Have the parties flipped? The 248th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 248th 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 begin and end by geeking out on biology: why there tend to be so many molecules in organisms that humans find useful (see: turmeric and ginger), why you can’t be both the fastest and the most agile anything, and new research that finds that some Atlantic fish with leg-like appendages can taste ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast special Saturday live stream I believe, even without looking it up, it is our 248th, is that right?
That's right.
248th, not remotely a prime.
I'm Dr.
Brett Weinstein, you are Dr.
Heather Hying, and the world is moving almost too fast to keep up.
Yes, as you say often, and I hope that it stops being true.
Yes.
Yeah, I was going to say I'm ready for it to be over.
I'm not ready for the world to be over.
No.
At all.
No.
But I am ready for some resolution on some things.
Whatever is going to happen, I would like to happen.
And whoever's living upstairs, and however many feet they have, could they just drop all the shoes and let us get a little things?
Drop the other...
We apparently are living downstairs of millipedes, all of us.
Oh, man.
Downstairs of millipedes.
That is not going to translate.
Downstairs of shoe-wearing millipedes.
Shoe-wearing cartoon millipedes.
Exactly.
All the way down.
Yes.
Well, no, all the way up, because if they were downstairs, we wouldn't hear them dropping.
Yep.
We have now botched this metaphor, something fierce, but...
I don't think so.
Okay.
Well, in any case, lots of shoes yet to drop, but it would be great if we got it out of the way.
Yep.
So we've got a watch party going on at Locals.
Please join us there.
We also have our monthly private Q&A on Locals tomorrow, Sunday, October.
That'll be 20th from 11 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Pacific.
Please join us there.
These Q&As are great.
They're fun.
And especially with the Sunday ones, two-hour ones, we make sure to look at the chat and sometimes respond to things going on in the chat.
So please join us there.
And let's get right into our sponsors.
As always, we have three sponsors right up at the top.
You can be sure that if we are reading ads, A, you're going to see that green perimeter around our screen.
That's sponsored content.
But we really choose and vet our sponsors very carefully.
So if we are reading ads for someone, it means that we really, truly appreciate the services or products they bring.
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I also think we have yet to see it up close, but that the lack of perverse incentives, in other words, the organic incentive structure means that during a crisis like COVID in which people are confused about what to do, it actually has an incentive to find the right level of treatment.
In other words, the total amount that the risk pool is responsible for goes down if people seek the treatment that actually works rather than the treatment that is mandated through standard of care.
Yes, I don't know that this has a way to deal with that.
I think it does, but anyway, we'll see.
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Still asking for it.
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What?
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Just the grass-fed bone broth is not a supplement, nor are superfood bars.
Maybe there'd need to be a semicolon there.
Right, a semicolon.
Which is like simple supplements, like magnesium complex ones.
See, here's the problem.
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This is one of the few points on which I disagree with him.
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Now at some future point, I want to talk about why it is that so many of the cultivated creatures that we have adopted...
You're looking at me funny.
I think you're about to go exactly where I was going to go.
Oh no.
What do you mean, oh no?
What is going on?
I don't know.
What I was going to say was that why so many of the cultivated creatures have multiple beneficial mechanisms of action for humans.
I would not call turmeric a creature.
I would, but I see your point.
Yeah, okay, so this is not actually...
Where I was going to go.
I think the fact that rhizomes end up often being things that we have discovered that have utility for us is interesting.
So you mentioned, and I know because I heard you and also because I wrote that, That both turmeric, the part of turmeric and the part of ginger that we are most familiar with that we tend to eat are the rhizomes.
Rhizomes being modified stems, modified for food storage.
And I just quickly looked it up to see if there was something I was missing.
In the definitions I find very quickly online, they tend to be horizontal.
So that's just interesting because often we think of stems basically being phototropic, you know, growing towards the light, and the light tends to be more or less up relative to the ground, so at a right angle to the ground, so you get stuff growing perpendicular to the ground, but rhizomes tend to be horizontal.
Modified for food storage.
And so, therefore, have nutrients the likes of which just plain stems don't tend to have.
You do have some organisms chewing on stems of things, but they would be more likely to go after tubers and such that have storage, sugar storage or even protein storage.
And it's the tubers and the rhizomes that will therefore tend to have secondary compounds associated with them, which will put off...
Yes, we'll deter most herbivores, but we weirdo humans are like, oh, I like that.
I like the ginger secondary compounds, like the turmeric secondary compounds.
That turns out to be good for me, and therefore I've adopted a sense that it tastes good as well.
Well, we in our book, of course, argue that there's a logic to the poisons that plants and fungi use being medicinally valuable, which is that the plants and fungi of the world have discovered a way to mess with every physiological system to deter herbivores.
And that by titrating these things, you can turn them into medicines.
If something has innovated a way to over-activate some portion of your liver, and your liver is under-activated, then you can use the over-activator from nature.
So, hence, nature's full of medicines, and the rhizome would be one of the exact places you would see it.
Also, corms and bulbs and...
Tubers.
Tubers, yep.
Storage.
Fruit is intended as a food to attract would-be dispersers to eat the fruit and disperse the seeds.
But these other things are not.
These are parts of plants that the plants do not want you eating.
And so put all sorts of interesting things inside them, and sometimes those things are just toxic, and often they might be a little bit toxic, but they're also good for you, and so you have to understand either how to eat them in moderation or how to cook them in order to detoxify them, you know, if it's a protein that's toxic that you need to denature, etc.
Alright, well actually we've set up the argument that I want to make for why so many of these things have multiple mechanisms of action that benefit humans.
And it works like this.
These creatures exist in nature.
You might not call them creatures, but let's say turmeric has an ancestor that exists in nature.
Just imagine it crawling around.
I like to think of it that way.
I think of creature as a synonym for animal.
Okay, so coral I would therefore include in creature, even though it doesn't crawl around.
But a bolete, a cedar tree, a paramecium.
Maybe it's motility.
Maybe it's being able to move.
And yet I think coral, so clearly my biological folk definition isn't coherent, so I cede the point.
Well, let's put it this way.
I think intuitively people take creature to mean exactly what you're suggesting, that that's the intuitive limit of it.
But I also think there's something, you know, especially with something like a rhizome, why does it go horizontal?
The creature is discovering the available space next to it.
It's exploring...
Yeah, just on a different time scale.
All right.
So anyway, my point was going to be, you've got some, you know, we've seen Zingibbers in tropical rainforests of wilds.
The family to which ginger belongs being the Zingiberaceae.
Yeah.
So the genus is Zingiber.
Some wild ginger that has a lot of defense compounds in its storage organ because ecologically it needs to do that.
Beautiful flowers.
It does have beautiful flowers.
It's true.
But here's the thing.
Humans find this stuff through mechanisms that I don't think are terribly well understood, but somehow we explore biochemical space.
We find compounds that are useful to us.
They end up in all of the traditional medicine traditions.
But, once you adopt these creatures, and we actually do know of a couple of these...
We're adopting Ginger now.
I think we have long since adopted Ginger.
It's like our natal, our family.
I mean, we could get a ginger, see how it goes.
But nonetheless, humans adopt these things and they start cultivating them.
And what that does is just like if you think about, you know, the dog, our longest domesticate, 30,000 years, three times the next nearest competitor.
The dog may come aboard as a human partner for its capacity to aid in a hunt, to find birds, to be a pair of eyes and a very sensitive nose.
It can contribute to human hunting, but once it's come aboard as a partner, Anything it does to enhance the capacity of the group that it's hanging out with is actually a benefit to it, because its mechanism of reproduction now involves the well-being of the population that it has now become dependent on.
Truly shared fate changes the logic of group selection.
Right.
It creates a powerful incentive not only to do the thing that you partnered for better, but to find new ways that you can contribute.
If it's low cost to me and high value to you and your success is my success, then it's a kind of cross-species kin selection.
So...
Anyway, the point is you would expect, therefore, exactly what we often see, which is that we identify some molecule in some creature and we say, aha, there's a medicine in there.
And then people start telling stories and they say, oh, it's not just one.
There are 30 different medicines in that rhizome.
And it begins to sound crazy, like, well, why would a plant which is making toxins be producing 30 medicines at a time?
And the answer is, well, it had an incentive to, as soon as it partnered And also, that one medicine that you thought was the thing, you know, you focus on just that one and usually it will turn out.
I mean, we talked about, I read a couple weeks ago from the bit from Hunter Gatherer's Guide where we talk about marijuana and vanilla, right?
And, you know, like, oh, THC is the bioactive molecule that people are into to get them high.
And like, well, you know, you ramp up the THC and down the, I think it's CBG and CBD. And that's just the ones that we have names for at the moment.
And you get, like, oh, you've just enhanced the psychotic effects of marijuana.
Congratulations.
Right.
So, like, actually, this thing evolved, you know, over depending, you know, let's call it just millions of years, in some cases, in concert with human beings using it.
And yes, you know, when we select it in nature, we can select for more and more of this or more and more of that.
do this and make obvious mistakes to think like, hold up, you know, maybe some of the dog breeds, for instance, that we have created, um, who have, you know, known perennial problems like hip dysplasia and jaw problems and can't eat.
Like maybe, maybe we should cease and desist a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, let's put it this way.
There's an easy and obvious mistake to make when you start isolating, you know, as we do, you know, we've talked extensively about things like milk, which we tend to think of as a food.
And, you know, it's a lot of different things.
It's a set of messages.
It's a food.
It, you know, may be a synchronizer of behaviors.
But anyway, the point is we identify one thing first and then we tend to think of that as the thing and we tend to imagine we can dispense with the rest and get very efficient about isolating it and maybe you take the one gene out of a something or other that you've cultivated and you put it into a bacterium and the bacteria produce this product and you think you're done and the answer is actually this is a classic Complex versus complicated mentality issue.
If you understand that a human symbiont is liable to have many positive mechanisms of action, and therefore you probably want the symbiont itself, you could also potentially use this to identify symbionts.
And here I would say just that you are using the term symbiont in a sensulato form, right?
That you are calling, for instance, ginger and turmeric symbionts of humans because we have effectively, because they have been under our selective pressure and have presumably been responding to some degree to us, you would argue using the word symbiont that we have also been responding in some ways to them.
Well, let's put it this way.
We're both getting a benefit, right?
You've got these magical critters that produce all of these compounds that we as animals are incapable of producing, and we are the thing that clears the space in the would-be forest and cultivates them and defends them against herbivores and All of the stuff that we do.
So the point is the benefit to both sides is through the roof.
And in fact, as I was going to point out, there are a bunch of creatures.
The more you dig into the literature on cultivated plants, especially things like hallucinogenic plants in Mexico and stuff like that, the more you discover that there are actually plants where we don't even know what the wild ancestor was, right?
The wild ancestor seems to be gone and there's something that's being cultivated In, you know, in gardens that is persisting only as a human cultivar.
We've seen this in Madagascar, too, with that, I've forgotten which plant it is that exists only in, it's a euphorb, that exists only in Malagasy gardens and parks.
Yeah, I don't remember this.
I'm trying to think of what the Mexican plant hallucinogenic sample you're thinking of.
It's salvia.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, so there's something about this logic that I, A, I think it's a great demonstration of the problem of thinking in terms of complicated systems where you've identified the molecule and suddenly you're the master of health rather than, oh no, that critter can do lots of things for us.
And we are liable never to understand the totality of it, but there's a perfectly rigorous biological mechanism by which it would have acquired multiple You know, plants are better at chemistry than we are.
Fungi as well.
So to the extent that they can do things for a population and they have an incentive because that population is the only way they're being propagated, you would expect to see it.
Yeah.
Autotrophs are better at chemistry.
Heterotrophs are better at stealing.
Yep.
Now this raises a question that I was pondering earlier this week, which is, I still have heard zero about the organism that produces ivermectin, which seems to have multiple...
The soil bacterium.
The soil bacterium from Japan discovered adjacent to a golf course.
This thing...
I haven't gone looking, so I don't...
We keep finding more mechanisms of action.
In fact, last week, a major publication came out, a monograph describing its effectiveness against cancer.
And There have been, I mean, there have been intimations to that.
Lots of hints in that direction, but somebody compiled the evidence and it looks compelling.
But anyway, the question is, well, why would an antiparasitic that is also an antiviral also be an anticancer?
Is there some story that creates, it may not be...
Sorry, anti-macroparasite, like worms.
Right.
Antiviral, antibacterial in some cases, and then also anticancer.
So to me, that is screaming, not necessarily that this thing was in some way cultivated, because almost certainly it wasn't, but that something we did created that same relationship where the more it helped, the more it propagated.
So the discovery in proximity to a golf course may not be accidental.
Right.
This may have been responsive to exactly the kind of stuff that, you know, many of us environmental types have been complaining about with regard to golf courses for, you know, forever.
And that, you know, it may, it may have, you know, it's possible that this is a success story, uh, in response and a bacterium that evolved in response to having to deal with the toxins that were being put on a golf course in order to keep it green.
That's totally hypothetical, but it's possible.
Yeah, so a couple of predictions.
One, I would expect to see some sort of, you know, I think golf course may be a red herring here.
Maybe the golf course was the place that it was found, but something...
I always assumed it was a red herring.
This is the first time I've thought maybe it's actually instrumental.
Well, I bet you it has something to do with human disturbance of habitat that then carves the...
What I want to know is, is there a wild...
Place where this bacterium exists, right?
That'd be really interesting to know.
But the other thing is there ought to be a distinction.
If the mechanism I'm arguing for is right, then you would expect a radical distinction between medicinal plants and fungi that are intensively and have long since been intensively cultivated by humans.
And things that you would find in nature but are not heavily dependent on humans for reproduction because that would not select in an intense way for this augmentation through novel mechanisms.
So anyway, that'd be the prediction of the hypothesis.
All right?
Yeah.
You got me thinking about corn.
Of course.
Does any wild type, actually wild type, I don't love that term, as you know, but does any actual wild type corn still exist?
I don't know.
It would have been from Mesoamerica, I think.
Almost unrecognizable to modern sensibilities, right?
Like tiny, a few kernels.
But I don't even know, because it was cultivated where it existed to such a great degree, it is quite possible that the cultivar just escaped from the tended plots where it was being grown and out-competed all of its wild counterparts.
Well, I would actually doubt that it could out-compete its wild counterparts, especially if it's doing the bidding of humans.
It should be an inferior competitor in nature.
But I agree with you.
I'm not sure what the wild corn relative is.
Probably, you know, virtually unrecognizable.
I think it's...
I think we still use the same name, right?
I think it's Zia Mays, I think.
And...
I think we have some understanding of what it has looked like, but I don't actually know if that's from contemporary observations or from historical accounts from, you know, still living people who remember the old days.
I don't know.
Well, as long as we are here, as long as we have driven off the entire audience with our geeking out on biology, there's another question.
Because one of the things, you know, Barbara McClintock and her jumping jeans, which was a heretical idea when she came up with it, but explains the mottled corn that has, you know, kernels have different coloration patterns on the same ear of corn, right?
So she was, I think, the first geneticist to start talking explicitly and formally about mosaicism.
So here's the question I have.
There's another result from animals, in fact.
It's from cattle.
And the result is that cattle, domesticated cattle, have a through-the-roof chiasma frequency, which means that when they go through meiosis to create gametes, sperm and egg, the rate at which the genes swap is And swap arms.
Between sister chromatees, right.
So the point is you get a chromosome from your mom and a chromosome from your dad, but you don't pass on your dad's chromosome or your mom's chromosome.
You pass on a combination.
And the amount of shuffling between the two chromosomes in domestic cattle is through the roof, which...
This is something I learned from Austin Burt back when we were in college.
But anyway, the interpretation for it was amazing, which is human beings have selected for all of these characteristics in cattle.
You know, you want a cow that is docile, right?
You don't want a wild animal.
You want an animal that's compliant.
You also want an animal that tends to put on weight.
You want an animal that produces milk when it doesn't have a calf.
You...
So you will select for greater precision in being able to breed for particular combinations, where if you're stuck with whole chromosomes, it's too broad brush.
You'll select for one characteristic and lose another one at the same time, unless they're crossing over like crazy.
Right.
Then you get everything you want.
So here's the question.
Is McClintock's jumping genes...
But hold on.
So do we know what their wild...
Wild counterparts have?
Yes, much lower.
The obvious prediction is that there's...
Right, exactly.
So that was known back in the...
Early 90s.
In the early 90s.
But I'm wondering, and maybe this is well known too, and I just didn't run across it, but maybe McClintock's jumping beans in corn is actually that, you know, Mesoamericans triggered the same sort of crossing over and basically turbocharged.
There's some latent capacity to increase...
Crossing over frequency and it went through the roof, which would make sense given all the different cultivars of corn that you see in South America, right?
You've got like hundreds, maybe it's thousands of different strains of this stuff.
How did they get there in such a short period of time?
Well, they would have selected just as we've done with cattle for a high tendency to shuffle so that you can even see shuffling in one ear of corn, right?
Wouldn't that be cool?
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That is awesome.
I was actually going to end with some like this week and oh my God, that's cool.
Some little biology story and maybe we'll still in there, but I'm glad we started.
Yeah.
That's good.
I'm happy with that.
Yeah.
Okay.
For the three of you who are left.
It had to be done.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, if you don't want biologists, there's plenty of other places to go.
That's right.
There are other podcasts.
Just look it up.
Okay.
So I've got a couple things, Smallish, but I think you wanted to start with...
Yeah.
Right?
Did you?
Yeah.
And it's actually, you know, it's going to sound a million miles away, but it's not.
It's the same kind of logic just applied to human systems.
Yeah.
That's why you guys are here.
I wanted to pick up on what we did on Wednesday about trade-offs and game theory as it applies to the political landscape, because for my way of thinking about this, it's so clarifying of just an otherwise terribly murky set of observations about where we are and how we got here.
So I wanted to talk about a couple of things.
I wanted to give an analysis that accounts for certain things.
Have the parties just swapped places?
Why and how would that happen?
The political parties.
The political parties.
What does this have to do with the odd fact of Donald Trump, right?
And so anyway, I wanted to run through the logic.
And I wanted to say that all of this...
Traffics on a couple of concepts, which I started cultivating my understanding of in a biological context.
Tradeoffs is what I ended up doing my dissertation work on, and my argument in my dissertation was that there is a A set of laws that govern trade-offs, that trade-offs are not inherently biological, that biology, evolution, explores the landscape of the possible, and it discovers trade-offs in exactly the same way that engineers discover trade-offs, right?
Or businesses discover trade-offs.
You discover you can't do two competing things at once.
You have to, you know, do something to overcome these things.
And just to give you one example, You know, you've got a trade-off.
If you wanted to make a flying object, an airplane, for example, and you wanted to make something that was very agile and capable of winning in a dogfight, for example, but you also wanted to make something that was capable of carrying a huge payload of bombs, It can't be the same plane, right?
You can make something that's like an F-16, or you can make something that's like a B-52, but if you try to get something that is like an F-16 and a B-52, it'll suck at everything.
So what that's telling you is that in engineering space, there's some Law that you can't overcome that forces you to choose between these modes.
You'd find exactly the same thing if you looked at the difference between a frigate bird, which can stay aloft for months, and a hummingbird, which is agile and can hover and fly backwards and all these things.
You can't make something that does the frigate bird job and the hummingbird job at the same time.
And even more compellingly, which won't seem important perhaps to most listeners, but you can more or less control for phylogeny.
You can more or less control for, well, but okay, frigate birds and hummingbirds aren't that closely related, so of course they're doing different things, and of course they couldn't, you know, both, neither of them could do both of those jobs.
But within fruit bats, you know, within the clade that you were most familiar with, you have deeply specialist roles and the trade-offs are apparent between them.
And so you have these like understory acrobats who are weaving in and out and they are different from the high-flying open-air hawking insectivores.
Totally.
And you can see this.
I mean, bats are a wonderful example, A, because they're kind of not well known.
People don't realize that there are a thousand species of these things and that they are distributed across a vast design space, right?
We do have high altitude gliding bats and we have, you know, close quarters hovering.
We have basically the equivalent of hummingbirds.
And everything in between.
So you can map out the distinctions and you can actually see that there are a couple of parameters about the way you build a wing, a wing loading and aspect ratio that actually you can look at an animal whose ecology you don't know and you can guess pretty well what it does or at least how it flies based on looking at whether its wings are, you know, long and narrow or stubby and fat.
And because you can do that within a group of very closely related organisms, you can see how ecological parameters have selected for different kinds of, for instance, wing shape.
Yes.
In fact, if you do the job well, you can use things like molecular evidence that tells you, okay, now that I know what my creatures are doing based on what their wing shape is, how are they related to each other?
How did the story unfold?
You know, what creature You know, evolved first, and then its wings diversified into these different shapes.
Anyway, it's a fascinating story that gives you a lot of different kinds of evidence if you know how to read it.
But okay, in the political landscape, there are some basic things going on that constrain the game theory, and it's actually much simpler than the biological versions of these things, but it's a story I never hear told, right?
There's one part of it that is told, which is The fact that first-past-the-post voting, right?
We have an electoral college, you cross a number of votes and winner takes all, as opposed to a parliamentary system in which you can get a bunch of different parties elected that then have to agree.
There is a first-past-the-post aspect to it, but it happens after election where they have to agree to join coalitions in order to wield power, which means that the little guy wields a lot more power than In that system than our system.
So this is one of the sort of famous defects of our system is that it defaults to two parties.
I used to say one of those parties was inherently incoherent.
I think I now realize both of them are kind of always incoherent because they accumulate.
Because they do the coalition building before as opposed to after.
That's what First Past the Post creates in part is that you have all these little coalitions that form in order to get enough power to become one of the two major ones.
Right.
Now, there was a kind of overarching coherence.
The world that you and I were born into, the Democrat and Republican world that we remember from when we were kids, had a logic to it.
And people are going to balk at this, but the basic logic was this.
The Democratic Party was the party of labor, and the Republican Party was the party of management.
And there is a tension and a trade-off hidden in here that people don't quite get.
Labor is always going to be the bulk of voters.
They're just always more workers than there are managers, right?
And that would seem to suggest that the Democratic Party would be the only electable party because it has so many potential voters there to support it.
And indeed, it was a dominant party for this reason.
The management party has a different advantage, which is power.
Management A is inherently more collective.
Management gathers behind the scenes in a conference room and discusses in which way to move the corporation forward.
It naturally has this, and it's coordinating a smaller number of entities.
But also, it has the power to lobby in such a way that it has a disproportionate force, a corrupting force on politics.
But nonetheless, there is a tension between labor and management that is manifest in the political arena where one does not inherently fully dominate the other.
Yes.
I would just add, and maybe this is trivial compared to what you just laid out, but in the now no longer existent system in which more or less the Democrats stood for labor and the Republicans for management, An additional advantage the Republicans had was aspiration.
There was aspirational advantage there, that people who understood themselves to be in labor could aspire to management class and vote for policies that would help them, vote effectively for policies that would help them if they got to where they were hoping to go.
Right, and there's a whole tale to be told about what you expect people who have traversed that gap to retain in terms of their obligations to the place that they came from and to forget.
But I would also just point out that, especially for us liberal types, there's a way in which it always seems like labor is being screwed over by management.
And there's a truth to this, but there's also this other story, which is you don't, just as with conservatism and liberalism, you don't want one of these worldviews to win out, right?
The world in which management wins out over labor is a horrifying world in which people can't make enough and their work to the bone and all of that.
But the world in which labor wins and installs some kind of communism is a very unproductive place.
And so you want some force that balances these things, because as much as we used to make fun of the claim that, you know, what's good for GM is good for America.
There's also some truth to it.
Right.
You don't want labor to defeat GM. You want attention between these things to be managed by something that cares about keeping the system productive and cares about taking care of the people who are doing the bulk of the work and doesn't let one override the other.
Yeah, and we have talked about this before in here, so we won't go deep into it, but I would also say that the labor management model, which obviously exists in business spaces and was perhaps a primary way of understanding how the world was organized that was accurate in much of the 20th century, isn't the way that all systems work.
And so what we saw, for instance, at Evergreen was a move to unionize the faculty back, you know, well before Evergreen blew up, that for many of us, and it turned out to be a lot of the scientists plus a smattering of other people, We looked around and we said, but we don't need that here.
We aren't labor, in part because management literally pulls from faculty and then the management, the deans, rotate back into the faculty.
The president didn't do that, although, who knows, sometimes they do.
It just wasn't the system that necessitated a union.
And sure enough, once it got voted in, even though a lot of us voted against the unionization, even though we understood ourselves to be pro-union in theory, and indeed I had benefited from being part of a union in earlier years.
It was part of what set the stage to allow Evergreen to be destroyed when it did so publicly in 2017.
It was exactly the faculty union that was part of that, and which also specifically utterly failed to have our backs, even though we were dues-paying union members.
Oh, not only failed to have our backs, it went after us.
So, you know, it was definitely not about protecting the, you know, faculty of the college.
But it needed to create, it insisted, like, the faculty behind the push to unionize insisted that this sort of, I mean, this literally Marxist and Engel-ish analysis of what human beings tended to wrestle with in labor markets is always the case.
And the fact is that it wasn't the case there until they made it the case, and then everything unraveled.
They imposed the story on a system that had actually been built so that it wouldn't be the story.
Right.
Okay, so we have first-past-the-post voting, which creates these two semi-incoherent parties.
We have a traditional division between labor and management.
What I wanted to highlight is that once you have a party that is effectively, I don't want to say it is anti-labor, but it is opposed to the interests of labor.
Labor wants its wages to go up.
Management wants to hold its wages in check.
So once you have a party that is effectively, by its position in this ecosystem, opposed to the interests of average people, there is another strategy that creeps in almost without fail.
And that is a betrayal strategy.
So to the extent that GM might have an interest in holding its workers' wages in check to keep the profits high...
That's one kind of force against labor.
But another kind of force against labor would be something like, you know, Monsanto might want the FDA not to protect average people from the toxicity of its products, right?
That's another way of getting profit.
And basically the point is, This is not a case in which there's a tension between, you know, you don't want Monsanto to win this argument.
You want the FDA to protect people and be completely deaf to Monsanto's desire to be able to put toxins into the environment and not pay a price for it.
So the point is, once you're opposed to labor, you become open to the possibility of opposing the interests of average people, even in places where that is not part of an inherent organic tension, but it's a grotesque betrayal of the interests of the people.
Yep.
The world that we were born into, the Republican Party was not only the party of management rather than labor, but it was also effectively the corrupt corporate party.
The Democratic Party, I don't want to paint the picture any cleaner than it was, was the party of corrupt labor.
So corrupt labor, the labor unions, especially the big ones actually, We have a history with organized crime, and there's all kinds of stuff going on there.
So it's not that the system wasn't corrupt on both sides, but it was a very different kind of corruption that we saw.
And then, as I've claimed many times, something changed in the Clinton administration.
Bill Clinton came in, and I do not know exactly what he was thinking, but what was evident was that he effectively He destroyed the traditional obligation of the Democratic Party that you and I remember to labor.
And he innovated the creation of a second corporate party.
Now, you might think, well, that can't work because the Republican Party is already the corporate party.
What corporations are going to sign up for a newer, less successful corporate party?
And the answer is, well...
There's a reason that once you sign up to betray the public that you might have room for two of these things.
And that is that there's different kinds of betrayal and you would imagine two sort of versions of the future, right?
The Democratic Party participated in Offshoring the traditional manufacturing jobs.
That was terrible for the American public.
And it's one of, you know, it's a version of the future in which somebody's corporate interests overrides the interests of the public who now ended up with much more menial jobs.
The safety net was destroyed, etc.
And they did.
They did pull...
Many corporations, we now know from donor records, now contribute to both parties.
Right.
Whereas that was not the case before.
Right, which speaks to a completely corrupt system where the idea is, look, I just want you to answer the phone when I call.
I may have a preference for who wins, but I want to make sure you answer the phone.
Whoever wins, they're going to answer my call and they're not going to answer the call of their nominal constituents, the voters.
But you can imagine that, for example...
You could have two opposing corrupt views of the worker from the point of view of, you know, if you're looking through pharma's eyes, pharma wants the right to create sick people because sick people are profitable.
whereas a corporation that needs workers to be effective or an insurance company that doesn't want people sick would have an opposing view.
They may both be interested in parasitizing the public, but there's two opposing views of how to parasitize the public.
And so for a long time, what we had was two parties which froze the American public out and disagreed over in which way to betray the people, but it was Betrayal A and Betrayal B.
Okay.
Yeah, so you can...
Whichever party pharma is contributing more to is likely to be interested in putting forward policies that keep Americans sicker.
Whichever party big food is contributing more to is going to be interested in putting forward policies that obscure how toxic our food supply is and do things like put it into school lunches.
Right.
Yeah.
So we hum along for decades in this two versions of corruption.
The elections are a farce.
Basically, you can, you know, demand that your politicians say nice things to you.
Every four years, you can get a presidential candidate to promise you something.
And then, you know, you get elected.
The president, you know, pays lip service to whatever it is they promised you.
And the public is just constantly getting screwed.
Year after year, it doesn't matter what color the administration is.
Now this opens a game theoretic opportunity, which is, hey, if nobody's serving the interests of the people, I know a strategy that's a slam dunk winner in a democracy if both of the major parties are corrupt.
You just do what the people want, right?
Where's the money in that, though?
And I don't ask that cynically.
I ask that in terms of, like, how do you win without money?
And the people, you know, the middle class has been destroyed.
Like, you know, where's the money in that?
It's even worse than that.
I mean, there is enough money in that.
Because, A, you don't need that much.
Because if all you did was serve the interests of the people and they began to detect that that's what you were doing, it would catch on of its own accord.
But you also have a large number of people who don't have a ton of money.
So there's a question about how they organize themselves to effectively lobby.
But nonetheless, it's a...
It's a strategy that the corrupt duopoly fears, right?
This is the strategy that keeps them up at night, is the populist, hey, I'm actually just going to serve the interests of the people.
This isn't a tough problem, how to be popular in a system that's overrun by corruption on both sides.
Don't be corrupt, right?
And it doesn't mean zero corruption.
It just means be vastly less corrupt and people will love you.
So...
So it does two things in response.
One, it demonizes populism, right?
So that as populists...
This is what I was just going to ask.
I don't know the history of the term or the actual sort of political way of being that we now call populism.
But since I started hearing it denigrated when it was being associated with Trump eight, nine years ago, I thought, why is it so obvious that this is a bad thing to be speaking to people?
And I think it was framed then as, yeah, but it's not really about the people.
The people are being tricked and manipulated, and then they just think it's the right thing for them.
To which I would say, no, actually, that's what you're doing.
That's what the major...
The marketing arms behind the parties are doing.
Right.
So I would argue that populism is not inherently good or bad.
But there are two versions of it.
There's an organic populism, which is somebody's actually, you know, like...
I hope I don't get this wrong.
But my impression is that Javier Millet is...
Argentine?
Yeah, that he is doing this.
And that this is an organic populism, but you can also get a Hugo Chavez.
So anyway, the point is populism can be demonized based on all of the examples in which it wasn't for real.
Somebody was taking advantage of the desire of the public to have somebody pay attention to them and was a megalomaniac.
But it's not inherently suspect.
But here's the thing.
The way this is prevented in the American system, right, it's always a danger when both parties have been overtaken by influence peddling.
There's always a danger that somebody is going to invent an alternative that just simply doesn't do that for long enough to become popular and displace one of these parties.
Mm hmm.
The way that this is prevented is through the lesser evil paradox.
The lesser evil paradox says this is not the election to vote for something other than the two major parties.
We all agree that the two major parties are a problem, but if you vote for something else, you will elect the greater evil and it will be your fault.
If Ralph Nader gets one vote and the lesser evil loses by one vote and America is stuck with the greater evil, then it's Ralph Nader's fault for getting one vote.
By siphoning off a tiny number of votes is a danger to the Democratic Party.
The fault is on the Democratic Party's side, that it did not field a stronger candidate, not Ralph Nader's fault for siphoning off a small number of votes.
But nonetheless, the American public is so terrified of being held responsible for the greater evil, which is always amped up as much greater than it is, right?
You and I remember Mitt Romney As the greater evil that must not take the office or the world is going to end.
We remember George Bush as the greater evil who must not take office or the world is going to end.
And I'm not arguing that these guys weren't bad.
They were.
But the degree to which the end of the world was coming, if they ascended to the office, was the thing used to prevent people from contemplating voting for something else.
So that lesser evil paradox is the reason that when I formulated Unity 2020, Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Right.
By siphoning from each side equally and by building in a kill switch if it didn't gain enough popularity to be viable by election time.
And by designing into the agreement between the two members of the the unity 2020 ticket that they would agree to rule by consensus.
The point is none of this greater evil stuff adds up.
It doesn't apply.
And so that argument should fall flat, which is, of course, why they threw us off X and what was Twitter at the time.
But anyway, I digress.
The point is, the lesser evil paradox keeps you trapped in a system where you have two corrupt parties.
Okay?
So what happened?
Well, what happened was Donald Trump was the unanticipated political entity that was capable of walking the minefield and bypassing this protective mechanism that prevents what happened was Donald Trump was the unanticipated political entity that was capable of walking the minefield And what Donald Trump did was
he took the vast collection of people that would once have been called labor and he brought them in.
His own personal charisma accumulated a large fraction of these people, which went to be called MAGA on one side and went to be called deplorables on the other.
And he brought them to the Republican Party, though they did not have a natural home there until he arrived with them.
So he decapitates the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is this corrupt corporate party.
It's, you know, betrayal strategy A rather than betrayal strategy B. Trump brings this vast collection of politically homeless voters with him, arrives at the party, and now the party is in a weird predicament and has been since his first run for office.
And the predicament is, okay, it's now got this large number of voters who are Right.
it's corporate owners in favor of this vast collection of voters.
Which is why so many power brokers for the Republican Party are never Trumpers and are publicly voting Harris.
Right.
And, you know, saying anyone but Trump from the very beginning because he doesn't stand for what the Republican Party has stood for.
Right.
And so in so far as the Republican Party was standing for corruption.
There are some core values that, frankly, are shared.
Between both parties in their honorable forms.
But in terms of the corruption layer that you're talking about, that's not what the MAGA slash deplorables are about.
And that's, you know, who knows what the impetus originally was for, I certainly don't, for Trump's first run.
But it certainly wasn't to protect the extant corruption.
Right.
That much I don't think anyone disagrees on.
Right.
It can be whatever it was, but the point is, what it was was radically disruptive of the stable order in which you had two parties betraying the American public, protected by the lesser evil paradox, which prevented a populist from getting enough traction to displace either one of them.
So now you get a populist who knows how to overcome that.
He does so, has this vast collection of energized, politically homeless voters who now show up exactly where you and I don't expect to see them based on what we grew up with.
Right?
Labor is now showing up under the Republican banner.
Okay, didn't see that coming, but there it is.
And then you see these traditional Republicans fleeing over to the Democratic Party.
Yep.
This is actually the mirror image of the Democratic Party preferred to lose to Trump than to win with Gabbard or Kennedy.
That was interesting.
Anytime a party prefers to lose rather than to embrace an obvious strategy that it has at its doorstep, it's telling you something about the importance of the corruption of the system.
But neither Kennedy nor Gabbard will take instructions from their overlords.
Right.
They're not.
They won't.
They are a threat to the racket.
And so the point is the racket would rather lose and live to fight another day than win and not be a racket anymore.
And now we're seeing that on the Republican side where the racket Republicans are now fleeing labor, which has just shown up dressed as MAGA over on the Republican side.
Yeah, and so, you know, we find, you know, the New York Times and CNN and NPR have read the way they have for, unfortunately, a long time, but so too now the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal that, you know, the once moderate, you know, the important publications that were the publications of, you know, the coastal educated, but not necessarily the liberals.
Like, you know, everyone read these.
And increasingly those publications, well, the Atlantic for sure is just completely shot, But the Wall Street Journal, it reads very similarly at this point to the New York Times.
They're all playing the same game.
The mainstream media is all on the same side, and that tells you that they're all part of the same racket.
Well, and if you look at what, you know, we had three publications cover the Rescue of the Republic rally.
All of them wrote about it in ways that were completely inconsistent with what it felt like on the ground, completely inconsistent with what anybody on the ground said to us.
It was Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, and The Spectator.
Oh, yeah.
And they actually couldn't quite agree on what was wrong with us.
They just, they all knew that- Well, that just tells you that there's so much wrong.
You just can't get track.
You just, you can't, it's hard to choose.
But anyway, do you have that Atlantic article?
Oh, yeah, I pulled up.
Because it really does tell this tale pretty well here.
Yeah, here we go.
Yeah, this week, the Atlantic published a piece with the headline, Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.
Yeah, that's right.
I feel like they've been calling so many of us Nazis for so long, and they've been calling him Hitler for so long, and it's just not getting any traction.
Psych 101 tells you you don't keep throwing good money after bad, at the point that people are full.
I don't know.
How many metaphors can I use here?
They flooded the engine on this.
Like, it's not going to do any more good to keep throwing despots, names of despots, at the guy and be like, well, that's Dick.
How about Pol Pot?
Like, oh my God.
We need more bad people to equate him with.
Like, dudes, you really look like losers.
Incompetent.
Sad.
Losers.
Yeah, no, they are sad, terrified, little whimpering losers.
Yeah.
But, okay, so you've got, you had two corrupt parties.
They were protected by a very powerful, but very thin protective layer that was, if you experiment with anything other than these two corrupt parties, you will be responsible for the evil that is at the door.
That thing gets broken through because Trump has unusual political immunities that normal people just don't have.
So he's able to stare this down.
He brings this big collection of labor.
I mean, labor showed up.
It was largely, MAGA was largely white.
That's not even true anymore.
Now we're seeing people of every color fleeing over in this direction, which is then doing the thing Not as many people with differently colored hair.
You mean like unnaturally colored hair?
That's true.
But even some of those, which is interesting because you actually...
I know that traditional blue folks just aren't going to be able to appreciate this until they actually break camp and check out what's going on under that big tent.
But the degree to which nobody in that vast unity coalition that happens to be gathered by the Red Banner at the moment gives a damn about this.
And if you showed up with purple hair, they'd talk about it.
It's not like you wouldn't get a little fun poked at you, but nobody's going to drive you off.
That's the thing, right?
The media...
Is finding it, has found it for eight, nine years now, so easy.
And only now are they really beginning to fail at this game.
To assure traditional liberal voters, traditional Democrats, that you can't possibly vote for that man.
Because listen to how he talks.
When he goes off the cuff, he makes fun of people.
He's mean.
He's trivial.
And...
I haven't heard anyone defending the particular little, you know, whatever, whatever thing that he said now that you are really upset about.
Like, I don't, I'm not going to defend that thing.
I don't, but, and what I was just going to say is like, as it turns out, I don't care that much.
Yeah.
Right?
Like people talk and people have different personalities and, uh, that's not, that's not how I would present.
That's not what I would do.
And that's, you know, more to the point, you know, of course I wouldn't, I couldn't pull that off if I wanted to because I'm a woman, but you wouldn't do it either.
It's not who you are.
Right.
And the fact is that the top priority when you're voting for president should not be, would I like to introduce him to my mother and have her consider him a nice guest in her home?
That's not the thing.
It's not about politeness.
It's not about tea parties.
And that's a weird thing to invoke because there was an actual tea party movement.
But just think about the logic of being very prim and proper and looking over your glasses and making sure that you've used the right spoon and definitely not saying anything out of place or hurting anyone's feelings at any time.
Well, Trump is never going to be that.
He never pretended to be that.
And frankly, we don't need that.
We never needed that.
We don't need not that if the right person came in that package.
But he's not that.
And how dare all of them for holding us hostage because they wanted a tea party.
They wanted doilies and politeness and using the right spoon.
And actually, we need to make America healthy again.
And we need our children to have their childhoods back.
And we need to have economic security and growth.
Stop the mass immigration at the border and all of the rest of the things that he and his big tent that he is building actually seem interested in doing and seem capable of doing.
Even worse than that, the fact that it has to come in a package like Donald Trump is entirely on them, right?
I'm not...
They could have had this in many other packages that would not have run afoul of...
Kennedy was right there.
Right.
Kennedy was right there.
Gabbard was right there.
They had Andrew Yang.
You know, the number of people who could have...
Brought a reasonable anti-corruption message into this space was large.
And they held it off with their lesser evil paradox bullshit and their rigging their own primaries and all of the stuff that they did.
They held it off so it took a bull in a china shop to do the job.
Right?
That's not on anybody but them.
So anyway, the final piece of this puzzle is if you follow through the logic of you had a corrupt corporate party, you had a party of labor, yes, corrupt.
The party of labor innovates a, hey, we're going to be a second corrupt party.
Maybe that works because there's a whole new set of industries being born.
And so at the same moment that we're sending manufacturing jobs offshore, a whole new kind of worker is born because you've got the internet doing all of the things that the internet did, which are not manufacturing jobs, but they still involve a kind of labor.
And then, you know, the workers are frozen out.
That means that a populist movement could step in, but it can't because it's always going to be held responsible for the greater evil being elected.
And of course, the greater evil is always Hitler, no matter what it is.
And then you have Trump who breaks the rules because he can stare down this accusation.
He brings labor, first the white part of labor, over into the Republican Party.
Now it's a rainbow coalition of workers who've been betrayed by the system for so many decades.
But what this has done is it has now inverted these two parties from the ones that you and I remember.
One of these is now the concentrated corporate corruption and betrayal engine.
And the other is this weird populist big tent because workers come in every flavor.
But there are, of course, many important distinctions, but one of them is that you have been very careful to say that in the 70s and 80s the Democrats were the party of labor, but it was still a corrupt party.
Big labor back then was very much associated with the mafia, for instance.
I don't think you are similarly arguing that the new big tent under which labor is accumulating, which is under the Republicans, is similarly corrupt.
Oh, I don't think it will be if nothing steps in to create the structures that prevent...
If the Republican Party wants to...
If the Republican Party is more interested in winning and wielding power than it is in catering to its corruption racket, the one that it has had since you and I were kids, what it would do is it would become the anti-corruption party, right?
Now, there's nothing that says that that's what the Republican Party will do because the It has been a corrupt party for so long that that corruption is now entrenched.
But if it wants to drive all of that betray the people stuff over onto the blue side, and it wants to become the party of the people, that will only last for so long if it doesn't think very carefully about how to fend off corruption so it does not overtake that party.
And I will point out, one of the concerns here Is that once you have accumulated a powerful political force in a democracy or a democratic republic where your power comes from having a huge number of voters who are on your side, there are two moves.
One is you can serve their interests and remain powerful in that regard.
The other is you can take all of that power and you can peddle it because it's now worth a fortune.
Right.
So that's the thing that we need to be careful of.
We need to be careful of this.
You know, let's assume that the polls are telling us something and that red is likely to win by a substantial margin in November.
Maybe that involves not only the presidency, but the balance of power in Congress.
Well, then that red entity is going to be faced with a choice that we're not going to hear about.
It's going to happen behind closed doors.
It's going to be given the opportunity to monetize all of that political power, and we need to be hypervigilant to make sure that we don't have our interests sold out to the highest bidder by this newly ascendant new Republican Party, which doesn't look anything like the old one, but nonetheless It has enough corruption remaining in it that it will be open to that discussion.
So that's where the game goes.
And I'm concerned that if Red loses, we're in big trouble because of what the Blue Team has obviously become.
It's a betrayal of the people.
It has signed up with the deep state.
And that is, I think, the greatest threat we face.
But the second greatest threat we face is that the newly ascendant Republican Party We'll be persuaded by its corrupt elements.
Because there's no static win.
Every positive, powerful amalgamation is fragile.
Yes, although in this case, I'm very wary of the psychological analyses of Trump.
But one thing that works in our favor Is that this is an old man who, if he gets a second term, it's his last term, and he has an opportunity before him which is actually good for us, good for the little guys, which is he wants to be Remembered as the person who stared down all of these vile slanders and then did tremendous things for the Republic, put it back on course, all of that.
If that's the game he wants to play, he has a set of cards that will allow him to play it to a win if he can see what they are.
His ego is potentially aligned with our interests.
Right.
His ego is potentially aligned with our interests.
And now that the price of acknowledging that you're listening to what he's saying has dropped, the ability to actually become a hugely popular and important historic figure is right there in front of him.
So anyway, that could be the force that prevents The corrupt elements of the Republican Party from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory here, which is what I fear would happen otherwise.
Yeah.
All right.
Wow.
Seems ridiculous to go here next.
Yeah, we're gonna do it.
All right.
Uh, hold on, let me see.
So, um, nature.
Remember nature?
I mean, I was there just yesterday.
In nature or at nature?
No, outside.
Yeah.
Now I'm talking about nature with a capital N, which is only the capital N is only given to one of the two, one of the world's two preeminent science journals.
So nature, the British one, science being the American one, published this.
You can show my screen here.
Two days ago, science seasons misgreetings.
Why timing matters in global academia.
Stop using summer, winter and the rest when inviting researchers to events.
It's a small step, but it's necessary and inclusive.
Oh?
Necessary?
So let me just read a few of these paragraphs.
So this is not, you know, this doesn't claim to be a research article.
It's a career column.
So, you know, like every other publication out there, even the science journals are trying to like put in little bits and pieces so people get more excited to what read, like do their homework and actually read the science.
I don't know.
I gotta stop.
Yeah.
Yes.
Career column.
What does that mean?
That's just like, you know, they have Nature News, which is where they were, and actually the next thing, which isn't, which is Nature doing a reasonable job that I want to talk about, is, you know, where they're like, oh, we didn't publish this thing, but this is a cool thing that was published in a different science journal, and so that's in the Nature News.
Career column is, like, they also have, like, a future, I don't remember if it's Nature or Science that does a futures thing, where they have this sort of science fiction that's, frankly, always terrible.
Like, it's incomprehensible and really bad.
But so they're just, they're doing these little, like, Yeah, but I'm just struggling with what the word career has to do with anything.
Well, these authors are, as you'll see, arguing that it's getting in the way of their careers in science as Southern Hemisphere dwellers to constantly being miraged with references to summer when it is in fact not summer for them.
And it's really making them very sad, Brett.
I mean, there is actually a point here.
There is a point here.
Let me just read something.
I would just point out that actually you and I are...
We are careful about this.
Exactly.
I literally...
Okay, so we haven't even gotten to what they're saying yet, and I just totally mocked them, which they deserve.
But I literally this week submitted my most recent Field Nuts column for County Highway.
And I talk about the reality of seasons and the constructed nature of how we define seasons.
That's literally some of what I'm talking about.
And I mean, obviously, I'm biased.
I wrote it.
I think it's interesting.
I think it's important.
That's a reasonable way to think.
And the global South does have less land, and it has, as a result, been less developed and more recently.
And therefore, it has less resources.
It has fewer scientists.
There's fewer people doing science.
So yes, there are fewer people.
And most of us, and we'll say this sometimes, like, well, for most of you, winter's coming.
But for some of you, We recognize that different people live in different parts of the world, and actually we are hyper-rooted in time and place.
Like, this is one of the things about being tropical biologists who live in the temperate zone, right?
Like, you're thinking about it all the time.
What is the season?
What does it mean?
How is the day length changing?
All of this.
These people are just whining and looking for victimhood status.
Yep.
Okay, so let's read a little bit.
Hello from the southern hemisphere, where the days are getting longer and temperatures are rising.
Yet, despite the clear signs of spring here, we find ourselves inundated with invitations to events that speak of fall or autumn, or newsletters announcing workshops that will run this coming winter.
It leaves us wondering, are we invited at all into this season different from our own?
This curious oversight, in which seasons instead of months are used for scheduling, is especially puzzling in the scientific community, a group known for its precision and careful communication.
Okay, just hold up.
I do want to read more of this, but there are a lot of reasons to use seasons rather than months.
And, you know, sometimes you don't know what month, but you do know roughly what season.
And I'm sorry, a group known for its precision, the scientific community, should not primarily be known for its precision.
It should be primarily known, if we're going to choose a statistical term here, for its accuracy.
Okay?
And you were saying your term, fall, isn't accurate.
It doesn't apply to everyone because for some people it's spring.
Fine.
But the idea that precision is what matters is insane.
And also, your little concerns are not everyone's concerns, and you don't have any right to make them so.
Let me read just another paragraph and a half or two and a half.
Why do we, of all people persist in relying on region-specific seasonal markers?
What is even more baffling is that this takes place in our fields of weather and climate science, with little regard for how different things might be outside the Northern Hemisphere.
We've even come across a number of global analyses that assume that June, July, and August are summer months for the entire world.
That's a problem.
Like, that sentence right there?
Really?
There's no references.
I wonder why it's in nature.
Like, I want to see that.
Because that's stupid and wrong, right?
You'd think this kind of mistake would have been cut early on, but no, it still happens.
So, and then they go into this, like, pseudo-scientific assessment of what a season is.
is I don't think they know.
I think they just know they happen to live in the Southern Hemisphere and they feel left out and like they weren't invited to the party that they want to be invited to.
And they feel like riding in on their victim status instead of actually doing some science and being quiet about all the little insults that we all experience all the time because that's what being a human is.
Point of order.
you I'm so tired of these people.
They're such whining little brats.
It's bad for science.
I don't know who these particular people are.
Let's acknowledge what this is.
This is a bid for power.
Imagine how they will feel if they do manage to push the global scientific community into a change in the language that it uses.
It's pronouns, but for seasons.
But I do want to point something out.
Can we go back to the first paragraph to the word invitation?
So, well, so what they're saying here.
Hello from the southern hemisphere where the days are getting longer and temperatures are rising.
Yet despite the clear signs of spring here, we find ourselves inundated with invitations to events that speak of fall or autumn.
So they're talking about conferences.
Right, I understand that.
Invitation.
Yeah.
Two.
Right, and then they say, it leaves us wondering, are we invited at all into this season different from us?
It's like, why don't you not respond to those invitations?
Please don't come if you are so put off by being in a different hemisphere that you can't like...
I want to skip that part for the moment.
Okay.
We'll get there.
Okay.
Invitation.
So I send out an invitation for a February conference in Montana.
Ah, if it's February in Montana, that's going to be a winter conference.
That's winter.
Yeah, and actually it's more important that you know that going in, especially if you're in Sydney.
Like, it's Montana in February.
You're going to not want to bring beachwear.
Right so the whole idea that I should not invite somebody to a winter conference in Montana because where they come from it won't be winter that's not coherent that's insane right it's a winter conference right as and if they don't think that it is they are free to dress as if it's not and find out how that works right but Okay, so it's about power.
The idea that it's an invitation to a place where it is actually some season and that that might be relevant to the way that the invitation is written, right?
It's like, you know, if you're inviting somebody to a wedding, but where they come from, there are no weddings, it's karaoke night.
Right?
They're going to be inappropriate when they arrive there if they assume that your invitation, you know, come to karaoke night, but then you show up and it's a wedding.
But you don't want to hurt their feelings.
Like you don't want to say things to them that like they don't have in their culture or it's different for them.
So you need to speak to everyone as if you are them.
This is, it's like, it's taking the important necessary to being human theory of mind And taking it into a stupid place, being like, no, no, no.
It's not enough for you to know what is going on in every single other person's mind that you've sent this broadcast invitation to maybe 30,000 people to.
That's not enough.
You have to actually speak to them as if you are them.
As if the thing that you are planning, which is over here, is actually in their head and in their place right now.
Which is, as you say, totally incoherent.
It's completely incoherent.
But as a power play, it's brilliant.
It's like I didn't see it coming.
I mean, even though, as we have said now, and I literally just finished writing a piece about, like, okay, the astronomical realities of Solstice and Equinox are amazing.
We've talked about them before.
I've written about them a number of times for County Highway and for Natural Selections.
And it's very hard for most mortals to come to understand exactly when the equinox is without the help of technology, but people can actually, if they're keeping very careful track, know when the solstices are.
And in modern times, we name our seasons to start at the four external to humans astronomical markers on this planet, the solstices and the equinoxes.
So we are now about a third of the way through fall in the Northern Hemisphere, which I usually say, and now I'm inclined not to, because these people, right?
But in Shakespeare's time, this is the easy example, and this is what I wrote into my piece for County Highway, because he literally named a play that tells us this.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is about the night of the solstice.
But it's midsummer in Elizabethan England, right?
So the solstice is midsummer in Elizabethan England.
Fast forward some hundred of years, some number of hundred of years.
I can't even speak anymore.
And you find now that the longest day of the year, the shortest night of the year, marks the beginning of summer.
Well, does that mean that seasons are a social construct?
No.
Seasons are real, but exactly when we define the borders of them and when they start and when they end are a social construct.
Both things can be true, and that is in fact true for almost everything that has reality.
There's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't have any physical reality.
But for those things that have physical reality, if we've named them, then our names for them impose a kind of staticness around the borders, both temporal and spatial and sometimes otherwise, that is entirely human.
So, like, that's where the interesting part of this goes, I think.
Not this whining for power about, like, I got an invitation.
I just don't know if I'm invited because it's summer here, but it's winter there.
What'll I do?
All right.
So we actually have the correct tool for this moment, which we picked up.
I think we picked it up at Evergreen.
Okay.
This is a teachable moment.
That's what they've provided us.
These numbskulls have provided us a teachable moment by making a preposterous bid for power from the southern hemisphere by attempting to force us into no longer acknowledging the season where we have invited them to come in an effort to not disparage the season where it is they are coming from.
Well put.
Yes.
Oh, and by the way, I have an answer for them.
Oh, okay.
No.
Just no.
Yes, no.
Whatever the question is.
Just no.
Yeah, you can go to the facts page and just...
Right.
And the other way to deal with this is, as you hinted up top, just not send those invitations.
Yeah.
I don't know that there's like an email filter that just blocks invitations from going across hemispheric lines.
Like they can't get to the other side of the equator, but maybe that's what they're asking for.
Maybe what we should do is we should start a boycott where people...
You probably can't use that word anymore.
A... Childcott.
Yeah, exactly.
A childcott, which...
I don't know.
It's impossible.
It's gotten ridiculous.
They've made it impossible.
But here's the thing.
If we start a boycott, then the smart people will know to ignore the boycott, because why would you?
And the dumb people will engage in the boycott, and the conferences will be better.
True.
Oh, excellent.
Everybody wins.
Everybody wins.
Okay, good.
I'm glad we solved that.
I don't have much on this last thing.
It's just really cool.
So let me see if I can actually find...
So because that was published in Nature, I thought...
And this is actually from September.
You can show my screen here.
This is Nature reporting on...
This is again Nature News.
So just like I said, right?
This is Nature reporting on research that was published somewhere else.
This fish's legs are made for walking and tasting the sea floor.
The northern sea robin, which is a strange name for a fish, has taste buds on its feet that can sense buried prey.
So how cool is that?
I can just have my screen back for a second.
I gotta figure out how to get to...
I'm not gonna mostly show the nature piece here.
I want to...
Oh, I've closed it down.
That was smart of me.
Okay.
Hold on just a second.
I'm going to try to talk as I figure out how to do this again.
So this Nature News article was based on two articles published in, geez, I want to say scientific communications something.
You can show my screen here if you want.
Yeah.
One of them was just doing the molecular genomics, and they're like, hey, we could use CRISPR to do...
I'm like, oh god, okay.
Okay, people, just back off.
But this is the other one.
It's the same research team.
Evolution of novel sensory organs in fish with legs.
And this is just the highlights in the summary.
I'm just going to show the highlights and then show the graphical abstract.
Sea robins are walking fish.
They're on the sea floor.
They're on shallows.
I think relatively shallow.
Walking fish use novel leg-like appendages as sensory organs.
They're not true legs.
They haven't modified their- I was going to say.
Yeah.
So they're being called legs.
They've been being called legs for a while, but they're leg-like because we see them using them to navigate, and so we think legs, right?
A small plate of specialists within the Sea Robins elaborated sensory legs for locating buried prey.
Sensation is mediated by mechanosensitive neurons and epithelial taste receptors.
That's frickin' cool.
So mechanosensitive neurons, they're basically using things like proprioception and touch as we expect from something that would act like a leg to help you move around.
But epithelial taste receptors, they're basically saying they've got the, like, it's like Your tongue was on the base of your foot.
They've got skin epithelial taste receptors in these appendages that you're using like legs, and they're not just using them like legs, they're using them to root around and to taste and to figure out what might be good.
And so, let's see if I can get to the graphical abstract here.
Which is just in those species that don't dig, they have none of these epithelial taste receptors.
And in the species that do dig, again, both of them have these leg-like appendages that aren't true legs.
If they were to develop true legs, it would be from those ray fins there.
But these additional leg-like appendages have these chemosensory, these epithelial taste sensors in their legs if they dig.
Which makes perfect sense in a way, because the reason that we don't have lots of such things, the reason that we don't have these things, we don't have them, is that it wouldn't make sense because you need a solvent.
You need a wet environment in order for those taste buds to work, but these guys live in a wet environment.
Yeah, we have to keep our taste buds inside our mouth when it's wet.
Exactly.
So these guys can have them on their feet.
That makes a lot of sense.
I didn't...
Didn't predict it, right?
But now that we encounter this, of course, why wouldn't they?
Why wouldn't some creature, and how many more aquatic creatures have taste receptors on some external surface for some reason?
Exactly.
It brings up all of the magic.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
This is the magic of science fiction done well.
It begins to imagine what is possible by thinking, oh, well, okay, there's a lot in the world to sense.
Yes, we are primarily visually focused, but there are different advantages to different sensory ways of interpreting the world.
And presumably there are reasons to taste other than to decide whether or not you want to eat.
We think of taste as entirely about deciding on nutritional choices, but it's a way of understanding the chemical world.
It's one of the chemo senses, and there are a lot of reasons to want to understand your chemical world.
All right.
Well, that's cool.
Okay, cool.
So we went back to geeking out in the end.
There was a lot of geeking out in this episode.
Yeah, it was good.
Yeah.
Okay.
We are going to be back on Wednesday when they're on the live stream and then off for a couple weeks.
And we are going to have a private Q&A tomorrow.
At 11 a.m.
Pacific, you can go to darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, where we've got access to our store, which has lots of great stuff, including Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply, titties and t-shirts and such, and also get the calendar so you can see when we're going to be And also when some of the guest episodes are coming out, there should be, I don't know if there are any out yet this month, but there will be two out this month.
Yes.
At least.
Maybe another one.
Yeah.
So you've been talking to some amazing people as always.
So those are, and those also go out a day early on Locals as well, I think.
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Please consider going there.
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