It Takes a Potemkin Village: The 251st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 251st 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 how the Harris campaign spent their billion dollar war chest—including on celebrities who appeared to be endorsing her because they believed in her, but were actually getting paid. Also: $26 million was spent for “text message outreach,” any many people donated $10 or $20. It’s reverse ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 251, if I'm not mistaken.
It's so 251.
251.
Which is prime?
Yes, I recall a friend of the podcast alerting us that it was a so-called sexy prime, and I meant to look that up and I have no idea what it means.
It refers to the Latin or Greek, I don't remember, which root meaning six.
So this is the first of two primes six integers apart, meaning that 257 will also be a prime.
So it's kind of a stretch.
Got it.
Yeah, it's a stretch.
But you know...
There's no mathematical...
I mean, in the world where prime numbers are your thing, it's a minor thing.
If you're one of us normies, and I use that term loosely, it's not that big a deal.
I've never felt like a normie.
No, me either.
Nope.
But there must be some...
Who are you again?
I'm Dr.
Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr.
Heather Hying.
This is the Dark Horse Podcast, which I think I mentioned right up front.
Yeah, you did.
Yeah, I did.
Here we are.
Okay, we're going to talk today a little bit about presidential campaign madness.
Seed oils are awesome.
Oh, God.
And a few confessions from the mirror world.
That's my summary of today's topics.
All right.
Yeah.
Thank you to everyone of our supporters on Locals.
There's a watch party going on there right now.
You can head over to Dark Horse Locals if you'd like to join.
This Sunday, we're going to have another Q&A there for Locals supporters only.
Got original content there, all sorts of great stuff.
So please consider joining us there.
And as usual, before we get into the meat and potatoes of the show, We have three sponsors right up top.
We choose our sponsors very carefully.
All of them have products or services that we truly vouch for.
And this week, you're going to start us off with policy genius.
One word.
Policy genius.
It sounds like two words, but no, it's one word.
It could be, but it isn't.
It's not.
Yeah.
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If you are in the market for new insurance, it's coming up on the holidays when many people gather with family honoring old traditions and sometimes coming up with new ones, like fighting about the new administration.
Oh, baking gingerbread is what it says, which everyone loves, and having a lot of mulled cider by the fire playing music together.
That sounds like fun.
Those traditions would be different if you were gone.
You didn't look at the script before reading it, did you?
No.
No.
Oh, no, no.
I'm reading the other two, man.
You got this.
You got this.
So, on a later episode, we may explain what explains what...
I see, we can't even speak.
We may explain what is going on here today, but we're not going to say anything now about what exactly explains this ridiculous level of unprofessionalism.
No, we are not.
We are going to bring you our three ads.
We're sponsors that we really, truly vouch for.
Policy Genius is awesome.
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We should assure people it has nothing to do with drugs.
It really doesn't.
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Practically the opposite.
Yeah, the polar opposite.
Yeah, unfortunately, but there it is.
And not coming off drugs either.
Nope, not that either.
Nope.
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Nothing to do with drugs.
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Not every...
You got this.
I got to get to two of these, man.
Like, seriously, it's such hard work to read, but...
The three sponsors are awesome.
They really are.
You could do this.
You could skip the holiday traditions, new and old, if you like.
Point is...
No, no, I got this.
Point is that your holiday traditions would be missing something if you were gone, right?
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Why is that funny?
God, man.
We only have to explain it.
Alright.
It's the reading.
it's not easy you so have it Okay.
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Someone is trying to tell you you're screwing up, man.
Someone must be trying to tell me that and that I've forgotten to turn off my phone.
Oh, it's good.
Not surprising.
All right.
Having a good policy...
At least I'm not dead.
Exactly.
And back to policy genius.
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The ability to read has vanished on me.
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I owe you one.
You're a marvelous person and your reading skills are second to none.
It's weird how this experiment that we're doing, which we are not going to explain today, but we'll probably explain later, has rendered so many things very, very difficult.
And some of them are very similar for the two of us, and some of them are very different.
So many things, difficult things, and people, in my case.
You're fighting?
No, it's rendered me difficult.
No, not at all.
The reading.
So the reading is not a hardship for me.
The speaking, though, if I'm going to be speaking a lot, this is going to cause some Some issues perhaps.
So I encourage you to jump in.
You want me to read one of those?
I'm going to do it.
You're not going to be able to do it.
I'm going to recover.
Okay, you can start.
All right.
Our second sponsor is unlike any other service on the market.
I know because before they were a sponsor, I went looking, that's Heather, for exactly what they provide.
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CrowdHealth really is great.
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Let me just say, that sounds like hyperbole, but it's not.
You're very specific.
I am very specific, and I was the one who often tried to call them or access them through their website.
Nothing worked for the low, low price of $24,000 a year with a $17,000 deductible for no services whatsoever.
So, tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
I, that's Heather, went looking for alternatives and found CrowdHealth.
For $185 for an individual, or $605 for families of four or more, you get access to a community of people who will help out in the event of an emergency.
That's a third of what we were paying for bad health insurance.
With CrowdHealth, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but in the event of costs that are more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or an accident, you pay the first $500 and they pay the rest.
Let me just, let me add something else here to interrupt your reading, which is going great.
Man, is it better.
We were at the Brownstone Conference a week, week or two ago.
I was talking to a doctor there who's amazing and who has been run out of her practice for standing up for, you know, integrity and not force vaccinating her parents, her patients without informed consent.
And she and her family were looking to get out of the insurance racket, but were very concerned because she's thinking of getting pregnant again.
And what she understood about many crowdsourced options, many of which are A, religious, which crowd health isn't.
It's a fully secular option.
But also that many of them excluded pregnancy, which I was not aware of because really the only one that I found, the first one, the first secular one that I found was CrowdHealth, and it's so good I didn't keep looking.
But there is never any indication that they exclude pregnancy.
In fact, when you get the monthly assessment of what kinds of events did CrowdHealth pay for this month, a substantial chunk is always pregnancy.
So pregnancy is absolutely included in the CrowdHealth Things that get paid for.
I don't know what the word is for that.
Coverage.
Yeah, but it's not insurance, so I'm not sure we say coverage.
I don't know.
Coverage-like phenomenon.
Yeah, that's great.
That's better.
All right.
I'm going to continue with the reading.
I, that's Heather, didn't expect to know how well crowd health actually worked for a while, but then Toby, our 18-year-old son, broke his foot in July as a result of bad judgment, Toby.
We went to the ER, that's Heather and Toby, and he got x-rays and the attention of several doctors and nurses, plus crutches and a walking boot.
It wasn't cheap.
Not only has CrowdHealth paid our bills, everything about the interaction was smooth.
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The real people who work at CrowdHealth are easy to reach, clear and communicative.
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It turns out that CrowdHealth had approached us about being a sponsor a couple years ago, and I, that's Heather, didn't get it then.
That's also me.
I also didn't get it then.
Yeah, we did talk about it.
Yep.
It felt complicated to switch things up.
I, that is Heather, was wrong, having rediscovered them on my own and benefited directly from what they are doing.
I, that's Heather, was now con...
It's not usually how reading works.
No, I mean, I just feel the need.
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Code Dark Horse.
You did it, man.
I did.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
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So that's sort of a short and to the point ad read, but I will say that we've interacted with the founder of Ralston, Stephen Blackwood, and he's extraordinary.
They've got Jordan Peterson as their chancellor, and it really seems to be a truly amazing place.
One of the few institutions of higher ed at this point in the United States that gives me hope that we can rebuild An incredibly strong educational system in this country, which we desperately need.
So that's Ralston College.
Yeah, I agree.
Everything we've seen about it is fantastic.
Very few institutions you can say that about.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right.
Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about today, that we want to talk about today...
And the thing probably that we'll spend the most time on is how campaign funds were spent.
And I actually don't have anything on the Trump campaign.
I'm sure it's out there.
The FEC makes these things available.
But what we have been hearing, and many of our listeners will already have heard part of this story, But we've been hearing, for instance, that, well, we've been hearing that the Kamala Harris campaign had a billion-dollar war chest, right?
A billion dollars to spend, and somehow they're $20 million in debt at the end of an unsuccessful campaign, which Trump has somewhat famously offered to pay on their behalf, which is him just sticking it to them, but also generous, because his campaign fund was considerably less than that, and they didn't use it all.
So what could such a demonstrably unsuccessful campaign have spent a billion dollars on?
Well, increasingly, and this doesn't explain a huge fraction of it, but increasingly what has been coming out is how much was spent on Paying famous, already rich people to appear to endorse Kamala Harris, which of course is not what endorsement is supposed to be, and that's where we'll get to.
But let me just give some examples of what we know so far.
A million dollars was paid to Harpo Productions Incorporated, that's Oprah's company.
This presumably went to create the celebrity-studded town hall that Oprah presided over.
In this case we have, and you can show my screen here, we have on GitHub the FEC's data, source data, recording $997,950,787.25 in total disbursements by the candidates' authorized committees.
That's Harris for President and Kamala Harris for the people.
From January to October 16, 2024.
Interesting, unless there's information missing there, that money was beginning to be spent in January of 2024 for the Harris re-election campaign.
That's something to note.
Maybe they're referring, maybe there's a date missing there, and it should be January 2019.
I don't know, but there we have it.
And the total amount spent on the top five disbursement recipients was two-thirds of that.
So let's just go down.
Most of this is hard to interpret.
Media buy and production by Media Buying and Analytics LLC, which we could probably dive deep into there, I haven't for today, was over a quarter of the total spent with $281 million.
But the point here was the Harpo Productions payment to Oprah's company.
And here we have it, if we go down to a million, because this is ranked by amount.
And here we have it, Harpo Productions Incorporated, right?
Event production.
So, and we'll show a little video later of some of what that town hall that looked to be just a bunch of people, you know, rallying because they really felt like Kamala Harris is the right person for the job, with Oprah being master of ceremonies.
Well, Yes, it took some money to put that on, but Harper Productions has paid a million bucks out of the Kamala Harris campaign war chest.
And if we just go to actual spending by disbursement description, again, this is data from the FEC, but has been sorted a particular way, where we do find again, you know, in fact, the registration date was in April 2019, which we would expect because that's when she was actually running and failed to Get a single vote because she dropped out before the first primary.
At this point, she has not failed to get a single vote.
She has, in fact, received almost half of the popular votes in the country for president, which is remarkable.
But we have the major disbursements from the billion dollars that the Kamala Harris campaign had to spend.
We have almost half of that in media, buy, and production.
Well, a lot can hide there, can't it?
Media buy makes some sense if it is what it appears.
Things like advertisements, that's pretty classic.
Payroll is, you know, payroll is what payroll is.
Text message outreach.
Text message outreach.
$26 million went to all of those spammy messages that a bunch of us were getting nearly every day in the last weeks of the campaign to encourage us to just, you know, just give $20.
It's going to be an $800, 800% match over here.
This will be a 700% match.
And well, where was all that money going to?
Well, it was going to fund more text messages and it was going to fund already rich people to pretend that they were of their own volition.
Paying for, rather, endorsing Kamala Harris.
So, point of order.
You and I talked at the time that we were getting these text messages about the mystery behind their typical form.
Their typical form was, oh my God, we're surging.
If you're doing it today, we are guaranteed to win.
There was that kind of hyperbole.
Guaranteed to win, but also the mystery of there is an 800% match, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which raised a question that we discussed during the campaign about whether or not that was complete bull.
Whether it was being used to take cash that had come from somewhere else and to launder it into the campaign, which I think is most likely.
It would obviously be incredibly easy to prove fraud if there were simply no 800% match at the point that people were being told that it was.
One possibility was that those weren't coming from the campaign at all.
Sort of seems like they were.
So if they were coming from the campaign, then the question is, what were those matches?
We have a right to know what's going on here.
And one possibility is that there was all kinds of money coming in from big donors that needed the little donors to trigger it in order to disguise it as something other than what it was by turning it into an 800% match.
They were trying to bring in a lot of money and obviously a billion dollars is a huge amount of money for a campaign.
Like what on earth?
I mean, I feel like they could have put some of that money to actually developing policies that would have been good for the American people.
I mean, clearly they could have done, they could have provided us something and they didn't.
So that's an amazing, I think, you know, obviously we will get here, but the upshot of all of this is that the entire campaign was paper thin.
Yeah, but let's just go through the rest of some of these examples here before we get there.
So we have also service fees to the tune of $17 million.
Service.
Service fees.
What was the particular...
Oh, when our bank decided to...
This is back when we had no money at all, like at all, before we even had the very low state of Washington professor salaries that we were living on for a long time.
Yeah, this is back as we were graduate students, and at one point our bank sent us a notice, and it had transferred $40 under the heading balance transfer fee, where they had just simply decided to...
Transfer some of our balance to them as a beat.
Yeah, exactly.
And you fought it because that's what you do.
And I think we got that $40 back.
I believe we did.
Which really meant something.
I still have it.
No, you don't.
But yeah, $17 million in service fees seems like a lot.
I mean, it's the fifth highest category by...
Disbursement by category.
Travel, okay.
Travel, airfare...
Toes that not travel, but okay.
Credit card payment.
Okay.
A lot hides there, right?
12 credit card payment.
I've done bookkeeping and I've worked with accountants and I know that credit card payment doesn't fly.
That's not an item.
It could be listed as funds spent.
Yeah, right.
But then we have, so remember the top, I mean, you can see this on the screen, the top two are media buy and production and media buy, which together add up to more than half of the total, three-fifths of the total.
And so we're down here in like the low, you know, 10 millions here, but we've got event production and media production.
Which I thought media buying production was already up there.
So, you know, there's just a lot, a lot hiding here.
And then, you know, event production again, audiovisual services, videography services, audiovisual services, site rental, political strategy consulting, There's just a lot here in which various things can be hidden.
And political strategy consulting, as a line item here at $2 million, is different from political consulting for a mere $800,000.
Event production and site rental.
The political strategy consulting, they deserve a refund.
Yeah, they really do.
Media consulting.
So just a lot of...
A lot of bad categories for, you know, with that much money, it feels like you could have found a good bookkeeper.
They exist.
I've got one to recommend, but it's too late for you guys.
So, one thing that we heard a lot about during the campaign was that so-called influencers were being paid to be supportive.
Yeah.
And that's where we're getting to next.
Not influencers per se.
I don't have any evidence on TikTok.
People whose names we don't know, but many people of particular demographics would.
But where they may be being paid is in any number of these.
There were many claims made that influenced- Internet access for half a million dollars?
Yeah.
Up to 10 months, and really, like, since she wasn't the candidate until whenever she was, July?
Internet access?
What?
Anyway.
Yeah, it's an incredible expenditure, especially for such a short campaign.
Yeah.
But the paying of influencers and the paying of celebrities, and those two things are different, right?
One of them is sort of a grassroots, and the other one is, you know, a Hollywood phenomenon.
The paying of these two things is so...
It's really...
It's a gaming of the mind.
Yes, it is.
Because we hold these people in a particular place in our mental architecture.
And when they say that they support a candidate, it has a meaning and it is violated if they are being paid to say it.
I mean, it's...
It's a complete inversion.
It's not obvious that anybody should care what celebrities think about who to vote for, but nonetheless, it's a whole different level.
When you get an endorsement in an ad, like in an ad for Cheerios, you know that they're being paid.
Right.
Of course they are.
And hopefully they wouldn't be endorsing that product if they thought it was total crap, but lots of people do.
Yep.
Lots of people do.
You know that you are getting two pieces of information at a time and they should be interpreted side by side and not as a single thing.
That product is for sale and this guy is being paid to endorse it and the people behind the marketing of that product thought that this guy would be a good person to endorse it.
In the case of, and here we can go here next, all of the evidence that all of these celebrities were being paid and then appeared to be showing up of their own volition and endorsing Kamala Harris because they just loved her so much, it's not just lies, but it feels deeply anti-democratic.
It's anti-democratic, and it also flies in the face of the accusations that are being leveled that Elon Musk bought the election for Trump.
Right.
Which is preposterous.
I mean, he went to bat for him, for sure.
But, you know...
I mean, he did arrange buses for the Amish to get to polling places.
And how dare he, really?
I mean, how dare he?
Yeah, yeah.
Alexandros Marinos had a particularly brilliant tweet on this subject.
I don't know if you saw it.
He said, it turns out the quickest route to getting humans to Mars involved is getting the Amish onto buses to go vote.
That's awesome.
Yep.
Sorry, Alex, for no doubt butchering it.
It was phrased very well, but the point is well made.
Yep.
Okay, so we've gone through what the official...
The official disbursement categories that presumably the Kamala Harris campaign produced for the FEC were and have seen how much hides there.
With really only one that is really clear, the Harpo Productions Inc., right?
Which is Oprah's company.
We have, and we'll show a little bit of this video later, but DNC Finance Committee staffer Lindy Lee claims that Al Sharpton's company received $500,000 and within moments promptly endorsed Harris.
So we have the Call Her Daddy podcast, which Kamala Harris famously went on, Kamala Harris wasn't on, apparently, the Call Her Daddy podcast set.
She was unwilling to travel to it, apparently.
And, again, to the tune of a million dollars, had the set precisely recreated closer to where she was.
Now, wait a minute.
Wasn't she running for president?
Isn't one of the expectations of running for president that you're, like, moving around the country and actually interacting with Americans?
Apparently not for Kamala Harris.
Nope, that's not how she runs.
So they created a podcast set for a million dollars, which seems like a lot.
We've built sets and they are expensive, but that seems like a lot.
In order to do that podcast, which appeared to be on the original Call Me Daddy, I guess, podcast set.
I don't know.
I haven't checked that.
I don't know what it originally looks like.
And yeah.
Wait, there's a lot to be said there.
First of all, that million dollars.
Mm-hmm.
I've barely glanced at the set in question.
It was simple.
But it's not remarkable as far as sets go.
Yeah.
Which is no reflection on the podcast.
I'm just saying, what did the million dollars go to?
The million dollars presumably went to the deception.
That is to say, the impression that one has as Kamala Harris shows up and has, I don't mean to be dismissive, but girl chat on the Call Her Daddy podcast is that she has traveled there because that is the natural expectation Of a podcast.
And when a podcast isn't of that nature, you know it because the set isn't the one you're used to.
So, what did they have to do in order for this to work?
A, they had to reproduce it so that all of the huge number of sleuths on the internet couldn't detect that it wasn't real.
That is expensive.
Right?
To reproduce it enough that you can't detect the difference.
That is a remarkable thing to do.
And the other thing is they had to keep it quiet because that would have been at least a fact that was widely discussed.
Why did you force the rebuilding of this set in order not to travel when you're running for president?
So anyway, we're going to come back to this theme again and again, but The inauthenticity of this is absolutely glaring, and notice it's glaring in retrospect.
We were not allowed to know that we were being...
I mean, that is effectively gaslighting.
Yeah, although it does, I mean, it puts, it confirms basically, not precisely, but, and puts into context Joe Rogan's story about, you know, obviously he extended invitations to both presidential candidates.
I don't know if he extended ones to both vice presidential candidates.
I never heard about what might have happened with Tim Walls, but But the story with Kamala that Joe Rogan put out was he invited her.
She said, sure, but we're going to have to do it on a podcast set near me and we're going to restrict it to an hour.
And he said, that's not what I do, which is obviously the right response.
But it feels...
So it raises the question of...
What that would have looked like.
Were they going to be trying to recreate Joe Rogan's set?
I don't know.
If they were going to restrict it to an hour, it would already have been so weird and not like anything else he did that it would have been hard to play off as anything normal.
He would never put up with it, I feel.
No, I know he never would have put up with it, but it raises the question of whether or not they would have tried to recreate a set that looked like his, given that other parameters weren't like what they usually did.
Whereas, and again, I've never watched Call Her Daddy, I don't know, but presumably that played like a normal episode.
Right.
The other thing I will point out, and this is just something we can't know, But there's the question.
It's obviously ridiculous to recreate a set and even just to run the risk that you'll be exposed because you didn't get something perfect, right?
To run that risk is crazy when the alternative is get on your private jet and fly there and do the episode.
But it does open the possibility That there was some reason that they didn't want to do it, that they needed the home court advantage.
And that worries me.
That it may have been about maintaining some kind of control over the interaction that we can't know about.
And there is, of course, a mystery here, which is why is this person who was repeatedly asked if they had made any mistakes or had any regrets and couldn't answer the same question no matter how many times it was posed, Well, running as the agent of change.
Right.
And successfully navigating a unscripted debate.
So what was that?
What was the distinction between not being able to field a softball question and being able to function in a live fire exercise?
And she did fine during the debate.
Right.
We don't know how or why.
And so maybe it was just that, you know, she has good days and bad days, but that's pretty weird.
I don't know anybody who has good days and bad days that are that different from each other, except for me on this episode.
But I don't know people who have good days and bad days.
No, people with dementia.
But that's not, no one has claimed that that's what's going on.
That's not what's going on for her.
So, the question is, was the million dollars spent in order to retain the home court advantage because there's something we don't know about the magic of Kamala when she's on script?
Okay, so...
Oh, then there's a story, and I don't think this has been totally established yet, but many people are talking about, and I've showed you the FEC data on the disbursement categories that the Harris campaign produced for them.
You know, $600 million in unspecified sort of media broadcast and events.
But the story is that many of the big names received big payments, big payouts to come before a rally.
So we have Megan Thee Stallion, Eminem, Beyonce, and many, many more.
And what we were hearing, remember, before the election, was that you'd have these events like, ah, look who's endorsing Kabbalah, look who's playing.
And the big crowds came out to see these stars perform because, of course, usually ticket prices have got to be hundreds of dollars.
Like, you can come for free.
And then they were leaving before the actual rally started.
And, you know, of course they would if your candidate has nothing to say.
Nothing to offer.
There was nothing there, there, except buying off rich people with some talent and fame to come play for crowds that really only cared about that.
Yeah, I'm stumbling over talent, but forget that.
It's neither here nor there.
I think Beyonce has talent.
Beyonce has talent.
I'm not so convinced about Megan Thee Stallion.
But in any case, again, the phoniness of this is not just that you've got a celebrity appearing to endorse a candidate as if enthusiastic about that candidate when there's nothing to be enthusiastic about.
But the point of it Is obviously to put a crowd there that leaves the impression that the candidate is popular amongst voters.
So you're faking every aspect of this.
You're faking the enthusiasm of these famous people.
You're faking the enthusiasm of the crowd.
This is all done for the camera, which you will actually spend a million dollars to pretend you're on a podcast set that you're not on.
This is so fake across the board that really...
And you've removed the ability of the observer to actually know what is true.
This from the party that is all about mis-dis and malinformation, right?
As you were just talking about, when you see an advertisement on television, you know that the person, famous or not, is being paid to appear in that ad.
You understand that that is part of what has happened to bring that ad before you.
You know, an ad anywhere.
We expect to know when we are seeing advertisements.
Endorsements that are being paid for are effectively advertisements, and we were never led to believe that what we were seeing was advertisements.
And so, of course, some number of people will have gotten confused because they had no way not to be confused and conflated the, oh, this person that I love to listen to is endorsing this person who I don't know, well, I guess I'll vote for them.
And I will say that the one...
Big name who famously endorsed Kamala Harris, whom I have not heard at all implicated in any of this mess, is Taylor Swift.
But that may be, insofar as she is, that may be an organic endorsement.
I don't know.
But also, you know, I mean, many of these people are richer than God, but she certainly is and wouldn't need it.
But then, you know, nor does Oprah.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it...
There's an obvious racket here, as you point out.
It's antithetical to the intent behind a democratic republic.
This is the inversion of it.
And I feel like, so we are going to show this video here in a minute, but let me just get to my punchline first, which is this feels like Robin Hood in reverse.
This feels like stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
Those text messages, the small donors, the outreach constantly to people giving $10, $20, $50, $100.
This is the working class and the middle class who were being tapped repeatedly for money and many of them were giving it and a bunch of that money was going to famous people to perform as if they hadn't been paid.
That is Robin Hood in reverse.
Wait, I like your metaphor here.
It is also happening downstream of a terror campaign.
The portrayal of Trump as Hitler was used to motivate people to part with small amounts of cash in order to somehow justify mysterious large amounts of cash to be infused into a campaign that was entirely phony.
Using fear and intimidation.
Yeah.
Again.
Fear and intimidation to drive the little guy to contribute to this thing that's obvious.
I mean, think about it in the context.
Again, we don't know that this is true.
It's speculation, but those text messages, which appear to have been authentic, say eight times match if you donate, right?
Yeah.
That implies a huge amount of money making a nonsense gamble.
Why, if you had a huge amount of money and you were trying to elect Kamala Harris, would you hold it back unless the little guy donated a little bit?
Why would you do that?
It's not necessary.
The eight times dwarfs the little contribution, so why wouldn't you just infuse it?
That really does suggest that there was some necessity to get the little guy to do it, right?
That it's cover, that it makes it look like a grassroots campaign, when the answer is, actually, there is a huge amount of money trying to elect an incompetent person An incompetent person who was not nominated through any normal process, was just installed.
So what is that huge amount of money?
Who were those people?
Why did they want this person elected?
Obviously, they're not patriotic Americans if they wanted an empty suit in the White House because that would be an insane thing to inflict on the public.
They must have had another agenda.
And this just leaves me with a question of what it was.
Yep, me too.
So, I'm going to show this little bit from From News Nation, in which the host is talking to DNC Finance Committee staffer, Lindy Lee, who has, you know, left the reservation, as it were, and is speaking out.
Before we show it, though, I want to say I don't totally trust her.
It's, you know, he, the interviewer in this piece, gives all, you know, says like, are you going to be okay?
You know, you always have a platform here.
And I feel like, oh, she's doing exactly what you would do if you were at all smart.
And, you know, actually speaking truth now that it's clear that the whole thing is about to unravel.
And furthermore, a piece of the video we're not going to show here, although we'll link it in the show notes, she talks about being assured that they were going to win 100%, even the night of.
And she acts therefore like she was betrayed.
Like, all of her work getting money from big donors and small was with the understanding, the assurances from the people who knew that there was a 100% guarantee that the Harris campaign was going to win.
So, A, what?
Like, how could they ever have known that?
Even, you know, putting aside the fact that they turned out to be wrong.
But more to the point with regard to this particular person, how could you be working as a Hire up, you know, finance committee staffer and be looking at, you know, your entire work is this campaign.
Why would you go to a self-appointed expert to find out whether or not your work was going to be for naught?
Why wouldn't you be doing what all the rest of us were doing and looking around and talking to people and looking at the signs in various places and watching a variety of news sources and using that to gauge what might actually be happening?
This feels to me like, and so I do appreciate what she's doing.
In many regards, I'm going to show a piece of this where I truly appreciate what she's bringing to light, which is in part a repeat of what we've just gone through here.
But this is part of what got us into the COVID madness.
It's part of what got us into the mess with higher ed.
It's part of what got us into the mess with You know, the NIH and NSF with science funding.
It's people going like, oh, well, I don't understand that thing, so I'm just going to look for an expert.
And I'm going to ask the expert the question.
The expert's going to give me an answer and look very sage doing it.
And then I'm going to decide the expert must know what's going on so I can just stop my brain.
I can just turn it off and not do any thinking anymore.
If a freaking...
I keep having to look for her title.
DNC Finance Committee staffer was taking at their word Other people on the campaign, even she says as late as 9 and 10 p.m.
on election night, that there was a 100% chance they were going to win, then that reveals so much that is wrong about the system with both individual people's brands and with the system at large.
I mean, I think it reveals something else.
I mean, I know where you're going to go, but we don't know this for sure.
We don't know anything for sure.
But I think the idea, frankly, you wouldn't go and look at publicly available information if you thought that the reason that you were going to win wasn't about the public.
And so anyway, you know, there does not appear to have been massive cheating at the ballot box in the presidential race.
Why that was, I don't know.
I think we have to ask the question.
Many of us spoke about the need to have a victory too big to rig because we were afraid of the cheat margin.
And the fact is, If the powers that be knew the size of the victory that was coming and that it was too big to rig, then they wouldn't have rigged it.
So the point is...
Given that she has said these things, this person who is coming out about the truth behind the campaign spending otherwise, and then she's leaving these little breadcrumbs in which, frankly, she comes off looking like a crazy person who doesn't know how to think for herself.
I was assured 100% that we are going to win.
If those are in fact breadcrumbs, then she needs to have the full courage of her convictions that she's already begun and say this.
Say, of course I went to them rather than looking at the evidence from the people because it wasn't about the people.
Yep.
Okay.
Are we ready to show this little clip?
What do you think of these allegations of what Oprah, I mean, either they paid the production company or they didn't.
I've never heard of people getting paid for endorsements.
Paying to perform, maybe, maybe, but usually they give it.
But do you believe it?
It's not a matter of believing.
It's literally in the report.
And she can deny it however much she wants to, but it says Harper Productions on the FEC report.
I really don't know how you get around that.
It's her company.
And she may not have gotten paid personally as a person, but it paid her company.
So I think this is a matter of semantics.
She got paid.
And it's just if my donors had known beforehand that the money would be dispersed this way, I do not think they would have given.
You know, it's a sacred trust.
These people, a lot of my donors have worked hard all their lives.
And again, these are everyday Americans around the country.
I didn't just deal with big donors.
I also fundraised some grassroots donors who gave $25, as I mentioned.
I did something called Geeks and Nerds for Harris.
People were giving like $10 to $15.
These are people, you know, some people are living paycheck to paycheck.
So it's a sacred trust for them to give money to a campaign.
It is our utmost responsibility to use that money in a responsible manner and to not treat it as OPM, which is other people's money.
If we can't handle campaign money the right way, how can taxpayers, how can Americans possibly trust us that we would handle taxpayer money the right way?
So, to be clear, we have no idea if all the people that they were showing during that clip were in any way paid.
I would hope and assume not, but I have no idea.
The people on stage, we think were.
Yeah, I mean, we just don't know what the relationship is between the people who put the stage on and the people who showed up there.
I would also just point out that there is something, you know, with the...
I don't even know what to call him.
Frankly, I think calling him P. Diddy is insane.
Sean Combs' revelations.
In light of what is going on, there is obviously some kind of panic.
Some group of people is looking to not lose control of the political structure because they're afraid of What might emerge.
And so, you know, some of the endorsements appeared to be motivated by fear of that.
So anyway, who knows what each of the individual explanations is.
But overwhelmingly, there is an apparent effort to create an artificial impression of enthusiasm, which would be bad enough if she had won If she had won the nomination in a normal contest, it would still be insane to create this false impression of enthusiasm about her.
But downstream of her being simply installed in that position, and then we were all told that she was so wildly popular and that, you know, that lasted for a week or something.
But then to try to keep it going, to keep the impression going, this is, you know, this is like wag the dog level phony, right?
That movie?
Yeah.
This is just a completely synthetic impression of enthusiasm, which then turned out not to be manifested at the polls at all.
Yeah.
Although...
I think we may have mentioned this last week, but even Democrats now are talking about this as a route, a mandate.
But the fact that Trump won all the swing states, and every state that anyone thought he had any chance of winning, Is great, in my estimation.
But you look at the numbers, the popular vote in each of those states, and they're still all close.
And so we still need unity.
We still need unity for all the reasons.
But nearly half of the voting public still voted for someone.
Who, through farce and magic and paying people to act like they were endorsing her for free, with no apparent skills, no history of important or good deeds, and no ability to speak truth in any way off the cuff, with the possible exception of her performance during the debate.
Voted for her.
And they not only voted for her, and actually, maybe this is the next place we should go, but they have beliefs about her that are just untethered from reality.
All right.
So I want to...
There's a lot to make about the symmetry of the two teams viewing each other as an existential threat.
Yeah.
But I think that that symmetry actually throws us off of something much more stark.
If you think about why people, to the extent that there were people who were enthusiastic about Kamala Harris with no accomplishments, no ability to articulate a vision, no policies to propose that made sense, What was that enthusiasm?
Well, that enthusiasm was downstream of multiple psyops, right?
We can see this campaign to portray Kamala as a down-to-earth person on podcasts, but of course a down-to-earth person doesn't rebuild a set for a million dollars in order to avoid getting on an airplane.
Right?
So there's the sort of public-level psyop, the paid endorsements, the paid influencers, all of that phony stuff.
Plus, whatever the Project Mockingbird 2.0 is, all the broadcast media saying the same things, the hyperventilating about the danger of Donald Trump and the portraying Kamala Harris as a serious candidate and all of this.
So...
All of those things functioned to make Kamala Harris more substantial in this election than she should have been, by a lot.
And all of those things worked against the other candidates.
The point is, Trump's landslide is in spite of all of those things, and Kamala's support is because of them.
So that's like the maximum level of inversion.
One of these things is completely inorganic, and whether you like it or not, the other one is organic.
It is.
Yep.
Yeah, actually, let me just share with you here.
You can show my screen if you like.
Smith College, which, as you know, I have some relationship with, having attended for five weeks once.
A story for another time.
But in dropping out, you also dropped out of Penn and we started our lives together.
Yeah, we did.
Yeah.
One burning Toyota in the middle of Nebraska later and we were off to the races.
A lot of illusions that nobody's gonna get.
Oh, those weren't illusions.
That was a literal report, part of the story, yeah.
Okay, so Smith College, which I get alumni information from, even though I literally attended for only five weeks, much to my chagrin of my mother, I'm sorry, put out today, I got in my inbox, I think, or maybe it was yesterday, or recently, whatever, hope and action, faculty and students reflect on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Smith College, for those who don't know, is a women's college, one of the original Seven Sisters, which includes Matt Holyoke and Radcliffe, Vassar, some of which have, like, Vassar have become co-ed, but Smith is not.
Although, of course, they are wrestling.
All of these colleges are wrestling, these single-sex colleges, with what to do with the trans people.
I was going to ask you, do you know what Smith has done?
I don't know what Smith has done.
I believe that I remember from a couple years ago that Mount Holyoke, which is in the same cluster of five colleges geographically as Smith, along with Amherst Hampshire and UMass Amherst, that I believe that they started letting in Boy, I can't even remember which way it was now.
It's a struggle, because do you let in women, even if they think they're men?
Or do you let in trans women, who are actually men, but think they're women?
Like, really, you should just say, it's women, and if you think you're a man, okay.
But, like, do you really want to be here?
Fine, you can come.
But anyway, I don't know what Smith's policy has been.
But just a couple of paragraphs from this.
Loretta Ross, associate professor of the study of women and gender, didn't mince words when reflecting on the election results.
Just plain misogyny, she said.
Harris ran a flawless campaign.
Now, I have seen this phrase.
Harris ran a flawless campaign in other places.
I've seen this.
This claim that people are making.
And...
I just don't even know what to do with that.
I don't know what could possibly provoke you to say that.
And frankly, and I hate that this is going to smack of identity politics, but especially if you're a woman, especially if you're a woman who is a professor of the study of women and gender, which I'm sure that's a bullshit field, but if you are a woman looking forward to there being a woman in the highest office in the land of the United States of America, which will happen at some point, Why would you want it to have been this woman?
There is no way that you should have wanted it to become this woman.
So let me just read the last, the second two paragraphs here that I want to read from this Smith thing.
Carrie Baker, Sylvia Lugash Baumann, Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Well, she's got that exactly backwards.
Baker, who has written frequently about access to abortion, expects the Trump administration will, quote, ban abortion nationwide and restrict access to contraception.
I'm sorry, but the delusional expectations of some random women's studies professor doesn't make it true.
There's no evidence that that's going to happen.
The stuff in the previous paragraph is backwards.
Like, Harris and Walls were the ones who were interested in breaking down the barriers to men getting into women's bathrooms and sports and rape crisis centers and prisons.
So, The delusion is surprising to me, and I know you have something to say here, but let me actually, if I can have my screen back here for a minute to find what I need to find, let me just share with everyone the first just four paragraphs of what I post on Natural Selections this week.
Reason for optimism, and that is where I want us to end up, is reason for optimism even in a hall of mirrors.
Three presidential elections in a row with three rounds of outrage and disbelief.
Three presidential elections in a row and three rounds of excitement and relief.
We are in a hall of mirrors.
We can be sitting right next to someone who has been shown entirely different facts about what is true.
Facts which demonstrate how decrepit Joe Biden is, how sexist Donald Trump is, how incompetent Kamala Harris is.
I don't believe the middle of those three statements, and I do believe the others.
Many people believe the opposite of what I do.
None of us are inherently fools or fascists for believing what we do.
So I would like to try to understand how these professors at Smith, who are teaching some of the best minds in America, presumably, if Smith's reputation is any reason to think that many of the best, and I know a few of them who have applied and gone to Smith recently, are great young women.
Professors there are arguing that Harris ran a flawless campaign and that Trump won due to misogyny and sexism and that he's going to enact a nationwide abortion ban.
This is beyond a disservice.
This is anti-education.
And this is a large part of why many of us And many of us who are not far right or, you know, fascist or any of it are saying that the entire educational system needs to be redone from the bottom up because this is insane.
So I want to drill down on this question about the Flawless Campaign and why that formulation comes up.
There is, within the woke architecture, There is effectively an assumption that she will have run a flawless campaign because it will be impossible to identify any flaws because to identify them would be the result of racism or misogyny or both.
There's the progressive stack, yes.
So, in effect, this is a circular notion.
She ran a flawless campaign because a woman of color would be incapable of doing anything else, so it was a flawless campaign, right?
Which then goes to this question of misogyny, and I want to point out a little pattern here, okay?
If you think about several examples, right?
We had the meltdown over George Floyd and the white supremacy of the United States, right?
Yes.
After Barack Obama had been elected president twice.
Black man.
Is this a wildly racist country?
Is it white supremacist?
Well, a white supremacist country would be unlikely to elect a black man twice.
So, no, it's not a white supremacist country.
But the fact that he wasn't in office at that exact moment allows you to make the claim, right?
People just can't put two and two together.
That's like what happened at Evergreen.
Right.
Evergreen.
Same damn thing.
We had this meltdown over white supremacy at Evergreen under, yes, a doughy white president, but the president that preceded him immediately, the longest serving president at the college, was a black man.
And they actually shouted him down when he came back as a building was being named in his honor.
A black man with actual skills for the job who never would have put up with that shit.
Never would have, and didn't put up with it when they shouted him down.
He actually shouted back.
He was one of the few people who did.
And then I would just point this out, and this requires us to do a little stretch because we can't be...
I mean, I think we can be certain based on the actual evidence, but we haven't had it demonstrated.
But are you telling me that this is a misogynist country that voted for Donald Trump out of misogyny?
Just run the thought experiment of they actually had allowed Tulsi Gabbard to get the nomination.
If Tulsi Gabbard had gotten the nomination, she would have been elected in a landslide, I believe.
In 2020?
Yeah.
Let's put it this way.
She would have been extremely popular among all the people who voted for Trump, even if the election might not have come out in her favor.
The point is, there is no misogyny here driving this.
Put the right woman in the position and you'll get support from everybody.
These are fiction.
I don't doubt that there are a handful, relatively speaking, of people in the country who won't vote for a black man, who won't vote for a woman.
And those may be slightly different people with some overlap.
But that's a small number of people.
It's a really small.
It's too small to matter.
It is not.
We're talking about what is the explanation for the election, right?
This person is claiming it's misogyny, but it's obviously not misogyny because the fact is we're wildly supportive of powerful women who demonstrate their capacity to do cool stuff.
It's just, it's unambiguous.
And so, you know, the point is it's the assumption being reported as the conclusion.
It's exactly that again, which again points to our need for, you know, actual Actual education in, yes, science, but even more basic, just like logical thinking, logical analysis, cause and effect, and, you know, correlation, and, you know, order of operations in thinking, and what your claim actually establishes, as opposed to what you would like your claim to appear to establish.
That's right.
And it's the distinction between those last two things.
What your claim actually establishes versus what you want it to appear to have established.
That is the bait-and-switch that we're seeing most often in journalism and in professorial thinking.
Where, well, the only possible outcome, the only possible reason for this outcome is sexism, therefore sexism.
Well, you started with your conclusion.
Where's your evidence?
Well, it had to be sexism because that's the only possible thing.
We had a solution set of one, so it has to be the one solution that I've already provided.
There's almost never a solution set of one, but you only allowed one thing to be considered.
So why do you get to act surprised or smug or, you know, pleased with your own analysis that you came up with the one thing that you allowed us to think in the first place?
Right, which was motivated by a desire to accomplish something, not by analysis.
Right.
And I would just point out, right before we went on today, I noticed that Tulsi Gabbard is being suggested as the Director of National Intelligence.
You do not see a backlash from all of the people who supported Trump over the idea that Tulsi Gabbard would be in this very important position, and yet is a woman, and how could she possibly handle it?
That backlash doesn't exist.
I mean, he's apparently in line to appoint a number of women.
Yep, chief of staff.
Super thrilled with, but there are a lot of women in the lineup that we've seen.
Right.
And that is a non-issue because frankly, this is actually, you know, it's a settled fact, right?
Women have achieved equality in this realm.
And, you know, does that mean, you know, perfect equality with respect to gaining access to the presidency?
No, but, you know, It's a preposterous claim.
It's the assumption of the system.
But I also wanted to point out something about the asymmetry again between these two perspectives.
Let's call them the blue and the red perspective.
The many red-leaning folks at the moment are struggling with the reactions of blue team folks.
The idea is that support of Trump is a sufficiently sizable moral breach that they're being tossed out of the lives of friends and family, things like this.
I'm sure it happened somewhere.
That did not happen in reverse.
The fact is, those of us who have red leanings, and that's not where we've historically been, but it's where we are now, those of us who have red leanings have certainly had pointed conversations with people in our lives, friends and family, who viewed things the other way, and we don't necessarily understand why they see things the way they do, but we're not tossing anybody out of our lives over it.
This is ridiculous.
And the point is, that's a profound asymmetry, and frankly, it...
It fits with one of the ways that cults function, right?
Cults force you to break bonds with people who might be able to bring your attention back to reality.
And the idea that we have this completely synthetic blue madness portraying itself as a popular movement Right?
That's so manipulative.
I mean, it's effectively, it's like laugh track used for garbage humor, right?
If you've got really low quality humor that's not going to cause anybody to so much as snicker, and then you put an uproarious laugh track so it feels like you're in a room full of people who think it's very funny, and what's more, it feels like you're kind of not right if You aren't laughing and everybody else is laughing, so the laugh track is manipulative.
This is manipulative, too, in exactly the same way.
It portrays you as out of step when, in fact, huge numbers of people have to be looking at this and saying, wait a second, I didn't nominate that person.
I didn't participate in a process that nominated that person.
That person was simply installed.
I'm not enthusiastic about that.
That should have been a very common thought amongst Democrats.
And it almost didn't occur because of this impression that came almost entirely through screens that this person was being supported by huge numbers of citizens.
Well, I think, you know, one of the clever moves of the DNC during all of this was finally reading the room enough or, you know, either being forced to read the room because of Biden's performance in the debate or having known for a while that that was going to be the moment when they got to do their switch.
At the time, the person they chose in Kamala seemed like a totally insane choice to many of us.
It really seemed like an impossible.
They would never go with her because of how unpopular and incompetent she demonstrably was.
But I at least failed to account for the incredible relief and even joy that people would feel that Democrats who were going to vote blue no matter who Would feel, after having seen that debate with Biden, at the opportunity to vote for someone who wasn't demonstrably demented, right?
And so the Democratic National Convention came not too long after she was anointed and appointed And it was all hail Kamala, right?
Like everyone was excited.
And I don't remember her speech there.
I think it was okay.
But mostly it wasn't about her.
Mostly it was like both the Obamas showed up and they're both great orators and like a lot of people showed up.
And of course that hall was packed because the conventions are always packed.
And so they had no trouble demonstrating that there were lots of people there and they were over the moon that they could vote for someone who was young and vibrant.
That's the only thing she was going for her, but she's young and vibrant compared to the president, who is neither.
So there was that, but they could have used that energy, that rocket fuel, with anyone.
And it could have been someone who was actually competent, who was actually fit for office.
Yeah, they could have used that rocket fuel with anyone, and they went with the second yellow dog in a row.
And that is really, for those who don't know the reference, there used to be a description of something called a yellow dog Democrat.
And a yellow dog Democrat was somebody who would literally vote for a yellow dog if it ran as a Democrat, because it's the earlier version of blue no matter who.
And the point is, blue no matter who, I mean, it's insane on its face, but there's no way that that should be an invitation to run an empty suit.
And the fact that the Democratic Party has run two empty suits in a row tells you that they don't have a bench full of people who are in sync with their values and presentable.
And I think that's horrifying.
I think I know what it's about, and I've said it many times.
The Democratic Party has become...
An influence peddling racket and the fact is it cannot embrace its former popular members like Tulsi and like Bobby Kennedy and Andrew Yang or any of the people who showed promise because to have somebody with actual values in high office is a danger to the racket.
That's why they don't do it.
So, okay, it's empty suits after empty suits, and then you have a completely phony campaign designed to create the impression of enthusiasm, which never existed, and that's a terrifying situation.
This is beyond idiocracy.
Yep.
Now, there's one other point.
I know you were going to make it because when we talked about what you wanted to discuss today, you mentioned it and we haven't talked about it.
But I want to compare what Kamala's campaign did paying these mega celebrities and influencers to create the impression of enthusiasm.
I want to compare that to what we know from behind the scenes at Rescue the Republic.
Now, at Rescue the Republic, Well, and let me just say, not just behind the scenes, you were one of the three organizers.
You know for sure what happened with funding and payments and all of this.
Yes.
And I will tell you, we didn't pay anybody to get on that stage.
We helped some people with travel, but nobody came out ahead for showing up on that stage.
On a stage with a huge number of people who are accustomed to getting speaker's fees.
Almost everyone there would have normally gotten a speaker's fee.
Yep.
And they did it.
They all did it because they thought...
We all did it.
We all did it because we thought the cause was so important and the risks needed to be taken to get that message out.
Now, it wasn't a political message, but nonetheless, it was done because there was actual enthusiasm for what it was that we were presenting.
A message of unity, a message of the necessity to rescue the Republic in order to save the West because those things mattered.
It seemed truly, truly important to all of us who were there.
And we know of a few of the big names who were there who changed their plans that they already had in order to be there because they saw it as so important.
Yeah, people suffered costs over it, and nobody complained.
But the point is, that was actual enthusiasm.
And the phony enthusiasm, if you're looking at it through a screen, maybe it doesn't look different, or maybe it looks better, right?
Maybe it looks, you know, the production values are higher or something.
But the insanity in a democratic republic of having somebody create A phony candidate for president?
I mean, that's really what happened.
We had a non-starter who made it almost across the finish line.
We got real close to losing the Republic.
And again, whatever you may think of Donald Trump and the team he has brought into power, thank goodness that there was enough actual democracy left in our Republic in order for the people to get their choice into the office.
Indeed.
On that happy note, shall we talk about seed oils?
If we must.
Well, the New York Times thinks they're awesome.
They are, but as an industrial lubricant.
Ah, that's not their take, actually.
You'll be surprised.
I am surprised to hear that.
Yeah, I knew you would be.
Let's see.
Okay, here we are.
The New York Times.
Are seed oils actually bad for you?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and others claim they're harming our health, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
Here we go.
So this, oh, don't this look delicious?
Doesn't that just make you want to eat?
It does.
Look at that.
Yeah, yeah.
And arrange a hue of colors.
And that's not just the crappy plastic they're sitting in either.
Okay, so this is published November 9th, so a few days ago.
I'm going to read a few paragraphs from this amazing article.
To their many vocal detractors, they're referred to as the hateful eight.
I've never heard anyone refer to them as that, by the way.
And we both spend a lot of time in like seed oil territory.
Like, have you ever heard anyone call them the hateful eight?
No, and I think we should reserve the term the Hateful Eight for a list of eight people I'm going to come up with shortly.
Excellent.
I know at least two of them on that list already.
Canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, and other refined oils made from the seeds of certain plants have become lightning rods for wellness influencers and some politicians.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
says Americans are being unknowingly poisoned by them.
Online forums, blogs, and influencers say they're toxic, slowly killing you and driving up rates of diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases.
The claim that seed oils are ruining our health is especially rankling to nutrition scientists who see them as a big step forward from butter and lard.
Decades of research have shown that consuming seed oils is associated with better health, said Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
We're going to talk a little bit about Gardner later.
Yeah, I feel like professor and medicine should probably be in quotes.
Well, at this point, so should the university and Stanford.
Yeah, indeed.
Stanford is what Stanford is, but professor, medicine, and university, not the labels, not what is inside those things that used to be inside those things.
To suggest otherwise, he added, just undermines the science.
The science!
The science arises again, yes.
We asked scientists to help clear up the confusion about how these oils affect our bodies.
What are seed oils?
Seed oils have become shorthand for refined plant-based vegetable oils.
Technically, not all of the hateful eight oils, which also include cottonseed, soybean, safflower, grapeseed, and rice brown oils, are made from seeds.
Soybean oil, for example, is made from a bean.
All right.
We're sending that person back to Botany 101.
She has a PhD in nutrition.
The author of this article, all of the people she cites and the author herself, they all have PhDs in nutrition and nutrition science, which tells you right away that whatever's going on in nutrition departments, that also needs to get burned to the ground.
These people have no idea what they're doing.
Just Botany 101, you said?
Yeah.
All beans are seeds.
Not all seeds are beans.
It's simple.
It's just a little nested sets problem.
Okay?
So, oh my god.
They called it a bean.
It must not be a seed.
What is actually wrong with these people?
Like, that's the defense?
Yeah.
They're not even all seed oils.
Yeah.
My god.
Brilliant.
Okay.
And there are other seed oils like sesame and flaxseed oils that aren't on that list.
Now that's actually an interesting point, right?
And the reason, largely, briefly, that I know less about flaxseed oil, but sesame seed oil is an oil that has been made from sesame seeds For thousands of years.
This is a traditional food that has been, you know, smashed from sesame seeds and is still, at least sometimes, being made in more or less traditional ways without all of the additional processes and detergents and crap that is going into the industrial, the hateful eight, if you will.
Right?
So it's not that sesame seed oil couldn't be produced with all of the extra crap in it, which would make it just as toxic.
But it largely isn't, in part because it pre-exists, and I suspect that the same thing is true for flaxseed oil, although I'm not sure about that.
It is a culinary product that pre-exists the industrial age.
Yeah, I think this is exactly right.
And so let's explore a little bit the logic here.
Um, and I actually, I think we should give a, uh, a hat tip to Zach.
Absolutely.
Whom you and I both, uh, were alerted to the whole landscape around seed oils.
So I have said this publicly and I feel like I just wrote it somewhere, but we had eradicated seed oils from our pantry some years ago.
We had had canola oil in our pantry during the life of our children.
In fact, there's one cake that I make that is oil rather than butter based.
And it calls for, like, rapeseed oil.
And I usually use canola.
And many years ago, but not soon enough, I replaced it with either olive or avocado oil.
But knowing that there was something that just didn't feel quite right, right?
But it was indeed Zach in the last couple of years who dug deep and really informed us of much of what we understand about seed oils now.
Our son, Zach, who is 20 now.
And the former producer of the Dark Horse podcast.
One of the things I learned from him, which I think is really the key to understanding what's going on here, is that the problem is largely in the mechanisms that are necessary to extract the oil from the seeds that make up this group of oil-producing plants.
And that basically, these are plants that are reluctant to give up their oils, and so you have to use things like detergents in order to get the oils out into an extracted form.
And then you use additional detergents and such to imbue them with magical qualities which make them shelf-stable and non-smoking at home.
So basically you're talking about some molecule that was produced inside of a seed, but it is an industrial process that turns it into anything that can be used as a food, which is suspect on its face.
And so your point about sesame seeds and their ancientness is...
Clearly going to be right.
Why are sesame seeds special?
Is it the fact that they're, you know, seeds that makes these things bad?
No, it's the fact that these are seeds that we've just figured out in the industrial age how to get the oil out of in order to use it that is the problem.
And I would point out there's another exception.
Coconut.
Yes.
Coconut is a seed.
Yes.
Coconut oil is fantastic.
It's fantastic for you.
So I would argue...
Water, lard, coconut, olive.
I would argue that the reason just, you know, this is going to strike people as a weird analogy and maybe I'm just in a weird mood, but...
If you think about, let's talk about the clade, the carnivora, right?
The carnivora includes all your favorite beasts that aren't monkeys, right?
It includes bears and raccoons and cats.
Now you've done it.
Some people really love bunny rabbits.
Yeah.
All right.
But are they anybody's favorite?
Squirrels.
I love squirrels, but I got to say the carnivores got it going on.
But notice- It's got the hyenas.
Everyone loves hyenas.
Not everyone loves hyenas.
Are you making this easy for you?
You're really not making this easy enough.
Here's my point.
If you compare all of the little cats that exist in the world, things that look like house cats that exist in the various habitats of the world, and you compare them to something like skunks, Just think about them in your mind.
These are both, you know, diminutive carnivorans.
You know, one is speedy and agile, and the other one is sort of cute and lumbering, right?
Why?
Oh, well, it's got a defense.
Right?
So it doesn't need to be so damn speedy because it doesn't need to avoid predators in the same way that a small cat does.
So here's my point.
The coconut has a line of defense that is physical.
So the seed oil in coconut is not chemically defended in the same way that most plants defend their seeds with secondary compounds.
So for those who don't know, a secondary compound Is a compound inside of a plant that is not useful to the plant itself.
It's there to poison animals that would eat it.
And so the distribution, if you look at a fruit, for example, a fruit like an apple, the apple flesh is healthy and good to eat.
It doesn't have poisons in it because it's intended to be eaten in order to get you to distribute the seeds.
The seeds have cyanide in them in order to prevent you from Deciding to turn them into a food.
So seeds are often well defended.
The coconut is defended by this incredibly difficult-to-penetrate coating, actually two coatings.
And so...
Which is designed, sorry, I was looking up skunks exactly where they fall in the carnivore and family tree, because I just have to...
Oh, I think I know.
I think they're just outside of the Mestelids.
Yeah, so they're in the micelloids.
Yep.
Exactly.
So they're related to like minks and other lovely things like that.
Yep.
Did you say, I imagine that you did, that what they're adapted for is traversing long ocean journeys?
I haven't said it yet.
Sorry.
Yeah, coconut is basically encased in a boat.
And the idea is it can float thousands of miles and show up on a beach.
And if you've traveled to tropical beaches, you've probably seen a coconut sprouting on a beach somewhere, you know, the cotyledon sticking straight out of the husk of the coconut.
But anyway, the point is that if you've ever tried to open a coconut, You know the coconut that travels the world's oceans is not the coconut you get in the supermarket.
Even if they're the same critter, the coconut in the supermarket and the one that shows up in cartoons with the cute little dots on the end of it is actually, it's had the wood removed from it, which is very difficult to do.
Yeah, not particularly wood because it's a monocot.
But yeah, you would like substance that allows them to float around in the ocean.
So anyway, the point is a seed that is defended so thoroughly physically doesn't need a chemical defense and therefore we can extract the oil and it's good for us, right?
So yeah, it's not the fact that it's a seed oil.
It's a plant egg in a way.
Right.
It's a nutritious plant egg is basically what it is.
But they're also great for you.
So seed oils is actually maybe the one saving grace of this article is that the category seed oil is too approximate.
It's not the fact of it being a seed oil that makes it good or bad.
It's the fact of it having toxins and needing an industrial process to extract it that makes them dangerous.
And anyway, coconuts and sesame are exceptions for two very different reasons.
Exactly.
So just a little bit more from this article.
Seed oils are made by pressing the seeds to draw out the oils, said Eric Decker, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
If you stop there, you have a cold-pressed oil, like extra virgin olive oil, which is rich in beneficial plant-based compounds but prone to smoking and degradation when cooked at high heat.
So this is, I don't know if it's intentionally confusing or just confusing because neither the author nor the professor of food science know what they're talking about, perhaps both.
But this makes it sound like olive oil is a seed oil.
She doesn't say that directly, but it's not.
And I actually, I feel like I made this error on Dark Horse myself a couple years ago before I thought very deeply about this.
The oils that we get from olives are from the fruits, not the seeds.
You don't press the seeds to make olive oil, you press the fruits, which is what you eat when you eat olives.
That's a fruit.
So it's a totally different thing.
It's the same thing with olive oil.
I mean, same thing with avocado oil.
Olive oil is indeed the same thing as olive oil.
I know you will feel that surprising.
Seems like circular logic.
And then also the prone to smoke and degradation when cooked at high heat.
I am increasingly questioning this conclusion as well.
Our sponsor, the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, disagrees with this assessment, and I have begun cautiously at first doing some sauteing and high heat frying in olive oil in his amazing olive oils, and it seems to work just fine.
So the smoking and degradation of cooked high heat may be partially about the age and impurity of most of the olive oil that's available in supermarkets.
Yeah, and I will also say this speaks to the elephant in the room, which is that apparently the American Heart Association was a trade group that was started to promote the use of seed oils as if they were healthy.
And so much of the madness that reached families back when we were growing up about you know well it's dangerous and you know margarine is heart healthy all of that nonsense was a slick advertising campaign that none of us understood was an advertising campaign disguised as you know heart advice and who knows how much damage was done as a result of it but Let's put it this way.
There's an analogy to what we have described as the game of pharma, right?
The game of pharma involves owning a molecule that has a plausible utility, demonizing competitor molecules as not safe and ineffective, promoting your molecule as if it was way better than it is and way safer than it is.
Yada, yada, yada.
So there's an analogy here, which is how much of what we think we know or thought we knew about something like olive oil, oh, you know, dangerous compounds are formed, you know, at too low a temperature, how much of that is actually propaganda and how much of it's real?
And I'm not saying it's true or it's false.
I'm just saying we have to be skeptical given that we were sold garbage like margarine as if it was good for our hearts, which turns out to be the inverse of the truth.
We have to ask ourselves every time we have a supposed fact about something like olive oil that turns out to be, of course, healthy.
I mean, Mediterranean diets are famously healthy.
Right.
Just like East Asian diets are famously healthy, hence the probability that sesame seed oil is actually good for you.
Sesame seed oil.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And coconut milk and all of that stuff.
Right.
So just a few more words of wisdom, were they, from this article?
Not so much.
No.
Yeah.
I haven't heard any.
Manufacturers usually process the oils further with heat and solvents to help pull more oil from the seeds, Dr.
Decker said.
They also often remove certain components that can contribute to rancidity, splattering, unpleasant flavors, or a dark color.
That is a crazy sentence.
They remove certain components that can contribute to splattering...
Well, it could be...
I'm trying to figure out how it would work.
Splattering usually happens when you have a mixture of water and an oil.
Okay, just impurities of some sort.
Yeah, and you would imagine you could just settle that out.
Yeah.
These processes result in a neutral tasting oil that is relatively shelf-stable and can be used at high heat without easily smoking, Dr.
Decker said.
Several concerns about seed oils have been simmering online, but none are borne out in the research, experts say.
Oh, experts say.
Yeah, well, follow the science, eat more seed oil.
Let's see, was there anything else?
Yeah, so, those foods aren't good for us, processed foods he's talking about, but there's no evidence to suggest that seed oils are what makes them unhealthy.
That's just bizarre to blame them and not the foods that they're in, Dr.
Gardner said.
How about both?
It's gonna be both.
It's gonna be both things.
And let's see, one more thing.
Here we go.
But it would be a mistake, Dr.
Lichtenstein said, to replace seed oils with ingredients like butter, lard, or tallow, which are high in saturated fats.
No, it wouldn't.
I will go ahead, and this is not medical advice.
I'm gonna provide some culinary advice.
Culinary advice.
Yeah, culinary advice.
Go into your pantry and get rid of all the seed oils.
Even if you are not yet ready to get rid of every product that you have in your pantry that has seed oils in it, and I promise you, if you have seed oils in your pantry, you almost certainly have many products that have seed oils in them, including things which have no reason to have seed oils in them.
But just throw out the canola oil, the rapeseed oil, the sunflower oil, the safflower oil, and use coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil, butter, lard, tallow instead.
Your food's going to taste better and it's going to be a lot better for you.
And is it possible to buy cheaper safflower oil than it is to buy any of those other six things that I just mentioned?
Almost certainly.
But it shouldn't be.
That's largely because of the subsidies that the federal government is giving to the producers of these toxic products, which hopefully will be ending soon.
And it's hard to advise people to spend more when our grocery prices are so high already.
But there are ways to buy these real foods in larger amounts at places like Costco, right?
We've got a big vat of organic coconut oil from Costco.
And there have been some problems with some Costco products, but in general, You're putting your trust somewhere.
And so if you believe that in that case the label is accurately describing what's in the container, you can get a lot of organic olive oil for not very...
coconut oil.
You can also buy organic olive oil there, but increasingly I don't trust the olive oil on shelves.
Yeah, we need some mechanism for figuring out which stuff is actually what it suggests it is.
Yeah, and I don't know how far that goes.
But as far as I know, the coconut oil and the avocado oil that is available relatively cheaply at places like Costco is what it says it is.
And it's so much better for you than the garbage that the New York Times is promoting here in the guise of health.
This is in the Eat section, actually.
Let me just say that, so I mentioned already that everyone that she cites and the author herself of this article have PhDs in nutrition or nutrition science, which again demonstrates how bad the nutrition education programs are.
And our main expert, Christopher Gardner, who was the main person in this article, I just did a little digging.
I wanted to figure out if he was being funded by these people, and I couldn't figure that out because it's all very Byzantine.
But I did go to his website, and here it is, as he's cited in the article at the Stanford School of Medicine, and he just has this thing that I've got highlighted in blue.
In the past few years, the interests of my research group have shifted to include three additional areas of inquiry.
One of these is stealth nutrition.
The central hypothesis driving this is that in order for more effective and impactful dietary improvements to be realized, health professionals need to consider adding non-health-related approaches to their toolboxes' strategies.
Examples would be connection between food and one, global warming and climate change, two, animal rights and welfare, three, human labor abuses.
Well, precisely.
So I don't know what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's not good.
This from the guy who's saying unequivocally that you need to decrease the amount of butter and lard in your diet and increase the amount of seed oils wants to do stealth nutrition and somehow involve climate change in that work.
So at the very least, we have to wonder whether or not he is motivated to give you advice in which your health would be sacrificed because he believes it will help save the planet.
Right?
Yep.
That's a possibility.
I mean, one can extrapolate from what he said that the need to address these other problems results in some sort of advice that isn't fundamentally about nutrition.
Of course he wouldn't put it that way.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
Uh, so I... Oi!
Really?
Oi!
That's the message here.
Um, so I don't know.
They're all following the science and it's gonna lead to early deaths.
Yep, I agree.
Yeah.
Maybe that's it.
I think that's it.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe we did it.
We had scheduled a Q&A for today, but we're going to shove it back to next week.
So we're going to have a locals-only Q&A this Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific for two hours.
You can begin posting questions soon, if that's not open yet, I think, but it will be shortly after this podcast airs.
And then we'll have another Q&A after our live stream next Wednesday.
Please do consider joining us on Locals, where we've got lots of great stuff, including the Q&As.
You can go to the darkhorsepodcast.org website to get updates and find out our future schedule.
It's been a little wonky lately, and it's going to continue that way.
But we look forward to every livestream that we do here, and Brett's got some great Inside Rail podcasts coming out with guests, I believe.
Yes, and my ability to read is going to return very quickly here.
Yeah.
Yeah, it should be any day now.
Not any day, but in a few days.
In a few days.
In a few days.
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