so we were talking about the London Eye.
Yeah. Yes, yes. Anyway.
We've digressed. So, olive oil...
This is about Fresh Breast Olive Oil Club, which is amazing.
It is amazing. Yeah. Right.
And not made of iron.
So, olive oil...
Olive oil? It's not made of iron.
It's not made of iron. No. It goes well with cast iron, but not made of iron.
So, olive oil is a...
No. No.
Oh, oh, wait. Jeez, God, you tripped me up here.
Your script says, so, olive oil is a succulent.
And I'm thinking, no, I had an olive tree in my front yard growing up.
It's not a succulent, but then the sentence continues.
So, olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that, like, pretty much all fats is best when it's fresh.
But, super...
This...
This is a succulent.
That is a succulent. Yes, not olive.
All right. But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid.
The solution is to have fresh-pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest when the olive oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak.
I feel proud to have read that well.
Okay. As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he is willing to send you a full-size $39 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils fresh from the new harvest for just $1 to help him cover shipping.
And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever. Get your free $39 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 shipping which can't come anywhere near the cost of actually shipping it.
Yeah, because it's liquid in glass.
Yeah. Very expensive. Yeah, awesome.
Alright, we survived my ad read, so that's a good sign.
That was excellent. I approve.
I approve that message.
This is now like the Trump campaign, which has taken to just broadcasting its enemies and then ending it with, I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message.
You gotta love a moment in the campaign where all you have to do is let your enemies speak for themselves and it puts you ahead.
That's a crazy situation.
Yeah, although the problem with that, of course, is that both sides, and it is a both sides situation at this point, both sides are now saying to the other side, but are you voting for or only against?
Because both sides feel absolutely 100% certain that they definitely need to vote against.
And it's harder to make an argument, people claim on both sides, for the candidate for whom the other side is voting.
I think that there are many positive reasons to vote Republican in this upcoming election.
Not least because major honorable former Democrats have said the Democrats aren't Democrats anymore.
They're acting like insane people.
Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, among many others, are going to be embraced in a Trump administration.
That's where people who considered themselves Democrats for many decades should be going.
Yeah, I agree. And I, you know, there's a lot to be said and I've had many discussions in the last couple of weeks with people about trying to understand what the relationship of that coalition that seems to be gathering under the red banner is to the traditional GOP that we all remember.
And I don't think they're remotely synonymous.
I think there are a lot of people from the traditional GOP who are actually completely open to that coalition and that the Republican Party is becoming something new.
Not the first time that this has happened.
And some people are not that open to it.
Some people wish the coalition wasn't happening, but I don't think that's very many people.
I see evidence of it sometimes.
There are some dinosaurs. There are some dinosaurs in that party who would prefer to keep the corruption racket that they innovated and then the Democrats perfected going, but...
Well, I mean, but also, I think that there are some people who, you know, the idea of embracing Bobby Kennedy, it's like, well, what about GOP values?
Like, he doesn't stand for GOP values.
And I don't know enough about how people understand traditional GOP values to know exactly what that is based on.
But I think some people feel that there is a dilution But actually, the unity movement that you spearheaded four years ago, and that was part of what was the impetus behind the Rescue the Republic rally in D.C. a couple weeks ago, is what this country needs.
And because of the archaic way that our election process happens, it needed to come together under one of the two major parties.
And given what has captured the Democratic Party, In the last, you know, six months and six years and, you know, maybe 30 years, there was no chance it was going to be there.
And so here it is on the other side.
Yeah, I guess I would just, in closing on that particular point, I would say there are some people who don't want the Republican Party revolutionized and transformed.
I think they truly do not understand the moment in history they are living in.
The risk of trying to keep the Republican Party, you know, which was no prize as it stood, to keep the Republican Party as it was, is unthinkably large.
And that any American who does not understand that it's late for unity to be arriving...
For there to be a viable unity movement as a result of a, I believe, well-justified terror in terms of where we're headed, that wherever it needs to find safe harbor, it needs to find safe harbor.
It doesn't need to be the Republican Party from my perspective, but I'm certainly open to it.
If the Republican Party is really open to that highly diverse movement, then I'm all for it.
Intellectually and ideologically diverse.
Diverse in every meaningful way.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it's not diverse in the ways that the new left insists upon everything being diverse.
I'm saying that that's not the diversity that actually truly, truly matters.
And the coalition that is forming under the banner of the Republican Party at the moment is diverse in a way that neither party could claim in recent years.
Yes, although I would actually argue that the superficial kind of diversity that the blue team has been exploiting ruthlessly and in an un-American way actually does have a relevance on the other side.
And the relevance is that it is actually a test of one of the suppositions about the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is passing the test.
The supposition being it's the party of racists.
Right. It's the party of racists or it's the party of white people who are deaf to the problems of other people.
And what one actually experiences when you actually participate with the Unity Coalition is you discover actually people are embracing of anybody who is ready to gather as Americans and move in the right direction.
But not because they're black or because they're women or because they're Native.
But the point is nobody cares in a deep way.
Right? Nobody cares.
The fact is, oh, you're interested in putting the country back on track?
Welcome. Doesn't matter who you are.
Right. So this is a great segue, actually.
And this is going to run a little bit counter to my, like, actually, we should...
It would be better for any campaign.
It would indicate its strengths to speak to what it will do, why it is a better choice for you, as opposed to why the other choice is a worse choice.
You can share my screen here.
This was tweeted this week, maybe yesterday, by Barack Obama.
Kamala Harris has a plan that will lift up Black men and their families.
She's laid out some ways to give Black men the tools to build wealth, achieve financial freedom, and lower costs.
Read the plan. So, I read the plan.
I'm glad she's got a plan.
And you can just actually keep my screen on because I've got notes printed out here as we walk through a bunch of this.
Wow, that's not it at all.
That's ads. There we go.
Wow, what is going on?
Sorry. Just to go back for a moment to what Obama said, Kamala Harris has a plan that will lift up black men and their families.
Spoiler alert, no she doesn't.
But that's the claim that Obama is making.
Here's the actual plan.
Kamala Harris will deliver for black men.
Subtitle, small font, Donald Trump is a serious threat to the lives of black men.
That almost sounds like a pharmaceutical disclaimer.
May cause death. Okay.
Vice President will deliver for black men and their families.
So she's got five bullet points right up front, and I just want to walk through them one at a time, okay?
And I'm just going to show them one at a time.
Vice President Harris will deliver for Black men and their families.
Vice President Harris is laying out an agenda to give Black men the tools to build wealth and achieve financial freedom, lower costs for themselves and their families, and protect their rights, addressing the issues that Black men across the country have told her are their top concerns.
Before we go into these five, and there's a couple more things that she puts, sprinkles down below that I'll also talk about, I want to say that what this looks like actually to me is a combination of, yes, the communism that people have often accused this future administration of embracing but I see it here.
And actual racism, like against actual Black people.
So that's what I see in this plan.
I do not see, what are they calling it, the opportunity agenda for Black men?
That is not what I see here.
You want to say something? Oh, race-based communism.
Not surprised that that's going to show up here.
But I will make the argument.
I'll save it. But my point is going to be, every time you see communism, it's not real communism.
Mm? It is phony communism that is being used to persuade people of something that they are ever less persuaded of.
Unfortunately, though, then that will get used afterwards.
Well, like, that wasn't... That was a failed experiment because it didn't really do the real thing.
I don't mean not real communism.
I mean, they don't mean it.
I mean, the people running the show are trying to mislead the people who vote for the show into believing that they support communism.
And what they are supporting is very different.
So you have to be careful about...
The language and tropes of communism and whether or not the DNC and the deep state actually believe that nonsense, which they don't.
Yeah. Okay, so it's items four and five that I think recall some of the communist stuff.
One through three, I don't think necessarily, but let's go there.
Provide one million forgivable loans up to $20,000 to black entrepreneurs and others who have a good idea but don't have the resources, connections, or access to capital to get their business off the ground.
Okay, I don't actually find anything inherently wrong with this.
There may be, but I don't see the inherently wrong thing with this.
But it's not about Black men in particular.
You know, Black entrepreneurs and others.
So I prefer that we don't give federal funds to particular demographic groups, as definitely happened during COVID. The Biden-Harris administration delivered a certain amount of the COVID resources to Minority-owned businesses, which did not seem fair or correct.
But I also prefer that people not lie about it.
So this doesn't seem to be about black men in particular.
Okay? Well, wait, wait, wait. Point one.
So I missed something.
I'm seeing this for the first time.
A million forgivable loans up to, so up to, red flag, $20,000 to black entrepreneurs.
And others. And others.
So two red flags in that one sentence that it doesn't mean what it says it means.
Sure, but I mean... But hold on, I'm not going to nitpick.
I'm just going to point out that that's there.
Not obvious to me that this isn't flagrantly unconstitutional, if you're tempted.
Why are forgivable loans flagrantly?
They're not, but naming a demographic...
But my point here is that they actually haven't.
They're claiming this is race-based federal loans, which the Biden-Harris administration did engage in.
Or at least what they did, and it's possible that they skirted the constitutional nature of this by providing money to the states and encouraging the states to deliver funds in a race-based manner, which we were living in Oregon at the time, and Oregon definitely did that, right?
So we know that this administration has encouraged that activity before, but this one doesn't appear to be doing it, which is better, but then it has no place in the supposed opportunity agenda for Black men.
Okay. So it's, you know, either it's this thing which is not constitutional and not honorable, or it's not, in which case it's a lie that it belongs in this place.
So this is honestly, I think, the best of these.
The best of these. Yes. Probably unconstitutional, but my deepest critique of it is that it plays on a well-known trope.
What's that? Which is effectively employee of the month.
The thing about employee of the month is it provides an incentive for you to work harder than you should based on how much you're being paid.
This is effectively a lottery that it is hard to put a number on your chances and hard to know how much you might stand to gain and $20,000...
I'm getting this critique, I don't understand.
They haven't said anything about how they're going to decide.
I understand that, but that's part of the point, is this is supposed to land on certain voters as actually, I have a good idea for a business and I have a decent chance of getting $20,000 towards it, but you don't have any idea what the likelihood of your actually accruing that.
So the point is, there's a discounting function that you should have, my likelihood of passing whatever test, how big the actual group is because if it's blacks and others, how big is the group of others?
And so the point is, they've allocated, they've got numbers that sound very concrete, but those numbers do not allow you to evaluate the return, the expected value of this proposal.
This will always be true. Anything that looks specific at this level, that will always be true.
I actually don't think that's a legitimate complaint about this.
Well, it may be more minor than you think, but it's legitimate.
Let's move on.
So again, this is the opportunity agenda for Black men that Barack Obama is touting as the thing that is going to lift up Black men and their families that Harris is, at the moment, making central in her campaign.
This is the very front page of her website.
Again, Kamala Harris will deliver for Black men.
Donald Trump is a serious threat to the lives of Black men.
Bullet point one is this provide 1 million forgivable loans up to $20,000.
We just talked about that one.
Two, launch a national health equity initiative focused on black men.
Well, equity, as presumably pretty much all listeners to Dark Horse will by now be aware, is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Equity does not mean equality.
Equity is a way to Artificially increase the, change the outcomes for one group as opposed to changing opportunity, so that, trying to equalize opportunity.
But really, my problem with this one, in addition to equity is, is there anything that this administration has done, that the Biden-Harris administration has done, to make us think that they have any idea what health is?
Remember, this is the administration, and I've said it now, I said it at Rescue the Republic, I've said it on air here, but this is the administration.
Harris is second in command administration, whose first in command made the claim twice that we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
And that was about the Inflation Reduction Act having negotiated with pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of some drugs.
That is not about actually improving the health of people.
That is about keeping people addicted to the current health system, which, you know, health system, which actually does not improve our health at all.
So this administration, given that what it wants to do is keep us enslaved to pharma, has no business talking about health at all.
Until and unless it manages to see what's right in front of it.
Well, unless you understand what that actually means, which I think a normal person would be almost incapable of seeing, but if you remember back when Evergreen was in the process of melting down, and we were told that the college would only have achieved equity at the point that every graduating senior was equally capable of things like math.
And the answer is, No matter what the explanation for the inequality of different students, there was one and only way, one and only one way to make a equal distribution of math capacity on graduation, and that is to hobble the highly capable students.
Yeah, you're not going to float all the boats.
Right, you're not going to float all the boats.
You can sink them all, and that's equitable.
Yep, you're going to leave them all stranded on shore.
And so here's the point.
Who better than the Democratic Party to create health equity if that means ruining everyone's health equally so that we are all as sick as the sickest people right? This is this is actually what this party has become and we will come back later in the podcast I'm gonna explain why it is the Democratic Party seems to like every terrible idea literally every terrible idea
They like them all, and they have rationalizations, which are complete nonsense, have nothing to do with the reasons that they actually want them, but they have arguments to be made for everything.
But the point is, yeah, they're all about heart-healthy fats and pharmaceutical remedies and all of the stuff that ruins your health.
So I actually think...
You know, you're never going to attain perfect...
Heart healthy margarine instead of bacon fat and butter and olive oil.
As long as you take reality and turn it on its head, the Democratic Party is in a pretty good position to achieve these goals if you understand that equity doesn't mean something good the way it sounds.
What it means is that we all end up even in the end, and we can end up even if they wreck all of our health.
Yep. All right, number three.
There's a reason that they don't have me doing PR for them.
Yeah, you're not getting a job in that administration.
No. Nope. Number three.
Legalize marijuana at the federal level to break down unjust legal barriers that hold black men and other Americans back.
Come again? What?
Like, this one actually stopped me in my tracks.
What the hell are they talking about?
So just point one, put aside, like, whether or not marijuana should be legalized is a separate question.
And my position on that, I think, is in flux.
Certainly... Given that today's marijuana has been bred into a state basically unrecognizable to those of us who came of age on, like, cheap Macs and such, I think my position is changing.
But that's irrelevant, okay?
Regardless of what you think about whether or not marijuana should be legalized at the federal level.
Regardless. How is legalizing marijuana going to uplift anyone?
And this said with the understanding that, and I have not actually gone back and looked into it, but I believe that, and I'm very curious to hear if I try not to be wrong about this, but that what we understood to be true about the effectively,
the de facto racist laws on the books for drug possession, From the 80s and 90s, wherein, for instance, crack was more likely to be used by Black people and cocaine was more likely to be used by white people.
And because of the way that possession was enforced or penalized, Black people with crack were much more likely to serve longer prison sentences than white people who were found with cocaine.
And this was de facto racist, right?
So, you know, I'm well familiar with the idea that it is possible to have apparently race-neutral or race-agnostic laws that actually end up bringing about racist outcomes.
Marijuana? Marijuana is a particularly Black drug?
No. What actually is going on here?
How is this uplifting Black men in particular?
And just to point out the obvious, if what you're trying to do is uplift Black men and get them to be their most creative and productive and engaged selves and make a go of it, Marijuana?
Like, the drug that is most likely to keep people in front of their console or Netflix with a hand in a bag of chips?
Like, that's not actually the thing to uplift and enrich people's lives.
Well, I think this is shockingly tone deaf for all of the reasons that you point out, but I think I know what whoever it is that came up with this was thinking.
Yeah. What they're talking about is disproportionate incarceration for victimless crimes, which does have a profoundly hobbling impact on the Black community.
Well, as you know, as I mentioned with regard to, you know, coke versus crack.
Right. Right. That ain't a policy, right?
That is, at the very least, a gamble that the good you might do by releasing or not incarcerating in the first place people who had committed effectively a non-crime, that that good would be...
Would outweigh the harm of increasing the penetrance of marijuana into the black community.
And it's a gamble.
This is a complex system and you're intervening in a way where you don't know what the net effect is.
And are our prisons overflowing with people imprisoned for victimless crimes while on the streets and many cities in America, people are not being...
Crimes are not being stopped.
So criminals are allowed to run free at the same time that the perpetrators of victimless crimes are spending time behind bars.
Is marijuana possession a victimless crime?
Of all of the crimes that you could name, It's pretty high on the list of victimless.
Like, you could argue with this, but, you know, obviously there are a lot of crimes which people are being allowed to enact without any enforcement that have victims in a way that possessing pot does not.
Yeah. But this is actually a much deeper rabbit hole that the Democratic Party refuses to discuss the depths of.
I can't remember where.
I've had a number of conversations that have revived this point recently.
I had a number of conversations back in 2017 and 18 and then a couple recently where I talked about the implication of the incarceration of men from a community on women's bargaining position in mating and dating and so to the extent that there is... We even mention it briefly in the book in Hunter Gatherer's Guide. Oh right, I had forgotten that.
But anyway, the point is, there is a perfectly predictable consequence of removing a bunch of men from a community, which is that women have a hard time getting men to commit, which results in a lot of fatherlessness, homelessness, which results in kids who are hobbled by families that are so busy trying to earn a living that they can't do as much parenting as they need to do.
So anyway, the implications of that for the black community are tremendous.
And we ought to be talking about that.
But what we're talking about here is some weirdo invitation to smoke dope.
And, you know, as you point out...
And this is part of the opportunity agenda for, their words, the opportunity agenda for black men.
Legalize pot. Right.
What are you doing?
Yeah, it's pretty off.
Yeah, it's pretty off. Okay, number four of the five main bullet points in the opportunity agenda to uplift Black men, what was it called?
Opportunity agenda for Black men is lower costs by enacting the first ever federal ban on corporate price gouging for food and groceries.
This again. So this is just a reframing.
Like, they proposed this, I don't know, a month or two ago, right?
And even if memory serves, like the Wall Street Journal, but even, I think, like either the Washington Post or the New York Times was like, whoa!
Like, what's going on here?
Like, you can't do that.
And basically, this is just, they just put a Different ugly shirt on the same bad idea.
This is now part of uplifting Black men, which they think is going to be protective because no one can criticize it, because if you criticize it and it's good for Black men, then you're a racist.
But it's still the same insane idea.
You can't actually set government limits on what the food prices are going to be.
Also, this is them cloaking their responsibility for the They're claiming that the economy is great.
Everyone who buys food, Everyone.
Everyone who buys food knows that the prices are going up, and they've gone up tremendously under Biden-Harris.
But they claim, like, you can actually talk to people who are still, like, sheltered, who know that their grocery prices are going up, who are like, oh, the economy is great.
Like, no, it is patently not.
Prices are going up. So this is also part of them saying, basically hiding, oh, it's not us, it's the corporate price gouging.
No, that's not actually what's going on.
This is you and your bad economic policies that have caused everyone's grocery bills to go up.
That's you, and you're going to make it worse.
Yeah, this is a matter of implausible deniability because you have to explain price gouging doesn't make sense in a market where there are lots of people supplying food because it requires collusion.
The fact is if some people are price gouging and you deliver the product at a decent price, then you win.
So that's, you know, the wage mechanism works.
Well, wait a minute.
What did you just say? If everyone's price gouging...
No, no, no. I didn't say everyone. If someone is price gouging.
So the point is, there's a collective action problem.
You need everybody to collude on price gouging in order for it to work.
Because somebody will come into the market and say, I'll sell you the same thing at a reasonable price.
And then all the business goes to them.
So there's a mechanism working against that.
There's also a great meme.
I don't know if you've seen it. Where some...
Democratic functionary is making the argument that the inflation is the result of price gouging.
And the other person says, oh, did the people who printed trillions of dollars tell you that?
There it is. Yeah, it's that.
So there's that.
But then there's also another one of these complex systems arguments.
Like, okay, suppose you price regulate the...
Suppose you price regulate.
You've already got a food desert problem where it doesn't make sense to supply high quality food into certain neighborhoods because it just isn't profitable.
Where a lot of black men live.
Right. And so the point is, you know, how much of this metabolic syndrome and all of that is the result of the fact that the worst foods with the greatest impurities and the highest level of processing are the only things But we can subsidize corn and soy and then that's going to be the main ingredient in food that does show up in the food deserts because it's shelf stable for years.
And so they'll be fine.
Right, but the point is, OK, you've got a problem that is caused by metabolic syndrome of unknown ideology, but highly likely to be connected to the level of processing and the rotten ingredients and the pesticides and other impurities and, you know, the ambient poisons and all of that.
What happens if you now declare the wage mechanism or the price mechanism setting the natural price for foods in these environments?
Well, what happens, you know, if it's hard to get organic food, which is a tough sell, but if it's hard to get organic food already in these places, does it become that much more impossible?
Does the number of miles you would have to drive to get it go up because the point is, you know, you're gonna scold a food that has a premium on it.
A premium that I would point out is in part instigated by corporations inflicting a penalty on organic food by making it go through a registration process that is expensive and arduous.
So it's naturally, it's more expensive after you force those things upon it.
Yeah, but you know what you sound like to me?
Oh no. You sound like someone who does not want to uplift black men.
Frankly, I'm shocked.
I will make a donation to the nearest marijuana dispensary in order to offset my modifying food sensibilities.
So anyway, the point is, you want to intervene in a market that is actually delivering foods at various levels of quality.
So there's the communism, in part.
So that's one of the two that looked to me like, oh, this is them wanting the state to step in.
I mean, honestly, regulating food prices is about as obvious a Communist intervention.
Communist intervention as is possible.
As is possible. And what doesn't follow from this.
So basically everything on this list is...
We haven't even gotten to number five yet.
Everything on this list so far, and we'll see about number five, is a matter of you can only see one move in.
It's like playing chess one move ahead.
But they're relying on the voting public to only be able to see one move in.
And they've, in large part, created a voting public who is encouraged to only see one move in because bad food, no time outside, everything in screens.
So yeah, they've created an idiocracy, but poor them.
Some of us are not fully addicted to the things they want us to be fully addicted to.
Not yet, and we've still got health inequity because some of us have managed to hold on to some of our health, right?
But the point about the price gouging and the communism is actually there is a very natural progression from even a naive but well-intentioned embrace of the idea of what they're calling equity and privation.
Right? Why does attempting to equalize everybody's access to everything result in barren shelves?
And as we've said many times, it works like this.
If you have a system in which we take, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, so we make sure that at the end everybody's got the same amount irrespective of how much they put in, what you're doing is you're rewarding people who contribute little and you are punishing people who contribute a lot.
What is the result of punishing people who contribute a lot?
They have no incentive to contribute, so they contribute less.
So what is the product of this?
Communist systems end up fantastically unproductive, which results in equal...
I mean, they're so corrupt that it's not equal, but for the little people...
You have equal access to bread.
What does that mean? It means a shelf with no bread on it and you stand in line for lots and lots of hours hoping that this week you're early enough that you get some of this tiny amount of bread produced rather than a system that produces plenty.
So would you rather be in a system that does not distribute these things equally, that ideally distributes them with a bias towards people who contribute more, But there's plenty, and even if you're on the losing end of that bargain, you're doing better.
That's a system we all should want.
We should want a system that doesn't have rent-seeking.
We want people who are productive to get paid more.
We want people who are productive in whatever means, whether it's because they are more insightful, because they are harder working.
We want those things to be rewarded, and we want people who...
We have worse ideas and are lazy to be less well rewarded.
And we want there to be enough that for anybody who decides, hey, I want to do better than I'm doing, that the ability to strive is something they have access to.
This is one of the things I said in my speech at Rescue the Republic, which is that one of the jobs of parents is to provide all the opportunities they possibly can for their children.
But any opportunities that don't come to their children, or which they lose, they need to find for themselves.
And this is, frankly, it seems like the opposite of what the blue team would have us striving for.
That it wants a state answer for every perceived problem.
Some of the problems that they are perceiving aren't problems at all.
What do we do about the girl who thinks she's a boy?
Like, let it Let it go, right?
But some of the problems are real.
And yet, by stealing autonomy away from people, by assuring people that the state is the best answer and that you can't possibly solve it yourself because, you know, Past systemic whatever-ism.
You guarantee a person who will be a dependent on the state for life.
And that is no way to live.
Why would anyone want to create that life for themselves?
Even knowing that there will be some people who will be dependent on the state for life because of circumstances that they really couldn't get away from, you should never aspire to it.
You should want to minimize that number.
And anyone who is going towards that should be working hard and should be given the capacity to escape that trajectory.
Okay. I'm going to...
Given the capacity.
Should be enabled to explore the capacity to escape that trajectory.
All right. I want to make a pitch based on what you've just said for why the conservatives, which are suddenly feeling rightly empowered, need us liberals on the basis of this argument.
Are we at the end of the list of interventions?
There's one more. Let's go for the one more and then I will make my pitch.
You can remember it? Yeah. Because there's two more after the one more.
I don't know. I can remember.
We can do the one more here, and then I'll...
Yep. Okay. So the last one on this list, which...
So remember, this is... This is what Harris is presenting as the top...
The five. Again, I'll just scroll down here.
This is, you know, Kamala Harris will deliver for black men.
Donald Trump is a serious threat to the lives of black men.
Yeah. And here we have her five bullet points.
Lower rent and provide down payment assistance to triple the number of new first-time Black owners.
What did I say? Black owners?
As long as you capitalized it, I'm cool.
I'm going to read that again.
Lower rent and provide down payment assistance to triple the number of new first-time black homeowners.
Okay. Anyway, it doesn't matter what I did.
What did you say? I think I may have said black owners.
That's one word, which is not at all what I said.
Okay, so now my error inviting some sort of nickname, it's small.
Let's start this again.
Okay, so number five on this list.
Of Harris' plan to uplift Black men, in Obama's words.
Lower rent and provide down payment assistance to triple the number of new first-time Black homeowners.
So first, like this again, this is an idea that we've seen before and was widely mocked, even on the left, even in the mainstream media on the left, in part because, you know, well, let's start with the first one.
Like I hadn't actually heard the lower the rent thing before.
Yeah. How are you going to lower the rent?
Are you going to force landlords to just take in less money?
What is your plan here?
So that's insane. What are you going to do?
And then are you going to address the squatters' rights insanity?
That is causing a lot of people who do maybe have an ADU or an extra room in their house, they could use the extra money because your economy sucks.
They could use the extra money and bring a renter in.
But a lot of people, especially in West Coast states like California, Oregon, and Washington, just won't do it anymore.
Because once you have someone in your house, you can't get rid of them, even if they haven't been paying the rent that you agreed on.
So you would have to deal with that.
Down payment assistance. Well, this is the one that we did here before.
It's just the same thing, which before didn't have the imprimatur of like, this is uplifting Black people, so if you criticize it, you're racist.
Like, every economist said when this was first proposed, you know, don't you, that if you just put a bunch more money into the housing market, that prices are just going to go up and make things more expensive for everyone?
Well, apparently they don't know.
Yeah. Or apparently they do know, but they don't think that most of us know and so will fall.
That's probably it. Two things.
One, this one makes it clear that these people are either just flat-out liars, which is going to be true, or have not the most basic concept of economics, because with a small number of mega corporations producing food, You could have collusion.
They haven't demonstrated it, but you could have collusion, which could result in price gouging.
Renters and landlords?
Like, you're arguing that there's collusion across the rental market?
No, there isn't.
There's a price being set.
And if you want to drive the number of rental properties down, setting a limit in which it's not profitable to rent to people is going to do it.
So they are intervening in a complex system in a way That is more than likely to destroy the very thing that they are trying or nominally trying to elevate.
You know what this may be about? This may be about Trump and his dad.
Slumlord is a real thing.
There are lots of people who have had really bad rental situations and know that their landlord is an idiot or an asshole or whatever and they need free of it and they need a place to live and there's no good solution.
This is a real problem that many people have.
But by putting this in here, then they can start making these connections to whatever Donald Trump's dad's name was, who was apparently kind of a slumlord.
He had low-rent residential properties in New York, and that may be what is going on here.
Yeah, well, at the moment, they're a long way from being able to make the case.
Oh, I'm just like, they're...
But the other thing is, the whole thing...
Is insulting, as is so much of this, because it's pandering.
Basically, the idea is, oh, we have a plan that's going to result in your food prices going down, your rent going down, and the possibility of getting $20,000 towards a business if all you've got is a good idea.
And the answer is, you know what?
None of those things are going to happen.
If they did, they would be a debacle.
And the only point is, what we really need is a webpage that suggests some aspirational stuff that will appeal to people who are struggling to make ends meet.
So that's what this is.
And the point is, first of all, I wouldn't go pandering to the black community with street level bullshit like this, right?
Like being conned is, and that's what this is, is this is a stupid con.
It's not even a sophisticated con, right?
It's not like a good shell game or something.
This is like just, you know, a bunch of people who knew nothing about what they were talking about, sitting around having a spitball session about what kinds of things they think would be appealing enough to get a bunch of voters to peel off.
With no intention of following through, of course.
Right. So, you know, it's pretty grotesque.
It's supremely grotesque.
So, there's a lot more on this site.
Those are the five...
Actually, you can share my screen here now, again, somewhat briefly.
Those are the five... This is now just a screenshot of what we were just showing you, of the five main bullet points.
We've walked through and eviscerated them all.
But lower in the site, you have...
Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.
More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets.
Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services.
She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.
I don't claim to know anything about this space, but that sends shivers down my spine.
I feel like this is code for...
Crypto, we see you and we're coming for you.
And this regulatory framework that we intend to put in place, we can claim it's going to benefit the 20% of Black Americans who own or have owned cryptocurrency assets.
Again, this has nothing to do with Black people.
So they're framing this under this, like, you can't critique this because you're racist if you do.
But I think this is a Trojan horse, again.
That's what I think of that. It's a Trojan horse predicated on what has to be a fiction.
Which one? Which part of it?
20% of Black Americans have owned cryptocurrency assets.
Yeah, that's a crazy number.
First of all, the word assets must be, there must be, you know, they have a fund that owns some crypto or something.
But crypto is still so hard to own that and, you know, so hard to spend, frankly, that the number...
So, yeah, some percentage of Black Americans have retirement funds that their employers have, and some percentage of the mutual funds that retirement funds have.
But they don't say participate in this market, are protected.
Protected from what exactly?
Yeah, yeah. You know, protected from...
Forgetting how to access your wallet.
That'd be useful. But, you know, for all of us.
But anyway, yeah, that does strike me as a Trojan horse.
I don't speak crypto well enough to know exactly what it is that that's a backdoor to, but it's something.
I also would just point out The business about...
By the way, I have a brand new relationship with capitalizing stuff, which I think is responsive to the online environment.
And there isn't a logic to capitalizing that goes beyond what we were all taught in school.
But, you know, if you're going to capitalize black, then you got to capitalize the others.
You got to capitalize white and all the others.
I know that isn't... Oh, I thought you were talking about capitalization, like market forces.
Nothing that's sophisticated.
I'm talking about the maddening fact of Barack Obama in his tweet and Kamala Harris in her webpage capitalizing black when they wouldn't capitalize white, for example.
Right? So anyway, the point is, you've got to have a rule, and if the rule is, you know, reparations start with capitalization, it's like, no, screw that.
This is America, you don't get to do that stuff, right?
So anyway, I'm insulted on behalf of all of us Americans at this cheapo nonsense with the shift key.
Yeah. Okay. One more.
And then, yeah, one more.
Let's see if I can get there. Okay.
This is again farther down the site.
Breaking down unfair and unnecessary barriers to employment for Black men.
I'm just going to read through the first two sentences.
Vice President Harris knows that Black men are disproportionately shut out of the job market based on their criminal records and credit scores.
Vice President Kamala Harris believes that employers should consider a job candidate's qualifications first without the stigma of a conviction or arrest record.
I'm sorry. But I think a potential employer is entitled to know about the conviction or arrest records of the people whom they are considering hiring.
You're also acknowledging here, implicitly by having this be in an agenda, opportunity, what did she call it?
Opportunity agenda for Black men, that it's conviction and arrest records.
Employers having access to conviction and arrest records is disproportionately affecting Black men.
Which means that Black men are disproportionately likely to have conviction and arrest records.
And some of that is quite possibly going to be due to things like de facto racist laws like the ones we were talking about earlier with regard to prosecution like crack versus cocaine possession.
But the idea that you should deal with the disproportionate conviction and arrest records in Black men compared to other men, let's just keep sex constant here, by keeping that information from potential employers As opposed to by addressing the issue at its core is exactly in keeping with everything that they're doing.
It's always this like, right now, what can we do to apparently address the problem without in any way addressing the problem?
We have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
No, you didn't. You made insulin a little cheaper for people who shouldn't need insulin in the first place.
Actually, I was going to make the same point.
This is a pharma-level solution where you've got a root cause.
There's no interest in exploring it.
But the other thing is, you know...
I could make an argument.
Arrest records don't have a place.
If you haven't been convicted, then legally you are entitled not to be downstream of whatever that is.
I could make that argument too. I would be good with that.
However... Conviction?
And you're not going to include something like for a victimless crime?
Right? Like, what are you doing?
You really want to deny employers the ability to know that somebody has been convicted in a court of law with all of the rights that our Constitution avails them of a crime that had victims?
That's obscene.
And for all employers? Including employers of people where you might be hiring people to work with children or other vulnerable populations.
Really? You don't want that available to employers?
Yeah. If you haven't listened to it, I know you have, but Hermit Dillon's conversation with Tucker Carlson this week about the history of Kamala Harris's record, actual record, as attorney in First Alameda County and then San Francisco and then San Francisco County and then the AG of California is eye-opening.
And it is particularly remarkable in light of these claims about trying to help Black men and Imagine an administration that actually became serious about addressing chronic problems in the black community,
right? And did address the question of, oh, you have an unequal sex ratio because of a disproportionate incarceration rate and pursued what is the ultimate cause of that disproportionate incarceration rate.
Right. My bet is it's going to be a lot to do with, you know, it's a, it's a vicious cycle that you get disproportionate incarceration, which results in fatherless homes, which results in more criminality, less ability to avail yourself of opportunities that do exist in the market,
et cetera. Yep. Would be like an actual, an actually useful program that might long-term have the positive effect that we're looking for rather than some sort of vote-buying scheme in which a bunch of things get promised to people, you know, to get them to vote in a way that they're otherwise disinclined to do, which is something we're going to get to here shortly.
But, you know, imagine an administration that was actually serious about that.
There's a lot to be said, but it does require a dispassionate analysis of root causes, and this has nothing to do with it.
Nothing to do with it. So just to wrap up this little piece, let's return to Barack Obama's claim, which is how I got to Kamala's plan in the first place.
He says, Kamala Harris has a plan that will lift up Black men and their families.
Fact check. No, she doesn't.
That's all. Like, actual fact check?
We just went through. And nope, really not about that at all.
And even where it does appear to be about black men, not going to work the way she's claiming it's going to work.
Well, it's classic political bullshit, right?
Classic political bullshit, where a politician promises you a bunch of stuff that sort of sounds good.
And, you know, it's not about that.
They have real constituents. Their real constituents aren't voters.
Their real constituents are the people that have lobbyists and interests that are contrary to those of the voters.
Basically, as we will return to here shortly, the Democratic Party has become an influence-peddling racket which sells the American people out to the highest bidder.
And, you know, no kidding.
People are sick across every dimension of their life because they are constantly being sold out to people who have something to peddle that isn't good for you.
So, yeah, not a surprise.
All right. Go for it.
I think it's time for my pitch. Yeah, okay, your pitch.
Now my pitch, if you remember, is a pitch about why the newly ascendant conservative right actually needs the traditional liberal left, based on where it is.
This even assumes that the conservative right is about to win a victory, which is of course not certain, but seems increasingly likely.
So here's my pitch.
We have ended up spiraling towards hell.
That hell has two components, one of them very obvious to people at the moment, which is the insanity of the blue team and its pandering and nonsense remedies and corruption.
What is less obvious is the role that the right played in driving so many voters to the left in the search for compassion, which made them suckers.
And that has to do with a traditional stinginess on the right.
So the right has a point, and its point is about the market and the market's ability to provide, which I defended earlier in the podcast.
A market system, even one that is unfair, tends to be so much more productive that even if you're on the losing end of it, you tend to do better than you would in a system that distributed everything evenly and was completely unproductive because it did that.
So the way conservatives get this wrong is that they find all claims about the market's failure to provide are false.
And they do not appreciate the degree of market failure and the vast amount of rent-seeking that goes on.
So my claim is that all the great fortunes Are at least partially made of rent-seeking.
That is to say, you may have made your first million through innovation, but once you get into the, okay, what do I do with all of that resource and you're investing it, you are a participant in all of this rent-seeking behavior, which is basically a mechanism for siphoning wealth away from people without providing value in exchange.
So, It is a failure to recognize that even the wonderful benefits of a market system are paired with this rent seeking, which is actually a much larger fraction of the market than most conservatives give it credit for.
They see all the things the market is capable of and they don't see the ways in which it fails.
And they also don't see the degree to which the market ends up fostering a solution in order to get labor to be cheaper.
The market uh undermines people at the bottom and the idea is if we terrify you about what happens if you fall off the bottom of the economic ladder then we'll get you on that economic ladder cheaper right we'll get to you'll you won't have a living wage and you'll figure it out you'll you know sleep on your mom's couch or whatever it is You'll figure stuff out if we don't pay you enough to live.
And the point is, if we had a system, the ideal system, I would argue, is one in which we don't redistribute wealth.
We work as hard as we can to distribute opportunity as evenly as possible.
There is no argument that I have ever heard for why our system is better off if opportunity is at all concentrated.
And you're never going to get it perfectly evenly distributed, but we should all be troubled when opportunity starts to concentrate somewhere.
Opportunity should be evenly distributed and wealth should not.
We should leave wealth to float.
But we don't want you getting rich off of rent seeking.
We want you to get rewarded when you produce something of value, right?
So a system in which people were, in general, rewarded for producing things of value, were not rewarded for rent-seeking, in which opportunity was evenly distributed, and in which we had a floor, which is to say, look, let's say that you gamble on something that might bring value to the world, but it's like many things in the market.
You don't know if it's going to work.
Maybe some other competitor is six weeks ahead of you and you don't know it, and so you invest everything.
In some idea and it doesn't pan out because they get the jump on you or they have, you know, a better ad campaign or whatever it is.
Well, do we want to punish you for your failure?
We want to let the market...
Address the question for the most part.
But we don't want you falling so far that you can't get back up and start producing again.
We don't want anybody hopelessly off the bottom of the ladder.
Let's say that you're a drug addict who doesn't aspire to get off drugs and you have kids and your kids are hobbled because you never aspired to amount to anything.
Well, your kids need to be in shooting range to get themselves out of the pickle that their parents created for them.
So the point is, you want a floor.
You don't want people living in inhumane conditions in order to cheapen the cost of labor for the employers.
You want a humane, decent standard of living for everybody.
Not something that's so lovely that people will want to be there, but something from which you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps.
A floor, not a ceiling. Yeah, a floor, not a ceiling.
And access enough that somebody who is at that floor, not enjoying it, can say, okay, well, where is the niche in the market that isn't filled?
Right? That's what we want people to do.
And this is the reason that this planned bullshit around, oh, we're gonna make opportunities here and we're gonna lower prices there.
The point is actually, the thing that the conservatives definitely do have right, is that the market, when you eliminate the elite rent seeking, in general, it's an ecological question, right?
Just like the creatures in your garden find the opportunities that you leave open for them.
And so, you know, there is some natural map of opportunities.
You want children to grow up with the ability to detect opportunity.
You don't want to tell them where opportunity is.
You want them to be able to figure out where there's an opportunity and to exploit it because that's...
Be excited when they discover opportunities you didn't see.
Right. And this is, this is what humans are.
Like imagine it's, you know, 30,000 years ago and you're a hunter-gatherer living in a tribe of 30 people in an extended community of 150 people, right?
You want to figure out what things are not already covered because the fact is that you get paid more, you get paid better in whatever this- Look at what happens when I strip the bark off this tree and I soak it in water for a while.
It remains strong, but it's more pliable.
Right. All of the observations and messing with the universe and coming up with solutions to problems that you either knew you had or sometimes to problems that you didn't even know you had.
At every level, right?
It can be, can you figure out something that the environment provides that we haven't figured out how to use yet?
It can be, can you bring people together musically and, you know, provide some sort of galvanizing force?
It can be the storyteller.
It can be the shaman. But the point is finding a niche in which you might have some leg up.
You might detect as a child, oh, actually I have aptitude in that thing.
So I like it when people say, oh, you're good at that.
And so I pursue it and I, you know, refine it.
So treating...
It's a complex versus complicated question.
You've got a habitat, which is human society.
You want people excellent at figuring out where the gaps are in what society provides, where they can...
Provide something new. We all get richer when you do that and we should want a system that enables as many people to do that as possible and protects you from falling off the bottom of the ladder where you just permanently, you know, are stuck in an eddy with your head barely above water.
That's not good for anybody.
It's not good for society. So, point being, is the argument I just made conservative?
No. It definitely has powerful elements of, yes, the market has amazing capacity.
There are certain things it should not be allowed to do.
One of them is it should not be allowed to create a permanent underclass that actually exists out of reach of the opportunity.
It shouldn't be allowed to concentrate opportunity at all.
So, this is my pitch for you actually need both Parts of this argument in order that conservatives don't now just repeat the errors of their predecessors, right?
You need to build that system.
And again, did I say that everybody should live well?
No. You want the floor that you set to be uncomfortable enough that people are motivated to get off it, right?
But it's not a liberal story.
It's not a conservative story.
It's both stories. And those things really need to be paired.
Absolutely. I agree wholeheartedly.
Alright. You had someplace else that you wanted to go, I believe.
Yeah. You had shared with me some things earlier.
Yeah, I wanted to make an argument for why, and I will just say up front, you and I have talked about whether or not the indications that we are getting that the Harris-Waltz campaign is tanking are reliable.
We've been through...
How would you know? Yeah, how would you know?
Well, I would say there are a couple indications that they might be reliable.
One is you're starting to see things like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton getting off the bench and making a pitch for Harris.
Yeah, but that might have been the intended timing.
It's October or whatever. Yeah, on the other hand, and I will come back to the weakness of this candidate, but you have people who have a legacy of some kind now taking a hit for stumping for a candidate who is profoundly weak.
Yes. Yeah.
So the question is, why are we seeing a effective runaway?
And again, yeah, it could be a PSYOP, you know, it could be an error in the polling.
There's something about the fact that pollsters come in two flavors.
What are the flavors? Oh, red and blue, which I find preposterous.
It invalidates the entire premise of polling.
The idea that a pollster, you know, he's a democratic pollster.
I want a pollster pollster who knows what's gonna happen.
I don't want somebody who's...
I've got a Republican doctor.
I don't care. Does he know anything about health?
I want a health biased doctor.
Exactly. Harder to find than you'd think.
I want a quantitatively literate pollster.
Yes, exactly.
I want someone who understands statistical and polling methods.
Right. Now, we do have stuff that stands in for these biased pollsters.
Actually, Jen, do you have that tweet graphic?
We have a prediction market.
Which, I want to be a little cautious about this, but here you have an animation of...
Oh, this is this month.
Yeah, and you're watching Donald Trump pull ahead of Kamala Harris.
So at the end of this graphic, you end up with a 56% to 44% bias in the prediction.
And this is across all states, or is it just Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which is what's showing here?
That's a good question.
Oh no, it must be all states, because actually those numbers are different.
Okay, but anyway, point being, a prediction market is in general a useful thing because it profits from the wisdom of crowds to the extent that there are biases large data sets and especially people with skin in the game people who are willing to bet in one direction or the other tend to drown these things out however I will revive a point that you and I have made repeatedly on the podcast about the distinction between random and systematic error.
Yes. So random error sounds worse because it sounds like, oh, what are you going to do about random error?
And the answer is what you do is larger data set.
It grounds it out. So the signal overwhelms the noise if you have a bigger data set.
It's like the statistical equivalent of dilution is the solution to pollution.
Right. It is exactly that.
Random error gets erased in terms of showing up at your signal if you just have a lot of data.
Right. On the other hand, systematic error does not.
If you have a built-in bias in your apparatus, it doesn't matter how many people you run through it, that bias is going to scale.
And so it's very hard to detect.
And the problem with a prediction market is the prediction market is inherently downstream of any coordinated effort to convince us of things.
The prediction market, you said?
Yeah. It may or may not believe those things.
A prediction market might spot a con.
I guess I don't really know what the phrase means.
I don't know what a prediction market is.
Let's suppose that you think that Hillary Clinton is going to be swapped in for Kamala Harris in the last weeks of the election.
It hadn't occurred to me, but okay.
But imagine that you do.
And there are people who do. Okay, I believe that now that you say it.
Let's suppose that you think that's going to happen.
Almost nobody thinks that's going to happen.
So, would you like to bet?
If you have reason to think that's going to happen.
Oh, okay, okay. Right, so...
A prediction market is one in which...
It's going to match. There are going to be a lot of people who would like to bet against you, but they're not going to make very much if they're right.
It's futures. But you're going to make a ton.
Yeah, it's a futures based on events, specifiably.
Okay, so if this prediction market is accurately representing the state of the election, So hold on, I guess I don't understand why what we're looking at here.
For those who are just listening, this is again the, you know, October 4th through October 15th changes in the presidential election forecast.
Yes. These aren't actual numbers generated from polling?
No. So what, how were these data generated?
People betting each other. Just bets.
Yes. This is bets.
But bets are good because unlike, you know, Democratic pollster who has his bread buttered somewhere where he can't, you know, he has limited leeway.
People betting, they have every reason to try to be right.
Absolutely. So this is rather than individuals who may be being led to give particular answers by pollsters being asked, who are you going to vote for?
This is people who inherently have skin in the game because they are putting some of their money on the line, taking all of the things that they are seeing around them, what all of their friends and family and the yard signs for various candidates are telling them and going like, yeah, at this point, I think it's going to be.
yep okay um so and you know pollsters have skin in the game too when nate silver gets it wrong it no no the pollsters do yeah but the uh the the people who are addressing who are responding to pollsters yes and the the and the it's not nate silver who's calling them but like whoever he has hired right um many we know We know historically that many of those questions are leading such that you are more likely to get a particular kind of response.
And that's good for a pollster who is a Democratic pollster or a Republican pollster because leading responses give the sense that some candidate is winning.
And once it appears that some candidate is winning, I think this will work less in this election because this is so polarized.
But in the past, people like to be on the winning team.
And so if people really were undecided, people are more likely to be like, oh, looks like he's winning, so I guess I'm going to go there.
You're mixing two things.
There's a push poll, which is actually designed to drive people in a direction.
Right. There's polling, which is designed to figure out where they are.
We are being told that the internal polling is showing a catastrophic collapse of tunneling.
Internal to what? To the Democratic Party, to the elites.
What do you mean internal polling then?
The DNC would like to know where the race actually is.
They would like to convince...
Right, so who are they asking? They have their own private polls.
But it's still, it's the same population, presumably, that would be called by Nate Silver's people.
Right. But, okay, when Nate, so I don't know exactly where Nate Silver is these days, but when Nate Silver does this, it's public.
And so there is the question of how good the results are public.
Right. The internal polling is presumably done with as high a quality methodology as possible.
It is Because they want reality.
They want to know where they are. You know, for one thing, they presumably are doing it across swing states.
And a swing state that they've already lost is not a place for them to spend money.
And a swing state that they are in danger of winning or a state that we don't know is a swing state but might do something surprising.
So they want accurate information, and they don't want accurate information getting out necessarily.
But what we are hearing is that that internal stuff, which is not supposed to get out, is reflecting a catastrophic collapse, which again could be a PSYOP for Kamala.
And I wanted to address why.
I think there's a game-theoretic aspect to this that's not so obvious.
And it involves me clarifying a couple of terms that are easy to misuse.
One of them is positive feedback and the other is negative feedback.
And the problem with these terms is that in general, when we talk in these terms, they mean something unrelated to their statistical meaning or their game theoretic meaning.
When you say, oh, I wrote an essay and I got a lot of positive feedback, that means people liked it, right?
Negative feedback means they didn't.
Put those definitions aside.
Think about a thermostat in your house.
A thermostat in your house that you set to 68 degrees when it's above 68 degrees can turn on the air conditioning and return it to 68.
When it's below 68 degrees, it can turn on the heat and bring it up to 68 degrees.
So a negative feedback system tends to return a system to a set point.
The entire body of every creature is built of many things.
Negative feedback systems that maintain what we call homeostasis.
Yeah, you can't get to homeostasis with positive feedback.
Right. In fact, the thing about positive feedback, which is a little surprising the first time you encounter it, is that positive feedbacks blow themselves up or ultimately are reined in by some negative force.
They have to be because the exponential power of them is so spectacular that you They can't do what they would mathematically do.
And I'll give you the example of the heater in your house.
If you took the thermostat and you wired it up backwards so that when it was a little warmer than 68 degrees, it turned on the heat, then it's just going to keep getting warmer, right?
If you turn it on and as it gets colder than 68 degrees, it'll go in the cold direction by turning on the AC. If you imagine that the colder it got, the more AC units it turned on, the point is, well, how cold is this thing going to get, right?
So positive feedback is exponential and it detonates, right?
Or something has to rein it in.
In the case of your thermostat, there's only so hot that your thermostat can make your house before the equilibrium between how much it's radiating to your backyard and how much heat is being put on the inside neutralizes the capacity to go any higher, right?
So there's a negative force reining in that positive feedback.
So positive feedback is exponential and it is unstable.
You have something you wanted to add?
Oh, just, I think this is relevant here.
In complex systems, even in simplified complex systems, negative feedback often comes in the form of exactly where you got to, some external force.
So I'm thinking specifically of the now understood to be a little bit simplistic, but still often fairly accurate, Lotka-Volterra models of how populations end up Staying within carrying capacity in an ecosystem, right? So, you know, the ecosystem can only sustain X number of whatever it is, but in general you would, you know, you get populations climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing
and they continue to climb after they are beyond what a particular ecosystem may actually be able to hold. But when you have these, the Lotka-Volterra equations involve predator and prey, and it's easier for us humans who don't spend a lot of time thinking about biology to think of two animals rather than a plant and an animal, but it would work either way.
But say you've got, you know, coyotes and deer, let's go wolves and deer. And And, you know, as the deer population goes up and up and up, so too does the wolf population go up and ends up keeping in check the deer population so much that it keeps in check the deer population a little bit too much.
And so while the deer population may have continued to expand absent the wolves, the wolves end up eating more and more of the deer, and then the wolves are doing too well.
And so the crash of the deer population, which happens because there are too many wolves eating deers, is then followed by a crash of the wolf population because now there aren't enough deer to eat.
And so you have these sort of just barely following each other sort of sine waves of population levels.
And it's not exactly Negative feedback, but it's kind of like when you have two things that are interrelated on one another, it's a kind of negative feedback.
Well, let's put it this way. You've got a population, let's take the double creatures out of it.
You've got a population in which the more individuals you have breeding, the more offspring there are, you get exponential growth.
It naturally finds what we call carrying capacity because that positive feedback runs into a limit on the amount of resource.
And at that point, you've got this negative force, which is, well, if I add another mouth to this, what is it going to eat?
Maybe it will eat, but it will deny every other mouth some fraction of what it was eating, which then reduces the birth rate, etc.
So anyway, the bottom line is positive feedback is something to watch out for because it is so incredibly powerful that it detonates systems and produces extraordinary outcomes.
Mm-hmm. Okay, so what's going on with the current election?
And here's my claim. The deep state, with its black budgets and its magic toolkit of psychological weapons and all of that, has done a fairly effective job of driving the cost of admitting that you are listening to or support Donald Trump It's done this over the course of however many years.
This is not a new phenomenon, right?
We all remember the basket of deplorables, Hillary Clinton's famous phrase.
So the cost of admitting that you were listening to or not horrified by Donald Trump was very, very high.
What's happening, the reason that you see, even on the scale of days and weeks, these two numbers now separating, is that there is a hidden positive feedback built into the system, and it works against them.
And the positive feedback is the more people who bite the bullet and make that admission, The cheaper it becomes for the next person to make that same admission, because there's already people ahead of them.
And this isn't just like one more person.
You know, there are influential people who make this admission.
And the point is, well, it becomes much cheaper to admit that you're paying attention after Tulsi Gabbard does it.
Right? So anyway, what's happening, right?
Exactly. You can shame me for this, really.
Right. You're going to shame me. And frankly, I'll endure it because the number of people who are making the admission is simply so high that there's not that much sting left in whatever stigma you're going to throw at me.
So the point is, what you are seeing is people are At whatever level of courage and commitment, they are admitting their severe concerns about Kamala Harris, a candidate who was, frankly, just simply installed into this position, and then went through all of this insane, you know, race pandering and other bullshit.
And the fact is, lots of people are now in a position to say, screw it.
Not only am I contemplating the other thing, but I am specifically not going...
I would be a sucker to accept that.
Ken, do you have that video of black folks at the whatever corner store it is responding to the question of who you're going to vote for?
This is worth saying.
Who you voting for? Trump. Aw, come on bro, Harris tell us backwards, bro.
What? Harris. Man, we not voting for that, man.
We voting for Trump, man.
And who you voting for, Trump or Kamala?
Man, Trump, we ain't with that Indian ass man.
Who, Kamala? Yeah, we ain't with that Indian ass man.
So what do you want Trump to do?
The business leaders team is operating.
And is Trump going to pull out?
Trump, to be honest.
Why Trump though?
He used to keep immigrants out so they were forced to get jobs.
It's hard for us to get jobs now because immigrants are taking over.
They do do it better than us though, but they take it out.
So what's the election around?
Are you voting for Trump?
Yeah, yeah, the fuck I'm gonna vote.
I ain't taking a lot on my blood.
Slaves, vote them.
That's the way.
Now what would make you want to vote for Kamala?
Hey, we was the last two people on earth.
You don't want to do that shit.
Damn, I'm from Brooklyn.
It's like that?
I'm going with Trump.
I'm going with him.
So if you ever order a beer at the door, check out his.
Y'all turn around.
So you want to vote for a black woman?
The first black woman you're going to vote for?
I'll tell you something man.
Ain't no man is going to piss her off.
That is y'all cunts, all my cunts, all of the cunts.
There's no man, god, this is so awful.
We could, but it's not gonna be history, bro.
That's gonna start 4-1-3, so CKD. Come on, Lord, Trump.
Trump? Yeah. Come on, bro.
Come on, Lord.
We voted for Trump, bro. What are you talking about?
You know damn well that we don't give a f*** about Trump.
Trump, what?
He's got free staff and everything. You're tweaking it.
Yeah, that's how you pay me.
You're tweaking it.
I ain't gonna lie, bro.
I'm on Kamala. Man, we skew him.
Come on, bro. I can't even have my opinion.
Damn, bro. Bro, you bummed.
You said you went down on Venezuela.
You went all that goofy?
Yeah. Nah, hell yeah.
You five- So I have a few reactions to that.
I haven't seen that before. I want to know where that is and how curated that is.
Did they know they were being filmed and was that seven conversations out of 700 or was that seven out of ten?
Wherever it is, are they actually interacting with Venezuelans who are coming and taking their jobs or is that what they're hearing the risk is?
You and Zach went down to the Darien Gap in January of this year and saw the immigration crisis firsthand.
So I do not doubt that there is a problem.
But I wonder to what degree people are actually experiencing what several of those guys said that they were experiencing.
The fact that several of them mentioned it could be either thing.
And then, of course, it's deeply unfortunate that we hear the thing that is going to be said if she loses, oh, it's because of the sexism.
It's because, you know, no one will vote for a woman.
Like, well, one guy says that.
And like, no one's going to take orders from a woman.
Like, you know, you got to get over that, dude, like all of you.
And I just didn't think there were that many of them.
And I still believe that.
But, you know, that's that's unfortunate.
It is unfortunate. And I found the same thing unfortunate.
On the other hand, What we have is somebody who is being advanced because she's a woman.
Oh, believe me. Right. And so, you know, that was not a nuanced critique.
None of those were. But my point really isn't dependent on any of that, curated or not pointed.
And you and I have had experience in just asking Uber drivers.
And, you know, we've had...
A, a shocking level of support for Trump amongst our Uber drivers in DC, which is a heavily blue city, including several black folks.
So anyway, point being, the cost is dropping because the number of people who are willing to make this admission is going up and in a public form, right?
These are people who are not hiding the They feel this way.
In fact, they're indignant that anybody is asking them why they would be thinking this.
So, anyway, point is, hey, there's a positive feedback here, and it leads to the collapse of this ticket, which has, frankly, no arguments in its favor.
This is a ticket without a valid argument in its favor.
The only argument it had was that it wasn't Trump, and the stigma that goes along...
Oh, it's still not Trump. Right, but the point is that matters more when people are harboring this preposterous notion of what it, you know, he's literally Hitler, who was in office for four years, didn't do literally Hitler stuff.
Right. You know, so anyway, cost is dropping.
That's a positive feedback. And that's why you're seeing this collapse is because the more you hear people who you might not expect to admit this, admit it, the more people you're going to see.
And that's going to result in this continuing unless something, uh, staunches that, uh, hemorrhage.
Now, interestingly, apparently Not only has Donald Trump agreed to go on Joe Rogan's podcast, but Kamala Harris is considering it.
Wow, is that a terrible idea for her?
So this is another positive feedback.
Oh, that would be huge.
Yeah, she's tanking on her own.
I don't know what she's going to do with a three-hour Joe Rogan experience.
I expect Joe to be very decent to her, but she's not capable of managing that environment.
She's just not. Which is to say, speaking off the cuff, which is an environment which every human being should be able to handle.
Right. I mean, not that every human being is expected to be able to handle three hours with Joe Rogan, even though he's like the nicest guy in the world, but speaking off the cuff is not something that she can handle.
It's not something that she can handle.
And, you know, Jo is in many ways going to be her worst nightmare.
If she met hostility, then people might feel sympathy for her.
But Jo's a nice guy and he won't do it.
He'll give her a fair shake and she'll end up doing herself in.
But, so I wanted to...
Talk about the mystery that this raises.
So my argument is a positive feedback that is completely foreseeable has resulted in this ticket tanking at an appreciable level, even though there's no exact reason for that to be happening.
You know, there's embarrassing stuff, right?
The, you know, embarrassing 60 minutes interview.
But why is this stuff moving the needle as much as it is?
Yeah, yeah. It's because it's changing the social stakes of admitting what you're thinking of doing.
And I would also point out, I think the fact of Harris having been installed in this position rather than having arisen in this position through some sort of pseudo-organic primary process is not sitting well with people.
It's like, where did this come from?
And I'm supposed to accept it because of the color of her skin, right?
And nothing else? You don't have another argument for me?
So there's something that's not sitting right and I think it's especially not sitting right with people who have street smarts and can smell a con because that's what it is.
But it's a con of something that is extremely well resourced And extremely sophisticated.
So why, if we can spot the game theory that is undermining them, did they make this terrible error?
And my claim is going to be that they made the terrible error because they literally do not have a viable candidate in the intersection of two sets, right?
There's a set which is appealing candidates, people that voters will naturally resonate with.
And then they have candidates who are complicit in the influence-peddling racket that the Democratic Party has become.
And the answer is, if you are complicit, if you're Gavin Newsom, you're not appealing, right?
There's nobody in the intersection.
They got rid of all those people, right?
They drove Tulsi Gabbard out.
She would not have been complicit, but they could have won with her, right?
And so the point is, there's nobody agreeable that they had to advance because it would have been inconsistent with their racket.
And their racket is compelling.
Yeah, their racket is their primary mission.
And people don't understand this, right?
They would prefer to lose than to win with somebody who ruins their racket.
And Bobby Kennedy would have ruined their racket.
Tulsi Gabbard would have ruined their racket.
So they were non-starters.
Not because they weren't winners.
In 2016, apparently Bernie Sanders would have ruined their racket, even though he appears to be a machine Democrat now.
But they pulled no punches with him.
They made sure that he wasn't ascendant.
They sabotaged him, and then when they were sued, they did not claim that they didn't sabotage him.
They actually claimed in court that it was their right to rig their own primaries.
So that's what you're dealing with.
It's people who will rig their own primary against winning because their racket is more important than winning.
They can sit out for four years.
What they can't do is allow their racket to be ended.
Yeah. Their party cannot include the people.
Their party cannot include the people.
Yep. And so the people need to recognize that and walk away from the party.
Yeah, they do need to walk away from the party.
And at the moment, walking away from the party, I think, means walking over to the unity coalition, which happens to be marching with the red team.
Now, if the red team or the Trump camp betrays the unity movement, I don't think the unity movement should take it lying down.
I think the unity movement stands for...
Unity and values that Americans resonate with irrespective of who is in office and who claims their mantle.
All right, so I think that's where I wanted to go.
Awesome. Well, I was going to say a few things.
I think I'll mostly say it.
Let me just say a couple words about one of the things that I wrote about for Natural Selections this week was about this new research finding on Well, there's FDNA Yellow No.
5 food dye, an azo dye made from petroleum products, which is well known to color everything from bullion cubes to Doritos.
And one of these known toxic substances.
It is outlawed in some countries in Europe.
Its use is specifically circumscribed in most others, but in the US, it's allowed in a lot of places.
And separately, there were some researchers who obviously wanted to make mice transparent.
Do you mean fiscally transparent?
No, no, no. It wasn't so much fiscal transparency because, as it turns out, the mice are not numerically literate, and so you can't teach them anything.
No, but there is actually, as much as I don't It doesn't sound good, and it certainly doesn't sound nice, and I don't really like the idea.
You can imagine there would be questions that you might have about biological systems, which you couldn't ask of either dead animals or animals that are alive but you can't see into.
And so there would be utility, potentially, if you could find a way to make the skin of mice, my god, transparent, that it could be.
Allow you to answer questions of, you know, physiological effects of certain other things you might want to do to the mice to learn, therefore, how the system worked.
Okay, so this group of researchers went looking for molecules with the right physical characteristics such that they could paint those molecules on mice and make them transparent, and they arrived at FDNA yellow number five, also known as tartrazine,
I think. And so now you have, this is big news this week, and it was published in, let's see, I think it was published in Science, and then Nature covered it, so like the big two in terms of the scientific journals have covered this story.
And again, I wrote about this in Natural Selections this week, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here, but...
Actually, I don't show my screen yet, but the Nature coverage of the science article says this throwaway line, because tartrazine is a food dye it is safe to use on living lives.
Oh, is that so?
Wow! Okay, so because the FDA approved it, it's safe for you.
It's apparently effective at making mice transparent.
When I was doing a little research for this piece, I found all of the things that yellow number five is known to cause in humans and all of the reasons.
Everything from ADHD to skin problems to some kind of cancer.
It's an azo dye.
It's not good for you. We shouldn't have it in our foods and even in our cosmetic products.
We just shouldn't. And I found the claim, which I cannot now refine, so I want to say this with all of the caveat in the world, but I found the claim that some chickens were being fed yellow number five in order to make their yolks yellower.
Because, of course, the way that most American chickens are processed, most egg layers are processed to put eggs on Americans' tables, is in these incredibly inhumane, and we could say, in chicken.
I don't think we can say that.
No, no, no one's talking about it.
No, no one would.
Truly awful circumstances in which they're packed and they never see the outdoors and so they can't make vitamin D and they're not eating grass and insects and all of this.
And so, of course, their yolks are depleted in nutrition and one of the indicators of that depletion in nutrition is the color of the yolks.
And so instead of dealing with the fact that humans like deeply, richly colored yolks and eggs, because historically that has always indicated deeply, richly nutritious eggs, let's deal with the problem by changing the color.
Change the proxy, don't change the problem.
So I cannot find this claim again, so I don't know for sure that yellow number five...
About feeding yellow number five? That yellow number five is being fed to you, because everything else I've said I have seen over and over again.
But when I was looking for it...
I did find, hold on just a second, on the USDA site about food additives, about color additives, these two generic claims.
And you can share my screen here.
FDA defines a color additive as any dye, pigment, or substance which, when added or applied to a food, drug, or cosmetic or to the human body, is capable, alone or through reactions with other substances, of imparting color.
FDA is responsible for regulating all color additives to ensure that foods containing color additives are safe to eat, contain only approved ingredients, and are accurately labeled.
Color additives are used in foods for many reasons.
One, to offset color loss due to exposure to light, air, temperature extremes, moisture, and storage conditions.
Two, to correct natural variations in color.
Correct. Three, to enhance colors that occur naturally.
And four, to provide color to colorless and fun foods.
Without color additives, colors wouldn't be brown, margarine wouldn't be yellow, and mint ice cream wouldn't be green.
Color additives are now recognized as an important part of practically all processed foods we eat.
Important? That's from the USDA, okay?
And then lower on that site is when were color additives addressed?
The 1960 Color Additives Amendment brought all colors, natural and synthetic, under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Color additives may not be used to deceive consumers or to conceal blemishes or inferiorities in food products.
That seems at odds.
Yes. With the thing just right up the page in which they say that they are providing color to colorless and fun foods.
It is deceptive that one of the main things that the USDA is saying what color additives are for is to deceive consumers, and later on the same site they say that the Color Additives Amendment in 1960 makes it clear that they may not be used to deceive consumers.
There's a lot to say here, but just right, it's so easy to find the inconsistencies in their own regulations.
Yeah, but imagine that you were a Bureaucratic midwit.
Do I have to? For a moment.
Okay. Who knows nothing about the difference between complex and complicated systems.
Should I let my mouth hang slightly open then?
It might allow you to get enough oxygen to your brain.
Or not. But anyway.
I remember when...
Hormone-free milk was being actively discussed by those of us in the health-aware community, whatever that community is.
And the point was, I wonder if hormones and milk have anything to do with the obesity epidemic because, you know, animals are being induced to produce more milk and to fatten up.
On the basis of the addition of these hormones, so is that fattening up and causing puberty to move earlier in time in humans?
It's a totally obvious and valid question.
I actually, one of my first teaching roles When we were at Michigan as TAs, was using the RBST, the recombinant bovine somatotropin, I think, that was just then, it was like 94 or 95, being introduced and there was all this hubbub about whether or not you're going to have to label it.
Right. Right? Label milk that had RBSD in it.
And so back then, it was easy to talk in a classroom of undergraduates.
Of course, we were just a couple years, a year or two out of undergrad ourselves.
Easy to have, and this was a class for non-majors.
So Have a bunch of just random liberal arts majors who had to take some science class argue about what the effects of hormones added to milk might be.
And it was a robust and invigorating conversation, which I think would be difficult to find in many, many places today.
No doubt. Yeah.
And the particular way in which this conversation was muddled Is visible on these packages because those that are labeled as free of RBST are labeled that the FDA finds no detectable difference in the milk.
Yes. FDA has found no different difference between milk treated with and...
Right. And it's a classic.
It's just like, well, yes, there's some mercury in that vaccine, but there's less mercury in the vaccine than a tuna fish sandwich.
Right? Which on the one hand sounds like, okay, well, that doesn't sound like very much mercury.
On the other hand, if you know where the bodies are buried, it's like, holy shit, you're not injecting a tuna fish sandwich into me.
I'm eating it and there's no mechanism to transport mercury from my gut into my body.
I mean, unless you've already been eating a lot of glyphosate, in which case there might be.
There might be. But the point is, the comparison is just phony.
And when the FDA says that they cannot detect a difference in the milk, that doesn't mean a damn thing.
And there's a very good reason why it doesn't mean a damn thing.
A, you don't know how hard they tried.
You don't know how good their assay is.
And B, a hormone is a biological signal.
A biological signal which millions of years of evolution, in fact hundreds of millions of years of evolution, have refined so that it takes the minimal number of molecules to send the message because it would be inefficient to spend more molecules than you had to in order to do so.
Because it's a signal, it is elegant.
And that means that a tiny number of molecules that the FDA can't detect because it's not good at detecting and doesn't want to detect them, Does not mean that that milk is not sending a blaring signal to your child that they should fatten up and reach puberty earlier.
Right? Yep. So the point is the milk says something on it that seems like it's a scientifically robust conclusion that casts doubt on the possibility that there's any reason to pay more for the RBST free milk.
But if you know how the biology works, you think, oh, I don't care that the FDA can't or won't detect this molecule.
I don't want it anywhere near me, right?
So anyway, it's a shell gang.
It's a shell gang. They're simply hiding the harms.
And the point is, they're also then, you know, the idea of safe.
It's as preposterous here.
Not only do we know that it isn't safe, but even if you didn't have any evidence of specific harms, you're taking a synthetic chemical that is not part of a normal diet, you're dumping it into a complex system, and then you're counting on the fact that you will have noticed the harm and connected it to the causal agent in an environment that's totally unregulated.
So The point is they can't say safe.
They can say, we know of no harms.
In this case, they can't even say that, but this is, it's insane.
And as you point out, there's some reason, I don't know what the history is, but there's some reason that human beings naturally gravitate to an egg that has a yellow or yolk.
Yeah. That, you know, for the same reason that you gravitate to something that smells better, you know, Oh, something fresh.
To Ramit that is red rather than gray.
Right. To an apple that is firm to the touch and luminous.
So what they're doing is they are...
They're not covered in appeal. Right.
They are biasing our food choices in the direction of an industry that games our senses.
You have senses that were built by evolution to detect...
Food and its quality based on how appetizing it is.
And food becomes unappetizing if the animals are raised in conditions that aren't good for them so they're not healthy.
If it has long supply chains so it's lost its nutrient value as it moved halfway around the globe.
And you have a right to know that your food isn't Good.
So that you can say, actually, I'd rather spend more for the eggs that got to the market sooner and came from chickens that were out in the sun.
For exactly the same reason that the USDA apparently wrote into its regulations that these food dyes, the color additives, can't be used to deceive.
And then elsewhere on the site, they're saying that that's exactly what they're doing.
But why would they have cared that they can't be used to deceive?
Precisely because of this.
Precisely because our senses have been developing along with all the rest of us for hundreds of millions of years.
Billions of years, really.
But as the humans that we are, call it at least 200,000 years.
In order to incorporate all of the things that we are sensing and come to a conclusion about it.
And so when the food additives and the color additives Change, make things look either more like what we think they should look like or look like something completely crazy and carnival-like and people are like,
oh cool, that looks bright. But then we also have all of the additives that are changing the colors because so much of the processed food, so much of the industry standards create Foul-smelling mixes that no human would ever get close to.
And so you have scents, S-C-E-N-T-S, scents that are added in order to end up with something that apparently smells like nothing, which is not actually what it is at all.
It's just like pharma.
It's like, here, take this to solve the problem that we probably created, and then take this to deal with the side effects of the first thing we had you take.
And so many of the additives in the processed food is to deal with the problems that the processed food itself created.
Right. That would cause you to naturally, your built-in systems, basically the point is informed consent actually has a conscious version, which is, Doc, I want to know what's in that stuff before I take it.
But it also has an unconscious version, which is that how appealing that is to me is my built-in guide to whether or not I should put it in my mouth.
And you're gaming that system with a bunch of stuff that my ancestors had no experience with.
So you're tricking me.
And there's a two-fold cost here, right?
On the one hand, I don't know what that freaking yellow dye is or how it's made, but I know that I'm not built for it.
It's a petroleum product. Right.
So I'm paying a...
It's from coal tar.
I'm paying a toxin cost for consuming it and it is disguising the low quality of my food.
That's two physiological costs.
And again, use the airport test.
You stand at gate D2 in the Seattle airport and you watch the world pass by and ask yourself how many people...
Worst gate ever. It's a bad gate.
Yeah. Because it's at the intersection with the train.
But if you stand there and you watch people go by and you just ask yourself, how many of these people look healthy in the way a wild animal typically looks healthy?
And it's like not even one in a hundred.
No, it's not. But okay, can I just take a divergence here for a moment?
Yeah. One of the last times that I was at SeaTac, the Seattle airport, I've told you this, but I saw two things near gate D2 that seemed to me quite indicative of our modern moment.
So A, item zero on my list of two is what you were talking about.
No one looks healthy.
Everyone looks bedraggled and unhealthy, even when they appear to be an appropriate body weight.
Everyone looks unhealthy. At security, which is not right near D2, but I had just gone through security and there was a very tall, thin man in a very short dress and bright lipstick.
Sounds lovely. I actually don't remember.
He had some kind of like bows in his hair.
Clearly a man. Yelling to his companion in order to get the attention of everyone around him about how he was just very tired of being treated like a man.
Okay, so that's one thing.
And, you know, what people at SeaTac do is mostly just, and what I did, I just don't want to see this.
I don't want to be looking at that guy with his bulge in his miniskirt, like, I don't want to be seeing this.
What are you doing? Why are we putting up with this, right?
But in the airport, security, like, just walk on, right?
So that, and then right before gate D2, You know, busy concourse?
Is that what it's called? Yeah. Yeah, busy concourse.
There were three empty, apparently robotic wheelchairs spinning around Making tunes, like singing to each other or themselves, and causing everyone around them to have to walk around these three wheelchairs.
And I stopped, like, what is happening?
And, probably a coincidence, but I got out my phone and started to record them, and they all went back to their homes.
It turns out there were two wheelchairs empty also, already parked, and all three of them went back to their homes and lined up with the other wheelchairs.
I'm not making this up.
I wasn't high then. I'm not high now.
Like, ah. What present are we living in?
This is nuts.
Yeah. On every level.
It is nuts. The necessity of the wheelchairs, the autonomy of the wheelchairs.
The fact that they were all singing little jingles.
I don't know. Yeah, things are no doubt out of control.
But it's amazing that we have to pay attention We should not have to guard our own well-being at this level.
And that's really the problem is that the vigilance that one needs to exert in order to just even struggle successfully at any level against the level of toxicity of everything, right?
From the stuff on your screens to the stuff in your food.
But I've made this point elsewhere.
You are not supposed to have antagonists to your health.
It's not that antagonism doesn't exist in nature.
It exists a plenty. But you're not supposed to be faced with photorealistic, compelling, moving renderings of a human being who are trying to convince you to eat things that there is no rational reason that you should put them in your mouth.
That's not supposed to happen.
You're not supposed to...
Have chemical additives that can disguise the off note of a food product that has been transported over too great a distance.
You are supposed to be able to intuit your way through the world and consciousness is supposed to be reserved for those rare circumstances where you encounter something that is abnormal enough that it actually deserves conscious thought.
But we have to be conscious about everything, right?
That beautiful yellow omelette It may not be a beautiful yellow omelet.
That may be a hybrid between an off-white, grotesque, unappealing, not-very-good-smelling food-like product and a chemical ingredient that zhuzhs it back up.
Yeah, made from coal tar. And you have a right to know that.
And it doesn't mean that you have a right...
To necessarily, you know, you certainly do have a right to know what's in it, which you can't, you know, you're going to go ask for the ingredient, you know, where did you source your eggs for the omelet that you made me at the diner?
You're not going to do that. And what were they eating? I mean, it's, you know, this Portlandia, which I think we only watched one episode of and which felt like a little bit of an unfair send up of some very, very real observations.
You know, the idea of I really, you know, I want to meet the goat that is now, you know, I want to meet the goat's parents, the goat that's now on my plate or something.
Well, I actually really do want to know the origin of my food, and I always have.
But trying to find out whether or not it is true that yellow number five is ever fed to chickens in order to enhance the yellowness of their yolks, I ended up looking at the ingredient list of a bunch of commercially available chicken feed, and I can't tell.
Right. I can't tell.
Yeah. There's a whole lot of stuff in there.
And the fact is that yellow number five goes by a whole lot of names.
I don't know if I have the complete list of names.
I can't tell. Well, many years ago, I put together a list of places that things that we didn't know about or had been led to believe were safe had turned out to be the opposite.
And it was incredibly long.
Yeah. Right. These were known, known things.
And since I made that list, the number of revelations, right?
Who knew that herbivorous bovids were being fed other bovids?
Right? And that that opened a possibility for prions.
Did I know that I needed to be worried about prions?
So that emerged in like the 90s, right?
Because when my parents were living in London, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy basically closed down all beef exports from the UK. Right.
And it really impacted their economy.
And that was the revelation there.
That was the revelation. They were being fed the brains of their Right.
This is an herbivore. And you don't even think to ask the question.
Are you feeding it anything that's not a plant?
Like, you know, even, you know, you're not letting it graze.
Not only that, but you're feeding it animal stuff.
And that, of course, opens an obvious pathology.
You could do the same thing with the raising, the farm raising of fish, right?
Right. You don't think to ask because it's like, oh, I'll have the salmon.
And then you realize, oh, that's an Atlantic salmon being raised in the Pacific in a high density pen where they're riddled with parasites.
You don't know any of this, right?
Yum! But it comes with dill, so it's delicious.
I want a list of all the questions I don't yet know I'm supposed to ask.
All of the things that I should be, you know, you and I, you know, 20 years ago saw shrimp farming and realized, oh, shrimp isn't just a nice product from the sea that you can eat, but in general, for reasons of economics, it's raised in, you know, its own feces at an incredible density.
It's like, I haven't had shrimp since, you know?
But how many of these places, is there something, you know, the yellowness of your chicken egg?
I didn't know that I needed to worry about that.
Now I do, and it's like...
Well, we are lucky to have enough wealth to source, to buy the best eggs that are on offer anywhere we are.
Because the spread of cost of eggs is still not so great that we can't afford the best eggs.
And I prefer to buy eggs that were pastured from a farmer that I know.
But I don't know, given that, for instance, as we talked about when we talked about appeal, appeal can be put on produce that is still USDA-certified organic.
There's no way that should be the case.
But if that is the case, What else can slip in under, you know, at the moment when I'm buying at the grocery store, when I'm buying eggs at the grocery store, I look for, you know, as local of eggs, I look for as local a producer as possible.
And for all the buzzwords, you know, pastured and organic, etc.
But I know that even the one buzzword there that has supposedly got some force behind it is already gamed.
So what are you supposed to do?
But even then, You can police your own food, but Almost nobody has the wherewithal to police it.
You're never going to go out.
And if you go out, you're going to be eating stuff that was cooked in a Teflon pan.
Using seed oils. It's almost always going to be not organic because a business that uses the organic stuff will go out of business in competition with a business that produces something similar that isn't organic because its ingredients are cheaper.
So the point is... Almost nobody is in a position to control this completely.
The only conceivable way you could do it is for you to make all of your own food at home from ingredients that you knew the source of.
And even then, the chances that stuff sneaks in, that you can't use organic as a guide to whether or not a peel is in something, you know, okay, now what do I have to do, right?
Is there, is there no way I can just simply opt out of this technical food madness?
So Tara at Slow Down Farmstead, highly recommended Substack, who also wrote Mila's story, which is my most read piece on Substack about the death of her daughter, actually does this.
She and her husband grow absolutely everything.
And when they travel, for instance, to see their new grandbaby, they take everything with them.
Well, it's more than a full-time job, and you need to have land on which to do it.
Almost nobody has the capacity to do this, and certainly, you know, you can do it if it is your job, but you can't do it in addition to your job.
Right. No, you can't.
Yeah. Well, that was fun.
Yeah. That was fun.
No, I mean... It's good talking to you, man.
I'll see you next week. Nice. Hopefully I'll see you before then.
Yeah, no, actually, we will be back in front of the camera.
I will see you a lot between now and then.
But we will be back here on Saturday for another live stream.
And then we have our private Q&A available to locals supporters only on Sunday, 11 a.m.
Pacific, for two hours. And then we'll be back for another live stream on Wednesday.
And then we're off for a little bit.
So... And there's been some great guest episodes that have been released and that will be released while we're away as well.
So keep tuning in for that.
And the darkhorsepodcast.org website has updates, links to all of our stuff, like where to find us, our websites, our store, which has lots of great stuff, including Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply.
I will not. Yeah, don't.
Either. Start. No.
Compliant has never been a strength.
No. No, you have not been compliant.
Yeah. That's a rule I try to stick to.
Yeah, yeah. I was trying, yeah.
Take up the time, really, even when sometimes I've made everyone happier.
Okay, so let's see.
Yeah, the darkhorsepodcast.org website is where you can find updates like also when our live streams are coming up.
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Like, you know, we're supposed to say things like turn notifications on.
I will not tell you that. I would like you to turn all of your notifications off.
Please turn the notifications on.
Please turn them off for your own sake.
No, turn them off for your own sake, but turn them on for our sake.
With your notifications off.
It will be easier for you.
We can cut the Gordian knot.
Okay. Turn your notifications off.
But turn at least two other people's notifications on.
Not those of the people you love.
Right. Exactly. No, I think that was implied.
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