The GOAT? The 261st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss how it was to be in DC during Trump’s second Inauguration, and the MAHA ball. Then: a summary of Executive Orders: positive (e.g. freedom of speech, reality of biological sex, affirmative action, putting America first, securing our borders, establishing DOGE, J6 pardons, promoting beautiful architecture, and withdrawing from the WHO), negative (Gulf of America, the death penalty), and environmental (off-shore wind and natural gas, ANWR, fish and fires). Then...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream, the first of the new epoch.
We are now living in the future, which is something.
It is live stream number 261?
261. 261. Yep.
And we are just back from Washington, D.C., where I will tell you it is chilly.
Very, very cold.
We've got a lot to talk about today.
You are Brett Weinstein.
I am.
I am Heather Hying.
All right, that remains true.
We are here with the Dark Horse livestream, The Evolutionary Lens.
Even in the new epoch, we remain those people.
Yep, here we are in our new studio, new this year.
Not new for the new administration, but new for the new year.
And yep, livestream number 261, not prime.
And we're going to talk about the inauguration and a number of the executive orders that were signed within hours of the new president taking office.
But first, as always, some sponsors right at the top of the hour.
We're not doing a Q&A after today's livestream, but we will have one on Sunday.
Please join us on Locals to check it out there and to participate in the Q&A. And without further ado, we've got three ads at the top of the podcast and none others.
All right.
I think you are starting this week.
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That is Heather.
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And the rib eyes, you said, are sitting.
In olive oil at this very moment.
At this very, very moment.
Awesome.
Yes.
So that's for later.
Yeah.
We have to do this.
Yes.
Of course.
Some other things.
Naturally.
But we'll get rib ice later today with some of TJ Robinson's fresh pressed olive oils on them before grilling.
And we will not set fire to the grill.
We will not.
I will not.
Right.
I definitely won't because I don't know.
It's a little weird, isn't it?
Like, mostly...
Mostly, the sex differences in domestic tasks are archaic because so much has been either made easier with machines or the division of labor is useful, whereas the particular ways that labor is divided is not that useful.
And we definitely have divided some tasks, but not always in the expected or traditional ways.
I don't cook over fire outside.
I haven't.
I've never done it.
Part of it is, if I want something grilled, I can hand you the task.
Right.
But there are ancient roots to the reason that it is the men doing the grilling outside, and it is because of the risk of attack by bears.
Bears?
Yes, attack by bears.
African bears?
Just any old bears.
I wouldn't think so, because you know, as well as I do, but maybe some of our audience does not.
That there are, in fact...
No bears in Africa.
No bears in Africa.
Well, see, now we could go phylogenetic and we could talk all about the pinnipeds around the edges of Africa, but, you know.
But we're not going to do that, are we?
No, no.
It's the bears, though.
That's the reason that it's the men grilling outside.
I think it might also be the lions.
You know, the lions.
Yeah, that's a harder task.
I mean, and why not the big three?
Let's go with tigers, too.
Sure.
Yeah.
Were you in Asia?
Oh, jeez.
Yes.
OGs?
Lions and tigers and bears OGs?
No, tigers are the OGs.
I think they're the OTs.
No, no.
They're the OG felids.
That's tigers.
What does G stand for then?
Gangsta.
I mean, it does.
Ask the kids.
Okay, I'm gonna have to accept your assessment here.
As you should.
Tigers?
The OG feelings.
The OG feelings, of course.
Okay.
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All right.
What?
No, I'm enthroned by the whole idea that, you know, we can talk in the abstract about pure fries and not have them at the ready.
Yeah, no, they're not.
And I don't think we're going to have any pure fries to go with our fresh breast olive oil, excuse me, marinated steak.
I was going to say snake, but we're not doing that.
We're not having steak for dinner.
No, I'm not having marinated snake again.
That was a fiasco.
I mean, we've tried snake.
Yeah.
I can't remember where.
I've had iguana.
I can place a place where I've had iguana.
Where do we have snake?
The Ruthven Museum.
We had several things there.
University of Michigan Museums of Alopee, where we were grad students.
Alligator.
Some snake.
I've forgotten what snake, but...
In any case, we've digressed.
Happens.
Yeah.
So, we went to the inauguration.
Yes, I remember this.
Well, we actually did not go to the inauguration.
We went to D.C. for the inauguration, and then, as is well known, the weather in D.C. took a turn for the ridiculous.
It was bitterly, bitterly cold, and so they moved the inauguration inside.
And therefore, not only was the inauguration not outside with seating for those Tens of thousands of us who were lucky enough to get tickets to the actual inauguration, but for the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, perhaps more than a million, who knows, of people who were scheduled to show up, who had scheduled themselves to show up, to be at the inauguration on the National Mall, where there were jumbotrons all set up and were going to be broadcasting it live.
That didn't happen.
Because the powers that be were concerned that the weather was so cold that people would potentially get harmed from being outside in the weather for that long.
And, you know, I think it's a legitimate concern.
Yep.
There were also persistent rumors that there were security reasons to do this as well.
And it's possible both those things pushed in the same direction.
But it was certainly cold enough to be a problem.
Although in general, you know, inaugurations being January 20th, cold is a recurrent problem.
But this was unusually cold for D.C. Yeah, it absolutely was.
And was, I think, one of the two coldest January 20th in recorded history.
So this was particularly cold.
What would you like to...
So we're going to end up talking some about some of the very many executive orders that Trump signed in his first day or two in office.
Talk about the very many positive.
uh things that we're seeing a couple of the negatives that we're seeing coming out of the executive orders and then because there was so much nuance i had i at least um had uh both Positive and negative senses about the few that seem to be about environmental issues, that I have that as a separate, a third category.
So we're going to go with positive, executive orders, negative ones, and then the environmental ones, and we'll talk some about that.
But first...
Well, Jen, I sent you some things very, very late, which is quite possible you did not have time to get into a forum.
You could show them.
But do you want to show pictures of us in the snow in advance of the...
The inauguration is the day before.
So it was the four of us, the whole family went.
Zach was recently injured in a skiing incident.
And so he was not present for the day before walking around on the mall.
But the mall was uncharacteristically fogged in.
You couldn't even see the Washington Monument from The capital end of it.
Do you have any of those pictures, just to kind of give people the sense of what it was like in D.C.? Well, here we are.
This is the night following.
This is the night after the inauguration has happened.
This is us.
It was not possible to get an Uber to drive you into the part of town where the...
Various galas were taking place and we ended up on foot for, I don't know, some long period of time walking to the Maha Ball, wildly underdressed for the weather.
But here we are.
That's the four of us.
Do you have a video that I sent of people behind a fence lining up to go into the stadium?
In theory.
But anyway, the mood in Washington was very, very unusual, I would say.
And it's worth just noting that there was a kind of enthusiasm that might accompany any inauguration.
You know, some team has triumphed in the election and is either retaining office or about to ascend to all of these important offices.
I don't want to speak for you, but I had the sense that the mood was much more elevated than would be standard, and we saw very little negativity of any kind.
You might imagine that Blue Team loyalists would have been vocal and obvious, but...
Yeah, well, so I attribute that to a few things.
I think, you know, as I said after the election, My sense was that it felt very different than after the election eight years ago, when I also felt very differently about the result than I did eight years ago.
But being immersed in very blue, very, very liberal environments eight years ago, the sense was one of utter desolation and dejection and hopelessness.
Granted, we don't live, you know, we're not professors at Evergreen anymore, as we were when Trump won the first time.
But, you know, we live on an island that is very blue, and we were at SeaTac, which is, you know, very blue, and actually we were in Montana traveling back the day after the election and had this sense of, I thought, you know, I think that some of the people who...
Voted the way they felt they had to and voted for Kamala are actually a little bit relieved.
And I've now begun to see this in some reports, in some journalistic reports, that people are saying, yeah, you know, I voted for her, but just let's see what happens here.
And, you know, these are people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump.
There's still a lot of those.
And, you know, they'll never have an opportunity at this point again.
But who didn't...
They didn't feel that the country was going in the right direction, even though they couldn't bring themselves to do something else.
But then there's also, and this feels like a counter to that point, some of the people who are still utterly convinced that he's, you know, a fascist who's going to bring nothing but harm down to the country have really truly convinced themselves that people who voted for Trump are dangerous to them personally.
That they are going to be aggressed against, that violence will be, you know, done against them if they show themselves as Democrats.
And so when we were walking, the video that you're referring to, when you and Toby and I were walking the day before the inauguration, and there was apparently a Trump rally in...
Okay, so this is at the Capitol.
You should see the Washington Monument there and you don't.
It's so cloudy.
Right.
So this is, I don't know, 4 or 5 p.m.
on the day before the inauguration.
And an hour or two before that, three of us were walking by people lined up who, we were told by some people, some of them had been lined up since...
In order to get into the Capital One arena, which is, of course, where in the end, not just the rally that Trump held the day before the inauguration, but the sort of the post-inauguration parade festivities were held the day of.
And the jubilation that was clearly emanating off the crowd was, the only counterpoint was, I think we saw one person, one person yelling with...
You know, a sign calling us all fascists.
Anyone who thought that Trump might bring goodness to the country was clearly a fascist.
That was the only one.
That was really the only thing.
And I think part of that is because some people are relieved, and part of it is because some people are still convinced that this is so dire that they actually have convinced themselves that their very lives are in danger.
Well...
I actually take something different from it.
There are, of course, some stalwarts who do still believe and say such things.
But I think there is a point where these weaponized stigmas break, where the hand gets overplayed.
You're concerned about what your kid is being taught in school, and they say transphobe enough times that transphobe just loses its meaning because you're obviously just a parent.
I'm trying to protect your kid.
Anti-vaxxer, right?
That was a vicious stigma.
And the problem is that now it's not really a stigma because they called us that for worrying about the COVID vaccines, which obviously created a tremendous amount of havoc.
And so now that even opens the door to all sorts of people who had very legitimate concerns about other vaccines.
So I think what's happened is they overplayed their Hand with respect to the accusation that this was a, you know, would-be dictator, you know, Hitlerian figure.
And because they overplayed their hand, they now, they're walking it back.
And so you even saw at Carter's funeral in advance of the inauguration, you saw...
Donald Trump sitting next to Barack Obama, obviously having a friendly chat.
Were anyone still of the belief that this was Hitler rising, you wouldn't be talking about the weather with Hitler.
And so to have Barack Obama sitting there talking, you know, no tension in his face, you know, talking in a cordial way with Trump is...
Effectively an acknowledgement that, okay, we're not going to do that anymore.
And I really did have the sense watching, especially the inauguration in the Rotunda, which is very singular because I do think I heard, but I do not remember, that Reagan was inaugurated once in the Rotunda for other reasons.
I think that was the coolest.
But in any case, watching the power elite...
I think he did hold back some stuff, but he even talked about it in his little speech in the overflow room afterwards.
He said a lot of things that people would not have had him say about the prior administration and what they've done to the country, things that by and large I agree with.
But to have him Deliver that speech to that group of people, right?
All of the people who've been censoring these viewpoints, many of them were represented there.
And, you know, frankly, some of us are troubled by the fact that Zuckerberg is sitting there.
But nonetheless, I did have the sense that there was like a tacit acceptance.
There's no claim that this election wasn't legitimate.
There's no claim that he didn't win.
This is basically as close as the regime gets to admitting that it got beaten fair and square.
And frankly, I'm glad to see that.
Hopefully the deep state is of like mind.
I don't expect them to be.
But from the point of view of those who have to get along in the world of power, they seem to have effectively ceded that Trump won.
They may not love it, but they're not going to withdraw in horror and claim this is Hitler anymore.
Those days are over.
So anyway, I thought that was very positive and a little surprising.
I agree.
So, I guess one of the other things we maybe want to talk about with regard to our experience there was being in DC with so much of it blocked off for, well, we weren't...
For, I guess, most of the inaugural balls, which were, I imagine, all in a relatively central place, although we only went to the one, we went to the Maha Ball, the Make America Healthy Again Ball, and it was fantastic.
It was a lot of fun.
We could neither get close to it on the way in, nor could we find our way out very easily.
And that actually became dangerous.
You know, we're in black tie.
And I said to you before this thing, I don't know how women are supposed to do black tie when it's cold out.
Like, it really doesn't make sense to me.
Because, you know, the footwear alone is absurd.
And it doesn't protect you particularly.
But on the way to the Mahabal, it was still light out.
But we ended up walking, I don't know, 20 blocks back and forth, like around, because you were blocked by military police and Secret Service, and I guess that's it.
Maybe other, maybe local police as well.
Well, and they had deployed these barriers everywhere, which were bolted together, and because they don't show up on the maps, and because they'd only existed for a few days, there was no agreed upon, you didn't know where you could and couldn't go.
So, I don't know.
You know, our Uber just dropped us off somewhere and said, I think this is the closest I can get you.
And as you said, you know, 20 blocks later, you know, it was in the teens and we were all, you know, we had, maybe you didn't because women's dress is different, but, you know, we could have had coats over our Tuxedos, but didn't because we had thought that we were going to be dropped feet from the thing and why have the extra...
I mean, that's user error.
I had a coat, but there was nothing more I could do because you can't wear winter boots and carry your heels, right?
As low as the heels were, but whatever.
The experience of walking through and being stopped by...
You know, like a DC cop saying, oh, go talk to her.
She's with the Secret Service.
Oh, yeah, the best I can...
We even got misdirected, right?
Like, the best I can tell you to do is walk down to...
11th.
Was it 11th or 6th?
Yeah, it was 11th.
And gestured in very much the wrong direction, which it only took a block to figure out.
She told us to go in the exactly wrong direction.
But it was...
I don't know that it felt...
Dire because there were barriers up and because there were military police and Secret Service all around.
It felt understandable.
But in combination with the weather, it did feel uncertain.
There was actual, real risk, both...
Climatological, both physical risk, especially as, you know, as all the balls started emptying and there are no cars unless you happen to have a private car that you could call.
And people were just on the street at, you know, 11 degrees out and, you know, not enough dress and there's nothing open past two really where you could find shelter.
And you can't just make a beeline for home.
And you can't just, you can't just walk off.
And it took, you know, at the point we left.
You know, just a simple map.
Imagine you've got all of these must be four or six foot sections of 10 foot tall fencing, you know, heavy metal fencing.
Every single piece bolted to the one next to it.
So they have to basically take the whole thing apart.
And, you know, obviously, you know, it was going to be days of restoring D.C. to a functional city.
Indeed.
It felt still, despite both the weather and the concerns for safety having nothing to do with the weather, overall the feeling was one of hope.
And certainly that was the case inside the Maha Ball.
I feel like the Maha movement is this mixture of...
Boy, I'm going to miss some of the groups, but it's, you know, it's heterodox doctors and disenfranchised scientists and COVID dissidents and crunchy hippie liberal types and libertarian and Republican Second Amendment, keep your hands, keep the government's hands out of my life types.
You know, real food advocates and parents of vaccine-injured children and just, you know, on and on and on.
This, like, this amazing group of people who, you know, the mainstream media has been scratching their heads over going, like, how did they end up on the same side?
Like, well, nothing in that group that I just said is actually inconsistent, even if 20 years ago most of us would have been surprised to be in a group Of that description.
But there's actually, I have, you know, none of us agree on everything, right?
Like you and I don't agree on everything, right?
But we're fundamentally interested in the founding principles of our country, which include, well, include having the ability to make decisions with full information, informed consent.
Well, I will say the Maha Ball, Thomas Massey, get a talk.
Thomas Massey gave a talk, although Thomas Massey isn't primarily health-oriented, but he's part of this larger unity movement, I would say.
But there was also, you know, Rob Schneider did some comedy, Russell Brand was there, Jordan Peterson.
So anyway, it was sort of, you know, it functioned on this evening as the umbrella for this larger unity movement, which is, you know, includes Maha, but...
Isn't synonymous with Maha.
But it's a little hard to encapsulate the sense of hope and positivity that was there, but it pervaded the city and just very little negativity.
And, you know, as we've talked about before, we always talk to Uber drivers and cabbies and things like that, and it was across the board.
People were hopeful and interested in the new era, and really almost without exception.
A couple people voiced particular concerns, but why wouldn't you try to embrace a sense of optimism now, regardless of how you voted or what your worst fears are?
That's the way to move forward.
So maybe with that, I should talk a little bit about what my particular sense of hopefulness is.
You want to save that or you want to?
I thought we would do that at the end.
Okay, we can do that at the end.
I think it's more natural because we haven't really said much yet about what he's done.
And he's done a lot.
Trump has already done a lot.
And I think it makes sense to go through some of it.
Before wrapping up the finale with your sense of what is possible here.
So again, I want to start with just some of the executive orders that seem positive.
And I haven't reviewed this list with you.
But...
So here we go.
You can share my screen for the duration of these first ones.
We have...
As far as I can tell, they're not numbered yet.
So I'm not...
Identifying them by number.
They will be numbered.
But this was one of the first ones after establishing some of the cabinet.
Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship, which is, you know, maybe the most important.
And let me just read the first section one purpose paragraph here.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without government interference.
Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring American speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve.
Under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government's preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.
Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.
So, I mean, there you have it.
And I'm not gonna go, we don't have time to read all of these in their entirety at all, But that feels like the thing that we've been needing most of all.
Not only that, it is, I think, a significant challenge to the cynics.
Because here you have somebody.
He has just taken the oath of office.
He has ascended to power, where the cynics have predicted that he is...
No different and will simply do this in his own interest rather than the interest of whatever he has just displaced.
But what has he just done?
He has tied his own hands with respect to the abuse of power relative to speech.
He has basically taken the liberty that the prior administration took to silence critics and he has said, we're not going to do that, which is a disadvantage.
So why would he sign up for that disadvantage?
Yes, it will be popular amongst those of us who have been censored and those of us who resent the censorship that maybe caused them to take a shot they wouldn't have taken if it had been properly discussed.
But it is not a dictatorial move.
It is the opposite.
It is the embrace of the First Amendment's constraint on government.
And so...
If you thought this was a dictator rising, then you now have a head-scratcher, which is that he just gave away power that the prior administration had commandeered for the executive, which he did not have to do.
Yes.
So there are a number of these executive orders, and I have not gone through all of them.
But that seem subservient to some other ones, even though they are not described in a hierarchical way.
And so the next one that I wanted to mention here feels like it's a follow-on to restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship, which is what you were just talking about.
This is ending the weaponization of the federal government.
Very comparable to what you were just talking about.
Again, the purpose in this one.
The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement weaponizing the legal force of numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community against These actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.
Many of these activities appear to be inconsistent with the Constitution and or the laws of the United States, including those activities directed at parents protesting at school board meetings, Americans who spoke out against the previous administration's actions, and other Americans who were simply exercising constitutionally protected rights.
Yeah.
Yeah.
again, you could make an argument that this follows the pattern.
We just described less so because the deep state is aligned against Trump and presumably still remains aligned against Trump.
It will not partner with him.
But nonetheless, this is a former president and current president who has faced the most concentrated use of or abuse of power and lawfare against him conceivable.
And for him to step up...
I mean, again, the key thing is he is not...
You can make two arguments.
One argument is they're going to abuse power against us, and when we gain power, we will abuse it against them.
And this is somebody who is doing the right thing, the American thing, which is not doing that, which is declaring an end to the abuse of power.
You know, it's funny.
I somehow...
I didn't even see the...
one, but it's obvious once you say it.
Obviously, he experienced the weaponization of the federal government against him still is.
But I read this perhaps from an ego perspective of like, oh, good.
Let's stop that then, shall we?
Because there are those of us who have been acting with integrity knowing that bad things might happen to us as have happened to others who are speaking out similarly, and that there will be no recourse.
And this would suggest that there will be recourse.
There will be recourse, yes, recourse to the law.
And I'm not sure how to say this, but I've been wrestling with a thought.
Trump critiqued his predecessors in a way that you could say was not presidential, that he in this address did not call for unity.
He called his predecessors to task for their abuses of power.
But I think actually, if you look at it properly, it is a call to unity.
And the idea is he's unifying with the citizenry.
Yes.
And that means not...
You know, declaring a truce with those who have been abusing the citizenry and him.
And I thought that that was actually kind of the right way to address it.
I did not want to hear a eulogy for the Biden administration that pretended that they had been better than they were.
They were terrible.
These people were absolutely traitorous, in my opinion.
I'm not saying legally, but morally, they were traitorous.
And I did not want to hear them forgiven or welcomed back in or any such thing.
But I also didn't want to hear divisions about people who had supported them, the citizenry, right?
Because, frankly, the citizens who were supporting the blue team were tricked, and many are still tricked.
But, in any case...
And you know what?
You don't here.
I don't think...
I don't think...
I may be wrong here, but I don't think that Trump, even in his earlier, more chaotic, less careful self, did a lot of mocking of American citizens who didn't happen to vote for him or even who thought he was Hitler.
His attacks were targeted against...
Other powerful people.
He has not, and again, there may have been a few instances, but by and large, he does not attack the people of the United States.
Well, I mean, I think there's some exceptions.
I think they're justified.
But, you know, he speaks about trans activists and what they...
But that's a category.
Yeah.
But nonetheless, you know, the point is, I think he's not going after people for opposing him.
Yeah.
Right?
He's going after people for doing harm.
And he may have a different view of harm.
Something that he thinks is harm may not be your view.
But nonetheless, you can reverse engineer a code from this, and it's a respectable code.
Yeah, indeed.
So speaking of trans activists, another executive order that he signed, defending women from gender ideology, extremism, and restoring biological truth to the federal government.
Oh, my goodness.
This is extraordinary.
I mean, they all are.
So this is written by May Mailman.
It's an exquisite document.
It's not that long.
I'm not going to read all of it, but I encourage everyone to read all of it.
Here, again, just the section one, the purpose paragraph.
Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women's domestic abuse shelters to women's workplace showers.
This is wrong.
Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.
The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women, but on the validity of the entire American system.
Basing federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
One more paragraph here.
This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.
Invalidating the true and biological category of woman improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.
It's unbelievable.
It's also so obvious, and there are many of us who have been saying these things for years now, and that this is simultaneously A compact, carefully, legally, and scientifically written document that is near perfect.
And I say near only because, you know, I don't know where the error is, but it's hard to write a perfect document of any length.
And it is also, you know, this issue has been primary for me in part because, you know, it is...
It is my background, right?
That, you know, thinking about the evolution of sex, the evolution of sex roles, the evolution of mating systems, the evolution of sexual reproduction, and all of these things is a big part of what I have done professionally, but it's also so damned obvious.
this like of all of the issues that we have been disagreeing about in this country for many years now there are more nuances in almost every single of the of the other issues than this one there are two sexes in humans only two sexes only ever have been and you can't go between them and so you know we've talked about this forever so you know this is stunning to me both because it is so perfect and you know a long time coming
and how did we ever get so far from reality how how did we let ourselves fall so far from truth yes I can't help but feel...
That there's some irony in suddenly we are living in the era of second-wave feminism again, and it's been ushered in by Trump, of all people.
I mean, there's something...
As I wrote about right before the election, why I'm voting for Trump, and why is he the better choice for, and I laid out for the American people, for the American system, for the Constitution, and for women.
And the idea that Trump was the better choice for women than...
Kamala Harris will have been staggering to many people, but here it is.
Here it is.
The thing is, and actually it is the perfect litmus test.
I'm not a huge fan of litmus tests, but it is the perfect litmus test because if your point is, oh, I can spot somebody who's good for women, right?
Women are good for women.
Women are good for women, right?
Somebody who they can identify with.
Really?
Somebody who backs gender ideology that allows men to waltz into women's bathrooms?
Decide that they're women and go to women's prisons, even sex offenders, all of this nonsense?
Or does somebody who's good for women look like Donald Trump, who, you know, obviously there's famously boorish behavior.
But the fact is, when it comes right down to it, here it is, with the stroke of a pen, he is protecting women.
He is not...
Ushering them into some traditional corner.
This basically is simply a protection.
What you do as a woman, you are liberated to choose on your own.
This document says nothing about it.
But will you be protected from men pretending to be women?
Yes.
And anyway, again, it's like signal after signal that this wasn't a con to get to a place of power, that the election was actually about Changing things in the promised direction to a large extent.
Will it be to the full extent that we were promised?
I don't know.
But this certainly looks like a good faith effort to bring these things about immediately.
Yes, indeed.
All right.
So that's Defending Women from Gender Ideology.
Related-ish, but also entirely different.
We have Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
This was signed the following day.
And it is an end to affirmative action.
Basically, again, purpose.
Longstanding federal civil rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
These civil rights protections serve as a bedrock, supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans.
As president, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.
Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the federal government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education,
have adopted and actively used dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, that can violate There are a number of executive orders that Trump signed that seem to me pieces of this that slot into it, and I'm just going to show one of them.
So a separate one that he signed the same day as he signed the last one, Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation, where he's specifically During the prior administration, the FAA betrayed its mission by elevating dangerous discrimination over excellence.
For example, prior to my inauguration, the FAA Diversity and Inclusion website revealed that the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.
We've talked about one of the famous examples of aviation failures in that Boeing flight out of Portland in January of 2024. Interesting that aviation shows up here as a separate executive order, but there are, of course, endless examples.
We emerge onto the platform that we're on now from one of the many examples in higher ed of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, taking over and destroying sanity and reality in institutions that are supposed to be defending exactly those principles.
And you can see that What he says here about aviation applies very directly to the failures that are implicated in the fires in Los Angeles.
The distinction being that aviation is a federal province because of the FAA. He does talk about the fires in one of these.
We'll get there.
That's excellent.
But, you know, this fits what we said.
Back when we came to prominence because of the event that you were describing at Evergreen, or you had mentioned at Evergreen, we said, look, if you let this diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff take over, it will eventually destroy all functionality,
and the bridges won't fall down right away, but they will fall down, and we're now seeing that, and here you have an executive order that addresses the I'm not going to show all of the ones that seem to me like they're sort of downstream of the major one that rescinds affirmative action.
But the problems in higher ed, which are by many understandings of the situation, including...
Ours, at least at times in the past, the place from which the whole DEI thing spread out into all these other realms are in some ways, well, A, they're not under federal jurisdiction unless it's at, well, almost every school gets some federal grant dollars.
Yeah, there's federal influence because of the money.
There's federal influence and therefore the granting agencies, you know, the president could declare that granting agencies can't give grant federal dollars to any institution that upholds DEI. But the particular manifestations are much more cryptic.
And I think, in part, the reason that Evergreen drew so much attention to the...
The extraordinary problems that higher ed had already been having for many years was obviously because of, you know, your grace under fire and your ability to keep a cool head and actually try to talk to people who had lost theirs.
But also because...
Having lost theirs, they took video of all of it and put it up on the internet.
It became something that you could point to and say, look at that.
That's crazy.
That's as crazy and obvious as, you know, what was it?
The window that could have been a door on the plane that blew out.
Yeah.
Right?
So there's something like physical and visual and visceral about what happened at Evergreen, whereas the day-to-day life of most of the people who are living under these policies, either in higher ed or in corporate offices or cubicles or whatever, or just in interacting with their neighbors at the grocery store or the yoga class or whatever it is, is one of just like silent...
Like mortification and becoming less and less interested in participating in the commons because it's become so insane to do so.
And, you know, that's what we are sort of hoping for as a turnaround that is in part sparked by at least some of these executive orders.
Yeah, actually, it occurs to me from what you're saying.
If you think about the way water boils in a pot, right?
Water elevates towards the boiling point and it reaches the boiling point first where it's in contact with the heat.
So you see a phase transition in the bubbles that form at the bottom of the pot.
What people got to see with Evergreen was a little preview of where they were going because Evergreen was ahead in terms of how insane it was.
And so that little preview did wake a lot of people up.
But we've all, you know, civilization has now caught up to Evergreen.
And the insanity is now all over the place.
And in any case, yes, it ultimately manifests as doors or would-be doors falling off of airplanes in flight.
And aquifers being empty when fires need to be fought.
So the real question is, this is the point at which we turn this oil tanker around.
How quickly can we get back to a system that has any reliability to it on the basis that merit was a key feature of what caused it to be staffed the way it is?
Yeah.
As quick as possible, and it's not going to be immediate.
It's not going to be immediate.
And I think people need to prepare themselves for that.
The harm done by confronting merit and replacing it with symbolism.
We're decades away from a system that functions well.
I mean, there are also just a lot of people employed who don't have skills.
and they are going to discover that the skills that they have are simply defending the place they've already got as opposed to generating, developing, learning real skills that have the actual value in the real world.
What they are going to do is defend their position and cry foul and say it's not fair and all of the things that people...
that can be legitimate complaints but that tend to be the only recourse of those who don't actually have anything to offer.
Yes, and we've had this discussion many times, but...
The betrayal that resulted in large numbers of people who didn't emerge from school competent at anything, that's a real problem.
And it didn't start with the people who are miseducated.
It started with a system that decided to create opportunities that weren't real and to lure people into not becoming competent and deny them the resources that would have made them competent.
And so, like it or not, we are actually responsible for figuring out what to do.
With all of the incompetent people.
And the fact that communism is constantly being rediscovered, anytime you allow a large number of incompetent people to accumulate in a system that is merit-based, you can expect them to invent communism.
And so here we're attempting to return the system to a merit-based system, and we've already got a huge backlog of incompetent people.
The wise thing to do is to figure out how to compassionately address their needs so that they do not become a communist revolution 10 years from now.
Yes.
You are right.
You are right.
Okay.
Next executive order.
That I wanted to talk about that seems like a positive.
Did my computer pick out something?
There's nothing changed here.
And it's connected over there.
Unplug it.
Yeah, I tried that before.
Is it going to be the USB thing?
It's fixed.
All right.
So the next executive order that we want to talk about is...
Basically putting America first.
The America first policy directive to the Secretary of State.
And America first.
Putting America first.
There are going to be people in the United States who hear that and say, what?
That's not nice.
That's not what we should be doing.
To which I say, if the President of the United States doesn't want to put America first, who should we expect to do that?
To do so.
So this one should just be completely obvious.
From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.
That's it.
I mean, there's obviously a lot more here, but...
Well, we should expect every nation to put its own citizens' interests first.
Is not said here, or I don't think is said here, is that the degree to which the American public is routinely sold out by the Uniparty in recent times, especially by the Democratic Party, the executive, the Democratic Party's chosen representatives and the executive, is so profound that this actually Which shouldn't need to be stated.
This is another one that shouldn't have been required.
It shouldn't have been required.
But just simply saying, just simply having a president reaffirm without his, you know, fingers crossed behind his back that actually I'm going to attempt to do what is in your interest as citizens.
There's nothing shameful about that.
It's no more shameful than my saying, I'm going to put my family first, which you should expect me to do.
Every person should put their family first.
And it doesn't mean I'm saying.
My family's better than yours.
I'm saying it's my obligation.
That's my job.
Nor does it say, you know, you can say, I'm interested in all of humanity thriving, and I am going to work harder to help those whom I already know and love.
Yep.
And there is a naivete.
That borders on the pathological in some leftist circles.
That would have you deny favoring those whom you love as if that is a sign of being evil.
And I would say it's the opposite.
If you are actually pretending to hold all 8 billion people on the planet equally in your own head with regard to how you will act towards them, you are both lying to yourself and pathological.
So, we have nested sets of care and of love, and this recognizes that in a world with nation-states, the nation-state of which you are a citizen is one...
That should be caring for you over those who are not citizens of that nation state.
Yep.
And it's also the case that to the extent that the policy of a nation puts that nation first, it empowers that nation to actually both model the behavior and facilitate the increase in wealth that does flow to the planet.
So, you know, this is likely best for the world also.
For us not to exist on some weird chessboard where our executive branch is functioning on behalf of the highest bidder.
Right.
What sense does that make?
Right.
So in keeping with America First, the America First policy, we have securing our borders.
And there are, like with the DEI and affirmative action one, there are a few that are subservient to this, and I'm not going to show all of them.
show a couple.
Purpose.
Over the last four years, the United States has endured a large-scale invasion at an unprecedented level.
Millions of illegal aliens from nations and regions all around the world successfully entered the United States, where they are now residing, including potential terrorists, foreign spies, members of cartels, gangs, and violent transnational criminal organizations and other hostile actors with malicious intent.
And it goes on and on.
And I think Trump identified actually this as the issue about which he felt that he cared the most or that he felt that the American voters cared the most.
I would say the First Amendment was top of the list for me.
But even absent the work that you and Zach and Chris Martinson and others did at the In the Darien Gap in Panama with Michael Yahn in January of 2024. It would be really clear to me and to anyone who's interested in paying attention to the stories in Aurora,
Colorado, in so many places of suddenly people with no history in a place and with clearly no cultural or in many cases linguistic connection to the United States.
Showing up and taking over and being barbaric.
And this can't be good for us, and here we are.
And before you say anything about that, just one of the sort of additional executive orders that's related to this, declaring a national emergency at the southern border of the United States.
So that's totally consistent with the first one.
One paragraph here, he says, So, in biology, the integrity, the ability of a creature to...
Regulate itself depends on the borders of that creature being properly maintained.
And what I'm seeing across multiple executive orders here is a return to notions that were correct, that got superseded by notions that may have sounded better, but We're the standard kind of hubris where you don't recognize a complex system and you decide you understand what's going on well enough to improve on it.
And you're, of course, going to be wrong.
And so the idea that we can diversify the construction of airplanes, right?
Sounds great.
Wouldn't it be great if the construction of airplanes...
Reflected the full diversity of this, that, and the other.
Except that the doors are going to fall off in flight.
That's not good.
The maintenance of the border of the airplane has been breached by a notion that turned out not to be true for reasons that frankly weren't that subtle.
Likewise, you know, can you have a nation that maintains its economic integrity, its coherence as a culture, if the borders are open?
Well, no.
Of course not.
It becomes a welfare program to the world.
Wouldn't it be great if the world was able to enjoy all of the wonders that we have here?
Yeah, I guess, but we can't do that.
What we can do is fully dilute the wonders that we have here by, you know, allowing the place to be looted.
Or we can decide to go back to what sounds like an antiquated notion, and for reasons that are a little hard to defend, why does the wealth that we create here belong to the people who were born within some arbitrary boundary?
That's a little hard to explain, but you know what?
It at least works.
It at least makes sense.
We can understand where the border is, and we can protect it, and we can say, you're on this side of it, and you are therefore a citizen of this nation.
What you just said, there is arbitrariness, right?
And there absolutely is arbitrariness.
Many people who had nothing to do with generating value in the United States benefit from the value that has been generated by others.
And it is that observation that I think confuses people.
Many people recognize that they themselves actually haven't contributed anything.
And they are not sure that they are going to contribute anything.
They're not sure they have the capacity or the interest even in contributing anything.
And therefore...
Since they don't really feel justified in benefiting from the wealth that has been created by those who have generated things, they would like to open it up to everyone.
It is a mistake, but it emerges from this do-gooder attitude in combination with a recognition of, if not incompetence, just mediocrity, perhaps.
Well, you know, it used to be that nobody had to be in the category of not contributing.
True.
Because while not everybody could contribute something new, everybody could contribute their labor to a functioning economic system.
Yep.
And, you know, as is included in our Hanukkah tradition, the fact is civilization has the right to ask stuff of you, but it has obligations in return.
And the idea that we have a right to ask you to contribute, right, but in so doing that you are...
Entitled to be protected, right?
That you are entitled to be taken care of and not be given an unsolvable puzzle where your children grow up in poverty from which they cannot escape or something like this.
So again, you know, there was a system.
It worked.
Did it work perfectly?
No.
Was it fair?
No.
However, was it...
Did it work fairer than what it had replaced?
Yes.
Did it work well enough that most people could find their way to a better life if that's what they wanted to do?
Yes.
And so there's something about watching these executive orders, many of which should not need to be made, but absolutely do need to be made in light of what recent history has looked like.
That does feel like a just sort of a reminder of here's what we are and here's what we do.
And if that sounds stodgy, then you might have spent a little too much time listening to pointy-headed intellectuals who thought they understood a better way and never bothered to prove it.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, excuse me.
Next executive order I want to talk about.
Establishing and implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency.
This is the establishment of Doge.
One thing that I did not recognize, but I'm grateful to see, I don't remember if I have highlighted it in here, I didn't, it's short, you can see how short it is, but that it's temporary.
It's 18 months.
He says, I guess I failed to highlight it, but...
There shall be a...
The U.S. DOGE service temporary organization shall terminate on July 4, 2026. So a little bit less than 18 months, actually.
The termination shall not be interpreted to imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order.
So he wants...
And many of these, actually, these executive orders have a...
An expectation of expiration, even if they don't set a date in particular.
Because one of the themes of this administration, or so we've been told, or so I can certainly read into the executive orders that I have looked through, is not a proliferation of new documents and rules and regulations, but rather a diminishing of them.
The desire seems to be, and this is the one that makes this most clear, A simplification across the board, both in terms of agencies and divisions and systems, and presumably in terms of paperwork and such, but also in terms of personnel.
And that, of course, scares people.
That scares people who are career employees.
And actually, just to that point, the next one, restoring accountability for career senior executives, I read this as basically an eradication of de facto tenure.
At the senior government level, where you've got senior career executives or career senior executives is the term that is being used here to refer to federal employees who aren't being held accountable for the work that they are expected to do, and yet they're being paid.
And so reintroducing accountability, this is very much like the discussion happening in higher ed around tenure.
Tenure exists.
to provide safety from one's enemies for academics who want to investigate or investigate questions that may have And
so, this is not exactly...
I like it.
And both this and the last executive order that you were discussing show a kind of wisdom.
What we've seen, you know, the liberal error Well, there are two.
One is the failure to understand that unintended consequences are likely to accompany any solution-making that you're going to do.
But the other is the sense that something is a permanent good.
I remember being a supporter of affirmative action as a young man, but the understanding was always that this was temporary.
It was a corrective for something that had...
Put people at effectively permanent disadvantage.
And once it had done its job, it was supposed to go away.
And the idea that, no, these are permanent features of the landscape.
There's nothing you could do to, you know, to correct the harm.
This is nonsense.
And so just to simply see that not only is there a desire to turn the ship, but the point is, oh, no, we're the people who turn the ship to starboard.
No.
We're going to turn the ship to starboard until it's back on course.
And then we're going to go forward.
We're going to find the course.
Right.
And we're going to maintain the course that we all agree on.
Yep.
Or that most of us agree on.
Yeah.
Or that we did agree on.
And we never, you know, that's the thing that's so bewildering is that...
We had an agreement about the way things were supposed to work.
We were not supposed to be paying attention to each other's race or become obsessed with, you know, sex or sexual orientation or any of these things, right?
These things weren't going to go away, but they were not supposed to be the focus of our interaction with each other.
And somewhere, the agreement that we had broke without us agreeing to something new.
And it was insane.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Okay.
And now for something completely different.
We have granting pardons and commutation of sentences for certain offenses relating to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. This is an executive order that came down on Inauguration Day.
It was either earlier that day or late the previous day that Biden signed an executive order pardoning the J6, the members of the J6 Commission, and one of the generals who was somehow involved.
I can't remember exactly.
Millie.
Millie, yeah.
Regardless of what story you have in your head about what happened here, the fact that the Biden administration pardoned the commission that effectively put these people away means that this was necessary.
This was absolutely necessary.
And the story that I have in my head is that the J6 commission shouldn't have been pardoned.
But given that they were, there are then...
Two reasons that the pardons and commutation of sentences for the J6 people was important and necessary.
Yeah, this is the one that's going to divide people hopelessly because I truly believe it is a PSYOP, but a PSYOP has been successfully perpetrated on half the country where it believes The standard narrative about January 6th, which does not stand up to scrutiny when you look deeper.
And many people have unearthed video that shows that the conventional narrative is incorrect.
There's lots of reason to understand that event as largely constructed and a setup.
But in any case, the absurdity of many of these trials, The long sentences for people who did nothing, and it's not true that everybody involved did nothing, but many of the people did essentially nothing.
Well, and this isn't a blanket pardon and commutation.
Certain offenses.
Certain offenses, right.
But anyway, I think this was necessary, and I'm glad to see it.
It's a proper use of pardoning power, and we've seen a lot of abuses of pardoning power.
Absolutely.
Many, many more positive ones, but I just want to end with two before we go to the negatives in the environmental.
The penultimate one seems really trivial, and it's trivial by comparison to all the rest, but I think it's beautiful, literally.
Promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.
And I feel like we've been here before.
I feel like, was he talking about this before when he was president, maybe?
But the idea that our public spaces...
Can and should be beautiful feels like another obvious thing.
And you could say perhaps that in the hierarchy of needs, seeing beauty around you is not as important as having your food be healthy.
But it is a good that has...
As far as I can tell, very little negative beyond probably coming at a slightly higher expense, because maybe you have to hire architects who aren't brutalist in their training.
Yeah, I think this is profoundly important for reasons that are a little bit hard to specify.
That this is, for lack of a better term, it's spiritually important.
Yes.
And I will say, I visited Washington, D.C. as a kid.
I almost...
Hadn't been back there until the last couple of years.
And I'm now very excited.
I was very glad.
This was Toby's first trip to Washington.
And I was very pleased.
I was a little disappointed that the monuments weren't more accessible.
But there's something about the reflection of your nation's aspirations in something more durable than any person.
That allows you to imagine that, you know, that we collectively aspire to something and we're on the way there and it's good and it's worth pursuing.
And, you know, there are numerous examples of humans engaging in this kind of architecture.
Architecture that, in fact, takes much longer than a human lifetime to construct and therefore is clearly about something more durable than a person.
Notre Dame took hundreds of years to construct.
The Mayan pyramids are growing structures.
They are constructed and then layers are added to them and they become more grand and more elaborate over time.
That is not an accident.
The election has built us to want to construct such things and we are demoralized by their absence.
The brutalist architecture, the utilitarian buildings that mean nothing when you look at them and will still mean nothing a hundred years from now is bad for a people.
And so anyway, I was surprised by this executive order, but I'm pleased by it.
Yeah, me too.
And the final one that we'll talk about here under Simply Positive is, of course...
Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization.
Hell yeah.
He did it.
He did it.
And, you know, purpose.
The United States noticed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization in 2020 due to the organization's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion from other countries' assessed payments.
China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300% of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90% less to the WHO.
Actions?
The United States intends to withdraw from the WHO.
And I think that the purpose there doesn't...
Begin to describe the actual nefarious nature of the WHO and what it has tried to do to us and what it is presumably still trying to do and will not be able to get its talons in with nearly the alacrity that it was hoping to with this order.
I said before the election that if this, if President Trump carried through on his pledge to remove us from the WHO, that And he did nothing else.
That would still be such an improvement over whatever the alternative would have done that it would be worth the price of admission right there.
And so to see this done on day one was marvelous.
Totally marvelous.
It's really...
It's hard to overestimate the importance of this.
But if you go back to our episode where we look at what the powers who tried to grant itself in the summer, late spring, early summer of last year, it attempted to become a dictator for the world.
And it did so largely at the urging of the American executive branch.
So it was a...
A completely immoral breach of our sovereignty, which we very narrowly...
And acting as a cryptic arm of our government without us ever having elected it.
Right, without it even being a public...
Not only is it not a global public entity, it's a largely private entity, unelected and unaccountable, to which the United States executive branch wished to hand over our sovereignty because it could do things to us that the executive branch could not do directly.
So that could hardly be a more despicable betrayal of the American citizenry.
So to see us pulled from that organization is truly a huge deal.
If you don't know that, know it now.
The threat that it posed is hard to understand because it's such a boring and cryptic organization that you think it doesn't mean anything.
But it did.
It went from being an unimportant phenomenon to a potentially terribly important phenomenon.
That's right.
Okay, let me have my screen back here for a minute so I can pull up the remaining, or one set of the remaining.
And I just, even these I have ambiguity about, but these are the two executive orders that felt, other than the environmental ones, which we'll talk about next, that felt negative to me.
First one here is restoring names that honor American greatness.
And some of what he's talking about is, for instance, Mount McKinley.
Just named for President McKinley.
Was renamed via, I guess, an executive order by Obama recently, in 2015, to Mount Denali.
I assumed that that had been a long time ago.
And he wants to make it McKinley again.
I don't feel strongly about this.
We have obviously seen a lot of wasted effort put into the renaming of things that shouldn't be renamed.
But this particular one...
I don't know the history.
I don't know enough about what Denali means to the people who lived in its presence or what McKinley did there.
But the second named part of this one is about renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And the analysis here is frankly ridiculous.
The analysis is...
The Gulf of Mexico includes a lot of things that are important to America, and therefore we're going to start calling it Gulf of America.
Yeah.
And he goes through, whoever wrote this, but Trump signed the executive order that goes through the analysis of how important it is, 1,700 miles.
Of coastline, 160 million acres, natural resources, economy, stone crab, looking on and on and on and on.
The Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America's future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our nation's economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.
This reminds me of nothing more than the Freedom Fries from the early 2000s.
I don't remember.
France wasn't into our warmongering in Iraq, I think.
And because France hadn't supported the U.S. sufficiently, some cafe in North Carolina, I think, was like, we're not going to call them French fries because fuck the French.
We're going to call them Freedom Fries.
And then some legislator managed to get the name changed in congressional cafeterias as well for some number of years.
And so it was so easy to mock.
Come on, guys.
That's not how we operate.
And, I mean, it was particularly ridiculous because it was never clear that French fries were in fact French.
But I don't think this is ours to rename.
One.
Two.
I have not seen any argument that it should be renamed.
Three.
It feels like a thumb in the eye of our neighboring nation-state.
For why?
For why?
What are we doing here?
All right.
I'm mostly with you on this.
I'm actually more strongly opposed to the Mount McKinley renaming.
You want it to maintain itself as Denali.
Yeah.
That's not how mountains work.
No, mountains have very little.
Mostly they just erode so slowly that it's not worth thinking about.
It'll be Denal before we know it.
I'm going to dust off an old argument of mine that I am perfectly comfortable with having lost.
Okay.
The argument was that there's a problem with the slogan, MAGA, make America great again.
And the problem with that is that America has yet to be great for everybody.
There are two populations which, because their origin story is different than all of the other immigrant populations, Did not really get a fair shake and haven't had one yet.
And I would argue that that's the African-derived population, African-Americans and the Indians, both of which were culturally...
The Native Americans, not the Asian subcontinent Indians.
Correct.
The Native American Indians.
So those two populations had their cultures disrupted as part of their origin story as Americans.
And that cultural disruption is so profound at a biological level, That I believe we cannot just treat them as yet another population with a different background.
So, my point was, make America great again.
I'm with you three of those four letters.
Make America great, absolutely, 100% on board.
Make America great again, I think, is a little tone deaf with respect to the populations who have never enjoyed that greatness.
So to the extent that Barack Obama, who is not an honorable contributor to our history, mostly what he did was terrible, but for him to have renamed this in honor of a Native American culture, and I assume Denali is a good name, and maybe it isn't, but assuming that the Native population finds Denali to be a good name, I think...
It's an excellent idea that this mountain has a name that reflects where it fits in our actual history.
So I would be in favor of that.
And seeing it renamed to something that, you know, is arbitrarily about the population that has held the most power does not seem to me a step in the right direction.
So I feel a little bit bad about this one.
Now, I will say...
In President Trump's defense, the executive orders have been overwhelmingly so good and so significant that I feel a little bit about this one the way I feel when Bob Dylan releases a bad album.
It's like, look, you've earned the right to, you know, to put out a few things that just aren't awesome.
Okay, let's see what you think of the second one that I've got on my negative list.
Right, well, hold on a second.
The other part of it, this frustrates me.
The Gulf of America is simultaneously, A, we don't need to do this.
We got plenty.
It's a geographic description.
It was not a claim on who this body of water is important to.
So it didn't need to be renamed.
But if you were going to rename it, you missed it.
You had a golden opportunity.
And that golden opportunity actually fits with some other noises that you've been making about effectively...
Returning us to the Monroe Doctrine, in which the Western Hemisphere has a special meaning and we treat it as a coherent place.
And it is a coherent place, geographically.
If it had been the Gulf of the Americas, then it's all of ours.
And frankly, it isn't the Gulf of America because this body of water...
It touches Mexico, it touches the U.S., it touches the entire Caribbean, and it touches South America.
And so if you had called it the Gulf of the Americas, then the point is that's actually inclusive.
You give up nothing.
And it signals that actually, you know what, we are going to overcome our embarrassing history with Latin America and go forward in a positive light and treat you as partners in making the Western hemisphere a vibrant place.
I agree with you.
Gulf of the Americas would be far preferable to Gulf of America.
And I see the reason that it would be an honorable name.
But I also see zero reason to go after a static geographic name that functions and has functioned forever.
As far as I know, no one else is worried about.
Right.
It just feels like making trouble.
We have enough trouble.
There's enough legitimate fights that still are going to take a lot of work.
And this one just didn't need to get created.
And then the second one, and there's nuance here, but the way it's named, restoring the death penalty and protecting public safety.
And the death penalty hasn't disappeared, but...
The argument here is basically that, here, yet for too long, in the second long paragraph, yet for too long, politicians and judges who oppose capital punishment have defied and subverted the laws of our country.
At every turn, they seek to thwart the execution of lawfully imposed capital sentences and choose to enforce their personal beliefs rather than the law.
And, you know, he talks about the overturning of sentences of, you know, the worst of the worst, and this is true, but those of us who have arrived at being opposed to the death penalty don't do so because we like criminals.
We do so, I mean, maybe there's a few people who like criminals, but I don't think that is what anyone is thinking.
We do so because we understand that mistakes are made.
And it is far better to have, and I'll say it this way, even though it sounds wrong, guilty men go free than for free men to be imprisoned.
And when you're talking about the death penalty, it's far better for someone guilty to live a life in prison than for someone innocent to be killed by the state.
That's just never an okay result.
Yeah, I agree with you.
The reason I am...
More favorable to the idea of the death penalty than I was 15 or 20 years ago.
maybe more familiarity with what took place at Nuremberg and the significance of those deaths has changed my mind or recognition of the absolute viciousness of certain kinds of criminals against utterly innocent people, people incapable of being anything other than innocent.
In combination with a certainty that they are the ones.
Right.
That's the problem.
The thing that has me feeling that this has no place is that not only are mistakes possible, but they, we know that they happen.
Right.
Right.
There are lots of people who have been executed by the state who didn't commit the crime in question and that that is morally intolerable.
Um, so I'm, I'm against this.
On the other hand, I see where it comes from.
Yeah.
Right?
You know, the Biden commutations were about Biden, of all people, deciding to change America's approach to, you know, it was an incursion.
It was a breach of separation of powers.
And although he technically had the right to do it, I think it was...
Nakedly political.
And so there's a sense in which balancing the nakedly political actions of the prior regime with something that reverses their course, I understand.
But again, until we have a judicial system that is vastly better than the one that we currently have, this is unthinkable and it will result in...
I think that's impossible.
You can't get perfection in a judicial system.
You can try.
But at best, you've got an asymptote.
Well, but yeah, at best you have an asymptote, but the point is we're so suboptimal with respect to how effective our system is in deciding who should be locked up.
I mean, even, I will just point out, the pardoned J6 prisoners who had their releases delayed.
I think this doesn't disturb people enough.
Oh, so you need to...
Most people don't know what you just said.
So say it clearly.
The J6 prisoners who were pardoned by President Trump...
In this, yeah, this...
...should, were effectively, at the moment they were pardoned, they were falsely imprisoned.
Now, of course, there will be some process taking an imprisoned person because the system has to even make sure we're talking about the right person.
Some papers need to be signed.
But effectively, any minute that you spend incarcerated after the system has declared you either not guilty or declared your sentence over is illegitimate.
And so for anybody who has been effectively torturing these people to slow walk their release, to me, this is false imprisonment.
It's kidnapping.
It's something like that.
And so anyway, this whole system has been so politicized that when we're talking about bringing the death penalty back, we're talking about a system that we're watching abuses take place right up into the present moment.
And you don't want the death penalty in a system where those abuses are even conceivable.
All right.
Let me have my screen back for a minute so I can pull up the few more.
just the environmental, the four, um, the four executive orders that struck me as in part or in whole about environmental issues, uh, which at first I was sort of organizing this the four executive orders that struck me as in part or in whole about environmental issues, uh, which at first I was sort
I was like, you know, I think this is at this point one of the places where I'm most concerned about What Trump will do and about the lack of nuance and about the sense that is sort of a traditional, as I understand, a traditional republic and a traditional conservative sense that the earth is here for us as humans and that it is for us to use it as we see fit.
And of course, I, as an evolutionary biologist, do not see the world that way.
I do not see the earth as having been put here for us in any way.
And so the analysis of various Concerns about how we are or are not using our resources is framed in a way that I'm just going to have a very hard time with and I'm concerned that decisions are going to be made that can't be stepped back.
This, though, I found.
Temporary withdrawal.
Of all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing and review of the federal government's leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.
That's a mouthful, right?
It's a mouthful, but...
What he's doing here is this withdrawal temporarily prevents consideration of any area in the outer continental shelf for any new or renewed wind energy leasing for the purposes of generation of electricity or any other such use derived from the use of wind.
This withdrawal does not apply to leasing related to any other purposes, such as but not limited to oil, gas, minerals, and environmental conservation.
And he says, the assessment shall consider the environmental impact of onshore and offshore wind projects upon wildlife, including but not limited to birds and marine mammals.
Those who have been paying any attention at all to the offshore wind generation know that it is prone to breakage, therefore largely inefficient, maybe largely inefficient for other reasons as well, and devastating to the environment and not just to the charismatic megafauna that's being named here, but the birds and marine mammals will attract our attention and are easier to measure in all of this.
And so this feels to me like a positive.
But then we have, you know, as I read up here, he's not including, all he says here is, oil, gas, minerals, and environmental conservation.
But in one of the very first executive orders, in which he just, initial rescissions of harmful executive orders and actions, this is just a list of all of the executive orders of Bidens that he's...
It's just on and on and on and on and on and on.
And we're not going to go through all of them because it goes on.
I didn't assess most of them.
But included in this list, and I'll just keep scrolling until I find the one that I highlighted here, it goes on and on and on.
Man, he is rescinding a number of Biden's executive orders, including...
This one, for some reason, is in here twice.
So, at the same point that Trump is initiating an executive order to stop the leasing of the outer continental shelf for wind projects, he is opening it back up to oil and natural gas leasing.
Obviously, you have the same concerns about environmental impacts.
That's the same place.
And yes, these are different technologies.
And there might be an argument that one of these is very much safer than the other.
But we know that oil and natural gas drilling in autocontinal shelf areas is not particularly safe.
Yeah.
So I agree with you about the wind part of this.
My sense...
Take it by analogy.
For some reason, for decades, we were supposed to view compact fluorescent bulbs as green.
Right.
The symbol for something as green is a compact fluorescent bulb.
This was the biggest...
I feel the same way about wind generation.
In coastal waters.
And inland, frankly.
That's not what we're talking about.
Right.
There's something to be discussed inland.
Are there places?
Maybe.
But offshore wind generation, this is some industry feathering its nest at the expense of the environment and aesthetics and everything valuable.
And we shouldn't allow it to happen.
You know, ethanol might be another.
One of these were effectively, you know, corn producers are getting a subsidy by disguising what they're doing as wildly beneficial environmentally, and it isn't.
I also agree with you that the bias in favor of drilling, while I think President Trump makes some good points about the significance of our access to fossil fuels with respect to Yeah,
and in fact, just to Pick up on that, and you weren't done yet.
But one of the other environmental ones that I have concerns about, it's called Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential.
You know where this is going, right?
So, it is the policy of the United States to fully avail itself of Alaska's vast lands and resources for the benefit of the nation and the American citizens who call Alaska home, and efficiently and effectively maximize the development and production of the natural resources located on both federal and state lands within Alaska.
And so he goes after ANWR, of course.
Rescind the cancellation of any leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR. Other than such lease cancellations, as the Secretary of the Interior determines are consistent with the policy interest described in Section 2 of this order, initiate additional leasing through the coastal plain oil and gas leasing program, and issue all permits, right-of-way permits, and easements necessary for the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas from leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This again, just to repeat what I said before, this feels very much like a misunderstanding of those things were put there for us to use, therefore we are Why wouldn't we use them?
How could we possibly not use them?
And it is not paying sufficient attention, at least in this document, to what the other effects are going to be.
And there is a conflation among many on the right and others who think of themselves as not being environmentalists.
There's a conflation between climate change We're alarmists and environmentalists, and they're not the same thing.
They're not the same thing at all.
While my understanding of what anthropogenic climate change is and how it is happening has changed in the last few years, I was never a climate change alarmist, but have always been and will always be an environmentalist in that I do not see the highest and best use of a piece of land inherently as resource extractor.
Well, this is a place where you and I disagree, and not because we want to see a different world, but my understanding of how you solve the problem just comes from a different place.
I would love to imagine that this is a world full of creatures that have their own rights and all of that.
I don't think it can work.
I've not found a system by which you could be consistent.
So what you're talking about strategically with regard to policy, not about core values, I think.
We all agree.
Orcas are cool.
Right?
But if you start saying, well, orcas have as much right to exist as anybody else, then how about Anopheles mosquitoes?
About smallpox, right?
So the point is you come up with some arbitrary system in which the things that you like get rights and the things that you don't like don't have rights and that system collapses into abuse.
So the way I solve this problem is actually it is reasonable to prioritize human flourishing as the test for how we should treat a resource.
A caveat that most people will not expect, which is it's not just current human flourishing.
It's the ability of humans to flourish indefinitely on this planet.
And humans flourishing indefinitely on this planet means you've got to protect orcas.
It's no generation's right to drive them extinct because future generations are entitled to live in a world that has them.
But you can drive the Anopheles mosquito extinct, assuming that you have some reason to believe that the cost, which will exist for driving it extinct, is exceeded by the benefit to humanity of not having malaria, for example.
Just to be clear, so Anopheles mosquito being the clade of mosquitoes, and there are many clades of mosquitoes, Anopheles mosquitoes being the clade of mosquitoes that vector malaria and dengue and I think yellow fever, although that might be a different clade.
Feedbats, right?
They are filling other pieces of the puzzle in ecosystems where they exist, but the analysis seems to more easily go towards their net negative for the planet.
We could look at President Trump's prescient discussion with Joe Rogan about the...
Control of water flow in California that seems to have made fires vastly worse based on the protection of...
It's the last one.
You want me to show it?
Sure.
Yeah.
So it's the last one of these.
Putting people over fish.
This is an executive order that Trump signed on Inauguration Day.
Putting people over fish.
stopping radical environmentalism to provide water to Southern California.
My administration's plan would have allowed enormous amounts of water to flow from the snowmelt and rainwater in rivers in Northern California to beneficial use in the Central Valley in Southern California.
This catastrophic halt was allegedly in protection of the Delta smelt and other species of fish.
Today, this enormous water supply flows wastefully into the Pacific Ocean.
I don't remember exactly his conversation with Joe Rogan.
This is at least written in a way that feels reductionist.
And narrow-minded, as if allegedly in protection of one random species of fish, a smelt, is clearly if you compare smelt to all of LA, you know where you land, you know where you're supposed to land.
But why do we take at its word the policy that says this is about preserving smelt as opposed to the people?
Hopefully the good-minded people who were trying to preserve systems that included the Sierra and the snow melt and the Central Valley and on into, I can't remember what the rivers are that flow into San Pablo and the San Francisco Bay and everything.
All of those systems are dependent on one another.
And the idea of the enormous water supply flowing wastefully into the Pacific Ocean.
The definition of waste that is implicit there is that is water we can no longer use and we could have used it and we would have used it and we would have put out those fires.
And so there's this like logical chain of events that frankly has a lot of question marks in it.
And what is that water doing as it's flowing ultimately wastefully into the Pacific Ocean?
It's doing all sorts of things.
It's contributing to the water table in Northern California and thus potentially making Northern California less likely to burn at some point.
It's doing a lot of other things that aren't included in this analysis.
Well, I don't know that it is or it isn't.
My guess is, yes, I read the same reductionist view into this.
But I have no doubt that the people who were managing the water before were screwing it up.
I don't disagree with that.
So it's not impossible that this would be a pure win from the point of view of human flourishing, including a improvement in environment across the board.
I don't know.
But it is not true that you should inherently Prioritize people over fish.
Again, I would say the test is what is in the long-term interest of human beings.
And it is quite possible to have some species on the brink of extinction For which you're going to move heaven and earth to preserve it at great expense to people.
And it's not worth doing because you might preserve it for another hundred years and then it will go extinct.
And all of the costs you've paid to preserve it are not worth it.
And species are blinking out of existence without our help all the time.
All the time.
The fact of a species is not inherently sacred.
Of course.
But the overall preservation of species in the interest of human well-being allows us to recover all of the values of nature and protect that which must be protected and compromise when we need to compromise because there's some higher value that actually makes sense to compromise for.
So that's the world I want to see.
I don't want to see a, come on, let's stop putting nature over people.
Because, no, it's people get value from nature.
It's long-term interests of people versus short-term interests of people.
It's abuses by powerful interests.
It's all of those things.
Anyway, I'm concerned that a deafness to the full complexity of the environmental puzzle is in the offing because there's been so much nonsense.
Reversing the nonsense seems like an automatic good, when in fact what you really need is wise people who understand that these complex systems are prone to disruption, that we're wrecking them, and that that has huge costs for not just Americans, but citizens of the world going forward, costs that we should try to minimize.
Yes, I agree with all that.
I guess one more thing about this.
This particular executive order.
It feels like almost nothing that I've read in these feels like it's an emotional manipulation.
And the name of this one feels precisely like it's trying to be.
Putting people over fish, stopping radical environmentalism to provide water to Southern California.
And maybe I'm particularly uninterested.
In such ploys, precisely because, as we talked about in the last two episodes, those fires took out the neighborhood in which I grew up.
My neighborhood everything from when I grew up is gone now.
And I do blame many of the politicians and the fire management plans and the failure to think expansively and with a long time horizon and all of this, right?
And the Santa Ana winds.
And the eucalyptus.
And so many other things.
But I also, you know, I remember in seventh grade being assigned a debate topic about whether or not we should be draining Mono Lake to bring water to LA to get more water for LA. And having one of the arguments be like, you don't want water from the lake?
There's fish particles in that water.
And just like the stupidity of the arguments were...
Insanely stupid, even to a 13-year-old.
You get assigned a side, and you immediately care most about that side, and you know much more about this than I do.
This is the only debate that I ever participated in.
But it was just really clear that...
When you're talking about water in California, and specifically Southern California, people immediately become entrenched.
And so using emotional manipulation over water in California, and it's Chinatown all over again, but at a much bigger scale.
So I don't appreciate that either.
There's one more thing I want to do before I know you want to talk about a more global question of what Trump might be able to do for us here.
I want to say with regard to, and I can have my computer back here, with regard to the executive orders, we see explicitly what he is hoping to do.
But there are, of course, a number of things still on hold.
And nowhere in the executive orders is there anything Maha-ish, really.
There's nothing, as far as I can tell.
And again, I did not go line by line through every single one of them.
There are a lot of them.
But I don't see anything that could...
Really broadly be described as Maha, and that's partially because Bobby Kennedy has yet to be confirmed for head of the HHS, and he's the big guy who will then hopefully make changes.
Jay Bhattacharya hasn't yet been confirmed.
And so until at least Kennedy goes through those hearings, few bold moves are likely to happen.
But I did see one worrying thing in this space today.
Well, so two things.
We have, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this later, but just to mention Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, advocating for personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, which causes a lot of people to be very, very concerned for good reason.
But then Thomas Massey today tweets this, that a seed on, you can show my screen, seed oil lobbyist will be chief of staff at USDA.
Her name, I have no idea how to pronounce that middle name.
Kaylee Thatch-Buller will serve as chief of staff of the US Department of Agriculture.
Most recently Kaylee served as the president and CEO of the National Oil Seed Processors Association and the Edible Oil Producers Association.
So that's not good.
No.
Anything in the Act of Orders about Maha, maybe it's because Kennedy hasn't been through confirmation hearings yet, but then behind the scenes we have these appointments that do not bode well.
Yes, and a meeting between Trump and Bill Gates is also concerning.
But anyway, we'll see.
Give the man some room in light of all the positive things that we've seen.
Yeah, and just as a reminder, you know, as much as we ended with the environmental stuff, and I had a couple of negatives there in terms of the executive orders, I chose, gosh, I think it was 13 positive ones, and I could have chosen many more, and I didn't, you know, there's just a lot hopeful here that he has already done.
So I wanted to deploy an argument that I'm wrestling with internally.
For why, I'm not saying this will be the case, but why President Trump might end up being one of the greatest or the greatest president of all time, which is a high bar.
We've had some good ones.
But I wanted to just put three points on the table.
One, this president seems to value greatly the admiration That comes from average people.
And you can say what you will about that being a perverse motivation, but it's actually not a bad one for a president.
A president is supposed to be looking out for average Americans and to the extent that this president seems to really care what they think about him, that pushes him in the right direction and I'm not inclined to question it.
So the fact that his motivation is that rather than Having a Sam Harris-style desire to get adulation from the people who matter and treating the other people as props, right?
This person actually seems to care about the country and its people, and that's a positive thing.
The second reason that he might be headed in that direction, the direction of one of the greats, is that the degree of corruption of our system, The Uniparty and what it has done to the country has basically turned us into a profit center for private interests.
We are being constantly sold out by our own government to, I don't know if it's the highest bidder, but it's generally going to be something like that.
Just as we have often said that in science, a stuck field is easy to beat.
It's not easy to get credit for beating it, but it's really easy to outthink a field that's stuck for reasons of either having embraced a school of thought that's broken or having become corrupted by an industry that needs it to believe certain things.
A field that's telling itself lies is really easy.
To beat.
And likewise, a corrupt establishment that is constantly selling the public out is really easy to beat.
You can be much better than such people almost without trying.
Now there is one asterisk on that second point, which is the regimes that have been constantly selling the American public out have created an obstacle.
Trump being a great president, which is that he has to overcome all of the broken structures, all of the looting that has taken place and has created a system that just does not work.
He has to overcome that and get the system to begin firing on all cylinders again.
It's not as simple as just simply not betraying the public.
He also has to deal with the fallout from all of the betrayal that he is following on the heels of.
So I think we need to give him some room.
That's what Doge is about.
The fact that you've got all of this bloat in the system that isn't productive on our behalf, certainly, and spotting it and eliminating it.
It's going to be a fraught process.
You may discover some things function there in ways you don't know.
But it's a good move.
But it's really the third point, which is the one I am least sure of here.
But I wanted to put it on the table.
And it has to do with the meme coin which President Trump unleashed prior to his inauguration and immediately created a huge market capitalization, apparently added tens of billions of dollars to his wealth.
And my initial reaction to this is the same as almost everybody who's thought of it, which is, oh God, that's grotesque, right?
This is a Ponzi scheme, effectively.
It's a pump and dump, etc.
But on thinking about it further, I have two other reactions.
One is, it is not inherently a pump and dump.
That effectively, what President Trump did...
was take advantage of the fact that he was going to be the focus of global attention at a predictable moment in time and by launching a meme coin at just the right moment the fact that it would be embraced by huge numbers of people that they would purchase it and infuse cash into it made it leap to the head I don't know how many meme coins there are in the world Tens of thousands of them.
No idea.
Worth effectively nothing, most of them.
This one now has a huge market capitalization.
And so amongst the tiny number of cryptocurrencies that actually have potential to do something in the world, I'm not sure that this one isn't on the list.
And to the extent that it goes from being worth nothing to being worth something, and that, yes, a lot of that is speculation on what it's going to do in the next day, but some of it...
I don't think it's crazy to think actually this coin might ultimately do something and therefore buying a small amount of it now might be worth a large amount soon and be worth gambling on, right?
That's what happened with lots of the Bitcoin millionaires, right?
Is they put in money when nobody understood what this was and then it turned out to...
Become much more valuable over time.
Yeah, it's not implausible that it could endure.
Yeah, it's not clear that this is a Ponzi scheme collapses in the end.
It's not clear that this is going to collapse in the end.
And so I think we have to reserve judgment about what the president was thinking until he at least tells us.
But the second thing is, and this is the place where I'm really unsure about myself.
When I think this thought, there's part of me that thinks, God, that's stupid.
And then there's part of me that thinks, no, maybe it isn't.
We have a problem.
People become president who exist at a certain strata of power.
And it is inevitable, it seems, that they become extremely wealthy, if not during their presidency, in the aftermath of their presidency.
And those of us who have thought about this at all understand that there are a number of reasons for that.
You become a...
a prized speaker in the aftermath of having been president, and so you can command high speaker fees.
But there's also the implication that your action while president is so powerful that lots of people will have sought to curry favor, and they will find a zillion ways to effectively bribe you without Breaking the law or without provably breaking the law or whatever.
And we've seen that the Biden administration was, I think, as corrupt as any in recent American history.
And the stench of corruption encompasses his entire family, who he, of course, pardoned at a moment that the pardons would be overshadowed by the presidential inauguration.
So Biden is about as disgusting a person as could have inhabited that office.
And the corruption was as close to the surface as you ever see it.
The thing about what President Trump did here was it was, in retrospect, predictable that if he released a meme coin at that moment that it was going to make him spectacularly wealthy at a level that he hadn't been before.
But that wealth, as much as I feel like a president shouldn't require Spectacular wealth in order to do this job.
The position is a position of honor and prestige and doing it well ought to be its own reward.
The fact that presidents inevitably do become wealthy means that we, the public, have a problem, which is that we have to worry about the mechanisms by which they will become wealthy and what we will have given up.
And by doing this in this way, President Trump has vastly increased his wealth without being beholden to anyone.
That is to say, people who believe in Trump or were willing to speculate on the value of his new currency going forward.
have effectively infused him with cash that comes with no strings, as far as I can tell.
So, I guess the question is, do we want to be naive and imagine that we're going to have presidents who aren't going to resist every opportunity that they will suddenly have upon having all this power?
Or do we want to say, look, they're going to get really, really wealthy.
And the thing that we have to worry most about is not that they're going to get wealthy.
That's petty.
What we have to worry about is whether the way they got wealthy was selling us out.
And to the extent that this president seems to be interested in how us little people are doing and he has, yes, taken advantage of an opportunity in front of him, but he has done it in a way that I believe everybody knows what they're getting into.
If you buy a meme coin, you know what you're doing, right?
That this does not come with big donors who have interests in selling out the public, right?
The seed oil lobby isn't, you know, somehow giving him cash through this meme coin, the, you know, the fossil fuel production companies.
This is just simply money that flows to him without, you can't even interpret what the message is.
You have no idea who it is who's infused this coin with cash.
So, in any case...
I don't know if that's a crazy thought.
It feels like it probably should be.
But I would much rather...
The thing that we have to worry about is being sold out.
And I think this in some sense, if President Trump treats it this way, means that he's absolutely liberated from having to do that because the amount of wealth that has flown to him by simply being the focus of public attention globally at means that he's absolutely liberated from having to do that because the amount of wealth that has flown I hope you are right.
I know.
I mean, we've talked about this, obviously, and I like the analysis.
It seems right to me.
I guess one remaining question is, is it ever enough?
People who become fabulously wealthy report that the number keeps changing.
Yeah, but, you know, again, there's a lot of particulars here, but President Trump is not a young man.
Yeah.
This is a huge influx, and one of the things about the not enough is that you're on a treadmill.
Yeah.
It's effectively an economic version of the hedonic treadmill.
But a sudden influx.
Well, and...
Including your first point, which is that he actually seems to really care about the opinion of the American people.
And so if he did this, and then he also sells this out in some way, the American people are forgiving, but...
We shouldn't forgive them.
We should not.
Some would.
But he would certainly tarnish his reputation.
And his reputation is a huge part of his reputation, included in which his historical reputation, which is to say his legacy, are what matter very much to him.
100%.
Well, I hope that.
Remains his guiding light because he can do a lot of good for us if what he wants is to be remembered as a great man.
Yeah, he really can.
I mean, the number of things that he has done in the executive orders in the first two days in office, and I don't even know what he's done today.
But I guess this is the fourth day, and he's going.
And not too many missteps as far as I can tell.
Reasons for concern.
Let's just see.
Let's hope.
Let's hope.
All right.
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