Dangers of the mental multiverse: The 287th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss “gender affirming surgeries”, AI and the future of cognition, and wild foxes. Kaiser Permanente is pausing surgery on trans-presenting children—we discuss sex and gender, meaning and identity, delusion and madness. Then: unlike the physical multiverse, mental multiverses are common, and becoming more so, as AI makes it ever more difficult to know what is true. We discuss grief, and how our worlds must fork when we think, but do not know, that someone has died. Similarly, when...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
It is our 287th live stream and the first live stream after the tsunami.
So, yes, the tsunami, which did not really touch us here to the extent that anything at all happened water-wise, it happened in the dark and it wasn't large enough for anyone to detect.
But it was quite an event and it does seem to have reached many places.
Following an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the east coast, I guess northeast coast of Russia yesterday, there were tsunami warnings for everywhere across the Pacific.
And Hawaii got affected, even parts of far northern California coast, Crescent City.
And we had warnings here in the San Juan Islands, but nothing.
It's just remarkable, though, to recognize both how much water there is.
We're talking about water being displaced on one side of the Pacific Ocean, by far the largest ocean on our planet, and having effects on the opposite side because of one of water's remarkable qualities, which is that it does not compress.
And so when displaced, it has to go somewhere.
It does not compress into a smaller space than it was in.
Yes, I think to be careful, we just have to say the Pacific is the largest ocean yet discovered on Earth.
No, we do not.
We do not.
Well, out of an abundance of caution, I will just make that caveat, because...
But yes, out of an abundance of caution, you want to say that the Pacific is the largest ocean yet discovered on this planet.
You do you, Brett.
Yes, well, here's the thing.
Most people who use that phrase use it as a way of cloaking some kind of tyrannical change that they wish to introduce.
I am at least not doing that.
I may be making a fool of myself, but I am not going to be tyrannical about it.
I think we can be assured of that.
Yes.
Yeah, it's not my style.
So live stream 287.
I find that remarkable that we have been doing this for that long.
287 is not, in fact, prime.
And the factors are.
Yeah, it's a tricky one.
Well, it's one and 287, but of course that doesn't get to not prime.
I would still leave it prime.
7 and 41.
7 and 41.
287, right?
Like it's a good one.
I like this non-prime rather.
Anyway, today we're going to be talking a little bit about gender-affirming surgeries.
And gender-negating surgeries, because every gender-affirming surgery is a gender-negating surgery.
Yes.
And AI and the future of cognition and more wild foxes because we have them in our neighborhood here in the San Juan Islands, and they are marvelous.
So thank you for being here.
If you are on locals, which we encourage you to be, there's a watch party going on there now, along with lots of other stuff.
We do our Q ⁇ A's there.
So please consider joining us there.
And without further ado, we will have our three sponsors right up at the top of the hour help us pay the rent.
Our three sponsors for whom, as always, we are very grateful and appreciative.
We do not accept as sponsors companies that make products or offer services that we don't actually really stand by.
So here we go.
Our first sponsor today is Masa Chips.
Masa makes delicious, healthy chips that aren't going to make you sick because they're made with real whole ingredients, the way that all of our food used to be made.
These chips are fried in 100% beef tallow.
No seed oils ever.
You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference.
America's health is declining fast.
Chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded.
Why?
Because, in part, we've swapped real food for cheap industrial substitutes.
All chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow, but in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper fats.
Today, seed oils, soybean, canola, sunflower corn, and the like, make up 20% of the average American's daily calories.
Seed oils, which are increasingly linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation.
Big food companies use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins as well.
In contrast, masa chips have just three ingredients.
Organic nixtamalized corn, sea salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.
Love that ingredient list.
It's so good.
Absolutely no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives ever.
Beef tallow is nutrient-rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible.
Masa chips are not only free of toxins, they taste great.
Masa chips are crunchy and tasty, and after eating them, you feel satisfied, light, and energetic.
There's no bloat or sluggishness, and you feel satiated, not hungry, after eating them.
MASA also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture.
Ranches that revitalize soil health, boost biodiversity, and protect ecosystems are the ranches that MASA is getting their tallow from.
Choosing real food heals us and our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy.
MASA is championing clean American grown ingredients, transparency, and authenticity.
Try them with salsa or goat cheese or a spicy pepper jam.
Smother them in beans and cheese or just eat them straight out of the bag.
They're delicious.
Masa chips are beloved by 10,000s.
Tens of thousands, I would think.
Yeah, now we're in the call to action.
So unfortunately, that's the one little misstep on the part of masa chips.
Just a tiny grammatical error.
A tiny grammatical error.
I'm going to fix it.
If that's their biggest sin.
I think it is.
I think it's their biggest sin.
So I'm going to just correct it.
Masa chips are beloved by, well, but I don't know if they mean tens of thousands.
I'm going to go with more than 10,000.
Okay.
Yeah.
Here we go.
10 plus thousand.
Masa chips are beloved by, oh, are beloved by over 10,000 customers and have been endorsed by industry-leading health and nutrition experts.
Are you ready to give Masa chips a try?
Go to masachips.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse for 25% off your first order.
That's masachips.com slash darkhorse and code darkhorse for 25% off your first order.
And I will also point out that for those in our audience who like, like I, like I, like me, like me, are sensitive to wheat, what a great alternative in crackerspace.
You can just swap in them.
Cracker space.
Cracker space, yes.
Because it's hard to find a good, I mean, there's lots of gluten-free crackers, but most of them are not great.
And a moss chip is perfect.
Moss chips are great, and they're sturdy enough to actually do the job of a cracker, which often chips aren't.
Yep, absolutely.
Yeah, and they're delicious.
Did I say that?
Yes.
Delicious.
Yes.
Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about how modern life puts our health at risk, including exposures to agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, food dyes, seed oils, and the hazards of non-stick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
In our house, we threw out all the Teflon decades ago.
Teflon is really toxic.
A single scratch on Teflon cookware can release over 9,000 microplastic particles, none of which you should be ingesting, many of which you will if you cook with Teflon.
Over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon, and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from non-stick cookware in their blood.
When you cook with Teflon, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins.
Enter Caraway.
Caraway Kitchenware is crafted with sustainable, non-toxic materials like FSC-certified birch wood, premium stainless steel, enameled cast iron, naturally slick ceramic, and more to help you create a safer, healthier home.
Caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron.
All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals, their new enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors.
These pots are strong and
highly scratch resistant the last generations we use enameled cast iron pots to braise large cuts of meat cook stews and soups even roast chicken sometimes because one of the great advantages of enameled cast iron is its uniform heat retention easy to use and beautiful too you can't go wrong there's no better time to make the healthy swap to caraway our favorite cookware set will save you 150 dollars versus buying the items individually plus if you visit carawayhome.com slash dh10 you can take an additional 10 off your next purchase this deal is exclusive for
our listeners so visit carawayhome.com slash dh10 or use code dh10 at checkout caraway non-toxic cookware made modern love this stuff though you cannot use it even though it is wheat free as a substitute for crackers um it's too it's too robust actually does not live in crackerspace nope that does not live in crackerspace our final sponsor heather is crowdhealth which is unlike any other service on the market so i will warn you this is written first
person as if I was you.
I've realized I'm given that I gave you that one.
So you're just going to have to change it on the fly or get one of them gender affirming surgeries.
We're going to try for me to convert it on the fly.
Our final sponsor this week is CrowdHealth, which is unlike any other service on the market.
Heather knows because before they were a sponsor, Heather went looking for exactly what they provide.
She desperately wanted to get our family out of the health insurance rat race.
And she did with CrowdHealth.
Yes, we are one paragraph in and I have nailed it thus far.
You've only got 18 to go.
Oh, God.
Health insurance in the United States is a mess at every level.
Enter CrowdHealth.
It's not health insurance.
It's better.
It's a way to pay for health care through crowdfunding.
Stop sending money to fear mongering insurance companies who profit off you while they barely cover your medical needs.
Check out CrowdHealth instead.
For many years, our family, that's both of our family in this case, no need to correct this sentence, had health insurance for emergencies only.
An accident, a bad diagnosis.
For a family of four, we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work.
Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
It went, Heather went looking for alternatives and Heather found CrowdHealth.
Yes, almost perfect.
One little error, but we'll forgive me for that.
No, you'll forgive me for that.
Yes.
Yes, you will.
For a maximum of $185 per month for an individual or $605 for families of four or more, you get access to a community of people who will help out in the event of an emergency.
With CrowdHealth, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, pregnancy or an accident, you pay the first $500 and they pay the rest.
When Toby, our 18-year-old son, broke his foot last summer, we went to the ER.
That's the royal we.
It was you and Toby.
I didn't happen to be at the ER, but I was there in spirit.
Where he got x-rays, the attention of several doctors and nurses, plus crutches and a walking boot.
CrowdHealth paid our bills with no hassle and everything about the interaction was smooth.
Their app is simple and straightforward.
The real people who work at CrowdHealth are easy to reach, clear and communicative.
And we are part of a community of people aligned in our interests, rather than being an antagonistic relationships that are inherent to the insurance model.
We've now had CrowdHealth for over a year and have been asked to pay even less than what they said.
We've saved over $1,000 every month using CrowdHealth and the comparison is to health insurance that was awful, while CrowdHealth is awesome.
Somewhere in there, there's a sentence.
It would only require a small reorganization.
So, we have saved over $1,000 a month compared to insurance.
but what we're comparing to is actually a terrible product that wasn't good at all so we've saved money and we're getting a much better product oh exactly yes um when crowdhealth first first approached us several years ago we didn't get it now we do crowdhealth is the way to deal with medical expenses join the crowdhealth revolution get help with your health care needs today for just 99 per month for your first three months with the code darkhorse at joincrowdhealth.com
one reminder crowdhealth is not insurance it's better learn more at joincrowdhealth.com that's j-o-i-n-c-r-o-w-d-h-e-a-l-t-h dot com code darkhorse yeah let me just say actually um since i did not update that since i had to go to the er for myself yep uh and you you took me to the ER a couple weeks ago when I slipped on a concrete floor and landed on my head and my knee.
And exactly the same excellent experience with crowd health and the aftermath of an unfortunate injury and some expensive imaging and suturing from actually the suturing is not expensive at all.
It's the imaging that'll really cost you.
But crowdhealth has been great again.
Yep.
I must tell you, I was really nervous at the point that we decided to go the crowd health direction rather than the insurance route, but it's just obviously superior.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So we are going to start just by talking a little bit about a new change in the trans story as reported by Billboard Chris.
So at Billboard Chris, he's got a real complete name, but this is what he goes by on Twitter, on X. And you can go ahead and show my screen here.
He reports, this is a week ago now, another massive victory.
Exclusive, I have just been informed that Kaiser Permanente plans to stop all gender surgeries nationwide on patients under the age of 19.
This is according to an internal email sent by CEO Greg Adams and will go into effect on August 29th.
So I just want to share the whole email as reported by Billboard Chris because this is huge.
So an important message from not just Greg Adams, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, but several other executives associated with Kaiser Permanente.
Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to providing safe, high-quality, and evidence-based care to all our members, including adolescents.
We are proud of the care and coverage we provide for transgender patients.
Our work in this area and the inclusive care we provide for LGBTQ plus individuals and their families is recognized in the community.
Since January, there has been significant focus by the federal government on gender-affirming care, specifically for patients under the age of 19.
This has included executive orders instructing federal agencies to take actions to curtail access and restrict funding for gender-affirming care, hospital inquiries by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and regulatory changes to coverage and broader federal agency review, including by the Federal Trade Commission.
Most recently, the U.S. Department of Justice issued subpoenas to doctors and clinics providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth as part of ongoing federal investigations.
In response to these federal actions, many health systems and clinicians across the country have paused or discontinued providing gender-affirming care for adolescents.
As the legal and regulatory environment for gender-affirming care continues to evolve, we must carefully consider the significant risks being created for health systems, clinicians, and patients under the age of 19 seeking this care.
After significant deliberation and consultation with internal and external experts, including our physicians, we have made the difficult decision to pause gender-affirming surgical treatment for patients under the age of 19 in our hospitals and surgical centers.
This pause is effective August 29th, 2025.
All other gender-affirming care treatment remains available.
We continue to meet with regulators as well as our clinicians, patients, their families, and the community with the goal of identifying a responsible path forward.
We recognize that this is an extremely challenging and stressful time for our patients seeking care, as well as for our clinicians whose mission is to care for them.
We will work closely with each patient to support their care journey.
We will remain a voice and advocate for safe, high-quality, and evidence-based care for transgender patients.
So that's the email in its entirety, as reported by Bill Birdkriss within the Kaiser Permanente email scheme from executives to the staff.
And I just wanted to point out that this was happening, which is great news at one level.
Of course, a pause probably just means that they, you know, if unless the tide turns on public sentiment more obviously under a different administration, this would be reversed, presumably.
But the language remains so, frankly, transparently manipulative.
Care affirmation specifically, and there are others, but you already presaged this when we were in the beginning of the episode.
Gender affirming care.
it's not caring to do this to to people who are confused about um what their feelings mean about what reality is and the idea of affirming someone's feelings as opposed to uh as opposed to negating what they actually are if it was called if it was
And I will say too that although this is an important and necessary step, the idea that Kaiser Permanente is insisting that all other transgender care remains in place, which is to say 19 and above, you can still get any of their services.
And under 19, you can still get the cross-sex hormones and the puberty blockers, which themselves, while not as obviously, materially, immediately destructive as surgical interventions, destroy fertility,
destroy psychology, destroy so many things about young people as they are precisely becoming the adults that they will be and have no ability to make such decisions for themselves, even if your point was that you think that these things should be available to people.
And I am not compelled that cross-sex hormones are a sane thing to be giving to people no matter what the age.
Yeah, I agree with you.
And there's something just so profoundly off about interfering with development, which very frequently corrects gender dysphoria.
In fact, overwhelmingly corrects gender dysphoria.
Just tiny.
Normal development causes people with gender dysphoria to get over it in general.
And I'm not saying there aren't those for whom that's not true, but the point is anytime you intervene in such a system, what you're doing is you're disrupting the body and the mind's natural tendency to fix itself.
And this is insane.
It's madness.
And we must continue to resist.
I'm reminded of actually some merchandise that we put out based on a natural selections post that I made during the pandemic.
Do not affirm, do not comply.
Like, you know, the orders to comply with, for instance, the vaccine mandates were immoral orders.
And the idea that to be a good parent, you need to affirm your child's delusions is an immoral construction itself.
And you must resist in order to be a good parent.
The idea that a young person's perceived sense of their own identity is the thing that should decide their fate for the rest of their lives is something I don't think we've seen before.
I don't think we've had the technological capacity before.
I mean, we obviously have the surgical capacity, but I don't think we've had the technical capacity before as humans to facilitate the widespread destruction of people at this level.
And, you know, the rancid frosting all over the story is by doing so, by helping children destroy themselves, you are showing them love.
And of course, it's exactly the opposite.
Yeah, it's absolutely the opposite.
To love them would be to stand up to the delusion, which would give the mind the idea that it needed to find another way through life, which for most of them would be exactly the thing that would make life better.
But I will also just point out there's something about that letter.
The degree of cowardice and weather veining implied.
It's not like, oh, some discovery has actually caused us to reverse course on what we incorrectly concluded before based on incomplete evidence or something like that.
The basic point is, well, the political winds have changed.
And so now you're going to do this other thing as if that's the right thing to do without acknowledging that actually you've maimed a bunch of people by doing what you were doing.
And, you know, as you point out, they've left themselves complete flexibility.
They've paused it.
Pause.
Right.
We haven't decided it was wrong and changed course.
What we've done is paused it and we may unpause it if the political winds shift in the other direction.
And the point is, no, no, no, you're talking about destroying people.
And you've paused it, which isn't bad.
You know, it's good that some people will not be maimed in the period of the pause, but the idea that you reserve the right to unpause it is, you know, as bad as having done it in the first place.
Well, I mean, we've talked about this issue many, many times.
And so there, you know, I don't know that I have anything brand new to offer on this.
But the medical establishment makes bank on the transgender delusion because not only are the puberty blockers and the cross-sex hormones, the puberty blockers are presumably temporary.
The cross-sex hormones are permanent.
The surgeries happen once and they make some money on it.
But you make into people lifelong patients.
There is no not being a patient of the medical industrial complex anymore if you have gone a fair ways down the road of acting on your delusion that you were born in the wrong body.
And the idea that any industry should be effectively corralling people into being their subjects for life and that the rest of us aren't up in arms about it is remarkable.
And there's another aspect of this that we've talked about before too, which is that Gen Xers, as we are, grew up searching, as I thought all adolescents did throughout history, searching for meaning.
Like that was like, what will I do in the world?
How will I provide my life meaning?
How will I do good?
How do I imbue this life that I have been given with meaning?
And that seeking has largely been replaced among those who are most likely to be deluded into the trans thing, like the younger millennials and the Gen Z's, I think, into searching instead for identity,
which is, you know, it's more cellipsistic, it's more narcissistic, it's inherently about me, I, what am I, and how do I get the world to see what I am and appropriately identify the thing that I now know that I am, which at some level, like, okay, fine, figure out who you are, but that's actually quite trivial compared to figuring out how to make meaning in the world, for yourself and in the world.
So this focus on identity as opposed to meaning is part of what basically opened the door, facilitated this focus on, well, maybe I'm not what I appear.
Maybe I was assigned the wrong thing at birth, which is of course not what happens.
There is an assignment of sex based on observable phenotype at birth, but that assignment is almost always in sync with what is actually true, and the assignment doesn't change what is true.
It is simply an observation, usually correct, about what is true.
So the idea that identity is what matters, that what young people need to do is figure out who they are and make sure the world sees them for who they are, that is much less important and honorable, frankly, than figuring out how to make meaning of your life.
And in part because the identity thing then will follow.
You will end up with a sense of identity if you are trying to figure out a way to make meaning in the world.
Yeah, I would argue that actually there is something I'm in one way restating what you've just said, but I think it goes one step further.
Your identity as understood by the world isn't really yours to define at all.
It's an interaction between what you create and put into the world and how the world understands it.
And the idea that your primary focus is going to be curating some avatar, that what you're going to do is create some impression of yourself and then market it into the world.
And that's what you're going to sell rather than I'm going to find something that the universe doesn't know and I'm going to explore it and I'm going to provide it and people are going to be benefited by the fact that I've found this thing and it improves their life.
You know, whether it's you discover a technique to do something that we didn't know or you invent a mechanism to accomplish something or you provide insight or beauty or you lead people into compassion.
The idea that you're just going to skip right to the part of like, I'm going to define myself and that thing that I define myself as is A, not yours to object to and B, that it is in and of itself a reason to support it.
It's like, actually, you're part of a, well, you're really part of a three and a half billion year lineage level history.
And you are a very temporary custodian of free will and the ability to choose what to do with that opportunity.
But the idea that you're going to spend it self-obsessed rather than trying to find something useful that contributes to that lineage's well-being, and I mean the entire lineage, it's a misunderstanding of purpose.
It is.
It is precisely a misunderstanding of purpose and is also a misunderstanding, and both you and I alluded to this and what we were just saying, but it's also a misunderstanding of how we make our mark in the world and how we affect what people think of us.
So the whole sort of, you know, like woke madness tries to get its way by diktat, by, you know, top-down authoritarian commands.
You will use my pronouns, you will not speak that way, you will not use this language.
And of course, that's not the way language works.
That's not the way understanding works.
That's not the way humans work.
But it is, you know, this focus on like, I am now a man, and you will refer to me by he, him, pronouns.
As if that declaration on my part is going to change anything about how you perceive me except, oh, God.
Like, you know, what is wrong with her now, right?
So, you know, there is going to be a change, but it's not going to be the desired one on the part of the person making the demands, unless they're in such an insular environment that everyone there, everyone in their community is busy doing the same thing and busy celebrating and affirming all the self-deluded choices that everyone's making,
which means also that your horizons shrink and shrink and shrink because that community becomes one that is self-reinforcing and it feels pretty good for a little while, probably.
But you can't step outside of that community and not just experience whiplash, like psychological whiplash.
And so it becomes ever harder to actually explore, either in physical space or mental space.
And, you know, what is it that we want to be doing in our lives, if not exploring all the different ways that we can?
And in fact, just the simple fact that that's Kaiser declaring this change in its policy.
Well, what is Kaiser?
You know, Kaiser is an insurance scheme, which means that at some level, it is a bastardization of a risk pool in which the risk that has been defined is the risk that you are born into the wrong body, which is going to be compensated by the collective of other people, whether they like it or not.
Everybody who's paying in to Kaiser's insurance is subsidizing the so-called gender-affirming care, which, as I pointed out before, is exactly as gender-negating as it is affirming.
You're negating one gender and affirming another.
You're affirming the one that does not comport with your sex.
And so anyway, the idea that that, well, I mean, I think you've nailed it.
It substitutes.
It feels full of meaning.
And in fact, it is destructive of meaning.
It's not even an alternative to seeking meaning.
It is taking actual meaning, which is you are born as a something.
Hey, guess what?
You're a human being and you're a human being with a sex.
And that gives you certain advantages and opportunities and certain liabilities and hazards.
And, you know, play those cards as best you can and see what you can make of it.
This is different.
This is like, you know, well, what if I don't like those cards?
And yep.
Well, you can throw a tantrum and it's not going to change the cards.
Or we're going to change your cards, but we're playing cards.
You have no right to change your cards.
I mean, I don't know.
It's hard to know exactly where this metaphor goes.
But I mean, the fact is that you can't.
You know, you have these deluded men who've decided to act like they're women and claim they're women who say, yeah, I'm on my period again.
I'm having menstrual cramps.
Like they really seem to believe this.
And they've taken cards that are female cards, like, see, that's proof that I'm female.
But you're beyond delusional.
And the idea that any of us are obligated to go along with your delusion, as opposed to, actually, it is our societal obligation to point that out and say, the emperor has no clothes.
Your cards are not the ones that you're claiming.
No, dude, you don't have a period.
That's not what men do.
So I think it's like you have a hand of cards and in it is a six of clubs.
And you have decided that the six of clubs is actually an ace, right?
It's an ace of hearts because that makes your hand better.
And it's a violation not only of reality, what your cards are, but it's a violation of the whole nature of the game.
The game becomes about changing your cards rather than playing your cards.
And further, I mean, I don't want to lose the fact that I think some people have gender dysphoria that doesn't lift, and that has got to suck.
That's not a situation.
It's not an enviable situation, and it may well be downstream of atrocine or whatever else.
So it's perfectly possible to be compassionate about the fact that people are being maimed by maybe chemical exposures or maybe it's informational exposure, stuff that they encounter developmentally online.
So I agree with that mostly.
I think that the focus on identity and on gender identity, which is a fabricated thing, has allowed us to have our compassion weaponized against again and again and again and again.
Because, okay, I do think that atrazine, for instance, like they are turning the frogs gay, right?
You know, they're turning the frogs hermaphroditic and not hermaphroditic, but like both and neither and, you know, non-fertile and non-functional.
And the atrazine, for instance, which is one of these, boy, neonicotinoid, I think, insecticides that is super damaging to vertebrate and, well, at least vertebrate nervous systems.
It's supposed to be only on invertebrates, but it's damaging to us.
Are there bad effects that human beings are experiencing developmentally because of the widespread use of atracine?
I am basically certain of it.
Does that mean that someone who has been badly affected, who is, say, a boy, and is less masculine, has been less masculinized by his development because his development is less normal than it would have been absent the exposure to atracine,
does that mean that focusing on how much he doesn't feel as much like a boy or becoming a man as he sees that some of his peers do, that that's the right thing to be focusing on?
No.
No, it's not.
Like get rid of the exposures as much as possible.
That's what we need to be doing at a society-wide level.
And that's what Maha is about in large part.
And then, you know what?
There is a whole range of how feminine presenting women are and how masculine presenting men are and what our interests are and what our skills are.
And none of that changes if you're male or female.
So like, I am very sorry that we have done this to the number of people that we have apparently done it to.
But the idea that we should be encouraging anyone to be really dwelling on the fact that they don't feel as masculine as they might.
And therefore, I wonder if maybe I should like, you know what?
How about think about something else?
Like think about something that isn't your so-called gender identity, which again is a made-up concept.
Well, it's also, this is one of these questions that when you actually come to understand what it is that we supposedly do for people in this situation when we intervene medically, it is preposterously inadequate, right?
We do maim them.
We take functional systems and we wreck them.
And do we get them into the other category?
No.
In fact, they're no closer to the other category than they were before.
They're just wrecked.
So the idea that for people who are not expert in physiology or anatomy or biology or logic or any of these things to be told, well, you're in a special category and we have something to do for people in your category.
No, we don't.
No, we don't.
We're not nowhere near having something that you could do.
In fact, it's implausible.
Right.
It's not like we'll get there.
Right.
Oh, you're at the early stages of successful transgender medicine.
Not a thing.
That's not how biology works.
It's not ever going to work that way.
Yeah.
It's about as close as, you know, giving somebody who is infertile a doll, right?
Like you could argue, you know, it somewhere might make you feel better, but it's not like, hey, well, yeah, we actually now know how to make babies and we can get past your infertility by giving you this thing.
Well, it looks like a baby, but it's not one, you know?
So anyway, it's like that.
We have a crappy, you know, facsimile of some of the characteristics of the thing that you feel like you are, but it is so, it is so far from being truthful.
And most people are not in a position to understand just how far it is until, of course, it's too late.
And, of course, another thing that I in particular have talked about a lot before, but the thing that has just exploded in commonality recently, which is male-to-female, well, no, they both exploded, but so it's very different.
Just like male homosexuality and female homosexuality are quite different, as you will at some point explain to the world.
Male to female trans people versus female-to-male trans people, again, scare quotes around both of these ideas, are very, very different.
And the thing that gets so much attention and has so many women, including myself, very upset about threats to the advances we've made and our safety in places like domestic crisis centers and changing rooms and restrooms and prisons are, of course, the male-to-female trans people.
And what is true about almost all of them, that entire community of men who are cosplaying as women, men who are wearing woman face, is that what they are also doing is re-establishing, revisiting, and bringing back into the mainstream, all of these grotesque stereotypes of womanhood.
The idea that what a woman does is dresses in a corset and flutters around in high heels in long nails and a lot of totally impractical and ridiculous stuff and that that's what it means to be a woman is regressive as fuck.
Yes.
It's so regressive and we had mostly gotten past that.
Just like with the race stuff, like no, we weren't there.
We'll never be all the way there.
But we had mostly gotten past the idea that that's what it means to be a woman.
And thanks to a bunch of woman-faced men, it's coming back.
And we've got now this, you know, this crazy thing called trad, which usually is not an embrace of traditional values at all.
It is an embrace of basically a porn fantasy of traditional values.
We've turned womanhood into a costume, and it needed to be liberated from the constraints that came from the elements that are now included in this costume.
But by being forced, coerced into accepting men who claim to be women as women, the point is the costume became synonymous with the category.
It's, frankly, just nuts.
Yep.
Sure is.
Yep.
All right.
Is there a...
All right.
Okay.
Well, then we're going to switch gears.
And what I wanted to do is talk a little bit about an idea that I've been working on, which I'm increasingly compelled is meaningful.
You and I have done some work on it in private conversation, hiking around.
And I presented a version of this at the Brownstone Institute where I was this last week.
It went over very well.
So I'm pretty sure there's something down this road.
It's going to take a little bit of developing a couple of adjacent concepts in order to put the thing together so that you can see it.
The whole thing is going to go by the title of the mental multiverse.
And it is not a close kin of the physical concept, the multiverse, which we will talk about here briefly.
But let's just start building up the concepts.
And the punchline to this is that the mental multiverse is going to be crippling of civilization in a way that I think we don't yet foresee coming.
So I want to highlight this danger in part so that we can prepare for it and not be so crippled by it.
But to get there, let's talk about what the multiverse is to people who take this concept seriously in physical space.
And I thought to do this, there was an exchange I had recently on a podcast in which I was challenging the idea of the physical multiverse as advanced by David Deutsch.
Do you want to put up that clip, Jen?
So here we're going to watch my rebellion against the concept of the multiverse, which is supposed to solve problems in quantum mechanics by proposing that every time some event could go more than one way, that multiple universes are spawned and it does go that one way in one of them and it doesn't go that one way in another one.
So this is what Schrödinger was trying to point out with his cat example, was that the idea that you would spawn, you know, that you would have a quantum superposition and that it might be solved by multiple different trajectories, all of which happen, but you're only living one, was absurd and needed a better answer.
Did you say it was somehow David Dorsch was involved?
No, he wasn't involved in the conversation, but it was being reported in the conversation.
Here, let's watch.
You reject the, for example, multiverse explanation of quantum theory.
Yes, I do.
Which does not mean that it isn't a very badly described, accurate representation.
But my feeling is everything we know, everything we actually know, is downstream of parsimony.
And the multiverse explanation seems to me to mistake one kind of parsimony, where the multiverse shines, linguistic parsimony, for physical parsimony, in which it is about as stupid as you could get.
It couldn't possibly be less parsimonious.
And so I don't have any reason to prioritize linguistic parsimony.
I think linguistic parsimony, at best, is a useful proxy for the real deal.
And when they depart the way the multiverse forces them to, I think the only game in town is physically parsimonious explanations.
But what I would guess is that the multiverse explanation is the description of an accounting system we can't see, in which there aren't actually other universes, but we behave as if on a trajectory passing through universes that might be.
I know I'm not saying anything precise enough to evaluate, but my point is I'm not arguing that the things that cause people to say, well, the multiverse is a good explanation are not accurate observations.
I'm saying as a description of the way things actually function, come on.
I mean, if it's true, then we don't know anything because the only thing that's ever told us what's true turns out not to be.
All right, so that is hopefully an inoculation so that my embrace of a concept, the mental multiverse, is not confused with my belief in the concept of the multi burst as it is invoked by people navigating the various paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
But let's start here.
I want to talk about grief as we understand it.
And you and I, Heather, have talked often about the fact that grief is not by any stretch universal amongst animals, but that there is a small number of creatures, creatures that we call the usual suspects, that show this very pattern.
And that that is remarkable because those creatures have many characteristics in common, but they are not close relatives of each other.
So the usual suspects includes tooth whales.
It includes the great apes.
It includes wolves, lions, basically elephants.
So we've got all of those.
None of the organisms that we just mentioned are any of the others' closest relatives.
And so we have the evolution of these usual suspects, which include being social and long-lived with long childhoods and overlap of generations living together.
And of course, we include ourselves among the great apes.
That all of these traits have convergently evolved several times on this planet.
And they're extant on this planet with us now.
Which is an amazing fact.
It's a little bit like the recognition that male and female in plants is not, in any way we can be certain of, the same male and female that we find in animals.
But the universe is telling us that male and female is such a fundamental concept once you have an isogamy, you have different sized gametes, that much follows from it.
The idea that, you know, the boy parts of the plant are more enthusiastic about sex with strangers than the girl parts of the plant is not because we are descended from ancient species that were divided into male and female in this way.
Or because we're imposing some patriarchal vision of ourselves on plants.
It is actually simply empirically observable.
Right.
And in fact, it happens even when one plant has both parts in the same flower.
The flower is in disagreement with itself about how awesome sex with strangers is.
The boy parts are more enthusiastic than the girl parts for perfectly comprehensible reasons, which is that the female parts are invested in each reproductive event at a much deeper level and therefore selected to be choosier.
So anyway, you had.
I'm not sure why we're on anisogamy.
Because I just wanted to make the point that when the universe comes up with male and female multiple times, it's telling you that that's a very important concept in the same way that when it comes up with grief multiple times, it's telling you that this is a...
I think sex is a bad example because it seems that we probably do have at least plausibly one evolution of sex.
But convergence is powerful.
Usual suspects, all of those organisms we just talked about, have separately evolved things, including grief.
Grief, which is a recognizable pattern, enough that, you know, if you watch any of these creatures, you can see this behavior.
And yes, maybe you have to reserve some skepticism that some other phenomenon could result in something that looks as clearly like grief as this does.
But I think if you watch enough of these examples, you know it when you see it.
And so we have actually a few of these examples.
Last week, I think I talked about the orca mother that twice has lost her calf and has pushed the body around for days or weeks, you know, unable to let go.
We see this behavior.
We see very grief-like behaviors in elephants, and it's been seen many, many, many times.
So here you have an elephant standing over the corpse of a close kin.
There's a very famous story from Japan about a dog that was adopted by a professor.
And every day the professor would go off to work and the dog would meet him as he got off the bus.
Or was it a train?
It was a train.
And then the owner died at work, had a, I think, a hemorrhage.
And the dog, for something like 10 years, continued to go every day to the train station, hoping that its master would get off the train.
And we write about this in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide as well.
All of these examples.
All of these examples.
So anyway, we see lots and lots of examples of grief.
And I want to connect it to the question of closure because I think these things are closely related and necessary to understand the larger concept that I'm building towards here.
So I want you to imagine the difference between losing somebody very close to you and attending, you know, maybe you're at the hospital when they're declared dead.
Maybe you're not, but you go to the funeral and, you know, things are said about this person as they're lying in a box in front of you.
You go to the graveside and you symbolically put dirt into the grave on top of this person that you loved.
All of these things have a cathartic value.
And I will get to explaining what I and we think that that is about in a second here.
But imagine the alternative scenario where all you've got is a phone call.
And the phone call says, yeah, we're sure they're never coming home, but there's nobody.
And there's not, as far as we know, going to be.
Then it becomes very hard to move on.
And the reason it becomes very hard to move on.
So let's take the example of MH370, the flight that went down on a flight from, I think it was Kuala Lumpur To Beijing and has never been found.
This leaves the relatives in a terrible predicament.
They logically understand that their loved ones are gone, but because evolutionarily, it would be very, very rare for, you know, 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, it would be very rare for a loved one to die and for there not to be some evidence, tangible evidence that you would encounter.
A human being is a large animal.
It leaves a big corpse.
There's a big exception to this, though, which is lost at sea.
Well, and people in communities where a lot of the men work at sea, either fishing or on longer voyages, I think are psychologically built differently, precisely because very occasionally such people do return.
And when your man doesn't return when he was supposed to, and then it's a day, you still don't know, it's a week, you still don't know, it's a year, you still don't really know for sure.
Yep.
But those communities build up a structure that causes the normal grief phenomena to trigger.
You know, there's some agreement.
There's a point at which, you know, the community always agrees that this is a period of time that indicates this or that.
But the human being is not built to do this without the evidence.
And in fact, this is one of the things that modernity gets very wrong, is that we treat the dead like something grotesque to be quickly taken away by professionals and dealt with in some manner that we have no contact with, which does not look like any ancient culture where you would likely be present with the dead body enough to really know that it wasn't going to wake back up.
You might be present at the funeral pyre or the burial or all of these things.
And the sanitizing of this event actually is causing a tremendous amount of trauma because it does not provide the closure material.
But the overarching point here is this.
The reason that the mind grieves, the hypothesis that we advance, is that a person who is important to you, somebody whom you love, is wired into who you are.
The expectation that they will be there at Thanksgiving, that they will be there to bail you out if you get into trouble, right?
All of these things are wired into you.
They're programmed into you.
And at the point somebody is lost, especially, you know, there's certain things that augment the amount of grief, like the fact that it's a surprise that somebody is lost when somebody who is young and vibrant dies in a car accident or something.
It increases the trauma relative to somebody who was old and feeble and who you knew was not going to last very much longer.
So the degree to which somebody is wired in and the expectation that they will be there is likely or seems likely causes the mind to have to unwire them at the point that there is a recognition that the person is gone, which is one thing when you have proof that the person is gone.
You know, if you interacted with their dead body for 24 hours and it became cold and stiff and didn't show any signs of life, that causes you to kick over into this mode where you go into the unwiring process.
But if you don't have some sort of tangible evidence like this, the mind does not know if it is going to cause a bigger problem by unwiring somebody who's then going to show up three weeks from now, which is a disaster.
So this is the reason that people like the families of the passengers on Malaysian Airline Flight 370.
370 have struggled with it.
And in fact, that article that I put up, we don't need to put it back up.
We could.
But anyway, this is an article saying that the search for the wreckage has been put on pause for some months.
This is 10 years later, right?
These families are still desperately searching because they don't have the evidence that would allow them closure.
Okay.
So closure is important.
Closure allows you to go into an adaptive process like grief.
Without closure, you've got a problem because you have to live between two interpretations of the evidence you have.
You know, how different is it that somebody flies across the country, somebody you would only see once a year, and you don't hear from them?
How different is that from they fly across the country, you get a phone call that says they're dead, and now you still don't hear from them?
the evidence that might accumulate just isn't even there so the mind is not Right.
And then be brought back to the reality of it.
So the mind hovers with these two possibilities, and the closer the person was to you, the worse it is.
Right.
So that's why closure is important.
Now, the problem is that closure doesn't just apply to things like grief over a loved one.
Let's talk about the situation that we are all stuck with with the events of 1963.
Okay, President Kennedy was shot and killed.
Now, the official story says he was shot and killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
And then there's a lot of evidence that suggests that though Lee Harvey Oswald was present and seemingly involved, that he was part of a much larger coordinated effort.
Now, the problem is the implications of those two versions of history are radically different.
In one of them, the country got a new president and moved on and healed, and it doesn't mean that we are restored to what we were, but at least we know what world we live in.
We live in a democracy and things ebb and flow between our two parties, etc etc on the other hand if 1963 was a coup if somebody took out president kennedy and thereby installed their own power structure you don't know what world you live in do you live in a democracy or do you live in a you know a country that has experienced a coup and pretends to have a democracy by having elections that do not actually shift power that
Those are such fundamentally different versions of America that not being able to resolve between them is paralyzing.
Yeah.
Right.
Yep.
Okay.
But that's only two universes.
Right.
That's two universes where you don't know what kind of country you live in, a democracy or a cryptic authoritarian structure over which you have no democratic influence.
What I suspect is about to happen is that the Cartesian crisis, which I've described many times, Cartesian crisis is the state in which your certainty over what's taking place is low quality.
Right.
Does did COVID come from the wild?
Did it come from a lab?
You know, is are the vaccines safe and effective?
Are they highly dangerous gene therapies that have been disguised as vaccines to get you to take them?
You don't know what to believe across many different topics.
And this is largely downstream of the fact that much of what we come to understand about the world is now intermediated by screens and authority.
Some authority comes up with some conclusion.
You are fed that conclusion through some screen.
You don't necessarily know what you're seeing.
Are we a planet that is regularly being visited by aliens?
Or are we a planet in which some powerful group or groups would like us to think that that's what's going on?
We don't know.
So we have to hold both possibilities open.
And the problem is that for each one of these things, you are effectively defining, you are doubling the number of universes you live in.
Right.
So you've got a, you know, the Kennedy assassination was a coup versus the Kennedy assassination was a tragedy that left democracy intact.
That describes two universes.
In both of those universes, you have a question about whether or not aliens regularly visit the Earth or somebody wants you to think so, but it's a psyop.
Okay.
So that's four universes.
Each time you have one of these unresolved questions of major import, it doubles the number of universes that you have to keep alive so that you can plot your course.
You know, if it turns out that it was a coup, but the aliens are real, then what do I do?
Right now?
The punchline here is that AI is about within the next year or so going to be capable of producing compelling video evidence that will not be detectable.
It's getting better all the time.
It's already sufficient that, you know, even an animal behaviorist like you or me will sometimes see a video of a creature that we don't know.
And it's a little hard to know whether or not that's a real creature.
You know, I would say I'm at about four in five examples.
I can usually spot it, but at four in five is not as good as I would like it.
And within a year, maybe it'll be one in five that I'll be able to be sure.
At some point, two years down the road, I won't be able to be sure at all because the AI will be refined enough to know what a plausible creature looks like.
And it will be able to therefore create creatures that if you don't actually have experience with them, you wouldn't know one way or the other.
So point is that is going to create first a radical increase in the rate of proliferation of cognitive universes that we are forced to keep alive.
And I suspect that the immediate consequence of that is going to be paralysis, that the number of different combinations of possibilities where you cannot resolve, you cannot get closure and say, I think I live in this world.
And so I'm going to ignore all of those possibilities over there and go forward as if this is true.
You're basically going to become agnostic about just about everything.
And so in this mental multiverse, you will maybe be able to avoid embarrassment by not putting your weight on any of the ice, but you can't accomplish anything in that state.
And that's what I'm concerned about, that we are going to be collectively put into a circumstance where everybody will be afraid to assume enough about the world to actually be capable of acting rationally.
And that's what I'm concerned about, that's what I'm concerned about, but I'm concerned about the world to be able to do that.
And that's what I'm concerned about.
Yeah, it is.
It's terrifying.
And it does point to the need for actual physical interactions with the world and with people.
And to work hard to decrease the percentage of the interactions that you have that are mitigated by screens, that could be mitigated by AI, whether or not you know it.
That when you are in the physical presence of another organism, be it human or otherwise, that is doing something, at least now, that is not...
And your sensory biases exist, and you and I could be watching the same thing and see something different.
But what we saw was real if it was a fox on the ground doing something.
And it's not...
It is not mitigated by AI, whereas nothing coming through the screens at this point.
And, you know, you and I are having this conversation.
Jen's in the next room.
The three of us know that we're here doing this.
Our dog's on the floor behind us.
But none of the tens of thousands of people who will listen to or watch this can know with 100% assurance that you and I are actually here doing the thing that we're claiming to do.
Right.
Although in this case, there's a lot...
is something of which you can be, you can't be as confident as the two of us are here, but you can be pretty confident because the number of things that would have to be true for us not to be real is spectacular.
But this is going to get less and less true over time.
And I agree with you.
One of the clear remedies here is in-person meeting so that at the point that people's confidence in factual material craters, that you at least have somewhere to go to where something doesn't need to be established, right?
That you know who the other people in the room are.
You know something about how they think and maybe collectively you can bootstrap your way out of it.
I do think this is one of the reasons that our podcast became so popular at the point that you had us take our private discussions about COVID online, is that I think everybody was suddenly catapulted into a world of total uncertainty about almost everything.
And watching people who, frankly, I think would have been kind of hard to fake, reason through things was, it was like an anchor point, right?
And it is, in fact, one of the things that people tell us over and over again when people who we don't know come up to us, you know, you kept us grounded during COVID, right?
They often say you kept us sane.
And I think there was just something about that doesn't look fake.
And we're not pretending to be experts.
We're trying to figure it out.
Right.
Just like all of you are.
And we bring a particular evolutionary toolkit that most people don't have, but we'd love for everyone to have it.
And we bring particular experiences that, you know, that happen to mean that we know stuff about science funding and bats and, you know, and such that like, and public health that, you know, the so-called experts probably didn't see coming.
Yep.
So, okay.
So in person is going to be an absolute key given what's coming.
The other thing I feel a little bit strange about saying from our starting point, but I wonder the following thing is true.
Amongst the people who we now know well, the people who figured out how to think their way through COVID and found each other and became the movement of COVID dissidents, there is a high degree of religious faith.
There is.
It is interesting.
And I always took that to imply that there's something about the courage that one gets from thinking, you know, well, there's only so much they can do to me down here on earth, but this matters in some context they can't do anything about.
If you have that faith, it probably emboldens you to face down what's frankly otherwise very frightening forms of coercion.
So that's what I always took to be the reason that we see so much religious faith in the COVID dissident community.
But I'm wondering also if belief in some higher power narrative does not also provide you an anchor point that doesn't change irrespective of how murky the evidence gets.
In fact, specifically because it is not an evidentiary question, right?
You inherit a belief in something, or you adopt a belief in something, and that something is by its very design impervious to proof.
And therefore, as the world of certainty collapses around you, it still leaves you something in which you can be certain and not something arbitrary, right?
If you made up your own God and maintained a belief in it, it wouldn't be useful.
In fact, it would mislead you as often as not.
But if you take something that has been proven out over the course of thousands of years, then it at least retains some kind of reliable currency.
It has a truth value that is maybe not measured in its description of the universe, but it is measured in its utility over very long periods of time.
Yeah, it's tethered to humanity's past, such that not only has it therefore literally stood the test of time, but it has been with real human beings for generation after generation after generation across not just time, but also space.
And so, I mean, there's both a like, therefore there is reality and value there, but there's also this question of, oh my goodness, I don't even know if what we're seeing are real people.
Like, well, you know that this thing that you have faith in has been believed by real people whom you will never met because they are in the past, whom you will never meet because they are in the past, but they were real.
Of that, you can be sure.
And there is value there that is unchanging.
Yes, and you can imagine at the point that the mental multiverse crisis is at a fever pitch, right?
Where you discover some fundamental elements of what you assume to be correct are incorrect.
And you're now trying to refactor everything based on, you know, if I, you know, if I'm three universes over from the one I thought I lived in, how does that change the combinatorics of all of the various other things that I'm uncertain about?
You could imagine being in that state.
And frankly, you know, you and I are non-believing members of this dissident community.
I think we're kind of structured to deal with that uncertainty and find a different way through it.
But you could imagine that for almost anybody, that having something that you don't have to go back and rethink would be, well, it'd be a godsend.
So anyway, I don't know.
Well, I hope I don't know where we're headed because my suspicion about where we're headed is that it's not going to be pretty and it's sooner rather than later.
But I do think it is useful that there are at least two pieces of concrete advice that come from this preview of where we're headed.
One of them is meet people in person and the other is consider embracing belief systems that have some timeless value because everything else is going to get pretty murky pretty fast.
Yeah.
Well, that's actually a decent segue to the last little thing I want to do today, which is talk about foxes.
Actual foxes.
And before, so I have about four minutes of videos across five videos to show, but before we start showing them, this, you have not seen, you were not present for this event.
You came in at the very end.
So you only have my and Zach's word and these videos, which I can assure you I have not edited for evidence.
But last week we talked about the barn swallows and the clutch of five that fledged and the definitely one, maybe up to three who survived.
Up to two.
Up to two who survived, yeah.
And not right in our landscape, but very close by.
We've also been watching for just a little bit longer since the beginning of May as opposed to the end of May, a fox den that has a mother, a mated pair.
The barn swallows and the foxes both pair bond, at least for season.
And we've named some of these.
So Vera, the mother of the fox pair, and we believe that Cinnamon is the father.
We see them both a lot.
We saw their five kits when they were first coming above ground, just adorable little fuzzballs.
And I now have, I am, I have visual evidence as of yesterday that at least four of those kits still survive, and it might be all five, but I saw all four at once.
So it's just amazing.
They've had tremendous success so far.
But they've begun roaming the neighborhood.
And so we see them in our yard and lots of yards.
And there's a particular intersection near us.
Slow, dead-end roads, except for one direction.
So not a lot of traffic, but where the foxes hang out.
And I was cooking dinner one night around seven, and Zach came home and said, mom, you got to come.
I was like, I'm doing this.
You got to come now.
And so he took me out.
And so just before we do start to show these, I'll say this is grizzly because this is predation.
The predation has already happened.
And I actually suspect that this was roadkill.
So what we have is very unusual, which is a raccoon being, foxes attempting to eat a dead raccoon.
The raccoon is already quite limp.
Given that it's happening in the middle of the road, I suspect it was a roadkill, a young raccoon.
But that's what we're going to be seeing here.
And we can talk over.
So here we have, this is the kit who I call cheeks because he has white cheeks on both his face cheeks and his butt cheeks.
So this is Cheeks.
And you can see this is just like Chipcoat Road.
And he is trying to get into this carcass.
And it's not a full-size raccoon.
The kits at this point, this is a fox kit from this year that came above ground in early May, but it's almost full-sized.
But raccoons are generally a lot bulkier and bigger than that.
So he just is trying to gnaw on the foot.
You can't get in.
You can't get in.
And this is 7 p.m. on July 14th.
So you can see the long shadows on the road.
We're under tree cover mostly, but it's still pretty light because we're very far north.
So July 14th is still quite a bit of daylight left.
And Zach and I, our 21-year-old son, are watching this thinking, God, you just got to get out of the road, buddy.
Got to get out of the road.
And there's Cinnamon in the grass, his dad, Cheeks' dad, watching this whole thing.
And oh, here we go.
Okay, I'm going to drag I, Cheeks, I'm going to drag this raccoon out of the road.
Oops, dad, help me.
Nope, got it.
Okay, I'm going to drag this some more.
And I think we're probably coming near to the end of this.
That's actually, that's good.
This shows the kit innovating something useful.
The road is not the place that he wants to be wrestling with this.
Precisely.
So now he's, if you're not watching, although you probably do want to see this, find video of this, he's dragged it onto the grass and Cinnamon, his dad, is watching and not yet intervening at all.
Just sort of looking at us, calm.
We are familiar to him and he is familiar to us.
Which is interesting also because cinnamon, you know, we are now headed into late summer and midsummer still, but cinnamon is clearly not ready for winter.
Cinnamon is a bit scrawny.
And, you know, these are the good times.
This is summer.
You should be bulking up because winter, he needs all the fat he can get.
But although cinnamon is clearly big enough to muscle his way in here, he's just letting this kit wrestle with this carcass, which is presumably because that's what a parent would do.
So here, this is just a minute or two later.
This is Cheeks again, having pulled the carcass of the raccoon off into the grass.
Oh, God, that's a handsome fox.
But still, still not getting in.
So this is just like a 21-second video.
So this is very short.
And he could see us, and we're not hassling him, so he's not perturbed by us.
Now let's go to the next one.
Same place.
Here we have Cinnamon walking by, like definitely being present.
And it sort of feels like Cheeks is looking for some advice, looking for some help.
Like, how do I get in here?
This seems like good eating, but I can't do it, Dad.
And he's just, he's working it.
And Cinnamon is watching, looking, assessing, kicking himself in the side, as all carnivorans do at some point, I think.
That crazy dog look on his face feels really good, doesn't it?
just, he got the spot.
And now it feels like Cinnamon's about to make a decision.
And so this, we have, excuse me for those not watching, Cinnamon approaching the carcass that Cheeks is at.
And the next video is, I think, totally hilarious.
Cinnamon has picked up the carcass and is trotting down the road with it.
And Cheeks, one of his five kits, is like, dad, dad, wait, I want that.
That's mine.
And Cinnamon's like, dude, I'm going to hip check you.
I have a plan.
And at first it seems like he's going to drop it right there on the double yellow line.
Like that's not a good choice.
But the fact is that although Cheeks had dragged, and actually, if you want to show that one again, because that's just such a great little piece of video, although Cheeks had successfully dragged the carcass off the road into the grass, that was at an intersection that was still pretty well trafficked.
And so what is happening here is, as I know, and even though you weren't there, you know where cinnamon is going.
Cinnamon is going to another spot that is down a dead end road in which there is some little meadow and some forest where people never are.
And if you know to look for them, you can stand at the edge of the road and look.
But I think people mostly are respectful and don't go in there and hassle the foxes.
And so finally, and I have more video, but if we want to show just the last little 18 seconds of video in the spot that Cinnamon deposited this raccoon carcass, here we have from a distance, Cheeks has actually successfully gotten in.
And I backed off at this point because once he had actually gotten in, and I don't actually know the sex of Cheeks, the kit, two of the other kits showed up and started coming around and there was a little bit of growling and a little bit of altercation.
But ultimately, at least three of the kits got some of that raccoon carcass, which is, you know, that's reality.
Yeah, that's reality.
That's reality.
It is.
I will say there is a lot.
The foxes are fascinating and surprising in many ways.
They are monogamous.
We've seen courting behavior.
We hear courting behavior somewhat regularly.
We've seen it.
Not in like January, February.
Yeah.
We've seen it once, and it's super dramatic.
But it is also possible.
We don't really know that cinnamon is the dead.
We infer that from the behavior, but there's a lot of this helper at the nest stuff, you know, kits from a previous year who stick around and help out.
So that's a possibility here as well.
He's around a lot.
I see him more than I see Vera at this point.
And I often see kits trailing Vera and she's kind of like, okay, okay, fine.
Like, I'll put up with this.
But she doesn't seem to be as engaged in teaching or as in sort of watching and shepherding behaviors like what we just saw.
Yeah.
And, you know, how this all conveys the lessons to the kids that they need to know.
And, you know, the message that comes again and again when you watch any of these creatures, whether it's the raccoons, the foxes, barn swallows, any of them, is that they are in a race.
And the race is against time because winter is this, yeah, because winter is always coming.
And so the question for a temperate creature like any of these is, well, you've got two choices.
You either migrate away from winter, which causes a whole bunch of constraints, right?
It's not easy to migrate away from winter.
It may be a better deal than facing winter.
You know, we have two hummingbird species.
One of them migrates out and the other one somehow survives winter, even though I really, it's hard to imagine that they're finding enough nectar in the winter, but somehow they do.
and they would even if there were no feeders in the world but the I think feeders have changed things.
They probably changed the size of the population, but they've- They've changed the population density, but they haven't changed the outlines of the range.
Of the range, right.
So the, you know, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
If you migrate, you've got the constraints of a migrator.
That's rough.
If you don't migrate, you've got to endure the winter.
That's rough.
You know, birds don't hibernate, so that's not an issue for them.
But for the foxes, they can't migrate.
They couldn't, even if they were on the mainland, they couldn't migrate far enough to be useful.
Sometimes you have altitudinal migrations and things.
But by and large, they are going to face the winter.
The winter is going to be a time of austerity.
And so bulking up during the summer is the thing to do.
And anyway, watching all of these creatures in the good times, and it seems like, oh, well, prey is plentiful and all of that.
But the answer is no, it's a boom-bust cycle where you don't even know how long the bust part of the cycle is going to be or how cold it's going to get.
And therefore, how much fuel you have to have on board to remain warm enough to be alive at the other end of it.
Yeah.
And these are, you know, foxes weren't on our list of usual suspects, but they're right on the cusp there as not social in the same way that wolves are, but family social with helpers at the nest and extended kin relationships among siblings and such.
And therefore, a lot of what they know how to do in the world is based on having experience it, having learned it, as opposed to having it be hardwired in when they're born.
Therefore, unlike, say, boy, a garter snake that isn't going to learn, that we do have here as well, that doesn't have to experience winter to know what to do in winter because it's not learning much about its environment through the experience of it.
It's born with the hardwiring in.
The fact that these foxes, these fox kits like Cheeks that I was just showing you, have literally never experienced a winter because they weren't born yet when winter happened last means that they do not know what is coming.
There is something in them that knows that they need to eat now and eat a lot and put on fat and all that, and they know that it's conscious and not linguistic or anything, but they literally do not know.
They have no way to assess what changes are happening.
And one thing that I wonder, especially when I watch Cinnamon interacting with them, because whether or not Cinnamon is the dad, which I think, or helper at the nest from a previous year, he has experienced a winter.
So to what degree can he share his knowledge?
You know, we saw him in these videos watching, assessing, looking, transporting the prey.
But to what degree can complexity, can abstraction get conveyed?
And usually our assumption is without language, not much, but there has to be some.
And this is one of the things that I want to know the most about the social animals.
Like what are all of the ways by which you are communicating and conveying things that we miss because we don't do it that way?
Yeah, I mean, we do, but we do it on such different topics that we don't really...
Like how much are the animals inferring something about how to allocate their time based on the prey that their mother brings them, right?
So, you know, you could invert, there might be a creature that's very nutritious to eat, but is a waste of your time because the amount you have to invest to get X units of food is just not worthwhile.
And so having an aversion to that kind of food, even though if you happen to find it, it's good, is something you would pick up.
So, you know, a parent can convey something without it being a lesson.
It can be implied by the way the parent spends their time.
Although it may, I mean, depending, because we talked about this a little bit last year, last episode, we think that they are going to be somewhat territorial.
And the prey that the mother and perhaps the father are bringing young kids is inherently about what is available in that territory at that time.
It's hyper-local.
But if, let's call it the mother who's doing it, the mother presumably wants to hold on to her territory because it has successfully raised a clutch, a litter of foxes once already.
She wants to hold on to that.
So she has the goal of raising this year's kits to success and getting them to disperse so that she can raise more the following year in the same place.
But having dispersed, they are less well suited to the place they've dispersed to precisely because it's not where they grew up.
Right.
And they have to intuit the new landscape and figure out what might be profitable there.
But it's also, this is really exactly how you have to think about this.
Yes, she wants to retain the territory.
Why does she want to retain the territory?
And this does have human parallels, right?
The parent is overjoyed when the offspring produces grandoffspring, unless the parent is still producing offspring, at which point there tends to be tension with the offspring producing grandoffspring too early, right, in humans.
In this case, the mother prefers to keep that territory because she's twice as related to her own offspring, the one she will produce next year, as she will be to her grandoffspring.
So she has twice the incentive to foster their well-being than her own grandoffspring.
And foxes, unlike humans, do not continue to survive after their reproductive lives are over.
They don't have menopause.
Right.
They don't have menopause.
Very few creatures do, like the tiniest handful, maybe elephants, orcas, people.
I think that might be it.
But so on the one hand, go forth into the world and find your own territory that will feed your own kits is the message.
But she does have enough of an interest in the well-being of her own kits, even at the point she would rather they be feeding themselves that she doesn't want them to starve to death because that's a huge loss given the investment she's already put into them.
And we see this in all kinds of creatures.
You see it, I remember, I don't know where I saw it, but there was some marvelous video of a cheetah mother whose cub had grown up, but was not doing well this year.
And there was tension as that cub returned, but the mother grudgingly allows it because, of course, you know, having that former cub starve to death is a huge loss.
And, you know, accepting some increased risk to herself by allowing this animal to hunt in her territory and helping out is a better deal than, you know.
You can come back home, but you're going to have to contribute to the rent.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So anyway, that is the natural tension.
And, you know, actually, our good friend Bob Trivers opened this line of inquiry with his great work on parent-offspring conflict, which is a very powerful insight that parents and offspring are not totally aligned.
They have a conflict of interest.
They have overwhelmingly aligned interests, but there's also a level of conflict.
And that explains not only the behavioral observations, but it explains physiological observations that David Haig then went on to describe in detail, the conflict between mother and fetus.
They are not in total alignment either.
And this also has very powerful implications for human behavior.
You know, one of the things I never hear discussed, and it frustrates me, is there's lots of this, you know, pseudo-sophisticated thinking about, you know, get over monogamy, right?
Monogamy is something that the patriarchy imposed, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no, no, no, no, right.
You are much better off as a mother, you are much better off having a brood that are full siblings than half siblings because their conflict with each other is elevated if they are half siblings.
And therefore, their success as, you know, as a team and their, you know, the likelihood of your being able to raise them well goes up if they have less conflict with each other because they're each fully 50% related to each other.
So all of these things play out.
And I will say one of the really fun things about A, having the luxury of watching animals in the wild, which is one of the great pleasures in life, really, and having a toolkit with which to think about these things in this term or in these terms is those questions,
you know, as you're watching gorgeous little foxes doing amazing things in front of you, the questions present themselves.
Yeah.
Right.
They do.
You know, who are these kids to each other?
And, you know, in some creatures.
What will Cheeks do once he finally gets into their Accun carcass and his siblings come over?
He, having spent all this time trying to get into it, now they want some?
Right.
Well, he lives with them.
Like the three or four of them are hanging out together more than either of them are with their parents anymore, but he just did all that work.
Isn't that his?
Doesn't he have sort of right of first refusal and all that meat?
But maybe that's more meat than he can eat.
And there are rules in human hunter-gatherer societies, especially, but in all human societies except the chaotic one that we live in now, in which most of the rules have been thrown out, around how, to whom, in what order, and what parts of the animal food gets shared when men return from a large hunt.
And it's different when you're talking about smaller animals and the kinds of animal foods that the women tend to bring in.
But when a large game animal returns with a group of men, the rules are different across different societies, but as far as I know, always established.
And this isn't, we're not talking about written down.
These are often non-literate cultures.
But the man who actually made the killing blow may have the first, and then any women who are pregnant at the time may get first access to the liver.
There's all of some of these rules that end up showing up over and over and over again.
But this is how you both encourage extraordinary skill.
The man who hunts the best does get the best and the most.
But also encourage community such that everyone will get taken care of within reason.
Everyone has to do their part.
But if you happen to not be excellent at the thing that you, because of the sex you were born to, need to be excellent at, you're part of our community.
We're still going to take care of you.
But you're not going to get the best of the best because that wouldn't be right.
And in human beings, we do the really odd thing, which is we spell this stuff out.
And, you know, there may be some, you know, I'm very fond of the Inuit saying that the best place to store excess meat is in your friend's stomach, right?
It's sort of a Buckminster Fuller style of point, right?
Obviously, you're not storing anything in anybody else's stomach, but you kind of are because you're banking it as a favor, right?
Rather than hoarding the meat and letting your friend starve, sharing the meat, what's going to happen when you didn't succeed in the hunt, you know?
So anyway, we spell this stuff out.
In foxes, they don't spell anything out, right?
So how does it work?
Notoriously bad spellers.
Oh, worse than me.
But presumably, this is all mediated through stuff like hunger and annoyance, right?
Like what would this look like if, you know, if the kit is at the point where the resource is necessary to get through winter, and therefore the other kit's need for it is not paramount, then the point is you will see annoyance that will result in a greater investment in driving the other animal off.
You will find annoyance on the part of the mother at the point that she needs to get the kids to move and find their own territory.
So that she can make more resource for herself.
Right.
And none of it is explicit.
They know nothing about genes.
The point is they're just wired to, well, to the extent that they are well wired to match the mapping that causes the right level of aggression and affiliation and all of those things.
The better their internal mapping is, the better it matches the genes that they know nothing about, the more likely it is that that pattern will be reinforced.
And the miraculous thing in birds and mammals is that this is happening on two channels, right?
In the garter snake or a gecko or a trout.
Dragonfly.
Yeah, any of those things.
It's all in the genome, which is an amazing fact in and of itself.
Like, you know, the idea that like the dragonfly probably doesn't feel anything about anything, but the gecko might well.
The point is those, how you're supposed to feel about this prey item or that danger is somehow encoded in four letters.
That's an amazing fact.
In the foxes or the barn swallows or raccoons or deer or any of these other things, you've got the part that comes to you through the genes, which cannot be perfectly matched to your particular patch of the universe.
And then you've got the part that you picked up by following your mother around and seeing what she did and all of that, all the cultural stuff.
And that can be really well mapped onto, I mean, in orcas, there are some beautiful examples where a pod learns to exploit a particular spot on the coast, which they can trick fish into escaping in, and then the fish have no way out and use that to hunt.
Right.
So that, you know, that's like a quirk of a coastline that you can inherit in the same way that you would inherit a predisposition to feel some way physiologically.
Right.
I mean, this is, you know, this is why does territoriality evolve?
Right.
Like it doesn't just evolve because, well, we need stuff and I want to defend it against others.
Like it evolves also because the benefit in having a thing isn't just in being able to keep others away from it.
The benefit in having a piece of land, of territory, of sea, in the case of coastline, the case of the orcas, is that you know it.
Home court advantage.
Exactly.
It's exactly what I was just going to say.
That you have home court advantage.
You know everything about it.
Or you know more about it than any interloper will.
And so, you know, I saw this over and over and over again with my frogs, with the Mantella Levagata, the Madagascan poison frogs that I studied, where I would watch a territory holder and I had them marked and I was watching them for months on end.
So I knew basically the boundaries of the territories, but I definitely knew like, okay, that's, you know, A1 and that's his territory.
And here comes J6 tattooed on the back by me.
So I knew who it was.
And I know that J6 is an aggressive male because I've seen him in other territories, and I know he's going to pick a fight here.
And the fact is that even if J6 happens to be, wow, J6 is maybe not.
Really unfortunate choice of the broader.
I'm going to go with the D4.
D4.
D4 has come in and maybe he's actually bigger and burlier and better able to win a fight.
But the home court advantage gives A1, the territory holder, the advantage that almost always, almost always means that the territory will not change hands that day.
That the individual who started the day with a territory is very likely to be the individual who ends the day with that territory, no matter how many times that territory is challenged in a day, precisely because he knows it well.
All right.
One last point, though.
We have described a continuum in terms of flexibility and learning, right?
The garter snake is going to be closer to the frog, but I think your frogs were likely amongst the various non-social vertebrates or non-meaningfully social vertebrates.
They are going to be rudimentary in terms of the amount of learning.
You know, the garter snake probably knows the garden.
Right.
But because these frogs were both territorial and they had parental care by both parents, even though they weren't pair bonded, there was a lot of relationship between individual frogs that you don't see in the vast majority of frogs.
Right.
But probably very little culture at the point that the baby frogs migrate out.
They navigate based on what their genomes tell them, and they might be able to learn a particular patch of something, but they're not picking up how to be a frog from anybody.
So over, you know, dragonfly probably picks up nothing at all from other dragonflies.
Frog, very minimal.
And then you get over towards the birds and mammals.
There are a couple of exceptional bird species, but almost all bird species and every single mammal species picks up at least a substantial amount from what is it, like bush turkeys?
Bush turkeys.
The bush turkeys that have like no parental care.
Yeah, parents lay the eggs in a rotting mound of leaves to get them to incubate and walk away so they never meet.
And also you can make the same argument.
Not as you would predict the brightest birds.
Right.
Oh, of course not.
Same thing for things like cuckoos, which are brood parasites, where they do encounter other birds, but it's the wrong species, right?
They've had their eggs laid in the nest of some other species.
And so picking up, you know, how to be a robin doesn't make any sense, right?
It's not a good thing to do.
So they also have to pick it up from the genome.
But once you get out towards birds and mammals, where a lot in potentially a lot of behavior is picked up from elders culturally, you get all of this amazing flexibility and the ability to learn the idiosyncrasies of the habitat, the local spot.
But you get a huge vulnerability too, which is that all of the knowledge necessary to be a fox or whatever can be wiped out in one generation.
So these animals are really hard to reintroduce into the wild because the fact that you have a healthy animal and you say, go forth into the wild.
Go be a fox.
They don't know what it means.
And so anyway, those, you know, the reintroduction of things like condors or wolves requires humans to understand enough about what it is to be a wild condor or wolf or whatever in order to be able to simulate it well enough that the animal can cover the distance when it actually gets into the wild and discovers how subtle that process actually is.
So anyway, all very interesting.
Oh, it's fascinating.
I'd like to talk more about this every week.
Sure.
All right.
And we will, in fact, be back next week to talk about we don't know what yet, but maybe it'll be more foxes if you're lucky.
We appreciate you watching.
Consider joining us on locals, subscribing to our YouTube channel, now remonetized, crazy, and liking and sharing clips that you find on Instagram, YouTube, anywhere.
Check out our sponsors this week, which once again were Massa Chips, Caraway, and CrowdHealth, all amazing companies making awesome products in the case of Massa Chips and Caraway or offering amazing services in the case of CrowdHealth.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
