Transcending Health: The 282nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss MAHA, wearables, health, and Israel. RFK Jr. announced that he hopes that in four years, all Americans will be wearing health tracking devices. What are the implications for individual health? Is hypothesis-driven science being undermined? Will equity be used as a way to force this on people? What should we think of the fact that Casey Means, the nominee to Surgeon General, has a company that incorporates wearables? What does Yuval Noah Harari have to tell us? Does having you...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number something.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haing.
It's 280 something.
Yeah, it is 280-something.
280-something.
How is it 282?
Yeah, it is.
All right.
Okay, good.
Well, time marches on.
It is Thursday, which is not our usual.
You have been off-island, as we refer to it.
You are now back.
And I had to look back and see what the state of the world was when we last podcasted.
What was it?
The state of the world was embroiled in an unfolding Iran war scenario, the dimensions of which we did not yet know.
And maybe we still don't know.
But at least there's been a lot of water over that bridge?
No, no.
Actually, there.
Have you seen these images of this bridge in which boats go over?
And there's a boat bridge somewhere on Earth.
If I had known that I was going to stumble into this, I would have dredged.
on earth are you talking about?
It's some, I think it's maybe Norway, A canal.
An elevated canal.
An elevated canal.
Okay.
Yeah.
Which is kind of cool.
That is cool.
I wouldn't have thought of it.
I mean, I think you would have, had you been in the position that they surely found themselves in needing to get boats from one side to the other and there wasn't a We just can't get there from here.
That's the answer.
But there's just no way it's the right answer.
I just don't feel that you're a we can't get there from here kind of guy.
You're right.
I might well have green lit such a project and I might have been.
You might have wanted to float the boats on hot air balloons from one side of the aqueduct to the next.
Rough week for hot air balloons.
I barely know, not really.
Something terrible happened.
Yeah, something really awful happened.
Yeah.
The balloon caught fire in flight and a large number of people injured and killed.
Anyway, quite bad stuff.
But I have seen, you've certainly seen these videos of boats being launched.
Have you ever seen a compilation of large tankers and things being launched?
Some of them are launched on these rolling balloon-like deals.
Balloon?
Yeah.
Like air-filled rubber.
Rollers.
Yeah, something like that.
Like the, not air-filled, but like the casters before you go through, before you put your luggage through the metal check at the airport.
No, no, these are, these are inflated.
So you say, but like otherwise just like rolling dowels, but inflated.
Yeah, except these ones were checking my memory from the last time I looked at this, but they actually roll down the ramp with, instead of staying static, and rolling over the top of them, they kind of.
See, now I have been in a situation in Panama, in the Bocas del Tora archipelago, where I and some of my students and whoever it was, who was our captain, Dujour, needed to get a boat that was far up away from the water, into the water.
And we ended up using, finding, cutting, don't remember, a number of coconut stems.
Like, I want to say coconut palm, but our colours are.
Coconut, yeah, coconut palm trunks.
Yeah, coconut, and they're not, and since they're monocuts, they're not technically trunks, so I'm trying to be all botanically precise.
Okay, but let's just go with coconut palm trunks because everyone will know what that means.
And getting the getting the boat onto them and then the same thing, like rolling, you can imagine this was Pampa.
They weren't exactly straight and that the rolling was.
They were not straight and the boat took a not precisely sinusoidal down to the water, but we did get it there.
Yeah.
Nice.
All right.
Well, that leads us to the paying the rent, which will be followed by a tour of whatever fresh hells have been unleashed.
It just doesn't stop.
No, it doesn't stop.
And I think it's kind of accelerating, as one might predict in light of certain developments.
We will get into that.
We will get into not only the what, but we're going to get into some of the why, what we might be able to infer from some of the strange announcements you never saw coming from the people announcing them, sorts of things that are happening.
Okay, but I also want to talk about smoke.
Of course, of course.
Culinary uses of smoke.
All right.
I'm dredging up what I know about smoke.
I know that where there is smoke, there is incomplete combustion.
Very nice, very nice.
And sometimes where there is chocolate, there is smoke.
Here we have smoked dark chocolate that I picked up in Sisters, Oregon at the Sisters Meet and Smokehouse.
So where there is chocolate, there is smoke.
I have not opened it yet.
I don't know how good it is.
No, but I'm hoping you've figured out how they do that.
I figured out how some people suggest that you might do it, but frankly, I'm put out by a smoker, and they do suggest that the big risk is, of course, that the chocolate melts.
At which point you have just a puddle of melted chocolate and the colours.
And if it doesn't, how does the smoke get into it?
That's the question.
But we will get into all that.
A little bit.
Yeah.
I just, I've been thinking about smoke, which I find I prefer to do to thinking about all the other things that are the fresh hell that we find ourselves.
But we got a watch party going on at locals.
Please join us there.
And you've got a couple of Patreon conversations going on this weekend.
So consider joining Brett on that.
That is so true.
It being the first weekend of the month that will be July, if my calculations are correct.
July, because it's June now.
It's not the first weekend of July at all.
Maybe it's next weekend.
Maybe I've got it wrong.
Maybe she's got it wrong.
Oh, that's right.
This weekend is the last weekend in June.
So, all right.
Yeah, no, I'm totally wrong.
It's the private Q ⁇ A that's this weekend.
But notice how easily your authority on all things calendar related led me straight into thinking I had.
Well, it led you straight into curtailing June by a few days.
Yeah.
Which is the only reason I was like, wait a minute.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's not July yet because July 4th is more than a week away.
It's not my right to curtail June without at least a plurality of the electorate.
June is one of my favorite months.
I would rather we not curtail June.
All right.
Maybe we could even lengthen it.
February is so compromised.
Maybe we just hack a few extra days off of February and tack them on to June.
I think so.
All right.
Yeah, let's do that.
Okay.
I'm glad we got that by the way.
Okay.
Paying the rent, we've got three sponsors at the top of the hour, as always, that we truly, truly do vouch for.
Our first sponsor this week is Brain FM.
Attention is one of our most precious attributes.
Even the language that we use around it reveals some of the depth of relationship that we have with it.
We can get someone's attention, give someone our attention, stand at attention, pay attention.
There are so many ways to be engaged.
And of course, there are nearly endless ways to be distracted.
By food in the fridge and clutter in the living room, by the fresh hell that comes every single day, by the necessary maintenance of machines, the gardening, the grocery shopping, the laundry, the appointments to be made and kept, all of it.
And then there are the notifications.
You have mail, texts, calls, likes, new follows, new content, new fresh hell.
On and on and on.
What?
I liked the ad-lib.
Do you want to pay attention?
Be truly at attention on a task that feels worthy and honorable and suited to your skills and aspirations?
Brain FM might just help.
BrainFM is an app that provides intense music designed specifically to boost productivity.
Inspired by and based in scientific research beginning in the 1990s, the people behind BrainFM have created music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better, if that is what you want to do, or relax more deeply or even sleep more easily, if those are the things that you want to do.
Brain FM's music demonstrably and quickly helps you find and stay in a state of flow.
Research published last year in the journal Communications Biology found that listening to music with strong amplitude modulation, the exact music to be found at BrainFM, increases the ability of listeners to hold their attention on tasks.
The amplitude modulated music found at BrainFM was found to be more effective than other auditory inputs at improving executive control, helping listeners engage in activity with sustained attention.
I'm reading an ad right now and not listening to Brain FM and therefore I'm easily distracted by you, what, pulling a bug off the table?
It turns out to be spalting in the wood, but I thought there was something else.
Ah, what a good word.
Yeah.
Spalting.
Exactly.
It sounds more active than it is.
And, you know, if you're engaged in it, I suppose it's pretty active.
But the spalting on the table is kind of passive at this point.
It is.
But I've digressed both of us.
Yes, yeah.
Anecdotally, we have heard from several listeners who have had great success listening to Brain FM.
Says one person of the dramatic effects of listening to Brain FM, quote, I am now able to do one thing at a time, and it keeps my brain in just the right place to facilitate being fully present.
End quote.
If you want to stop giving away your attention to the lowest bidder, consider Brain FM to help you focus, unitask, and get stuff done.
Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to brain FM slash darkhorse.
That's brain.fm slash darkhorse for 30 days free.
Our second sponsor this week is Peaks Lundaka, an adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao, tati, and mamushrooms.
Doesn't really work.
No.
Mushrooms.
Yeah.
This is a fantastic product.
Peaks Lundaka stands out among all the coffee alternatives that are now on the market.
It supports your brat eight, your body, and your brain with slow-release caffeine from probiotic teas plus functional mushrooms and cacao.
Peaks Nandaka provides energy and gut support without jitters, sluggishness, or crashes.
And if you're looking for a way to bring mental focus to your work, the ceremonial grade cacao in Peaks Nandaka helps to lift your mood and bring clarity.
Nandaka is crafted with the finest and purest ingredients sourced from around the world.
It comes in compact sachets and dissolves quickly in water.
Easily transportable, so wherever you go, you can have a delicious drink that brings clean, sustained energy.
Nandaka tastes great, like a creamy, indulgent, spiced hot chocolate.
The cacao that they use has a particularly high percentage of cacao butter, which enhances nutrient absorption.
The fermented teas in the ducka are triple screened for toxins.
The many mushrooms in Peak's Nandaka include, but are not limited to, chaga, reishi, and lion's bean.
And unlike many other mushroom coffees, peak uses only the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, so Nandaka is free of mycelium and grains.
Peak's Nandaka provides sustainable all-day energy and makes you feel like you're doing something good for your body.
If you are ready to make the switch and feel amazing, try Nandaka today.
Right now, you can get 20% off plus a free rechargeable frother and a glass beaker that we really, really like when you shop exclusively at peaklife.com slash darkhorse.
That's peaklife.
That's p-i-q-u-elife.com slash darkhorse.
Don't wait.
Start your mornings on a healthier, more delicious note while supplies last.
Beaker.
Beaker.
I will say I've been off-island, as you said.
I've been off-island for a week, a little over a week.
There's no place to put that.
And I was putting some things away that we had generated in making dinner last night on the drying rack this morning and went to put things into the drawer where the beaker usually lives and found the beaker missing.
And we are going to need to get that beaker back where it lives because I really, really enjoy that beaker.
One of our children run off with it.
No, I think it just got put in a different drawer.
Okay.
At least I know that.
Yeah.
Our final sponsor this week, Heather, is Jolie.
Jolie is a beauty and wellness company that purifies the water that we shower in for better skin, hair, and overall well-being.
I think it should say the water that we shower in and breathe when we're in the shower.
Clumsier, but super important.
I'll add it.
I'll add it now.
All right.
Cool.
Yeah.
Most municipal water systems, indeed most water systems, period, use chlorine to disinfect the water, but chlorine is damaging to skin and hair.
Add to that the fact that a lot of water also contains heavy metals, also not good for your skin or hair or to breathe.
Jolie makes a filtered showerhead so that you can bathe in water, which starts out clean.
Jolie's showerheads remove chlorine and heavy metals from your water and have been demonstrated to reduce the shedding of hair in 81% of people who use them.
After showering with Jolie's showerheads, people report that their hair is less frizzy, their skin is softer, and that they are having fewer breakouts.
Okay, but we've all experienced water filtration systems at some point, and one thing that seems to always happen is that the pressure is reduced.
Suddenly, where you had a nice high-pressure stream, you've now got a trickle.
This is not a problem with Jolie showerheads.
The water pressure is still very strong, and now your water is clean and clear.
Also, these shower heads are quite beautiful.
The perfect combination of form and function, and the plumbing pipe is universal, so it's easy to install.
When we approached Jolie, our first thought was, when we were approached by Jolie.
Yes, words in the correct order, and all of them read out loud.
Our first thought was, we don't need this as our water is already quite clean.
But we tried out one of Jolie's shower heads and liked it so much, we installed it on our other shower.
Jolie will give you the best skin and hair guaranteed.
Head to jolie skincode.com slash darkhorse to try it out for yourself with free shipping.
That's J-O-L-I-E-S-K-I-N co-C-O.com slash darkhorse for free shipping.
If you don't like it, you can return your Jolie for a full refund within 60 days.
No questions asked.
Jolie is also available on Amazon and at their select ultra stores.
Get yours now.
And I will remind people that in my opinion, the most important benefit has to do with the atomized chlorines and other pollutants that you're breathing when you're in the shower.
I'm more convinced than I was a week ago of the tendency of chlorine to cross the skin, but it certainly gets into your blood if you're breathing it, which you definitely are in the shower.
All right.
What happened in the last week that convinces you more?
Oh, I ran across some evidence suggesting that chlorine does transit the skin.
That's less of an answer than it might be.
No.
That's what it is.
Okay.
All right.
So let us start.
There's so much going on, and frankly, I think there are some interesting connections between topics that do not seem in any way connected.
But let us start with the remarkable facts of Bobby Kennedy's testimony in Congress.
There were a couple of interesting moments.
Let me say there was one extraordinary moment in which he pushes back on a committee member regarding an apparent change of stance that they had since they had last discussed an issue.
Jen, do you want to show that video?
And I'll address you, Congressman Ballone.
15 years ago, you and I met.
You were at that time a champion for people who had suffered injuries from vaccines.
You were very adamant about it.
You were the leading member of Congress on that issue.
Since then, you've accepted $2 million from pharmaceutical companies in contribution, more than any other member of this committee.
And your enthusiasm for supporting the old ACIP committee, which was completely rife and pervasive with pharmaceutical conflicts, seems to be an outcome of those contributions.
Mr. Chairman, point of order.
Point of order.
Point of order, the gentleman is impugning the reputation of a member of Congress.
Mr. Pallone.
Please, Mr. Pong.
Stop the clock.
Stop the clock for a second.
Can you state the point of order?
Yeah.
He was impugning Mr. Pallone's.
Mr. Chairman, I didn't hear it.
Oh, you weren't paying attention.
That's why.
Well, you know, it's hard to pay attention here when we're not getting any responses.
Okay.
All right.
Now, I find that utterly extraordinary.
That is not the way committee hearings usually go.
I have not seen the full clip.
Who is he responding?
Who is he addressing?
Is he addressing either of the people who are speaking there?
That I couldn't tell you.
But what he is doing is he is pointing out the degree of corruption and then the pandemonium that breaks out in the committee that is not sure how to handle this.
I mean, is this secretary, the secretary of the largest department in the federal government entitled to go after a member of Congress over the largest department of the federal government larger than defense?
Yes.
Amazingly.
HHS is larger than defense?
I know.
It's incredible, but it is.
So in any case, is he allowed to do this?
Well, on the one hand, you might imagine that it's very impolite and that we don't do impolite things in these circles.
On the other hand...
Pointing out a change of position.
And, you know, people are allowed to change positions, but pointing out a change of position and also pointing out a piece of fact-checkable evidence that may have contributed to a change of position has something to do with impolite.
Oh, in these circles it does.
You're not allowed to, I mean, it's like, you know, going to a party and, you know, talking about money, right?
It's not done.
It's gauche.
What was the thing?
There was a phrase that used to be used at Evergreen to tamp down dissent that you were considered you were punching down?
No, no, no, no, no.
If you spoke truth in a way that say about your colleagues, even very, very carefully and respectfully, you were not being collegial.
Not being collegial.
Yeah, you're not being collegial.
So this is like impolite.
Like, I'm sorry.
Having colleagues doesn't mean forgetting that reality exists and putting up with corruption and graft.
Oh, I 100% agree.
And I totally voted for that, whatever it is.
I thought that was great to have Kennedy pointing this out because, I mean, my feeling is, first of all, part of the problem is the collegiality, right?
As at Evergreen, the collegiality is hiding absolutely unforgivable stuff, including that people are very, you know, soberly pretending to be looking out for your health while they are taking contributions from entities that are actually looking to enrich themselves and are willing to do so at the expense of your health.
That is a piece of information you are absolutely entitled to, just as you are absolutely entitled to the information that your doctor is getting kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies for vaccinating patients.
All of these things have a material importance to your ability to manage your own health, and yet we don't know about them because, you know, the doctors don't tell you these things.
It would feel impolite to ask, you know, your doctor, are you working on commission, which they are.
So anyway, I voted for that.
And the more impolite, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
I wonder if it feels impolite or it just feels uncomfortable.
And maybe that's a distinction without a difference.
But I actually think to me, it doesn't feel impolite to ask a doctor that, but I am not particularly inclined to do it because of my particular personality.
Well, let's put it this way.
Somebody gamed the norms.
They created an environment in which you don't go into Congress and start talking about who's funding whom.
And actually you do, right?
This is what we voted for, and it is important.
And I would say that the standard is the same one for libel.
That you cannot be you cannot be pursued for having libeled somebody if what you said is true.
Right.
So anyway, is this true?
Then we want to hear about it and we need to hear about it.
But the most interesting thing about that clip is what the committee, the committee suddenly does not know what planet it's living on.
If we're going to suddenly be discussing these things, is there's, you know, they're trying to figure out in real time, is there some way that we can now punish this behavior so we don't start seeing it on the regular?
So anyway, great stuff.
Really good.
And a powerful blow in favor of improved health, in favor of making America healthy again.
So absolutely what we voted for.
And, you know, just so beautiful.
On the other hand, in the same hearing, we also have this other announcement, which caught the entire medical freedom movement off guard.
so let's let's play that the The wearables.
Yeah.
Secretary Kenny, my first question is, there is a tremendous amount of research that shows that greater engagement with one's health leads to better outcomes.
In recent years, American innovators have created and improved wearable devices so that not only are consumers able to better engage with their health through monitoring data, but they are able to share that data with providers.
I believe American consumers, in line with the 21st Century Cures Act, should be able to access these innovative wellness tools.
Secretary Kennedy, do you agree that consumers should continue to have access to these tools?
Absolutely.
In fact, we're about to launch one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history to encourage Americans to use wearables.
It's a way of people can take control over their own health.
They can take the responsibility.
They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics as they eat it.
And they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.
We think that wearables are a key to the Maha agenda, making America healthy again.
And we are going to, my vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.
All right.
Now, I will tell you, there was just a wave of shock that ran through the medical freedom movement at hearing this announcement about not only a favorable view of wearables, which, you know, reasonable people could disagree about that, but the universality of it, the idea that every American should be wearing one within four years.
Now, I've done a lot of thinking about it since I've seen that.
And I must tell you, I have mixed emotions here.
You know, well, here's the thing.
I wasn't brought into the administration.
I totally get that.
You can only have a certain number of skunks at the garden party.
And I'm probably better out here, you know.
But I don't know if Bobby Kennedy realizes this, but I have 50 years experience with advertising.
And I did not get a phone call on their campaign.
And I'm a little hurt because with 50 years experience in advertising, mostly avoiding advertising, but nonetheless, 50 years of experience with advertising, I think I have some insight into how to sell this wearables campaign, but my phone is not ringing.
So I want to unveil a kind of a prototype of a campaign.
So I've developed a spokesperson, well, spokes creature.
Okay, this is Warner's, the Wearables Werewolf.
Warner's.
Warner, the Wearables Werewolf.
And his tagline is, it's later than you think.
So I think that that's going to put a lot of wearables on a lot of people.
You don't feel favorable about this idea.
All right.
So in any case, I do think that there's room for honesty in advertising, and a werewolf is the perfect spokesperson for this campaign.
Spokesnug.
Spokes tainted, really.
Yeah, spokes tainted.
Now, I will say also, wearables, you know, the idea of every single American having a wearable in four years, I think is preposterous.
It runs counter, I think, to many of the things that Kennedy believes.
There are, of course, cases in which a wearable is a perfectly appropriate tool.
Jen, you want to show the image of the use case that I actually think wearables are perfectly justifiable?
It's a little dark.
He's wearing an ankle monitor.
That's Anthony Fauci.
He's wearing an ankle.
Oh, this is AI again.
Yeah, this is an image I mocked up to show a use case that I think these things would be valuable in.
But okay, so jokes aside, let's get to the heart of the matter here.
First of all, there is an interesting connection that I think we need to be aware of in trying to understand what Kennedy is up to here.
And I will make an argument for what I suspect is going on a little later on.
But it is the case that the nominee for Surgeon General, Casey Means, is actually the founder or one of the founders of a company in which wearables are a key element.
So she is the founder of a company called Levels.
Can we show the screenshot of this is the tagline at the top of the Levels website?
It says, become an expert in your own health.
Levels helps you understand your body through comprehensive lab testing, glucose monitoring, and AI-powered habit tracking so you can take daily action and improve what matters most.
Now, what I want to, and here's another one on their website.
It says, reach your health goals.
What is levels?
Levels helps you achieve clarity and control over your health by revealing comprehensive biomarker data and clear guidance toward your goals with access to blood testing, continuous glucose monitors, which they later in their site call CGMs, and one-on-one dietitian support.
You can uncover deeper insights into your body, features an AI-powered food logging, habit tracking, and adaptive insights to help translate the data into daily actions that drive measurable improvement.
Okay, let us give the devil his do.
There's an aspect, and what Kennedy is alluding to in his comments in Congress, there's an aspect to this that we all can relate to.
Just the simple fact of not having a proper log of what you've consumed means it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you're eating less than you are or eating different things than you are.
So we all get how more data could be useful in improving health.
On the other hand, the idea that, I mean, when he says every American wearing a wearable within four years, that includes a whole lot of people who have excellent control over their health and presumably don't need this.
So the idea that there's a universality that's necessary here is, you know, it's transhumanist for one thing.
Yeah.
Second thing I want to point out, we don't need to bring those screenshots back up, but the mention of glucose monitoring is fascinating.
It shows up in Kennedy's comments in Congress, in his testimony.
It shows up prominently on their website, and it is one of the key features.
It's an extra feature that you can buy.
You can use what they're selling without glucose monitoring, but they do have a wearable that monitors your glucose in real time.
Okay, so one, I think we have to ask ourselves, there was a lot of confusion about the nomination of Casey Means.
There was a lot of bad blood.
We covered it here on Dark Horse.
But this seems, frankly, kind of grotesque.
The idea that our incoming Surgeon General, if she is confirmed, is the head of a company that stands to make a huge amount of money if these things become the default.
That is a reason for concern.
The exact kind of corruption that he's talking about when he's calling out the senator for contributions that the pharmaceutical industry has made is in the same hearing showing up only by implication, but by implication in another place that makes you wonder.
I'm not sure I agree with this.
If it were true that wearables, that this reductionist, data-driven approach, data-driven, data-heavy, data-everywhere, everyone-involved approach to understanding human health really were the solution to the problem that many of us have identified as we need to make America healthy again because we are not as a nation and for most of us as individuals healthy.
If this really were the best solution or even a fantastic solution among five that are being proposed, it might not be surprising that the best or one of the best people who were chosen for Surgeon General would have already seen that coming and would have made inroads in that space.
And so I don't inherently see the, I don't actually know if she's been, if she's been.
Okay, so the proposed, the presumed incumbent Surgeon General having a company that would stand to raise her star financially considerably with this announcement from the head of HHS could be read as precisely consilient evidence that this is in fact an excellent move for HHS and Americans to make.
However, I find this an appalling suggestion, an appalling solution, and for a number of reasons that presumably we are going to talk about here.
And so in light of the fact that the solution that's being proposed by, I can't believe it, Bobby Kennedy Jr., is also a solution that stands to be vastly monetizable by the incoming Surgeon General, we do have a problem there given that the solution appears to be, frankly, diabolical.
And at the very least, the solution reflects a misunderstanding of complex systems and a misunderstanding of what science is, that is to say, hypothesis-driven rather than data-driven.
All right.
A couple of things.
One, the American founding fathers, I'm trying to remember what the phrase that they used to talk to each other about the issue was, but I think it definitely had to do with interests.
They were very concerned that a person who had interests not be in a position to make policy, that basically one needs to separate these things.
As indeed, like Elizabeth Warren asked Kennedy to not profit from any outstanding lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers during his confirmation hearings, precisely because of interests.
Right.
And, you know, frankly, all of the people who were drafted into the administration above a certain level were forced to divest, to put their assets in trusts, or I don't know how it works, but there's some mechanism for preventing a feedback.
And, you know, we are caught between two worlds.
One, you know, you don't want a world in which you are punished for going into public service by losing, you know, your ability to make your way in the world.
That's, you know, that's a way of preventing people who are doing well in the world from.
And if you were prescient, if this were the right solution, if means were prescient enough to have figured out a way to monetize this thing that is actually going to be great for people, and it was exactly that prescience or related types of prescience that made her the right pick for Surgeon General, two big ifs, right?
Then it shouldn't be surprising that that solution is showing up as something that is being suggested by the head of HHS.
But yes, there has to be a firewall of some sort.
There has to be a firewall.
And I will point out that this has been the go-to response of every industry that has gone up against the public well-being, right?
It is always the case that they argue, well, who better to sit at the table and dictate energy policy than the energy companies?
Who better to understand how we can improve your health than the pharmaceutical companies?
They always make this argument, we are in the best position.
And the point is, no, you're not.
It is perfectly possible to understand these issues without being in a position to profit from particular outcomes.
And I would point out, you know, again, we will get back to why Kennedy may have said what he said.
I find it surprising that he would have said it.
But there's something so extreme.
This is a guy who has mastered his health, right?
This is a guy who has mastered his health without these devices, who is aware that others have done so too.
And he's really arguing every American.
That's such an extreme version of the idea that there are many Americans who would benefit from this.
First of all, I will just say, yeah, I think there are a lot of people who, if they could have something that would allow them, without a tremendous effort, to have information on what they are doing and what effect it has on their health, could probably leverage that information to positive effect.
I think that's probably true.
I guess it surprises me that almost anyone is suffering from ill health at this point because they are uninformed about what kinds of decisions they're making are actually bad for them.
I think rather we have behavioral issues, all of us, with regard to once you start eating carbs, you want to eat more carbs and you eat them and you know you're not supposed to be eating them and you eat them and they taste good and it goes on and on and on.
It's not a question of like, oh, I just didn't know.
Like I knew.
Right?
Okay, okay.
And to some degree, being confronted with a list can be very useful, but for some types of people under some conditions.
Okay, so let us give the benefit of the doubt while we paint the dystopia to which we are obviously headed.
Okay.
I think we have to do both simultaneously.
Okay.
So imagine for a second, you know, for the sake of those who are watching and trying to understand why this will go down the way it goes down, Heather and I are both involved in trying to fix our very badly broken Spanish using Duolingo at the moment.
Right.
So Duolingo is.
It was never.
We are trying to build it.
We're trying to build it.
We have both spent a lot of time in Spanish-speaking countries and not acquired the language anywhere near.
It's embarrassing.
And so anyway, we're both brute force using Duolingo.
And I will say, Duolingo, on the one hand, is actually kind of good at getting your motivational structures aligned with your objective.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, it creates goals that you have no idea why they exist or what matters or why it should matter at all.
And yet when you reach a goal, you're like, ah, I feel good.
But the fact that you can have your dopamine system triggered by yet another thing that is going to, frankly, in the end, make you less healthy is not a good thing.
So let me paint a picture of that, right?
Okay.
Brett, don't let your 19-day streak of not eating peanut butter go by the wayside.
Enable a notification to your retinal implant heads-up display that will allow us to alert you when you hear...
Exactly.
And by the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I do not have a 19-day streak of not eating peanut butter.
I haven't gone 19 days, but I have gone more than 19 hours, which is pretty good.
Are you under the impression?
I mean, this is a different question, but peanut butter is one of these interesting choices that you might have made here because I'm not a big fan.
We have lived in places, Madagascar, where being able to procure it was sometimes the only protein available.
And so I just needed to eat it.
But it is attracting actually a fair, I seem to find it is attracting a fair bit of attention right now among the sort of health and wellness keto carnivore crowd, some of whom say absolutely not, you shouldn't eat peanut butter and some of whom are saying, you know what, I mean, it's not a nut.
It's a legume.
It's got protein.
You look like one of those animated Duolingo things.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, here's the thing.
Peanut butter, my feeling is, you know, I'll give it up when you pry it for my cold dead fingers because it's really good.
If you say so.
Chocolate, I'll get you that.
Really good.
But anyway.
But no, actually, but what do you think?
What do I think?
Do you think it's actually something you should be giving up?
No, but I do think it's something that probably a lot of moderation is called for with peanut butter.
It's high fat, high calorie.
I don't even think it's the fat and calories.
I think it's high fat, high calorie.
And I say that knowing that fat is actually not the enemy, but fat in relative isolation, especially if you're also eating carbs, can be a problem.
It's super addictive, and I think that the secondary compounds are an issue.
I also worry, I mean, I am almost beyond obsessive in terms of buying organic now.
I almost don't buy anything that isn't.
That said, I don't know how much to trust the label that says it's organic.
For one thing, there's so much fraud when it comes to things that we can assess.
Like is the species of fish the one you think it is?
Is that olive oil really olive oil?
Is that honey really honey?
There's so much fraud.
Yes.
Are the products that appear to be the same thing as over here the same product?
Right.
So I'm super worried.
It's not even turtles all the way down.
Yeah.
No.
It's frightening.
But anyway, even the organic peanut butter, I'm concerned that there's a fairly rapid buildup of toxic stuff.
And so, you know, small amounts, yes, large amounts, probably not, but whatever.
The issue.
Sorry, I know you want to get back to what you were actually talking about, but your concern about toxins with peanut butter is that because peanuts are seeds.
Are they seeds?
Yeah, are they actually?
They are, I think they're underground organs.
No, they're seeds.
They're seeds.
They're seeds because you've got the little peanut plant if you crack them open.
Yeah, yeah.
So is your concern then for any actual, like a tree nut as well?
Or is it, or do you have a specific concern about peanuts?
I have a special concern about peanuts, and I don't know if it's well-founded.
But anyway, I digress.
Point is, you could imagine a little, you know, Duolingo has you and me, you know, protecting, you know, a streak of days of a certain amount of study in a way that if I set out, if I told myself, you're going to go 100 days and, you know, you're going to study at least 10 minutes a day and, you know, you're going to allow yourself five screw-ups where you get to midnight and you didn't get back to it.
Right.
There's no way I'd stick to it for 100 days.
Do a lingo hounding me about it and, you know, with the clever animations and whatever it works.
So you can imagine that empowered with a bit of data, that your motivational structures could get you aligned with your health in some positive way.
I don't find that hard to imagine.
I don't find it hard to imagine at all.
That doesn't mean I think it's healthy.
Oh, I don't know.
So like I just anecdotally, last night, as you know, you were trying to help me move my phone into a new phone.
And it was, of course, not easy.
And it went past midnight and the Duolingo thing passed.
And instead of doing anything useful with my time, I spent, you know, two minutes.
Two minutes.
Everyone wastes two minutes.
But I spent a few minutes vaguely mourning the lack of having spent time on an app that isn't really all that good, frankly.
Not anything like actually being in the place and talking to people in their native language and your non-native language because of a different technical glitch that caused it to go past midnight.
And I mean, I do this, I have other streaks, like the seven-minute app, right?
This thing that probably many people will know, but I read about first in the New York Times many, many years ago, where you do, you know, 12 exercises for 30 seconds each with a 10-second break and a different set of exercises every day.
And it just like, it's a way to, no matter what else you do in a day, you do at least that amounts to, you know, usually eight, 10, sometimes, you know, 12, depending on what the exercises are, et cetera, of some mixture of cardio and strength training every day.
And it's just a way to keep yourself a little bit honest about moving.
So I also feel like that's a problem to have any tech advising me that it thinks I should be paying attention to something now.
So let's tease apart the two things.
I think they're both quite real.
One is we live in a novel environment in which our motivational structures get broken for all kinds of reasons that prevent us from doing that which our conscious mind knows we should be doing, right?
That is something for which there is a partially successful technological remedy that you shouldn't need, but it's not surprising that most of us do, especially when we have antagonists competing for our attention, for example.
And so basically you want somebody whose interests are aligned and competing for your attention to be put on things that are good.
At the same time, we have the same bargain that we strike with our smartphones generally, which is, you know, there are a lot of things in that contraption that I absolutely wouldn't want to not have, right?
Having a camera always at the ready, a highly capable camera that I can take a macro.
Now I've discovered I can point it at some plant that I'm puzzling over.
What is that plant?
And, you know, nine times out of ten, if I take a close-up picture of the leaf or the flower, the thing can tell me what plant I'm looking at, which then allows me to, you know, fast forward my, you know, upgrading of my ecological understanding of what's going on in this patch of plants.
Yes, but.
Right?
Navigate a city like a native, all of these things.
But.
I'm reminded of the presentation that we gave.
Of course.
And the paper that we wrote at the conference at Colorado College on field studies, a paper and a talk that we titled, Don't Look It Up.
Yep.
Right.
Precisely because being in the place of not knowing is part of how we generate the ability to figure out how to know.
And having answers always at our fingertips and being compelled that it's just easier to know right now because why would you spend any time not knowing is rendering us all less capable and frankly also probably less smart.
Of course.
But you have a tool and I do this.
In fact, with that tool, I try to figure out what I'm looking at before I use it.
I do this also with the navigation stuff where I'm keenly aware that as a kid, I was pretty good at navigating.
As an adult, I don't need to be because, you know, I'm as good in Barcelona as I am in my own town because I've got a device that knows everything.
But I try, you know, if I go to the same place multiple times in some place I don't know, I try to not use the thing and figure out if I can get a map in my head.
So I agree that you can become dependent on these things and you can become stupider because you don't allow yourself to develop these thoughts.
But nonetheless, the tool, I want the ability to answer the question in those cases where I do need to know, right?
Or where I've already done my hypothesizing and now I want to know.
I want to figure out if I did it right.
So there's all of that.
But the point is, it's not the box.
It's the business model.
That device contains tools that are unbearably useful at an unbearable cost, right?
So tremendously valuable things, but because the business model is what it is, it allows parasites and predators into every aspect of your life.
And I feel the same way about not the claim that everybody should be wearing wearables inside of four years.
I find that claim absurd.
But the idea that wearables have a valuable in many, a valuable role to play in many people's attempt to become healthier, I find that relatively easy to imagine.
But what comes along with it?
You're talking about a lot of connected technologies.
But so yes, but let's not go there yet.
I don't think we've explored yet.
So again, it's the reductionist model of we can measure these things, glucose, blood pressure, probably dissolved salts.
We can measure these things.
Once you've measured the things and you have them tied to your monitor, those are the things that you and everyone else believe are important.
And the model that the AI or whatever it is is going to be using is going to be inherently driven by the belief that it is those things that are easily measured that are the most important in terms of driving health outcomes.
And like every single model out there, garbage in, garbage out.
And you simply won't know if what you are measuring is the right thing to measure if everyone's measuring the same stuff and getting or not getting results.
And frankly, probably for the first, I'm going to make up some numbers here, for the first three months that you're wearing one of these horrifying things, you are more conscious.
And you're more conscious because you're thinking about it.
And then you're more conscious of what you're putting into your mouth because you're thinking about your health in general.
And like, you know, also true of pharmaceuticals, the longer you're on something, the less likely it is to be having the beneficial effects that it may have been having in the past.
You know, a habit that you yourself train yourself to do is maintainable.
A habit that is created by a piece of technology will fail and fade over time because you are less conscious of the fact that you're still wearing the thing and it becomes background noise and you slide back into whatever your old habits were.
Yes, I agree that that's likely.
I don't agree that you won't find, first of all, there are metrics that are probably pretty useful.
Like, you know, let's take this glucose issue.
For your ancestor, your ancestor didn't have a glucose problem.
We have a glucose problem because lots of people are gaming our senses in order to get us to consume stuff by using glucose for which we don't have a circuit that tells us enough.
But is the time horizon by which it's measuring it?
And I think it wasn't in the clip that we showed here, but Kennedy talks about like there'll be an ability to show your glucose as you eat.
Okay.
Is that when it matters?
I don't know.
And I don't think we know.
I think the assumption is that, you know, there's, yes, a lot of data have been taken from a lot of people about glucose and what spikes your glucose and what doesn't.
But what is the actual time scale that matters?
Is anyone busy thinking about that?
Or are we too busy going like, oh, just data, data, data, data?
Look, as you know, I'm not on the data, data, data thing, right?
I think the obsession with data and the way that we use it is absolutely toxic to a proper model of health, especially in a complex system.
I agree with you.
You could have an instantaneous versus long-term issue.
On the other hand, what the proponents of this stuff are going to argue is, you know what this was going to give us?
This is going to give us the data that will tell us what time scale is relevant, and then you can pay attention to that.
Only if glucose, only if it's a single parameter problem and it's only a time scale issue that maybe we don't have right right now.
And like, yes, there are plenty of complex heuristics and statistics by which to discover things that we haven't yet discovered, but without human beings being scientific about trying to figure out what is actually going on, we're not going to end up getting there.
Look, I agree.
But the point is you and I would advocate for people to look at what it is that they consume and make certain educated guesses about what they should probably be eating less of, what they should probably be eating more of.
Right.
So to the extent that there are guesses that you can make, something that enables you to then compare that to what you actually are consuming and whether or not, you know, to- Right.
So like the idea that someone out there, some like head nutritionist of the U.S. is going to decide what you should and should not be eating is insanity.
Right.
These people have no idea what they're doing.
And I think that Kennedy does, but not in this regard.
Look, I was going to point out, right?
Salt.
Right.
Totally false metric to judge your health by and something that we've actually proved.
Saturated fats.
Saturated fats, cholesterol, all of these things turn out after decades of hounding people to alter their diets.
Eggs.
Yeah, eggs, meat, the whole thing.
Right.
So the whole thing has been upside down, largely as a result of corruption.
Various people, you know, convinced the federal government to defend a pyramid that actually caused their products to be sold and other people's products not to.
It was sleight of hand.
So I'm not arguing for the government's ability to tell you what you should and shouldn't be eating.
That we haven't seen yet.
Maybe Kennedy can turn that around.
Maybe he can't.
But what I am saying is just as Duolingo, because they have an interest in getting you to use their app and to remain focused on it, their alignment with you is sufficient to actually keep you studying when otherwise you'd quickly divert yourself to other things.
So it's a Faustian bargain in this case.
And I'm afraid it's a far worse Faustian bargain because of what the data that will be collected is actually potentially useful for well beyond being able to give you more insight into what you are doing to your own health.
And that is a truly frightening development.
Okay.
One more thing before you go there.
Okay.
Some of this reminds me very much of things that we talked about with the COVID vaccine, the so-called vaccine rollout for COVID, where the framing that I gave it then was, hey, we've got this problem and it's COVID and we've got the solution to the problem.
And if you don't like our solution, then you don't believe there's a problem.
And we saw this from a bunch of talking heads out there, right?
Like if you don't believe that these mRNA shots are the solution to COVID, that's evidence that you don't believe in COVID.
And there were some people who didn't believe in COVID, who still don't believe in COVID.
But by and large, those of us who were speaking out against the mRNA shots did not think that COVID was a non-issue.
Rather, that the solution that was being proposed, nay, mandated in many cases, was absolutely the wrong solution.
And it is this conflation of you don't like the solution with therefore you don't believe there's a problem that I don't see evidence of here yet, but then this has just been trotted out now.
But then there's another thing that also showed up with the COVID vaccines that I saw some take, it was either it was like politico, some like left, left-wing-ish take on this proposal that mentions equity.
And the idea is, oh, the solution, don't think too much about what the solution is, but the solution, we got to get it widespread immediately because otherwise there will be inequities in access and that's not okay.
And so it basically it jumps forward from the discussion of, wait, is that the right solution?
To getting people concerned about whether or not everyone has equal access to the thing.
And suddenly we're all worried about making sure everyone has equal access rather than worrying about whether or not the thing that people have equal access to is the right thing at all.
Right.
And so, I mean, it's a now classic leftish wing approach to pushing something through under the guise of sort of, you know, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
But, you know, coming from a surprising source here.
Yeah, I agree with that exactly.
I remember this phase where it was like, you know, you were lucky if these vaccines were inequitably distributed such that you didn't get one, right?
Right.
And, you know, that was, it's too many leaps for most people to have gotten it, but it was like, no, I, you know, I'll take the short end of that stick any day.
Right.
I don't want that thing.
But so let's talk a little bit about the various hazards here.
One is that you could get obsessed with wrong metrics.
And actually, I had an analogy I wanted to drop on you.
This is not industrial strength here, but just someplace we've seen this.
So our kids are involved in a bunch of farming.
They're farming the summer at several farms.
Farms in the islands here.
And they talk about the distinction between people who are gym strong, who have, you know, can bench an impressive number, for example, and people who are farm strong.
Our children have done a couple years of work at gyms and have also done a fair bit of physical labor and now, including on farms before, but now are working many days a week of long days of farm work.
So they know from where they speak.
And paying attention to both what they can do in a gym, which they're still going to, even though they're spending all this time doing stuff on farms.
But the point is the distinction between a person who is strong because they've gone and isolated muscle group after muscle group and reached an impressive number and somebody who's strong because they're forced to confront all of these different natural puzzles that force them to not only generate strength, but figure out how to leverage it because the machine doesn't precisely control everything with a pivot or whatever.
And so the point is one of these is actually much better than the other, right?
The gym thing is a kind of a distant second to a lifestyle that forces you to be strong in natural ways.
And so anyway, the point is it's metric driven, right?
The gym.
The gym.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, precisely.
You know, yeah.
I remember when we were young being in the mountains with your parents and there'd been a heavy snowfall the night before and the balcony or the deck or something just had, you know, like four, six feet, like a ton of snow on it.
And your dad asked us if we'd shovel the deck so that you could go to the gym.
And we did.
Like, fine.
Like, okay, cool.
But why would you give up on like being outside and doing work that needs to be done and feels good?
And to go inside and do it in the gym is the antiseptic version of something that is very natural.
And the point is health comes from an interface that is natural.
And so this idea that we are going to high-tech our way into health as a society is pretty freaking unlikely.
Now, that said, you know, there are examples like this where you can take a distortion in one system and you can put another distortion and you can get clearer vision.
And that's not impossible, but we ought to be very skeptical of all such solutions.
But I'm also concerned here about what brave new world we are inviting by allowing ourselves to be monitored moment to moment.
Our phones already do this at a level that is absolutely intolerable.
And what's coming will be intolerable at an entirely more invasive level.
And can we show that you've all know a Harari clip?
Now, why is data so important?
It's important because we've reached the point when we can hack not just computers, we can hack human beings and other organisms.
Now, what do you need in order to hack a human being?
You need two things.
You need a lot of computing power and you need a lot of data, especially biometric data.
What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch.
The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin.
The most important development of the 21st century.
That's enough.
Can you show the tweet?
I don't want to hijack.
Somebody put together that compilation and I don't want to steal it without attribution.
Do you have the tweet that that came from?
So anyways, as you're putting that up, I will just say that I am beyond the concern about the metrics and the way they will be misused and the way they will mislead people into pursuing something like a low-salt diet.
So here's the tweet.
It's Robin Monati.
But in any case, beyond being seduced into paying attention to metrics that are either much less important than they seem or counterproductive, the degree to which allowing anything to monitor your internal physiological processes on a moment-to-moment basis in a way that will presumably be reported
back, it will be used, yes, to collect big data, which arguably could be useful, but in the hands of a private entity is likely to be abused.
In other words, let's suppose.
Did we learn nothing from 23andMe?
Did we learn nothing from 23andMe?
And that was the shallow end of the pool.
That was the shallow end of the pool.
And also, there were a lot of us who saw that coming and refused to give our DNA to that company or any like it as well.
So just a couple of things that I think are worth considering as scenarios in which this could go very wrong.
And I think is in fact guaranteed to go very wrong.
One, we will all remember the terrifying campaigns to portray those who were concerned about the COVID vaccines as selfish grifters or delusional anti-science grandmother killing.
Yeah, that whole thing.
So what happens the next time some emergency, real or phony, occurs and some entity gets the idea that the bad people are saying X and therefore we can't, you know, remember we weren't allowed to talk about actual vaccine injuries because of the impact that might have had on what was called vaccine hesitancy.
So you weren't allowed to talk about the facts because it might cause people not to want to get one of these vaccines, which was then going to kill grandma, right?
So once you've got that logic running in your head, now what happens when these monitors, these wearables, start recording the data that says actually whatever that shit is that you're injecting into people is having a terrible physiological impact.
Does that data get buried?
Do we end up with a system that creates the impression that health is improved?
And once you can take the supposed big data that is being funneled through private entities that's coming from the wearables that everybody's got in order to cover the asses of whoever has dictated the policy that is now damaging people's health, it doesn't strike me that anybody is going to say, well, actually, the public has a right to know.
They're not going to do that.
They're going to do the opposite.
They maybe they will start blackmailing each other, right?
Well, we've got the evidence that shows that that shot that you Pfizer have been putting into people is doing a tremendous amount of damage.
What's it worth to you in order for it not to make, you know, to see the light of day?
Or who knows what kinds of behind the scenes nonsense might happen.
Further, imagine the insight.
As bad as it is to have your phone listening to what you say, and, you know, again, the shallow end of the pool is that the advertisement shows up for the thing that you never searched, but you mentioned.
Yep.
And you know, oh, my phone must be listening, right?
Well, what happens?
Yeah, and even worse, because a panopticon can't see what you're thinking, but a wearable can indirectly, right?
In other words.
Yeah, panopticon meets Brave New World.
Right.
Like, imagine, you know, you got a crush on somebody.
And imagine that someone else had a crush on yet a third person.
And they're wearing monitors because, of course, within four years, we're all going to be.
Right.
And the point is, oh, every time those two entities come into contact, their blood pressure goes up.
Okay.
Now, some third party, some distant third party has information on the emotional state of two people who, you know, may be both trying to behave themselves.
Maybe they're, you know, they've both got partners.
Right.
But there's, but there's perspiration, there's oxytocin, there's all sorts of indicators of sub actionable arousal that we already know about.
Right.
And the point is, you're actually allowed to have a response to somebody that you're not supposed to have and to control it because you're an adult.
And the point is having your antagonists know what stuff you're controlling, it's not their goddamn business.
And what are they going to do with it?
The point is that's highly monetizable stuff.
So the question is, we cannot even anticipate the abuses that would come from all of us wearing monitors that are checking, yes, our glucose, but also our blood pressure.
And who knows, you know, it could be hormone levels, whatever it is that indicates your internal state.
So that's abusable at every scale.
Not only is it abusable at the scale of the individual who's wearing the monitor and who now, you know, can't have a poker face, but it is monetizable at the big data level, right?
Imagine the inadvertent focus group that we are all signing up for, right?
Where your device is going to be able to figure out your response when you watch Bobby Kennedy say, you know, every American wearing it in four years and everybody's like, what the fuck was that?
Or you find that there are three factions, right?
There are the people who have the what the fuck reaction.
There are the people who are like, yeah, that sounds pretty good.
And then there are the people who pretend to have the what the fuck reaction, but actually think it's kind of good.
You know, the ability to game us goes through the roof once we surrender to a universality of any novel technology like this.
You know, imagine, you know, we're not all going to sign up for this, but imagine that we did.
Well, what does that eliminate?
That eliminates, if the thing gets abused, it eliminates a resistance of people who don't have this technology and therefore have remained outside of the manipulation matrix or whatever, or to the extent possible.
You know, you and I are playing some role in the world at this point, but it's pretty clear if you listen to anything that we say that we are likely to be resistant to this kind of would-be authoritarian measure.
That will come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying any attention at all.
There are, I am nearly constantly heartened to be reminded every time I go out into the world and run into strangers, a large number of people who don't have a public presence speaking about the necessity of resistance, who are resisting many things in the world.
And it needs to be easy and common enough to resist this kind of thing such that everyone who has resisted a, come on, just put the thing on, what harm could it possibly do you move isn't immediately slatted accurately into the, ah, you're going to be a problem for us later on.
Therefore, we've now got, you've put a mark on yourself.
There needs to be, even for those people who think, you know what, a wearable might be good for me.
Like, I think this would be a useful thing for me for the following reasons.
You know, I've been 40 pounds overweight all my life, and I've been trying to get the this under control and that, and I can't seem to be honest with myself about what I'm eating and how much I'm moving, and I really do think I want it, but no way, no how if you're telling me I have to.
So we want people like that to also be resisting, even if the product in like the solution that's being proposed is something that they think they want to use.
Precisely because what we can't have is the people, all the people who resist be easily marked as, ah, We'll take care of you next.
Right.
And, you know, we saw that exact program, inadvertently or not, with things like the universal mandate for vaccines amongst the military, where you got all of the people who would resist to stand up and say, no, I need an exemption.
The point is, well, then you're going to be discharged.
And, you know, you make a compliant force and you find all the troublemakers.
And the point is, no, actually, we need the troublemakers.
You can't do that.
And so, but I think in part, I'm, yeah, this is a big ass that probably can't be answered, but we need people who don't see a particular issue with any particular this or any particular thing that comes in the form of in X years, everyone will do the thing.
Everyone needs to resist any such language.
Whether or not you think the thing in this case is something that you kind of like to try.
Well, actually, I want to refine that.
I think you're on the right track, but I think I've just glimpsed something important.
In that clip, I won't put us back through it, but in that clip, you'll remember that Kennedy says something about the wearables really being the key to the Maha agenda, to making America healthy again.
I think he has exactly portrayed the inverse of what Bobby Kennedy privately understands.
And it works like this.
There are two different visions of where health comes from.
One of them is you need enough data and you need enough tools and you can force health into being.
The other is actually, that's always a losing bargain, right?
Because you're going to be treating the symptoms of the thing that you cured the last symptoms with endlessly.
It's the problem with complex systems and unintended consequences.
And so our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, highlights and names the concept of hypernovity.
Hypernovelty is where ill health comes from, right?
It is a mismatch between your environment and you and a rate of change that's so fast that you cannot correct what you're doing fast enough to keep up with that pace of change, which will leave you sick across every dimension in your life permanently until you solve that problem.
So the point is you really have two different visions of how to maha, right?
One of them is we try to put us in an environment that is as similar, let's say, nutritionally to the one that we are built for as we can get, right?
You want a diet that looks as much like what your body is expecting to eat as you can get.
And to the extent that there are extra additives in it, or you've radically increased some nutrient and decreased some other nutrient, that's going to make you unhealthy.
So the point is, not paleo, right?
Because as we point out in the book, there's no particular environment we're going back to.
We come from a whole sequence of environments, but you're looking for something for which you are evolutionarily prepared at the point that you have that from development through adulthood and it doesn't change on you.
You will actually be healthy barring a very rare circumstance like a severely broken gene or something like that.
But our ill health comes from hypernovality, except for a small minority.
And so the point is, when Kennedy says, you know, and Kennedy understands this over on the vaccine front, right?
You're intervening in the physiology of this child.
How many times can you do that and claim that there's a net benefit?
It's very unlikely that there is one.
So these things need to be studied carefully in order to know which of them cross the threshold of being worth whatever the cost of using them is.
And it might be none.
So that's one version of Maha is you restore yourself to an environment in which you can be healthy because you're built for it.
And the other version is, can you come up with something high-tech enough to put you right?
And the answer is no, you can't.
It's not going to happen.
Can you transhumanist your way out of this problem?
No, you can't transhumanist your way out of any problem because that's a mistake.
I did want to say with regard to what you were just talking about, it reminds me a little bit of the concern of the argument between germ theory of disease and terrain theory of disease, which, as we've talked about before, are not actually in conflict.
There are cartoon versions of both germ theory and terrain theory that sound utterly ludicrous.
And there are proponents of the cartoon version of germ theory, which is to say it's external to you pathogens that cause disease, and there's nothing you can do about it.
You have to fight off those pathogens with other external things, that is pharmaceuticals.
And the cartoon version of terrain theory is, well, viruses aren't real, like pathogens aren't real.
And therefore, it's only about the health of your body.
And the mature version, the wise version, the obvious version of the two of them together is terrain theory suggests that you create as healthy an environment in your own body as is possible,
which in part is going to be, I would say, embedded in doing that is recognizing hypernovelty and how many hypernovel influences there are in every part of our lives now, while also recognizing that there are pathogens,
and some of them are hypernovel because things like the military are creating them, but there are also pathogens that haven't been messed with by humans, and pathogens have killed humans before, and you are less likely to be badly affected, including killed by a pathogen, the healthier your body or terrain is.
But it's not a guarantee.
And so, you know, people, you know, people get cancers and die of diseases, even if they are incredibly healthy.
So, you know, those things happen, even absent hypernovelty.
But it's always your best shot.
It's always your best shot.
But there will be those who will find the examples of the person who was doing the right stuff and rejected some intervention that actually has known costs and then died or suffered an ill effect from the pathogen itself as evidence that what you need to do is take on a higher burden from the germ theory of disease people.
And I'm sorry, you can't do it that way.
You can't use individual examples to make a broader population level point.
Right.
Now, I want to come back to two things.
One, it's always your best option, but you cannot arbitrarily start it late.
The point is you may get a tumor because of something you were exposed to, and then, you know, the surgeon may well be your best option or maybe even the chemo.
But the point is your best option was to live in such a way that you were exposed to mutagens that were only of the sort that your body is well accustomed to dealing with evolutionarily, not the novel stuff that we're constantly exposing them to.
So the other thing, though, is you, I'm trying to remember your formulation.
You said something about you cannot transhuman your way out of this.
Yeah.
I think you're right there.
And the idea is you can't transcend your humanity out of it.
That's right.
So the question is, is it transhuman or are we going to humanize our way out of it?
Going back to an environment in which we are well suited is a reasonable thing and you don't need to understand the details of the complex system to get there.
You need to understand the distortions to the environment and how to mitigate their influence.
And the benefit there is that if you can understand the distortions and mitigate their influence, as you say, such that your body is responding to an environment that it has some evolutionary history with, the benefit is that you get to use your senses and you get to become a sensual being that is actually tasting and feeling and touching and hearing and seeing all of the beauty of the world and responding appropriately to it,
as opposed to having all of these screens and artifice between you and the world and being assured that you have to take that pill and then that pill to deal with that and that because you can't possibly know.
Well, you can't possibly know in this modern world, most of us can't, because we can't taste anything anymore.
And then, of course, the food itself doesn't taste like what it used to.
So if we can get back to just an environment in which we have some evolutionary history and then can rely more completely, not completely completely, but more completely on our senses to perceive the environment and what is in fact good for us,
while recognizing that our senses will lead us astray in some regards, because no person 5,000 years ago had access to endless honey every day or maple syrup and didn't have access to, you know, or cane or sugar cane, right?
So, you know, recognizing that there are, you know, still some things that are accessible to modern humans that need to be, that you need to recognize as the things that your senses think they want.
But if you, boy, if, like, if you begin to think through your senses to some degree and also keep track of the time scale on which you are receiving pleasure through them, the, you know, I like sugar.
Ice cream tastes good.
A scoop of ice cream sometimes tastes good and doesn't leave me feeling bad.
If I'm traveling and if I, as I just was, if I'm in Portland and Salt and Straw is there and it's, they make great ice cream and I go get ice cream for them three days in a row, I don't feel good.
Yeah.
The pleasure of the ice cream, I then try to think about the fact that the pleasure of the third scoop of ice cream in three days is making me not feel as good and therefore I should not be taking as much pleasure from the eating of it.
And you can train yourself to actually be more sensorily engaged on a longer time horizon that then allows you to take more pleasure in more things all of the time.
All right.
A couple things.
One, you say senses, and I agree, your senses are first pass, reliable in an environment like the one you came from.
But the environment like the one you came from doesn't have salt and straw in the sense that we have it now.
So you have to understand that salt and straw's ability to capture your attention is novel.
It may be one of the things you can't control because our need for markets to solve problems where we can't centrally plan our way out of stuff, which is to say almost everywhere, you know, we have to accept salt and straw will be there.
So you have to correct something because you're not in your native environment.
But I would say, you know, and this is in our book too, it's really a question of your senses and then your intuition.
And the thing, I've never made this point land with anybody as far as I know.
It's not one of the things that people reflect back.
So maybe this time it'll work in the context of this conversation.
When your environment is sufficiently healthy by virtue of two facts, one, it looks a lot like an ancestral environment in the ways that matter.
And two, it is not different from the one you grew up in.
So you as an adult are living in an environment that works because it's like an ancestral environment and it's not different.
So you're native to it.
When that is true, what you really can go on is your intuition.
Not because your intuition comes from some mystical place.
It's just that you will have trained in the very environment.
And so you look at something and it looks appetizing because it's good for you and it looks unappetizing because it's not.
And that intuition then does exactly what you're suggesting, which is it frees your conscious mind from the never-ending puzzle of modernity.
How should I feel about that?
Now, this is exactly right.
And you hone your intuition through developmental experiences and through learning in adulthood.
And, you know, why is it at this point, and it's going to be a slightly different answer for the two of us, but neither you nor I, when we go past a McDonald's or a Wendy's or an Arby's or anything, it just doesn't render as food for us.
There's nothing there at all.
And there's no interest.
There's no tugging at the edges of consciousness.
Whereas, you know, a gelateria, you know, for me, a good bakery or a good ice cream store, and frankly, knowing more and more about all the gums and all the ingredients makes it easier again.
Because my first job, my first retail job was at Baskin-Robbins.
I used to eat a lot of Baskin-Robbins back when I was also playing a lot of volleyball.
So it didn't have any ill effects on me as far as I could tell.
But now I think, oh, I don't need to eat that ice cream ever again because it's filled with so much garbage.
Too much xanthan gum.
Too much, yeah, I'm not even all that concerned about the xanthan gum, but too many other things that don't belong in good ice cream.
So everyone's going to have their particular things that appeal to them.
And they may, you know, there's no, I don't feel any virtue for not being interested in going to KFC.
I just never did.
And so it doesn't run, it doesn't look like food.
And so you don't get points for not doing the things that don't appeal to you for some developmental reason or some wisdom that you've already acquired.
Now the trick is honing your intuition such that and keeping track of your senses, all of them, including how your gut feels for days afterwards, such that your intuitions are better honed and you don't look at the ice cream store the second day in a row that you passed it when you just got some the day before.
Like, actually, that's not actually going to bring me pleasure net.
And the dividend on having your conscious mind freed from puzzling over all sorts of modern stuff, especially stuff built to fit in your blind spot.
Yeah.
Right.
The dividend of having your conscious mind freed to dedicate to other things is priceless.
I mean, like, literally you couldn't put a price on it.
And we don't live there because you constantly have to look at every single thing.
And, you know, it's gone even from, I don't know what to think of that thing that I just saw on my screen to, oh, I have no idea if that even happened.
Right.
Precisely.
So, you know, this problem is going to get worse.
The Cartesian crisis is going to descend into, you know, probably your best shot is mild agnosticism about every single damn thing.
And that is, you know, you're just constantly going to be wrestling with.
And the trick is keeping diagnosticism mild.
Right.
It's real, yeah, it's real easy to just descend into, I can't know anything.
How could I possibly?
Therefore, I believe nothing.
And, you know, either, I don't know, the choices are going to be sort of anarchy, hedonism.
You know, there's just a bunch of terrible choices in front of people.
Yep.
All right.
So to recover our gains on this before we move on to the next piece, I really think the idea is that you can imagine two models of how to maha.
One of them has to do with a non-utopian return to an environment that looks enough, let's say, nutritionally to the one you grew up in, that intuitions work.
It's not changing and the stuff in it is what it appears to be sufficient that you can learn to manage your own health.
And the alternative version is the high-tech version where you're going to transhumanize yourself out of ill health.
And frankly, it's implausible.
And it's implausible because you're dealing with a complicated solution to a highly complex problem.
And even if somewhere in the remote future, we will have generated enough information on physiology to have some hope of your net improvement.
Look back at the food pyramid.
Look what we were told not to eat and what we now come to understand that you're supposed to eat.
And you'll realize how error-prone the transhuman version of this simply is.
Now, one last transitional step here.
I want to talk about why we find in the very same hearing, Bobby Kennedy, on the one hand, saying something that's a complete relief to hear anybody say in such a chamber, which is that's your corruption talking, Senator.
And saying, oh, all Americans should be wearing wearables in four years.
That's coming from two very different models of health with respect to government and physiology.
And here I want to add this last piece.
This comes from somewhere else.
This is a report on the likely removal of aluminum from vaccines.
This is not a done deal, but anyway, we have a clip of this being discussed.
There is a movement among the Secretary Kennedy and others in the anti-vax movement to take alum out of vaccines.
So alum is an aluminum salt.
It's used in about seven different pediatric vaccines, including one by Pfizer as an adjuvant.
So it helps stimulate an immune response.
So they want to force manufacturers, I believe, to reformulate those vaccines.
That would be a major issue because this is a very safe ingredient.
It's been used for 70 years.
There's really no alternative.
And if they force manufacturers to have to reformulate all those pediatric vaccines, I think you'd see a lot of vaccines potentially come off the market because there is no good alternative.
Meaning that they would no longer be effective.
They wouldn't stimulate the immune system.
There is no good.
The other adjuvants you could potentially use probably aren't as safe.
But if you had to reformulate those vaccines, it would create a real dislocation in the market.
My God.
Yeah, I know.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Who is that?
Do we know who that is?
I don't know, but he is obviously reporting on a Kennedy initiative at HHS.
I will say, was that CNBC really needs to put on Toby Rogers.
If they're going to put that nonsense on, in which they're going to claim that aluminum is a safe adjuvant, they really need to put on the actual story.
Of course, they won't, but morally speaking, that's their obligation.
But anyway, my point would be this.
Why do we have two Bobby Kennedys?
Right?
On the one hand, we're seeing strong indications that the mRNA COVID vaccines may be pulled from the market.
They're already not going to be recommended for pregnant women and children.
This is huge progress in a direction that's very positive.
It's frustrating that it's not all at once and that it's not complete.
But wow, this is a whole different planet than we were living on.
And we're even going to talk about adjuvants in childhood vaccines.
This is a dream very slowly coming true, right?
All of the hard won knowledge, all of the injuries and the, you know, the huge amount of work that had been done by people who endured the most terrible slanders as they were trying to reveal what had happened to them and their families and what they had discovered about the sources of these things.
This is all now being discussed at the highest level with, you know, a sympathetic HHS head.
That, you know, I don't want to say it couldn't be better.
It could be faster.
But I can't believe that these things are now suddenly being discussed at this level.
On the other hand, we're talking about universal wearables.
We didn't even get to talking about the radiation issue that comes from, you know, having a wearable, you know, right on the surface of your skin and all of that.
So here's my guess as to what this means.
Why we, I mean, and again, as I've said in other instances, we know Bobby Kennedy.
We have a pretty good idea what he believes based not only on what he says informally when the camera is not on, but in the books that he's written that have revealed in depth where his thinking comes from.
And so it's very strange to hear him embracing a transhumanist version of health when in other cases he has said very clearly that ill health, you know, the chronic health epidemic is the result of the toxic soup that children grow up in.
So here is the, I'm going to do my best to just give a model of what's going on.
And I must say, I do not envy Bobby Kennedy's position at all.
He's in, I think, a terrible spot that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, which is he is in a position to do good, but he's having to do it as a negotiation.
Yes.
Which means that he is, you know, having to accept many things that are unacceptable in order to make progress on the fronts that he knows are so important.
And I think that accounts for this.
Okay, it's wearables and a surgeon general that causes a lot of us to wonder what the hell is going on.
And on the other hand, you know, it's suddenly we're talking about adjuvants.
And my goodness, the whole world is going to be different if we suddenly realize that it's insane to put something into a vaccine that causes your immune system to freak out in a general way, right?
I mean, just think about the insanity of this.
We're injecting something into your arm, right, or your leg that contains an ingredient that's going to cause your immune system to freak out across your body, including on the inside of your lungs and your mucosal surfaces.
So it's like a recipe for allergies, right?
Of course it is.
I mean, we've talked about this a lot in years past, but just to remind at a relatively low level, what the problem that is being solved is, right?
Is that a vaccine, as originally imagined, exposes the body to a pathogen at such a low level that the immune system can learn to recognize it such that if it gets exposed to that pathogen again, it will already have a memory of it and thus be able to mount a response quickly.
But the risk is that on first trivial exposure, the body gets sick instead of simply developing a memory of it.
And so in response to that, vaccine manufacturers said, oh, okay, we're not going to give live vaccines.
We're going to give bits and pieces of the pathogen that couldn't possibly make you sick, but could, if the immune system thinks to wake up while those things are in your system, could develop a memory such that upon being exposed to the entire pathogen, there would be an ability to matter response, but they're not really that triggering.
So what we're going to have to do is add adjuvants, which is to say immune system triggers that while you are getting these bits and fragments of pathogen, your immune system will be waking up to everything.
But of course, it will be waking up to absolutely everything.
The problem being solved, as we've talked about before, is how do you provide the immune system a clue to future exposure of a pathogen that could be quite bad for you without putting you at risk of eating the disease now?
And it is, you know, it's not wholly intractable, but it is intractable if your solution has to be absolutely no one will get sick from the disease right now as you're being given the vaccine.
Well, it creates a very high threshold for how good the immunity that you got would have to be to overcome the, once you know how they do it, foreseeable consequences for other immune interactions, whether it be autoimmunity or allergies or any of these things.
So, I mean, in its own way, adjuvants are a transhumanist solution.
Right?
We'll make you bounce.
Just use aluminum to cause your immune system to feel like it's sick so that it will respond to the antigen we just gave you.
Sounds great on paper, right?
But, you know, of course, once you include the rest of the system, it's not going to work.
So anyway, I guess I have become very concerned that people do not understand the danger of utilitarianism because at some level, rule of thumb, utilitarianism is kind of the right thing to do, right?
In general, a system that does the greatest good for the greatest number does a lot of really good things at usually small cost, right?
On average, greatest good for the greatest number, not terrible.
But the point is, wow, you can get to a lot of places once you commit yourself to utilitarianism as the North Star, right?
You can get to slavery easily, right?
You know, imposition on a small number of people does a lot of good for a bunch of other people.
You know, maybe slavery is okay, right?
You probably even get to genocide that way, right?
In the right circumstance.
So the point is, that is a slippery slope you don't want to step on, right?
You have to be very cautious.
But where is Bobby Kennedy?
Well, he is having to navigate a world in which there's a tremendous amount of power that us normies out in the world, we may think we understand what it is, but we don't really understand the depth of the corruption or how it functions, what those conversations sound like.
And so imagine that, you know, you're Kennedy and you suddenly are at the head of this largest governmental agency, tremendous amount of power, but you have to navigate with all of these people who have all have commitments to, you know, entities you can't see.
And they're not going to just allow you to scrutinize adjuvants.
I mean, let's face it, there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
They're not going to allow you to scrutinize the adjuvants.
So what do you have to give them in order that that gets on the table?
Well, I wouldn't want to have to play that game, especially if I understood that every time I accept something that, you know, I have to accept in order to get something I'm prioritizing on the table, that it's going to mean, you know, people are going to get maimed, right?
But anyway, I think that's what we have to understand.
And those of us in the medical freedom movement, frankly, I'm sympathetic to the people who are alarmed every time they hear a noise that goes in the direction of, you know, industry or transhumanism or any of the things that we've gotten over.
Yes.
I'm alarmed too.
On the other hand, do I want Bobby to give a hell of a speech?
You know, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and, you know, be thrown out on his ear and, you know, he'll be returned to us and he'll be able to speak the truth again.
And the adjuvants will remain in the vaccines and they'll get injected into children at the behest of doctors who are on the take.
I don't want to live in that world either.
So I guess the point is, I think as troubled as I am by some of the noises that are coming from HHS, the good stuff is so unthinkable from a position six months ago that we have to be glad that somebody who does have integrity and insight is navigating the utilitarianism on our behalf because you wouldn't want to do it, right?
You wouldn't want to be in that position of accepting the unacceptable in order to get something important done.
That's not a position anybody enjoys if they understand what they're up to.
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Okay, so I have one last piece on that.
And it's unfortunately it comes from breaking news right before we went on today.
So I have not had time to look at any analysis here.
I haven't had time to even fully process what I read.
I just know that it was profound and suggests a hidden world that has tremendous importance.
So can we show that article about the apparent negotiation over the fate of Gaza today?
Okay, so this is the Times of Israel.
The title of the article says, Report, colon Netanyahu agreed to end Gaza war within two weeks after U.S. strike on Iran.
Now, that already leaves me with a giant question mark, which is that title suggests the negotiation may have preceded the strike on Iran, that this was something that was done in exchange for something?
Is that I don't know that I would I don't know that I would read too much into the grammar in a headline.
Yep, I wouldn't.
On the other hand, what is Iran even doing in that story?
Yep.
It does not make sense to me, and it suggests a world, an unthinkable world just below the surface.
So let me read.
It's not a very long article.
It's just a report on the developing story.
And I will leave open the possibility that since this is live, that it was...
It may have changed in the intervening hours.
So it says, after the U.S. strike on Iran earlier this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed on a rapid end to the war in Gaza, an expansion of the Abraham Accords.
Israel Hayam reports citing a source familiar with the conversation.
All right, already I'm struggling to understand what that could mean.
According to the outlet, Trump and Netanyahu agreed in a phone call that the war in Gaza would end within two weeks.
Four Arab states, including the UAE, Egypt, including the UAE and Egypt, would jointly govern the Gaza Strip in place of Hamas.
The terror group's leadership would be exiled and all hostages would be released.
Notice, there's no mention here that Hamas was involved in the negotiations.
So again, I'm scratching my head.
All right.
However, Arab allies...
They're going to be in control.
True.
However, Arab allies have repeatedly asserted that they will not take part in post-war rehabilitation of Gaza, absent Israeli acquiescence to the Palestinian Authority gaining a foothold in Gaza as part of a pathway to a future two-state solution.
But Netanyahu has flatly rejected any Palestinian Authority role in the strip.
Moreover, Hamas leaders have also long rejected demands to go into exile.
Trump and Netanyahu were joined on the Euphoric call late Monday night by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, says Hayam, the source.
Gazans, who wished to emigrate, would be absorbed by several unnamed countries, says the report.
Saudi Arabia and Syria would establish diplomatic ties with Israel and other Arab and Muslim countries would follow suit.
Israel, for its part, would express its support for a future two-state solution conditioned on reforms made by the Palestinian Authority.
Meanwhile, the leaders agreed that Washington will recognize Israeli sovereignty in some parts of the West Bank.
The Hedi plan would explain Trump's fury over Israel's planned retaliation to Iran's violation of the nascent ceasefire on Tuesday and his truth social post calling for an end to Netanyahu's corruption trial.
All right.
Every sentence just raises so many questions.
It raises so many questions.
So obviously, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu cannot unilaterally end the war in Gaza.
I mean, they can end the Israeli part of the war in Gaza, but this suggests that Hamas was somehow part of this discussion, and yet it's phrased as if they weren't.
So I don't know what could possibly be going on here.
The idea that the strike on Iran was part of a negotiated deal over Gaza causes my brain to throw multiple errors.
Now, if what is reported here is true, I think it's a big win for Trump.
There's a lot here that's back on the table, including a two-state solution that many of us did not expect to see return.
On the other hand, one more thing.
This does rather unsettlingly suggest a kind of well, it depends, but it's sort of it's hard not to see ethnic cleansing here, right?
You've got Palestinians who it doesn't say who or how many, but have been bombed into oblivion and are now going to be absorbed by other nations.
Those who want to go into exile will be absorbed, it said.
Right.
So, and you know, those who want will be absorbed into other nation states unnamed.
It seems, so my read on hearing this for the first time, having you read it, is the states, some of them named, some of them not, that the Muslim states that would be involved in both administering control over Gaza and in absorbing willing Palestinian exiles into their borders would appear to have been in some control over there having
been a war in the first place if their involvement, but not Hamas's involvement, can supposedly guarantee such an outcome.
That if leaders or forces in Syria and the UAE and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, being the four states I think mentioned there, and presumably others, can be somehow involved in these discussions with Trump and Netanyahu and arrive at this,
yes, you know, there will be a discussion of a two-state solution and, you know, and all of this without Hamas being involved at all, then the support for Hamas has to have been in part from some of those places that are now going to be pulling support.
I I don't know.
I don't see it.
It seems to me, obviously, what is true is that the U.S. is tremendously wealthy and powerful and that basically there is something going on behind the scenes, a massive system of incentives.
And that incentives can motivate most parties, maybe any party, to sign on to an agreement if there's enough stuff that they want on the table.
And so anyway, I do, part of the reason that I thought it was important that we actually go here is that I think we are seeing the same utilitarian world poking through, that we're learning something about the administration and it is both.
The American administration.
Yeah.
And in fact, I don't think, you know, I think we were warned.
We were warned in the form, you know, the art of the deal, right?
Donald Trump is, in his own mind, and I think credibly, a master deal maker.
Deal making does not mean what most of us think it means, right?
This is like, you know, a master basketball coach who has weaponized the foul.
Right.
And the idea is, oh, the foul is just another move.
It has a cost.
It has a benefit.
Right.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Out of bounds, blah, blah, blah.
So Donald Trump is a master of the art of the deal environment in which things are incentivized that would not cross the mind of a normal person that enables him to do things that other people couldn't do.
It also endangers, it creates the danger that he will do things that other people couldn't do.
And, you know, I mean, I guess the point is this is some new version of realpolitik.
Yeah.
Right.
This is a, this is a level of realism about game theory that is on the one hand fascinating.
On the other hand, it's terrifying.
And I will point out, I've mentioned this scene before.
People who have watched Dark Horse for a long time know that I'm not huge on reading fiction.
Love movies, but fiction I often don't engage with.
But Catch 22 is one of my all-time favorites because it seems to have anticipated so many things that later happened.
It's a great book.
But the thing that I keep returning to is this scene in which Milo Minderbinder is this character who goes from a plucky young American who figures out how to feed the pilots who are stationed where he is in charge of the mess.
He figures out how to feed them brilliantly by trading, you know, and so he's got the best ingredients and he makes awesome stuff.
But he goes from that admirable, innovative character to this Hitlerian monster in a sort of a seamless transition.
And at one point in his trajectory, he actually has contracted with the Nazis to bomb his own base.
And he bombs his own base because the Nazis are going to bomb it.
And if he arranges to bomb the base, he can make sure nobody gets hurt.
So it's a good deal from the point of view of the Americans.
And the whole point is that somehow the logic of markets is just unstoppable and that it even extends to, well, look, if you're going to bomb my base, how about I just bomb my base and then I can get more out of, you know, it's not so risky and bloody and all of that and everybody wins.
And the whole idea of like, you're going to bomb your own base because everybody wins, like, I don't even want that thought.
Right.
Right.
I don't want to live in a world in which we bomb our own bases because everybody wins because I don't know what's down that road, but it's not good.
It's madness.
And so in any case, I think we are seeing in the Trump administration, on the one hand, possibilities that haven't been on the table in decades, like a two-state solution.
And on the other hand, Faustian bargains of a scale that's just unfamiliar.
And yeah, we don't know what's on the table, much less what's actually been promised.
I mean, I can't even make heads or tails of that article.
Like, why does the clock start at the American, I presume, bombing of Iran?
That suggests that we, of course, without declaring war because the president can't declare war, but effectively declared war on a sovereign state in a deal with another state about a war that it was conducting.
I mean, what kind of crazy world are we living in?
That just does not, I mean, you know, admittedly, Iran funds Hamas, so it's not like there's no connection, but, you know.
No, it looks, I mean, the article would have us believe that the Middle East is being reformulated with most Muslim countries and Israel on one side of an alliance and Iran on the other side.
And that, you know, Israel and Syria are on the same side now.
This isn't something that was conceivable yesterday.
Right.
On the other hand, you know, we went and destabilized nations, including Syria.
So it's possible that Syria isn't Syria in the sense that we understand it.
And it's also, I mean, look, I don't know if I'm just simply losing my mind because this outstrips my ability to understand what could possibly explain it behind the scenes.
In my defense, I will say you and I study animals that don't talk and we figure out what's going on behind the scenes there.
So it's not like this is a completely foreign job, but there's something so weird about this.
And, you know, is Iran in on it?
And in which case, at what level?
Right?
I mean, what we think, what I think based on what I've read, and this has become an impossible job to figure out what's actually going on in the world because we don't even have an agreement that we're supposed to compile a record.
So there's like two versions of history.
But what I think happened is we bombed a, we bombed three nuclear facilities that were put deep underground in order to protect them from bunker buster bombs.
And we dropped some bunker buster bombs and we declared victory.
And very likely the enriched uranium was salvaged, which I think was almost certain to be the case because, you know, if you can put an enrichment facility, you know, 100 meters underground, you can go another 50 meters for a storage facility.
You know, it doesn't strike me that there's any solution from bombing from above that's going to be capable of outstripping the ability to dig further.
But anyway, so it looks like the enriched uranium probably survived.
The nuclear program, I am led to believe, was set back months, not years.
So was much accomplished?
No.
Did World War III start?
Not yet.
So that's good.
A lot of people are crowing about the fact that World War III didn't start as if you could do the logic that way.
Well, all of you who were worried about World War III blew it because it didn't start.
Our winds get smaller and smaller.
Yeah, try that logic on drunk driving right he got home unscathed drunk driving must be safe all of you who were worried about the drunk driving you're wusses right that's not how that works nope so anyway was iran in on this were they in on it at the level that you know kind of milo minderbinderish that they had agreed to be bombed or something i don't know but
i i just don't know what to think that article is so mysterious and the idea that there's a deal in which hamas is not mentioned as party to the discussion and yet appears it would have to have agreed to this in order for there to be a meaning well again or um some of the sources of its power be it resources or men or whatever are in on the deal either some of the named
parties uh or or other unnamed states um that by their uh agreement to withhold whatever it is that they are currently giving to Hamas Hamas will be so weakened that the leaders can be exiled and the other parts of this deal can can happen yeah well I guess I mean I guess the upshot I think is the logic of utilitarianism
is diabolical but undeniably powerful and all of these parties have interests and one can imagine that somebody with a view of a larger deal-making landscape could shuffle enough things in enough places to get something novel to happen that none of us saw coming.
I do think actually, I don't know if it was added to that article after I read it the first time.
I did not remember the first time I read that short article, a mention of Netanyahu's corruption trial being canceled, that Trump had mentioned that.
So I don't know if that's in the offing.
I do think one thing that has concerned me about the events in the Middle East in the last 10 days or whatever it is, 12 days, is that Netanyahu has some very perverse incentives.
He's a very dangerous guy, guilty of all sorts of things in my book.
I became aware of just how diabolical he was over his handling of COVID, but that his desire to avoid his own incarceration over rather famous corruption on his part creates a tremendously perverse incentive for him to make war, to fail to resolve wars.
Maybe in this case, it was used as a bargaining chip that, you know, if he can remain free, that that would incentivize him to sign up for things he wouldn't have done otherwise.
Despite evidence to the contrary, outsiders to a country tend to assume that the leader of the country is a patriot.
And very often that's not the case.
Right.
I see no evidence that he is a patriot, and I really wish the Israelis would remove him from power.
I don't think any military action that proceeds under him can be understood as legitimate in light of his role in creating the predicament in the first place.
But anyway, who knows?
I do think people should consider that scene from Catch-22 and whether or not we have just entered a landscape in which new things are possible because suddenly we're the equivalent of bombing our own bases.
Yeah.
Yep.
I think we'll save the smoke and the mirror for next time.
All right.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
A little promise of discussion of culinary smoke and maybe even some hardened smoked swallows next time.
Totally.
To use the phrase that you invoked this morning, which will mean nothing to our audience until we come back next Wednesday.
To discover the hardened, smoked swallows.
Hardened smoked swallows, which I think will still be doing fine despite being both hardened and smoked.
Be somewhat further smoked.
Flying around being smoky.
All right.
So we will see you next.
It will be July by then.
What?
I think.
Yes.
Yes, it will be almost, in fact, July 4th.
By the time we come back to you next, although we've got a Q ⁇ A this Sunday, join us on Locals.
We have questions.
Question answering period is up now, and we engage with the chat some during those Q ⁇ As.
They're a lot of fun for us, hopefully for others as well.
And what else?
Anything else to report before we sign off here?
Yeah, we released a interesting Dark Horse intervention with James Lindsay, which has garnered a fair amount of interest and pushback and embrace.
But anyway, check it out.
You recorded with Mike Maina and James Lindsay while you were collectively in Palm Springs.
Collectively in Palm Springs, pretending that it was 1963.
Oh, yes.
Mary Jetson's mid-century modern.
Yeah, I did not meet George Jetson or his boy Elroy.
Let's do that.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
I mean, they're probably much aged at this point.
Unless that transhumanism stuff works.
True, true.
Yep.
Yeah.
But yeah, I've heard about it, haven't listened, watched yet.
It's interesting.
I will be interested to hear what you say.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay, so until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
