Hamgate: The 266th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss travel, Spain, ham, and MAHA. How do we travel, how has it changed over time, and what is the point? From the Alhambra to street altercations, what can we learn from the places that we go, and how we interact with them? Then: one cannot bring iberico ham into the United States from Spain, the USDA says, “because there are special restrictions.” We suspect the ham lobby. Also: past interactions with border control, over vanilla, and dart-poison frogs. And: MA...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 266. Yes, I definitely knew that without checking.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
We have been away, so this is the first live stream in a couple of weeks.
Actually, we did some work away, as our long-time viewers will know.
But anyway, we're raring to go and get back into it.
I don't know about you, but I'm discovering all sorts of things have happened while we were...
Not entirely paying attention to the global picture.
And it is causing interesting dynamics where, you know, people have lived something and you've lived something different and you're now in danger of talking at cross purposes.
Have you had any of that experience?
I think...
I think I am generally so much less online than many of the people you're talking about and you that I imagine that I'm usually living a parallel life.
No, I have not had that experience because I have not tried to reconnect with whatever it is that you're referring to.
But as I understand it today, we're going to talk a little bit about Spain and Hamgate.
And the Game Theory of Maha.
Yeah, okay.
So there we are.
Thank you to all of you who are joining us on Locals, where we have a watch party going on right now.
Please consider joining us there.
And let's get right to our ads.
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Now, I'm just going to take an aside for a moment.
I think I know what you're going to say.
Okay, say it for me.
Are you going to say that actually all of the forests of New Zealand are remote?
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I'm wondering what, so the training of beekeeping, is that going to be like the, I can't think of the word, like what are you called when you're in training?
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It's not the best analogy.
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Doubt it.
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Yeah, if you make a note, that increases the chances from 0.01% to 3%.
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Let me just say, I am not that great at predicting what you're going to say next, but I'm way better at predicting what you will order at a restaurant.
I would say, you tell me, I think I'm above 90%, maybe even 95% on that?
Yeah, I'd say 90%.
Yeah, somewhere between.
Having just spent three weeks mostly eating out, I would say you had a couple of misses at the end of the trip.
I'm thinking 90%.
Yeah.
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I'm pretty good on that front.
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Uh-oh.
We're having a punctuation catastrophe.
Cooking with Teflon, comma, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get...
Yeah.
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Can we talk about things that we have observed and experienced in Spain?
If that's where you want to start.
Start wherever you like.
No, go for it.
Well, all right.
Let's just say we've spent now three weeks in Spain.
Fascinating.
It's been a long time since you and I have done a trip anything like this.
You and I had never been to Spain before.
And I will just say that one of the impressions I know you and I share from this trip is that Spain is marvelous, actually quite different than other places that you and I have been.
You and I have both spent a bunch of time in Europe.
And Spain did not disappoint with respect to being unique.
It wasn't just another European country.
It had a flavor that was all its own.
And it didn't.
So something you've been saying, you've been noticing, some places you've been.
Where I've not been with you, but especially where you've been with Zach, you've said, this feels like it could be anywhere in Europe.
Like, it's got a European flavor, but it could be anywhere.
And there was no place in Spain that we went.
And we traveled across southern Spain, almost entirely Andalusia, although we flew in and out of Barcelona, so we spent a few days in Barcelona as well.
So, you know, Barcelona, Cordoba, Seville, Cadiz, Ronda, some of the white towns around Ronda, Gibraltar, bizarrely, and Granada.
And no place we saw felt like, yeah, this would kind of be anywhere.
Yeah, I was actually looking for it.
So the place that specifically struck me as generic, that really disappointed me, was Geneva, the city of Geneva itself.
Really felt like it could be just about anywhere in Europe.
It was definitely European, but had almost no character of its own.
Maybe by design, as it's kind of an international meeting space.
But anyway, Spain was amazing.
And I would say that the sights, the sights that you must see as a traveler there, at least in the parts of Spain that we were in, didn't disappoint either.
Even, you know, you hear about the grandeur of the Alhambra or the Mesquita and you think, well, okay, I got to see it.
But I bet I've seen stuff like it before.
Well, no, it's really incredibly remarkable.
So we had not talked about what we were going to talk about except for a few other things today.
And I wasn't necessarily planning on doing this, but I wonder if you have not read what I wrote about Our travels on Substack.
And I think I should read it here.
Because so far, everything you've said is somewhere in there.
And we obviously...
I wrote it as my experience and was not pretending that it was your shared experience.
But you began this conversation by saying, we haven't done a trip like this in a while.
We've never done a trip like this, right?
That's true.
We have traveled a lot together.
One of our very early experiences together, in fact, was traveling through Central America together.
First in my first car, which was already at that point 13 years old.
I had gotten it as a used...
No, it was already like 15 years old.
I had gotten it as a used...
It was a 1976 Toyota Corolla.
And then that...
That proved expensive and there are stories there.
We sold it and we traveled by bus and backpack and such.
And on that first trip in 1991, we discovered, and we spent the entire summer at it, that we traveled really well together.
And it was in some ways a little surprising because there's a lot about travel that can be very particular.
And you and I, while It has been observed by some people appear to share a brain, and some regards are extraordinarily different in many regards.
And the discovery that we could travel really well together was wonderful, and we've since done both research together and traveled together.
We've been through Turkey.
We've spent time in Madagascar, first just exploring, and then as part of my dissertation research, spent time in Panama.
We spent time in Ecuador together.
And more recently, Europe, always with a reason to be there.
Always, you know, because we were doing a talk or an event or something.
And so this did not have that framing.
And it was really obvious to me, especially as the planner of the thing, how much differently a person has to travel now if one wants to make sure that one has a bed at night.
Basically.
So we could be totally freewheeling back in 1991, the entire 90s.
Because we knew if push came to shove, we had a tent and a couple sleeping pads and we were young and we'd find something.
And we did that sometimes.
We slept in the shadow of Mayan ruins and in the Osa Peninsula.
I remember that one.
Very muddy night.
Failed to make a field station and decided at some point that we better give up while there was still enough light to know.
I think we'd lost the trail once or twice.
Oh, the trail vanished underwater.
It rained heavily, and the trail that was so...
This is not the only time this has happened to us, but the trail in the tropical rainforest can just simply disappear on you as rivulets of water are everywhere, and it all looks the same, and that did happen.
And we camped in it.
It's not a good night.
It was not the most comfortable night.
But, you know, when you're whatever we were then, you know, 22, 24, 28, whatever, you could do it.
And it's an adventure and we have the story.
And A, we're not 22 or 28 or anything like that anymore.
And also Europe just isn't.
The Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, right?
And so having to know well in advance where we were going to be spending every night so that we could be sure that we had a night meant that I had to guess in advance where we'd like to spend what amounts of time.
And I think I did pretty well, but I didn't do perfectly because how could you?
But it also just constrains you into...
At least me, as someone who is sort of constantly monitoring time and waiting for space where I don't have to be thinking about it and can just let it flow, you're like, well, okay, but we've only got one more night here, and I wanted to see the X. Or, oh, we've got three more days here, and so I'm just going to get up whenever and just start walking.
Sort of half-jokingly said before we left, like, I'm going to walk and eat and walk and eat and walk and eat, right?
And we did a lot of that, right?
But it's definitely different from anything that we've done before, and that's partially because it's Europe, and that's partially because times have changed.
All right, so, yeah, I think the closest thing we did was Turkey, but that wasn't exactly the same style of travel.
I did want to say one other thing before you launch into your piece.
There is one way in which I know you and I both felt that this was, there was a bittersweet aspect to this because the world has gotten, I mean, I used to say of Yosemite, do you know that Yosemite has shrunk by 50% in my lifetime?
And the answer is it hasn't really shrunk at all in terms of area, but it has shrunk in terms of there's only one of them on earth and the number of people that means that Have only one Yosemite that they have to see has made it effectively that much smaller.
And this is, you know, in Yosemite at least, there are regulations that keep the place from being completely overrun.
I must say it's been a long time since I've been to Yosemite.
But you spent a lot of time.
I spent a lot of there as a kid.
And I sort of thought that was normal and I expected that we would.
And we have spent a lot of time in other places with our kids and we never got to Yosemite.
I think the last time...
Is it possible the last time we were there was when we backpacked through it for the three days before we got married nearby with a small group of friends?
I think that's correct.
And we were, you know, not in the valley.
We were up in Tuolumne.
But the thing about this trip was this was off-season, right?
It's still winter.
It wasn't especially cold because Spain is far enough south in Europe.
But it was cold.
Cold enough that it wasn't high tourist season, you know, When you got to the beach, it wasn't really beach weather and all of this.
But even in the off-season, there are just so many people from all over the world trying to get away from each other that the point is there is no getting away from anything.
You don't get to see what Spain is like without Others, because it's very rare that, you know, sometimes you walk down a street and there's nobody else.
But it takes a fair amount of work to do it.
And we do a pretty good job of finding those places.
But you still want to go to the places that are justly famous.
That are justly famous and there's no escaping it there.
And the other thing is, and I want to be very delicate about this, I try very hard not to be judgmental of people who didn't have better options.
And in some way, we are all the product of our developmental environment.
But there's also something about the way that people from around the world are encountering these spaces that are now overrun with other people from around the world.
And the thing I kept thinking was, I'm watching, it's not everybody, but a huge number of people trying to figure out how to consume.
The experience.
And the point is, it's not.
Consumption isn't the right metaphor.
You shouldn't be trying to consume this.
That's not what you're doing.
You're not.
It's not a bird list where you're trying to check something off.
Well, now I've seen, you know, the mosquito.
Right?
Well, I mean, in fact, this has always been our critique of birders as well.
That, you know, birders as opposed to ornithologists.
And that's not a perfect distinction.
But, you know.
Birders started off being birders because they thought birds were really cool.
They wanted to know something about them.
And it sort of helps organize their days and gives them a little bit of something to say, oh, I want to go there and I want to see the thing.
And that's why we ended up in Gibraltar.
I've always wanted to see European monkeys because that's such a weird piece of truth that there are European monkeys in addition to the humans that are there.
But many people who, you know, and this is true of, you know, why do so many doctors not seem to care about human health, even though they presumably went into it because that was one of the things driving them?
Why do so many birders not seem to care that much about the bird species as much as, I've got to put another thing on the list.
I've got to check another bird off the list.
And so it's the same sort of consumption versus observation, analysis, experience approach.
Yep.
I wanted to say two things about it.
One thing is, um, I, and I, this was, you know, we did pretty good.
You did great in planning this trip.
A few errors.
One of the errors that was mine, I almost never go anywhere without a pair of binoculars.
I just don't do it because they, it always comes in handy and you don't expect it to, and you're so glad you have them.
And in this case, somehow in the final flurry of packing, I didn't bring them.
Desperately wanted them.
There was so much more that needed binoculars in this case.
So anyway, we just suffered through not having them.
This might be a good moment to ask our audience if they have any recommendations for compact, 8x, weather-resistant binos.
Because we've got great binos that are bigger than what we would take on such a trip.
Yeah, I would have taken them anyway.
But anyway, the point is, I also didn't see other people with binoculars.
And I noticed that difference because 25 years ago, you would have.
You and I talked about this, but I think what's going on is that binoculars do not fit into the...
You can consume binoculars.
You can get all involved in which are the best pair and why and all of that.
But using binoculars is fundamentally transitory, ephemeral.
It doesn't capture an image.
You can't take the image that you saw from your binoculars and...
Give it to somebody or send it to somebody.
So the point is it really is about an experience, inherently about an experience.
And I'm not sure, I'm really not sure that in three weeks with way too many tourists looking often at things that were quite distant that I saw a single pair.
I mean, to be fair, this was mostly we were not in nature.
Yep.
And when we were in nature, we weren't around any other people.
So there were no other people to see whether or not they had binoculars, right?
I think if either of us had had the forethought to bring a pair of binoculars, we would have begun to bring them to the sites if we had been to bring them in there, right?
Because there were things that were far away, even within the grand historical sites.
But it's not a situation where even people who normally might carry binoculars might think to bring them.
I mean, as evidence, take us.
I'm comparing my own experience from 25 years ago.
You would have seen a certain number of binoculars.
I'm not sure that you had never been in Europe.
You weren't in Europe 25 years ago.
So I don't think that people in Europe were traveling around with binoculars.
I didn't spend time there.
But I believe binoculars would have been not as common a sight as a fancy camera or something.
But they would have been present.
The other thing, though.
Is the prevalence of selfies designed to take the experience of being in some place that, you know, is a wonder of the world and to get something from it of value, right?
Like what, I'm seeing something thousands of people.
I was here.
I lived.
Right.
And there is also something, this is...
Maybe more delicate, and maybe it does tread into the judgmental.
But the number of young women going out of their way to create some flirty selfie in some marvelous place that really demands consideration.
Why is this place like this?
In Spain, there's this interplay between the Islamic and the Christian that...
Creates this, you know, architecture fusion that really, you know, makes you think, well, what tradition did result in that arch, right?
So, but the number, you know, and maybe this is judgmental and maybe it's not fair, but I had the sense of like, this is actually, it's not the first destructive thing, but it actually kind of destroys female beauty too.
Because female beauty has become the self-consciousness of these selfies designed for broadcast.
And anyway...
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know if you're thinking of any particular cases, but there's a particular pretend coy, pretend flirtatious, especially over the shoulder that we saw.
Not as much selfies, but like pairs of women where it was clear what had been planned.
And the photograph was being choreographed, as it were, to look like a snapshot, to look like they just like the friend just caught her in a beautiful moment.
And there was studied nonchalance.
Studied nonchalance.
And there was one moment, actually, when we were in Cordoba outside the Mosquita.
Cathedral mosque, mosque cathedral, the mosque cathedral or cathedral mosque.
I'll talk about a little bit in this piece.
And there are, you know, lots of people taking selfies, taking pictures of each other, almost always with this.
There's the classic like travel photos, like here I am looking a little bit uncomfortable in front of this important thing.
I was here, I lived, right?
It's proof.
But then there's this like, oh, I'm just going to pretend you just caught me, you know, right?
And those are in some ways.
They're harder to witness, too, because you're watching someone else's theater, and you're watching someone else create theater that they're going to pretend wasn't theater.
We walked past a couple, an attractive middle-aged couple, who were sitting on the steps, and sort of like their legs were touching, like we'd been a little bit entangled.
It was totally appropriate what they were doing, but they were just, their heads leading together in conversation.
I really wanted to take a picture of them and give it to them.
Because I thought, I don't know who they are.
I don't know if they're married for 30 years, married to other people.
I don't know what their story is, right?
That's the picture they would want of this moment, because here they are enjoying each other in the shadow of a beautiful place that they came to because they knew they wanted to be here.
And that's, if you want a picture of yourselves, that's what you want, is for someone to have caught you actually off guard, as opposed to you pretending to be off guard when what you've done is maybe stood in front of the mirror for a long time and practiced the thing over and over and over again.
And there's just, there's no flow, there's no serendipity, there's no naturalness.
There's no authenticity.
And so, you know, I told you this afterwards, like, you should have.
Like, I don't know.
And I didn't, and I probably should have.
Well, one, the thing that you're describing, you're like, this person is curating their brand using something transcendent.
And maybe we'll come back to this, but transcendent, especially in terms of time, right?
Many of these structures take Centuries to produce, which means that the people who decided to produce them didn't live to see them completed.
They're that significant and important and transcendent of normal human time.
And the idea that, oh, that would make a great backdrop for, you know, oh, this old thing, you know, right?
It's just so discordant.
But the point I wanted to rescue from this is just simply as a biological critter and as a male human biological critter, Human females have been given a superpower that they're not supposed to be overly capable of curating.
Yes, curating that thing has, you know, gone on for time in memoriam, but there's something about the internet era that, you know, I've always said that the mirror is a terrible invention because imagine that Your understanding of how you looked came through the way other people interacted with you.
Oh, you would better yourself to try to look better, and it would work because the real point is, are you attractive, not are you physically attractive?
Is your whole you attractive, right?
The internet takes that one step or ten steps worse, right?
And it allows you to present.
Only that that you want to present after you've crafted it and maybe used filters and your camera has intervened on your behalf and all of these things have happened.
Well, I think there's another way in which it's worse.
And I feel like we talked about mirrors from one of the live streams that we did in Spain.
But what the mirror does is it gives you the direct feedback so that you can create what you think you want the world to see in you, even if the world...
Doesn't necessarily want to see that in you.
So there's a question of like, what do I want to be?
And how is the world responding to me?
And before a mirror, you were basing how you looked entirely on how people reacted to you.
And with the internet, with production of content for the internet, you actually have no idea.
It's at least asynchronous.
It's at least delayed.
You have no idea if you get no response at all, maybe that's some information, but maybe not.
Maybe it just hasn't gotten anywhere.
And if you get a lot of negative or a lot of positive, maybe it's bots.
Maybe it's fraudulent.
You have no idea.
And so the reaction that you get isn't information.
Whereas when you walk down the street and someone gives you a look or even like...
You know, wolf whistles are terrible, but they are information.
Yeah.
Right?
Right.
And, you know, it's almost it's a positive feedback, too.
And I don't mean that in the sense of, hey, that's some great feedback.
I mean, it's self-amplifying because the feedback that you get on the Internet is also curated.
Right.
Right.
Even the real stuff.
Right.
The dude who's trying to get laid.
Knows that he needs to come across not as a creep, but as a sympathetic.
So, you know, the point is he gets to edit what he writes and the whole thing results, you know.
It's just it's wrecking beauty of all kinds, right?
It's wrecking the beauty of the things that are being posed in front of constantly.
And it's wrecking the beauty of the people who are posing, who, frankly, you know, this is this is where I will recover myself from being judgmental.
These people.
Are young enough that they don't have any idea what they gave up.
They don't have any idea what the control that they now have over their image, what the price of that was.
Because they didn't see the world before this was a thing.
And so, in some sense, they're just doing what people do, right?
As you point out, people have always taken awkward snapshots in front of famous stuff.
And it wasn't this toxic thing.
It was like, you know, I'll be in front of that thing once in my life.
Maybe I'd like a picture to remember it by, right?
Rather than, oh, I'm going to make people jealous or make them desirous or whatever I'm trying to do by taking that selfie.
And so anyway, you've probably done a much better job of encapsulating this than what you wrote.
So there's so much.
I actually didn't write about this, what we were just talking about.
So let me share it.
Great.
And let's see what you think.
Okay, and you can show my screen if you want while I do this, Jen.
Travel and its discontents.
Exploration in the age of self-obsession.
On our...
Oh, is it not working?
Unplug it.
Yeah, I didn't touch it, and it was working before, so, you know, that's my computer for you.
No?
Still not.
How about now?
My computer's bouncing around like it's working.
All right.
Travel and its discontents, exploration in the age of self-obsession.
On our last morning in Spain, near the beach in Barcelona, a parrot stole pizza from a flock of pigeons, flew it into a tree, and began to eat.
A magpie, watching the interchange, thought he could best the parrot and take the pizza for himself.
The parrot was having none of it, however, and the magpie, perhaps now feeling a bit outclassed, picked a fight with some other magpies.
The three of them flew off into the city in a frenzy.
Travel is not as I remember it.
Thank you.
The number of people who travel is growing, but the world is not.
The places, therefore, the ones from history, the places which those who think about such things will know the names of, are inherently more crowded.
One such place is the Alhambra.
A great Moorish complex that began to come into being in the 9th century, and is now an immense relic in the middle of modern Granada.
It was citadel, palace, and administrative center for hundreds of years, a city fortress in which 2,000 people once lived, a center of the Islamic Golden Age.
Even now, empty of furnishings and the bustle of royal life, it is extraordinary.
Within the Alhambra's Nazared palaces, geometrically renait tiles and carvings adorn every surface: floors, walls, and ceilings, in wood, plaster, stucco, and ceramic, one room into the next, more and more and more, interspersed with perfect gardens.
The number of visitors to the Alhambra's biggest draw, the Nazared palaces, is capped at something like eight thousand per day, which is both a lot and a little.
Tickets are sold out months in advance.
Even with the earliest time slot to enter one morning, on a chilly morning in the off-season, we were amid throngs.
Throngs shuffling.
Throngs taking selfies with cameras on their phones.
Throngs trying to pretend that they are alone, that the other throngers do not exist.
But also throngers who are not quite sure what it is that they are supposed to be doing there, either.
Yes, of course, there has always been the tourist problem.
How do we simultaneously expand our horizons, appreciate how many ways there are to be human, how many different ways there are to live, while not destroying what we seek in the process?
It is a true conundrum, a cultural observer effect.
Just as has been noted in physics, wherein the act of observation itself changes that which is observed see Schrodinger's cat, or rather don't unless you want to change what is true about it, there is no way to visit a place as an outsider without bringing the outside in with you, no matter how hard you try not to.
And of course, many people are not trying at all.
My very first research, on which a natural experiment unfolded in front of me in Costa Rica, involved a self-described ecotourist lodge.
It was one of those places to which good-hearted people frequently go when they want to see wild nature, while also feeling that they are good stewards of the world, protecting wild nature, seeing to it that the locals are included in the profits, that sort of thing.
This ecotourist lodge had, a few years before I arrived in the region at a nearby field station, introduced a non-native species of dart poison frog to a forest that already had quite a fine species of dart poison frog, thank you very much.
The lodge had thought that the new species would be more appealing to ecotourists.
But the original, and very fine, species of dart poison frog was intimidated in the presence of the new, bigger, brasher species, and was, I would discover, going locally extinct.
That, unfortunately, is sometimes how ecotourism plays out.
It is also, in general terms, how tourism often plays out.
Being herded here and there, moving like so many cows or salmon to a destination, unthinking, prompts existential angst in me.
What, after all, is the point?
In Granada, we walked up through the Sacromonte neighborhood, which is where thousands of Roma, gypsies, used to live in Granada, in homes built into caves, in the stone cliffs.
Many Romas still live there today.
At some level, we were gawking.
We didn't want to gawk.
That wasn't the hope or the point.
We wanted to get a feel for what it would have been like to live, as Roma, in caves, in the sides of cliffs, above the city of Granada, next door to the Albazin, the Moorish quarter, across a ravine from the Alhambra, its fortified palaces impressive from every angle.
In the Sacramonte, someone was selling access to his cave for the tourists.
Sidewalk cafes advertised vinos, bebidas, tapas on checkboards.
Many tourists were there in organized groups.
Unsure how to navigate back streets without a guide in the comfort of 20 other tourists, they had hired a leader.
As we passed one such group, we heard the guide say, There is a woman here who does not like the tourists, so stay with me.
With me it is okay.
I understand that woman.
She doesn't want any of us there where she lives in her neighborhood.
She must have issues with some of her neighbors as well.
Some are selling access to the caves, others are selling overpriced drinks.
Tourism is how the money comes in now.
That doesn't mean that she has to like it.
More than 25 years ago, Brett and I traveled to Turkey.
It was late summer, the season of the apricot harvest, and as we drove through the vast Anatolian plain, every town gleamed orange from a distance, apricots laid out on mats on all the roofs, drying in the sun.
When we stopped for gas, we were invited by the station attendant to join him for some apple tea.
We accepted.
In Cappadocia, as in the Sacramonte neighborhood of Granada, people have lived in caves for a much longer time, building elaborate structures onto and into cities that came before.
In Cappadocia, we were befriended one day by a local man, who showed us some of the nooks and crannies that visitors generally did not find, and we had a picnic of meats and cheeses, and yes, dried apricots, with his extended family, and were invited into his home to meet the elders who were not up to a picnic, and the whole thing was not a scam,
It is not just the crowds, though.
It is also the globalization, which brings homogenization.
We've traveled to see outside of our own perspective, but there is McDonald's, just feet from the mind-blowing bridge and ravine in Rwanda.
When you are done having your mind blown, consider having a Big Mac.
It will taste just like you remember.
If it is always possible to pull back into the familiar, there is little risk of discovery.
And if the computer in your pocket promises access to anything you might want to know, any time you want it, you will surely lose curiosity.
There will be a flattening of cultural affect.
Yes, you will surely look some things up, and yes, you will surely take some photographs.
I certainly do both, and I will continue to do so.
But there is such value in not knowing, and sitting in the not knowing for a while, and allowing yourself to wonder, what if?
Why?
How did these people accomplish what they did?
How is what I am seeing even possible?
And there is also value in not documenting, or at least not documenting until you have had the experience that you are supposedly documenting.
People who live wholly behind their cameras may have good photographs, but they are not laying down memories of their own lives.
When we think we can know anything immediately, as easily there as here, then as now, we lose the very particularness of this time and place.
But it is precisely the particularness of this time and place that allows us to feel alive.
The abyss in Rhonda is so startling, it is difficult to conceive of.
Unless you are right there on top of it, it can seem imaginary.
At dusk, a startling cry emanates from somewhere in it, haunting and sharp.
It's a peacock, says Brett.
And he is right.
Pavel Real in Spanish.
Royal Turkey.
A royal turkey right here in Rwanda.
We do not learn why there is a peacock here, nor why he is so forlarn that he shrieks into the darkness each night.
In a bakery several blocks away, on a morning that is neither haunting nor dark, a woman takes particular care in wrapping up little cakes, arranging them just so on brown waxed paper, tying them neatly with colored twine such that, when carried, they are balanced just right.
A few blocks away, another woman sweeps outside her shop with a broom made of branches, a broom that appears to be both functional and pleasurable to use.
After this work, her establishment is notably more inviting.
The small pleasures of a natural whisk broom or a well-wrapped package of pastries would not seem to compare to the glories of mosques and cathedrals, palaces and parks.
All of the places that we went to that can be named or require tickets to enter were in fact as glorious as they seemed like they might be.
The Alhambra in Granada and the Alcazar in Seville, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the fevered room of Gaudí, which is still being built, and especially the Mesquita in Córdoba.
But that should not detract from the value of a good broom, a well-prepared package.
The whole of southern Spain, at least of Andalusia, is a temporal mosaic of sky-god religions.
Islam and Christianity in particular have been vying for dominance for many hundreds of years.
Each one ascended in its time, the others sometimes being tolerated, sometimes not.
In the year 950, Córdoba was a thriving city of 100,000 people.
Its streets lit at night with oil lamps, water piped in from outside the city, its neighborhoods dotted with a myriad mosques, palaces, and public baths.
The city was under Muslim rule, but Christians and Jews lived there too, and people spoke not just Arabic, but Hebrew and Latin as well.
At the university, men studied medicine and math, literature, and the law.
The Mesquita of Cordoba was already built then, a mosque of endless columns and arches and red and white stripes that is jaw-dropping today.
What impression must it have made on people over 1,000 years ago?
But the golden age of Cordoba, ruled over by the Arabic Amayads, would not last forever.
Fighting among rival groups of Muslims led to its decline, and the city fell to Christians in the year 1236. And the Christians, rather than building a separate cathedral and letting the mosque be, or tearing down the mosque and building a cathedral in its place, decided to build their house of worship inside of and up out of the mosque, leaving most of the mosque intact.
That is what exists today.
The Mosquita is a mosque-cathedral, or perhaps it is a cathedral-mosque.
It is called both things, for nobody seems to know which it is more of now, mosque or cathedral.
All of those places, the Alhambra and the Alcazar, the cathedrals and mosques, were magical and mystical, historical and necessary, but we saw them coming.
They have already been well described.
It is the things we cannot predict, those things that we do not see coming and which have not already been analyzed endlessly, that are the true experiential gems.
In addition to its historic mesquita, Córdoba has a Roman bridge that spans the Guadalquivir River.
Just downstream of the bridge is a giant, ancient wooden water wheel, in and around which lives a colony of feral cats.
Many of them appear to be Siamese.
The water-wheel is mounted on high stone walls on which pigeons roost, clinging to shallow impressions on the vertical surfaces.
Cats sit above the birds, looking down, considering.
In Grazalima, a white-hill town within the vast olive, cork, and cave-filled Sierra del Grazalima Natural Park, we were stopped by a man named Juan.
He was celebrating his 75th birthday when he saw Brett taking a photograph in a grocery store and guest for reasons that he never did explain that we must be Scottish.
Upon learning that we were American, he jokingly made the sign of the devil at us before inviting us to join him for some tapas and a drink.
Not the sign of the devil.
It's to keep away the devil.
Yeah, it's the cross.
Keep away the vampires.
Yeah.
And in both Cordoba and Seville, the trees were full of oranges, beautifully ripe oranges, but they were ripe bitter oranges, not good for grazing right off the tree.
Yes, we tried.
Better that they be made into bitter orange marmalade than eaten with thin slices of manchego.
One night in Seville, we happened upon orange thieves stealing all of the oranges, pulling them off trees and filling bucket after bucket, stashing the fruit-filled buckets in the backs of vans.
The orange thieves, it turns out, were not thieves at all, but employed by the city.
Municipal workers paid to harvest the oranges and, I hope, turned them over to people who would in fact make bitter orange marmalade out of them, which in turn would be sold.
The profits turned back into public works projects.
Or at least, that is my dream.
Brett thinks it won't happen.
And finally, the only whisper of violence or threat of any kind that we saw in nearly three weeks of mostly urban exploration was in Granada, a physical confrontation between two men.
They were Glovo delivery guys, Glovo being the local equivalent of DoorDash, and also North African Muslim men by the looks of them, being held apart by other North African Muslim men, until those holding back the combatants could do so no longer, and the alley in which the altercation started, where we happened to be walking at the time, no longer contained where we happened to be walking at the time, no longer contained The two men spilled out of the busy street, onto each other, a punch thrown, a phone hurled onto the pavement, and then they were separated again, pulled back by their respective people, tugging at them.
On the street, where we had hustled to make sure that we were not collateral damage, all activity stopped, watching.
Police suit arrived.
Half an hour later, the police were still there.
Other than that, we literally never felt at risk in Spain, not even a hint, and it was odd.
Police were around, but hardly ubiquitous, and people were raucous at times and places, but nearly always it just felt like there were a whole lot of people living their own individual lives, often in close quarters with others, and everyone was pretty much getting along, doing the civilization thing.
Doing the civilization thing.
It's what we all need to be doing.
It has become rather rare in American cities.
We might take a few hints from older cultures than ours, people who have lived among differences and disagreement for far longer than we have, and have learned to make it work.
We might give doing the civilization thing a solid try.
Wow.
Well, that's...
And I didn't touch on food at all.
No.
There's something about that.
You know, I was drawing this dichotomy between those who were...
Just reflexively trying to consume what they were seeing and what I think the better way to approach it is, which is to actually just experience it and not be so focused on how you can project it back into your own world, but you've done something productive with it.
And it's really, really good.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm sure there'll be little bits and pieces that you, you know, you were standing in a different place, you have a different brain.
You didn't perceive it exactly as I did.
Does that remind you of...
That all resonated.
Yeah, that all resonated quite well.
And I think you captured the glory of it and the tragedy of it.
Because the glory of it, the wondrous thing about the fact that so many of the things worth going to that part of the world to see are indifferent to the tourists and how they behave.
They just simply continue to exist.
Well, indifferent unless the tourists put their paws on things.
Indifferent to the presence of tourists if the tourists don't engage with the thing.
Yeah, and more or less, I don't think we saw terribly much evidence of tourists behaving destructively.
They were just sort of accidentally misunderstanding how important they were relative to these ancient things.
Yeah, and I said this to you on the trip, and I say it here too, but I think that it...
Prompted a lot of existential angst, but I mean it really actually did in a way that in the past when I have When I have engaged with tourists, especially since, as you will remember, my very first research ended up being, you know, revealing the hypocrisy of so-called ecotourism.
You know, something that I was not driven to reveal the hypocrisy of ecotourism.
I just, you know, happened upon this natural experiment.
I'm like, oh my god, these people introduced a frog that is driving the local frog extinct.
And to what end?
So, because they think that the frog they introduce is a little bit sexier than the other, like, what are they doing?
Like, how is this an ecological...
But in the past, I didn't experience it sort of coming back on me and making me feel like, then why am I here?
What is the point of being here?
And I did feel that a certain amount on this trip.
I just felt like I don't know that this can be experienced in a way now that feels true enough, that still has enough of the, like, The ghosts, the echoes of the lives that were involved in building this space when it was in its glory days, when we were at the Alhambra or the Alcazar or whatever, that I can still hear it or sense it.
It just feels like it's being obliterated.
It's being paved over.
Yeah.
I mean, I get that, you know, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot, that feeling.
On the other hand, there's a part of me that...
You know, it goes back to the discussion we had some weeks back, months back, about elephants and the fact that an elephant is a completely singular and strange thing to exist with you in a universe, right?
To find that you coexist with elephants, especially if they're not where you live and at best you've heard or seen a picture and you think, well, that must be exaggerated.
And then you encounter an elephant and it's like, now I have to correct my model to understand that such a thing is and somehow came to be, right?
The world that you and I remember, which I think was a better world to travel in by a lot, that world was also...
radically broken already.
But because you and I entered it at the stage we did, that felt like normal.
It was still possible to get off the beaten path so regularly that it sort of felt like that was the point.
And yes, things have gotten way worse very quickly.
But I would also point out that, you know, of course, because human beings are the way they are, this can be reversed.
I don't know how you deal with the number of people who are still enjoying an Earth that's not getting any bigger.
Especially, you know, if the current understanding that, oh, there are just too few people, you know, that this problem only gets worse from the point of view of a larger population.
But from the point of view of the people and how they interact with the world around them, it's really a question of did your developmental environment prepare you?
To understand how amazing the world you're in is, or did it cause you to become self-obsessed so that you think that it's all backdrop?
And anyway, so as troubling as what we've experienced is, it's also hopeful because, you know, a cultural shift fixes it.
And I don't know whether that cultural shift can or will happen, but it is possible.
Yeah.
I hope you're right.
I'm reminded of that very first trip that we did together in 1991. We started off in my old car.
You remember driving?
So we drove down through Texas, entered Mexico at Ciudad Juarez, of all places, and drove down the eastern side of Mexico, up through the Yucatan, and then down the east side of the Yucatan and then at some point...
Got rid of the car and continued exploring the Yucatan by bus and such.
But when we still had the car, I think we were going from Merida and aiming for someplace down the east coast of the Yucatan and drove sort of unaware what we might be driving into or through Cancun.
Oh, yeah.
And this was 1991. Right.
And it felt like hell.
Mm-hmm.
And all we did was drive through.
We didn't need to stop for gas.
We just drove through.
And already, already, it was just a sort of densely populated Disney version.
Yeah, I would say the number of dollars available by catering to every desire and whim of American tourists had totally distorted.
Everything about Mexico at that place.
Mexico could not help but present people with what people expected and wanted rather than with what it is.
So it was an inversion of the reality of travel where travel, when done properly, confronts you with all sorts of things that you did not expect or anticipate or know to want or anything like that.
And instead, the point is that stuff all has to be pushed aside because The dollars come when we give you the thing that you think you want, which means that this is inherently, this is a mirror of you dressed up as Mexico.
That's right.
It's not Mexico.
Right.
And it's not travel.
I mean, this was something that I always used to try to work with my students before I did study abroad.
And, you know, in the final study abroad, we did together.
We did this together as well.
You know, people can't know until they've gone someplace how uncomfortable they're going to be, what their own bias, what biases are going to be revealed to them about themselves, you know, what parts of being an American they took for granted and actually were depending on, and how they can learn from those things.
And so just trying to, like, you know, I would have conversations about comfort.
Like, what is your relationship with comfort, and how important do you think that is to you, and what will happen when, you know, you realize that it's more important to you than you knew.
That trip, we saw so much of the ancient Maya.
And because we had a car for a lot of it, we were able to go to many, many Mayan sites that most people couldn't get to, right?
And in 2016...
Actually, halfway through the final academic year that you and I were employed as college professors, I thought that our boys were old enough.
We'd taken them to Ecuador actually earlier that year.
And so over winter break, I planned a trip so that we could take them back and see some of those amazing Mayan sites that we had experienced when we were young.
I knew that we didn't want to spend any time in Cancun, but because we weren't driving a car down from the States, I flew us into and out of Cancun, and we ran out of car there.
And it was, again, complete hell.
And it was hard to know, like, to what degree is this way worse than it was?
And that would have been, what, you know, close to 30 years later.
And to what degree are we less tolerant?
But it felt like the spread of the Disney-fied, American-fied, the dollar rules, and there are no authentic experiences left to have, spread far down the coast.
It felt like it had gone all the way to Tulum by the time we were back there in 2016, which had been a remote outpost from Cancun when we had been there.
Yes, although...
It's funny because I took a couple things away from that trip that we took.
You say it's 2016. Yeah.
One was the absolute tragedy of what's happened to Yucatan and the thing that not only are the major sites now so overrun and distorted by tourism that in some sense I wouldn't, you know, if you're going to be in the neighborhood of Tikal, you should see it.
But I would pretty much skip all the major sites.
That was one of the takeaways of that trip.
The second thing was the absolute tragedy of what we are dumping into the oceans and the way it washes up onto the beaches of the Yucatan, which is, you know, it's a problem, you know, as our friend Mike Brown likes to say, the trick is not to put the stuff into the ocean because it's so damn hard to get it out.
Right?
It's much easier not to put it in.
But the number of things that are washing up on those beaches just wrecks them.
And the only place where that's not true are the places where the tourist dollars are resulting in somebody effectively sifting the garbage out of the sand so it looks pristine.
But the other takeaway of that trip caught me totally off guard, which was you took us to some sites I can't even remember the name of them now.
I just looked up one of them, Chachobin.
Chachobin.
I think Chachobin is, I think, and I have the whole list, is the one that we ended up at on Christmas Day, where I'd gotten us some Airbnb and some remote place that just did not work out, and I found us a new place, and so we moved.
There was literally going to be no place to eat on Christmas and Christmas Eve.
So we moved, and we were between lodging, and we went to this site that for some reason was not Locked down.
Like, you know, it wasn't behind a gate.
And so the four of us just were alone, exploring on Christmas Day this ancient Mayan city that was extraordinary.
Ancient Mayan city that was still under excavation.
So the downside of that is some of the amazing stuff hasn't been reconstructed yet.
And the difference between what a Mayan temple looks like when it's a mound of earth that's...
you know over when the jungle has recaptured this thing and when the archaeologists have come in and they've stripped away the roots and the stuff and they've put the rocks back in the right uh orientation the difference is major but from the point of view of experiencing a what the maya were and how terribly surprising it is yeah and b Something of the feeling of discovery,
not like, oh, there were these amazing civilizations in the jungle, and here's what they looked like, Tikal, right?
It wasn't that at all.
It was like you actually are seeing something being resurrected out of the jungle that people didn't even know was here at one point, and then they realized it was here because the jungle was itself distorted by it, and then there's a question of how much is there, you know?
That big mound is unnatural.
It's going to be a temple, and then you start...
Digging down, and you realize it's actually a system of temples built on a giant terrace.
The whole thing is so strange and amazing.
And because there was a lot of it, because the Maya didn't build a city, they built many cities.
Yeah, from Yucatan through northern Honduras.
Right.
It was an amazingly large civilization that lasted for a long time.
Right, and actually...
This occurs to me, I think, for the first time right now.
You and I, on our first trip, passed through Copan.
Which is in northern Honduras, I think the southern most.
It's the farthest south Mayan site of all.
And it's in many ways not the most impressive, but it was still amazing.
It's got Mayan writings, which were finally, the code has finally been cracked, so the writings are on the stairs of one of the temples, and so we can get some, you know, the writings that were on.
Parchment were all destroyed by the Spaniards, with one exception when they arrived.
But Copan was this farthest south site, well-preserved, was sort of in the process of still being surfaced, but mostly it had been reconstructed.
But the poignant thing about it was that the moment we were there, the last spider monkey in Copan was there and we met him.
You literally sat down and had him come put his tail over your shoulder.
His prehensile tail.
Yeah, his prehensile tail, which has a fingerprint on it.
It literally has the same pattern as a fingerprint for the same reason.
Grip, right?
Somewhere you've got a picture of him sitting with me.
Sitting with you and you, yeah, having a meeting of the minds with him.
But anyway, so the point is, okay, well, that site was in the process of being fully extracted from the jungle to the point that the monkeys were now gone, right?
In Yucatan, at Chochoban...
We encountered wild monkeys.
Yes, that's right.
And so anyway, the point is, even in the midst of Yucatan being in way worse condition than we had first seen it, the experience is still there to be found.
But you had to know that actually in 2016, the thing you wanted to do was scratch all the sites you've heard of off your list and go pursue the ones you haven't heard of, which are not...
Dinky.
They're gigantic.
They're just not fully resurrected yet.
And that's in many ways cooler than seeing the fully resurrected site in the midst of thousands of other people seeing it too.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I didn't write this week about the amazing jamón that we experienced in Spain.
But man, is it good.
It's really good.
It's really, really good.
The Spanish are rightly famous for the ham that they produce.
There's a few kinds, but the Iberico was what we had a lot of.
Yes.
More and more and more and more of these acorn-fed.
Pigs that are descendants of the wild boars have a marbling in their meat, fat marbling in their meat, thinly sliced by, you know, expert knife wielders.
And you can get it just about anywhere.
And it also comes in sealed packs.
And we thought, well, obviously we should take some Hamon home.
But it was not to be.
It was not to be because of Hamgate.
Hamgate.
Hamgate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you want to tell the story or should I? I will tell it.
You will correct it.
All right.
All right.
Classic.
Classic husband and wife paradigm.
Yeah, but you invited me to correct you.
Oh, yeah.
It's going to need correction.
I don't think that's classic.
Memory is faulty.
So we were coming back into SeaTac, Seattle's airport.
Correction.
Coming back into SeaTac, actually under time pressure, trying to get back, trying to make a connection at Boeing Field.
But anyway, We both have global entry, which my experience has been that you almost don't even touch the kiosk.
You walk up, it takes your picture, they know who you are.
It's an international version of TSA PreCheck, but much better.
Yeah, well, whatever it is, you know, it's much more dystopian, but it certainly works.
But anyway, all you have to do is sell your soul.
So we were sort of running along, trying to catch our shuttle and...
You went to the kiosk, which is supposed to just pass you along, and you got flagged.
And I thought, oh no, what's happening?
And I went to the kiosk, and it passed me through.
And it turned out that you had been...
Random ag.
Random agriculture check.
So, random agriculture check.
We realize we're going to miss our shuttle because of this.
I say to the guy, hey, actually, we've got a flight to catch.
Like, I'd already said, and he's like, ah, it's be fine.
Ag checks are fast.
So, he takes you to a room, tells me where you're going to emerge, and...
So, I should probably tell the part that I lived since you weren't there.
Yeah, you should tell the part that I know nothing about.
Yeah.
So, I'm back there, and every person I meet, like, this woman is walking me so slowly back.
I'm like, I have this connection.
And I've already, he's already asked, one of the people has already asked me, like, do you have anything?
I was like, yeah, I have some vacuum packed ham.
I really didn't think there was going to be a, like, why would this be a problem?
It's vacuum packed.
I had, like, it hasn't been opened.
It's cured ham.
Value, I mean, it's expensive, but it's a hundred bucks worth of ham.
It's not a problem.
Yeah.
And this woman who's walking so slowly says, we find there's no one here.
I'm like, yes, but how far do we have to go?
Because you were walking at a snail's pace.
And she's like, okay, just put your bags through.
And she hands me off to someone else.
And they put my bags through and she says, where's the ham?
It's in the suitcase.
It's okay, you can take your backpack.
I took my backpack.
And she goes right to it.
And she says, we're going to have to take this.
Like, why?
Like, why are you taking my ham?
Like, it's delicious.
I get it, but are you just stealing it?
I don't say all that to her.
But she says, there are only a few countries that the U.S. allows people to bring ham in from, and Spain's not one of them.
And before she said that to me, though, she kept saying, so were you only in Spain?
Only in Spain?
Only in Spain?
And I think this was code for, like, if I had said, oh, yes, I was in...
I don't know where.
She could have said, like, oh, well, this is probably from there, then.
Maybe you can keep your ham.
But I don't know why you'd bring in ham from one of the places that doesn't have great ham.
You could just get bad ham in the United States, right?
So, the short version is, they took our damn ham.
And they never asked you at all.
You didn't even have an opportunity to declare.
Right, right.
I think this is the key to the story, right?
It's fine that there's some reason.
No, I do now know some of what that was.
Presumably they have a reason.
I'm not saying it's a good reason or a bad reason.
But there's some reason.
But what's troubling to me about this story, deeply troubling, is it is not that the information That suggested that we would need to declare such a thing was posted anywhere.
This is not like the old days where you're given a Travel card and told, you know, what value and which things are you bringing in?
So it's not as if we were knowingly trying to smuggle ham.
We simply were not asked.
And if you've been tagged for the random ag check...
We would have gotten away with it.
Yeah.
And they knew I was traveling with you and they never asked me, does your husband have anything?
Right.
They never asked.
So the upshot of that, to me, what's really golf...
Unfortunately, we didn't split up the ham.
In this case, I almost hope that it...
It sounds like you've found that there is actually a regulation.
Well, it doesn't make any sense.
Well, okay.
But if there is a regulation, then the one hope, which is that these people are clever enough, they're underpaid, and they're clever enough to realize that the ham coming in from Spain is really, really good.
And so they've come up with a cock and bull story about why they have to take it from you.
As immoral as that would be, I would understand that at a human level, right?
Yeah, she should have asked him, do you have any of her moves?
Right, exactly.
Barring that, what we have is a completely insane governmental policy because, A, these ag checks are rare enough that I've never seen one before.
I must have been through 25. Global entry things.
I've never been flagged.
I've never seen it happen.
So it's rare, which means that they are taking 100% of the ham from a tiny percentage of the people coming in from Spain carrying it.
So to the extent that there's some agricultural reason that they should want to prevent it from entering the country, they're totally failing.
All they're doing is, you know, causing a small number of people to have a completely frustrating experience of having purchased ham and then not getting to consume it.
So there's no point to the policy.
It's just annoying.
It doesn't, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
And so I realize it's not high enough caliber to be worthy of the attention of Doge, but it's exactly the kind of idiocy that we should be interested in getting rid of because it does nobody any good, costs money, frustrates people.
So anyway, it should go.
What did you find out about why they're taking the ham?
Well, okay, so one thing here, you can show my screen here if my computer will let you.
The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has a page that I had to really search for, incidentally.
Even if we'd thought that there was a ham restriction, I doubt I would have found this.
But international traveler meets poultry and seafood.
Well, it says travelers entering the United States must declare all agricultural or wildlife products.
This certainly used to be the case.
You always had to fill out that card.
You don't do it anymore.
Right.
Anyway.
USDA does not allow travelers to bring back most cattle, swine, sheep, or goat meat or meat products from countries affected with certain serious livestock diseases.
And it mentions them.
And then at the very bottom, it says cured hams.
Prosciutto, serrano ham.
I'm saying that right.
Serrano ham.
Cured hams, prosciutto, serrano, ham, Iberian ham, and salami from areas within France, Germany, Italy, and Spain may not be brought into the United States by travelers.
These items may only enter in commercial shipments because there are special restrictions that require additional certification and documentation.
Separately...
I suspect the ham lobby.
Yes, precisely, because separately, and I could not find this on the USDA's site, but I got Grok to spit something out at me that says, and actually give me my screen back just for a minute so I don't reveal anything I don't want to.
So yeah, Grok gave this to me.
Spain's status regarding certain livestock diseases affects the importation of pork products.
The USDA monitors countries for diseases like ASF, which is one of the swine diseases, which has historically impacted Spain.
Even though Spain may currently be free of some diseases, the USDA maintains strict controls on current pork products from the region due to past outbreaks and the risk of reintroduction.
Nah, wait a second.
Ah, wait a second.
Because Portugal is in the Iberian Peninsula.
They produce great ham.
Was I supposed to answer her question with, yes, I was in Portugal.
Was I being invited to lie?
But then when I go and say, well, can I bring in ham from Portugal?
I'm told no.
Well, why not?
It's not on this list.
So it's just this Byzantine, and it's Byzantine, and there are special restrictions that require additional certification and documentation.
I'm sorry, that sounds as exactly as you say, like the ham lobby.
The ham lobby.
I, as a biologist, I also find it highly unlikely that whatever diseases that they are talking about of livestock could possibly endure the process that results in this ham.
The curing and the vacuum packing!
I was watching these incredibly skilled...
I don't know what they're called.
Hammers.
These incredibly skilled guys, mostly.
We saw at least one woman who is incredibly thinly slicing these hanging legs.
Legs of ham that have been hanging for, in the case of the fancy stuff, like 48 months.
Yeah, 48 months, up to four years, and thinly slicing them.
And every town has one or...
Eat many, many of these shops where you can get as much incredibly delicious just sliced ham as you want.
It didn't occur to us that we would, like, of course we would have loved to bring a bunch of that stuff in, but no, we bought the vacuum-packed stuff.
Well, the vacuum-packing, you know, if it had something in it, that's not going to purify it, but I still, the...
This is an ancient process.
These people are very good at it.
They've handed this down for centuries.
And frankly, I don't know, but I'll bet the acorn feeding, you know, acorns are...
Toxic, and probably the interaction between the animal and the acorn is actually imbuing flavor into the meat, but it's also helping the animals not have any parasitic infections.
But it's scary, because on the outside of the legs of ham, before they start slicing into them, they're allowed to develop mold.
And mold is scary.
Mold sounds pathogenic and nasty.
So it's all very scary for the USDA. Something's off.
At least it's stupid.
I just want to know.
I want somebody to tell me what the disease is and explain to me how it's going to persist in this food.
Maybe that's possible.
And then get into a pig from this ham product in what way?
Yeah.
No, the ASF, I remember it was African swine fever.
Like, it's the...
Pigs long since dead, how long do you think that's going to survive?
It's been curing for, you know, two to four years.
Yeah, yeah.
You think it's still got African swine fever?
I find that unlikely.
Yeah.
Oh, and also, like, it seems like probably Spain hasn't had any cases of it for a while now, but it might.
It might.
So I actually wanted, before we move on to what else you wanted to talk about, relate two other stories of crossing into the U.S. with animals or plants.
Because I just...
This isn't the first time.
Have you checked the statute of limitations?
Oh, I didn't do anything wrong.
No, I'm...
Maybe you're thinking of a story I've forgotten.
But no, I'm...
I absolutely stand by the two stories.
I'm wondering what stories you're thinking.
I think you're going to tell the same story.
I think you...
I could defend you, but I think the statute of limitations is the better play.
Is it vanilla?
Yes.
Okay, so that's the first one.
Yeah.
So vanilla is an orchid.
Orchids are this giant clade of plants, and vanilla is literally the only species of orchid which we have any culinary use for at all.
It's native to Mexico, but it has been introduced to Madagascar and Indonesia, those three places being The places where vanilla is produced in the world, and Madagascar produces a huge amount of the world's vanilla.
It's one of the very few, that and some other spices like cloves being the main exports of Madagascar.
And Northeastern Madagascar, where I did my dissertation research, is where most of the vanilla is grown in these tiny little operations, like single farmers, like the guy Solo, who we befriended, are just...
Maintaining a few of these plants in the understory of intact rainforest.
And the problem with vanilla being that because it's native to Mexico, its pollinator isn't in Madagascar or also in Indonesia.
And so in order to grow vanilla, you need to hand pollinate each vanilla bean, vanilla pod.
And so it's incredibly time consuming, and then it takes all this time to cure and everything.
I will just point out in passing that the delicate interaction of the...
The vanilla farmer who has to do all of this pollinating causes the Malagasy people who do this to detest this plant.
They don't want to cook with it.
They don't want to see it.
They don't want to smell it.
Yeah, they hate the smell.
It's interesting.
Yeah, they really don't like the smell of it because it's what they are sort of living in.
So I asked Solo if I could buy some from him.
He proposed.
I actually went back and looked.
I've written about it in my first book, An Antipode.
He sold me a kilo of vanilla, which is about 250 beans for $25, about 10 cents a bean.
And if you've tried to buy vanilla beans, you'll find them $6, $8, $10 a bean.
And this was a while ago.
And that amount of money was more than he first wanted me to pay him.
I doubled or tripled what he asked for.
And he's like, oh, it's too much.
I'm like, no, it's really, really not.
The different economies of scale meant that we were both getting a fantastic deal.
And I knew I was coming back, and I knew I hadn't invested that much, although I had this amazing amount of vanilla.
And so my first time through, and this is why I feel like I totally stand by what I did, my first time through with vanilla, and I did go back through again when I went back to Madagascar, brought more vanilla, and went back through, I made a point of being very explicit and vocal about the fact that I had vanilla.
And did anyone want to look at my vanilla?
Did anyone want to check?
What I had was this interaction with a customs guy who kept saying, well, but do you have reproductive parts?
And I said, well, it's vanilla beans.
It's, you know, it's the pods.
It's vanilla beans.
They've been cured.
But are they reproductive parts?
It's beans, and they have seeds in them.
Do you have reproductive parts?
I'm like, I don't.
It's not my job to say that seeds are the result of reproduction.
Maybe this was an early investigation into gender.
Yeah, so I just kept getting asked the same dumb question over and over again.
I answered truthfully, but I didn't do all of his work for him.
Right?
And what I was trying to do that first time was be like, okay, I want to know if this is legitimate to bring through, so that when I come through the next time, because there's often people on the Malagasy side who will find an excuse to relieve you of some other things, and I had been relieved of some of my things before.
So I wanted to know, really, what were the limits of the law?
And the first time through, I thought, no, actually, I'm being told over and over and over again that this is fine.
You have something different in your head about what happened.
No, I just think that, unfortunately, the answer to the question of, do you have plant reproductive parts is, yeah, you caught me.
You did exactly what I would have done.
He didn't get it.
He needed to go back, not even to Bio 101. He needed to go back to elementary school biology.
But I'm fairly certain the statute of limitations has expired on this, and you're free.
But we still have some of those vanilla beans.
I mean, they are decrepit at this point, but they're good and cured.
So just one more story about crossing borders with plants or animals.
I can't actually remember.
I think it must have been when I was doing work in Costa Rica rather than Madagascar, because I don't think I had these permits for Madagascar.
But at one point early in my research, I wanted to bring back a few dart poison frogs so that I could see if I could get them to breed.
And do some work with the tadpoles.
And so I had gone through all the rigmarole, like months of paperwork in advance on the Michigan end and, you know, in grad school, getting everything underway, the Costa Rican paperwork, and like everything, everything was in order.
I was so pleased to have everything in order that at the point that I had collected the small number of wild frogs that I was going to collect and I had built little frog condos for them.
I had gone to a local hardware store and these sort of little plastic containers and punched holes in them and each frog got his own little plastic container and then I duct taped them together so I had like, I don't know, ten maybe two five-story frog condos and I get to American Customs and Of course, I'm not carrying them.
They're not in my bag or anything.
They have to breed, these frogs.
And I really wanted them to pay attention.
I had live frogs.
I had live poison dart frogs, which are not offensive.
They don't bite.
They're not vipers.
You don't want to lick them.
But these particular species, even if you did, you'd be fine.
And I had all of my paperwork, everything in order.
And the customs guy was like, what do you have there?
Like, it's live poison dart frogs.
He's like, oh, no, just go.
You're fine.
He wouldn't look at my paperwork.
I could have been anyone.
I could have had stuff in, you know, Cyrillic.
Like, why did I go through all of that trouble to get these permits to have the guy be scared of poison dart frogs enough that he pushed me through?
It was one of two things.
Yes.
One of two things.
And I have a guess which it was.
Either your permit...
Was actually magic paper from Doctor Who.
You know, magic paper, which is actually, of all the superpowers you could have, I think that might be the one I most want.
Yeah.
It says whatever you need it to say, and so you thought it was permits for poison dart frogs, and he would have thought so.
What it actually said was, don't fuck with me.
Right, don't fuck with me.
Yeah.
This is not the droid you were looking for.
Right.
That kind of thing.
Or...
He knew from experience that if he actually heard you say anything about poison dart frogs, that the nightmare that the next seven hours of his life was going to turn into dealing with somebody trying to bring these things into the country was not worth the hassle.
So, you know, he didn't hear a thing.
Yeah.
I'm guessing it's the latter.
Okay.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
He acted scared, though.
He acted like he thought they were going to bite him.
Yeah, no.
Seven rough hours.
That's...
Okay.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Okay.
I'm done.
All right.
Yes, we had other things we wanted to talk about.
You wanted to say something about Maha.
Yeah, I did want to say something about Maha.
I wanted to...
We're in a very odd moment.
Many people have noticed it.
Let's just take an example.
Bobby Kennedy...
Did two things that caused many people in the medical freedom movement, frankly, including me, to do a double take or more.
First one was an article, a Fox News article, in which he appears to embrace the MMR vaccine.
Very surprising thing for Bobby Kennedy to do.
Now, if you read the article itself, you will find that it is extremely carefully worded, as is...
Generally the case with anything RFK Jr. does.
The title, which is the most inflammatory thing, is in general not written by the people who write the articles.
This is an unfortunate fact that all of us who have written for major publications have discovered and frequently been annoyed by.
But you would think in the case of the Secretary of HHS that he could have said, by the way, if you're going to write a title, I have to sign off on it.
And either he didn't know, forgot, something happened that Bobby Kennedy, of all people, appears to embrace the MMR vaccine.
And that's very troubling because the MMR vaccine is, it's not even a vaccine where we just simply don't have the evidence because the placebo-based control was never used, and so the evidence doesn't exist.
It's not that case.
We know the MMR vaccine is a serious problem.
And what's more, it's a serious problem in the current context.
The reason that Bobby Kennedy is saying anything about the MMR vaccine in Fox News world is an outbreak of measles.
Now, measles is one of the M's in MMR, right?
Measles, mumps, rubella.
And part of the problem, part of the deep, dark backstory of this vaccine is that the vaccine industry scuttled the idea of being able to have the vaccines individually.
Which many parents advocated for, tried to get done, you know, for decades, and it's just not possible.
Right.
So if Kennedy had come out and said, we need a measles vaccine, blah, blah, blah, a lot of us could have said, well, okay, we know what he's talking about.
He actually wants a measles vaccine separated from mumps and rubella so that this isn't quite the health hazard that it would be.
And maybe, you know, there's a question about...
What measles was, why it was on the decline, what the consequence of having a largely vaccinated population of people is.
So there's lots of questions here, but there was something very jarring about hearing Bobby Kennedy embrace the, or seem to embrace the MMR vaccine, and it caused a lot of concern within the medical freedom movement.
Is this the message that actually...
We are not going to finally get the investigation into vaccines and their various consequences that many of us insist has to happen.
To his credit, though, he does talk about both vitamin A as treatment for measles and also shows some of the data demonstrating that measles was already well on the decline and basically at modern levels before the MMR vaccine was introduced.
Yes, he absolutely does.
And it is also the case that those in the medical freedom movement need to understand the position that he has been put in.
So he is finally in a place where he can do good on a topic that has been his mission for I don't know how long.
At the same point that he has been set up to be the villain of deaths by measles, by a false portrayal of past stories, etc.
And so there's, you know, you have to appreciate that he is in a predicament that none of us have ever been in.
How do you maintain a position that can do some good in the face of having been set up or basically being framed for killing people by virtue of spooking them away from a vaccine?
So I looked at the article and I was like, whoa, where'd that camp come from?
But I also do understand.
I don't understand the landscape of problems he has to solve in order to do his job, and so I'm not in a position to judge it.
The second thing was far stranger, I thought, which was he tweeted something about the scourge of antisemitism and then said that it was effectively a health issue.
Do we have that tweet available?
Can we look at it?
I cannot read it from here, and I... Here I have my binoculars.
Yeah, I can't either.
That's unfortunate.
So anyway, I guess we'll just have to go by memory here.
But basically he says that anti-Semitism is a public health concern and that effectively we...
Do you have it?
You want me to look it up?
If you can.
But anyway, I will just say in the meantime...
That this was particularly troubling to many of us because, A, it's such a stretch.
There's no reason that the Secretary of Health and Human Services needs to be tweeting about anti-Semitism, and he is entitled, like everyone else, to have an opinion on such a matter.
But to be tweeting about this, especially when the tweet takes a form that appears to suggest, it's reminiscent of...
What happened during the beginning of the George Floyd fiasco when we were being told that we were not allowed to gather unless, of course, we were protesting racism because racism was the real pandemic or something along those lines.
So that caused many of us to realize back in 20...
What would that have been?
2020?
It would have been 2020, right?
Well, that caused many of us to realize that something was up, that somebody was scripting a narrative in which they wanted to take our rights to gather under some circumstances, and they wanted to allow us to gather under other circumstances, and that this was not a natural phenomenon.
I don't know what that account is going to do.
But here's the larger point that I want to make.
These two incidents are perfectly built To cause all of the people who have supported Bobby Kennedy to get to this point, to suddenly withdraw their support,
to fight each other because division over questions surrounding Jews, anti-Semitism, Israel, the war in Gaza, Palestine, all of those things.
That's a powder keg.
And in fact, I've pointed out before that I expected something to happen During the run-up to the election, because it would take a growing coalition and fracture it.
And I did not see anything that matched that description there, but I sure am seeing it here.
This is tailor-made to cause a fracturing of the support for Bobby Kennedy exactly when he needs it in order to do the job that we all hoped he would do.
So, what I wanted to talk about is just simply...
The game theory surrounding what we should do now.
And there is a lot of energy, I think, largely from people who read the title of the Fox News article and maybe didn't read the nuance of what was written, how carefully it was written, in which he sent us a lot of messages that he hasn't forgotten any of what he knew about the hazards of vaccines or the real story of measles or any of those things.
So here's the point.
At this moment, where people's natural instinct is to walk away from Bobby Kennedy, they should be doing exactly the opposite.
They should recognize that however it works, something is putting messages into the universe designed to cause us to walk away.
I would point out that the tweet in question actually did not come from Bobby Kennedy's account.
It came from the Secretary Kennedy.
That's why I couldn't find it.
Does this mean that this tweet wasn't even his?
We don't know.
Yeah, we have a piece that is written that is very careful that has his name on it that we can presume that he either wrote or completely signed off on.
Yep.
We have a headline which we can assume he did not sign off on because people don't.
And we have a tweet that we shouldn't assume he signed off on because important people don't run their own accounts.
Right.
So...
All of those things put together and then we have the strange fact that he hasn't said anything to clarify but of course you could imagine he is now a member of an administration that has all kinds of balls in the air and he may well want to say things he can't say.
What should we do if we want all these issues taken care of properly?
We should actually back him at this moment, right?
If he continues on a path that doesn't do the things that we know need doing, then that is obviously a reason to question him.
But the idea that these things would come so early in his tenure, before he's had the opportunity to do anything, it's a setup.
That's what I think.
And I would just point out that...
Well, I will actually save the second part of that.
Or later.
I think there's a deeper consideration that we have to go through how we deal with scenarios in which we have bad actors, we don't know a full story, etc.
But anyway, we can leave that for next time.
All right.
So that's it.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we will in fact be back in six days.
Six days.
Next Wednesday.
At our usual time.
But before then, actually, we're doing a private Q&A on Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific for two hours.
Join us on Locals.
You can ask questions there now.
And we also are able to join the chat there and engage with it.
So those are a lot of fun.
Please consider joining Locals to join us there.
We are supported by you when you do that, when you join us there.
Also, you have Patreon conversations coming up as well.
I do.
I'm hoping that we've checked and they don't conflict with our...
I think they're close, but not directly overlapping.
All right.
Because that would result in fireworks.
Yep.
So we should just say, next week we will talk about the wheat experiment and its final analysis.
So are you going to make sure that happens?
Yes.
Do I need to put that into several alarms that have...
It wouldn't hurt.
Emojis.
Yes, the wheat experiment continues-ish.
I think we have a pretty good final analysis, and I think it's well worth going back and looking at everything we've discovered and trying to puzzle through what could possibly explain it.
Awesome.
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