A Tale of Two Fuentes: The 299th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we begin with Nick Fuentes—how did he go from a guy with Jewish friends, to someone who is proudly anti-Semitic? Why does “anti-Semitic” now have so many meanings? What are the differences between preference, discrimination, and bigotry? Then: Bill Gates changes his tune on climate change—or does he? His new memo still sounds the alarm about Carbon, but also privileges his pet projects of vaccinating the world and handing agriculture to the technologists. Finally: manta rays, how smart ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream 299.
Yep.
That's wild.
Right on the cusp.
Right on the cusp.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haiing.
The universe is still here, and we are going to talk about some of the things in it, including the Nick Fuentes situation, which is a powder keg no matter how you slice it.
I don't think you slice powder kegs.
Not if you know it's good for you.
That's a good point.
I will unmix that metaphor and come up with a better one.
Yeah.
So we're here today.
We did a three-hour Q ⁇ A on locals last weekend that I thought was pretty great.
So if you're considering joining us on locals, do that.
All the Q ⁇ As in the past are up.
We talked about, among other things, colorblindness and Tip for Cro Matts and had a lot of fun with that conversation.
That was wild and very insightful.
I can virtually guarantee that no matter who you are and how much you've thought about that topic, this will introduce some new stuff.
Yeah.
And we're actually going to be off next week, but we encourage you to check out Inside Rail episodes as always, including maybe especially the most recent Inside Rail, in which Brett talks with Senator Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson about 9-11.
So that's a pretty remarkable conversation.
And we encourage you to go check it out.
And I would just point out, obviously, religious perspectives differ.
But the fact is, if you have a religious perspective, it might just be that somebody wanted us to have this conversation because he put us together in the woods, which is how the conversation came to be.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Can you put us together in the woods?
If you believe in someone or other organizing events down here on earth or shaping them or influencing them, then the fact of our running into each other, that is to say, you and me and Ron Johnson and his wife in the forest totally by surprise is what led to that conversation.
So it was either serendipity or divine providence or I don't know, maybe you have some other epistemological way to address such things, but it was pretty wild.
Forest sprites.
Forest sprites, that would be another.
One more.
Yep.
All right.
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Yeah, so I'll bring that back up.
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I mean, it's in there.
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I did it with a lot more neurons, and hopefully I didn't eat them all.
Yeah.
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We obviously, we're not sitting at one right now.
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All right.
I think we should start with, I'm not even sure what to call it, the slow-motion train wreck that is the mainstreaming of Nick Fuentes.
And I want to just say personally, Nick Fuentes is somebody I've been paying attention to for a couple of years now.
Longtime viewers will remember some discussions that you and I had about what I alarmingly, you know, in alarm called Nazi Twitter.
I said something on Twitter that caused the algorithm to start feeding me stuff that was not just edgy, racist, whatever, but was actually like rehabilitating the image of Hitler.
Now, that's not exactly where I found Nick Fuentes, but at the same time that the algorithm was feeding me this actually Nazi stuff, it was also feeding me Nick Fuentes, and it is troubling,
or it was troubling to me back then because Fuentes is so bright and so articulate and frankly charismatic that the stuff that he says that is alarming is coming through on a channel that it is not safe to dismiss.
In other words, you have somebody that has the characteristics that make the vile beliefs truly dangerous.
And so what has now happened in the aftermath of If I'm completely honest, the point is I can watch Nick Fuentes from two years ago and I can learn things.
I can be given actual insight into the mindset of a group of people that I wouldn't ordinarily encounter, right?
How do they think?
He is very articulate, and so he gives voice to things.
And even if you just think that's wrong, you need to know how it sounds in the minds of somebody to whom it sounds good.
And Nick Fuentes is very good at that.
So anyway, I got a lot.
I learned a lot.
The same part of me that has the instinct to go into a DIE space, you know, diversity, DEI space, diversity, equity, and inclusion space, and listen to what, you know, people who are involved in that mentality sound like to themselves.
I can also go into, you know, a space of white nationalists and get something out of it.
Or I can listen to Louis Farrakhan.
I get a lot from him too.
You know, it's incredibly useful to listen to people with whom you are certain you disagree.
Totally.
And to know something about what is in their heads and to discover what is actually true about what is in their heads, not only to become familiar with their arguments and the ways that they think, but also to find out to what degree what is in your head about what is in their heads is or is not accurate.
Right.
And the fashion of the moment on seemingly every side that you are committing a sin to even listen to somebody with whom you disagree is preposterous.
It's a mistake.
But what has now happened is that this guy who I was paying attention to, I think, you know, let's just put him in context for people who don't know.
I believe Nick Fuentes is the founder of the Grouper movement.
The Grouper movement is fringe.
It's large.
It has very.
I don't know what it is.
The Groiper movement is essentially a white nationalist movement of people who feel bullied and fed up.
It's sort of a descendant of the Kekistani movement.
You remember?
Pepe the Frog.
Well, Pepe the Frog kind of lives on in the Groypers, and I think it's just a continuous thing.
Groyper was not a word that was used back when, as far as I know.
Does the word reference something?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But in any case, it's a faction.
It's a fringe faction on the right.
And I would say, you know, I don't know whether they would resonate with the idea of being white nationalists, but I don't think they would bridle at it.
I think it's, you know, in the ballpark of how they would describe themselves.
So in any case, this is very popular in some quadrants.
It's been largely invisible to most people until very recently.
And what has happened in the immediate past is the death of Charlie Kirk essentially created a vacuum.
And that vacuum has pulled Nick Fuentes into the mainstream.
And he's showed up in all kinds of mainstream places.
He's showed up in a debate with Dave Smith.
He showed up on Glenn Greenwald's system update program.
He's now showed up with Tucker Carlson.
So he's now all sorts of places.
And there's a question about what to make of it.
First of all, you know, should somebody like Tucker be having Nick Fuentes on?
Well, I don't have a strong reaction to the question of whether to have him on.
My tendency as a civil libertarian is I don't want to silence people.
I want to hear what they have to say.
And then I want to meet them with superior arguments when they have stuff wrong.
So I'd kind of rather people be aware of this than not be aware of it.
It's much more useful to be able to hear people in a context where their interlocutor doesn't inherently agree with everything they're saying.
You will see it's a better pressure test of what it is that they actually think.
Yes.
And interestingly, so I will just add a couple pieces of context here.
I believe it may be Megan Kelly who famously said in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death as Nick Fuentes was suddenly on people's radar, well, you killed our nice guy.
The implication being, and now you get, you know, something much more frightening.
You know, Charlie Kirk wasn't frightening at all.
He just wanted to talk.
He was a downright decent guy.
And there's a question about what Nick Fuentes is and what role he plays in the future now that charismatic spokespeople for conservatism has lost its star.
Okay, so what I want to do is I want to show a couple of things.
I want to show a rather long clip, which we will interrupt from the recent Tucker Carlson interview, which actually told me things about Nick Fuentes that I did not know that actually changed my understanding of who he is and what things are about.
And then I want to show some of the stuff that causes people to be frightened of his assent and causes people rightly or wrongly to not want him heard in public.
So let's start with the Tucker Carlson interview.
This is early in the Tucker Carlson interview, and I will just say I have not finished the interview.
don't know what remains toward the end of it.
I'm really starting to lean into America first.
I'm becoming more pro-Trump as time goes on.
And what really stood out to me was Trump's inaugural address in January 17th.
This is just a couple months later.
And in Trump's inaugural, he says famously, a new vision will govern our land.
It's going to be only America first, America first.
And I said, that's me.
Like, that's what I believe.
I'm an American nationalist fully at this point.
Not even a conservative.
And there was one.
Describing his initial evolution.
What you don't see here is he's talking about the fact that he's a freshman in college and he's hearing Trump and Trump sounds refreshing to him.
So he's talking about 2017 or 2025.
Exactly, 2016, really.
The inauguration is 2017.
Yeah, that's true.
Okay, so he's describing this evolution.
And I should just say, I forgot to mention that Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes had a famous beef over the last six months where they were literally each accusing each other of being CIA and things like that.
So the fact of Tucker having him on for a cordial discussion is a big change in this landscape.
But the thing that caused me to want to pause here is Nick Fuentes, in this case, says he's a nationalist and Tucker signs on to this.
And I just want to say this is one of the places where I actually think the right is making a terrible error, that there is a distinction, which I've, frankly, I've said this to Tucker.
I may have said it to him on his program, that I think there is a conflation between nationalism and patriotism, that we tend to think of them as synonyms.
They're not synonyms.
They're in fact not exactly antonyms.
But the famous JFK quote, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, I think describes the two things.
What your country can do for you, and that's nationalism.
What you can do for your country, the willingness to sacrifice for your country because it makes life better and possible and all of those things is patriotism.
And so I would urge those who hear nationalism and they think, yes, my country is important, think about whether or not what you're reflecting is nationalism or patriotism.
And please consider making that distinction carefully.
Well, and I don't think the framing that Trump apparently made all those many years ago, America First, is inherently a nationalist position.
It's potentially quite a patriotic position.
I agree.
And I would describe my position as America First.
And it doesn't mean, you know, all others be damned, but it means we belong.
We have no choice but to live as citizens of countries.
This country has been very good to me, to you, to our family, and a willingness to sacrifice for it, I think, is perfectly reasonable.
And we put our own interests first, the interests of the United States over the interests of other countries when the country is making decisions about how best to spend resources.
Any country that didn't do that would be making a mistake.
It is leaving a vulnerability to its competitors.
So yes, I think America First is a very reasonable and it's strange that it even needs to be said, you know, but we'll see more about what.
But in saying it, it comes to be mockable as if it is extreme, when it is in fact not extreme at all.
It's like the idea of borders.
Like, you know, as if open borders is the null hypothesis for what normal people believe in.
Like, no, actually, I don't think any normal person believes in open borders if you take all of the immediate political context of now away and you provide them a scenario in which everyone is simply streaming into the place that they want to be the most, no matter what, no matter what they bring with them.
No one actually thinks open borders makes sense any more than they would think that sacrificing your own people and your own stuff in service of others is the honorable position.
Yeah, no reasonable person favors it.
Lots of people favor it for, you know, hidden reasons.
Or are confused by the political landscape in which things are dressed up like things that they are not.
Yeah, I guess I'm putting those people in the unreasonable category.
They've been made unreasonable by their credulity and all.
But I don't think we need to detain ourselves there.
Let's just say the left has been very frightened by the idea of patriotism.
I think in part because it doesn't understand the distinction with nationalism.
And so it just gets spooked away from it.
And, you know, I've been saying for, I don't know, 15 years, maybe 20, I'm a proud patriot.
I'm not a nationalist, but this is an amazing country for all its flaws.
And it is deserving of our willingness to sacrifice on its behalf.
Okay, so let's continue with Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.
And there was one thing that happened just before that that really struck me as strange.
And I've told this story before.
I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but suffice to say, Barack Obama in the lame duck period.
So the Democrats lost the election.
He's on his way out.
There's a resolution in the Security Council condemning the settlements in the West Bank in Israel.
And typically, the U.S. delegation will veto those resolutions condemning Israel.
Well, Obama's on his way out.
He's got nothing to lose.
So the U.S. delegation abstains from the resolution and it passes.
And Fox News and all the pro-Israel conservatives are calling him an anti-Semite.
They're saying he hates Jews.
He's an anti-Semite.
He hates Israel.
And I saw that and it struck me as strange because it seemed hypocritical.
It seemed like how when conservatives would critique anything about race, we got called racist or anything about feminism, we got called sexist.
All Obama did was uphold U.S. policy on the West Bank that we've had since 67, which is we don't support the settlements.
I said, how is it anti-Semitic to just be consistent on our U.S. foreign policy?
Like I said, which is a Republican-Democrat consensus.
And I got attacked for this.
I wrote a big article about this.
I tweeted about it.
I tweeted to Ben Shapiro.
I said, you know, I've never seen anything on the Daily Wire that's actually critical of Israel.
And he quote tweets me.
And at this time, I have a thousand followers on Twitter.
How old are you?
I'm 18.
I'm a freshman.
You're still a freshman in college.
And this is even before I started my show.
And I don't know, I probably got 100 likes on this tweet.
It wasn't a viral tweet.
He quote tweets me and says, to accuse a Jew of dual loyalty is the surest sign of anti-Semitism.
And like, this is how it sort of begins.
And I see this tweet.
And by the way, that was on Christmas Eve in 2016.
He immediately called you an anti-Semite.
So I'm driving to Christmas Eve Mass with my family.
And I see on Twitter, the notification comes up, Ben Shapiro quote tweets me calling me an anti-Semite.
And I was like, what is this?
Like, why is this guy attacking me?
You know, because I don't have a platform at this time.
I'm not an influential guy or anything.
And so then I put out another tweet similar.
I said something like, if you're China first, you should live in China.
If you're Mexico first, you should live in Mexico.
If you're Israel first, maybe you should go live in Israel.
And again, he quote tweets me and says, you're an anti-Semite that same night.
This was, I think, a couple weeks later.
Happened a little bit further down the line.
And so.
Are you surprised that he knew you were?
Yeah, I was.
I was surprised at why he cared.
Yeah.
Because I'm thinking, how does he even know who I am or what I'm about?
And it turned out that Cassie Dillon, she had texted him earlier and she wanted him to take me under his wing.
She texted him after that debate and said, you know, you really like this guy.
He's amazing.
He did this great debate.
She goes, but he's a little too pro-Trump.
He's a little too Trumpy.
And he goes, I'll take a look.
And so I guess the two of them were kind of like grooming me in a sense.
They wanted me to go maybe and be a daily wire or maybe looking me as a potential conservative activist or influencer.
And so they started paying attention to me.
And the more critical of Israel I was, I started to get this really intense pushback from the both of them and from a lot of the people at Daily Wire.
Why do you think, so you're an 18-year-old college freshman, you're clearly talented and you're engaged, you're really interested, and you ask not, not crazy questions, like, what is this?
And rather than explain it, they just call you a racist, call you an anti-Semite.
Like that's the first response.
That seems like the least effective.
Well, it turned out to be not very effective in your case, but that seems like the least effective thing you could do.
Why do you think they did that?
Well, I think that you have to look at it not in retrospect because hindsight is 2020.
And so looking back, you could say they made a terrible mistake because look at sort of what they provoked or what they catalyzed.
But at that time, you got to consider, I'm 18 with no following, with no network.
I'm coming from the suburbs of Chicago.
My parents didn't go to college.
I have no connections.
And so for them, it was very easy that if they detected that a promising young guy was going to become anti-Israel in the conservative movement, they could crush that person easily and grind them under the heel.
So they sort of were alerted, oh, there's a precocious young guy that isn't on board with Israel.
We'll keep an eye on him.
And if he gets too vocal or popular, we'll cut him down.
We'll crush him.
Because at this time.
So obviously, I don't know whether Fuentes is telling this story accurately.
Presumably, the part of it that takes place publicly is checkable.
So I assume it must be true at that level.
But what troubles me is, okay, as you will see shortly, there's a Nick Fuentes problem that is not ambiguous.
It will be very clear.
It's not hard to demonstrate.
Where did the Nick Fuentes problem come from?
I had no idea that the Daily Wire was going to show up in that story as a radicalizing force and that the story, if he's telling it accurately, is that this guy who is circulating amongst Jews, there's parts of the interview earlier where you can hear he's circulating amongst Jews.
You'll hear a little bit about that later, has questions about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
He says some stuff that I think is inflammatory.
I don't think it is fair to say, if you're Israel first, go live in Israel.
If you're Mexico first, go live in Mexico.
But I think it is very important to recognize don't speak as if you're a patriot telling Americans what you think they should do in their own interests if what you're really doing is advocating for the interests of another country, right?
That is duplicitous.
And so what I'm saying is, you know, he's a young guy.
If you took every dumb thing I said as a young guy and suddenly they're on the internet and they live forever, that's a problem, right?
As you've pointed out, you sort of get the right as a human being to mature and not have every utterance you made frozen permanently.
That's no longer true because the internet makes.
It's also kind of a right to temporal privacy, to let yourself evolve without everything being on display permanently.
Yes.
And therefore, a normal person, yes, there are things that you say and then you realize they're wrong.
And so they were impactful enough that you should point out that you've changed your position.
But for most stuff, you mature and you don't go back and imagine every sentence you uttered and say, well, this sentence needs correcting and that sentence wasn't quite right.
It's just nope.
You can't live that way.
It's paralytic.
No, the fact that we are, that young people are living this way is part of why they are, in fact, paralyzed.
It's part of why they're not getting together and they're not, you know, they're not even making phone calls when they're not together.
They're texting behind screens because they're scared of what they might reveal when they actually are in front of one another or even doing just synchronous activities like talking to one another.
So, you know, is it paralyzing?
Yes.
Is it destructive of humanity?
Yes.
So, you know, youthful error should not be blanket excused, but it should be allowed.
We all should be allowed to be able to mature in relative privacy.
And mostly people don't anymore.
Yeah, can't.
It's a technological, it's weirdly analogous to, you know, it used to be that if you were going to photocopy something, you know, you can photocopy the original as many times as you want and you can get a slightly degraded copy.
But if you start copying copies, you know, the Xeroxing process causes the thing to degrade in front of you.
And that's kind of the way, you know, memory, it's what time does to the memory of some dumb thing you said, unless it's literally digitally preserved in some way that it's, you know, as realistic looking today as it was when it happened.
So then, you know, the question is, well, you know, do you recant?
It's like, that's not, that's not supposed to be the question in general.
So anyway, let's just say you have a report of a historical event in which, yes, I think Fuentes was over a line.
He said some things that I think were irresponsible, but he was also 18 years old.
And what comes back at him is an accusation, which it sounds like was likely not true at the time.
And even if it was true at the time, unless there's more to the story, Ben Shapiro doesn't have the goods on him, right?
All he knows is that somebody is questioning, you know, the, are you cryptically advocating for a, the well-being of another state over your own state?
It's a legitimate question.
And I will point out, actually, Jen, would you put up my tweet that I sent you?
This is a tweet from, I think, this last year.
This is 2024.
But, you know, I'm not the hothead that Nick Fuentes is, but I said in this tweet in 2024, I said dual citizenship in quotes is a fundamentally flawed concept, irrespective of the two nations in question.
If your two countries are in conflict, one must have your allegiance above the other.
You can't be loyal to both.
And any two countries that are never in conflict aren't meaningfully distinct in the first place.
So my point is, okay, yeah, I'm a 56-year-old guy.
I'm pretty good at speaking precisely and avoiding...
But not spelling precisely.
Oh, did I fail to spell something correctly?
There are only three errors on the three errors.
This is awesome.
So I'm just not going to look at it because visually I find it difficult to look at.
Keep talking.
This is how I find out.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I'm going to wonder about what three words are misspelled.
But okay, so point being, it is not, I'm not anti-Semitic.
And, you know, they will, of course, accuse me of being a self-hating Jew because that's what it says on the flowchart.
Internalized anti-Semitism is what that is.
Right.
You accuse somebody of anti-Semitism and they make an argument you don't like.
And if you can't make that argument because they're Jewish and therefore it's very unlikely to be anti-Semitic, you do the double reversal thing and it's like, aha, you're a self-hating Jew and knew it.
And, you know, okay, I get it.
It's a flowchart.
But anyway, point is, we have a real question, right?
There are dual citizens.
First time I heard the concept of dual citizenship, I thought, what, how, I thought growing up, maybe it was even true when I was growing up, that in general, if you become a citizen of another country, you recant the citizenship of the country that you were born in.
And I believe, neither of us has looked into this recently, but I believe also that the U.S. was specifically firm on this, that there were dual citizens out there, but not generally of the U.S. and other places.
Well, maybe that's true.
I don't know.
My feeling is dual citizenship showed up and became a big thing without an announcement that something had changed.
I don't know what happened, but suddenly it was like, oh, oh, he's a dual citizen.
She's a dual citizen.
My children are dual citizens.
And, you know, look, let me be very clear about this.
If you have the ability to become a dual citizen, I get why you would accept it, but I don't understand why the countries of the world tolerate this.
It opens up real questions about loyalty, democracy, self-governance, all of these things.
So anyway, my point in showing that tweet is just simply, there are real questions.
They are not the product of anti-Semites.
Whether Nick Fuentes was motivated by anti-Semitism, whether the way he phrased his critique was deliberately trolling or revealing of a personality defect, I don't know.
But what I do know is the fact that somebody has a concern about dual loyalty does not mean that they are harboring anti-Semitic feelings.
It means there are real questions and we have to be biased in the West in the direction of you are allowed to ask questions, right?
You just are.
In this case, the questions are almost too obvious.
So anyway, the idea that somewhere in Nick Fuentes' origin story, he trips a wire that gets him called anti-Semitic publicly for asking real questions about the relationship between two nations.
Oh my God, I was not expecting to discover that.
And again, maybe it's not true.
Maybe there's something wrong with the story, but if the story is true, it's pretty dramatic.
All right.
Can we continue with the Nick Fuentes interview?
As you know, in 2017, it's a very different time.
2016, 17, any criticism or dissent on this subject was a death sentence.
You became radioactive, unhireable, blacklisted.
And that's exactly what happened.
And basically from then on, it was just this escalating series of blacklisting, censorship, hit pieces, rumors to try to ostracize me from the movement.
While you're a college student?
Yes, as a freshman.
Yeah.
So looking back with that 2020 hindsight, I mean, Ben Shapiro seems like a big part of your political evolution.
Yes.
You went from a fan slash accolade to an opponent and then just pivoted against everything that he believes.
Yeah, it was because it was this new dialectic that Trump forced.
Yeah.
Trump planted the seed.
And the seed was America first.
Yes.
So once you accept that, a lot of the way we're doing things becomes impossible to support or justify.
Right.
The contradiction becomes apparent.
It gets moved to the center and it becomes unignorable if you're consistent.
So what kind of efforts did they make to make you go away?
So this is a couple of months down the line.
You know, first they would try to dissuade me from asking questions because I was friends with a lot of the Daily Wire writers, not just Cassie Dillon, but many of them, many of them were Jewish.
And I would ask them point blank, I would say, so why do we give Israel all this money?
$3.8 billion per year?
What is that for?
And they would say, well, you know, there's a really good answer for that, but you're asking it in the wrong way.
You're asking it in an anti-Semitic way.
I'd say, I'm just, I'm asking for the proof.
You know, what's the argument there?
And so first it was the sort of, hey, man, could you kind of tone it down?
Maybe just don't bring that up so much.
But I was persistent because at this time, I was genuinely inquisitive.
I wanted to know, is there an actual reason?
And I was actually expecting that there was a really good reason for all of it.
And the more that I read, the more that I dug into the subject, the more I found out there's a lot of these neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq war.
There's the foreign aid complex, which is really unique.
There's APAC, which is this intense foreign lobby where it's bipartisan.
It seems to be the only thing that the parties can agree on.
And so it just made me burn more with curiosity.
So I just kept asking them.
And eventually they said, you know what?
We're not going to talk to you anymore.
And these are my friends.
I met them, went to Christmas parties with them.
And all of them one day said, you're done.
We're blocking you.
We're never going to speak to you again.
We're never going to have you on our show.
And I said, wow, like this seems like inhuman.
I'm struck by how impersonal this is.
Like here, I thought we're friends.
We're all conservatives.
Maybe we disagree on one issue.
Now I'm being canceled by the right.
So I was shocked by this.
When was this?
This was February or March 2017.
So you're still a freshman in college.
Yes.
So you can imagine, assuming the story is true, this is a guy who doesn't see himself as anti-Semitic.
He's got Jewish friends.
He's circulating in an environment in which Jews are common and powerful and important.
And then he finds himself exiled.
And suddenly now we have this force of nature who does have, I think, unarguably an anti-Semitic bent.
And I was reminded when I saw this, you know, I was literally just struck by that origin story.
And it's possible it's a phony creation, but assuming it's right, it actually mirrors an argument I made in a different context back in, I think it would have been 2019, where I was talking about the hazard of DEI, which was, well, maybe we should just play the clip.
We have the, this is from our first Dark Horse studio before COVID caused Zach and me to rip all of the stuff that wasn't nailed down out of the building and take it.
In conversation with who?
This was, I think, me just monologuing.
Not working.
Well, I tell you what, maybe Jen can troubleshoot this.
What I say in this clip is that if you back the straight white guys against the wall together, that you are creating the conditions.
Oh, she's got it.
All right, let's see it.
Concern that I have is that the intersectionalists may end up creating the very enemy they claim they are fighting.
They're going to back straight white males against the wall and speak of the devil.
White nationalism will emerge from that cohort.
And when it does, those people will feel empowered and they will feel self-righteous because they have been accused of things that are, frankly, a form of bigotry.
They have been accused by bigots of oppressing others and they have been told that they are not entitled to well-being, no matter how they individually have behaved.
And so what do they have to lose by cooperating together against the intersectionalists and essentially creating the world that the intersectionalists claim already exists?
Now, what we should do about this is not entirely clear.
But one thing that must happen is we must level up our thinking and we must understand that backing people against the wall who have a genetic basis for cooperation is very dangerous because history tells us that movements created by such people can be very destructive and that ultimately they may turn into.
Okay, so you get the idea.
Game theoretically, it is a terrible mistake.
It was a terrible mistake for the DEI crowd to go after the straight white males because it created this very same impulse like, well, if I can't win because all of the things that I am are declared no good, then what exactly is my incentive to play along with the civilization that's doing that to me?
And my point here, I wasn't talking specifically about anti-Semitism in that clip, but the logic is the same.
What a terrible error it is to go after anybody who has legitimate questions about the interaction between the United States and not only a foreign state, but a particular administration that has a very hardline bent within that foreign state.
You're allowed to have questions.
You're an American.
That's one of the great things about it.
You're allowed to have questions.
You're allowed to ask any question you want.
And anybody who wants to say that the reason you can't ask that question is because you're revealing a horrible defect in character or defect of character is running exactly the risk of creating the enemy, effectively calling it forth.
And, you know, Nick Fuentes' origin story suggests that this is actually what happened.
This was somebody had questions, was circulating in a milieu in which there were lots of Jews and being accused of harboring some kind of internal hate, which may or may not have been there, meant that that hate got reinforced, right?
Maybe it was built de novo, but it got reinforced by this process.
And now we're left with the unfortunate situation of having this articulate, charismatic, insightful young man who is now leading a movement of people who all, I mean, what I see when I look at that clip is I see the classic, you know, the wimp on the beach who's had sand kicked in his face, and he's just not going to have it anymore, right?
And, you know, what becomes of such a thing over time, right?
We've just seen this now mainstreamed.
And where does it go from here?
I don't know, but it's exactly the stuff that we should be worried about.
Go ahead.
Well, I'm thinking about words.
And what Fuentes reports Shapiro coming at him with in their very first social media interchange in which Shapiro says to accuse a Jew of having dual loyalty is being anti-Semitism.
Sure sign of anti-Semitism.
Sure sign of anti-Semitism.
And it seems to me that anti-Semitism means many different things, that we need more than one word.
And if we are actually going to try to describe, try to create the taxonomy of things that people believe, similarly, Zionism means apparently many different things and has experienced a shift in its meaning as far as I have understood it over time.
You know, I have said, in fact, I was just recounting this last night to you.
I said recently to your father, I used to think of myself as a Zionist.
I don't anymore because I no longer understand all of the ways in which it is used.
And I cannot stand by such a word.
Anti-Semitism still has so much power that I don't know anyone who is going to grok to saying, yeah, I'm an anti-Semitic.
I also don't know anyone personally who's going to say, yeah, I'm a racist.
You can say, no, I'm not an anti-racist because that's an insane ideology.
And it doesn't mean when you think it does.
It doesn't mean what you're telling me it does.
To go into another of these spaces, which is in which speech control is being used to win arguments illegitimately, transphobe, right?
Well, actually, you just made that up.
And no, not scared, but don't believe your lies.
So you want to call me a TERF?
Go for it.
That's fine.
Anti-Semitism, like racism, still has too much power.
It's like, well, no, I'm certainly not.
But what are the various things that are met when people are accused of being anti-Semitic?
If the story that Juentes reports about his initial interchange on Twitter with Shapiro is accurate, and presumably if it's not, he will get called out, right?
Whatever, immediately.
Right.
What about, I mean, you've already said this, but like, what about saying I see dual loyalties here makes a person anti-Semitic?
That can't be, that can't be the calling card of anti-Semitism because it casts way too large a net.
Yeah, the problem is, in what universe is dual citizenship not, does it not raise a question of dual loyalty?
Right.
It does.
And yet, I mean, I do, this is what identity politics is, right?
Like, only people who have the identity are allowed to speak freely about that identity.
Oh, and also, by the way, because you're not of it, you will never know how we actually police inside the borders, right?
So there may actually, and in fact, we know for sure in many of these cases, there isn't actually free discourse within the identity, but certainly you're not allowed to speak if you don't identify as the thing, and you're not allowed to suddenly declare yourself Jewish, even though that is a thing that people can become unlike black or female.
So, you know, what are all the things?
Are there people who simply hate Jews for being Jews?
Yes, that's what I thought anti-Semitism meant.
Yep.
Right.
But apparently, apparently no.
There are all sorts of other use cases that people are employing now that the word has either lost all meaning or has so many different meanings that we really need a whole slew of words.
Well, my biggest concern, as you know, I've been thinking about and studying the question of why racism happens, why genocide happens, these sorts of things.
And unfortunately, I think there's a very straightforward evolutionary story to be told.
It requires one little upgrade to the conventional evolutionary toolkit.
But once you see it, it's not surprising or it shouldn't be controversial.
And then once you understand that this is a built-in vulnerability of our species to see genetic relatedness and to view the world with a bias based on how related you are towards another person or group, once you see that, then you realize that we are actually, I mean, it's an obvious case of boy who cried wolf.
Anti-Semitism is a problem.
I would argue that actually, as much as, you know, all bigotry is bad, there is a special version of it that is reserved for Jews.
So it deserves to have a name because it does show up in history with a certain degree of regularity for reasons that I think have to do with a population that lives as a diaspora.
But nonetheless, we are depending on everybody who cares not to abuse the term, right?
You cannot simply fend off arguments you don't like with that term because it makes them go away because what it does is it causes them to fester in the dark.
And this is the manifestation of it.
Yes.
Yes.
And I mean, that's the more important point here.
But when you say all bigotry is bad, I also, if I try to hear that from the perspective of someone who thinks of themselves as a nationalist, a white nationalist, for instance, or thinks of themselves as an anti-Semite, I can begin to hear, if I try to, if I try to get into their head and steel man what they may feel when they hear all bigotry is bad, what do you mean?
Individual preferences are okay.
We're all allowed to have our individual preferences, are we not?
And maybe I like, you know, dark-haired guys.
Is that bad?
So now I'm making a group assessment.
And how about if I say, actually, I'm a Christian, which I'm not, but, you know, I'm a Christian and therefore I'm looking for someone who's Christian.
Does that mean that I am bigoted against potential mates who are something else?
Well, you could use that framing.
But so as you segue from the individual to the population level, where does bigotry, where does preference end and bigotry begin?
Well, I very deliberately did not say discrimination for exactly this reason, because there's good discrimination, bad discrimination, and then there's stuff that's ambiguous, but you're entitled to it.
Bigotry is a unfair bias, right?
You're allowed to have preferences, but the idea of a structural built-in preference against some population is, I would argue, inherently bad.
So bigotry.
But the borders are impossible.
I don't think Polish jokes are a thing anymore.
But when we were kids, Polish jokes were the thing.
Oh.
Right.
And like, I don't, one of my best friends in high school ended up being of Polish extraction.
But until then, I was like, I don't know why everyone makes fun of Poles.
I really have no idea.
And the jokes usually aren't funny, but I don't see anyone getting particularly upset by it.
You know, we didn't make jokes about black people because we had obviously recent historical things in front of us.
It's like, that's not cool, guys.
It's not that it was illegal.
It's not, you know, but like, not so much.
Well, I'm not arguing bigotry isn't protected.
I think bigotry is protected.
I'm just saying bigotry is bad.
Discrimination includes bigotry.
So there's bad discrimination.
And then there's lots of discrimination.
You know, you're entitled to have whatever preferences in a mate you want.
And one of the absurdities of DEI was that, you know, for a while they were trying to tell you that you were required to be attracted to, you know, trans people or whatever.
And it just, you know, you don't get to dictate that.
But okay, so there's a boy who cried wolf issue where anti-Semitism, because of recent history, is so potent an accusation that it's like it's a super weapon.
It's a cheat code to make arguments that are legitimate go away.
So it gets used ubiquitously.
And I must tell you, as a Jew, as somebody with Jewish children, I am horrified to watch the concept robbed of its meaning by abuse, because what that does is it opens the door to some massive historical anti-Semitic event, which is, you know, it's unthinkably stupid to do that.
So here we are.
Now, I do want to go on.
We've now looked, you know, that's probably more Nick Fuentes than you had encountered till now.
Is that true?
Yeah, I mean, I've been seeing the name for many years, but I didn't know what he looked like.
Okay.
So now you've seen, you know, articulate, interesting, likable, insightful, all of those things.
Okay.
Now I want to show you the, is it Mr. Hyde is the dark side of Dr. Jekyll?
Let's show you that side.
So while Jen is setting that up, I will say that is from a hybrid podcast between Bob Murphy and I think Adam Hunan.
I don't know any of those people.
These are insightful podcasters.
We will link to their channels in the show notes.
And it's forbidden for the same reason.
And I'm finding it more and more.
And that's women.
If you try to challenge the power of women, and I mean really challenge it.
I don't mean you go out there and you're one of these like medieval night LARPers.
You're going out there and saying, my fair trad maiden, my shield maiden is traditional and she's very submissive, but she also tells me what to do.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm not talking about these like Christian simps.
I'm not talking about these crypto feminists, you know, these Catholics where their wives run their shit.
I'm talking about if you really challenge women, you really challenge the power of women.
And that's as simple as going to women and saying, hey, shut the f ⁇ up.
You know, we don't want to hear you talk.
I'll let you know when I want to hear you talk.
I don't want to hear you talk right now.
So shut the f ⁇ up.
When you really have a guy that's out there challenging women and telling guys to challenge women, it seems like that is almost just as much of a forbidden subject as talking about the Jews.
And it is, you also have equally the same amount of obfuscation.
What I mean by that is when you talk about who runs society, people are always doing these gymnastics to say, well, you know, it's not really the Jews.
They'll say that it's satanic pedophiles.
They're just blaming the Jews or they'll say it's globalists or they'll say it's leftists who happen to be Jewish.
They're always contorting themselves.
They're sort of admitting there's a problem.
They're admitting the problem, which is that a minority that hates us is running society in a conspiratorial way.
Everyone knows it.
Everyone knows what's up.
But they have to come up with these like convoluted theories to obfuscate the reality and say, really, it's something else.
And the same thing happens with women.
Because guys get to a certain age and they're like, you know what?
Women suck.
Like they're talking too much.
They're not hot anymore.
Like you're fat.
You're chubby.
You're not as hot as you think you are.
You talk too much.
You're a b ⁇ .
Why do you have this job?
You don't know anything.
You're an idiot.
You're like, you can't tell me anything I don't know.
As a matter of fact, you couldn't name five countries.
You couldn't tell me what continent China's in.
How do you have a job?
How are you getting paid?
You say that.
Everybody kind of realizes women need to be taken down a peg.
Women are in control.
Women are running our lives.
They're clearly not up to the task.
They need to be taken down a peg.
And equally, just like the obfuscation with Jews, you have all these people saying, no, no, no, that's not the problem.
The problem is modern women.
They say it's all these degenerate modern women.
You need to find yourself a good girl who's traditional and Christian and conservative.
It's like they're telling us what to do too.
They're talking way too much too.
Half the time when you go on Twitter and you have some stupid wagging her finger in your face, she's a Christian.
She's got a Proverbs in bio.
She's got a Bible verse in her bio.
People say, no, it's just those, it's just those degenerate, modern, left-wing, blue-haired feminist girls.
I want a good trad Christian girl.
Half the time, it's the girls with the Bible versus in the bio that are the problem.
So it's, they're always coming up with, no, it's not the Jews.
No, it's not women.
No, it's not blacks.
It's actually really complicated.
No, it fucking isn't at all.
Jews are running society.
Women need to shut the f ⁇ up.
Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.
And we would live in paradise.
It's that simple.
It's literally that simple.
But the older I get, the more I realize it is really this simple.
We need white men in charge of everything again.
That's it.
Like it's that simple.
You sort of start to get based and you kind of realize what's up.
And you have this inkling in your head.
You're like, man, we need white men in charge of everything.
And then people kind of get convinced.
like no it's like it's about ideology we need like right-wing patriots that love the free market or like no we need like trad christians it's like no dude we need white men running everything okay white men need to run the household they need to run the country they need to run the companies they just need to run everything that's a pretty good heuristic
okay that's from now uh it's recent it's it's his new set now i will i want to make perfectly clear bob murphy and adam hunan uh had clipped that they were not talking to nick fuentes so they had people would understand um what the alarm with fuentes is um and uh adam says that that was not the most extraordinary clip it was just the one that he quickly
found and i can i can attest that there is really frightening stuff like that and it's not hard to find it um so obviously obviously i mean it's just it's it's it's sad in art i mean just forget the forget the bigotry yep um but it's a craving for the static solution the simple static solution in a complex world where simple static solutions will never work in
a complex world is this naivete that is in fact what has a big part of what has gotten us into these messes and it just it just won't work and so you know obviously he he appears to be um
not just well spoken but actually smart in the carlson segment um but you know he's still young he's you know he's in his 20s yet so um so there is there is an an arrogance and an assuredness of one's solutions to complex problems that when one has still not lived very long and i'm sure he feels like he's not young anymore but he is uh that that he is not yet understood but really you know even even
even
if that solution seemed right under some circumstances which it doesn't to me but even if it did the idea that that's the solution it's that simple to say anything is a simple solution to a complex problem and that it will be forever is remarkable right and it you know it elides what even solution are you talking about you're talking about an end state and you have not yeah he said it sounds like he wants to solve all the he will solve all the problems by simply putting white men of you know christian men he doesn't say uh because
spicy white doesn't work apparently
um right but so let's just say i don't actually he's very smart he's very young he if the story he told on the carlson podcast is right he had a radicalizing shunning from polite society um based on questions that i think he was over the line but not that far over the line um and accusations that it was about a defect so then
imagine i mean i have to also tell you there's a part of this that uh
unfortunately resonates for me because of what you and i went through right this idea that you're embedded in the community and then suddenly you know something happens and it's ready to pretend you're a freaking witch when it knows better and it's like what just happened to all you people why do you sound like that like weren't we friends weren't we going to parties together right and so anyway that does something to you you know in our case i think what it
did to us is honorable you know i'm sure there have been mistakes over the past eight years or whatever but i think it you know it radicalized us but it radicalized us honorably and decently but you can imagine on the other side that suddenly everybody turns on you they block you you lose he loses his job you know it radicalized us but you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's like you know it's them.
So he loses the program that he had gotten.
He's shut out of his personal contacts, right?
He's being treated like a pariah for having asked questions.
And then he finds that there's a ready audience.
Of course, as I more or less predicted in my little rant there, you know, he finds a ready audience of people who've had similar experiences or feared that they would if they said what they really thought.
And so now he's in the situation where the more his niche is like the most extreme, articulate, and intelligent person, right?
He owns that territory, right?
And so the more outlandish and despicable he becomes in this direction, the louder the cheers get.
The Adaboys, you know, the amplitude goes up for him, like, you know, blazing new ground over in this white nationalist area.
And I guess, you know, the punchline of the whole thing is he hasn't been given reasonable options, right?
He's been given knuckle under and don't say, don't ask certain questions, right?
He's been given do what he's doing and make a living, in fact, make a great living.
And then, you know, suddenly, you know, there are all sorts of people who want to talk to you.
And so.
I don't think I understand that he hasn't been given good options, Take.
There are, there are many things that people can do in the world.
Well, there are many things you can do in the world.
But when somebody tells you, hey, why don't you go find something productive to do, but don't ask these questions, right?
what does a person with self-respect do i mean i tell you my instinct is right And it's not that, oh, by the way, you might run into some things.
We hope that you won't go there.
It's I'm already asking these questions and I'm running into barrier after barrier.
Right.
And you're turning up the heat on me and suddenly I'm losing my job and my friends, you know?
So the point is that it reinforces whatever suspicions he might have had.
So anyway, I don't want to harp on it too long.
You've seen Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Believe me, I'm troubled by the fact that Nick Fuentes is filling the vacuum left by Charlie.
And, you know, oh boy, does seeing that second clip of Fuentes make me miss Charlie all the more because this is exactly the inverse of what Charlie was, right?
Charlie had love in his heart for, you know, the trans person who gets up at the mic in order to embarrass him.
And he, you know, welcomed the questions and he addressed them.
He took them seriously.
And he was also young.
So youth is not an excuse.
Yeah, it really isn't.
Anyway, I guess the last thing I would say is in reviewing this, I was reminded of what Ben Shapiro said in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death, where he said that he intended to pick up Charlie Kirk's bloody mic and carry on the mission.
And my thought was, you can't.
You don't have the characteristic that made Charlie capable of it.
Charlie picked up your mic, Ben, and he went to campus.
And instead of belittling people, he invited them to challenge him.
And then he met them on a level playing field.
And it was a unique characteristic to be able to do.
But anyway, to find that.
Yeah, I mean, I think, obviously, I didn't know Charlie, but what you have said, what others have said, what we've seen in the, you know, the vast library that he leaves behind is that he, like you, like me, like Jordan Peterson, like many people, actually are fundamentally interested in humans and in the personal stories and experiences of anyone that we meet.
And that is just an individual approach to humans, which is so much more expansive and wonderful and I guess productive, but just enjoyable to live your life that way.
You learn constantly because no one else has, you know, there are no two identical human lives.
And, you know, we can aggregate and there are true things that you can say about men versus women.
There are true things that you can say about Jews versus Christians, maybe beyond what is written into the fundamental texts.
There are true things that you can say at population-level analyses.
And of course, population-level analyses is a lot of what the kinds of science that we do depends on.
Evolutionary biology, ecology, these are population-level disciplines that require that you make generalizations about things and recognize that there will be outliers, there will be exceptions, that sometimes you think you see a pattern when you don't.
But ultimately, the population-level analyses are in service of the recognition that those populations are filled with individuals, all of which are different.
And if you are only interested in saying, okay, well, I can just ignore, ah, it's so messy.
There's so many of you all.
I'm just going to ignore, let's see, half.
Let's go with women.
Let's see, you know, whatever the fraction is, children, perhaps, old people, you know, Arabs, whatever it is, Lithuanians.
As a way of sort of narrowing your world so you can make it more fathomable and interpretable and easy for you to deal with, not interested.
It's just, it's such an uninteresting, venal way of going through the world.
Well, I want to take the same point and come at it from a slightly different perspective, something you and I talked a bunch about when we were in Spain and Portugal.
There's some normal human stuff.
Some of the stuff that I think is actually the most useful, important, endearing, right?
Like it starts for me with the ability and tendency to make fun of other people's accents, right?
I get why you could make, I get why in the academy you could make an argument that that's disrespectful.
I also know as a human being who's lived more than half a century that A, it is interesting to listen to somebody else so carefully that you pick up the little errors and nuances in what they're saying.
I can tell you from every place where I have lived or worked or traveled where a different language was spoken.
People are always fascinated to hear their own accent reproduced by people from a different culture.
It's funny to hear British people talk as if they're Americans.
It's so important.
Yeah, I mean, you also, there's so much here.
You reveal blind spots to yourself and to other people.
Like I remember being in Ecuador and, you know, as we have said many times, neither of us is fluent in Spanish and we wish we were and we blame ourselves for not being, but we're not.
We can do well enough, but and we've been around, you know, we spent a lot of time in Spanish-speaking countries.
So, you know, we hear the differences, like, you know, European Spanish versus Latin American Spanish is wildly different, of course, way beyond anything that I had been led to believe.
But we had spent a lot of time in Central America, and then we started going to Ecuador as I started leading study abroad trips there.
And in Ecuador, the double L sound in the double L in words like Ardia, which is French for squirrel, French, Spanish for squirrel, is always pronounced with a j.
It's ardesha.
And at the moment, I can't think of any other words with a double L in them, but there are a lot of them.
And it's always pronounced ardija.
It's always pronounced j.
And I started pointing this out to Ecuadorans.
They're like, no, no, we don't.
We don't say that.
It's like, well, but yeah, you do.
No, we don't say Ardesha.
But you just did it.
No, I didn't.
And so that itself is interesting.
Like, oh, wow, what am I doing then?
What am I doing that I don't know that I'm doing?
What could you tell me that I'm doing?
That I could say it.
I could do the thing in my defense of not doing the thing.
We all have blind spots.
And so part of what is amazing is to see other people's blind spots in a completely no stake situation, right?
Like there's just no stakes.
It doesn't matter.
And in so doing, we can level ourselves and other people up.
It's also just normal, right?
To the extent that you are interacting with people from far enough afield that they don't sound just like you, the tendency to hear as exaggerated the features of their dialect or whatever it is, totally normal.
And the idea that there's something wrong with noticing is like, oh, come on.
You're talking about a fundamental inside of what it is to be a human being, to notice differences and to wonder about them and to try to figure out what the pattern is.
And you know what?
It may be that you've met a tiny number of people from some far-flung corner of the world and you've misunderstood something as general that was actually particular to those people, right?
This is a normal process.
This is pattern recognition.
This is what we do.
This is the science thing that humans do.
Right.
Am I a bigot for noticing that Italians gesticulate as they talk?
No, there's nothing bigoted about it.
I think it's funny.
And I think people push each other around over, you know, stuff that they've picked up in their own racial groups.
And does it go wrong?
Yeah.
There's lines.
Figuring out where those lines are is not something you learn from a whiteboard.
It's something you learn from interacting with people and watching somebody go too far and realize, well, why was that not acceptable when this other thing was all right?
You know, well, the basic point is just like with language, right?
Where there are all of these petty tyrants who want to police language, right?
And the point is, well, it's not even policeable.
You know, you can occasionally put something off limits, but in general, language, language evolves.
And so like, oh, it changes.
Well, then let's change it.
You know, sorry, that doesn't work that way.
And we have a utterly amazing, largely still mysterious toolkit for navigating these things.
It's humor, right?
Like we make fun of each other.
And, you know, oh, that's bullying.
Well, I don't know that it is or it isn't, but the point is making fun of each other.
You know, I get to make fun of you.
You get to make fun of me.
We therefore find out what can be seen about us.
These are normal processes.
And the number of people who want to, you know, use any instinct towards this very normal thing is evidence that you're not an okay person.
Where did you learn to think about people?
Because none of this fits with what it is to be a person.
I'm not arguing that making fun of somebody for their culture is always okay, but we figure out where those lines are empirically through humor.
You say the thing and you think it's funny and nobody laughs.
That might be an indication of something.
Maybe you're over a line, right?
Or you say something you think is funny and people do laugh.
And you realize that you have said something that was just below the consciousness of the people whom you're talking to, right?
That it is the reveal of a difference, a pattern that people have known but didn't quite know that they knew.
Yep.
And difference, recognizing difference is not bigotry.
Right.
So at some level, instead of having, you know, assassins open niches for obvious trolls, we need to go back to using our full human toolkit to solve difficult problems about what happens when populations live together inside of a nation.
What happens when different populations in different nations have to agree what to collaborate on and what not to.
These are all open questions.
Nobody's got it nailed.
And the last thing you want to do is rule out an important part of the toolkit by leveling accusations to shut people up.
It's just inherently a mistake.
And frankly, it's un-American.
Yeah.
Good.
Well, if that's all you want to say about Nick Fuentes for today.
I think that's it.
There are a couple other things that you had suggested.
We could talk about the fact that Bill Gates seems to have changed his mind about climate change.
Let's talk about that one.
Okay.
I might have a few words to say about manta rays.
Sure.
I mean, and which is what I would you've been thinking about Nick Fuentes this week.
I've been thinking about manta rays.
It's actually a great counterpoint to a discussion of Bill Gates because they have a kind of an inverse characteristic.
We'll get to that when we get to the manta rays.
It's the spa time, isn't it?
It is.
Yes.
It's what leads them to have it.
We'll get back.
Let's start with Bill.
Okay.
So you want to bring up what Bill Gates shockingly said.
Well, so, yeah, so he put out a big old thing that I have put I've put into a Word document, but here, let me just pull it up on his site.
And he's made it, he's made it difficult.
So you can show my screen now if you can show my screen, which is always a question.
He could change this at any moment and we would have no way of knowing.
So I have separately, and I think I've got everything, so I'm just going to do this.
Nope, that's wrong.
Nope.
Okay.
This is the text that I just copied and pasted from his website so that I will know later if something has changed.
But it didn't, it took work because he's a tech guy and he made things in particular ways.
So if you actually just take my screen now for a second so I can get back to where I need to get to.
Yeah, here we go.
So this he put up a day ago.
So October 28th.
2029.
Nope, October 28th, 2025.
Three tough truths about climate.
What I want everyone at COP30 to know.
That's the big climate change conference that's taking place in Balaem, Brazil next month.
It's long.
It's just long and long and long.
But his main points are, we'll read what to know and then scroll through to his three main positions.
He says, climate change is serious, but we've made great progress.
We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions.
But we can't cut funding for health and development, programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change to do it.
It's time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the green premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
So just a couple of translations there.
The green premium is how much more it costs to do things in ways that are considered green as opposed to not green.
So for instance, there's jet fuel now that is being made in a way or burns in a way.
I don't actually even know all the ways that it is supposed to be better for in terms of carbon emissions than standard jet fuel, but it costs so much more than standard jet fuel.
And that difference in cost between the standard and the better for the climate maybe product is the green premium.
So he wants to reduce the green premium to zero.
Assuming that the products in question are actually better for the planet, yes, great, fantastic.
Don't trust this man to know what's better for the planet.
Well, Bobby Kennedy has said, show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy, I think is the way he phrases it.
And so the point is, it is inherently true for reasons of trade-offs that a fuel or any other technology that is more climate friendly will cost more to make.
In other words, the market chooses the most economically efficient thing to produce.
If you're choosing either, you don't need to do anything because the most economically efficient thing is the best for the climate.
But in general, it won't be.
And so there will always be a premium.
And the only way to neutralize that is to subsidize.
Well, not inherently, because technological progress exists.
Now, I am not a techno-optimist, as you know, and I do not think that we will solve all of our problems through advancements in human knowledge.
There are some just impenetrable barriers, but some of the green premium exists because we have not yet discovered solutions that could exist without the cost that we are currently paying.
Well, the only reason that I'm speaking in an unnuanced way is because if I understood you correctly, he says reduce it to zero.
So reduce it is something you can do through technological advances.
Reduce it.
In fact, technological enhancement will naturally go there because inefficiencies, a pollutant is an inefficiency in a production cycle.
Yep.
And, you know, the media response to Bill Gates is, oh my God, he's changed his position on climate change.
But even these top three bullet points that we just shared doesn't sound like much of a change.
In fact, the second bullet point, but we can't cut funding for health and development programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change to do it.
That sounds to me like he is admitting that this is a totally self-interested position, that he is seeing efforts to reduce carbon emissions as cutting into his efforts to get all of Africa vaccinated against whatever his newest thing is.
And you see in what he's written here throughout this, a focus on exactly what we have come to know that Bill Gates is focused on.
Things health and development, so-called health and so-called development in developing world nations, in which most of his solutions require high-tech interventions, giving people solutions that require constant handouts in the form of GMO seeds, for instance, and vaccines for everyone, including for the freaking cows to reduce their farting.
It's truly a remarkable set of solutions that he's solutions that he's got proposed here.
But he says here, Unlike what he has said in the past, there's a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this.
In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.
The evidence is all around us.
Just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures.
Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
And then he says, fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.
Now, he's sounded like those people in the past.
So this sounds like a reversal, but I think it's just self-interested.
And he's got three big points in this.
And they're hard to find because this is a kind of ridiculously formatted document that he's got.
One, climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.
Okay.
You know, we will reasonable, reasonable people will disagree as to, you know, how serious the problem is and how you're defining climate change and whether or not carbon is the problem.
How much of the change that we're seeing is anthropogenic.
How much of it is due to Earth systems and larger solar system and galactic systems that we actually have nothing to do with.
But that does seem like a change from his previous perspective.
I must say, as much as I think climate change is a scam, as it is currently delivered to us, far from our most important problem delivered because of the solutions that it suggests are mandated.
I don't like the idea of him reversing course and say, but it will not end civilization.
The fact is, this has always been a problem because of the unknowns in this space, right?
While it is true that sea level change, which ought to be a pretty solid indicator of the change in the climate globally, hasn't changed, right?
You can make arguments that it's changed, but it's changed here and not there.
It's pretty weak.
The evidence that there's been substantial change is hard to find.
On the other hand, there's a question of methane class rates buried in the Arctic, which could take a relatively small change in climate and could cause a runaway that would put human populations in conflict with each other and could result in a nuclear exchange that would end civilization.
So I don't like the idea that Bill Gates, who is an authority on what again and how?
Like this is a guy.
Yeah, well, and not even, right?
This is a guy who basically got rich by stealing technologies and marshaling them in an aggressive fashion in a market that was ready to explode.
That does not suggest expertise on complex systems.
It does not suggest a deep moral commitment to the well-being of humans.
It doesn't suggest any of those things.
And his recent behavior calls all of those things into question.
So why the hell are we listening to this guy in the first place, especially if what he's going to do is go from being a gloom and doomer who believed or at least argued that climate change was the thing we needed to pay attention to because of the massive threat it posed to humanity to now he's the guy who's going to tell us to calm down about it.
Like for one thing.
But again, I think it's because it's self-interested.
I agree, but I think that's the easiest way to interpret Bill Gates is that it's all self-interested, hence we shouldn't be listening.
Right.
This is not the person to listen to.
This is somebody who has an angle on everything and he's making a killing and he can be safely ignored when it comes to prescriptions for how to make the world a better place because he hasn't demonstrated a single thing that would suggest he's an expert on that topic.
But what really bugs me is that they didn't let us have the discussion.
Right?
Bill Gates went from the guy defending a now indefensible point to the guy now making a new point that frankly I think is overdrawn.
But what, where's the acknowledgement that you had lots of people raising the right question who got shouted down, who got censored?
It's preposterous.
Yeah.
So maybe that's it.
Maybe we're done talking about it then, because I think that's right.
I mean, there's a lot of detail here, but maybe we just don't need to go there because I think, I mean, that's the final point right there.
Okay.
So I guess maybe I encourage you guys to go and take a look.
There's a number of details that are interesting, but ultimately, when we are told that there's a conclusion that we aren't allowed to disagree with, why aren't we allowed to disagree with it?
But the people who are coming to the conclusions are allowed to change their minds.
It's absurd.
Yeah.
And in fact, that thing needs some sort of a name so that we can label it.
The hallmark of a dishonest conversation is that the powers that be can reverse course, but you're not allowed to have made the arguments that they will ultimately claim as their own without being accused of being a quack or dishonest or whatever it is that they say.
And it's again and again and again.
The acknowledgements are never, well, let me put it a different way.
In order for the system to work, those who get stuff right have to have their credibility elevated and those who get stuff wrong have to have their credibility downgraded.
Now, a person can get a certain number of things right by accident.
And so elevating their credibility does not make the world better.
But a pattern of getting things right suggests insight.
So in order for that insight to rise so that we get smarter over time, you can't take the people who were wrong and now make them right in the opposite direction because they are the people who know.
If they knew and they got it wrong, now they're the people who don't know.
I would say Bill Gates is now last in line to listen to on climate if he was the guy making this alarmist point.
And now all of the people, all of the people who were saying, hey, actually, there's a problem with the data.
There are heat island effects that are causing us to see an elevation in temperature that's really about urbanization around weather stations or something like that.
All those people should be ahead of Bill Gates.
Well, but I mean, as you will see, if you look at his ridiculous memo, I don't think he's actually changed his position about the seriousness.
I think he's just trying to re-elevate his own pet projects, which is vaccinate the world and mess with agricultural systems.
That he still is claiming, you know, and what I was going to show, you know, the various sectors that are contributing the most to carbon, we really have to focus on the carbon.
And that's why you have to vaccinate the cows so they don't fart so much.
That's the easiest to mock of his would-be solutions.
But each of his solutions, A, has several companies that are, you know, on it who are doing the tech development, who are going to solve the problems he wants to, the way he wants them solved.
But, you know, the solution to the fact that the energy sector is producing most of the carbon, he wants more wind.
He wants more wind energy, which, like, what a scourge.
What an obvious and complete scourge.
Has he never been in a landscape with these things?
Right.
So it doesn't seem to me that he's actually changed his tune.
He's just written a screed that looks like he's changed his tune enough so that money can keep on being funneled into his even more diabolical projects, frankly.
So what it really is then, is it's portfolio-based epistemology, where he's organizing his belief structure around the positions he has taken in the market or the opportunities that he sees.
And, you know, he's reverse engineering a position about climate that is optimal relative to his investments.
And again, obviously, somebody who does that is not somebody to listen to if you're trying to figure out whether the climate is being destabilized by people or whether or not pandemics are a big danger and how to control them.
This is somebody trying to make a buck.
Yeah, exactly.
So you can see it in the language that is mostly loosey-goosey, except when he comes up with particular numbers.
We largely don't know where the numbers are coming from.
But the fundamental, he simultaneously says his second truth is temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate and health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.
But still his only rubric for establishing that we're making great progress on climate and that's why we can put it aside for a moment and focus on messing with agriculture and health across the world is they're all measures of carbon.
It's all about carbon.
So he's trying to have it always, all of the ways, and he's probably trying to do that always.
And it's not compelling.
Like it doesn't fall, it's not a good argument.
It's not a good set of arguments.
It doesn't, and I guess I wonder there are a lot of people who actually, and I don't know why, because as you point out, when has he demonstrated excellent pattern recognition or problem solving or predictive capacity?
Other than in business.
So given that he doesn't seem to have those capacities, why do a large swath of people listen to him, go to him, like jump when he has a new idea or he says he has a new idea?
Why are we all paying attention except for the fact that he is powerful?
But many of the people who are listening to him, I think, think that they're listening to him because he's right, because he's good at this, because he has insight, as opposed to, no, you're being told about it, because what he decides may affect your life.
That doesn't mean that what he decides should be affecting your life.
It's a very different thing.
It is a very different thing.
And you need to have a small amount of sophistication to spot that what is being peddled here is sort of designed for that slick publication rather than to persuade anybody who has an analytical toolkit here.
Because truth, is that three or two?
Three.
Truth three.
Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.
What?
That sounds, you know what that sounds like?
Racism is the real pandemic.
That's exactly what it sounds.
June 2020, George Floyd has died.
What's the real pandemic?
We've been locked down for months.
Why are we locked down?
Oh, it's not the virus.
It's the racism.
What?
Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.
Right.
But I thought it was the carbon.
The best defense.
Isn't the carbon?
The best defense against climate change where the hard-headed version of the climate change scenario involves a runaway process with the Arctic melting of frozen methane.
How does health and prosperity protect you against a sudden jump in the temperature of planet Earth?
In fact, the starvation.
I mean, look, I don't think this is likely to happen in part because of what I have become aware of through Ben Davidson with respect to the solar cycle.
I don't think the methane clathrate story is going to be the one that the climate doomers have been peddling.
But to the extent that that is the story about why climate change is this very frightening thing, it's not that the globe gets warmer.
It's that the globe gets warmer and that positive feedback kicks it into a loop where we have no control over it, right?
Where it gets arbitrarily hot.
How does health and prosperity deal with the fact of every biome on Earth suddenly being radically altered by climate change?
It doesn't.
So you're telling us you didn't believe the original version and that what you're saying now sounds like a cool platitude, but it doesn't add up with any sophisticated model about climate change.
It makes no logical sense.
Right.
It's incoherent.
And the point is, what fraction of the people who see that document could explain why it's incoherent?
I'm sure it's small, but those of us who can see, it's like, well, you're telling us that this is not analytical.
You're telling, you're making what sounds like an analytical argument.
But there are graphs.
It must be.
That's quantitative then.
Well, yes.
Colorful, no doubt.
All right.
Yes.
Well, all right.
I would like us to stop listening to Bill Gates on matters that do not involve Microsoft's technology place.
I would trust him in any regard to report anything useful.
Yeah, he finishes his document actually by patting himself on the back.
He's like, this reminds me of that moment when I really turned Microsoft around and as if this is a similar moment.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Can we finish by talking just a little bit about manta rays?
We got it.
For one thing, we got to close the loop on Bill Gates.
There's something about manta rays that is the inverse.
Yeah.
So I found myself thinking about and writing about and digging into the existing research about manta rays this week for the book that I'm writing for, obviously the chapter on beauty.
They are lovely.
They are actually lovely.
Although if you get really close, one of the things I've been thinking about is like, I'm not sure that beauty is fractal in the organic world, that there are levels of beauty in most organisms.
But there's like, there's a particular close-up view on a manta ray, especially if he's got his jaws open because they're planktonic.
I mean, they're filter feeders.
I don't know if they're filthy raised, but they're eating plankton.
And it doesn't, it's not beautiful.
Like a manta ray coming at you close with their mouth open.
Not that that's ever happened to me or to you, but it's not.
I've seen pictures and it's not beautiful.
But manta rays from above or from some distance, seeing them effectively fly through the water.
They're just, they're gorgeous, right?
And rays like skates and sharks are the Elasma brex.
These are cartilaginous fishes.
They have no bone at all.
Sharks have no bone.
They have teeth.
They have these mineralized tissue that are very hard.
And they got a, you know, sharks especially have this bite force.
It's incredible, but their jaws are entirely made of cartilage.
And same thing is true of skates and rays.
And they've looked the same way for a very long time.
So they are, you know, the language that we will tend to use over in evolutionary biology is that they're basal, often the word that you'll hear used even by evolutionary biologists, that they're primitive.
But that sends the wrong message because there are a lot of things on this earth that still look like they did a long time ago.
Crocodiles, turtles, dragonflies, rays.
And the fact that they have persisted in a relatively stable form while mammals have transformed ourselves very, very quickly doesn't mean that they're not good at what they do.
In fact, it means they're really, really good at what they do and they found a stable enough niche to keep on doing it despite all of the changes that have happened in the world around them.
And manta rays in particular, the exact number of species is up for debate because what exactly is a species, but one or two-ish, not very many species of manta rays, but they're pan-tropical and they get into sort of some temperate waters too.
But they're in all the oceans, all the equatorial and tropical oceans of the world.
And they're social and they've got the biggest encephalization quotient of any fishy fish, by which I mean their brain-to-body ratio is huge.
Now, I learned that this week.
I had no idea.
Did manta rays?
Manta rays have big brains compared to their bodies?
What about all the other?
And when I say fishy fish, I mean to exclude tetrapods like us and like kangaroos and like fruit bats and parrots and such, which are fish in the technical sense, but it's not all that useful unless you're us to think of them as fish.
So all the things that you think of when you think of fish that are still in the water, of all of them, manta rays apparently have the biggest brain-to-body ratio of any of them, which is incredible.
Especially it'd be one thing if it was a tiny creature.
Yeah.
It's not a tiny creature.
It's not a tiny creature.
So it's got a really large brain, which raises all kinds of questions about what benefit does a creature with this niche, especially if it's feeding on plankton.
Exactly.
What benefit does it get from all of that brain?
And so, I mean, that's one of the things, too, that in general, if you eat things that aren't actively trying to escape from you on land, if you eat plants in the water, if you eat plankton, you don't have to be as smart because all you have to do is know where to find it or know when to open your mouth if you're like a whale shark and it's there, you're going to get fed.
So over in tetrapod land, you tend to find carnivores being smarter than herbivores.
And so these manta rays that are entirely eating plankton, why are they so smart?
And not only do they have these big brains, but they have these brains that have a lot of imaginations in them, just like the more sentient, the more social organisms, tetrapods on land have is, you know, the more cauliflower-looking brains they have.
So a couple things about these guys.
And maybe just, I'll save the spa for the end.
There is a test for self-awareness that was first given in, I think it was 1970 or 72, I can't remember now, to a chimp, where you put a chimp in front of a mirror in order to figure out if they have self-awareness.
The idea is self-awareness is a step on the road to sentience to consciousness and how many of the organisms with whom we share our planet have self-awareness.
And we think that there are a fair number.
But in this particular case, a couple of chimps were allowed to become familiar, these were captive chimps, were allowed to become familiar with mirrors.
They came to, they went behind them, they did stuff in front of them.
And then the chimps were taken away.
They were anesthetized, and as were some chimps that had not become familiar with mirrors, and they were given marks.
They were given red dye on one of their ears and over a brow ridge, places that they couldn't see without a mirror, right?
You put these chimps back in front of the mirrors, these chimps that are mirror-experienced, and they immediately start doing this on their own bodies.
Implying that they...
Implying that they know that this is me.
That I am seeing me in the mirror.
This is not some other chimp who has something red, in which case you might expect them to reach towards the mirror.
So the mirror self-recognition test has now been employed on a number of other organisms.
And there's legitimate objections.
Like, why do we think that the rest of the world that might be sentient views has the same sensory capacities and biases as we do?
This is a visual test.
What about those who mostly run their world olfactorily?
And in fact, a cichlid fish has been given an olfactory test.
And these cichlid fish have apparently demonstrated self-awareness through olfaction.
So it's a whole different story, which I haven't talked to you about.
I don't know what that experiment would have looked like.
But all the great apes, that is to say the chimps and bonobos and orangutans and gorillas pass the mirror test.
Asian elephants, bottlenosed elephants, and magpies, which are corfits, all pass the mirror recognition test.
But then like other monkeys don't.
Reese's macaques and Langers and such don't pass the mirror recognition test.
Many public health authorities don't.
Public health authorities don't.
Pharmaceutical executives.
Not clear if Bill Gates would.
That's the connection.
That's not why we're talking about manta rays, but that is why you wanted us to get to manta rays so that we could point out that Bill Gates might in fact fail the mirror recognition test.
Yeah, I think there's a fair chance that he would.
However, you put a mirror in a big tank with captive manta rays and you give them an opportunity to explore.
And we are not in this case taking them away and anesthetizing them and giving them marks above their brow ridge, not only because they don't have brow ridges, but that is not what is happening.
But also because they don't have hands.
They couldn't tell us that these thought were there.
This is also true.
So what do they do?
What do they do when you give mirrors to manta rays?
They spend much more time in front of the mirrors than elsewhere and much more time in front of the mirrors than they do in that part of the tank when the mirrors aren't there.
Okay.
So they're clearly engaging with the mirrors.
Manta rays usually, when they encounter someone else of their own species, change color.
They have these white markings on them and they change color as a sign of recognition that I'm seeing someone else.
In front of a mirror, the manta rays do not change color in this way.
But what they do do is they'll swim at the mirror fast and sort of, you know, and veer away at the last minute and they will change their speed a lot and they'll kind of circle around and swoop.
And it reminded me reading about what the manta rays do of that scene from Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers movie, the 1930 whatever Marx Brothers movie, in which Groucho Marks and Harpo Marks are the characters that they are playing are dressed identically.
Harpo is trying to evade Groucho and I think it's Harpo runs into a mirror, breaks it and makes a loud noise and Groucho's character runs in and somehow the glass is all cleaned up.
never explained um but you have no no aren't they walking by an open doorway No.
At least there may be another one, but the one that I've now looked at a couple times since thinking about manta rays, obviously you go to Duck Soup, is they then, you know, Groucho runs into the room where there used to be a mirror and there is no mirror, but only Harpo knows that and he's on the other side.
And so they start mimicking, well, Harpo starts mimicking everything that Groucho is doing and Groucho does increasingly complicated things to see if he can trick Harpo, which he's like, is it a reflection or is it my brother that doofus?
And I need to grab him into realizing that it's not a mirror.
But it seems like the manta rays are testing the mirror to see if it responds exactly as what they are doing, except in reverse.
And given that the manta rays also don't change color in the way that they normally do when interacting with a different manta ray, it feels like the manta rays have, in some measure at least, passed the mirror recognition test.
Yeah, I mean, I would say the fact that they don't flash the color signal that they would do for a conspecific, that's a good passage of the test.
I'm wondering, I have a hypothesis.
I am struggling to think of any way you could possibly test it, but hypothesis for why they actually grok what's in the mirror.
And I'm not certain about this, but there are certainly ways that you can look at the surface of the sea from beneath and see a mirror-like reflection, distorted by the undulation of the surface.
And at least sometimes they're swimming quite near the surface, so they would have access to that.
Yeah, they're surface creature.
I mean, in fact, I think they breach the surface and launch themselves sometimes.
Yes, they do sometimes.
I just don't know.
I haven't seen the research about how much of the time they spend deep as opposed to surface.
But in any case, you can imagine if you were a intelligent creature who doesn't have to spend that much time thinking about your food because it's plankton and you do spend a certain amount of time interacting with the surface and seeing a mirror-like reflection of yourself.
And then you saw one in the wrong plane, you know, underwater, be like.
Yeah, I wonder.
I think I feel like a prediction of that might be that, so a surface of the water is breachable.
The mirror is not breachable.
So I would expect them to sometimes touch it with their razor with their cephalic, with their race, with their, with, with their pectoral fins, or even with their cephalic fins, which are these, you know, they open their mouths and they use these projections that are cephalic fins to help funnel plankton into their mouths.
And so I would expect them to maybe touch the surface of the mirror.
And I don't, I don't know.
I don't remember if it's in there, but I don't know that they do or do not do that.
But I think it's an interesting possible prediction of the model.
So one other thing that manta rays do is they apparently end up in tussles with sharks and orcas a fair bit because I guess probably because they're delicious, that they are not instigating fights with orcas or sharks.
They, the rays, are delicious to the orcas and the sharks.
I believe that that's the only reason to get into regular fights with sharks or orcas if you're a manta ray.
There's no other reason.
Like, what are they not fighting over plankton?
Ideological differences.
Possibly, possibly.
Or, you know, the manta rays are like, God, you guys are dumb.
But then they ran into orcas, like, oh, they're not that dumb actually.
No, not that.
But so the manta rays often have wounds from these fights that they've gotten involved with, involved in.
And in some, in at least one population, manta rays spend sometimes eight hours a day at these cleaning stations that I insist on calling spas because it feels like they're spas.
These cleaning stations that are staffed by little fish who spend their time taking parasites off of manta rays and cleaning the wounds that have been inflicted by sharks and orcas, and thus helping the manta rays heal more quickly and go out into the world and do whatever self-awareness, shark-tussling behavior they're actively doing.
So there are a number of things about that that I wonder.
One, if they don't have any new wounds or any open wounds, do they still go to the spas?
Probably not.
My guess would be probably yes.
My guess would be that the amount of time there is probably about parasites on their surface that decrease their swimming efficiency or something.
But I'd be curious to know.
Or actually risk infection or disease.
Right.
There's something weird about the idea that their encounters with sharks and orcas are so common and yet so rarely fatal that there are just lots and lots of wounds to be cleaned.
Well, I don't, again, you know, there's never having been a marine biologist, but always having been, well, you know, your advisor and on my committee, Dick Alexander, used to, he had a lot of students who worked on the dolphins in Shark Bay in Australia or, you know, affiliates, right?
And he, you know, he used to sort of sort of half make fun of them.
It's like, you really are going to study an animal for which you can see a fin occasionally.
Oh, he would outright mock them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I don't, I don't know.
I think, you know, we do know a lot about, for instance, the dolphins in Shark Bay in Australia and a lot about various populations of dolphins worldwide.
But there's a whole lot that is difficult to know about any species that spends its entire time in a milieu that we do not find ourselves comfortable in.
I don't know to what degree manta ray population demographics are known.
So I don't, you know, maybe they do die from shark or orca attack somewhat commonly.
I have no idea.
Well, the idea that they all have, either they don't all go to the spas or they do all go to the spas and it's not about the wounds or the adults tend to have wounds that they survived the attack.
So what the hell is going on?
Why, why?
Yeah, and the description of the cleaning stations being that it's about picking pairs, that little fish, the little fish who staff these stations, these spas, are picking off parasites and dividing wounds.
Well, I don't know, you know, is that 80-20?
Like what, you know, what is the fraction of the time spent?
And is it, you know, when a wound is present, do they, do the little fish go after those first?
Because you also get, you know, it's, it's, it's more tissue, it's more nutritive.
Yeah.
But they will, they will do whatever work needs to be done if it benefits them, even though it will benefit them less if they're just, you know, decrusting a manta ray as opposed to cleaning out its wounds.
Yeah.
I mean, the surprising thing, or one of the several surprising things, maybe obvious in retrospect, but the idea that there would be an agreed upon location, right?
That if you're a manta ray in need of cleaning services, it makes sense rather than haphazardly swim around and wait for these fish for there to be a place that you go.
And it's obviously in the interest of the fish to go to the place where the manta rays show up reliably.
Yeah.
And they're at or near reefs where the fish can then be secluded and safe when they're not actively in the act of cleaning manta rays.
Yeah.
And it'd be cool to know where one of these places were where you could just go and wait for the manta rays to show up.
Yeah.
That'd be awesome.
It would.
So that obviously, other than the question of whether or not Bill Gates would pass the mirror recognition test, as well as a manta ray can, there's really no connection.
But that's what I've been thinking about the last couple of days.
That's cool.
So I had no idea to even wonder about the intelligence of manta rays because them being rays, I wouldn't have put the odds of them being intelligent at worth worrying about.
Yep.
So cool.
I agree.
And I mean, just, God, what an amazing planet we live on.
Yeah.
I mean, there is so much diversity of life, of intelligence even, that two people who are actively thinking about this for decades can still be surprised by learning about the remarkable intelligence of something that we have actually seen in the wild.
Amazing.
Yeah, love it.
It is amazing.
Amazing.
It is a lovely planet.
Finest in the district.
Yes.
Yes.
Indeed.
Too bad about that highway they're putting in.
What are you going to do?
Space bypass, yes.
Yes.
That.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we, I want to recommend to people again to go check out your conversation with Ron Johnson, Senator Ron Johnson on the Inside Rail, which just came out on Sunday.
We've got cool Q ⁇ As on locals, including a three-hour one that we just did this last Sunday as well.
And we're going to be off next week, but we'll be back in two weeks.
And until then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
