Saving Civilization: The 300th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 300th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss where we started back in March 2020: Covid, lockdowns, sunlight, masks, repurposed drugs, grainy videos, and more. Then: the recent and on-going massive solar storms, and how to think about them, now and in the future, especially if you find yourself away from home as a civilization ending event may be about to happen. Also: space weather, or anthropogenic climate change, or both? Finally: Rod Dreher on the groypers among D.C. zoomer...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 300.
Can you believe it?
I cannot.
Now, on the one hand, 300 is extraordinary.
On the other hand, it's not even close to prime.
I mean, it's like it's not even trying.
It's not trying.
No, it's not trying.
It's failing or it's succeeding at not being prime.
One of the two depends on.
If it's not trying, it is neither failing nor succeeding.
I suppose I'd have to accept that.
Yeah.
In any case, it is our 300th episode.
For those of you who are watching, you may recognize that I'm wearing a festive shirt, a shirt I never put on because it always, as much as I like the shirt, I have no idea whether it looks any good on me.
And I always balk when I get to it in the closet and think I should possibly put it on.
But for the 300th episode, I thought a little something celebratory might be in order.
Yeah, I actually, I think it's fantastic.
For those not watching, it is a drab.
It is a pair.
It's not drab.
It's not khaki.
Okay.
My goodness.
It is a Paisley print, but entirely in blues.
And so I often do not like Paisleys because they're so loud.
They just do so many things at once, too many things at once.
But this controls for Hugh, more or less.
And I really, I think it's great.
I dig them.
They're kind of biological.
And since I have paid my dues.
A little Daphne-esque.
Yeah, exactly.
Since I've paid my dues, I can wear Paisley in blues.
What dues have you paid, sir?
It's a blues thing.
I've been ridiculed, slandered.
You paid some dues.
I've been canceled.
Man, I got some scars.
So anyway, I figure I've earned this.
You know, we're not going to do it today, but I was looking back through some of the episodes that we've done.
So actually, I was not looking back through episodes, looking back through my notes that I wrote in advance of episodes to see sort of where we've been.
And I think it was episode 20 when we came upon the third anniversary of Evergreen blowing up, which is now, you know, seems so far away, right?
And I had gone into some of the deep history and found some original source material from some of our then colleagues.
And I had forgotten.
I'd forgotten just how insane some of the rhetoric was and how well it prepared us for then what happened during COVID.
And so, you know, if that came across in any way, like, I don't think you paid your due, you can be assured that that is not the case.
It's not how you feel about it.
I realize I missed.
It was the perfect place to quote Paul Simon.
I've been slandered, libeled, heard words I never heard in the Bible.
One step ahead of the shoeshine, two steps away from the county line.
What song is that?
I have no idea.
I would have to think about it.
It must be, I don't know.
It must be, I don't know what the title of that song is.
But anyway, I obviously know a few of the lyrics from it.
Yeah, well, yes.
It says you do know a few of the lyrics from many, many songs.
True.
All right.
So here we are.
Yeah, we're going to go back through some of where we've been today for our 300th live stream episode and then talk a bit about Solar Storm and some insights from Rod Dreer's newest piece.
And we may begin a segment today on the show, something we haven't done before, but that might become a recurring theme.
A little thing called, now that's a first world problem.
All right.
Yes.
That is not a small category.
No, no, it's not.
In fact, unfortunately, I came up with this yesterday.
I told you, like, now that's a first world problem.
And already it has more than one thing in it.
So I don't know if in the inaugural segment of now that's a first world problem, we want to do two things.
So let me get this straight.
Yeah.
There are too many things for your podcast segment.
That's a first world problem.
That's pretty meta because that is a first world problem right there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Indeed.
Indeed.
All right.
So we're going to do a Q ⁇ A after this live stream, only on locals.
Join us.
If there are any questions left at that point.
We're going to do a Q ⁇ A regardless of the state of questions.
But in the meantime, we pay our rent right up top with three sponsors.
You can be assured that if we are reading ads on this show, they are for companies, sponsors who make products or offer services that we truly vouch for.
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So I was, as you know, at the CHD conference in Austin.
That's Children's Health Defense.
Children's Health Defense, if you were to say all the words in sequence.
And I had multiple conversations with people about CrowdHealth.
This is catching on.
So anyway, we're not the only ones who are having a great experience with it.
Yeah.
And we tried to convince a sidewalk poet who ended up waxing eloquent to us about her lack of health insurance about CrowdHealth.
It is a service that is extraordinary and available to nearly everyone.
Yep, you might as well bypass the broken system and do it in a reasonable way run by honorable people.
Yeah, exactly.
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It's amazing how far the health awareness conversation has gotten into the mainstream.
it's stunning when i was um thinking about that list of modern stressors um you don't five years ago if you put together a list of um that's the wrong That's the wrong ad.
There are things on that list that would have made most people look at you like you were Looney Tunes, and they have moved right into the mainstream.
And therefore, so has the discussion around how we can repair ourselves and maintain health once we have it.
And Armor Colostrum is one of the excellent products on the market that has moved into a space that needed something.
And here it is.
Yeah, and even just the recognition that milk is something beyond food, that there's a component here that has deeper implications for health, and that it might matter what the cow that you got that from had been eating itself.
All of those things are well known to our audience.
But the fact that people are widely becoming aware of what a perilous world it has become at that level and how much you can affect your own health by paying attention to where those hazards are.
Speaking of which, asterisk for a later conversation, either privately or perhaps publicly, I did not tell you that yesterday I went down the rabbit hole of what exactly does homogenization do to milk and does it make it mean for you?
It's not better.
I'm just going to leave that there.
All right.
So we think we, when we think about processed milk, we usually think about the pasteurization, but the homogenization is part and parcel of what, at least in the U.S., is done to milk when it is processed and made safe.
And it is, by most metrics, not an improvement.
Yes.
And yeah, anytime you do something like this, I mean, you know, the peanut butters that don't settle, right?
As annoying as it is to have to remix your peanut butter.
Emulsifiers and stabilizers.
Exactly.
Mark of the future.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
Plastics, my boy.
Wow.
I was not expecting that connection, but there it is.
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All right.
Shall we start with the rather frightening solar reality?
The 300th episode.
Yes.
That is where we're starting.
We don't have to spend a lot of time here, but we are here for 300th.
You're 100% right.
I'm a little frazzled because the solar storm has me preoccupied.
I mean, we can skip it.
No, no.
But I don't want to stuff it in the middle.
No, no.
We should talk about it.
Okay.
300 episodes.
Shall we talk about how we got to 300 live streams?
It depends.
What do you mean?
You want to describe how the ball got rolling?
No.
Do you want to?
Yeah, I will.
What happened, and you'll help me out with roughly what the date would have been.
It would have been somewhere in...
You're asking when the first episode was?
Yeah.
The first episode was on March 24th, 2020.
That's the first live stream.
Yes.
So what happened was Heather and I were talking about the reality of the developing COVID story, which I don't think we yet called COVID.
Yeah, we did.
March of 2020?
Yeah.
Of course we did.
Okay.
Well, I would have said we were still calling it novel coronavirus at that point.
But in any case, the story began to emerge.
And like everybody else on the planet, we were trying to understand what it meant.
And we had certain tools in our toolkit.
I had been a bat biologist.
We're obviously evolutionary biologists, which is relevant to the virology, the epidemiology, the immunology involved in fending off pathogens.
And so we were having a discussion.
And it would soon turn out that my background working for a year in a university grants office would become relevant to understanding what, for instance, Fauci's role in the whole shenanigans was.
Quite right.
So our conversations, which we were having around the dinner table, largely with our children who were a little young to grasp exactly what was going on, but we're getting the gist of it.
Heather said, you know, I really think other people need to hear this because they don't know how to think about this.
And, you know, our painstakingly putting together a coherent model of what was going on would be valuable to them.
So I think we were initially doing two a week.
Yep.
And I just, I actually just wanted to share, not my screen here, but my notes that I wrote in advance of our first live stream.
So I should say this is not this is not the sort of thing that I tend to.
In fact, at the point that podcasts started being a thing in, I don't even know when it would have been, maybe early teens, right?
You know, at some, at some point, I mean, there had been things that weren't called podcasts for a long time.
I remember actually recording episodes of This American Life in the 90s and taking them with me to Madagascar so that I could listen to them.
So sort of, you know, long-form conversations in that case, you know, highly scripted and beautifully put together.
I went going on for a long time, but I remember you making a joking comment to me at some point in the early teens about how podcasting had to be last on my list of things I would ever want to do since I prefer not to be in front of a camera and just kind of riffing.
So I don't know what the date was.
It's possible we could look it up, but I believe the initial podcast is Adam Curry, the podfather.
The initial podcast in the universe.
Yeah, I think so.
I think it's at least the first place that it was called that.
Obviously, you're right.
There are precursors in the same way that Beatles movies are sort of precursors to modern music videos, if modern music videos are even still a thing.
MTV is either about to or has gone off the air.
Apparently, nobody wanted their MTV.
Yeah.
I ran into that recently.
Yeah.
And like with a whimper, apparently no one has noticed.
Yes, no one has.
Well, it makes sense.
People have moved on to other stuff.
But it's like the iconic thing for our generation, right?
Right.
So I think all the initial podcasts were not video because it would have been almost unthinkable, the level of bandwidth.
I hope I'm not getting all this wrong.
I don't know.
Yeah, but the original one, I mean, I think it's named after the iPod, you know, back before more sophisticated smartphones and things like that.
But anyway, yes, the idea of, you know, broadcasting, especially live, you know, there's something perilous about live.
So it was very much not a suggestion that I would have expected.
Yeah, well, I mean, that actually doesn't throw me as much.
It's just the, I don't.
I would prefer not to be recognized in this way.
Yeah.
So, you know, we have our own different concerns about the medium, whatever, but it did seem like a valuable service, potentially.
And what's, you know, a number of things that neither of us saw at all.
And, you know, we made we made many errors, of course.
I think we made all the errors.
No, we did not make all the errors.
We made many errors, of course, but we also just didn't see some things that turned out to be true.
One of which is, oh, obviously, if you start something in which you are speaking honestly with the person that you love at exactly the moment that for the first time in, I don't know, ever, the government has successfully kept everyone from doing most of the things and seeing most of the people that they love, that is going to have a particular kind of appeal, you know, even separate from the content.
And so it was compelling and appealing what we were doing for social reasons above and beyond the scientific and skeptical content.
Yeah.
And in fact, it's one of the things that at least people most commonly say to me when I run into them in the world and they're introducing themselves and saying what their history with Dark Horse has been is they say that they found it reassuring or I don't know, in some way, very positive to see two people interacting in person who obviously love each other deeply, disagree about stuff.
It's not the end of the world.
So anyway, that is a very interesting factor that has played a role here.
I guess I just, as long as we're completing the story, let me just say the podcast sort of Dark Horse was not intended to be live.
You had started Dark Horse the podcast six months earlier.
Six months earlier.
And what I was basically doing was talking to people who I regarded as dark horses, people who had accomplished things from backgrounds that you wouldn't have expected them to be able to, because I'm very interested in what it is that allows somebody to do something remarkable without having gone through the usual process.
And, you know, the theme song of Dark Horse is Martin Mullen's Marble Machine song.
And I think if you go look at his Marble Machine video, the original one where he's put together this prototype of a brand new musical instrument that he plays.
Yeah, in that case, there's no out of left feels.
Like there is no pathway that prepared you for that because that was just a totally new thing.
Right.
I mean, obvious genius, right?
But the way he got there was so interesting.
And one day he will allow me to have him on Dark Horse and we can talk about what that was.
But anyway, Dark Horse was supposed to be an exploration of, you know, these unusual people.
And of course, you know, on the Inside Rail episodes, I still talk to many of those people.
But the live streams kind of took over because COVI changed the world right in front of us.
And having any sort of a generalist toolkit that would allow you to talk about all of the different components of the pandemic or whatever it was was something people were craving.
The world tried to isolate us from each other and Dark Horse happened to bring people into a conversation where they were suddenly less isolated because we were together.
Yep.
And we were also, not only were we doing two episodes a week at that point in the beginning, but we were also doing Q ⁇ A's after every episode on YouTube.
So it didn't, it, that was available.
There were a lot.
People were just, you know, streaming in with questions that they were wondering about what was going on in the world.
And I do think, we've said this often before, but part of what made it so successful also is that it was all fast and furious at that point.
And no one knew everything that there was to know.
And everyone who was speaking at all off the cuff, at all, just like trying to process it in real time would make errors.
And we began starting every show with, oh, there's a couple of things we have to fix.
We have to correct from last time.
And we used to run our classes like this too, because if you're going to explore ideas, if you're going to explore things that you don't, if you're going to explore a period, which means go someplace that you haven't already completely vetted and know in its entirety, then there will be missteps.
And that's part of the landscape.
And if that's what you're scared of, then exploring in any form is not for you.
But any explorer who's doing so in a public way and is interested in taking responsibility for what other people may glean from their explorations needs to own where the missteps have been.
Yes.
And I even think that our set kind of reflected this because the history of the set, when I was doing Dark Horse as a talking to Dark Horses podcast, we had a set built into an office downtown.
And as COVID hit and we were being restricted in terms of what we could do, Portland put curfew on downtown even before the lockdowns hit, I believe, which was an insane move.
Yep.
And we had no idea where it was headed.
So Zach and I went downtown with our truck and took every single thing that was not bolted down from the studio.
Three successive nights.
Three successive nights and built a set in our house, in my office, actually, from materials that we could source, frankly, at Home Depot, including, you know, the cedar siding or cedar closet building.
Yeah, closet lining.
Exactly.
The tongue and groove cedar and some cabinets and some butcher block countertop.
And then we put a bunch of objects that didn't really belong together on.
So you have now put together a few of the pieces, but people who have followed what you just said very closely may think, why did you build a sink into your set?
Didn't you just say it was an office?
Because that room that we had slated to be your office was actually this gigantic room in this house that we had bought in Portland that had been the former owner's art studio.
And so, but it was a standalone paint-splattered sink that had no aesthetic appeal whatsoever.
But the plumbing was there, and you don't just rip out a sink because you decide that you never want a sink again.
So, you know, it was going to be a workspace, all of this.
So you did not install new plumbing in order to build a podcast set.
No, I didn't.
But it was an authentically functional thing.
Anyway, so I think the sort of, you know, I thought the set, it said we couldn't control the light in the set because I refused to let Zach, who always wanted to, draw the blinds.
Right, because the sun would come across the set and, you know, it's a nightmare from the point of view of getting exposure right.
But anyway, I do think the idea.
Well, it is, but, you know, for your eyes, you can go out and the sun can do what it does and your eyes correct the exposure.
Cameras, for whatever reason, aren't really up to the challenge, even still.
But anyway, there was something about the fact that this was, you know, we built the set.
Nobody else did.
We built it with stuff that you could source.
So it was an authentic representation of us too.
And, you know, it was also, you know, maybe it was a little busy and it did look like a sauna.
But I think people kind of, here's the thing.
In an era that is so drenched in bullshit, things that actually suggest authenticity are the coin of the realm.
And so it was authentic.
It looked authentic.
You know, it worked authentic, which wasn't always perfect, but it, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't slick.
One of the things I really liked about that set was, and again, this is not good for, from the camera perspective, it's not good for us, but the camera, because of the way the room was set up, was way too close to us.
And it was very close to the desk that we were sitting at.
But that meant that occasionally Fairfax, our delightful epic tabby, would come onto the desk and stick his snout in the camera.
So everyone would get a close-up view of Fairfax, which was, I think, pleasing to just about everyone.
I don't care.
Even if you think you don't like cats, having a cat snout suddenly come up at the camera is pretty cute.
But it also kind of had an element of risk because it wasn't always his snout that he put into the camera.
We tried to prevent that.
Okay, so I just, I often, well, before the first one of these, I thought, well, I'd better have a plan.
And so I do have written notes for every single one of the 300 episodes.
And usually I try to go back through afterwards and gray out anything that we just totally didn't touch on at all.
And for a while, I was trying to summarize what it was that I was hoping to get to up at top.
So I'm just going to read what I had, what I thought we were going to get to in our first live stream, March 24th, 2020.
We badly need data.
We need testing.
We need serological testing.
We need to know how it's transmitted.
SARS-CoV-2.
What about blood types?
Remember this?
Like, O blood types didn't seem to get it as much.
A seemed to be greater at risk.
With regard to rumors at Innuendo, do not put a hairdryer up your nose.
Do not eat aquarium cleaner, please.
But we talked about hydroxychloroquine and we talked about how it might be functional.
And I have a link in this to a WAPO, a Washington Post piece that's talking about hydroxychloroquine.
And when I go to that link now, it is gone.
This article from before March 24th, 2020 in Washington Post talking about the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine, which I'm linking to in my notes here, it now goes nowhere.
Well, it was, in fairness, malinformation.
And when I look up hydroxychloroquine WAPO 2020, now I've got all these things about what an idiot Trump is.
Right.
Okay.
So this, again, from our very first, our very first, we told a personal story about how Zach and I, clearly at this point, I don't know how certain we were then, but in early February or mid-February of 2020, had gotten COVID.
I had been in LA.
I had come back and been sick within hours and then I had gotten Zach sick and it was terrible.
But, you know, it wasn't here then is what we were being told.
Right.
But I've since, and I'm sure many people have since heard many stories of hotspots from way before we were told it was around.
And LA in January, February of 2020 is one of them.
That's clearly where I got it.
Continuing with just the summary notes from before our first live stream, March 24th, 2020, what everyone should be doing now to stay safe, socially distance, go outside, open your windows, get moving and stay active, get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, eat real food.
It's not a bad list for a moment when we were masking.
Yep.
We had not cottoned to the insanity of any kind of lockdowns.
I mean, I think those are the big errors that I know we were making then.
I'm sure there were some others.
Hold on.
I want to, because people so frequently take me to task over masking, I want to say, in retrospect, masks did not work, cloth masks particularly bad.
That is not to say that at the time we knew enough about the virus to say whether or not they would work.
Even just a mask that keeps you from touching your face is potentially valuable in keeping you from contracting certain things.
So was it a reasonable precaution to take?
Maybe.
Did it end up working?
No.
But, you know, I don't like the idea that it was just simply wrong from the get-go because at the beginning we knew so little.
Yep.
Whereas now I come to know now that there had been ample, really high quality research on what lockdowns do.
And in combination with my enhanced distrust of governmental diktats since March 2020 that suggests that any any lockdown is not okay now.
Yes.
I think that was just an error.
It absolutely was an error with predictably awful consequences.
And it also appears that what we were being told about the duration of the lockdown.
Oh, I didn't mean it was an error on their part.
I don't know that it was an error.
No, no.
It is an error to lock down healthy people in order to control the spread of a disease.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah, so there's a bunch more that we did in those in that first episode.
I guess I want to one more thing because I knew that we talked about this later, but the fact that we were specifically talking about going outside, getting the sun on your face, making vitamin D.
We were talking then about viruses not thriving in general where there is sun and vitamin D being good for you on so many levels.
And if you're stuck inside opening your windows and getting airflow, basically increasing the effective volume of whatever space you're stuck in and the effective volume of outside is infinite.
The effective volume of a small space of the window open, especially if you have two windows open, is much greater than that same space with none.
And that was all already in the mix right there.
And I guess just one more thing from that very first episode.
There's an article in the Financial Times already, mid-March 2020, suggesting that half of Brits might already have been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
So there was considerable countervailing evidence that this had been circulating for longer than we were being told.
People already had people had already been exposed in ways that we weren't being told, which set us up for, well, which should have set us up for when Jay Bhattacharia published his study on Santa Clara County finding high seroprevalence in people in Santa Clara County.
And I failed to look it up, but it's not, it's like April or May of the same year.
And we talked about that on air and I didn't think it was right.
I didn't think it was good work.
And actually, when we saw him at Brownstone, I told him that.
I said, you know, I was dead wrong on this.
And I apologize.
You know, to his credit, he's just such a good guy.
But he said, ah, well, it was, you know, it was the first piece of rigorous work that suggested that, but then more dominoes started falling.
Like, yep.
And I think, you know, there was some earlier suggestive work that SARS-CoV-2 had actually already been circulating so much longer than we'd been told, which means that many people already had natural immunity to it, which means we didn't need any of the measures, even if they had been potentially effective and well-intentioned, which they weren't either.
And that put that just that puts the entire history that we all collectively lived in a different light.
Yes, really, in retrospect, it was clearly a phony story.
Whatever the actual story is, which I don't think we completely know, the story we were given was phony from one end to the other.
And much was predicated on that phony story.
Like, when did this start spreading here?
Yes.
Right.
If you had known that it had been spreading rampantly, the idea of a lockdown is preposterous on its face.
Never mind a deep analysis.
It's harder to terrify people if the thing that you're trying to terrify them of has been around for six months.
Right.
If it just showed up and it's already in your neighbor's house, well, you got to be really scared.
Right.
And they set us up and they set the doctors up too.
This is something Walter Kern is very good on when he describes, you know, his version of it involves the story sort of beginning with the grainy video of the guy in Wuhan falling down.
Man falls down is what Walter says.
And the point is, this is the shock, right?
Like, oh, goodness, there's a virus that causes that.
You know, the guy riding the bicycle in the hazmat suit, right?
So, you know, then there's the question of, oh, goodness, the hospitals are going to be overflowing.
Your doctors are going to be on the front lines.
Who knows how many of you are going to get it and die?
So you're heroes.
Yes.
And so the point is priming them so that they would overreact and they'd be willing to put people on ventilators is what caused there to be a significant indication of deadliness here because, you know, I still think the virus is more damaging than many people give it credit for.
It has consequences that are serious, but it is not deadly.
The case fatality rate is very low.
But causing people to think they were about to engage something with a high case fatality rate caused them to overreact, killing many patients, creating a substrate for the people who pulled the accounting shenanigans to claim that it was super deadly, which then caused the public to be terrified, be willing to accept all of these countermeasures.
Yeah, go ahead.
Walter Kern, as you say, talks about those early grainy videos out of China.
And most people in the West didn't have a way to vet them particularly.
I, at least, at first, didn't question them.
It's like, oh, whoa, that's happening.
But I remember similar, not similarly grainy, not similar like cinematography, but similar videos, I think, now designed to terrify us that came out of two places that I do have experience with.
And we talked about them both here on Darkhorse.
That was Guayquil in Ecuador, which you've been through and I've spent a little bit of time in.
It's a massive coastal city in Ecuador.
And then Manaus in Brazil, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, where I spent a week or more a long time ago, somewhere of 2003.
And in both of those cases, suddenly we were being told, oh, the virus has taken off.
It's taken hold.
All of these people, the hospitals are overflowing.
The people are dying in the streets.
There's no water.
It's all the same kind of stories.
But in both of those cases, because they were, not only was it a culture that I had some relationship with and that we both had some relationship with.
And obviously, the Brazilian Amazon and coastal Ecuador are not the same culture, but Latin American culture is in its aggregate a thing with which we are very familiar, whereas Chinese culture is not.
And these two places happened to be places that I had actually spent time.
And so the more I watched those videos, and we reported on them, we talked about these without obvious skepticism about what was being reported in the videos.
But I have in my afternotes and in my journals from the time going like, hmm, there's something that just feels off.
Yeah.
There's something that isn't quite right here.
That's not how I feel like those people would be responding.
It looks staged.
And then this was also happening at the same time that we were beginning to get like the TikTok videos of the healthcare workers that are super choreographed.
Like, how much of what we were seeing is choreographed?
That's choreographed for sure.
And how do they have time to do that if they're so overworked?
But okay.
But then is this also choreographed?
How much of all of this is choreographed?
So that was part of the waking up that we were doing on camera in part, like willing to share, huh, I'm not sure about this.
Yeah.
Two things.
One, with respect to the waking up on camera, there is an uncomfortable question at the core of this.
So if we look back at our history with the so-called pandemic, I'm pretty sure I know the following thing to have been important.
If we had been, you know, if we had simply intuited that we were being lied to across the board from the very beginning, I don't think we would have been as useful.
Yeah.
Right.
Because for one thing, the number of people who could have heard us and thought that we might be onto something would have been much smaller and basically already, you know, preaching to the choir.
So as much as I don't like that I believed bullshit, it did turn out to be important.
The process of waiting.
And I remember, you know, for example, I remember when we got to the story of ivermectin.
I remember literally saying, what the fuck is this?
Why would we not be using a drug that has as much promise as this does in this case?
And, you know, to this day, people are confused about this.
It's amazing how confused people are.
Yeah.
In fact, if you want, I will give a brief plug to the best conversation I had at CHD was actually contentious.
It was a podcast that, frankly, I had never heard of called, I think it's called Why Should I Trust You?
And we had a conversation.
It was me and Pierre Corey as the heterodox medical freedom folks and then several doctors who were more mainstream.
Pierre Corey also being a doctor.
Yes, but now heterodox.
He in fact reports that it's the first productive conversation he's had with mainstream colleagues since the pandemic began.
Shame.
Yeah.
But anyway, in this conversation, you can hear, because we actually talk about ivermectin, and these doctors are quite convinced that the matter has been settled by high quality studies.
What more is there to talk about?
It just doesn't work.
They're not claiming that it's dangerous.
They're just saying it's ineffective.
Why would you go there?
It's ineffective.
And, you know, obviously it could be dangerous if you put your hope in this drug that doesn't work.
And there no longer are people, even the still pretend people claiming that it's toxic.
Yeah, right.
But anyway, I would go listen to this episode.
It's out now.
I think a video version of it is going to come out this week.
But anyway, sparks fly.
Everybody remains respectful.
So I think it was a productive conversation.
And I think these mainstream doctors did not expect what they got from us on this topic.
Go on.
There's one other thing I wanted to add, which is that of all of the things that I think we accomplished, you know, obviously we made some errors in those early days, year, year and a half of trying to figure out the COVID story.
But of all the things that we did, I am maybe proudest of what we did on the bullshit that we were being led to believe about the lockdown and the comparison to going outside.
So initially, I think we were very interested in outside because vitamin D, we became quickly aware that vitamin D was a key element of this story that was not being discussed.
And there's just no ability to concentrate the virus, so you're not going to get sick.
It was two very distinct.
Well, for me, it's many more than that.
But as I read from my notes, it's like, get outside for all the reasons, but specifically, the virus is not going to be transmitted effectively, and you're going to be healthier because you're getting sunlight on your skin.
You're making vitamin D.
Well, but we developed the effective volume model.
But that's in my notes from the very first episode.
Right.
But I think, well, I would be curious.
Maybe I'll go back and watch it.
But we developed that model over time.
I think we were initially convinced that outside was very important because of vitamin D.
And obviously it's better to, you know, not constantly, you know, there was lots of talk about if you were in a car with somebody who was sick, what was going to happen.
And obviously opening the windows changes that dynamic.
But the fact that COVID at the time, and maybe still, does not transmit outside was both an indication of something, right?
Pathogens evolve outside.
They transmit outside because creatures live outside.
And this one was behaving in a special way, which implies something potentially about its unnatural nature.
But in any case, the alarm, I remember the alarm you and I had in real time as they started doing things like closing beaches, closing hiking trails.
And we're looking at...
We had caution tape across the trail heads of all of the trails in the...
How big is Tryon Creek?
The...
The...
The giant hundreds of acres city park that was walking distance from our house in Portland.
They had caution tape up across the trails.
Now, to their credit, the sane people of Portland mostly just lifted up the tape and walked because what else were you going to do?
Like, where else were you going to go?
You're going to lock yourself in your house with sick people.
Well, not only, I mean, you imply it there, but any hour you spent on a beach or on a trail was a reduction in your risk of contracting COVID.
It was actually exactly the thing you should be biased towards.
If the idea was to control the spread, go where it doesn't spread.
You know, all of the disruptions of life that occurred, all of the developmental disruptions.
If you could just simply figure out what to wear outside, then the point is, oh, actually, you don't have to pay any attention to this virus.
And we're watching people sent home where it was most common to get this virus and being told to not do exactly the things that would both make them physiologically more immune and behaviorally immune by virtue of the fact that for whatever reason it wasn't transmitting outside.
So I actually think if you follow that thread through our initial couple of years, I think we actually moved the needle.
I think they would have gotten away with locking people down because intuitively, maybe it seems like the right thing to do.
And you and I were freaking out.
Like, we can read this evidence.
There's no evidence to transmit outdoors.
Why would you lock anybody off the beach?
I mean, go to the beach.
So anyway, I'm proud of that thread.
And I don't think, I don't think it's been recorded properly anywhere that part of what we collectively, wherever it came from, did do was successfully push back on the madness of telling people to be indoors when they should be outdoors.
Yes.
No, I agree.
And I think, you know, we don't, no one knows what will come at us next, like what, what form the attempt to scare us into submission and compliance will come next.
But we can be assured that it will, it will attempt to use fear.
It will attempt to scare us.
And I would, you know, I guess I would suggest that when you see people acting scared and lashing out, try to figure out what it is that they've been convinced to be scared of.
And it was most obvious during COVID in the incidents, which, you know, anyone who was acting at all sane had some of these experiences.
But, you know, I got yelled at being outside on trails without a mask for, you know, putting them at risk, hiking in a mask.
And, and, you know, this, again, as much as we were, you know, you've already said something about it, but, you know, we did wear masks for a time, but never outside, not once.
Not a moment of it, right?
Or alone in your own car or in your own house.
Like, you just, so people, the, the forces that will would have us become compliant and submissive again or maintain it would have us be scared and ignorant of the actual risks to increase the fear.
And there are still people walking around masked.
There are still people walking around outside masked.
There are still people posting on social media about how awful everyone is.
They also aren't masked and how they're putting grandma at risk.
It's the same stories over and over and over again.
And I don't know actually what the right move is now to try to break those.
For the people who got it wrong all the time on COVID, they want to pretend none of it happened.
They don't want to talk about it.
They want it over.
Why are you still focused on this?
That was before.
Let's move on.
For the people who got it right in varying degrees, many of us are saying, actually, we need to learn the lessons.
We need to make sure that this cannot happen again.
And I think part of that will be accomplished by noting where the fear still lingers, where the fear and the ignorance still linger.
And those people are trying to be their little petty authoritarian selves still.
And what of what they're doing is working and how can we make it not work?
I do want to I don't feel like putting any nuance here because at some level the mask thing was so preposterous and I feel bad for having, you know, been dragged into it, maybe hung onto it longer than I should have, even though initially I don't think it was a crazy thing.
I'm not sure what to do with what happens when I see people in masks now.
I would say 98% of them are broadcasting virtue and this is about COVID and they've not gotten the memo.
Yeah, it's not necessarily some of them are broadcasting virtue.
Some of them are just scared.
And it's not inherently the first.
Okay.
Either one.
But the point is, here's the problem.
I am now reluctant to put on a mask when I'm woodworking and making dust.
Now, that's insane.
Right.
Masks do masks did come into existence because they were good at keeping some things out of your lungs where you don't want them.
They're great for drugs.
And your sinuses.
And I'm sensitive.
They work.
I'm an idiot for not doing it.
But the trauma of having been dragged, for it being part of some sort of insane psyop, my participating in some way, and then now I just feel I'm allergic to masks.
And that's the wrong move.
That's an overreaction.
So the reason that I would say that, you know, and we actually ran into a colleague in an airport recently.
He was wearing a mask.
And I thought, oh, my God, what?
But it turned out he's got an immune issue that I didn't know about or I'd forgotten about and was wearing, it wasn't about COVID.
It was about a general sensitivity to things.
I was just going to say, actually, my oldest, dearest friend has an autoimmune issue and she wears masks.
She's been wearing masks on airplanes for decades.
And as COVID hit, she said, well, you know, I don't feel like such an outlier now, but I'm not doing this for fashion.
I'm not doing this because everyone else is doing it.
This is part of how I understand that I have kept myself safe.
And I don't know if she has successfully kept herself safe by wearing the admittedly high quality masks that she does wear when she travels and has for decades.
But it is impossible now to tell the difference.
Yeah, you can't tell the difference.
It makes sense not to have a knee-jerk response to somebody in a mask, even though I think most of them probably are, you know, just out of habit, out of fear, or out of a desire to broadcast or whatever it is, are just on autopilot.
So anyway.
Yeah, no, we make, all of us make snap judgments on easily identifiable phenotypic characteristics, including the ones that we put on, like a mask, a hat, the way your jeans fit, what kind of shoes you're wearing, all of this.
And even the things that we, those of us who are like, I don't know anything about fashion.
I wasn't paying any attention.
It's like, well, there are things you'd notice, right?
Like there are things that everyone would notice.
Oh, I mean, I'm colorblind.
I don't notice race.
Like, yes, you do.
Come on.
Like, you have eyes.
You notice these things.
That doesn't mean you come to biased feelings about them because you've accepted some bigotry from something that has no reason to exist.
But pretending you don't notice is foolishness.
And it makes you look naive and like you're lying, at least to yourself.
Indeed.
All right.
Is there more?
There absolutely is, but maybe we stop there for now.
Cool.
Well, anyway, happy 300th.
Happy 300.
300th.
I have the strong sense that 301 is prime.
I don't know exactly why I think that.
But anyway, we'll find out next week.
I guess.
I don't know offhand.
All right.
Shall we talk about the solar situation?
And I have an interesting, I think people will find it interesting how that interacted with my being away from home as the situation was unfolding.
Well, you have, if you want to do this, you have to promise to actually start at the beginning.
Begin at the beginning.
The vast majority of people have no idea what you mean when you say the solar situation.
All right.
So in the beginning.
They could probably know what all three of those words mean independently, but what the hell are you talking about?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and in the heavens, he put the sun.
I don't think I'm going to need to be.
Just get out of here.
I actually think it's a perfectly reasonable place to start.
Okay.
The problem is much more than 4,000 years old or however it is that that rendition of the universe would have us be.
6,000?
I don't know.
I still think it's a perfectly reasonable.
We got billions of years to contend with.
Yes.
All right.
So we're billions of years in.
Yes.
The universe has gotten more complex.
We now have planets and stars.
Our star is engaged in fusion reactions driven by its immense gravity.
And it has much more structure than we normies are generally aware of.
So it also has some interesting temporal patterns.
It has an 11-year solar cycle, which basically amounts to it has an oscillation in how calm the surface of it is.
In particular, sunspots have an 11-year solar cycle.
When I asked Ben Davidson, who is an expert in these matters.
And you had him.
You did an inside rail with him.
Yeah, I had him on the podcast.
And it was quite good.
He still mentions the episode.
It was as episodes that he's been on of various podcasts went.
He was impressed at the depth that we got to.
But anyway.
So when you asked Ben Davidson.
I said, you know, I've always wondered what the heck, you know, you've got this giant, you know, fusion reactor.
How does it even know about years and 11 of them?
And that seems like a really odd thing to be episodic.
What is going on?
And he said, we're not.
It's years.
It's not like 11 years and a month and a half.
there's wobble um but yeah if you plot it out over because that doesn't that does seem like that's just a strange coincidence because the year's about us not about the sun Well, that's just the thing, though.
It's not really about us at all.
But no, the unit of time, the year, is about us.
It's not about the sun.
Correct.
Because Mercury's here is a totally 88 days or something.
Jupiter's right.
Well, but in any case, it is Jupiter that appears to be the most likely driver of the 11-year solar cycle.
In other words, Jupiter's orbit seems to be causing this cycle.
So anyway, I found that a very satisfying answer, the idea that there is something in our clock-like little solar system that actually correlates with this cycle.
And you can imagine it's the second most gravitationally forceful thing in the solar system.
Jupiter.
Yeah, kind of satisfying that it would have something to do with this.
It also suggests, you know, you heard people talk about woo-woo stuff about planetary alignments.
Turns out it actually matters when you have a bunch of gravitational things pulling in the same direction.
It has an impact on the sun in a way it wouldn't if they were pulling in different directions and canceling each other.
So anyway, we have a truth in that woo.
There is sometimes truth in the woo.
Okay, so the sun has an 11-year solar cycle.
We have passed probably through the maximum of the current solar cycle, but we are still in the active phase.
It is ebbing, but we are not terribly far past the peak.
And what we are seeing is solar activity that is causing unusual levels of terrestrial disturbance for the ejections coming from the sun.
Given the size of the coronal mass ejections coming from the sun, the Earth is being affected more than you would expect.
More than such sized CMEs, coronal mass ejections, would have caused in times past.
Right.
Now, some of the effects have to do with human technology, which has moved on.
So there was a major disruption in 1859, the year everything happened, called the Carrington event.
And the Carrington event was noticed.
correlation between a flash from the sun and disruption on earth was noticed by the astronomer Carrington, which is why it bears his name.
The disruption down here on Earth amounted to basically telegraph operators being shocked at their stations, the telegraph system going down, telegraph operators being able to send messages even though there was no power in the system based on the machine-induced currents.
I believe some telegraph stations caught fire.
Anyway, it was a telegraph nightmare, right?
But it wasn't a nightmare in many other regards because the world was not an electric place yet, right?
So the one serious electrical system we had went nuts, but by and large, you know, there were auroras and other things.
So that's my point.
There's a technological aspect of impacts down here on Earth, and then there's a natural impact, things like auroras.
And the aurora situation is becoming intensified.
We are seeing auroras farther south than we should be for the given level of storm on the sun, which I will get to the reason for in a second.
But we are also much, much, much more vulnerable to the coronal mass ejections and other things that contribute to the solar wind because our electromagnetic field is decaying.
That is the Earth's, the geoelectric, electromagnetic field is decaying.
Is decaying.
Right.
And that is affecting.
Which is also cyclic.
Yeah, but on a time scale where we are not going to see it return.
We are going to watch it continue to decline, which means that our vulnerability is going to continue to go up while the electrical and now electronic nature of Earth is only increasing.
So our dependence on those electrical systems is profound and the danger that they pose to us if they go down is utterly profound.
So when you say the danger they pose to us if they go down is profound.
I'd like you to spell out, you know, so when I hear that, I hear, well, we're suddenly not connected and we mostly don't know how to do anything for ourselves anymore.
And the fact that we're not connected, we can't just like pull out a map.
No one has maps anymore, that sort of thing.
But then there's also systems that actually take input in order to maintain neutrality, like reactor cores and nuclear plants.
Right.
So what Heather is alluding to is that the generation of nuclear reactors that we have, civilian nuclear reactors that create power, is such that they require active cooling in order not to melt down.
And the fuel pools in which the fuel that is spent that has come out of these reactors, the pools in which they are kept cool, require a constant infusion of cold water.
And if that cold water stops flowing, the water will boil off very quickly and the spent fuel rods will catch fire and all of the radioactive isotopes will be released into the atmosphere in the form of smoke.
All of this is very, very bad.
And there are reactor designs, so-called fourth generation reactors, which fail safely, but we're not using them.
And so anyway, we have a...
And even if we started, we still have all of the previous ones that need to be maintained.
Yes, I would say whatever your position is on nuclear, and I've come around to the idea that nuclear may be necessary, even fission.
Fusion, I'd be thrilled by.
Fission, you know, there are forms of reactors that I think might be very useful.
You know, thorium, liquid salt.
These are designs that fail safely.
I believe could be used to very good effect.
But the kinds of reactors that are currently generating power can't be rendered safe.
There are requirements for them to have, I think it's two weeks of diesel fuel for generators in order to keep them cool, which is good.
But we saw, for example, in Fukushima that the generators were immediately overwhelmed with seawater as a result of the tsunami that caused the triple meltdown.
And if you've got a continent-wide grid failure, two weeks of diesel isn't going to cut it.
Right.
So you could imagine, and in fact, I wrote an article in, it turns out to have been 2019 about basically unheard the publication asked me to write on this topic, and I decided to write a scenario of how a solar storm could result in human extinction.
And I was shocked, actually, at how easy it was to get from A to B, right?
It almost wrote itself.
And that was long before I understood the full extent of the danger, right?
This was just simply the fact that the Earth flings off these coronal mass ejections.
They pose a danger to the grid.
And the grid is constructed in such a way that our sense that if it goes down, it will be back up in a few days is just simply not accurate.
But anyway, now I understand a great deal more about what's going on on the solar side of this.
And it's far worse than I had suggested.
Do you want to put up just a picture of that article?
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
You want to scroll.
No, back the other way.
Yeah, there we go.
Yeah, how the sun could wipe us out.
So anyway, we will link that article.
But what we have is a situation where the Earth's magnetic field is degrading.
The sun goes through these 11-year cycles.
The sunspot cycle, a sunspot can eject a flare.
Not every flare is accompanied by what's called a coronal mass ejection, but many of them are.
And those coronal mass ejections can be small.
They can be large.
They are usually just by chance pointed away from the Earth.
But when a sunspot cluster is facing the Earth and it releases a coronal mass ejection, that coronal mass ejection hits the Earth.
It causes the shields of the Earth, the electromagnetic field, to weaken suddenly.
So in other words, that electromagnetic field takes a hit.
It absorbs this coronal mass ejection, protecting us, but it also becomes weak in the immediate aftermath of this hit.
There are other things that can contribute to that weakening.
In the case of what happened on somewhere between the 5th and the 7th of November, what we had were some not very large coronal mass ejections, but they hit us in the immediate aftermath of a coronal hole stream.
This is a cool, thin spot in the surface of the sun that is basically putting out solar wind, like, you know, a leak in a beach ball.
So we were being swept by the solar wind at the same point that these coronal mass ejections hit us.
And so they did more disrupting than they would have been expected to based if they had been in isolation.
Now, there was briefly a moment back November 6th when the coronal holstream had weakened the electromagnetic field.
The coronal mass ejection from the M-class flare hit us, and there was concern about whether or not this could result in the grid going down.
It wasn't a super high chance.
It was down in the single digits, according to Ben Davidson.
But nonetheless, single digits is still frightening, right?
You know, a one in 20 chance of the grid going down and not coming back up is nothing to sneeze at.
But the danger quickly lessened because, ironically, the speed of the coronal mass ejection was greater than the folks who tracked these things had expected.
So while ordinarily speed is a negative factor, it puts you in more danger.
The fact that it gave room between the coronal mass ejections hitting us actually lessened the danger because it gave the electromagnetic field time to recover.
So there was brief concern, and then that concern evaporated.
And then the sunspot cluster that is putting out these coronal mass ejections rotated even more directly facing the Earth.
And we got another series, including X-Class flares, which are a class above M-class flares.
And things, again, have gotten scary.
In fact, yesterday, which was the 11th, we had a solar storms are graded, and we had a G4 storm heading towards G5.
G5 is the top class and very dangerous.
And so people will have heard that auroras were seen as far south as Florida and Texas.
That shouldn't be happening.
This was the result of a cluster of CMEs, two of which the first two joined together and delivered a much bigger wallop than either of them would have done on their own.
And now we have the largest of the CMEs due to hit tonight.
Now, there's a lot of modeling that goes into knowing how big a hit to expect.
And there's no, none of it is highly accurate because as you imagine, if you were to, you know, fling a cloud of dust at some object, the cloud of dust could be very dense, but it's possible that the object would get hit by, you know, a section of the cloud that was not dense at all.
Or the inverse can happen where you could have a cloud that's not very dense, but one patch of it is.
So there's lots that we don't know until it hits.
We don't know the timing of it.
We don't know how two bursts will interact with each other.
All of these things have an impact on how severely the Earth systems will be disrupted, if at all.
Just a second.
So Ben Davidson is the person you keep referencing who is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
But it's not just him.
So can you show my screen or is my computer not playing nice?
Look at that.
So this is NOAA, NOAA's site.
That's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, government, U.S. government site, specifically their Space Weather Prediction Center.
And what they've got on their site right now, it's real time.
They've got solar wind speed, solar wind magnetic fields, you know, the, gosh, I don't even know what R, S3, and G4 are, so I don't know how to refer to those categories.
But, you know, they've got they've got all the things here, and they're not always going to agree in interpretation with other observers like Ben Davidson, who's on Twitter at SpaceWeather News, I think.
But you should find the empirical data insofar as it is measurable.
That is to say, you know, we're obviously using remote tools, remote instruments that need to be calibrated and such.
And, you know, different tools will measure slightly different amounts of things.
But you should find empirical measurements basically agreeing with one another.
And NOAA, like Ben Davidson, came to see what was happening over the last several days as a very large threat.
One question I had for you as you were talking about, as the current giant crop of sunspots rotates so that it's facing us, it raises questions about how long the sun's day is.
That is to say, how long does it take to fully rotate once on its axis?
I feel like it's like four weeks or something, in which case, it's coming into full blast on Earth space.
And obviously, sunspots can show up, I assume, anywhere on the sun, but this particular cluster is not expected to totally disappear anytime soon.
But once it is no longer facing Earth, we have at least three and a half weeks or so before it circles around again and is putting Earth at any immediate risk.
So it takes two weeks for something to cross the face of the sun that we see.
So we get an indication of it as it comes around the edge.
It moves towards center disk, which is where it poses a big threat, and then it moves out.
At this moment, we on Earth are in danger because we have a CME coming from an eruption a couple days ago.
But the sunspot itself, even if it were to emit a much larger X-class flare, most of it would not hit us because it is already facing away.
It's still visible, but it's already facing away.
That only gets better for the next week.
It will be out of view.
It can do anything it wants on the far side, doesn't affect us.
And then it will come back around.
It may have broken up.
It may have calmed down.
And the last time we had a big solar storm, which was back in May, was it?
May of 2024.
May of 2024, it did come back around.
The monster cluster of sunspots came back around the other side.
So anyway, that can happen too.
Not relevant to what we're currently talking about, but the periodicity, the length of the sun's day being four weeks-ish, is remarkably similar to the length of the moon's orbit around the Earth.
Is that a coincidence or not, I wonder?
I think it's likely to be a coincidence, but it's certainly conspicuous.
I'd certainly want to know, you know, it's not the only satellite in the solar system.
Right, that's it.
So there's lots of other satellites with lots of other, I guess it's their year-ish.
It's hard to know exactly what to call it.
I guess you would still call it, I think it's a year, however long it takes for you to orbit around the thing that you are most closely orbiting around, because the moon is also orbiting around the world.
So the lunar year is a month.
Yeah.
But then if the sun's day is a month, the sun's day is 28 days and a lunar year is 28 days, earth days.
That's an interesting coincidence if that's all it is.
Yep.
It is an interesting coincidence.
And I'm, you know, who knows what we will ultimately know about this system.
It's really fascinating.
more I've delved into it, the more interesting it was.
I used to puzzle over the 11-year solar cycle.
I'm just like, okay, solar system's weird.
It's not weird.
Of course, it makes sense.
Well, I wonder, I mean, so this question I bet most good astronomers have thought about.
But if it's a coincidence, if the sun's day and the moon's orbit around the Earth being the same length just happened to be, that might then have set the conditions for the moon to be tidally locked.
That it is, that it's day length and it's effectively year length of the same length of time.
It is moving itself at the same rate as the sun is moving itself on its axis.
Well, I am definitely going to pursue the answer to this question because it's a really, really good one.
All right.
So is that a real-time before?
I think so.
Strong geomagnetic storm levels.
It's switching.
It looks to be real-time?
Yeah, it does.
Okay, interesting.
All right.
Strong geomagnetic storm levels now, severe still expected.
Okay.
Well, all right.
That's something to keep your eye on.
What Heather is now looking at, the emnol spiral is a model.
Oh, it's now gone.
Oh, I guess I do have, I am in control.
Is that what you wanted me to look at?
What?
The other one.
This one?
Yeah.
So that spiral is a model.
When a CME happens, it is modeled, I think, by NOAA as to how quickly it's moving, how dense it is, what direction it's going, how it will interact with other ejections and the solar wind.
And these models, you know, you generate that model, and then you find out in real time whether or not the model was accurate.
So when we say that experts were surprised at the rate of the arrival of one of these CMEs, that it came early, and that actually gave the magnetic field a chance to build back up before the next one hit.
That's a result of that particular model having been inaccurate.
They're pretty good, but they're far from perfect.
Okay, so what I wanted to actually get to, though, was I went through a weird mental exercise because I was in Austin.
I had two things.
I was on Joe Rogan's podcast, and then I stayed in Austin for the Children's Health Defense conference.
And while the day before Joe's podcast, the danger to Earth appeared to be significant.
Something Ben had it at 4% of a grid-down scenario.
And if you read my little article on grid-down scenarios, you'll see why that might be a very, very dangerous thing.
You know, the grid can go down.
It coming back up is far from guaranteed.
And if it doesn't come back up, chaos can ensue and spread.
So I was in Austin.
And of course, if the only thing I was focused on was these solar dangers, then the obvious thing to do would be to get on an airplane and go home so that you and I wouldn't be trapped in different places, etc.
But if you do that every time there is a significant set of CMEs, then you will disrupt your life to an amazing extent.
So anyway, I decided that I was going to white knuckle it through whatever happened.
And it turned out that the danger lifted pretty quickly because that first CME arrived faster than was expected.
And that turns out to have made us safer than the initial estimate.
But it did cause me to think, okay, suppose you were in Austin and the grid went down and wasn't showing signs of coming back up.
What then?
Austin is not a good place for me to be in that case.
You know, I'm in a hotel exactly.
How is it that I move on with my life in hopes of things fixing themselves?
Well, the answer is you don't want to be caught away from home.
It's not like I was staying with a friend or something like that.
So I started thinking, well, what the hell would I do?
And my first thought was, well, you now know you can walk 20 miles a day.
And maybe the answer is to try to figure out how to walk home.
And obviously there are lots of problems that have to be solved.
You've got to figure out how to feed yourself, how to stay hydrated, how to stay safe.
Because of course, most people don't have any idea that they're in this danger.
So there's going to be human chaos aplenty.
That's really one of the biggest dangers about it.
But if I walked home, I, A, better print out some maps while you've still got electricity because you're not going to be able to print them later and you probably aren't going to be able to find them very easily.
So anyway, I started figuring out what my route would be.
And the, you know, most direct route would have been through the Rockies.
But of course, it's November.
Do I want to be walking into the Rockies in November?
That's probably a really bad idea.
I will confess I did consult Grok and Grok suggested that I walk through Southern California.
And if I walked 20 miles a day, it turned out that I would have been assuming nothing went badly, which is a rotten assumption in this case, but I could have gotten home by sometime in the spring, right?
So, you know, rough to have to walk through the whole winter, better to walk through California, Oregon, and Washington.
But I realized that's not the right way to think about this.
If I got a bike and I managed to hold on to that bike, I could make it home by Christmas.
So that I basically, after the danger had already alleviated, I decided to actually walk through Austin and find the objects that I would want to collect if I thought this scenario was happening.
Before you go on, I think you elided the conclusion that was your assumption.
But that the first thing that people would want to do is figure out, where do I want to be?
Like, is this where I should be, but I need to prepare the place better?
Where are places that I could be where I could decide to stay?
Who would have to be with me for me to decide that?
And what you decided right away was I want to be at home.
I need to be at home.
But, you know, that answer, you know, what is home?
Where is home?
Who is home with?
Does home differ depending on who, you know, those are the questions that will differ by a human being.
Right.
And, you know, you point to it.
Where home is matters a great deal.
If your home is in a major city, it's a long time before that calms down.
I'm not sure really it ever does.
It's an intolerable place to be.
It's a death trap.
In my case, my consideration in part had to do with the fact that as screwed as I would have been trapped in Austin, starting from, you know, a hotel.
I mean, you know, what is a hotel after the power goes out and doesn't come back on?
Yeah.
You know, nothing there.
Yeah, there's nothing there.
It keeps the rain off at best.
But I didn't think your situation was any good if we were separated.
better than mine.
But anyway, both of those things were intolerable.
So my sense was get home as quick as you can.
How quick is that?
And the answer is, well, with a bike, I could get home by Christmas, which is good because, you know, Christmas is pretty much the beginning of winter.
So I could avoid the worst of the complicating factor of winter if I just, you know, didn't dilly-dally and got on it.
But then that raises the question of like, what does it look like as the, you know, one thing that I will say, just an experience that you need to have is at the point that you're aware that something is going on with the sun and you think, you're in, how do I deal with the very serious problem that this could create?
And you're walking around, nobody has a clue.
Everybody is just completely oblivious to this danger.
There's no sense of urgency anywhere.
And it's a strange feeling to be in the mindset of, wow, this could get really bad really fast.
And not only is that true, but everybody would be caught off guard.
So anyway, you know, I did a little, you know, I went to a hardware store.
I went to a bike shop.
I went to an outdoor store and looked at the things I would accumulate, try to figure out what I could carry.
I still don't exactly know how food would work, you know, but it was such an interesting exercise that I thought I would mention it here so that people can do their own mental exercise because the boys were in Colorado.
Yeah, and, you know, their situation, in some ways, Colorado is well positioned for some of the stuff that may be downstream of a serious solar event.
On the other hand, you know, being at a college that isn't prepared for this isn't much better than being in a hotel in Austin, and winter is pretty ferocious, you know, in Colorado.
So anyway, I wasn't happy with any of it, but it always makes sense to go through the mental exercise of exactly how would I bootstrap my way out of this situation.
And even the fact that I hadn't put together initially that I was initially thinking, you're going to have to walk your way out of this.
Well, I know better than that.
You've been walking more than biking lately.
I guess so.
But I mean, you know, on a bike, you can go five times as far, five times as fast.
It's just, it's the obvious answer to the question.
But of course, the delicate part of it is, how do you hold on to a valuable object like a bike that's carrying all your stuff?
I mean, imagine the chaos that unfolds if civilization falls apart and you look like you're more or less holding it together.
You become a target.
And so anyway, I did go to a gun shop and discovered you can't buy a gun on, you can't buy a gun in a gun shop if you're not from Texas in Texas.
That was an interesting, I wasn't expecting that.
Well, actually, that's not true.
You can buy a long gun.
You can't buy a handgun.
And probably from the point of view of, you know, protecting you and your bicycle, a handgun is the only way to go.
On the other hand, you know, buying a 22 rifle, if there are squirrels and things, that might allow you to feed yourself to an extent.
So is there any capacity for motorcycles to carry a lot of extra fuel?
Not a lot.
No, they do.
I mean, they're so efficient that.
But I mean, like, can you put something that can a motorcycle haul a trailer?
Yeah, but you'd have to find one.
And that motorcycle would have to be equipped to do it.
It's fairly rare.
Because, I mean, you and our children all know how to ride motorcycles.
That's true.
And you can obviously get a lot faster.
And you can't, you know, they're very fuel efficient, but you obviously can't get from Texas to Washington on one day.
So you'd need to be able to, you'd need to assume that you were starting off with the fuel that you needed.
Well, the other thing, though, is the question of what objects might continue to work after the EMP part of the coronal mass ejection is really unclear.
Well, I mean, you'd have to have the right bike, but there are certainly motorcycles still out there that don't have motherboards.
Well, let's put it this way.
Right?
Yeah, but so then the question is, okay, the clock starts ticking.
Can you find a classic motorbike?
Can you figure out how to hook a trailer to it?
So it becomes arduous.
You know, you could also think of it as, well, how far can I get myself?
Right.
Well, that's the other.
It's like, okay, a bike with a trailer, a motorcycle with a trailer with fuel and a bike.
So at the point that the, you know, what something happens, you could, you know, you can't well, you can't have all the contingency plans because then you're carrying as much in contingency plans as that's it.
You gotta, you gotta prioritize.
That's really the key skill, actually.
But you do make an interesting point, though, because if you could overcome the barrier of every motorcycle is suddenly dead.
Right.
I actually wonder if maybe fuel is not an issue.
Well, but I don't know that you can get it out of gas stations.
Maybe you buy a siphon, maybe not gas stations.
Oh, vehicles.
There's going to be vehicles littered everywhere.
Okay.
Yeah.
I just wonder, maybe, maybe, maybe fuel isn't the fuel isn't an issue in that case, but you'd certainly want to get a siphon.
So anyway, I mean, I went into a hardware store.
It didn't occur to me that I might want a siphon because I was in bicycle mode.
But you're right.
That'd be a lot faster.
And harder to catch.
Right.
Like, you know, on foot, anyone who's fit can catch you.
On bike, anyone with an internal combustion engine can catch you.
Yeah.
Or, you know, you're fast enough on a bike.
You're not easily catchable by someone else on a bike, but it's possible.
If you're ambushable.
Right.
You're ambushable.
Yeah.
You're ambushable.
And on a motorcycle, it's tougher.
Like, you can obviously get shot down, but it's tougher.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's faster.
It is faster.
Yeah.
Well, anyway.
And therefore, you also don't need to be worried about food for as long.
Quite right.
And food was going to be the toughest part of this.
And, you know, frankly, if you, if, I don't know, I don't, you, how, what was the mileage?
It was 2400, I think.
Good lord.
Seriously?
Oh, my God.
Okay, well, that's a long ways, but assuming that you would...
That's going through SoCal.
Yeah.
And I wouldn't have gone through the city, but that'd be insane.
Yeah, that would be insane, of course.
But I feel like I'm having a hard time figuring out how long that would take you if you have to stop to sleep on a motorcycle.
And obviously things get dicey once you're several days into a fast.
But you and I both now also have experience fasting.
So, you know, that distance on a motorcycle, you don't inherently have to, you aren't inherently running up against the hard limit of I absolutely need food.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, I mean, I mean, on a motorcycle, you could potentially do it in two days.
It wouldn't be good.
Yeah.
But nothing's good at that point.
I mean, that's really, you know, this is part of why this exercise was, I mean, let me just give you the punchline of the exercise, right?
We're all still here.
What's the amazing thing?
No, no.
Punchline of the exercise of how do you shop is two things.
You've got a problem, which is there's a point before it's certain that anything terrible is happening where you're running a risk.
But do you shop for all these things at that point where it's perfectly possible that nothing bad happens?
And then you have to get the airline to accept them.
Right, or you lose the money.
I mean, one thing is, look, if the grid's going to go down, your money isn't worth anything anyway.
You might as well just buy the things you need right then because you're going to be much gladder to have those supplies than to have the money because how are you going to access it?
So there's that.
But the gap where you know something terrible is happening, but nothing terrible has happened yet isn't a really good gap.
So even just mental exercise, where are these things is kind of the key thing.
It's actually, this is going to sound like a non-sequitur, but it reminds me of the habit that you and I, I think independently, but both adopted as we started to travel in Latin America, which is wherever you go in a town of any size, you go check out the hardware store.
It's instructive.
It's intriguing.
It tells you a lot about how local people are living, how they're solving problems, what kinds of problems they're running into, because a hardware store in Costa Rica or Guatemala or Ecuador or Brazil look wildly different from one another, even, but certainly very different from the ace down the street in Toledo, Ohio.
Yep.
Yeah, knowing what's available and where it is is important.
And probably taking a bunch of money out of the bank so you can, you know, if the world of cash registers goes down, you can still persuade somebody to give you the object is a worthwhile thing too.
I did want to say the punchline of the sort of mentally preparing for a journey I didn't want to have to take, you know, what did I think the chances of my being able to get home?
There's obviously a last stage where I have to get over a bunch of water, which is going to involve finding a boat that isn't destroyed.
Or very friendly, Orca.
If I had the kayak, it could be done, but you wouldn't want to do it on the wrong day or set of days.
But anyway, what do I think the chances that my bicycle plan was going to get me as close as I could get to home before I had to find a boat of some kind?
15 or 20%.
15 or 20?
15 or 20%.
You know, you've written 50 on your piece of paper there.
50 is what I'd give myself the chances of making it by starting out on a bike and finishing on foot, which still may be wildly high.
Wait, so it was the 15 to 20 number?
15 to 20 is you see the future coming.
You get a bike, a rack, panniers.
Maybe you wrap the bike in duct tape so it doesn't look like a shiny object to people.
You get a, a gun, you a tent sleeping bag I don't know where this is going yet.
Uh, you get all those things and you set out what are the chances um, that I make it that whole route and I still have with all your stuff, with the bike oh, the key element to making me faster yeah 15, I would put it out.
Um, the chances of making it the full distance, maybe i'm just being generous saying 50.
It depends on the level of chaos.
Um yes, but you're exposed to the chaos a lot longer once the bike is gone.
Yep um, you sure are.
Yeah um yeah, there are a number of good um, high quality dystopian sci-fi uh, novels that take this on and um boy, i'm thinking of one right now.
I can't, I can't come up with a name.
If I do, before we uh, before we stop here, I will, I will say it uh, is that, is that what you wanted to say?
Yeah, I think.
I think that's more or less it.
Um, I hope it was useful to people.
Uh, I do think this is a thread worth cracking, though obviously it's a frightening one to even think about that somehow we've been left vulnerable to a perfectly foreseeable set of catastrophes.
There's part of this you can't do anything about, but the the vulnerability of the grid.
Oh, and the reason I should just say the reason that the grid going down is liable to be uh, irreversible if it's severe enough is that there are limiting factors in the grid, transformers which you can't just uh order, or you can order them, but it takes a year to get one, and if you needed 50 of them, or 100 of them, to get the grid back up?
Uh, it's unlikely that it would happen, you know, in a reasonable time frame before absolute chaos broke out.
Um, so that's something to think about.
The vulnerability of our reactors makes.
It compounds all of this stuff because if you have, you know okay, in my little scenario that I wrote, the military is, you know, flying in diesel fuel to keep the reactors from melting down.
That works for a while, but at some point, you know, everybody in the military realizes that.
You know, civilization is coming apart at the seams and they need to be at home protecting their families.
So yeah, it's really unclear how any of this stuff stays together.
And just the final little punchline here I believe I read and I don't I never chased it down, i'm not even sure how I would chase it down but um, that the Biden administration actually sent what spare transformers we have to Ukraine for some reason, which rendering us even more vulnerable.
Hopefully, that's apocryphal, but if it's not, it's like, are you trying to put us in danger?
You know, I mean anyway.
So yes, that is, that is about it for this topic, but worth paying attention to.
Yeah um, I mean, I think, one of the bigger questions that this raises the idea of space weather, which itself is a phrase that i'd never heard until a few years ago.
Space weather, what are you talking about um?
That there are, um solar system level impacts on Earth.
That there are potentially galactic level impacts on Earth puts the whole conversation about climate change in a totally different context.
Right, um is, is the earth's climate changing?
Yeah, it will always be changing.
Is it changing uh, in a directional way?
Uh, that will mean that things are different than they were under the conditions when civilization was built.
Quite possibly, uh.
Is the speed at which they are changing uh, speeding up itself?
Quite possibly.
Is it anthropogenic?
Maybe, Maybe not.
Definitely some of it is not.
And what to what end are we all being are they attempting to terrify us into believing that the changes, many of which we can see around us, are inherently anthropogenic?
To what end?
Well, unfortunately, if you view these two things as competing reasons for concern, the anthropogenic climate change reason is a very nice excuse for authoritarian measures that limit our freedoms, because, of course, it's us causing it.
So, you know, getting us to accept 15-minute cities and CDCs.
I was just going to say, track our carbon footprint or whatever makes sense.
On the other hand, if the solar system is moving in a predictable way through a galactic current sheet that is causing our electromagnetic field to decrease, that is causing the sun's impact on us to be greater.
How dare those fascists?
Yeah, it's not something you can solve with tyranny.
So the people who are inclined towards tyranny, I think, are inclined not to talk about that impact because while buying up islands and building vast underground bunkers.
Right, exactly.
So, yes.
And, you know, there is the strong hint that a great many elites are perfectly well aware of this story and not sharing it with the public because, I don't know, I think they think they're going to inherit the earth and let the sun take care of the rest of us.
I personally think that's bonkers and the earth you're going to be left with, you're not going to want it.
You know, if you can even survive into it, which I'm not convinced these people have planned in a way that actually understands what's going to unfold afterwards.
But who knows?
Maybe they're smarter than I think they are.
They'd have to be smarter than they think they are.
Probably even that.
And what kind of Earth is it going to be?
Yeah.
You know, it's going to be grotesque.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's 1.21 already.
We've been closing on two hours.
Yeah, I think we should quickly do the last story here.
And I think we can do it efficiently.
I have been trying to get people to refocus their attentions surrounding Nick Fuentes.
I am not defending Nick Fuentes for reasons that will become clear here shortly, but I do think...
I mean, we spent most of the last episode talking about Nick Fuentes, so that's...
I think people are comforting themselves with a story.
It's the story you would come up with if you went and you found all of the most egregious clips of Fuentes and you showed them to your friends.
Then people would conclude that this was a simple story.
And I've been trying to get people to pay attention to two things.
One, to watch enough of what Nick Fuentes is doing to understand his appeal, right?
His skill set is considerable.
And if you do not understand it, if you think he's just some vile little racist troll and that the reason that he's catching on is because racism is the, you know, the contagious defect of the moment, you're not going to get it.
So anyway, I've been asking people, pay attention to what he's actually doing and why it has an appeal and pay attention also to the question of why it is that the public, especially Gen Z, is susceptible to this message.
And only after you do those two things can you properly understand what we're up against and why.
So in this fray, there was, I've seen people now make useful progress on both fronts.
People looking at Fuentes.
Do you have that tweet handy, Jen?
So I saw a tweet in which somebody said he, so it's Pascal Emmanuel Gabri, who says, I watched an hour of Nick Fuentes, so you don't have to.
And he comes up with three points.
He says, he's good, like really good.
Witty, funny, great pacing, great voice.
Several times during his shtick, I found myself holding my sides from laughter, shaking my head all the while.
So my masad handlers would know I disapprove.
Two, he's smart and he's a political operator.
He's not just a guy talking.
He is and thinks for himself.
thinks of himself thinks of himself as he can you read it better maybe uh He is and thinks of himself as, as the leader of a political movement who acts towards political goals.
What he says about squeezing JD Vance and urging his Groupers to infiltrate elite DC institutions and hosting the GOP hostage because he's happy to have the establishment face the choice of either electing a Groiper-friendly GOP candidate or a Dem race communist, all those things are on point.
Okay.
Three.
He's a real, honest to goodness, classical anti-Semite.
I was actually shocked by this.
After all this time, I just automatically discount accusations of naughty beliefs by at least 20%.
I have many friends who tell me, oh, he just doesn't like Israel and makes spicy jokes.
Nope.
Fuentes does not hide the fact that his beef is with, as he calls it, world Jewry, that he believes Jews are intrinsically malevolent because of their genes, that they cannot be loyal to America, quad Jews, etc.
It was kind of refreshing.
Refreshing.
It was kind of refreshing almost to watch the 100% version of these ideas that I assumed have been dead for a century.
Putting aside the moral stuff, it's retarded and it's political poison.
Se pir kung krims c'estunfut.
I don't know what that means.
And if a critical mass of young people in the GOP believe this stuff, we will just more than shoot ourselves in the foot.
Okay.
So I thought that was pretty good.
I do depart from it in one way.
I don't know what Fuentes thinks he's doing in his own mind.
He certainly talks like a classic anti-Semite, but it is possible that that is him trolling.
It is possible that it's not.
I give him no leeway if he's just simply trolling and doesn't believe that stuff because he's playing with extremely dangerous tropes.
And if he's doing it cynically, that's not better, right?
It's bad either way for two different reasons.
But okay, so we've got the two threads.
Have you watched enough Nick Fuentes to understand what his appeal is?
That's important.
The other thread is the people to whom he is appealing.
Why are they in a position to be persuaded by this persuasive person?
And so anyway, I read with great interest and considerable relief Rod Dreer's piece that he put out called What I Saw and Heard in Washington, in which he addresses that part of the question.
And I wanted to read, maybe you'll have to do it.
I can't see.
It's too small, but scroll down.
There's a paragraph near the top.
I don't know what I'm looking for.
Claims.
The claims right there.
Yeah.
The claim that I first floated in the space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, quote, between 30 and 40%, end quote, of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes.
That's true.
Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.
Okay, keep going.
If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you're wrong.
Even young Christians, especially trad Catholics, I learned, are neck deep in anti-Semitism.
They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can't join their informal social groups.
Not every DC Zoomer con who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says or the way he says it.
What they like most of all is his rage and willingness to violate taboos.
I asked one astute Zoomer what the Gripers actually wanted, meaning what were their demands.
He said, they don't have any.
They just want to tear everything down.
I'll keep reading, but like that reminded me so much of so much of what Antifa says and what is happening on the woke left and the violent, the violent, confused, anti-establishment part of that world that we lived in Portland in the summer of 2020.
And we saw them.
They have no plans.
They have nothing that they want to build.
They just want to tear it all down.
Well, I want to make sure people understand that the tear-it-all down instinct and the manifestation of it are separable.
And I don't know that people get this when I say it, but I often say that even when it comes to the vile little twerps in Antifa, that what they are responding to is a situation in which they don't have good options.
I call it team loser, and I do that because I don't want people misunderstanding what I think of them.
These are people who have decided to wreck the system because the system froze them out.
And when I say froze them out, in the case of Antifa, it actually literally harmed them with chemicals and bad food and bad developmental environments and school that didn't prepare them for anything and who knows what else, right?
You can see when Andy No puts up the mugshots of the people who are rioting, they don't look well, right?
So therefore, their anger is understandable.
They have been frozen out.
And the Zoomer cons, as Dreer is calling them, are the same generation.
They're not malformed.
They don't look physically malformed.
They look like healthy young men mostly, but they were raised in the same environment.
They've been chemically harmed.
Most of them have not decided to halt their puberty and start taking cross-sex hormones or go on anti-anxiety meds or whatever.
But they have been raised in the same toxic soup that we are all breathing, drinking, living in, and the screens, and the economic debacle that, and this is something that Dreer quotes a number of the people he's talking with in this piece.
He says, I can't afford to buy a house.
What are these jobs that I'm looking for?
Where's the prospect of a long-term commitment and a family?
I don't see it.
So this is exactly what I'm getting at.
It's not the Antifa version.
For one thing, even if that exists over on the conservative side, that's not who Rod Dreer is interacting with.
He's interacting with people who are comparatively well equipped, but the situation they've been handed sucks so badly that they don't see a future in it.
And what that means is they don't have an investment in the system that the rest of us are trying to keep on the tracks.
And their burn-it-all down mentality is understandable.
So I'm going to have you keep reading another paragraph or two.
Okay.
So this is again from Rod Dreer's latest piece on his sub stack.
I've just got a PDF version here.
Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed.
The problems are mostly economic and material in his view.
And this is something echoed by other conversations.
They don't have good career prospects.
They'll probably never be able to buy a home.
Many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out.
And the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.
Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture.
Many of these young men are fatherless.
Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites and especially as white males, they are what's wrong with the world.
Their own speech was policed with stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals and were even rewarded for it.
Keep going?
I think that's probably good.
So I don't think Nick Fuentes makes sense in any regard until you realize how bleak the scenario looks, even to those who are well positioned within Gen Z.
And it's, you know, it goes beyond what Dreer has pointed to here.
I would also just point out, you know, I know I'm going to take flack for, you know, being some old curmudgeon or something, but what has been done to the dating landscape of these people is also apocalyptic.
And so the thing that might get you through, right, the love of a good person who is going to be on your team and with whom you can plan how to deal with all the crazy crap that these Zoomers are going to face, that thing doesn't seem plausible because the whole, every aspect of the world that they're facing is now incoherent.
So, you know, when you're in that situation, the idea of burn it all down is not crazy.
And in fact, listen up, guys.
You've heard me say burn it all down.
I'm not talking about civilization, but I'm talking about the institutions, right?
Why do I say burn it all down sometimes?
Because the institutions are clearly unsalvageable.
And when they are unsalvageable, the point is, do I think it's safe to burn down the institutions?
Hell no.
It's incredibly dangerous, but if they don't work at all, it's actually not that different.
They've effectively been burned down, and you just can't tell because something still goes through the motions and makes it look like we have functional institutions.
So the punchline here is really you are looking at a situation where people are responding to the fact that they have not been given any good options and they've picked an option that you don't like, but they have picked from a menu of bad options, right?
So when you understand that and when you understand that Nick Fuentes is playing into this, that he is just simply responding to a world that he's been handed that doesn't work and he's saying all kinds of outlandish things because it gets people to pay attention.
And the fact is the audience is primed for it because really they have a very bleak future.
That's the picture we need to understand.
It doesn't absolve Nick Fuentes of any responsibility for his apparent bigotry, whether it's a put-on or whether it's for real.
But the fact is, he there's a rule.
You have a niche, you're going to get a creature to fill it.
That's what happens.
And the point is there's a gigantic niche here because of how badly managed civilization is.
That's the place to address this.
There's one more piece from this Dreer piece that I'd like to share.
Can I say one thing before you do?
I think I know where you're headed.
I will say when I read Dreer's piece, I was thrilled by it because it did finally address in sober terms this other piece of the puzzle that I just haven't seen addressed well elsewhere.
But I really think of it as three pieces, right?
It's got the one piece, which is where did this Griper thing come from?
Why are Zoomers in this mood?
He does a perfect job on this regard.
How did it become okay to be an anti-Semite as a Christian?
Right.
Then there's the second part of it, which is about, you know, anti-Semitism, what it is, where it comes from, why we're seeing it.
And I think he does a very good job on this front.
I think there's more room to talk about things that he doesn't have right potentially, but it's mostly excellent.
And then at the end, he goes through bullet points of what he thinks the upshot of all of the things that he has learned.
And I would say half of them are right on.
I disagree with half.
But anyway, I sort of wish it were three pieces because that first one is, you know, as a standalone, it's great.
It's quite long and it's somewhat meandering.
And he says, look, I've been, you know, been on a plane.
And he's been in D.C. meeting with the vice president and the president of Hungary.
And there's just a lot going on.
But in that, what you're calling the middle of the three pieces, his brief historical description of how it is that Jews ended up in many of the positions that they are today that are facilitating people looking at Jewish people and saying, oh, you're the problem, was, I thought, particularly insightful.
So let me just share these two paragraphs by Dreer here first, writing from someone else's words.
Yuri Sleskine, in his book, The Jewish Century, published in 2004, argues that the 20th century was fundamentally the Jewish century because Mondernity involves the world becoming more like the Jews.
Urban, literate, mobile, intellectually agile, and occupationally flexible.
He frames Jews historically as a quintessential Mercurian people, nomadic service providers, traders, intellectuals, professionals, living among Apollonian food-producing majorities, that is, in settled agrarian societies.
In pre-modern Europe, Jews were outsiders, specialized in Mercurian roles due to restrictions on land ownership and guild membership, which honed skills in literacy, argumentation, and adaptability.
So, Dreer continues, the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions.
In other words, our, so here Dreer's writing as a Christian.
In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are.
And today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it.
Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world.
You well know that I have a lot of complaints about the liquidity of modernity, but the Jews didn't force this on us.
If anything, Enlightenment philosophers, French revolutionaries, and early industrialists were its chief architects.
I just had never thought of it that way.
It's a fascinating and deep perspective.
And again, I would say same principle, right?
You have a niche.
Yes.
You're going to find a creature in it.
If you forbid people from doing certain things, they will make use of the things that are still allowed to them.
Right.
I mean, in this case, it was, oh, there's an obvious niche which we want all of the people we approve of to be doing, but you're excluded.
We don't like you.
Well, what are we going to do?
We're going to have to be flexible and be able to move on a dime and not set down deep roots and be more migratory.
And that ends up being what modernity looks like.
Right.
So, you know, culture caught up with a role that the Jews were forced into by bigoted laws from hundreds of years ago.
Yeah.
It's a really interesting model.
And I think there's at least a lot of truth in it.
But anyway, the whole article is well worth reading, you know, with those three components as sort of separate, separate entities yep, so we're gonna save the new segment.
Now that's a first world problem.
We're gonna save it.
We're gonna save it and by by next week maybe there'll be a third.
Right, I bet there will be.
Yeah, totally yeah um, so good, and um yeah uh, we will.
By the time we see you next, this solar madness will be finished one way or the other.
Not if you join us in 10 minutes when we are coming back with a q a next next.
Yeah uh, and so please please, do consider joining us.
We do an hour q a once a month after live streams and we do a two hour this month.
This month it was a three hour q a on um on some sunday, last sunday, something of the month um, but uh, today we're doing that one hour q a uh, in you know 10, 15 minutes after we sign off here on locals.
Come join us on locals.
Uh, we like to see what's going on in the chat there as well.
Um gosh, there were other things I wanted to to say, but i'm not prepared to do it.
So yeah um, it is.
It is november, hopefully in a week uh, the sun will be spinning on its merry way and facing its sunspots away from us and uh, we will yes, flinging its coronal mass ejections at planets with nobody on them.
Yeah yeah, That would be nice.
That would be very nice.
Okay.
Wow.
I am just so confused by what I've put into my notes here.
It doesn't even look like English.
So I will not look at my notes and say, until we're back here, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
