Honoring Charlie Kirk: The 295th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we give a tribute to Charlie Kirk: who he was, how he engaged with people, and what we lost when we lost him. Kirk was a patriot, a Christian, a husband and a father, and believed in the humanity of all people. Then, for the living: regenerative agriculture, Polyface Farm, and the rejection of Big Ag in favor of real food and community. ***** Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: http...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I forgot to even check what number is it?
293?
295.
295, of course.
Yes.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are, of course, Dr. Heather Haing.
The last time that we were streaming, while we were on the air, Charlie Kirk was shot.
And those of you who were watching know that we did not know how to respond to this because, of course, at the time, we did not have any idea how serious Charlie's injuries were.
That became obvious when we stopped streaming and saw the footage, of course.
In any case, we've done a lot of thinking in the intervening week, and there's an awful lot that needs to be said.
So we are going to discuss Charlie's life, his death, the significance of both, and then how it is that we move on from this with today's stream.
Anything you want to say before we launch into it?
Well, you, just in terms of sort of the logistics of what we usually do here, we pair rent up top with sponsors to whom we are very, very grateful.
And you worked with our amazing ad broker today and asked if we could move the ads off this live stream because you felt that it wasn't appropriate to have commerce involved in what you understood to be a tribute to a man assassinated in the prime of his life and who was a great hope to many people.
So we won't be starting the way that we usually do.
And I think let you just begin.
All right.
First, I want to just say Charlie's death has impacted me profoundly.
I did know Charlie, and that's part of it.
But I don't want to overstate the degree to which I knew Charlie.
I want it to be, I want you to have a perfectly accurate understanding of where we were so that you can understand what it is that's really throwing me about this.
Charlie and I were becoming friends.
When I first became aware of Charlie, I did not know what to think because, of course, I wasn't paying attention to Charlie himself.
I was paying attention to whatever it is that comes through with the algorithms being what they are.
And I have long been profoundly concerned about the Republican Party.
So his tight connection with the Republican Party predisposed me to think negative things about Charlie.
But I came to know Charlie in the run-up to Rescue the Republic when we interacted and it became clear to me that he was very supportive of the non-partisan movement that was taking form, that he was not a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, though he obviously was on that side of the aisle.
And the more I interacted with Charlie, the clearer it was that I had misunderstood him and misjudged him, that this was somebody who was really interested in figuring out what was true and bringing people together, and that that was a lesson for me.
And it's not the only time I've learned that lesson where somebody I thought I had a bead on, it turned out, was much, much greater than I had hoped.
So Charlie and I were becoming friends.
He, in fact, was one of a small number of people who rescued Rescue the Republic when it was in deep trouble.
He bailed us out financially.
And he was going to be the closing speaker at Rescue the Republic.
We were all very excited about that.
He canceled when he developed laryngitis, which I learned after his death is something he was prone to.
But at the time, his doctor had told him.
that he couldn't deliver that speech or he risked losing his voice at a critical moment in the campaign.
But in any case, we continued to work together.
And I think it's quite clear.
I finally went back to my text exchanges with Charlie.
We had numerous phone conversations with my text exchanges and just reminded myself of what they were.
And, you know, it was quite clear that we really appreciated each other despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Now, I guess the first section of what I want to discuss here is why this feels personal beyond just the fact that somebody that I knew was assassinated in an extremely public and terrifying fashion.
And I think the first thing to say is that one of the things that was very special about Charlie was that his instinct in a moment in which we are polarized, like few times before in history, his instinct was constantly to reach across the aisle, to jump the divide, to humanize those that are being dehumanized by others.
And I think it's why we got along.
And as I think our viewers will know, it's also our instinct is to figure out what is going on on the other side and try to understand from their perspective.
So that's a rare characteristic.
It's very easy to fall into the polarization.
And Charlie was so good at not doing that.
And so go ahead.
I didn't know him, as you know.
And I've spoken to many people who also feel a deep sense of grief and loss and mourning despite not having known him, which has been a strange thing in and of itself to grapple with, which is, I think, where most of our viewers will be.
But to the point that you're making right now, the exchanges that I have seen that he has with interlocutors whom he does not know on college campuses mostly also reveal a willingness to push back with a generosity of spirit,
but a rigor that is also quite rare right now, that it's not just that he was overwhelmingly kind and gracious and recognized everyone's humanity, which he did, which we should all be doing and which many of us are failing to do.
But he also, and this is rarer yet, and is also something that we strived to do, strive still, but strive to do explicitly in the classroom.
And it does feel like he was making a classroom out of all of these interactions that he was in.
When people came to him with views that he did not agree with, he told them no, and he told them why.
And he appreciated when they engaged back with him.
But I know that many of the youth of America now are shocked when someone pushes back without conflating what you're saying with who you are.
That the pushback, as far as I can tell, never with Charlie Kirk, and this is a rare, rare characteristic.
There was never a conflation of, I don't agree with what you're saying with, I don't like who you are.
The fact that I don't like what you're saying or I don't agree with what you're saying has no bearing on whether or not I still view you as a human being.
And that may be one of the rarest characteristics we see in public, but I think in private as well now.
And one of the things that made him so powerful in a very good way.
Yes.
And I think one of the positive things that have come out of this terrible tragedy, and I will get later to why the tragedy is so terrible in this case.
But one of the things, the positive things that has come out of it is there has been a survey of the catalog of all of the interactions that Charlie Kirk had on these campuses.
And you can see this again and again.
And I have a couple.
People may have seen them, but I think it's worth a minute or two just to see what this looked like in action because it is the degree to which he was falsely portrayed to his would-be enemies was spectacular.
It was the absolute inverse of who Charlie Kirk was.
And so, Jen, would you play the clip of the young man who introduces himself as a conservative?
I'm a gay conservative, and I just want to kind of ask you, like, what do you have to say for people like me who kind of feel like, I guess it's kind of hard for gay conservatives because there's not a lot of us.
So like, what do you have to say to other gay people who need to realize like they do have a choice?
Yeah, first of all, welcome to the conservative movement.
I don't think you should introduce yourself just based on your sexual attraction.
No, I agree.
I like to say that.
Because that's not who you are.
I like to be thought of as a person.
And for sure.
You are a complete human being.
And I'm sure you treat people well and you're studying something.
So I want to get away with this idea that you're gay anything.
I just think that we have gone a long way in the negative direction in this country where we act as if the most important part of your identity is what you do in the bedroom.
It doesn't mean that much to me.
But if you ask from a perspective as a Christian, I don't agree with that lifestyle.
But politics is about addition and multiplication.
I imagine you agree with a lot of what we talk about.
Absolutely.
Right.
Strong borders, strong country.
And for that, you know, we welcome you into the conservative movement.
Thank you.
I just think that's so remarkable because, you know, Charlie had a religious conviction that does say something about the characteristic that this young man chooses to introduce himself with.
But it does not, it doesn't throw Charlie at all.
He embraces him.
He invites him into the conservative movement.
And, you know, that is not the exception.
That's every single clip you'll find.
It's an explicit and honorable rejection of identity politics in a way that mostly the rejections of identity politics that we see feel screechy and ideological in and of themselves.
So, you know, we hear two other forms of identification in that interchange.
We hear conservative and we hear Christian.
And yet they are not being worn as badges.
They are simply, they are being invoked as things that these people believe.
And that is actually, I think, one of the distinctions between, you know, like we do have things that are true about ourselves, which could be called parts of our identity.
But identity politics, which as we see there in so many other places, Charlie Kirk explicitly rejected, is mostly about characteristics that were actually immutable.
And so, you know, characteristics that are actually immutable are, you know, or, you know, or so we are led to believe are not anything to be, you know, proud of one way or the other.
I think they can be true of you, but, you know, it is who you have come to be, who you have made yourself to be, that is the thing to be thinking about and presenting to the world and engaging with the world about.
It is the necessary characteristic because if we don't engage in that, the trajectory is clear.
Again, there's more to say on that topic.
But there was another clip that struck me.
I think many of us have struggled with how to deal with trans folks because obviously this has been used as a Trojan horse by activists who are looking to breach the protections for women's sports, etc.
And so there is a way in which it's easy to lose one's compassion by virtue of what a small group of people is doing in the name of a larger group of people.
But even here, Charlie does this and it's just evident.
Much better for Charlie to speak for himself than to allow me to do it.
So can we play that clip?
I just want to say I'm a transgender male.
What age should kids be able to get things like hormone therapy?
Because I don't know what's true, what's not.
Tell me, are you comfortable telling me your story?
I've known that since like third grade.
And I'm currently 19, almost 20.
I've known basically since then, I didn't start going by like a different name until seventh and eighth grade.
I just don't know like with the whole medical stuff, like what's true, what's not, what's helpful, because I've heard so many different opinions.
First of all, thank you so much for that.
Of course.
So I'm going to have an opinion that very few people will ever tell you, which is I want you to be very cautious putting drugs into your system in the pursuit of changing your body.
I instead encourage you to work on what's going on in your brain first.
I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis, just someone that is going to listen to what you've gone through, listen to what else is going on.
My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born.
I know that you might not feel that way, but I think that is something that you can achieve.
I think that with the right team and the right people, you don't have to wage war on your body.
You can learn to love your body.
Yeah, there's just something so powerful.
You can feel he's not, you know, reviewing what he's saying in his head to figure out what will play well.
He's just having an interaction with this person who's struggling, and it's a very human interaction.
And anyway, that's such a unique characteristic.
And the loss of one such person is a spectacular loss because of how easy it is to fall into a polarization from which there is no return.
How sad it is that that interaction feels rare.
I'm actually struck by that because I watched that and did not think it unusual.
But then I think about how many other interactions I have seen, at least publicly like that.
And it's very, it's very rare.
It is Almost all of us just feel like we've been backed up against a wall.
We're in a corner and we're told we have to know what we think.
We have to have certainty.
We have to already have our opinions ready.
And those things about which we are pretty certain, then when we start getting badgered, it's real easy to just lash out, to just lash out.
And I've seen it.
I mean, I've seen it in places that I didn't expect it.
I've seen just the desire to demonize those who might well have not have your best interests at heart.
But if there's a chance of actually reaching across that aisle, and in this case, I don't mean the aisle down the middle of Congress inherently, although that's one of the aisles that we should be reaching across.
But any aisle, any boundary, which is to say anyone that is not you.
And in some cases, like that young woman, there are many people who are conflicted within themselves and have been told lies by the pharma and medical industry that they can become something they cannot become through technological interventions.
So be it a conflict within yourself or conflict with others, approaching with grace, but also just trying to be honest in the moment about what it is that you feel.
And there will be a lot of moments, a lot of times when you just don't know.
You just don't know.
And then it may be incredibly difficult to say, I don't know what we're doing here.
I don't know what I think.
I'm going to walk away.
And that is a better move than to strike out, strike back, hit at whoever it is that is coming at you.
And of course, it's just fundamentally different once you're talking about the online world, because so much of what is happening there isn't a real person that you're interacting with.
And it is no good at all.
It is not healthy in any regard to engage with those things.
Yes.
And in fact, the confusion that comes from the online effect, either by you being shown things that are effectively an edit on the full richness of reality or denied the view of things causes people to reach conclusions that are upside down and backwards and have no idea that they've done it.
And so on the one hand, you see that with this young self-identified trans person, right?
This person has been told things that are not true about what she can do with medical treatments.
And Charlie is doing her the service of being honest with her, right?
So he's filling in reality where somebody has put together some sort of a fiction.
But here's the other thing that makes this particularly tough.
The same falseness that is being delivered with respect to analytical topics like, you know, can you change your sex or, you know, are the shots safe and effective, which we will get back to here at some point soon.
But that false portrayal is exactly the same as the false portrayal of Charlie in this case, right?
If you listen, and unfortunately, it has been very difficult to avoid the Celebration of Charlie's death by so many people who completely misunderstood what he was, who understood him to be a villain in a manner that just simply being present with him would have told you couldn't possibly be right.
And I really don't want to make this about me, but I will say one of the reasons this feels personal is that you and I have experienced this phenomenon of being portrayed as something that is completely incompatible with what we actually are.
Being villainized.
Being villainized.
You know, you become a witch in the eyes of people who will then go hunt you.
And I was reminded in seeing all of these discussions of Charlie and his views on this and that, just all of this false portrayal that, I mean, I'm sure many of the people who are saying this actually believe that that's who he was and that's why they're having the reaction they are.
But the false portrayal thing is so devastating to our ability to even be a people.
That is true.
However, and I didn't pull this up, but there are those who are receiving only that slice of media, that gross misportrayal of who Charlie Kirk was, who still retain enough of their humanity to remember that this is tragic no matter what.
And what I'm thinking of, and I don't know if, Jen, you might be able to find it, but Jamie Lee Curtis was interviewed by someone.
And Jamie Lee Curtis, who, you know, proudly thinks she has a trans child and is, I believe, a sort of a blue no-matter who Democrat, breaks down in tears about what happened to Charlie Kirk.
And in the middle of it, you know, she says, I think I disagreed with everything he stood for.
And I think that's not possible.
I don't think you could disagree with everything that anyone, like, I don't think that's-Do you disagree with the golden rule?
Right.
Like a particular person.
I doubt that's possible.
And so clear, and so part of that is, you know, a kind of a desperate virtue say to them, like, don't mistake me for having, you know, cryptic, I don't even know what, you know, Republican tendencies.
But I think it also felt like honest, like she really did had bought in to the media portrayal of him as someone who was hateful and bigoted.
And yet, despite that, she is crying truly desperate tears of anguish, of horror, that anyone could consider this action and could consider this outcome a good thing.
And that should remind all of us that no matter what you think is true, you can still retain your humanity.
No matter what else, what you're being fed, no matter how awake you are or not, or how awake you think you are, and you still have so much farther to go because don't we all?
We can all still engage with every single other human being as fundamentally another human being.
Well, and this event is a perfect opportunity to check your model, right?
If you think that the world is better off without Charlie Kirk because homophobe, transphobe, racist, whatever you've been told, go find the evidence of that thing.
You're going to find it impossible.
You will find that he had very clear perspectives, but you're not going to find that evidence.
And so, you know, Jamie Lee Curtis maybe is just barely getting the hint that there is another world that she can't see based on what subset she is in contact with.
Many other people aren't getting that message.
I wanted to show a clip from the early days after the Evergreen meltdown that I was reminded of in hearing all of this nonsense about Charlie.
This is from Vice News, and I will just set it up in the following sense.
I was interviewed by, I think, Michael Moynihan in the immediate aftermath of Evergreen.
So this is a little over eight years ago.
A little over eight years ago, 2017.
He, very professional.
I enjoyed the interview.
Apparently, privately, he was thinking, this guy can't be telling it right.
It can't be accurate.
It's too bizarre.
And the next thing he did was he went to Evergreen itself to see the story on the ground, and he contacted me, and he said, I can't believe it.
It's actually worse than you were saying, which is, you know, one of the things that is hard to believe.
If it's sufficiently out of touch, then it's very difficult for people to believe it's happening.
And so anyway, in the report that he ultimately filed, there's an interview with one of the students who was prominently involved in the protests and riots at Evergreen talking about me.
Now, mind you, this is a student, like all of the others who burst through the door of my classroom.
This is a student that I had never met.
I don't care what happens to Brett anymore.
He can go and be racist and be a piece of shit wherever he wants to do that.
Hopefully long term, we can just weed out people like Brett.
Now, I don't even know what she thinks she's talking about in that clip.
Certainly not responsive to who I actually am.
No, but it was responsive to the narrative that had been created by the activist faculty on campus about which even people who did know better, none of our students, but colleagues of ours who did know better, were silent when they heard that.
And I think one of the things this kind of attitude, this buy-in to false narratives that is then followed with effectively cries to violence has been going on for long enough in this country now.
That was eight years ago, that one of the things that we are seeing in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death is no one is putting up with it.
And of course, that's going in, that's veering into utterly inappropriate responses, right?
Like with, you know, with calls to restrict speech.
No, no, that's not what we do.
But the ramping up, the buying into false narratives and the fear that is used to keep people who we thought were good silent cannot continue.
Yeah, it can't continue.
You've just seen a profound example of an impact.
And I will talk a little bit later about why the impact is so great, even beyond the loss of this person and the, you know, the death of a father and husband and the profound loss to the family.
There's a greater significance here, as many, many have spotted.
But yes, we can't allow that process, which so easily picks up ahead of steam, to continue because where it ends is unthinkable for all of us.
Which brings me to the next element here.
I've heard some of the people who are celebrating Charlie's death specifically draw a connection that stops me in my tracks.
They say, well, Charlie, not only was he a supporter of the Second Amendment, but he said a certain number of deaths was an acceptable price for the value.
And I have made that point many times myself.
I know exactly what Charlie was saying.
And the idea that he was suggesting that those deaths are tolerable is preposterous.
What Charlie was saying was that there is a value of the Second Amendment.
I believe he would argue that the value of the Second Amendment is that it backs up the First Amendment.
It protects the Republic on which we are all depending from tyranny.
So, yes, anyone who says that is accepting that they might be the victim of that.
But the idea that he somehow deserved to be the victim because he believed there was a much higher price that would follow from the loss of the Second Amendment does not suggest that he was callous about anybody's death.
And of course, anyone who knew him knew that he was not callous about any such thing.
So hearing the shallowness on the other side, people refusing, it's a kind of inadvertent sophistry, I think, in most of their cases.
They don't understand that they are refusing to engage the arguments that are being made at full strength, and they have an obligation to do so.
As you point out, the rhetoric, you know, when you start calling people Nazis and fascists and white supremacists, you are deliberately invoking a category that breaks sympathy, right?
The idea that somebody is a participant in fascism or Nazism or white supremacy means that those people are callous and therefore not deserving of human compassion.
You couldn't come up with something that was more diametrically opposed to Charlie's actual perspective, which humanized everybody and sought to find their humanity and to make a connection in real time.
You know how hard that is in front of an audience to make a connection with somebody who comes to the mic thinking that they're your foe.
That's not an easy job to do.
And, you know, Charlie was a Christian in the best sense of that term.
He really, you know, not only did he talk the talk, but he walked the walk and has now paid the ultimate price for it.
And so to just close out this piece, I guess the final thing that makes this feel personal is that all of the folks who are stepping across these lines and trying to heal the country, trying to get out of the terminal spiral that we seem to be in, feel a personal jeopardy.
There's a risk in speaking out.
And we don't know whether the risk is from somebody who will believe some false portrayal of what sort of demon we might be and will act based upon it or somebody who will find their fortune threatened by the truth.
We don't know.
But everybody feels jeopardy.
And I will just say that among other things, this assassin succeeded in raising that to the top level of consciousness for a large number of people.
I believe almost all of them will ultimately come to understand that they must not change their attempt to do what they're doing as a result.
Assassins can't have that power over us as a people, and we have to find our courage wherever it is.
But I think that was a sort of galvanizing aspect of this in a most unfortunate way.
So I wanted to also spend a little time on why Charlie's tragic and terrifying death is significant.
And this is a tough one because one of the things that assassins successfully do is deny us any ability to know what actually might have been.
I think many of us who met Charlie saw something so unusual in him.
He's so articulate, so good at crossing boundaries.
You know, he's only 31.
He's not even eligible to be president.
He's already this talented and poised and capable on, you know, on an impossibly large stage.
And, you know, who knows what he might have been at, you know, 35, at 40, at 45.
We will never know.
So the assassin, whatever the explanation for that assassin is, let's say it's a confused person acting, you know, out of a misguided sense that he is saving the world from someone evil.
You know, it could well be worse than that.
It could be a Patsy also who stands in for powerful forces and puts the blame somewhere where they want it.
But who knows?
Whatever the assassin thought they were doing, they have accomplished a radical shift in history.
Now, it is always possible to look at somebody who's young and very talented and think, oh, they might have been president someday.
And of course, maybe they wouldn't have been.
We have to assume any individual is not likely to attain that office.
But in Charlie's case, he had such unusual gifts that I think it was actually highly likely.
And, you know, I think the best case from the point of view of what this could have been is that it was just a lone, confused individual.
But either way, this assassin has achieved a veto over our right to choose Charlie Kirk and his compassionate way forward.
Somebody has vetoed our ability to choose that.
They have spoken as if they had the mandate of some majority of the country, and that is impossible.
So one of the things that has to be true is we have to have a system in which whatever needs to take place, whatever security needs to be provided must be provided so that assassins don't have this kind of power.
Because if assassins do have this kind of power, we're going to get the dregs.
We're going to get what's left over after they have eliminated those who they truly fear, maybe specifically because of their compassion.
And I just find that if you try to imagine what the size of this loss was, you have to factor in all the things that Charlie would surely have accomplished and might have accomplished in the future, right?
None of those things will ever be.
He accomplished a tremendous amount at 31, but 31 is awfully young.
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
Except for the idea that can make ourselves safe from assassins.
You know, at Rescue, actually, right, they had some speakers and they wanted all the speakers to be behind glass at Rescue the Republic.
And I remember you and I both feeling like, but that's, no, that's not the way to interact with people.
And, you know, you can argue that, you know, standing on a stage with a lectern and a microphone, you're already not interacting with people.
But it's certainly what you and I want to be doing.
And, you know, and we did it.
We went out and talked with some people in the audience as well separately.
But, you know, do you live contained, safe, protected, read-only, right?
Therefore, actually unable to learn from people what their experiences are.
And maybe you only hear it from your staff and then you're getting their take on it.
And they are modifying their take over time to, you know, to not irritate you with some people's takes.
And so they, you know, they edit it and clean it.
And you have to actually interact with real human beings, many types, in order to know what is true of us and where we're going and what the diversity of our minds include.
And to be totally protected from assassins, you need to be in a bubble.
A literal bulletproof bubble.
Yeah, I'm, as I'm sure, you know, I'm not arguing that you can be perfectly safe, but I am arguing that we need to have the structures that make it very difficult for an assassin to accomplish this and certainly so difficult for an assassin to get away with it that the idea would be essentially unthinkable.
What we have at the moment is, let's say, an FBI that most of us don't trust, that most of us feel is compromised by the same sorts of forces that have captured our other regulatory agencies.
We don't, you know, I don't know what happened to the Butler investigation or the other assassination attempt on President Trump.
Those should be matters of national soul searching.
What actually did try to veto a presidency that has now come to pass?
Something did.
Maybe it was two somethings, but we have every right to know what it was.
Instead, we have an FBI that, you know, has gone zombie and has started assuring us that Jeffrey Epstein, for example, definitely killed himself because that's what it says in the FBI file, which, you know, even if he did kill himself, we need to see an investigation that gets there organically.
We don't have the apparatus.
Absent an FBI, assassins have a kind of latitude that they mustn't have.
And that's what I'm saying is that you need this the thing that it says in the brochure about how our system works has to be a match for what we actually have.
We have to have the protections that come from the structures that we're paying for rather than a system in which anything and everything is unhooked by who knows what, what power.
But this, I mean, this, of course, is one of the key revelations of COVID for those of us who thought of ourselves on the left for our entire lives is Frequent calls for obvious need for regulations suddenly seem impossible in light of the definitely difficult and perhaps actually unachievable goal of having regulatory
structures that are not corrupt.
So, get rid of the Department of Education.
When I first heard that, I thought, what?
What?
Well, given the state of education and given that it's not actually about asking Americans to be uneducated, but hoping that Americans can become better educated by creating more localism, by sending departments of ed back to the states and hopefully more local than that.
Okay, maybe better than faceless federal bureaucrats.
The whole Doge attempt, as badly done as much of it was, was, again, an attempt to just unhook bad regulations and bad regulators from American agency.
Well, I think we can sum this up.
Our system has been corrupted from one end to the other, and it needs the equivalent of a reboot, where we all agree that an uncorrupted system that is actually working in the public's interest should be baseline for everybody.
It should be completely unifying.
There's not a person in the country who should be against that.
And frankly, you know, if I think back to, you know, Charlie never tried to convince me to be a conservative.
He knew damn well that I was a liberal, and it didn't bother him at all.
And I think I know exactly why.
I think the basic point was, well, I mean, exactly as I felt about him.
I can see you're a patriot.
I can see that you want things to be better for people, all of them.
So, you know, we can differ over how we get there, but we're on the same team.
And that really ought to be the overarching lesson.
The second reason that this is so significant after the first reason being the radical shift in history that this assassination probably represents is that it also denies Charlie the ability to grow.
Again, he was 31 years old.
And if I think back to what I thought was true at 31, and I think what I now believe to be true at 56, there's unbelievable amounts of growth have taken place in that time.
And I think not only was Charlie growing, but it is inevitable.
And, you know, in a world that is so confused by low quality, low signal to noise ratio and false signal, having somebody who their baseline was to try to get to the bottom of it, no matter what it was, and feeling a courage to do that, it's a necessary thing for us to have.
And to be able to stop somebody in motion and freeze them permanently at whatever they thought at 31 is a kind of tragedy all its own.
And it leaves this third thing about why this is significant is that it leaves this incredible vacuum.
Charlie was, you know, on a trajectory.
He was doing things at a scale that almost nobody ever achieves.
And his sudden and unexpected death creates this vacuum, which is going to be filled by other things.
And already, I mean, I'm not even saying that the desire to fill it is illegitimate.
But, you know, already we see, you know, J.D. Vance sitting in on the podcast and we see Ben Shapiro saying that he's going to pick up Charlie's bloody mic.
And on the one hand, I get it.
I think it's laudable to want to continue what Charlie was doing.
On the other hand, there's something about this that we have to think very carefully.
And I would say, you know, I was a bit troubled hearing Ben Shapiro say that he was going to pick up Charlie's bloody mic.
Because as I read the actual history, Charlie picked up Ben's mic.
Ben Shapiro, his thing used to be to go to college campuses and confront people across the aisle, but he didn't do it in the way that Charlie did it.
He did it in a very confrontational way.
It's not that I don't understand what he was doing, and it's not that I don't even appreciate that he was willing to do it, but it was done without the kind of generosity of spirit that Charlie had.
And so it was also limited in the amount of good it could do for that reason.
Charlie took what Ben was doing and reinvented it so that it was actually welcoming of anybody with the courage to get up at the mic and say to Charlie what they really thought.
And so I do think the absence of Charlie at the mic is profound and important.
And some of the people who lost something profound were the very people that Charlie would have interacted with and would have revealed that there was, you know, a depth to what's going on on the other side that they otherwise would not be encountering it.
But I don't, you know, Ben Shapiro would have to recognize that he had been doing this in a much less productive way in order to pick up the mic meaningfully.
But on the larger point, we are left with a vacuum.
That is unfortunate.
I don't believe the vacuum is going to be filled with a proper replacement for Charlie because there is no such thing.
We can set the goal of all of us leveling up in order to fill that vacuum.
And I think that that's a laudable objective.
And I hope we do it.
I do too.
The fourth piece on the significance of Charlie's tragic death is that it reveals something that you and I have been grappling with here for years now.
So the Cartesian crisis, the fact that we are starved for information that is trustworthy, and that is causing us to not know what to believe.
And the problem is, I don't think that that's a natural state, that in general, our ancestors have been able to assess the world mostly by looking at it.
And we, because we are so dependent on information that comes through screens, are now in a terrifying state where we know very little for sure.
And this is only getting worse with AI.
You know, if we look at the videos that emerged of, you know, the supposed shooter leaving the building, I assume those are what they appear to be, but it's well within the realm of possibility to create such things.
And two years from now, it will be child's play, I would imagine.
I think you have two things that interplay that are making each worse.
You have the Cartesian crisis created by the fact that so much of what we think we know is mitigated through screens and therefore can be utterly manipulated.
AI making that problem much worse.
That's one thing.
But you also have a social media circus, a time horizon that is ever-quickening, such that you are required to have an opinion right now.
As soon as something happens, if you are online, much less wanting to speak to anything, you need to know what you think, even before you possibly could know what is true.
So there is on the one hand the problem that we can't actually know what is true unless we experience it with our own bodies and senses.
And on the other hand, the demand ever more shrill and insane, often not even from real human beings, but too often also from real human beings, to stake a claim, state your position, and then we can go from there.
And the requirement that you know immediately, say immediately, and stick to your guns, all three of those are in error.
We need to be able to remain in a state of agnosticism with regard to what we understand to be true, what we think it means, and how we therefore should go forward.
And I think those of us who were watching this last week saw some evidence of that as we became aware only that Charlie Kirk had been shot, knowing nothing more about it, and did not know how to respond to it other than to be thrown by the fact that there was something huge happening in the world.
And that even if we had felt like, oh, we're going to pause for five minutes and come back after we've informed ourselves, that would have been the wrong move.
Because you can't trust what your brain tells you in the immediate aftermath of learning something strong, emotionally strong, even if you have high confidence that it is true.
You need to let yourself settle.
We are almost all of us living in this constant state of high emotional alert.
And it's not safe.
It's not sane.
And it does not create the best decisions, nor does it create coherent narratives.
And then once people have made a staked a claim to what they think is true, then they feel that they must stick with it.
And that's an error too.
But it's much harder to just not say anything for a bit than to undo what you've already said.
It also creates a vulnerability for us, which I have a feeling we will have to wrestle with this further at another time.
But if you think about, just imagine the following.
We have enemies in the world.
And they may look at us and think They'd prefer a world in which the United States, for example, did not continue to exist.
But there's nobody on earth who can safely go to war with us.
So you might imagine that one play would be, well, invest instead in getting you to go to war with yourself.
In other words, the Cartesian crisis leaves us starved for a narrative that makes sense of the world.
And what I increasingly think is true is that you have two narratives, neither of which makes sense, but are satisfying to different groups.
And the existence of those narratives, you know, the narrative in which Charlie Kirk is some kind of Nazi, that satisfies one group, and they reacted based on that story in the aftermath of his death.
And that meant that a lot of us got to see it up close.
You and I had seen it before targeted at us, you know, white supremacists.
What?
On what planet?
So anyway, point being, we are definitely being fed material that causes us to reach certain conclusions.
In the most benign cases, we are being fed information because the algorithm wants us to stay on the platform.
And so it creates a narrative that we think we need to keep paying attention to.
Effectively, it has us rubbernecking some particular, you know, would-be car crash that it's portraying to us again and again.
In the worst case, somebody decides to set us against each other for their own purposes because they benefit from us hobbling ourselves, right?
How much better is it to get you to go to war with yourself than to go to war with you, right?
So if that isn't happening, it is going to happen.
And we need to become upgraded in our skepticism of that which we see that causes us to say, yes, that's what I think, right?
Anything that reinforces our pre-existing biases needs to be thought about very, very carefully.
And maybe that your pre-existing bias is right.
You know, I certainly think that a lot of the stuff that we've, the conclusions we've arrived at are true.
They're hard won.
Many of them are reversals to things we used to believe, which is part of why I believe them with some conviction.
But anytime the screens are feeding you what you want to hear, you've got to be skeptical.
And anyway, you know, we definitely, in the aftermath of Charlie's death, are on some kind of precipice where we're trying to, you know, it's very hard to have liked Charlie and thought highly of what he was doing and not feel something just awful at those who are cheering and cackling and all of that stuff, if they're even real.
How do I know?
Right?
I'm sure there are people celebrating.
Are some of them copycats celebrating based on portrayals that are fictional that somebody seeded into the zeitgeist so that people would cheer?
I don't know.
But let's put it this way.
In this case, we do know what Charlie thought because he lived it.
And we have who knows how many hours of him crossing the divide and trying to heal it.
And again, what we saw him do over and over again was gently, with due respect to the human on the other side of the interaction, disagree.
Yep.
He pushed back.
He was willing to push back in a way that too few people in any position of authority with young people, parents, teachers, employers are willing to do anymore.
And I know, I know that when we were professors, sometimes early in a program, I would have a student come to me and say, no one has ever given me critique before.
And sometimes that would come with some frustration and anger.
What do you mean?
I'm not worthy.
I don't deserve critique.
If I deserved critique, I would have heard critique before.
Well, no, because the world has become soft and stupid and unwilling to make anyone uncomfortable, even in the moment, even though that is how you grow.
And so we saw Charlie Kirk over and over and over again in so many of these interactions.
I don't know how cherry-picked they are.
I don't know if 90% of his interactions were sort of love fests between him and the people coming to the mic.
I doubt it, but I don't know.
You know, I haven't, I don't pretend to have surveyed most of, you know, a majority of, or even a large number of the interactions he had.
But the ones that I've seen almost always involve him pushing back a bit, offering what is effectively critique from which that person at the other side of the interaction can then learn, can then take that back and say,
ah, okay, I have something from which I can become a more useful human being, more interesting, more whatever, just something more than just look around for people to congratulate me on already having arrived.
Well, I think we do know that they were not heavily cherry-picked in this regard because the whole approach was prove me wrong.
It was deliberately inviting people to tell him what he had wrong and then doing what he did so well, which is, you know, sight evidence, while leaving the person on the other end of the interaction perfectly humanized.
I've seen cases in which the person on the other end made that impossible.
Sure.
But in any case where the person left that possibility open, Charlie did it.
And so it was a beautiful thing.
But the other thing that is raised by your point here is there is something also marvelous.
I'm not sure I even knew this until after his death, but Charlie did not go to college.
So he was...
He started turning point at 18.
Right.
Right.
He started turning point at 18.
He's a beautiful demonstration of the fact that college is not where you become smart, right?
I'm not saying a good college experience can't make a person smarter, but it is not the thing that makes you smart.
Education isn't.
Education is a supplement.
And Charlie was very, very smart and, in fact, wise beyond his years without college.
And yet he was going to college to talk to these people who disagreed with him, which, you know, just a marvelous model.
Okay.
I guess I had a couple other points I wanted to make here.
I'm still, I think it's fair to say, literally stunned by Charlie's death.
I don't feel that I have been myself since last week when this happened during our stream.
And right after, just so you know, right after it became clear, I saw the video of what had happened to Charlie.
And I was shocked, as many people were.
And there were reports that he was still alive.
He still had a pulse.
I can't imagine that that was true.
But nonetheless, 20 minutes later, it was announced that he had died.
And the whole thing, I know I haven't, you know, I haven't been myself for many reasons.
Lots of stuff that I'm usually good at has fallen by the wayside.
I hear lots of people grappling with what they're feeling.
I must say I've taken the most solace from Megan Kelly.
I thought she's done a particularly good job of grappling with her own emotions, including profound and totally understandable anger.
I must say, I think I haven't gotten to anger yet.
Maybe it's not going to hit me, but I think maybe I haven't gotten to anger yet because I don't even know what it was.
It's very different if this was a lone, confused, or deranged person than somebody who found Charlie inconvenient and decided that the threat was too great of leaving him at the microphone.
And we may not know.
Yeah, we may not know.
And in fact, this is one thing.
Unfortunately, the state of our system is such that I think the evidence so far is strange.
Maybe it would be no matter what.
Maybe the strangeness of the evidence means something.
But I think we can be pretty sure that this is going to be yet another event in which we Americans can't even agree what happened.
And I struggle to even explain how bad that is for a population not even to share the same factual narrative of what brought them where they are.
Every time that happens, it is like a jolt that shatters our collective sanity.
And I can't believe we're dealing with it again.
We have to learn how not to do that.
And I don't even know what to do because, you know, the evidence, the Cartesian crisis is going to make whatever quality of evidence we get that much more suspect with each passing year.
I think even the parts of history that we thought we knew are being unraveled.
So the idea that new things that happen will have clarity seems like an impossibility and simultaneously an impossibility and utterly necessary for us.
So how do you reconcile an impossible necessity?
I don't know.
Yeah, well, I would say one thing is true.
And I think, again, the interactions that I had with Charlie tell me that this is something he would resonate with.
The thing that made it very easy to interact with Charlie, despite coming, you know, I'm not a Christian.
I'm an evolutionary biologist.
I'm a lifelong liberal.
But the simple fact that it was quite clear to both of us that the other was a patriot who wanted the best for people, that's a huge platform to build an alliance on.
We need to build an alliance collectively on the idea that whatever happened, whatever happened, we should all want to know.
We should all want to know who decided to intervene in history.
And if that was a lone lefty who thought Charlie was a transphobe, let's find out.
And if it was a conservative who was confused about his conservatism, let's find out.
And if it was something larger than an individual, let's find out.
We should 100% of us be interested in knowing who did this and what their purpose was, because at some level, they have had a hugely disproportionate impact, and we have a right to neutralize it.
Okay.
The final piece of this puzzle is something, again, I apologize for over-personalizing this, but I posted something on X yesterday saying that Charlie wanted the mRNA vaccines removed from the market and that we should get it done in his name.
And I got a bunch of pushback, which I stupidly did not expect, and which really kind of threw me for another loop.
The pushback was essentially, how dare you put words in Charlie's mouth effectively, or where exactly can I see these comments of Charlie's, blah, blah, blah.
You know, effectively like people assumed the worst of me.
They assumed I was using Charlie for my purpose, which maybe most weeks that wouldn't be a big deal to me.
But this week, that really hurt.
So that leaves me with a predicament.
The predicament is this.
I have, in this case, I am lucky to have perfect receipts on Charlie's perspective on this issue.
Receipts that nobody else has.
And they are in the form of a text exchange that he and I had.
Unfortunately, I can't ask him if it's okay to show them.
Obviously, he's gone.
And under ordinary circumstances, I would not be showing private text messages of somebody, least somebody I cared about, to the public without their permission.
So I've wrestled with whether or not to show people this.
And I've come to a pretty unambiguous conclusion.
One, I've put myself in Charlie's shoes.
Let's say that the shoes were reversed, and I had been shot, and Charlie wanted people to know what I thought on this issue, which was for some reason not as well known as it might be.
Would I want the text messages out there?
And the answer is so unambiguously yes.
It's 100% yes.
So golden rule, which I know is something Charlie believed deeply in.
I'm doing this because I believe Charlie would have wanted it, because if I was in his shoes, I would have wanted it.
That works for any version of the golden rule I've ever heard of, and there are multiple evolutions of the golden rule.
The second reason I'm doing it is because it is about a very concrete objective.
We are not going to know what Charlie would have thought about many things, but we can know in this case what he thought should happen.
He was very explicit about it, and we can get it done in his name.
And so let me show you the—go ahead.
Just before you do, I think you've made it very clear, but I want to reiterate that responding to trolls, be they people or not, online, does not make sense.
You have the reasons that you have laid out to want to share your exchange with Charlie on the subject of the mRNA shots.
But part of why we are in the madness that we are in is that people respond to bad faith actors.
And it can be impossible to tell a bad faith actor from a good faith actor.
And so people feel honor bound to respond to all of them, lest they miss some of the good faith ones.
I think, you know, certainly my bias, but I think a healthier bias in general is to not be responsive.
So I want you to put these out here in a way that is explicitly not responsive to push back, because that's not what this is.
Okay, but I'm going to push back slightly here because I don't know if the people who pushed back on me are real people.
I never do.
Sometimes you do.
Sometimes you do.
Let's just say, okay, if they're real people, you're probably right.
But there's a substantial chance that either they aren't real people or they are real people responding to something that is inorganic, right?
In other words, whoever it was who took me to task for my saying that Charlie wanted the mRNA shots removed from the market was working for those who want the mRNA shots to stay on the market.
In this case, these are people who are working for those who would callously allow others to be injured and to be killed.
And my feeling is they've earned this, whoever they are, even if the intermediaries are just suckers who are believing some online portrayal that's nonsense.
So, Jen, would you put up the text exchange?
So this is part of a larger conversation that Charlie and I were having, of course.
So Charlie, in the aftermath of my being on his show to talk about the reason that the mRNA platform itself cannot be made safe, says, we made great progress getting the shot removed for kids and pregnant women.
Now it's time to get them removed totally from the market.
I say, absolutely, and congratulations, Charlie.
Most of the kids and moms will never know, but you and I do.
Let me know how I can help with the next step.
Mark says the last step.
He says, we are doing holy work together with two exclamation marks and a smiling emoji.
And he says, I would love to have you come to Phoenix this summer for a long form multi-hour podcast.
So hope is that that will put any question of what Charlie thought about these shots and what he was working towards to rest.
This is what he wanted.
He wanted the shots removed.
They should be removed.
And he was working towards that goal.
So in this case, I believe it is perfectly fair to say we should get this done in Charlie's name.
All right.
I guess the last thing to say is, how do you get that done in Charlie's name?
Well, one thing is to realize, as we discovered or discussed on the podcast a few weeks back, there is a well-organized, well-resourced campaign to get Bobby Kennedy out of HHS.
We know this because the memo was leaked.
Robert Malone reported on it.
We reported on it.
And the answer is, given what Charlie clearly wanted, keeping Bobby in that office and, in fact, emboldening him and empowering him by showing that he has us at his back is the right thing to do.
I feel very good about that as an approach.
And I would simply say that should be among our top priorities in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy.
All right.
I guess the last thing here is we obviously, as the living always do, have to figure out how to move on, irrespective of how terrible a loss is.
Life continues.
That is its nature.
If it had been somebody else, Charlie would be in the position of having to figure out how to do that.
And so we, I will say, were lucky.
We, at the point that Charlie was killed, you and I had plans to go to an event out east.
And I feel like it was the right place to be to process this terrible turn of events.
And anyway, you wrote about it this week and you wanted to talk about the experience.
Yeah, I want to abbreviate what I was going to talk about and just share a very little bit.
I wrote about it on Natural Selections this week, and I want to share just the beginning and the end of that piece.
Encourage you to go read the rest of it.
But by way of introduction, before I read the beginning and end of that piece, which I do think comes back to many of the things that we have been speaking about with regard to Charlie Kirk and his unifying role for people.
This was an event put on by the Brownstone Institute, of which you are a fellow, the founder and president of which is Jeffrey Tucker, who has just written another book.
He's written many called Spirits of America on the semi-quincentennial.
I believe I got that right, which of course is coming up next year.
And this is a beautiful little book.
It's really, I say little, not derisively, but it just a small book.
And I'm quite inspired by it.
He, in turn, was inspired by a book called The Spirits of 76, written by Eric Sloan, published in 1973, in which Eric Sloan, this is a book that is out of print and Jeffrey Tucker doesn't imagine will be in print again, identifies several fundamental spirits, excuse me, spirits of America, including respect, work, frugality, thankfulness, agronomy, time, more, a pioneer in godliness.
And on each of these subjects, Jeffrey Tucker expands, revises and expands those themes, and then he adds a few of his own.
Things like enterprise, physicality, localism, and forbearance.
And so you've been going to Brownstone events for a few years now.
This is only the second that I've been at.
And when we were invited back in the spring to go to this one, I had no hesitation at all, even though it was, it turns out that it would come just a few days before a big trip that we have planned.
And so the timing was not perfect for us.
But the invitation said simply, you know, Brownstone conference at Polyface Farm.
And for those of you who don't know Polyphace Farm, it's in the Shenandoah Valley of Western Virginia.
And Joel Salatin is the farmer there now along with his adult son and many others.
And I first came to know about Polyphace Farm in this extraordinary book, on which I've taken off the dust cover so you won't be able to see it very well, written by Michael Paul in 2006 called The Omnivore's Dilemma, a natural history of four meals.
And I would love to spend some time with this book, with you, our audience, but I want just to say, on page 125, Joel Salatin to Michael Pollen in 2006 called himself self-described, quote, Christian, conservative, libertarian, environmentalist, lunatic farmer.
Which now having met the man, I think I don't see him as a lunatic at all, but I see that many other people do.
And I just, I love that description.
This book is extraordinary.
And let me just read a little bit of what I wrote.
Can you see my screen?
You can, it's a miracle.
Okay, back to the land on generating self-worth.
In the Shenandoah Valley of Western Virginia, Polyphace Farm is a beacon.
Joel Salatin, the proprietor, has created a farm so vital the land itself seems to breathe.
Unlike much modern agriculture, which relies heavily on capital, electricity, and infrastructure, Polyphace Farm relies primarily on people.
Polyphase Farm has beckoned me since 2006 when Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma came out, and I, like so many others, fell in awe with Joel Salatin and his farm.
I was a professor at one of the country's most liberal colleges then, and when I assigned Pollen's book to my students, they too fell for the promises therein, that we can and we must remember what we have been, what the earth is, what we are all capable of, and grow our food and communities with attention to ancient and actually sustainable ways.
Back then, Salatin reports, about 80% of the visitors to Polyphace Farm were on the left politically.
Treehuggers and granola-eating hippies, back to the land types who, if push came to shove, were hoping that the government would solve their problems.
These were people who reviled corporations, but trusted the government.
Now the ratio has flipped.
About 80% of the visitors to Polyphace Farm are on the right.
Homesteaders and homeschoolers and hunters, back to the land types who are more likely to push the government away than invite its help.
In fact, there is much in common between the two groups.
A hunger to return to the land, our roots, our home, a desire to connect with self, community, and all of humanity.
The differences emerge when we start talking about who ultimately should be in charge of our fate.
Am I responsible for my choices and must I deal with the consequences no matter what?
Or ought there be a safety net protecting me from some consequences?
And if so, how many?
When does a safety net become a security blanket, infantilizing its comfort, preventing adulthood and self-worth from ever blooming?
I then talk a bit about the farm in my family's history and that Salatin in his keynote posed the question, how do we generate self-worth?
And his answer was, successfully accomplish meaningful tasks.
I speak more about this.
Again, I encourage you to read it, but to go to the end of the piece.
I wonder why the people who are showing up at Polyface Farm are of a different political bent than they used to be.
Some people on the right, who never trusted the government but were a little too eager to believe in promises from the private sector, were once tech optimists and anti-agrarians.
In the chapter on agronomy and spirits of America, Jeffrey Tucker writes that for much of his adult life, he couldn't understand why anyone regretted a move off the land.
Before exposure to ample critique of industrial food and big agriculture, his thinking was, what's wrong with corporate farming?
It's feeding the world and we would starve otherwise.
We need big companies, huge machinery, oceans of pesticide and fertilizer, and consolidated supply chains.
We simply cannot and should not go back.
He's changed his tune since then.
So there's that.
But I also wonder if those of us who showed up 10 and 20 years ago and called ourselves liberals aren't many of the same people who show up now.
We're not Democrats anymore, though.
We're politically homeless, or maybe we even call ourselves conservatives or libertarians now.
We haven't changed, or not much.
Just as many on the right have woken up to the problems of big ag and big food in light of what happened to us all during COVID, many who thought of ourselves as being on the left have woken up, too.
We appreciate the Second Amendment more now, having seen some of what the government is capable of.
And we are more wary of regulations for the same reason.
But we're still fundamentally interested in conserving the earth and its inhabitants, people included.
We prefer our food real and the moneyed interests far away.
Problem is, real food has become ever more difficult to source, and discerning who and where the moneyed interests are has become a devilishly hard game.
Don't we all, every last one of us, feel the tug to be more connected to ourselves, to other people, and to the land itself?
Work brings us together.
Much has been said of the lack of work ethic among the young now, but I believe that this is always said of the young.
Perhaps more mothers and fathers need to be telling their sons and daughters that it's time to build fences, because again, we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.
Right on Target.
And I think you've hit on a profound theme.
There is something fascinating and heartening, frankly, in finding this, I don't want to call it a center, because centrism is nothing.
It's a coming together.
And it's a reshuffling, right?
Yeah.
Joel Salatin is a radical environmentalist and a person of faith and a believer in science and one of very few people who is a deep believer in science who I trust to understand the implications of a complex system.
And I say that having...
I mean, you see how his use of science has transformed a land that when his father bought it in the 60s was a rocky, ruined landscape.
It is now a fertile grassland on which he is growing cows and pigs and turkeys and chickens.
He calls himself a grass farmer because that's where it is.
Well, and what he's really done, and I want to say something aesthetic after this, but what he's really done is used the lightest possible hand to facilitate the land restoring itself, which doesn't mean that he's not heavy-handed in those places where it's required.
I mean, he talked, you know, he interestingly talked about the fact that beavers were once the dominant force on these landscapes that were, you know, transforming them.
And the beavers are gone, and so he uses an excavator to do their work for them, which means he can do the work in places that the beavers would never have done at places where there's no flowing water.
He's building ponds.
He's building ponds.
Because the beavers are gone.
Right.
He's building ponds because the beavers are gone, which allows him to build them in places where they end up with no glyphosate runoff from other farms.
In any case.
And also, he owns his own watershed.
Right.
And so there's no runoff.
There's no glyphosate runoff possible.
And so he can be coherent in a geographically coherent slice of the world.
And I will just say this.
One of the things, one of the experiences of being on this farm that is very hard to encapsulate.
As I travel, I know as you travel, we pass through many farms.
They may look beautiful, but there's always a sense of like, I don't know what this person understands and what they've put in the environment.
A farm is now a kind of frightening place because of all of the inputs that can be put there.
And on this farm, one can feel the lushness of the grass with no fear that its beauty has been architected.
There's no fertilizer being put on it.
There are no seeds being added to it.
I was not alone in taking off my shoes and walking barefoot there on a working farm where you could step and probably stepping in some chicken poop and you hope to avoid the cow pies, but it felt so alive and healthy.
Felt alive and healthy.
And the evidence was also crawling everywhere.
If you just took a moment and paid attention to the spiders and insects that were on this farm, this is not a common experience anymore.
And on this farm, it just felt like you'd been teleported back 150 years.
And I guess the last thing I want to say about it is it's possible to live that way.
And this is not a loony lefty who's, you know, this is somebody who believes in capitalism, who believes in technology where it's appropriate, but he also believes in equilibria and the desirableness of the world, the little microcosm that he's created in this one, how many acres?
A little less than 500, I believe.
He's got 500 acres that he has transformed.
That's possible in the world.
You could live in that world.
He's created a microcosm that proves it.
And I just think it's such a beautiful thing.
Yeah, it really is.
So this is again from Onivorous Dilemma.
So this is these numbers are from 2006 in which Paulin has reported earlier, I believe, that he's got 100 acres in pasture.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Polyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries on 100 acres of pasture patchworked into another 450 acres of forest.
So maybe more than 500.
But if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living, he'll tell you in no uncertain terms, I'm a grass farmer.
100 acres of pasture.
Back in 2006, I don't know what the numbers are now.
By the end of the season, Salatin's grasses will have been transformed by his animals into some 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs.
This is without much compared to any other farm that can produce anything close to that.
Infrastructure, electricity, no, no fertilizers.
Fertilizers.
He does not buy seed.
The thing that is getting in the way to the extent that things are getting in the way of him, but that are getting in the way of every other farmer who's trying to do what he's doing, are the bureaucrats.
Are the regulations that are telling him that he can't sell you chicken that he has prepared because it has to go down directly without the interface of a dozen regulations?
So that's a story for another time.
But that's how this radical environmentalist, man of faith, amazingly successful regenerative agriculture farmer also comes to be a very strong libertarian.
Yep.
And I will just say, a lovely person, right?
Not surprising that you would find somebody who's this insightful is also unendingly decent.
Indeed.
So that's for the living.
You know, we need we, those of us who still live, we need to live.
And eating real food, as I encourage everyone to do at the end of every podcast, is a big part of that.
Not just for the food itself, but for the community that we generate, both in producing or preparing it, but in eating it together.
And it is vanishingly rare that it is possible for Americans to get real food now.
But Polyphace Farm is a giant exception to that.
And we could have more of that if we have the will and if we resist the powers that are trying to get people like Kennedy out of positions of power to actually affect how healthy America is.
All right.
May Charlie Kirk's memory be a blessing to us all.
Indeed.
We're going to be off for a few weeks.
We'll talk when we get back about where we've been.
There will be Inside Rail in the interim and a few composite videos that Jen and others are working up on our behalf.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love.
