There’s a New Tariff In Town: The 271st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Tariffs, Trump, AI, nature, and science. Are the tariffs insane, or brilliant? Will Trump actually bring manufacturing back to the U.S.? How are the “reciprocal tariffs” calculated, what game is everyone playing, and how long will it take to know who wins? Then: AI marches us further into the Cartesian Crisis; can we restore our humanity? Scientific American claims that too much nature is bad for you (it’s not), and finally, some words from County Highway, and why we should consider being qui...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It's the 200...
Let's try that again.
The 271st.
Indeed. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Spring is humming along.
Feels pretty good to be out in the sun and be soaking it all up, though may not be as safe as we once thought.
Yeah, so I'm going to just start right off by saying I object to the framing that you put out into the world just before the live stream started.
You said, don't go outside until you watch this.
And I want to never be on record advising people not to go outside, honestly.
I mean, there are times, you know, we lived through some fires in Portland where there was no desire to go outside.
The air quality was that bad.
But no, do go outside.
Yes, this was, of course, dripping with irony and sarcasm, and I now realize I forgot to include the emoji that is supposed to let people know that what I'm saying should not be taken at face value.
Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, apologies.
I will find some way to get you all an extra emoji, and you can go back and paste it in yourself.
Okay, so this is the...
This is number 271.
We're going to take a couple weeks off after this in order to go to Savannah, Georgia and give the Sophia Lectures at Ralston College.
If you're in the area, please consider joining us there.
So we're here on Saturday, which we haven't been normally in a while.
We are streaming or we got a watch party at Locals.
Please consider joining us there.
Lots of great stuff going on at Locals.
And as always, our only ads are at the top of the hour.
Our sponsors are carefully You know that we actually truly vouch for the products or services being advertised, so here we go.
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The longer we have it, the more comfortable I am.
It's fantastic, and I guess one thing that's obscured in...
In the official read and such is I have downstream of the boat accident that I was in, I have some ongoing things that I see an amazing osteopath and an amazing physical therapist for in Portland.
And the physical therapist does work with insurance.
And when we had insurance, I put things through there.
But our incredibly high deductible meant that I never got anything anyway.
It was just more paperwork for them.
And I paid.
I paid a high rate regardless.
And the osteopath, whom I see, is amazing, and who I've had you and the boys see as well, in part keeps himself sane in his office, somewhat streamlined, by just not doing insurance.
They will bill insurance on your behalf, but they don't take insurance.
And I know that a lot of the great providers, the great healthcare providers out there, are...
Unfortunately, knowing that this will cause hardship for those who have health insurance and don't have any extra money with which to pay for other health expenses, but many of the most excellent health providers are going this route and are saying, look, if you can pay cash, if you cannot force us to send this through insurance, we're going to give you a little bit of a discount, and frankly, it's possible we just don't take insurance at all.
These two providers, both of whom are extraordinary.
They have both the science and the intuition, like the hands and the analytics, to really help out.
And they're not cheap.
But I was just in Portland a couple weeks ago, and my osteopath wasn't there, but I saw my physical therapist three times.
And the...
The cost out of pocket for us of going to her three times within a week is still far less than what we would have paid for insurance, which wouldn't have covered any of that cost anyway.
So I guess I was thinking, you know, I did more than the math that I just said in that ad, which is consider if you are now saving so much money, if, you know, the more you were paying, the more you save, obviously.
What providers perhaps you can see whom you weren't able to see because you didn't have the money in addition to your health insurance premiums?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a much better relationship with healthcare.
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All right.
Yes. Yes.
Well, shall we start with...
Trumpin' tariffs?
All right.
All right.
Trumpin'. Trumpin' tariffs.
So, obviously, everybody and their mother has heard Trump's major announcement about his what is being called reciprocal tariffs, although we will get to the fact that that is not exactly what these things are in a few moments here.
Let me first say, I've got a lot to say about this tariff plan.
I've been...
Thinking about it and talking about it with people, doing a certain amount of research.
I'm not going to cover the economics of it.
It's not my strength.
You should go to other people who have more expertise in that area.
But I want to talk about the bigger picture.
What is it that he's trying to accomplish?
What is the chance that he can accomplish it?
Because I think there is a battle developing between two perspectives.
Two perspectives that come from camps that in recent times have been reliable as interpreters of Trump policy, and they are divided over this.
So anyway, I wanted to orient people a little bit, and I think one of the ways to do that, let's look at a video clip.
This is Scott Besant.
The Treasury Secretary talking to Tucker Carlson.
I've got a few minutes here that I thought were particularly salient.
So, Jen, why don't we play that?
In the U.S., and think what the president's doing here.
He is backing into an affordability solution for the bottom 50% of wage earners because they're the ones who will benefit from all four of those programs.
So looking at, say, a year from now, so beginning of next April, do you have any sense of how much the U.S. government anticipates bringing in from the tariffs announced yesterday?
It's going to be a moving target.
For sure.
But could it be anywhere from $300 billion to $600 billion a year?
Sure. Okay, so that's meaningful revenue.
Very meaningful.
But what will happen with tariffs over time, the ultimate goal of the tariffs, and the president says all the time, bring your factory here.
That's the best solution toward getting away from a tariff wall.
So move your factory from China, from Mexico, from Vietnam, bring it here.
So what will happen over time, we'll have substantial tariff income in the beginning.
Manufacturers will build their factory here.
The tariffs will drop, but the revenue from the factories, from income taxes, from all the new jobs will go up.
So we'll be taking it in domestically as the tariffs drop.
And why are the tariffs dropping?
Because we're making it here and our trade deficit's dropping.
So you've obviously thought this through.
You think that the United States has the necessary labor force for this transition?
I think we do.
I think with AI, with automation, with so many of these factories are going to be new, they're going to be smart factories, that I think we've got all the labor force we need.
And what we are doing on the other side, one of the reasons, other than my...
support for president trump that i came out from behind my desk and you know i had a pretty good life and i wanted to come out and really tell people that i was worried about an impending financial calamity given the high levels of government spending that were leading to high levels of government debt so what we are doing on one side the president is reordering trade On the other side,
we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.
And then on the other side, that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing, and we're going to relever the private sector.
So the private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years.
And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again because it's been hemmed down by excessive regulation and it's been crowded out by the government.
All right.
Now, go ahead.
Well, I'm way out over my skis here.
In fact, I don't belong on this mountain.
Like, this is really not anything that I...
Claim to know anything about or have expertise in.
For me, the question that that raises.
So Tucker says, oh, but do we have the workforce?
And I'm surprised he asked that question.
My sense is, of course we have the workforce.
We have so many people who are underemployed or unemployed.
I have no doubt that we have the workforce, including, as Besant says, with AI, which I'm very concerned about.
The concern, just like with higher ed, like, oh, if you build a good university, will there be the students?
Like, that's not the problem.
The problem, similarly, I think, is going to be, you know, just like with higher ed, it's like the problem is we don't have the faculty because we've got generations of people trained in ignorance.
And sort of analogously, my question watching that is, but tariffs aren't forever.
They could be, but they aren't inherently.
And the next administration can reverse them just as easily as this administration is putting them in.
And it's a big ask.
It's a big capital and other outlay to ask corporations to return a manufacturing base to the United States where, okay, at the moment, oh my goodness, those tariffs, that's really getting in the way of our bottom line.
But it remains true, and presumably it's going to remain true for a long time, and this is part of the hope.
I presume of the Trump administration, that salaries and other costs of doing business in the U.S. are just higher than they are in the places where our offshore, you know, where the manufacturing has been moved to.
So if there is any sense that the tariffs could be removed in the future, which of course they could be, why would you invest, you know, unless you're like just being a good-hearted patriot but not...
Concerned about your bottom line, why would you invest in bringing your manufacturing, your factories back here where the people get paid better?
Well, first of all, let's just notice the overarching tone of this.
This sounds like a radical reorganization of our economic relationship to the world.
Whether or not this is plausible, this is not a tweak to anything.
This is a major rethink and it is akin, I would argue, to what happened in the 90s in the other direction.
So we had a major modernization of the economy that flew under the heading of globalization that was taken to be sophisticated and it resulted in us taking a very large manufacturing base and offshoring almost the entire thing.
To other parts of the world, now largely China.
So what I'm having trouble wrestling with here, you've got a president who is at a disadvantage.
He's got four years, and he's really got two years because the midterms are coming up.
And he's got to deliver something that Americans understand to be a hopeful future quick enough that he doesn't get his head handed to him in the midterm elections, which...
both because he's personally sensitive to such things and because it's traditionally taken to be a bad indicator, he can't afford to have the midterms swing against him.
And he won't be able to do as much in the second half of his term if he has a Congress that is strongly blue.
Right, especially if he's facing new impeachments, which presumably will come along because Yeah, it's not just how it looks and how he feels.
It'll actually get in the way of accomplishing things.
So, the question is, he is deploying a policy that...
Looks like if we take it at face value and we imagine and we give it the benefit of the doubt, there is a huge bitter pill that may in the end be worth taking.
Take your medicine, deal with the impacts on the stock market, the economy, the upheaval, and 20 years down the road, you'll be glad you did it.
That's kind of what this policy sounds like.
Yes, but my, so to my question, why?
Why do we think it will work, given that there is no way to keep the tariffs in place after a four-year administration?
I think that's a good question.
I don't think it's the only question at this level.
He's playing a game that has a two-year time horizon, and the play he's deployed looks like, if it works, it's a 20-year, it's a two-decade fix.
So there's something interesting in that.
And it's reversible.
I'm going to try to, well, it's reversible, but he's not going to be, He wants to go down in history as a great president.
He does not want to go down in history as somebody who made a mega blunder that had to be reversed by others later.
No, no, no.
I meant it's reversible within the administration by him, potentially.
But there's just not enough time.
I mean, he's talking about doing something that is going to radically alter our relationship to the world.
And so, anyway, maybe we should put out, we should look at the Jeffrey Sachs clip that I sent Jen here so you can see what the other perspective is.
What's happening is Donald Trump is succeeding in uniting the world against the United States.
And we've actually seen this in recent weeks, some in anticipation of yesterday's actions.
Though I have to say, yesterday's actions were far worse, far weirder, far more arbitrary, far stupider than anybody.
So let me be clear about that.
But there has been, of course, for weeks, the feeling that the United States is not a properly run country and that things are not in control.
And what is happening is that other countries are changing their partnerships.
They're discussing among themselves, we can't go on this way.
For example, Korea and Japan, which purportedly are on, quote, the U.S.
side, met with their Chinese counterparts and said, we really need to strengthen our relations together.
Now that's fine with me because they should.
They're neighbors.
So I have no problem with that.
But that was provoked by what we just heard from a Japanese official.
That was provoked by the fact that the United States is utterly unreliable from their point of view.
We've had, by the way, again, a good thing in my mind, but a warming of relations between China and India.
This too is coming about because both countries understand there's some weirdness going on in the United States and so we should...
Really be on normal terms with each other.
This will lead to a warming of relations between Europe and China.
The United States, in other words, is just standing alone.
No friends in this anywhere.
Not our neighbors, not Europe, not Japan, not Korea, not anybody.
because this is an assault a basic system of exchange in which the world operates and this assault does damage to everybody starting with the United United States.
We had the biggest stock market decline because the impact is most negative of all in the United States, but it's negative worldwide.
Okay.
Here you get the other perspective, that this massive disruption takes all of the things about the global economy that do work and puts them in a kind of jeopardy, because nothing is based on the assumptions that all of those agreements were established under.
Now, I do want to go back to a third clip.
We couldn't get a perfect version of it, but I want to show this clip of Ross Perot in 1992 running against George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton.
Well, anyway, maybe I'll let it run in the...
And you can see what it is I'm arguing is being reversed here.
Yes, I'd like to direct my question to Mr.
Perot. What will you do as president to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States?
That's right at the top of my agenda.
We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have A process in Washington where after you've served for a while, you cash in, become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month, then take a leave, work on presidential campaigns, make sure you've got good contacts, and then go back out.
Now, if you just want to get out of brass tacks, first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years, and say, fellas, we'll take the same deal we gave you.
And they'll gridlock right at that point, because...
For example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships.
If they had to comply, you see if it was a two-way street?
Just couldn't do it.
We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple.
If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers, And you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire a young 25...
That's assuming you've been in business for a long time, you've got a mature workforce.
Pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care, that's the most expensive single element, making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So, if the people send me to Washington, the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street.
One last point here.
I've decided I was dumb and didn't understand it, so I called a who's who of the folks who've been around it, and I said, why won't everybody go south?
They said, we'll be disruptive.
I said, for how long?
I finally got them up for 12, 15 years, and I said, well, how does it stop being disruptive?
And that is when their jobs come up from $1 an hour to $6 an hour and ours go down to $6 an hour, then it's leveled again.
But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.
We've got to cut it out.
Thank you.
And that was before NAFTA, which Clinton brought in, and I just looked it up, 1994.
Yeah. So this was in the midst of the negotiation of what was being called free trade.
And Ross Perot quite presciently argued, if you do that, If you negotiate these so-called free trade agreements, what's going to happen is American manufacturing is going to disappear across the border, the giant sucking sound, etc.
And I believe that time has proven him right.
Right. So again, it happened.
What is to encourage the corporations from bringing the manufacturing base back, given that that math still holds?
Absent the tariffs, which cannot be made permanent.
Well, I don't know whether they can be made permanent or not.
What I wanted to argue is that President Trump appears to be engaged in a negotiation.
And the Trumps, the tariffs as announced, are not likely to bring him the kinds of things that we can expect he would be focused on on the time frame.
That we know he has to be expecting them.
Okay. Into your time frame.
So what is really going on is my question.
Okay. I do think he is engaged in something remarkable.
This is, and actually elsewhere in that interview between Scott Besant and Tucker Carlson, is the concept that what has been taking place is that Wall Street has done brilliantly and that this is now Main Street's turn.
So the idea that although we are used to thinking of the Democratic Party as concerned about working people, traditionally the Democratic Party is the party of working people.
The Republican Party is the party of management.
That's a natural tension.
Something has happened.
I've argued that it was Clinton who cut the working class loose and became a second corporate party.
So for decades, we had two corporate parties, both of them paying lip service to the well-being of average Americans.
And in part, that was related to downstream of NAFTA.
Yes, of course.
Downstream of NAFTA, what happened to welfare.
The whole thing was the betrayal of working people by the Democratic Party, which is now why the Democratic Party is struggling.
If you are defending the well-being of working class people, you've got a winning strategy.
That will always be a winning strategy because working people will always outnumber everybody else.
So why is the Democratic Party not doing that?
Because the grift is good.
Because the racket that they've got running is so profitable that it is worth paying the price of being politically hobbled in order for them to capitalize on the corruption.
So what happens, you've got the working class out there ready to be politically captured.
Trump does it.
That's what MAGA is and becomes, is basically the working class that got abandoned by the Democratic Party.
And now in office, we've got the question, well, did we get fooled again?
Is this just another corporate guy who took advantage of the votes of working people who were gullible and willing to go along with him?
No, I don't think so.
This is a radical policy that at the very least appears...
intended to benefit working-class people.
At whose expense?
Well, look at the stock market.
So, next layer is that we in the public have a mindset that is overly sympathetic to corporate interests because those corporate interests own all of the mechanisms through which we make sense.
Right? They own the news.
And so when the stock market tanks, it's not presented as one of a bunch of things.
It's presented as the economy itself.
This is another point that Tucker makes in that interview.
So the point is we are overly empathetic with those corporate interests.
And what we really need to do is step out here.
Because they're writing our narratives.
Because they're writing our narratives and they are interspersed in our conversations.
They're writing our stories and they're places that we don't know they are.
Right. They've gotten into our heads.
And so we have to free ourselves in order to understand what this policy actually is.
I still think there's a central mystery to it, which is how could it possibly work fast enough to be in Trump's interest to do this?
How is it not a massive self-sabotage?
But, you know, just to cap off the sort of overarching picture of what he seems to be presenting at the level of intent, never mind whether it's going to work.
This is an America-first policy, as he promised, right?
This is an America-first policy.
We are going to deploy tariffs in a way that benefits Americans.
And then the most interesting part is that this is a little bit, it sounds like noblesse oblige.
This is an extremely wealthy and powerful guy who appears to be genuinely working on behalf of the citizenry of the country, the people who elected him, who are not overwhelmingly wealthy people, at the expense of the people in his own economic class.
That's interesting, right?
So this is sort of, you thought that...
Stunt at McDonald's was hokey?
Or with the trash truck?
No. Yeah.
In a way, it was kind of an honest signal of where the guy's heart is.
He actually likes being appreciated by average people, and he's attempting to do something for them here.
He appears, I may be wrong, I hope I'm not, he appears to actually like human beings.
Yeah. Which, I feel like that ought to be a first bar that you need to pass if you want to be the Leader of the United States.
You have to actually like human beings and, you know, and yes, prioritize your citizens and all of this.
But it seems quite clear that most of the actual power brokers don't like people.
They just don't like people.
And they're not interested in the well-being of people.
And that's a travesty and a tragedy.
And I have never, even eight years ago, when I couldn't imagine ever being in favor of being in office, Never read him as someone who was working against the will, working against what he saw as what was good for the people.
Even if I, at that point, and many people couldn't imagine how this would be good for people.
Well, he's sort of bilingual.
He's obviously at home owning a private jet and living in a palace.
That, but he also likes his McDonald's french fries, and everybody thinks that's genuine, and...
I don't know, I don't think that's bilingual.
I think liking crap food doesn't make it bilingual.
No, but I don't mean it that way.
I think he...
There's something about him that is comfortable in both roles.
But it also feels...
And again, I might be wrong.
One doesn't...
I don't get a read out of him of code switching.
Whereas many people who are effectively bicultural, bilingual, have moved into a sphere that was not the one that they grew up in, but still have, you know, that will always be home, whatever it is, be it a different class, a different geography, a different whatever it is, right?
And I guess, you know, I think earlier in his life, Trump made a few forays into claiming that he was a self-made man, whatever.
I don't think he's pretending that anymore.
He certainly has done a lot, but his father gave him a lot as well.
And everyone knows that.
There's no point in pretending that's not true.
But I don't get the sense that he is moving back and forth between...
These two worlds, in part because he's never been of the one world, but he actually just seems to like people.
I guess it doesn't seem to me to be a bilingualism or a biculturalism, but he actually just appreciates the people before they ever elected him, but whom have effectively elected him to office and given their hope and trust to him and said, Please, sir, do what you can here, because this is not working.
It's actually, in some ways, the inverse of that famous gaffe of Sam Harris's, where Sam Harris took Elon Musk to task and said he was screwing up with the people who matter.
And Trump doesn't draw that distinction.
People matter.
So he undoubtedly likes adulation.
We can see that.
But your point is he doesn't discount the adulation of average people, which is interesting.
And I think actually explains a lot about what he might be doing.
So the line that you're drawing, and that I think I am too, then, is elitism.
Do you fundamentally believe that there are a small group of people who are better at things?
Who are more deserving.
Probably their betterness and their more deservingness has already been manifest in the world by their greater power, their greater wealth.
And should you therefore listen to them?
And it's closely related to, if not identical to, a belief in experts, a belief in authority.
And this, frankly, is I think the fight that you and I have been in since the beginning.
Since the absolute beginning.
How is it that we were very happily doing work at a college that was explicitly not elite, given our, you know, pedigrees, where, you know, we should have, we could have, you know, gone someplace else.
And, you know, my logic choosing there was, I don't want to only teach the children of rich people.
Yeah. I'm not interested.
No, you're right.
It is quite parallel.
And the fact is, you...
Once you do that, you understand, oh, actually, there's a tremendous amount of good to be done here.
You know, it never felt like, you and I never wanted to move to some other college that was more elite, because the fact is, you know, teaching people who were in more need of good teachers was rewarding.
And it's fundamentally more interesting.
The elite, those who are being primed to be elite, who are on that canal, that developmentally canalized pathway, come to look more and more like one another because they are trained to do so, because they know which fork to use when, and all of this, right? It is a narrowing and a refining is the positive valence version of that.
But it narrows what you can be, what you're allowed to say.
You don't speak out of turn.
You don't say things you're not supposed to.
And this is, again, part of how we reliably get in trouble because we say things that, oh, you can't say that here.
That's not, no, you're not allowed to do that.
And as you said to me early in our knowing each other, you having been briefly a fencer, In high school, that it was often more interesting to go up against people who'd never held...
Well, no, in this case, it was me.
The fencing people who knew what they were doing, if you didn't know what you were doing, you were sort of a more interesting...
You were the novice because you didn't do it very long.
Unpredictable. You were the novice and you could see that you were unpredictable to them and often made, I don't know the language of fencing at all, made scores, hits, touches, I don't know.
That... You shouldn't have been able to based on your skill, based on your background.
And that presumably hopefully made it more interesting for them to compete against you.
And in the educational framework, which is not one of competition between faculty and students, at least it shouldn't be, it was much more interesting to engage with people who actually didn't already know what they were supposed to think.
Didn't already know what they were supposed to say.
Yep, and didn't know what thoughts shouldn't be voiced, because that's not a good question, and the point is those are often the best questions.
So I agree with you, and sort of to tie this back to Trump, he really does seem to represent the full inversion of the two parties now.
He's decapitated the old GOP.
He's replaced it with this MAGA party.
And this MAGA party appears to be willing to deliver a blow to Wall Street in favor of Main Street.
That's pretty interesting.
The noblesse oblige is different too.
And I have to say there's a way in which it's refreshing.
Because after now a lifetime of watching the Democrats with their solution making, you know, we have to help the downtrodden.
How are you going to do that?
Big bureaucratic program that if everything works as planned will help the downtrodden.
Well, what are the chances it's going to work as planned?
Zero. Right?
You're intervening in a complex system and you don't know nearly enough to do it well.
And so anyway, I've gotten tired now of watching Democratic solution making that doesn't work, and then the Democrats lie to themselves about whether it did work.
And this is the inversion.
This is a, well, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to change the way the economy functions, and we're going to change the way it integrates with the rest of the world so radically that nobody could possibly have anticipated that he would actually do it.
Now, interestingly, I don't have this clip, but Tucker alludes to the fact that Trump has been talking about this tariff play for 40 years.
That surprised me.
I thought that this tariff play was new.
It's not new, and in fact, there's a clip of him on Oprah as a young man back when he was welcomed, you know, in such places, talking about this exact thing.
So anyway, this is a long-standing...
We don't have that.
We unfortunately don't have it.
But anyway, it's interesting that he's been on about this that long, and this is...
Finally coming to fruition.
Whether it's a disaster or not, it's interesting that this has been his mindset for that entire time.
I think that's back when he was a Democrat to now as a, you know, a capturer of the Republican Party.
But okay, so now let's talk about what might be going on.
How do we reconcile the fact that he's deployed something that will, you know, if it turns out to have been wise, will turn out to have been wise?
Two decades from now, long after he's out of office and probably dead, you know.
So why would he be doing this?
Well, my guess is this goes to his nature as a dealmaker, which is what he sees himself as, right?
The art of the deal is sort of how he understands himself.
And so I wonder if we are not exactly being given the real plan.
So, Jen, do you want to show, first of all, you want to show that Balaji tweet?
So, Balaji is a venture capitalist intellectual, and his response here is, this is nuking every single supply chain that passes through the U.S. in any way under the illusion that 45 years of deindustrialization can be fixed in one day of 45% tariffs.
Countless low-margin businesses, including U.S. exporters, will be pushed to unprofitability.
Okay, so first of all, I think it is not surprising to see elite people like Balaji, who I respect, but to see them responding to this like this is catastrophic, because what they've been counting on is that the order that has...
governed our international trade will continue they've placed bets of this sort and so they of course will be very sensitive to the indication that suddenly everything they thought was certain is uncertain yep now do you want to show that graph and this graph is going to need a little Actually, can you show the tweet that goes with it first?
So this graph, can you read that?
Yeah. Flexports, this is from a guy named Ryan Peterson.
Flexports team was able to reverse engineer the formula the administration used to generate the quote-unquote reciprocal tariffs.
It's quite simple.
They took the trade deficit the U.S. has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.
The chart below shows the predictions of this formula plotted against the actual new tariff rates.
And if we can go back to that graph now, it's...
I mean, they're right.
It's clearly they figured it out.
It's simple.
It's a line.
They have to have...
There's nothing invariant.
They have to have exactly nailed the formula in order for it to come out as a line rather than a scatter.
Yeah. Now, I know you're going somewhere here, but when I saw this, the thing that jumped out to me, because it's at the very top, right?
Oh, yeah.
I see it.
Right? Yeah.
And so, you know, again, it's...
What is it?
The trade deficit the U.S. has with each country and divided up by our imports from that country.
Actually, let's keep on the graph while we're talking about this, because the trade deficit the U.S. has with each country divided by our imports from that country.
Madagascar is at the tippy top.
Yeah, I don't think, I've got to tell you, I don't think it means anything because my guess is there's almost no trade.
Let me go where I want to go here.
I know something about Madagascar.
I lived there.
I did two field seasons there, and we traveled there a couple of times before that.
What does Madagascar export to the world?
First of all, Madagascar, at least when I was paying a lot of attention to it, I wrote a book about my time in Madagascar, was always at or very near the bottom in terms of GDP for the world.
Annual income is like less than $200 per person.
It's desperately poor.
It's gigantic.
It's an island off the east coast of Africa that's bigger than California.
But it has basically no economic development, with a couple of exceptions.
There is some mining, and apparently in 2023, which is the most recent data for which I found, nickel was actually the primary export from Madagascar.
but it's still a small amount, and gold is also exported in small amounts.
And then the two, the second and third largest exports from Madagascar, much larger than gold, which is its fourth largest export, are, and you'll be able to Vanilla. Vanilla.
And cloves.
And cloves.
Right. And so like everyone who has ever baked, think about how many, how much cloves you use, right?
Like cloves is not a big ingredient.
Now, where I worked, where I lived in a tent in northeastern Madagascar, sometimes the air smelled of cloves because these little spice boats would come through and they would just be reeking of cloves, which is not a bad smell at all.
Because indeed, Madagascar is where most of the world's cloves are coming from.
And it's also the country's largest, the world's largest exporter of vanilla.
Okay, so if you bake, if you like sweet foods or, you know, even some not sweet foods, do you, you know, do you like vanilla?
Do you like cloves?
Then you're probably getting a lot of that from Madagascar.
What can the Malagasy buy?
Not much.
The Malagasy have...
They don't have money.
Most of the people have nothing.
They don't purchase things, right?
They purchase rice if they can't grow it themselves, and that's pretty much it.
So the...
You know, the deficit the U.S. has with each country divided by our imports from that country, presumably the U.S. is sending almost nothing to Madagascar because the Malagasy have nothing to buy, whereas Madagascar is sending what is to them a huge amount of vanilla and cloves and a certain amount of nickel and gold to the U.S., and it's still a tiny amount to us in terms of money, but it's a huge amount to us in terms of the fact that vanilla and cloves aren't evenly spread across the world.
world. Vanilla in particular is coming from Mexico, Indonesia, and Madagascar, and most of it's coming from Madagascar.
So what happens if we impose these giant tariffs on vanilla from Madagascar?
Well, is barely keeping a certain number of vanilla farmers, like the one we know, Solo, afloat, is just gonna disappear.
Well, I don't know what fraction--This feels like an oversimplification of the problem, just like, Musk's 15% flat indirect rate on federal grants.
Well, it's obviously an oversimplification of the problem because it results in a line.
And also, just think about the fact if, so, effectively what's going on, the reason Madagascar ends up at the top of that line, is they can't possibly import anything from us.
The population can't afford to buy things that we make, we don't make very much, and it's a long way to ship them, so the price goes up.
In order to get them there.
So we should expect a radical trade deficit to the extent that there's something rare enough that they have that we use that it makes it to us.
We would expect an almost total deficit, a trade deficit here.
And think about the logic that has been told to us.
The logic is, hey, if you want to get past our tariffs, Build your factory here.
But you can't grow vanilla here.
Right. You just can't do it.
So it's impossible.
Now, that said, I don't know what happens to Madagascar if this doesn't get fixed because presumably most of their vanilla doesn't go to us.
So it is possible that this would be a hit on their vanilla market.
Oh, actually, apparently a lot of their vanilla does come to us.
We are their...
Let's see.
I don't have it here now.
Yeah, I can't put my finger on it.
I'll try to find it.
But we are one of...
One of, if not their major country that they export to.
Okay, but...
Of vanilla.
I don't know if that's because we buy 70% of their vanilla or we buy 10% of their vanilla, but it's more than anybody else.
No, they're just a few big countries.
So it's like the US and China and a few others.
Again, I can't...
This is not quite...
I can't quite see it.
Nonetheless, we can agree that a tariff that punishes Madagascar for a trade deficit that it cannot do anything about is...
Not just.
It does not benefit Americans and it is not a penalty for the misbehavior of the Malagasy.
It is just simply a problem.
So, if you go back to that graph, Jen, what that means, we are now discovering something about, oh, I know how we're going to fix the American economy.
We're going to institute tariffs based on trade deficits, right?
Oh. Right.
So, presumably the tariff should be modified so that they only punish people who are choosing to make things in their country that they could actually make in our country instead.
Right? So you would get scatter over this rather than an exact line.
But the fact that it is an exact line generated through a simple formula to me actually suggests that this is a tactic and not really a proposal.
And what I wonder is two things.
And Trump spells out in his articulation of his negotiation strategy the frighten the crap out of everybody move that begins the negotiation that puts them in a mindset to give you what you want.
Yep. Right?
Yep. Yep.
Absolutely.
This is terrifying.
You can see Balaji, you can see Jeffrey Sachs talking about how terrifying this is.
You can see the market being utterly terrified, the stock market, that is.
You can see stocks collapsing and all of that.
You can see, you know, Sachs alludes to the fact that we have people like the Japanese and the Koreans that are talking to each other about trade because they don't take us as reliable.
Now, I could see that two ways.
Either we are causing Relations to warm, where, you know, as Sax points out, warming relations are in general good, but as a competitor in this market, we might not be happy to see the Japanese and the Koreans talking about an alliance.
On the other hand, the Japanese and the Koreans know that, and it could be that they are also negotiating, and that their announcing that they are in talks is them firing back.
You know, their attempt to control the negotiation.
Yeah, it's always easy to imagine when you're in the middle of a complex game that you're the only one who's actually playing the game.
Right. Like, now everyone is playing the game.
They're doing it differently with different cultural expectations, with different facility, but everyone is playing the game.
Everybody's playing the game, and so we shouldn't take any of this at face value.
Now, when I do look at that line, one other thought, and maybe this is crazy, but one thought is...
That Trump is actually creating a social credit score for trading partners.
He's creating a currency with which to reward and punish trading partners at will.
And that currency is proportional to trade deficits.
So what I'm expecting here, how do you take a radical 20-year plan And get it to manifest gains in two years.
I'm wondering if there's not a second move that we are shortly going to see.
If that second move is effectively an individual negotiation where let's say Vietnam is high on that line there.
Vietnam could come to the table being frightened at the prospect of facing these tariffs which are going to drive Americans to buy products made elsewhere.
And they could say, look, we are willing to build factories and...
You know, but I'm betting, and I'm going to look it up, I'll bet that Vietnam is up there because of rice.
Oh... Vietnam exports a lot of manufactured goods.
Do they?
Yeah. So anyway, you could imagine that this line is effectively a threat, a credible threat, and that that credible threat is going to be used to bring all of our trading partners to the table to renegotiate our deal with them, right?
Sort of an inverse NAFTA.
And you're right about Vietnam, incidentally.
I do.
What'd you say?
You're right.
Broadcasting equipment, integrated circuits, office machine parts, computers, broadcasting accessories, exporting mostly to the United States and China.
So if you imagine that the next phase of this is a negotiation with each of these partners or with coalitions of these partners in which they announce their plans to create a factory in, you know, Illinois, a factory in Michigan, whatever it is that they announce, those factories don't have to be up and running.
in order for the political benefits to accrue to Trump, because it will be understood that actually he has successfully brought the world to the table and that they are going to now do something that will ultimately, I think, be to the benefit of the American citizen, the average American citizen.
You know, having products made here creates much better jobs than we have for the working...
Right. No, I mean, there's obviously benefit to having people be gainfully employed in ways that feel to them like they are being productive and that they are being treated well.
I guess And I hope you're right, that this is basically both a strategic and a tactical move to get everyone to up their game and come to the table, and then we'll end up with a non-line sooner rather than later.
The line, if it's that, good.
It concerns me, for the reasons that I went into with regard to Madagascar, because I just know Madagascar, that it suffers from, if it's not the kind of strategic move that you are saying, that it's the same kind of honestly complicated machines-style thinking that the techutopians are bringing to the table.
at cost of, yes, our humanity, but also at the cost of an understanding of the complex ecology of the planet.
The distribution of resources is not uniform, it never will be.
We have hemispheres, we have seasons, we have the jet stream and trade winds and different biogeography of things that grow natively in places and things that can be taken out of their native places and grown elsewhere, but the idea that I think that we should be excited about aiming for a world in which everything is uniform, everything is homogeneous, we could just get our meat grown in labs, and our, you know, it doesn't matter how long the supply chain is, because it's all dead.
It's all...
A creation of humans that doesn't matter where its origin was or what its development was or how it lived.
And this is not just going to be a problem for tariffs and trade.
It's going to be the death of humanity.
What is going to be the death of humanity?
This tendency to homogenize, to make generic, to imagine that there's uniformity of distribution of stuff, of things, of ideas, of beauty, of growth, of all of the things.
And that we can just, you know, again, the 15% indirect tax, indirect cost rate on federal grants that Doge wants to impose on all the grants coming out of everywhere, NSF, NIH, everything.
You know, the straight line.
I like your I like your hypothesis.
The straight line, the simple numerator over denominator.
We drew a line.
Here it is.
Your move.
I like that as a hypothesis.
I hope it's right.
If it's not, it's further evidence of this oversimplistic, complicated versus complex.
We can just logic our way out of everything thinking that is a hallmark of, frankly, the...
20th and 21st century, some would say it's a hallmark of the Enlightenment.
I don't think so, but it's a misunderstanding of what science is and of what logic and analysis and rigor can be.
Yes. I don't want to hold them responsible for it unless that's actually what's going on.
it's very early to say what their plan is.
I do think the fact that the plan they have described can't possibly provide returns on the timescale that we should expect them to be focused on at this moment is telling.
Frankly, if they did this in the second two years of what will be Trump's last term, that would make more sense if it was a 20-year plan that designed to make Trump victorious in history.
But in the first two years...
It's pretty interesting.
It's a very radical move.
And so I don't know that this is the result of that oversimplification.
I don't understand why you think doing it in the second two years would be a safer move, or I'm not even sure exactly what your argument is.
Because if Trump gets clobbered in the midterms, it creates a major problem for him, both in terms of his power to govern and in terms of how his presidency is understood.
So if the midterms were safely behind him, if he did a bunch of things that were popular, got through the midterms without getting clobbered, and then did something radical that had a 20-year time horizon that would result in his name in history books looking better.
Sort of the way Reagan was a very different figure in real time and history, whether it's right or wrong, has understood him to be more insightful than he was understood by many at the time.
Trump could make that play, but I would expect it in the second two years, not the first two years.
Well, except that it seems that this has been a focus of his for decades, you say.
And I certainly remember him talking about it a lot during this election.
He did.
He came right out of the gate with a bunch of executive orders, as we talked about, that fit with his campaign promises and seemed to be likely to be effective.
But I don't recall any off the top of my head that were going to actually bring Jobs back.
And the fact that we were being told for four years under the Biden-Harris administration that the economy was great, when it patently was not.
When people were losing jobs and people couldn't afford groceries and people couldn't afford their mortgages and all of these things.
That I think Trump actually is trying to make good on the broader campaign promise, maybe never made explicit, which is we're going to help Americans.
I agree, and actually there is another element of this.
Trump appears to be interested in improving the well-being of Americans.
We can argue that that's because he loves adulation, or we can argue that that's because he actually feels the pain of Americans and wants to help.
It doesn't really matter.
Neither of those things is good enough.
We can also see that President Trump...is not going to sideline his own advancement economically during this period.
His Trump coin move at the beginning told us that actually he is not...
the sacrifice that has to be made, he's not going to personally sacrifice.
But I would point out an interesting parallel.
We look at the CEOs of major corporations and we know, we've been talking for, I don't know, 40 years about the disproportionate pay that these CEOs get.
Even when they're fired and leave, they often get these extremely lavish packages.
And I remember there was some question, economically speaking, about why.
Right? Why is it that we pay these folks as much as we do?
And I've heard interesting hypotheses about the fact that you have to pay them that much because they're in a tremendous position to do damage.
And there's also the question of whether they need to be economically sort of symmetrically large as the things that they are administering in order to properly do it.
It doesn't really matter why.
The point is the deal that Wall Street has had with its CEOs is you will Be economically elite and you will do the bidding of the shareholders.
And the question that I have is, is the deal that we have seemingly worked out with President Trump that you will be economically elite and you will do the bidding of the citizenry, which is not a bad deal.
I mean, I'm uncomfortable with it.
I'd prefer that this was done out of...
Yeah. Ever.
Forever. Are, you know, seeing their life flash before their eyes.
We obviously can't allow those corporations to fail, but the idea that they have actually had their interests overly cared for at the expense of their workers makes a lot of sense.
To hear that coming from, you know, the red team, that's interesting.
That is not what you would expect to be seeing, but nonetheless, that seems to be the era that we're living in.
So, I don't know.
I'm concerned that they don't understand enough about the system to pull this off.
I'm hopeful.
I never thought that this free trade thing made sense.
NAFTA was a mistake, obviously, at the time.
Ross Perot gave voice to it.
You say you're concerned that they don't know.
One of your concerns is they don't know enough about the system to pull this off.
I would argue that it's not possible to know enough.
A big move is going to be required.
There is going to be risk.
And so, what I have not heard, but again, I'm on a mountain I don't even want to be on here.
Much less, you know, comfortable with making choices between these various options.
But, so what's the...
Everyone who's freaking out, and I get to freak out at some level, Are you arguing that there's not a problem that needs to be solved?
Or, yes, we recognize there's a problem that needs to be solved.
No one has come close to solving it in forever.
And here's what we could do.
Like, are there other proposals on the table?
I have not heard them.
And absent that, you said, I'm concerned that they may not know enough to know what they're Yep. Yep.
Yep. No, I don't think so.
Well, no, there are a couple of possibilities.
Okay. So first of all, let's call this move, go big or go home.
Okay? The magnitude of what's being proposed is what would be needed to reconcile this problem, to fix this problem that was, you know, 40 years, 30 some years in the making.
So the scale is right.
The suddenness of it is shocking.
I think the reflexive negative reaction of the elites to this is actually part and parcel of something else I've talked about here too, which is that the problem of communism comes down to two things.
Communism gets invented when a large fraction of the population discovers That it's in a meritocracy and it has not been equipped with the tools that would allow it to compete.
So it has no interest in preserving the system.
And the answer is, hey, that's not fair.
Let's transfer what you're making with that system back to me because it's as much mine as yours.
It's a terrible idea.
It ends up with a stack of bodies.
But you can understand why it gets reinvented every time a meritocracy does not take care of the people on the losing end.
So I have complained about what I call the stingy right.
Okay, the stingy right are correct in recognizing that meritocracy is the goose that lays the golden eggs.
The market can do things nothing else can do, and that you're wrong to want to punish people for succeeding in the market.
That's true.
But it does not pay nearly enough attention to market failure and externalities and fortunes that are made through parasitism and predation.
And the point is, if the right I think what we are seeing here is a new animal.
We are seeing a...
Republican working class reorganization that is not stingy with respect to working class people.
It's trying to take care of them.
And if it succeeds, that will actually be to the benefit of all of us because even the elites, you know, they may do great in those intervening years when they're sticking it to the working class, but ultimately they pay the price of the working class rising up and overturning the system.
And so anyway, there's something, Of the right magnitude here, in the right direction, something novel.
I mean, a Republican?
You know, a guy who flies around in a private jet with his name on it, doing the bidding of working class people by attempting to reorganize the way the world trades in a way that actually will cause goods to be manufactured here rather than imported?
That's ambitious.
And, you know, I think at that level, you've got to like the approach.
As for whether or not Anybody could know enough.
I don't think anybody could know enough to guarantee a success.
There's a question about whether or not they know enough to take the risks that they're taking.
In other words, not knowing enough is the category everybody would be in, but how much do you know about what you're tinkering with and how likely is it to succeed?
Is it worth the gamble?
On that point, one last thing.
There's a tweet that...
It goes through a frightening exercise in which four different major AI engines were queried as to how to solve this problem.
So the tweet here from Rohit says, this might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.
What does that say?
It's four AI tech names.
Okay, so four engines, including 4003 High, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7, and Grok, all give the same answer to the question on how to impose the tariffs easily.
And then, so the tweet presents these four answers just to show that they all come up with the same thing.
And what kind of answer is it?
You're not going to be able to read it on the screen.
Is it like what they've done or no?
Precisely. And that's the problem.
Why is that the problem?
Well, it means one of two things.
It either means that they've found the canonical solution and they're deploying exactly the only rational thing to do in this situation.
Or that they asked AI.
Or that they asked AI.
But it's not sure.
But it's one of two things.
It's not inherently that.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
And I'm hoping that this is the canonical answer and that we're just not allowed to talk about it because, you know, that's the way the social environment works.
But nonetheless...
And I don't know enough.
I haven't messed with AI really at all.
And I've never compared stuff between the...
What do you call them?
Engines? LLMs?
Yeah. I don't know to what degree they tend to agree.
I found this shocking.
I haven't done all that much playing with it either, but I found the level of agreement surprising.
I don't have a baseline to compare to, so I can't be surprised without knowing what it looks like in other situations.
Therefore, maybe not inherently canonical at all.
It's just that one answer starts to happen and then all the other AIs sort of cluster around it.
Good. All right.
Well, I think that's everything I wanted to To present on this front.
All right.
You also had some other stuff to talk about with regard to AI.
Or we could do that now?
I guess probably given that we're on the subject of AI, it makes sense to do it.
Yeah. Okay.
So the next thing is I happened across the demonstration of a new AI video engine and its capability.
And I'm going to show you, can we show the tweet and then show the two examples from it?
So this is an apparently a Chinese engine and what it does is it takes a photograph of a person and allows you to take an actor and then it will cause the person whose photograph you have taken to act out and say the things that the actor separately said and did and I was shocked at It's quality.
And then I did want it.
And now I really want it!
And I want to do it well!
As well as it could be done.
And then I did want it.
And now I really want it!
And I want to do it well!
As well as it could be done.
All right.
Now, the reason that this especially caught my attention, we have talked many times about the Cartesian crisis, all of the reasons that it has become very difficult to know what of the things that we believe are true are actually true.
You know, universities pump out science that isn't really science.
And so, you know, Descartes famously had a...
A philosophical crisis when he realized that almost everything that he thought he knew to be true he was taking on some kind of authority and that that was not trustworthy.
This is a new level of AI's disruption of our capacity to know what's true.
Now, I have no doubt that those videos are imperfect enough for a sophisticated crime lab to detect that they are not the genuine article.
But that's for now.
Let me just say, I don't know who the second actress is, but the first one is Marilyn Monroe, obviously.
And you've got some actress we don't know the name of doing something, and they have the AI do the famous person through this actor's manifestation of it.
That doesn't look like Marilyn Monroe to me.
It looks like her phenotypically, but that's not the way she acted.
That's not the way she emoted.
Again, with this reductionism and this back to numbers that we can count and therefore we can build a whole human from it, there's more.
There's more there.
I think you're missing my point.
I agree with you.
I wasn't responding to your point.
I was responding to that, saying I don't buy it yet.
Here's the thing.
That thing apparently animated a photograph.
Suppose you trained one on you, having sat in front of a camera for who knows how many thousands of hours, and it picks up every nuance.
I hope it's not thousands.
Hundreds at least.
You could train an AI on the particular nuances of an individual's...
Facial movements, body movements, intonations, all of those things.
And that is only a matter of time and compute.
These things will eventually become indistinguishable.
And the point I wanted to make is that this, it's a world that many of us have seen coming since this AI revolution dawned and even before, where, you know, do you want to live in a world where somebody,
Can, with a computer, take an image and porn and cause a person who didn't consent to it to apparently enact the entire thing?
I don't want to live in that world.
That's a sucky world.
It's pretty hard to see how we're going to stop it.
But even worse is the question of what the hell happens to evidence that you did or didn't commit a crime?
Based on the ability to create a undetectable fake of what appears to be video documentation of you committing the crime.
And then, one step beyond that is what we are seeing here.
If you project down the road two years, right?
Two years of refinement of this model, two years of learning how to train it so that it actually does reproduce in individuals' movements and intonations and all of that.
Is compromise about to become worthless?
Because who's to say whether that was actually you or...
It got the goods.
It got the video.
I don't know.
Maybe you do.
I say I didn't do that.
You show me a video.
I say that's not me.
Prove it.
Now, of course, there are that have been proposed for addressing this world, technologies in which everything that you actually do gets lodged in a blockchain so that it's unfakeable.
If it's modified, you can say, hey, that wasn't me.
Here's the original or whatever.
There's a lot of things that we can't know.
What happens if something shows up?
That appears to be evidence and it's not stamped.
How do we understand it?
How does the court adjudicate whether or not it constitutes any kind of evidence at all?
Yeah. Right?
These are difficult questions.
So anyway, I just think the rate at which we are crossing, you know, we are well over the event horizon.
The rate at which we are now opening new territory of things that worked for some reason that suddenly are in jeopardy because of this is amazing.
And anyway, I wanted to call.
Yeah, I mean, actually, I had...
It feels to me like a related sort of revelation this week, which is at a much lower level.
It has to do with...
Attribution of words to people.
Quotations. Where I ended up separately, independently, and it wasn't until the third one that I realized that I had been in this thing three times already this week.
I had these quotations from people that I was thinking that I had, you know, I was working with for a book I'm writing, for a lecture, and they were really good.
And whereas everything else I was working with, I had pulled the quotations from the book that I was reading or the paper that I was reading.
These had sort of come to me through the ether.
And I'm going to share them.
They are from Einstein.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
It's good.
You've probably heard it, right?
From Anais Nin, who I enjoy, she said, apparently, life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Great quote.
And from T.S. Eliot, only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
And I've read a great quote, right?
And I've read a lot of, actually I've probably read more Anaïs Nin than the other two, but I've read some T.S. Eliot, read some Einstein.
I know, I have a sense of who all these people are, and I really resonated with the thoughts in each of those quotes, and it felt like them.
Just like, you know, that video kind of felt like Marilyn Monroe, right?
It felt like them.
But I didn't find those quotes in the source material.
I don't remember how.
Like I said, they came to me through the ether, so I went looking.
And I couldn't find them.
I couldn't find them, and I finally asked AI.
I asked Grok.
After I had tried and tried and tried and tried, and in each of those cases, what Grok returned to me was...
Yeah, probably didn't happen.
Probably didn't happen.
Probably didn't happen.
And they, you know, it sort of explained like, oh, there was this thing.
But then, you know, the actual quote is from a book after he died.
And there's the, and, you know, and it's like, yes, you're right.
It does feel like the person, like Einstein, like Anaïs, then like T.S. Eliot.
But they didn't say those things.
Yep. And, you know, we used to have.
I mean, we still do.
In academic papers, when you want to cite something that has been said to you that is worthy of citation in a paper but isn't published yet, you say perscom.
This has been observed in the field once before, Weinstein B, personal communication.
And that is a nod so that you can respond and say, I never said that to her.
And so it doesn't...
It doesn't go any farther than that.
That is why I was always, with my students and in my own work, so emphatic about being super careful with citation, because we have things in our heads that we think are true, and they're not.
The Cartesian crisis has been going on for a long time, and it's just jumped levels with the AI and with the videos.
All of those sound They're good.
They're meaningful quotations that meant something.
And I wanted to share them here today and then sort of wipe them from my consciousness because it's not that the ideas aren't valuable, but in part we quote people because it's the idea in combination with the person.
You get a little bump in...
In the importance of and memorability of the thing, if it's a quotation from someone who is themselves famous.
And if none of these people ever said any of these things, well, then you can't cheat that way.
You shouldn't be able to cheat that way.
Yeah, no, you can't cheat that way.
And it's amazing what a large fraction of the things that we repeat that have been said by so-and-so weren't really said by them.
It's amazing.
I've been through that exercise many, many times, and it's more often than not some famous quote that is attributed to Einstein isn't.
Right. Einstein's got it particularly bad.
There's a bunch of them for him.
T.S. Eliot also, actually.
I went down that little rabbit hole.
I'm like, oh, okay.
It must be somewhere in the love song of J. Alfred.
Proofrock? I may have that wrong, but it's this mind-blowing, expansive, modern poem from 19-oh-something.
They're like, oh, it's probably in there somewhere.
Well, actually, mostly it's not.
Well, I'm beginning to think that the Cartesian crisis may go back as far as Descartes.
No, I think he was identifying something that pre-existed him.
Yes. Actually, maybe it goes back to the horse before Descartes.
Sorry. I take it back.
Yeah. I mean, it might with regard to the horse, but the horse at least isn't wondering about these things.
It's hard to tell.
Hard to prove he's not.
That's my claim.
That is my hypothesis.
The horse is not wondering about these things.
No. No.
All right.
That's it from my side.
All right.
So I have two little things.
The first is something that we have referred to a bit, and I don't have a lot about it, but can you see my computer at this point?
Really? Because, you know, every time after the livestream we check all the tech and it all works, and then next time, nope, does not work.
My computer is now freaking out as if it's connected to some other computer, so I'm hoping it's now visible to you.
Is it?
Jen, is it visible now?
So, Scientific American this last week had this remarkable headline.
Time spent in nature can be good and sometimes bad for your brain.
A Goldilocks measure of green space might help stave off dementia, but an excess could lead to cognitive decline.
An excess.
An excess of nature.
Okay, let's see what Scientific American is up to, shall we?
So I'm just going to share a little bit from here and then show you some of the research that they're supposedly pulling from.
There's nothing like a good walk through your local park to unwind and release stress from a busy day.
Taking some time in nature is undeniably good for you, with well-documented benefits to physical and mental health.
But new research suggests that when it comes to the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, easy access to nature can sometimes help, but at other times can be too much of a good thing.
You might not be yet so.
And they talk a little bit about like, oh, yeah, we really are getting a beat on dementia.
We have some sense of like why people get dementia.
It's like, no, it turns out they really don't.
But they do talk about like there is some heritable component, probably.
And so in light of that, you might not be able to change your genes, but in some cases you can change where you live or your hobbies or habits.
According to Marco Vincetti of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, quote, there is growing and convincing evidence that risk of neurodegenerative disease, including cognitive impairment and dementia, can be substantially reduced by environmental and behavioral factors, and this may even be true in individuals having high genetic susceptibility, end quote. Studying the role of environmental factors has led to the recent discovery that exposure to air pollution, such as from wildfire, smoke, or heavy traffic, increases your chances of developing dementia.
Go figure.
This is also the line of questioning that led researchers to discover the positive effects of green space.
Based on this research, you might be ready to give up city life.
You might presume that more green space is better and that living on a few wooded acres with nothing but trees for miles around will lead to the lowest possible chance of dementia.
It turns out this is not so simple.
A 2022 research study led by Federico Zagnoli of the University of Modena at Reggio Emilia revealed that more green space is not always better.
The researchers found a U-shaped association between exposure to green space and dementia risk.
Low levels of green space were associated with a higher likelihood of developing dementia, and medium levels were linked to a lower risk.
But the highest level of green space exposure didn't reduce dementia risk relative to the medium level, and in some cases even increased it.
In other words, too little green space has an adverse effect, but so might too much of it.
And just one more paragraph from here.
This is, again, Scientific American a few days ago, reporting for some reason on a paper published three years ago, so what that's about I'm not sure.
So the conclusion is that green space itself is not bad for your brain health, but living on a few acres of land surrounded by forest and farmland might increase your risk of dementia in their ways.
Although trees have a positive effect, they are no substitute for a nearby hospital, local community center, and a walkable neighborhood with friendly neighbors.
Aiming for the lowest possible dementia risk is all about a balance.
neighborhood density to have easy access to services and social support, but plenty of trees for a walk in.
Did you say trees are no substitute for a hospital?
That's exactly what they say!
Yes. Trees have a positive effect.
They are no substitute for a nearby hospital.
These people...
Are well on their way to dementia, whether or not they know it.
So, there's...
Okay. Let's just go to the original research, which I'm not going to spend much time on because it's a giant modeling mess.
But... Published in Current Environmental Health Reports in 2022 is Greenness Associated with Dementia, a Systematic Review and Dose Response Meta-Analysis.
It's... It's a giant meta review of, uh, that basically is looking at other research that has done these, um, there's two different databases they're pulling from, but like assessments of greenness, which point one, greenness around you is not the same as nature.
Yeah. Like greenness and nature are not the same thing.
And Scientific American conflates those two in its freaking headline.
To make, to make the point clear.
Greenness could be that you're surrounded by GMO corn with Roundup being sprayed on it.
So it's not synonymous with nature.
At best, it's a proxy, and you would want to test very carefully how good a proxy it was.
Yes. Because, for one thing, when you get a result like that...
Wait. But it turns out, like, these researchers with this ridiculously complex but I think crap method...
Didn't even actually get the result the Scientific American's claiming.
Not really.
So, again, we're not going to spend too much time here, but I'm just going to go through the paragraphs I've...
Oh, well, this is interesting.
So these authors apparently are new to the idea of hypothesis.
And so in their introduction, is it their introduction?
I think still, yeah.
They have this paragraph.
According to the Population Exposure Comparator Outcome and Study Design Guidelines, the specific research question is, quote, in the adult population, what is the effect of greenness on risk of cognitive impairment or dementia from epidemiological studies?
End quote.
So maybe that's just badly written, but...
According to the guidelines, the research question is?
Like, no, you've been, apparently, it required guidelines to inform a bunch of researchers so they needed to have a question going in so they didn't post-talk their way into getting the answers they wanted.
So, again, the problems with modern science and part of why, you know, what...
What Doge should be doing is going in and saying, all y'alls who claim to be doing science, that's not science.
I don't see a hypothesis.
Stop it with the data-driven.
Get out of here and come back once you know what the scientific method is.
So, you know, according to the guidelines, here's our...
Okay, fine.
So, you know, it doesn't give me faith that these people actually know what science is.
Study characteristics.
Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of included studies.
The publication period ranged from 2015 to 2022.
Three studies were conducted in Europe, two in the UK, one in the Netherlands, five in North America, two in Canada, three in the US, three in Asia, one each in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and one in Australia.
So first off, we've got...
It seems great.
Oh, it's global.
But like...
Do you think that green space might mean something different in the Netherlands than in Hong Kong than in and where in the U.S. exactly?
Actually, in this case, I think you want to control for what kind of thing is around you and what green space might mean.
So right away, I don't have a lot of faith that this method could possibly reveal anything interesting.
Sorry. On, on, on, on, on through here.
Here we have...
In their results, the dose-response curve between dementia and greenness, as measured by LULC, showed a lower risk ratio for the intermediate range of exposure, between 0.2 and 0.8, with the lowest RR of around 0.8 and a greenness level of 0.5.
Like, lots of...
whatever, it doesn't matter.
At the highest levels of greenness, there was little evidence of protection, with the RR approaching and slightly exceeding 1. Two of the three included studies.
Three included studies.
Demonstrated a U-shaped relation while the other suggested no association.
So they've got two studies which show a very weak supposed U-shaped correlation in which they define green weirdly and they're looking at studies from across the world and it's just two studies as well.
And I don't know why they exclude all the rest, I don't remember, but two of the three show a weak U-shaped curve in which, oh, more greenness makes you more susceptible to dementia and one of them doesn't.
Right. So the one that doesn't raises all sorts of questions about why the relationship isn't there, and the fact that this hypothesis is preposterous on its face.
Yeah. Right?
Well, but again, so I shared with you their hypothesis, and they did not hypothesize that they were going to find higher rates of dementia with more greenness.
They had a...
Two-tailed hypothesis.
They didn't even specify.
They had like an open-tailed hypothesis in which they just said there's going to be an effect.
Like greenness is going to have an effect on dimension.
We don't know what it's going to be.
So, yes, and that does include the rational hypothesis, which is that likely it would have benefits.
Yeah. But I would just point out, human beings evolved outside.
The idea that we are ill-prepared for...
Right. Let me just finish this before you do the rant.
The systemic review and meta-analysis suggests that environmental greenness may have a non-linear association with dementia.
Specifically, the data are consistent with the hypothesis that living in a place with an intermediate greenness value may protect against dementia.
Again, they're claiming a hypothesis here, which they had to say up top what the question was, and that wasn't the hypothesis.
Given the limitation of previous studies in terms of exposure assessment, control of confounding, and lack of precision, future studies should address these methodological challenges to facilitate pooled analyses and to provide more reliable conclusions, which is just their way of saying more research needs to be done and you can't really trust what we found.
Which does raise the question as to why Scientific American, which is a compromised property, decided that now is the moment to take this research, which is doubtful in and of itself.
That conclusion says we don't exactly know what happened here.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, and yet Scientific American is touting it as if it provides some sort of guidance about how to live your life, which it clearly doesn't.
So, once again, the headline from Scientific American this week was, Time spent in nature can be good, and sometimes bad, for your brain.
Arguing specifically for a Goldilocks measure of green space.
You know, they've made several errors here.
And I can have my screen back here so I can make sure I know what the errors are.
They have conflated green, which is what the original research was looking at, green, weirdly defined, but green with nature.
Green is not the same as nature.
There's this methodological bullshit in the original article which is complex and...
And stats heavy and being generally surrounded by green doesn't mean that you're actually experiencing it.
So if you look out on a GMO cornfield, that's supposed to be like choosing to go out on a walk three times a week?
I don't think so.
And these big, messy, gross, gross in terms of too large, too gross-tuned categories are what big data likes to traffic in.
but it means that more and more of the science that we are seeing is just unreliable and wrong.
And then it's the inaccurate reporting by the mainstream media, which has this headline about, you know, go into nature, but not too much.
It's dangerous for you.
And the original research finds a little tiny correlation in a couple of the studies that their big meta review is supposedly looking at, and not at all what Scientific is reporting.
Problem after problem after problem.
And, but, you know, Scientific American got me to click and presumably we're going to have people arguing like, oh, well, you know, I already went on two walks this week.
I better not go out again.
And if I do, I better slather myself in sunscreen and, you know, and, you know, and wear a mask and make sure that I don't ever get touched by anything natural out there because I know I'm only safe when I'm under the watchful eye of big whatever it is.
Alternative title for that article.
Touch AstroTurf.
Yeah. All right.
Well, I'm betting this is not going to change your advice at the end of the podcast.
No, no, it's not.
I did actually want...
It's maybe exactly the wrong moment because we just spent a lot of time talking and using a lot of words and having a lot of opinions, including...
Me on things that I specifically kept saying, like, I don't know enough to be talking about this.
But I wanted to share just the final words from my Field Notes column in the most recent issue of County Highway, which those of you who don't know County Highway, you should.
It's America's only newspaper.
Coming to you from...
David Samuels and Walter Kern, and I'm one of their columnists.
I do the Field Notes column, and it comes out every two months.
It's hard coffee.
You're supposed to drink it on your porch with coffee in the morning and bourbon at night.
That's my edition, but I think it's right.
Actually, I think that the original, like the founding editorial, did mention something like that.
I need to find...
I did have it.
Oh, here we go.
So this...
I wrote this in January, right after the inauguration.
And it's a piece I call No Time for Words.
And I'm talking a lot about the scientific method and what it is that we should be doing, like holding tight, white-knuckling it through this weird transition that we're living through right now.
And here, just a couple of paragraphs.
The whole country is at a fever pitch.
This is the most promising moment in America in many a decade.
Alternately, this is the end of us.
All hope is lost.
There are, of course, many who attempt a more measured approach.
We are hopeful but not without critique, or worried but reserving judgment, trying to see the good.
But even those of us who cling to nuance, even we can find ourselves in extremists, wrung out, ready to succumb.
It's already too much.
Never before has everything we understood to be true seemed so patently to be at risk.
Pay attention.
Learn the facts.
Form an opinion.
Proclaim your opinion from the rooftops or from your phone, whichever is easier to access.
Probably your phone, then.
Most of us haven't been on a rooftop in ages.
Perhaps this is part of the problem, then.
Let us cease the analysis for a moment.
Allow the happenings to wash over us, or to wash over someone else, even.
Certainly we don't need to proclaim.
Often we need not form an opinion.
It is even sometimes true, more often than we are led to believe, that paying attention and learning the facts is not the best approach.
For what we are capable of paying attention to too often is constrained to what others have already digested for us.
It is their words, their analysis.
I just looked up and lost my place.
It is their words, their analysis, that we are supposed to take in and interpret.
Rather than internalize their words, perhaps it is better to sit back and observe.
Turn the sound down and observe without words.
Watch instead of speak.
Ground yourself in the reality that surrounds you instead of spiraling in the cacophony of opinions that would have you believe rather than see.
Certainly there are moments when it is not the time for words.
Perhaps this is one of those times.
Aslan, the great lion, begins singing halfway through the first book of C.S.
Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.
None of the humans who are present have any idea what to make of him.
They are in a land they have never imagined before, in the presence of a giant music-making feline, brought there by magic wrought by an arrogant and hapless man, Uncle Andrew.
Andrew's nephew, Diggory, and Diggory's new friend, Polly, are open and adventurous.
So too is the cabbie who has found himself in the middle of the adventure.
They do not know what to think, but they are watching.
So.
Certain of what should happen, certain of their rightful place in the world, certain that only they can see the truth of the matter.
As is often the case with deeply certain people, Uncle Andrew and the witch wildly disagree with and dislike one another.
As is also often the case with certain people, neither of them can manage to stop talking.
As Aslan's song shifts, changing the very landscape on which they stand, Diggory and Polly and the cabbie are rapt and enchanted.
The witch and Uncle Andrew, however, begin to bicker, wrapped up in their own stories, trapped.
When Uncle Andrew goes on a rant against the witch, laying bare past grievances, the cabbie has had enough.
Oh, stow it, Governor, do stow it, said the cabbie.
Watch and listen is the thing at present.
Not talking.
Here, then, is my plea to my fellow Americans.
Do not take the bait.
Do not feel it necessary to come to a conclusion.
do not even feel that it is your job to follow all the news.
Many who think that they follow all the news follow only one slant, and so are more misinformed than those who intentionally look away from the entire circus.
Try to observe without interpretation, avoid certainty, and as you return to your senses, quite literally, remind yourself that what you think you know may not, in fact, be true.
Thank you.
That is exquisitely well said, and this is the perfect moment for that message.
Everyone, at some level, is holding on for dear life.
White-knuckling it.
Oh, God.
I either never wanted this, and see, I was right, or I voted for this, and okay, let's see.
But there's not a person I know who's totally comfortable and laid back at the moment.
How could you be?
The fact is, for the first time in I don't know how long, we are actually seeing a...
Radical re-envisioning of the way things work.
And that is not going to be without a certain amount of carnage.
Whether it leaves us better off remains to be seen.
But I think anybody who is sure that they know how this plays out is not realizing the scope of difference.
Yeah. That's right.
All right.
Are we there?
I think so.
Yes. All right.
We'll be back two weeks from today on Saturday, April somethings.
18th, I believe.
Okay. I'll just look because my sense is that that's not right.
I think that's actually quite wrong.
I think it's going to be the 19th is the actual Saturday, yes.
The 19th, yes.
Yeah, I wanted people to start getting ready on the 18th.
No, you don't.
No. You have no...
That's not you.
No. No.
All right, so we'll be back in two weeks, and there will be a great Inside Rail episode dropping, maybe early on Locals, and then...
And... Check out our sponsors for this week.
They are always excellent.
They were CrowdHealth and PeakNandaka and Sundays.
I'm gesturing to something you can't see, but it's our dog in the corner.
You can hear her snoring.
You may be able to hear her snoring.
We should give her a mic.
That's a thought.
I said to someone the other day, she has a different kind of dog, and she said, ah, my dog snores so badly.
But not as badly as my husband did before he lost all that weight.
And I said, yeah, my dog snores too.
I said, what kind of dog do you have?
She said, a lab.
I said, a lab.
She said, oh yeah, a lab snore.
I'm like, really?
Because I don't remember our Labrador snoring when she was younger.
I feel like she's adopted this as sort of a late-life fad.
There was a certain amount of snoring.
Yeah, okay.
Anyway, feed your dogs Sundays and make them both awake and happy.
Both awake and sleeping more happy.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
