Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying - Raising the Dead: The 301st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Nov. 15, 2025 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying

01:33:19

Raising the Dead: The 301st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 301st Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss grief and mourning, and what makes us human. How many distinctly human traits will we prune away before we realize that we have gone too far, that there is too little remaining of humanity to be resurrected? From the Industrial Revolution(s) to that of AI, now we’ve got apps that threaten to keep your loved ones “alive” forever, with none of the valuable complexity that ancient grieving traditions offer. Then: bonobos show evidence o...

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	Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
	It is number 301.
	I am not even embarrassed.
	I am mortified.
	Oh, no.
	Mortified.
	So early in a weekend?
	I am more.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's the beginning of the weekend.
	We got a ways to go, but I am mortified that I looked at 301 and felt strongly that it was going to be prime.
	And then I revealed to you that, as is my want on my hike yesterday, I started going through the obvious, the obvious numbers that it might be divisible by and arrived at seven pretty quickly because one does.
	Yes.
	And it would appear that, you know, 280 being obviously a multiple of seven because 28 is, and then 301 is 21 more than 280, which is, of course, a multiple of seven as well.
	So seven would appear to be.
	I haven't actually checked that against a calculator, but it would appear, it would appear that 301 is not prime.
	Not prime, despite it seeming like it really has no choice.
	But can we agree that absent the number seven, it would be?
	No, we cannot.
	I cannot agree to that.
	I have not considered.
	Let's see, it's going to be 73, 7 by ⁇ 43, 7 by 43.
	Yeah.
	So at least 43 as well.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, 43 on its own wouldn't do it.
	You need the seven.
	I don't think you're helping your cause.
	I'm not.
	I'm just, I'm grasping at straws with respect to the mortifying misassessment of the primeness of 301.
	But I mean, if this is the only thing you have to be mortified about this weekend, I'd say you're in fine shape.
	I'm doing okay.
	Yeah.
	This is the worst.
	Yeah.
	I will say there has obviously maybe, I don't know, you have been knee-deep in profoundly important work, but big news out just yesterday, I believe.
	Oh, boy.
	We're finally getting to the bottom of it.
	Oh, good.
	Yep.
	What is it?
	Amelia Earhart.
	We are going to see the files finally released.
	The files?
	The files.
	Like the federal files?
	Exactly.
	Were not released.
	Telsi Gabbard announced that the files are going to be released as a result of the courageous efforts of President Trump.
	And I imagine that next on the agenda is the, there's presumably going to be an initiative out of the National Institutes of Health to get to the bottom of spontaneous human combustion.
	We're going to work our way all the way through.
	And that was a scourge in the 70s.
	Oh, man.
	You couldn't walk a block without seeing a pair of smoldering shoes.
	Exactly.
	Yep.
	In search of.
	I think that's where we are, is that this administration has decided to finally get to the bottom of all of the various things repeatedly covered on In Search of in the 70s, if I recall the show correctly.
	Yeah, there was at least one other as well.
	I can't remember what it was called, but In Search of, that's a good recall there.
	Yep.
	Well done.
	Amelia Earhart.
	Okay.
	I had forgotten to notice that the files had not been released.
	Right.
	I kind of thought.
	She's three generations ago at this point, four something.
	I mean, we're a flight.
	So, you know, not early 20th century.
	Not the remote history, but I sort of thought we were there.
	I thought plane goes down.
	We don't really know anything.
	Remains on Pitcairn Island.
	I mean, what else is there to know?
	I guess I'm curious.
	I don't really think this should be the highest priority of the administration, but I'm a little curious.
	So you said that Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence tweeted?
	Yes.
	Yesterday?
	Yes.
	It's going to go very slowly.
	That the files of Amelia Earhart's tragic and surprising disappearance are finally being released due to the bravery, did you say?
	Was the word bravery?
	I believe, Jen, do you have the tweet in question?
	POTUS's direction.
	Leadership.
	Leadership.
	A historic initiative is underway to digitize and publicly release these records.
	Okay, so at least this does not, she's not implying that he is brave to do so.
	But okay.
	Well, maybe let's hope that what's going on here is that there's an inbox.
	And because Amelia Earhart's disappearance happened in the early 20th century, it is ahead of the JFK files and the Epstein files and that those are next because that would be like important.
	All right.
	I don't know what to think of all of this.
	I will say it did not take long from my observation last week on Joe Rogan's program where he asked me how I thought things were going.
	And I said that I was watching all of our friends who'd been pulled into the administration being drained, obstructed, and forced to back off their ambitions to much smaller things.
	And next thing you know, Tulsi Gabbard is tweeting about Amelia Earhart.
	And I don't know, it kind of breaks my heart that this is where we are.
	I wish we weren't, but I do think.
	Weirdly, the writing is no longer on the wall.
	It's on your phone on X, and it comes from all the official accounts.
	But something is trying to tell us that our hopes may have been a bit ambitious themselves.
	For this administration.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	That there is not as much freedom within the administration as we once hoped and assumed that there was.
	Yeah.
	And I'm not sure we will ever know exactly what happened, but it does seem like somebody is playing five-dimensional chess.
	And it ain't us.
	Okay, well, you went way off script.
	I did.
	As always.
	Yes, as always.
	But we need to pay the rent.
	Let's put up at the top of the hour.
	We did a Q ⁇ A on Wednesday.
	And no.
	Did we?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And is that where we talk?
	So my notes, I just can't remember now if I've updated my notes about that Q ⁇ A or the previous one.
	We talk about Maha and mattresses and the twin perils of the industrial and AI revolutions.
	That was last Wednesday.
	Yes.
	So if you were interested in any of those topics, we're definitely not going to talk about those things today.
	But go check that out on locals.
	All of our Q ⁇ As are up there.
	And you've got Patreon conversations going on this weekend.
	You had one just now.
	Got another one tomorrow.
	Yep.
	Check us out there.
	And then we have our sponsors right at the top of the hour.
	As always, three whom we really, who make products or offer services that we truly vouch for.
	And without further ado, Brett is going to find his ante ojos.
	With only a little bit of further ado, because our first sponsor this week is Timeline.
	Timeline makes Mitopure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone.
	It's urolithin A. Urolithin A is found primarily in pomegranates and has been the subject of hundreds of scientific and clinical studies, scientific and or clinical studies.
	Many of these studies find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance.
	But how does it work?
	Your mitochondria, actually everybody's mitochondria, are the powerhouses of their cells.
	But like you're talking to everybody, so you don't need to specify.
	You've got cells, mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells.
	So your does that job linguistically?
	Yes, I guess it does.
	But it's ambiguous because every so often people write to us and it's clear that they think we're talking to them specifically.
	And anyway, I just wanted to be clear.
	It's everybody's mitochondria, right?
	I mean, their cells and their mitochondria, which power them.
	See earlier point.
	Where the hell am I?
	Oh, yes.
	The older we get.
	Get that to yourself.
	I sure did.
	The older we get, the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues.
	This is in part because mitophagy, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get.
	The age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria, but it also impairs the creation of new mitochondria with that new mitochondria smell.
	And this results in an overall decline in cell function.
	Mitopure from Timeline works by triggering mitophagy.
	Quoting a research article published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2022, here's the quote.
	Targeting mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline.
	We present results from a randomized placebo-controlled trial in middle-aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound, urolithin A, which is mitopure, a known mitophagy activator, at two dosages for four months.
	The data show significant improvements in muscle strength, approximately 12% with intake of urolithin A.
	We observe clinically meaningful improvements in urolithin A with urolithin A on aerobic endurance.
	I got this, man.
	English is tough, but it's not that tough.
	With urolithin A on aerobic endurance and physical performance, but do not notice a significant improvement on peak power output.
	See, this was an honest paper.
	That's not in the quote.
	That's me commenting on the quote.
	Further.
	And we are honestly reporting on the paper.
	Which is so meta and not in the corporate sense.
	Furthermore, research published by Nature Medicine in 2016 found that in mice, the beneficial effects of urolithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age.
	Take two soft gels of mitopure a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance.
	Mitopure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria.
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	Timeline is now offering 20% off your first order of Mitopure.
	Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use the code Darkhorse to get 20% off your first order.
	That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash Darkhorse.
	All right.
	Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
	Here in the U.S., November is a month in which we give thanks and in which we remember that for which we are grateful.
	Here at Darkhorse, we are so grateful to be able to cook real, healthy food in high-quality, non-toxic cookware.
	Listeners to Darkhorse are well familiar with the myriad ways that modern life puts our health at risk.
	This includes the hazards of non-stick coatings on cookware and bakeware, which is why we threw out all our Teflon cookware decades ago.
	Why?
	Because Teflon is toxic.
	And yet over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon, and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from non-stick cookware in their blood.
	When you cook with Teflon, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins.
	And when do you ever cook anything in a pan for less than two and a half minutes?
	Pretty much never.
	Enter Caraway.
	Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable, non-toxic materials like FSC-certified birchwood, premium stainless steel, enameled cast iron, and naturally select ceramic to help you create a safer, healthier home.
	Caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
	Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron.
	All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals, and their enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors.
	These pots are strong and highly scratch-resistant, the last generations.
	And Caraway also now offers butcher blocks to cut on, glass lids for non-toxic cooking with a view, and a new bar set which is crafted from rust-resistant 304 stainless steel.
	In August, our son Zach set up his first college apartment with beautiful, functional caraway cookware.
	He will be cooking with it for a long time to come.
	The holidays are closer than ever, so get their gift or yours in time.
	Visit carawayhome.com/slash dh10 to take advantage of this limited time offer for up to 20% off your next purchase.
	Again, that's carawayhome.com/slash dh10 to get new kitchenware before the holidays.
	Caraway, non-toxic cookware made modern and two-egg omelets made awesome.
	Two egg omelets, but yeah, two eggs.
	In particular, there's this little frying pan that we've got of theirs that you have perfected the two egg omelette.
	Two egg omelette with the coarse salt and lots of fresh.
	You blacken the omelette with not with a Maillard reaction or by charring, but with pepper.
	Yep.
	Yeah.
	It's good stuff.
	It is good stuff.
	Our final sponsor this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
	We love these guys and their olive oils so much.
	Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutrition.
	It is actually good for your heart, helps prevent Alzheimer's, is high in antioxidants.
	The list of health benefits from olive oil goes on and on, and it's a cornerstone of Mediterranean climates.
	But if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.
	Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter.
	He brings the freshest, most flavorful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door.
	TJ's farm fresh oils are incredible.
	We've received several different varietals now, all with noticeably different flavors, and have used them in all sorts of culinary contexts.
	In marinades for meat and fish, tossed with carrots or asparagus or potatoes before roasting or grilling, rubbed directly onto steaks before grilling, used fresh in salads or drizzled as a finish on a cold soup or on grilled halloumi cheese.
	We made olive oil cake and several raw sauces that benefit from amazing fresh olive oil, a mostly classic Italian pesto, a Venezuelan green sauce that is rich in cilantro, and a lemony garlicky aioli that benefits mightily from amazing fresh olive oil.
	Right now, we're sampling their olive oils from Australia.
	Last night we had carrots roasted in their owlife varietal.
	The night before we rubbed steaks in Nula Mungee, I believe is how it's pronounced, before searing them.
	Delicious both.
	They're both on offer from Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club right now.
	Earlier this month, when we got our newest shipment, we sipped them to taste them in their purest form.
	One was spicy, green, and aromatic with distinct hints of arugula, another was bolder and richer.
	They are all unbelievably good.
	Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh.
	But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid.
	The solution is to have fresh-pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest when the olives, when the oil's flavor and nutrients are at their peak.
	As an introduction to TJ Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he will send you a full-size $39 bottle to one of the worlds of one of the world's finest additional olive oils, fresh from the new harvest for just $1 to help him cover shipping.
	Yep, it's going to be prepositional today.
	Oh, goodness.
	Yeah.
	And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever.
	Get your free $39 bottle for just $1 shipping and taste the difference freshness makes.
	Go to getfreshed darkhorse.com.
	That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle of amazing olive oil and pay just $1 shipping.
	Yeah, it's kind of addictive stuff.
	The tasting the distinctions, figuring out what you can use it in next.
	It's really, really good.
	And, you know, it's like a healthy addiction.
	So it's not really an addiction.
	It's something else.
	A habit.
	A passion.
	Perhaps.
	Perhaps.
	All right.
	We have a number of places we are headed today.
	Let us start with the, I don't know.
	Jen, do we have access to the video?
	Yeah.
	Okay, we're going to show you a video of something that I caught wind of on X earlier this week, and it caused my jaw to fall open.
	didn't hit the floor but largely because i was standing up and the floor is a long way down so um anyway uh let's so you did not simultaneously fall over else your job might have hit the floor You know, I was holding onto a banister at the time, and so, no, I didn't fall over, but the potential.
	You were scrolling on your phone while holding onto a banister?
	Increasingly, that seems like a good idea.
	I see.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	He's getting bigger.
	See?
	Oh, honey, that's wonderful.
	Kicking like crazy.
	He's listening.
	Put your hand on your tummy and hum to him.
	You used to love that.
	It feels like he's dancing in there.
	Oh, honey.
	Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?
	Once upon a time, there was a baby unicorn who didn't know he knew how to fly.
	This baby unicorn was like your mom because she didn't know that she knew how to fly, but she knew how to do all kinds of fabulous things.
	Hi, Grandma.
	Hey, Charlie.
	How was school today?
	It was really fun.
	I'm in this crazy shot and basketball.
	I don't really care that much about basketball.
	What about the crush?
	Stop.
	Grandma, stop, dog.
	Just tell me one thing.
	Look who's going to be a great grandmother.
	Oh, Charlie.
	Oh, congratulations.
	She says that he's been kicking a lot, though.
	Like, a little too much.
	Tell her to put her hand on her tummy and hum to him.
	You loved that.
	You would have loved this moment.
	You can call any time.
	Okay, Mom, I just need a quick video.
	Is this like an audition or something?
	No, mom.
	Just three minutes.
	You need my best side?
	Can I say another one?
	I can play the piano.
	She's so talented.
	I am.
	I'm absolutely.
	I'm your mother after all.
	Keep going.
	Start by telling us a little bit about yourself.
	Well, I was born as a very young child.
	I would hope so.
	So that's an app that's already available?
	Yes, apparently.
	For those who were not able to watch it, I think a lot is left out if you don't see the video.
	It's an app that allows you to capture what they represent as a small amount of apparently video of a living person.
	And then when that person dies, they can kind of live on on your phone and interact using AI in some way so that it is as if you are talking to the living person.
	In this case, the video depicts a soon-to-be mother getting counsel from her own mother that the kicking of her fetus can be calmed by placing her hand on her abdomen and humming.
	And then the child is born and the child begins to interact with the app and grandma, who is now passed, tells the child bedtime story.
	Grandma who was gone before the child was even conceived.
	Right.
	So the child never met his grandmother.
	Child never met the grandmother.
	The baby grows up, weds.
	His wife is pregnant.
	The wife is experiencing the kicking of the fetus and grandma delivers this information that she has passed down now to two generations about how to calm the kicking fetus and the beautiful circle is closed, renewed, whatever it is that they want to imply.
	Now, as I said, when I saw this, my thought was, well, two thoughts, really.
	Of course they would do this.
	Somebody's going to do this.
	Multiple somebodies are going to do this.
	But what I ended up tweeting was, I'm not a religious person, but this is unholy.
	That what they're playing with here is wildly destructive of the meaning of being a human.
	I just, I feel like that's the theme of the era.
	Like almost everything we are doing that is being announced as new and about the future and progress feels unholy.
	It feels depraved.
	It feels like it completely misunderstands what the value of being a human is.
	We seem to be seeking, you know, conformity and homogenization and in everything across all the domains.
	And then here we're going to lose our ability to grieve, our ability to lay down stories about people who have a right to have their own histories and not to have an algorithm decide what they would say as new things happen in the world.
	Yeah, I agree with you exactly that grief, among other things, what is at stake here most fundamentally is grief.
	And of course the people doing this have no understanding of what grief is.
	And I can say that with some confidence because you and I have spent time on this biologically, evolutionarily speaking, and grief is clearly a very important process.
	We're not the only species that experiences it, but the ones that do are on this very short list that you and I call the usual suspects.
	And it, let's put it this way, grieving is very expensive.
	So the benefit of it has to be much greater than that easily calculated massive expense.
	So it's something very important.
	And to disrupt it by preserving permanently in some crude way a not even photorealistic, but a apparently animate facsimile of your dead relative is it is a terrible, uncontrolled experiment that is about to be run on humanity.
	It's an act of violence against the individual who is now dead and is therefore an act of violence against humanity.
	Presumably, I'll bet the app doesn't have these now dead animated avatars getting tetchy, getting irritated with their loved ones when they want to engage with them, having an off day, having a response that they don't like, having a different opinion than what the person is looking for.
	I'll bet it's got confirmation bias and conformity and agreeableness all the way down.
	And that means that it can't possibly actually, I mean, it wouldn't be able to.
	There's no way for it to accurately predict everything that a person now dead would be doing.
	That is not what humans are.
	But it will always have this bias.
	And it will therefore also lead people to wish more for the people who are dead than for the people who are alive.
	Because the people who are dead aren't going to get in irritating little snits with you.
	They're always going to be what you want.
	Yep.
	And, you know, to your earlier point about this really being The nature of the era, violence against the human.
	Let's just compare this, you know, to the already grotesque landscape of pornography, which takes sexuality, which is, and sex itself, which is this, I would argue, sacred realm of connection between individuals and causes something else to be able to trigger the most basic reward that is supposed to go along with it.
	But that reward is supposed to be about something.
	Instead, porn rewards a person for engaging with a fiction that makes no demands on them.
	And so it supplants something deep and important that has a richness to it with something utterly superficial that is easier and doesn't challenge.
	And the point is, how many realms are we going to rob ourselves of something that no one on earth really understands?
	You can't understand these things.
	Nobody has the depth to see it all.
	And yet we're just going to, one after the other, obliterate them.
	Well, and just you mentioned the usual suspects, the other species, the other clades on the planet that are social and long-lived and have long childhoods and have overlap of generations living together or living at the same time, at least, such that there can be learning between generations.
	And this group includes mostly mammals, elephants, the toothed whales like dolphins and orcas, wolves, the great apes, including us.
	I feel like I'm forgetting someone.
	And then over in bird world, you have corvids, crows, and parrots, perhaps.
	With regard to grief, we have evidence of grief in many, maybe all, but I don't know for sure, but at least many of these groups.
	And yet in all of these cases, we seem to have, and maybe this is just because of the numbers, because we outnumber, wildly outnumber all of the other individuals of all those other species on the planet, but we have a much greater diversity of grief.
	We have a much longer intensity and across sort of more scales of association.
	And that seems to be part of what we do as humans, that we take these extraordinary things that are found in a few other clades on the planet and we expand on them and we exaggerate them in interesting and new and deeply human ways.
	And so too with regard to sex.
	Like with regard to grief, all organisms can experience loss that can be utterly damaging.
	If you don't have any relationship with your parents at all, it's harder to have that happen.
	And with regard to sex, all organisms that are sexually reproducing, which is to say at least all the animals, have sex and it feels good, whatever that might mean to them.
	But in, I don't know about the birds, but in the mammals, the usual suspects, there is seemingly some additional relationship that is happening with regard to sex in many of these cases.
	And humans, much more so than even anyone else, than say, say, Pan, the two species of chimps, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo, about which maybe more later.
	But so we engage in sex in ways that are much of much deeper meaning than other organisms do.
	And so when we strip it back to the thing that is most easy, most titillating, most obvious, we again do violence to our humanity.
	We reduce ourselves to something that is almost pre-human.
	And is that, you know, is sexual activity part of being a human?
	Sure, of course.
	But it is so much more for us.
	At least it should be.
	It can be.
	And pornography reduces it.
	These apps, this app, unholy, as you say, this app that takes the ability for people to actually die and removes it.
	I mean, it doesn't actually, but it appears to remove it.
	It removes one of the impacts of it, which is, I think the thing I'm going to settle on is we don't know what the damage of this will be, but we do know it's incalculable.
	That's the problem is that because we don't have an exact description, nor do I expect us ever to have an exact description of the importance of the adaptive process of grieving, we can't say what we lose by interfering with it in this way.
	It feels, oh, go ahead.
	It feels almost explicitly analogous to the response of the pharmaceutical industry to anxiety, to depression.
	We got a pill for that.
	We got a solution for that, as opposed to maybe you're anxious because there's something in your life that needs visiting, that needs correcting, that you need to figure out how to get your agency back and change something in your life so that the thing that has been bothering you for a while and is now encroaching itself on your daily activity, you can't seem to get rid of it, maybe instead of making the symptom go away, you should deal with the underlying cause.
	And so there's no underlying cause to be dealt with with regard to grief.
	It is, as we said in our book, grief is the downside of love.
	You can't disappear it.
	It is adaptive.
	It is itself healing.
	And it instructs you, the person left behind, in making an ever more encapsulated model of the person you have lost so that you can help move that into the future.
	That is your job as a human being who loved this person, not an apps.
	It is not the Java machines.
	It's not the Java machine, nor is anybody in possession of the information of how you would do it with any sort of elegance or nuance.
	No, it won't be done well.
	It won't be done well.
	So I want to actually back up to an argument that I've made in a very different context, right?
	People, these transhumanists, and this is yet one more bit of transhumanist nonsense.
	But these transhumanists rail against aging and death.
	And it's understandable why.
	We're all built to continue living.
	And so the idea that there's something that will cause your ability to keep doing that to come to an end, it's a little bit galling.
	And we all face that.
	But the fact is there's a built-in biological problem, senescence, which I've made the argument enough times.
	I probably won't say much about it here other than the fact that it's basically the consequence of what economists would call future discounting.
	The fact that your early life matters more to your fitness than your late life causes things that do something good for you early in life and bad for you late in life to accumulate because they tend to be a good deal.
	So that process creates our tendency to grow old and feeble in so doing and then die.
	Why has selection not solved this problem?
	Longer lives give more reproductive opportunities than shorter ones.
	Natural selection does not like senescence.
	It's a negative, not a positive from selection's point of view.
	Why doesn't it solve the problem?
	And my argument is it did solve the problem very elegantly, especially in humans, where what it has done is created a creature with dual inheritance, where we inherit genes and we inherit culture, which becomes the substrate that builds our minds.
	And the point is, does your child pick up all your culture?
	No, and you wouldn't want them to.
	Your child picks up the part of what you know, hopefully, that is excellent and jettisons the part that's superficial, unimportant, wrong, bad, right?
	They're in a position each generation to shed the part of you that doesn't make sense and pick up the part that is the most valuable.
	So that is beautiful because it means that the evolution of your family, you can get better at a generational scale, right?
	Lots of stuff that, you know, my grandfather, who was really like the origin point for a lot of the things about myself that I like, he got so far.
	And then he passed on what he knew to Eric and me.
	We've taken it so far.
	I expect our kids to take it another step.
	That's the way it's supposed to work.
	But all of that is dependent on a natural maturation process in which the natural order of things is you lose your parents at some point.
	And a process that keeps them alive interrupts whatever developmental consequence naturally follows from even just the knowledge that you will lose them.
	And it interrupts two distinct processes.
	It interrupts the developmental process by which you learn how to deal with loss and incorporate loss into your life and then recognize a different kind of loss the next time it comes.
	but it also interferes with your ability to uh to create models in your head of what people are to you and what people were in the world and and who they are and so it's just i said this actually on our on our local's q a last time that we had a question about the industrial revolution the ai revolution And I got thinking about it.
	I was actually writing about it a bit.
	I thought, well, the Industrial Revolution, at least the one that surrounded the sort of turn of the 20th century from like 1870 through the beginning of the First World War, had so much change associated with it.
	And I won't go through all of the things that I understand those changes to have meant right now.
	In some ways, it was the chemical revolution.
	It was sort of the birth of pharmaceuticals.
	It was the birth of the Haber-Bosch process, which allowed us to fix nitrogen and immediately double triple crop yields from having to use leguminous cover crops or guano or something.
	But it also, it was like electrification and mass production at the same time, like electrical grids spreading out across landscapes and mass production meant that pretty soon thereafter, we started to have these labor-saving devices in both masculine and feminine spheres, traditional masculine and feminine spheres.
	But within the home, it wouldn't be too many decades past that when most people would have refrigerators and washing machines and vacuums and electric lights.
	And oh, it's so great that now we don't have to do so many of the things that we've done before.
	I guess we have more time.
	What will we use the time to do?
	And, oh, remember what we are called.
	We are called Homo sapiens.
	We are the wise human, the thinker.
	Well, maybe we will spend time.
	We will spend the time creating new things, imagining new worlds, like figuring out new problems, new solutions to old problems and new problems that need solving.
	And here comes the AI revolution.
	And it's like, yeah, we can do that for you too.
	You had a revolution already, which unhooked all the need to do most of your physical work.
	Cool.
	And now you're going to be, you know, you're just going to storm right in to the AI revolution and say, hey, actually, we humans are pretty much done with the thinking for ourselves too.
	We're going to also outsource that.
	And to what end?
	Like, at some point, you've outsourced everything that makes you human and there's nothing left.
	Yeah, I really like this point.
	I do think that this is the next stage and that it basically has become cognitive outsourcing, except it's almost worse than that because what, why is the AI knowledgeable about certain things?
	Because humans wrote about them.
	So it's almost like it's farming humans.
	It's like, you know, it's farming us and then spitting it back as if it is smart.
	And, you know, look, I'm impressed with what AI can do, but it's still, it's basically draining us of something valuable and then selling it back to us in some unholy way.
	And there's no way that any of us will be able to identify all of the things that we are losing.
	And probably together, we can't yet identify all of the things that we are losing.
	But not being able to point the thing that is being lost does not mean that there aren't things being lost.
	See, again, Chesterton's fence, right?
	And in this case, it's a new thing.
	It's like, well, you're not tearing anything down.
	It's like, well, with regard to that app that you showed us that video from, what you're tearing down is grief.
	Like you lose grief.
	Like, how about we not decide to lose things that have been fundamental in the human experience before we stop and carefully and lengthily consider what was that doing there?
	What was the value?
	When somebody dies, when somebody we know loses somebody important to them, there's a thing I always feel like saying to them.
	I've said it a few times.
	I've stopped saying it because nobody knows what I'm talking about.
	But the thing I feel like saying to them is grieve well.
	That that process, when it goes properly, is so important and so cathartic that the idea of robbing yourself of it by preserving a dim shadow of the person you've lost is a preposterous thing to even consider.
	Further, the whole thing is presented and predicated on the idea that all of your relationships are, you know, the loving mother who wants nothing but the best for you.
	And those of us who have such a thing are lucky.
	Not everybody does.
	And the idea that people with broken relationships don't get to live those relationships down and experience the world after their, you know, complicated parent vanishes, that's also a very dangerous thing.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I don't see that as a risk of this particular thing.
	It's going to be opt-in, but maybe it's just opt-in for now.
	Yeah, but what happens, you know, the guilt trip from the manipulative parent that wants to find their own immortality and frankly maintain their own control.
	Yeah, but once they're gone, they're gone.
	Right.
	But the point is that works if you're a perfectly rational person.
	If you're somebody who's been raised by somebody with a malevolence to them, then A, you may be left in a situation where your grief causes you to preserve them.
	You never discover what your relationship actually was.
	You know, is this going to cause suicides?
	I think certainly it will cause some of them, where some relationship that is troubling never ends.
	And this is confusing because not only does it never end, but you don't have a template for what to do with the ancestor who never ceases to be.
	So anyway, dangerous there.
	Also dangerous.
	Like let's imagine for a second.
	Let's say this becomes normalized.
	And I hate to do this with myself, but let's say that our children preserve some aspect of me in one of these things, right?
	What happens when COVID 2.0, okay?
	Does the app allow them to have a conversation with me in which they say, Dad, they're telling me that this new technology is safe and effective, but I'm not sure what to think.
	Do I get to say, fuck no, stay away from that goddamn thing.
	These people are liars.
	You know what they did the last time, because that's what I would say, right?
	Or does Anthony Fauci begin to speak through me and say, well, you know, in this case, it's, you know, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of this, that, and the other.
	You know, you certainly shouldn't be taking some drug that only works for this, that?
	You know, you could imagine that in a world where these people are as comfortable abusing their power over us as they clearly are, there is no way that even if they had the power to be neutral with respect to your relationship with your ancestor, that they're going to stick to it.
	At some point, they're going to decide, well, you don't really have, you know, your ancestor was bad.
	They don't have the right to pass on what they actually would have thought.
	In fact, we're going to correct that relationship for you, right?
	Of course that's coming.
	So anyway, my feeling is get as far away from this technology as you possibly can.
	I've said before, I'm worried that when it comes to AI, that the abuse cases will outnumber the use cases.
	This is clearly an abuse case.
	And I'm not saying anybody should be forbidden to create such an app because who, of course, would dictate what the rules are.
	But I think wise people will just not want to touch this at all.
	Well, I mean, and that raises the question of, you know, we're living in this brave new world of capacity for people to create things.
	And, you know, it used to be that there was a job classification called ethicist and bioethicist.
	And, you know, they never had any power per se, but it was understood that people, some people took it on for themselves to be thinking about what the implications of technological and scientific advancements in particular were.
	And there's really no, there's no place for such people anymore.
	We don't, we don't listen to them.
	I don't, you know, I don't know if they existed, if they would make any sense.
	It may be like your friend Steve Patterson says about the philosophers, right?
	Yeah.
	Do I have this right?
	So you say that.
	My favorite line of his is philosophy is where it's at.
	Philosophers aren't.
	Right.
	And I think, you know, so many of the modern real academic disciplines, that's, yes, anthropology, awesome.
	Most anthropologists, oh my God.
	So it's going to be the same thing.
	So I don't know.
	I don't know if there are any compelling, actually creative and insightful ethicists anymore.
	But regardless, the rate of change, the rate of technological innovation is too fast for anyone to keep up, even if there are good people out there doing it.
	So who does that leave?
	Leaves.
	Unfortunately, at one level, the only thing it leaves is, every single individual needs to take responsibility for their own choices and never imagine that what you're going to say later on was, well, but they told me to, it's not enough.
	It's not enough.
	They're going to tell you to do a lot of things and most of them aren't going to be good for you.
	Yeah, and you know, as we said during Covid, lots of people said, you know the shots were, you know, a huge experiment.
	And I would always say well, it's only an experiment if you collect the data.
	And the fact is, the fact that this is emerging in a market means that they have every interest in not collecting the data and finding out what harm they've done and you know, upending their own business model by discovering that it's toxic.
	Yeah um, which I did.
	Maybe I should have done this at the top, but this is obvious, cognitive, emotional poison right, you and I can spot this one a mile off and, to their credit, many on X, when they saw this, were properly horrified by it.
	So it's not like the public is, you know, mesmerized by the shiny thing.
	A lot of people can see how troubling this is, but I did want to point out.
	It is a radical new step in a subtle evolution of technologies that have some aspect of this, some of them we adore.
	So I just wanted to point out that, you know, at some point it became possible to create a painting of an ancestor and preserve them at some age.
	So they hang over the mantle and they look down on you and it is not entirely unlike being in the room with the person.
	That's not a totally safe innovation right, I think, depending on what your relationship is with that person and how long ago they lived, if you interacted with them in real life, it potentially allows you to think oh, what would?
	What would he think of what I'm doing right now?
	Right, would he approve of this decision I'm making personally business-wise, anything?
	Well actually, I'm going to come back to that.
	You'll probably see it coming.
	But so we've got the picture over the mantle that has some aspect of preserving a person, unnaturally freezing them at a moment in time, preserving some aspect of your relationship, because it does feel like they're in the room with you when you're with that picture, right?
	And then you get to photos and initially you know the nice thing about the painting is that it comes with indicators that it's not reality.
	Right like I've always worried about the distinction between fiction portrayed in a photorealistic way on a television and a cartoon.
	Like I think a child can maintain the idea that when it looks like a cartoon it's of a non-real place and when it looks like a person it's confusing.
	Right like I remember when I was a kid I was watching public TV right Sesame Street or something and it was in the middle of some public TV fundraising thing and so My show ended.
	The fundraiser people came out and the guy came on the screen and he was like, okay, kids, why don't you go and get your parents and bring them into the room so that we can talk to them about public TV?
	I literally went and I'm like, mom, you got to come.
	She's like, what?
	I'm like, they want to talk to you.
	She's like, what are you talking about?
	And it was confusing because the man in the living room who was coming.
	He wants to talk to you, mom.
	Right.
	He's asking, who am I to like say no?
	He's a very, he's a public television guy.
	He's nice.
	Right.
	So anyway, you know.
	Did she come?
	I think she did.
	And then she rolled her eyes at me like, okay, no, this is, we don't do this, right?
	So anyway, but the cartoon and the oil painting both have little indications that they're not real.
	The oil painting, you know, you see the brush marks.
	Then you get to photography.
	Well, it's black and white.
	That's not what life looks like.
	Okay, it's still got that indication that this is from a different realm.
	You know, file this separately.
	And then at some point, you get photorealistic pictures.
	And, you know, you sort of run the risk.
	I think the story is not apocryphal that when the first movies were put on a screen, that there was a scene of a train coming at the audience and the audience panicked over it because they hadn't gotten used to the idea that the screen is an indicator.
	This isn't real.
	But the point is you keep marching down this road from sculpture to painting to photo to video, or it's not even video.
	It's film at first, right?
	Film, oh, it's got no sound.
	Still has an indicator.
	It's not real, right?
	And then you get to video and it's like, oh, you can make as much of this as you want.
	Then you get to fake video.
	And the point is, how different is fake video of your relative talking to you through your phone from a Zoom call with your relative?
	It's like, not different.
	And so the point is the danger grows the fewer indications you have.
	And, you know, it's one thing for us, you know, Gen X and even Gen Z types who.
	Just skipping over the millennials.
	I'm a little, a little sore at them.
	But all right.
	For us moderns, like we watched the technology go from not realistic to realistic.
	And so we have some way of calibrating that and some level of suspicion based on it.
	But of course, at some point, you're going to have a generation for whom the phony rendering of your relative is as real as anything else.
	Right.
	And they're developmentally just not going to have the proper skepticism.
	Right.
	And the urge, like, you know, I can imagine this for those who are overly in love with technology, the urge, like, look, you know, it's not like, let me tell you about your great-grandparent.
	It's like, I want to introduce you.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	It's just, it's irresistible and so dangerous.
	Well, irresistible and dangerous is also the theme of the moment, isn't it?
	I think, you know, 23andMe and it's ilk were in that were in that category.
	You know, we were encouraged many, many times to sacrifice some of our DNA into the abyss, knowing full well that these people were likely to do nefarious things.
	And we refused over and over and over again.
	Never succumbed.
	But we looked like crazy people.
	Like we sounded like crazy people, like the oughts, right?
	With new babies.
	Like, don't you want to know the whole history of you're like, not that way.
	No, that's not, that doesn't, that does not look safe.
	What exactly are you worried about?
	few things, but also it's not my job to enumerate for you all of the possible harms, nor my job to have come up with all of them.
	I'm allowed to have a reaction to new technology that says, no, no, not doing that.
	And here's why I also think that it's not good for you.
	So, yeah, you can't enumerate it in advance.
	And the fact that you can't enumerate it is not an indictment of the, hey, I've actually noticed that there's a pattern and we keep embracing tech and then discovering what's wrong with it decades later.
	It's no way to live.
	But here's the thing I said that I thought you would see coming.
	Really, when comparing these novel shufflings of profoundly important relationships that we have and the way that we deal with death, right?
	There are ancient versions of this, right?
	Of course, the belief that your ancestors are in heaven, right, or in the afterlife somehow, allows a maintenance of characteristics that are desirable, a connection to them, a justification for talking to them.
	But then you also have versions of that that are unsettling to, you know, us Western moderns.
	The retrement ceremony that you went to in Madagascar, in which when a Malagazi person dies, somebody who's still in a traditional setting.
	Several of the 17 tribes practice the retro ma, not all of them, but the Betsamasarik.
	Betsumasaraka, for example.
	They bury the person, and often bury isn't exactly the right description.
	It's sort of they put you in a coffin in a place, in a burial location, and your flesh rots off and you become bones.
	And is it five years?
	It's different in different traditions.
	I think it was seven there, but different with the different tribes.
	After some set number of years, the elders, the ancestors, get disinterred.
	They are brought back, their remains, in front of the people at a regular moment during the year.
	For the Betsumasarika, it was around the harvest season.
	And the elders, the current, the living elders of the village speak to them and they tell them what has been going on.
	They catch them up.
	They catch them up on what has been happening.
	And then the elders who are long dead, if they came out of a body box, they did not die so long ago that they had not yet been moved into a bone box.
	They now get moved.
	If they're just bones at this point, they get moved into a bone box, which takes up less space.
	And they get put back.
	And the ancestors are brought out regularly, reliably, predictably, such that the living can inform the dead of what is happening and thus answer for any sins that have been committed, effectively.
	So I would argue a couple things.
	One, our model, as we present it in our book, you've heard us talk about it, is that a behavior like this has a real cost, obviously.
	And it's a cost you could reduce.
	You could just simply not bother, right?
	The fact that it doesn't get reduced, that this gets passed on, tells you that there's a benefit that exceeds that substantial cost.
	So that doesn't tell you what the benefit is, but we can surmise certain things.
	Imagine that you have tension with somebody else in your tribe that is kept under control because you both have obligation to your aunt, right?
	And your aunt dies.
	And the point is, oh, now the safety's off the gun.
	Yep.
	But it isn't off the gun because your aunt's going to be back in seven years and you're going to have to explain what you've been up to.
	So your aunt kind of sticks around, but she's not looking over your damn shoulder, right?
	It's different, actually, than an afterlife tradition where your ancestors are above looking down on you, right?
	It functions differently.
	Now, is that an adaptive difference or just an arbitrary difference?
	Who knows?
	But the key point is each of these systems, right?
	Whether it's bone boxes and retrement ceremonies or a formalized afterlife where your ancestors go and have some contact with you, but they don't interfere directly in your life.
	The thing that those all have in common is that they pass the test of time.
	They weren't toxic.
	Were there toxic versions?
	Maybe.
	They're gone, right?
	The non-toxic versions, the ones that actually have benefits for you remain.
	And this new thing, it has not passed the test of time, nor will it.
	I mean, you know, that's speculative, but it's not a risky prediction.
	This is so disruptive.
	And, you know, when has a market ever produced a, you know, an important mythological structure that facilitates the well-being of a population over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, right?
	Not a thing.
	Well, and so the value of the traditions, the ancient traditions that you have mentioned, is in part that there is a kind of accountability, that the living know that the dead would have opinions, were they still around, and are allowed in the spirit of the tradition to have opinions about what the living are doing.
	With this app, you can just obscure whatever it is that you're doing from the person.
	You know that.
	You know that this isn't godlike.
	And so there is actually not even a safety on the thing.
	Like you, you can just use it to get the cleanest, most mundane, most banal, but supposedly happy version of this dead person without any of the it's not the cost, without any of the discomfort that comes from actually having checks and balances in a relationship that actually comes from someone saying, you know, I love you deeply, but that thing that you did, I saw you interact with that guy,
	and I think you were too harsh with him.
	Or, you know, whatever it is, right?
	A loving relationship has to include the potential for critique.
	And the, you know, the traditions, the religious traditions have that.
	You know, it requires the living to infer that the person who's looking down on them can see everything and is going to have an opinion just like they did in life.
	But the app doesn't even pretend to that.
	So there is no critique unless you, the living, go explicitly seeking it.
	And usually when you go explicitly seeking it, you're already open for it.
	You're already primed for it.
	And very often the critique that we need the most from the people who have been most dear to us are the ones that we don't see coming.
	Yeah, this is a great point.
	And also think about what it does to, you know, if you, if you are, if you fear the critique of your mother, and so you present things in a way so as to minimize the likelihood of her critiquing you.
	Well, then you preserve that tendency through death because you're talking as if on a Zoom call to your mother.
	And so the point is you're lying to yourself persists through this thing because it superficially maintains your telephone relationship.
	And what, you know, how much better is it to have, you know, the idea that your mother has ascended to the afterlife and is looking down on you and now there's no fooling her, which might make you wiser because that critique is something you can't dodge.
	Yes.
	Right.
	So, yeah, I mean, you could go a week naming risks of this bizarre intervention into our humanity.
	But wow, is it profound and really, I mean, unhealthy is one thing, unholy is another, but you're looking for terms strong enough to indicate just how insane it is to march headlong into this new tech thinking it's a good thing, right?
	There's not a person on earth who should look at this and not think, wait a minute, what makes me think that's going to be a positive change?
	Yeah.
	I agree.
	Okay.
	I sort of felt like we should leave it there, but we still, we should go on a little longer.
	All right.
	You want to talk about bonobos or ostriches?
	Let's talk about bonobos.
	Bonobos.
	All right.
	There is a paper out.
	That is not it.
	This is going to be it.
	Can you not see my computer?
	This actually came out several months ago, but it's a 2025 paper published in Science.
	Science.
	Excuse me for messing with my screen here.
	Called Extensive Compositionality in the Vocal System of Bonobos.
	Well, that is quite a mouthful, and that doesn't sound very exciting necessarily, but I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs to give us a little background here.
	A quintessential, I am going to try to make it bigger and see if my screen doesn't freak out.
	There we go.
	A quintessential feature of human language is the capacity to combine elements.
	For example, morphemes can be combined into words.
	Bio and logi is biology.
	Or words into sentences.
	Biology is interesting.
	This is possible because of compositionality, whereby meaningful units are combined into larger structures whose meaning is determined by the meanings of the parts and the way they are combined.
	It's all fairly obvious, but just to define the term compositionality.
	Compositionality can take two forms.
	In its trivial or intersective version, each element of the combination contributes to the meaning of the whole independently of the other element, and the combination is interpreted by the conjunction of its parts.
	For example, blonde dancer refers to a person who is both blonde and a dancer.
	If this person is also a doctor, we can infer that they are a blonde doctor as well.
	So that's a trivial compositionality.
	However, compositional syntax can also be non-trivial.
	The units constituting a combination do not contribute independent meaning, but instead they combine so that one part of the combination modifies the other.
	For example, the meaning of the expression bad dancer does not refer to a bad person who is also a dancer.
	Indeed, if this person is also a doctor, we cannot infer that they are a bad doctor.
	Here, bad does not have a meaning independent from dancer, rather it complements it.
	So there's our sort of background, our linguistic background in terms of understanding what it might mean when we see the title of this paper, Extensive Compositionality in the Vocal System of Bonobos.
	First of all, bonobos are panpeniscus.
	They are one of two extant species in the genus Pan, Pan Trocletais, the common chimp being the other.
	Bonobos are sometimes called pygmy chimps, not really anymore.
	But together, the chimps are sister to humans.
	So chimps, both species, bonobos and common chimps, are our closest living relatives.
	So we might expect that there was more language present, or at least capacity present in these guys than elsewhere among the usual suspects, as we were talking about before.
	On the other hand, one of the many anatomical and physiological changes that happened as humans evolved away from our most recent common ancestor with Pan, which is something like six million years ago, is we went, you know, we went bipedal, which changed a lot of things about our pelvis and our feet and our Achilles tendons and all of this, but also our snouts shortened and our larynx changed shape.
	And as those things happened, we gained the capacity for much greater precision and fine differences in the utterances that we make.
	So this seems to be one of the precursors that were necessary to at least having intense vocal communication like humans do.
	I can't help but think that we went from a pretty severe disadvantage to looking even more ridiculous through all of those changes.
	A pretty severe disadvantage phenotypically, like in terms of beauty.
	Yeah, the apes are not, like we do not live in the most beautiful clade.
	We are not.
	No, it's not the most beautiful clade.
	And in that clade, I would not have chosen chimps for more than one reason.
	But all the great apes are pretty damn ugly.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I mean, you know, a gorilla can look, you know, majestic in its own way.
	And then you're right.
	The lesser apes, I think the Gibbons, you know, they do all right.
	They're beautiful.
	Yeah.
	But yeah, chimps, you know, it's an acquired taste, I guess.
	Humans too, I think.
	Yes.
	Yes, mostly, mostly for other humans.
	Okay, so what that background is, is we were looking at bonobos and the claim is that there's extensive compositionality.
	And rather than walking you through all of what they have done, and I'm compelled that it was good work, is they've identified hundreds of different calls and they've classified them into seven different, seven different call types that bonobos make that are equivalent to morphemes, like individual sound units that have words like, I don't remember, it's like yeep and pant and hoot and such.
	And they also find the bonobos combining these regularly.
	And what the research discovers, I believe compellingly, is that when combined in particular ways, you get meaning that cannot be inherently inferred from the base units and yet has a clear relationship to the base unit.
	So that you have, again, to use their language, non-trivial compositionality in bonobo vocalizations, where they are using utterances in distinct combinations and creating more meaning that is emergent than is present in the original utterances.
	That was what I was going to ask you.
	Is it fair to characterize this as there is emergent meaning more than the sum of the constituent pieces?
	That's the word that I kept on looking for in here, and I actually failed to search on that.
	But my read of it, yeah, it's not in the paper.
	Not even in the paper.
	It's not, yeah, the word.
	It seems like the obvious interpretation.
	I agree.
	So I don't know.
	You know, I'm not familiar with these guys' work otherwise at the time I read this paper.
	I don't know if in linguistics there's a reason that that word is avoided.
	You know, there may just be some historical reason that they're not using that word, but it sounds exactly to me like the two different kinds of compositionality of additive language bits and emergent language.
	But is it multiplicative?
	It's not even.
	It's more than that.
	It's emergent.
	And that's exactly the word that I was thinking of in reading this.
	And I think I'm compelled.
	Just as I think two shows ago, maybe we were talking about the manta rays, not among the usual suspects.
	Find some evidence of the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror in manta rays um, but what you know, what is?
	What is the evidence here?
	We have um, you know, and surprising, in manta rays, in Bonobos, we're not so surprised to find uh, extraordinary capacity, but given the laryngeal restrictions on what kinds of utterances they can make, it is perhaps a little surprising that some of the complexity is coming in linguistic form.
	That said, These authors say at the end of their paper that there are also gestural things that often accompany vocalizations.
	And obviously, you know, the different sensory modalities have different strengths and weaknesses.
	Sound works in the dark.
	Gestures don't, and they also don't work in clutter or if you're far away.
	If there's a tree between you and the guy you're gesturing to, it's not going to matter, right?
	But at least at short distances, vocalizations in combination with gestures may have even additional, even more emergence or at least more multiplicative effects.
	And once you're in a species that can combine utterances, the need for the face palm gesture is all the greater.
	Very, very much so.
	Question for you.
	Yes.
	I think, you know, to you and me, it will be the obvious question.
	It'll take some explaining as to why for those who aren't well-versed in phylogeny.
	But the obvious question, given that we excel in compositional meaning-making like no other creature, and bonobos are on the branch, on the branch to which we are sister, they are our closest, they and the common chimps together are the closest living relatives of humans.
	It would be interesting if common chimps did not have this capacity.
	Yes, indeed.
	Did they look?
	Oh, they, you know, not only did they not look, I mean, and of course they wouldn't, like, you don't expect, this is a big involved situation.
	But they shouldn't mention it.
	Right.
	But so I just meant to qualify.
	I shouldn't have said not only did not, did they not look, because you wouldn't expect them to have done all of this in two different species.
	But they say this strange thing at the end of the paper, which I didn't highlight, but here it is.
	The extent to which our findings can inform the evolutionary roots of linguistic compositionality is yet to be determined.
	One interpretation of the data could be that non-trivial compositionality can be traced as far back as the last common ancestor of bonobos and humans 7 million to 13 million years ago.
	It is also, no, that's not where they say it.
	They say in here, no, I'm not finding it.
	They suggest in here that bonobos are our closest living relatives.
	Oh, here, right before what I just read.
	Our results indicate that non-trivial compositionality is not limited to humans and that bonobos, our closest living relative, also engage in non-trivial compositionality.
	Now, that sentence...
	That's at least sloppy, if not wrong.
	That is a very strange sentence.
	And I feel like this will be of almost no interest to just about anyone, but I do think it's important.
	So once again, the sentence is them saying that bonobos are our closest living relatives.
	And that's, at one level, just sloppy because it's both extant chimps in the genus Pan, which are our closest living relatives.
	It's peniscus bonobos and pandraglidae as common chimps.
	But it also harkens back to this strange unscientific hypothesis that was popular in anthropology back in the 90s when I was getting an anthropology degree.
	It was my undergraduate degree before going on into biology.
	Which I think is what maybe you wanted to.
	Well, I want to do a couple things.
	One, what Heather and I are both reacting to is that because bonobos and common chimps diverged after our lineage diverged from theirs, they are each inherently equally close to us.
	There is no more closely related to bonobos or more closely related to common chimps.
	The point is we are equally related to everything on that branch, which includes these two things, which I believe diverged.
	Is it 2 million?
	I do not remember that number, but just imagine.
	So everyone's sort of Neanderthals.
	We do not, you know, apparently there's some Neanderthal genes left in some populations of humans, but we don't imagine that Neanderthals are still walking among us, but they could be.
	And if that were the case.
	I'm right here.
	If that were the case, there'd be two extant species in the genus Homo, Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, just as there are, in fact, two extant species in the genus Pan, Panpaniscus and Pan Troglodites.
	And Homo and Pan have a most recent common ancestor, and there's nothing else extant on Earth that is more closely related to any of those things than they are to each other.
	So if you wanted to rephrase what they've said in a non-sloppy way, assuming that their error is not analytical, it's linguistic, what you would say is finding this compositionality in Pan, our closest living relatives, is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	You would not single out bonobos.
	Yeah.
	And you'd also then say, next up, we want to look at chimps.
	Right.
	We want to look at common chimps.
	Which they allude to, sort of, in the sentence you read.
	They say one possibility is that this implies that at the divergence point between our ancestors and the ancestors of modern chimps of both kinds, that this characteristic existed, which is exactly why I said, is it in common chimps?
	Because if it's not, then that suggests what they say is there's absence of evidence in other species.
	Right.
	So this is the same.
	So they haven't looked.
	Right.
	They haven't looked.
	one has and so my prediction would be well i actually don't know if absence of evidence means they haven't looked No one has found evidence in other species.
	Because of the syllogism, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
	It seems like by using that phrase, they are implying nobody's looked.
	It is also possible that the absence of evidence in other species has been hampered by the lack of appropriate methods.
	Oh, that does suggest they looked, or somebody looked.
	So my prediction would be that it would be that the same compositionality would be found in common chimps.
	Absent that, it suggests something else.
	One of two things, and I think one of them vastly more probable than the other.
	One, it could have been lost, right?
	If it was in the shared, most recent common ancestor between Homo and Pan, then it would have been lost in common chimps and retained in bonobos.
	That would be interesting.
	Why would you lose such a thing?
	Possible, but just weird.
	The other possibility is that it had been evolved, that it evolved in bonobos and our ancestors separately, which would suggest that this was a parallelism rather than a convergence, that basically there was some precursor that caused this shared evolutionary trajectory to unfold on both branches separately, which is always cool when that happens.
	But anyway, I will say I'm surprised at how readable that paper is.
	Often they are not.
	And I love it when somebody writes so that it's sort of accessible from regular English.
	Yeah, it actually is.
	I mean, even down to this.
	Again, I'm not going to walk us through the methods and such.
	In fact, most of the methods are in a whole separate supplemental file, which is 39 pages long, which I do have.
	And it's mostly readable too.
	But here in the results, we estimated similarities between single call types and call combinations of wild bonobos using a multiple correspondence analysis.
	I've never heard of that, MCA, performed on the FOC, so that's just like they're individual calls.
	The MCA, the multiple correspondence analysis, is similar to a principal components analysis, which I have heard of, which you've heard of too, which maybe no one in our audience has, but oh, principal components.
	Okay, got it.
	But it's conducted on categorical data.
	Oh, well, you just gave me in a few words.
	Like, I do need to know something, but you use it mostly in they're saying here results.
	It's really the methods, but they've combined the methods because they do all the methods in a different place.
	Usually when you describe stuff in a paper like this, you just say the thing.
	And if someone doesn't know what you're doing, you just let them flounder.
	In not very many words here, they told us what this is and how it's like the thing you're more likely to know, except that it uses categorical data, which, you know, again, we're like off in the weeds here, but this struck me as so clear and so indicative that these authors actually want their readers to know what they did, which is an excellent sign about the research.
	I agree.
	And I more or less feel, you know, obviously they're going to be rarefied places where you can't write in a way that it's accessible.
	Yeah.
	But that explains like 2% of the inaccessibility.
	And I more or less feel that if you submit a paper that is inaccessible except to the tiny number of people who are expert in your immediate thing, they should just send you home to rewrite it.
	Yes.
	Write it in English.
	You know, you'll have to use some terms of art, but as few as possible, right?
	As few as possible and as precisely as possible.
	And you'd be amazed at how much better science would work if you forced people to explain what they were actually doing so that other people could look at it and call bullshit.
	Yes.
	Now, I did just want to show a little bit from the supplemental paper.
	Can you see my screen still?
	I'm never sure.
	So this, I'm just sort of scrolling through.
	They've got the vocalizations like peep and a peep yelp, which is a combination and a whistle.
	And they've got the incidences and what happened and what they think it means.
	And so there's a lot of inference here.
	And bonobos are awfully interesting.
	I have still never seen, I've never seen any great apes in the wild or lesser apes.
	I've never seen any apes in the wild.
	Very much love to.
	But bonobos, you know, sort of got famous in, I guess, probably the 70s for supposedly being these crazy, sex, happy, hippie, feminist apes, which it turns out it's not exactly what's going on there.
	But they do these like food for sex trades and such.
	And they're just, they're more hippie than their warlike cousins, the common chips.
	And so, you know, you have things about, you know, the caller was building a nest.
	There was food present.
	There was an encounter at the time of the call.
	And it goes on.
	I just was skimming through these.
	And I don't know what this means, but I think it's the next page.
	Another individual was doing a butt drumming at the time of the call.
	A butt drumming, right?
	Butt drumming.
	I don't know what a butt drumming is, but given it's bonobos, it's probably vaguely sexual or maybe very sexual.
	When the high-hoot low hoot was emitted in one case, another individual was doing a butt-drumming at the front of the call.
	I suspect the high-hoot low hoot is, has anyone seen my phone?
	You think so?
	Just a guess.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	That's all I got on bonobos.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's cool stuff.
	Really interesting.
	Yeah.
	Wild to find that precursor in our closest living, living relatives.
	Yeah.
	And by that I mean Pan, not bonobos.
	Yeah.
	Indeed.
	Okay.
	Maybe we should just mention we talked actually it turns out on September 10th in Dark Horse 294, which was the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated before we knew that that had happened.
	We talked about the ostriches in British Columbia and that what is it?
	The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had been told by a court in Canada that they needed to kill all these ostriches in this ostrich farm because back in January there had been some animals that were sick and had died and it was thought to be bird flu.
	And now all the surviving ostriches were at risk of being culled because why?
	Hadn't they survived?
	Isn't that what the immune system is for?
	Didn't they probably have herd immunity now?
	I mean just even individual immunity, right?
	Flock immunity.
	What's that?
	Flock immunity.
	Flock immunity.
	And so this argument was going back and forth in the Canadian courts for a bit.
	And as we talked about on September 10th, a lot of mainstream media was getting in on it.
	The WAPO and the Wall Street Journal and Politico all had articles in July and August.
	They were mostly bringing in the angle of that the Maha people, those crazy Maha people, think that avian flu isn't a risk.
	And Bobby Kennedy wrote a letter suggesting that you really shouldn't kill these ostriches.
	And isn't he a crazy guy?
	So that was the bent of the mainstream media, of course.
	But the very bad news, and frankly, I'm a bit surprised, is that the ostriches have been killed.
	The Canadian Food Inspection Agency orchestrated the call.
	And here we have the AP writing about it.
	There's no one else in the mainstream media that I can find.
	The Guardian did one piece, but WAPO, Wall Street Journal, Politico, all of whom had articles on this back when they could use it as a way to try to mock Bobby Kennedy, have said nothing about this.
	Canadian federal agency says, call over all ostriches shot dead at British Columbia Farm.
	And this was on November 7th, so a week ago.
	And just the opening paragraph of this thing.
	A Canadian federal agency said Friday it has shot dead all ostriches at a British Columbia farm, fulfilling a 10-month-old call order over a bird flu outbreak.
	10 months old.
	These birds have not had a sick or dying or dead bird among them for 10 months.
	There's over 300 of them.
	There were over 300 of them doing just fine.
	The owners of this farm knew these ostriches.
	They knew they were healthy and they're dead now.
	Well, dead, brutally killed, you know, in a disgusting way.
	In a disgusting way.
	This was not done in any arguably humane way after being tortured, denied food, all kinds of insane madness.
	And, you know, I think actually the tell is in the fact that the story, when it first broke, was covered by many outlets.
	Yes.
	And now covered by just a couple.
	Yeah.
	Because what happened is the public didn't buy the story that we were supposed to buy, which was that this was being done to protect us from bird flu.
	Right.
	Right.
	So when that story didn't fly and people were like, what the hell are you doing?
	Then this became a loser story.
	Yep.
	And rather than back down, which is what they should have done, they decided not to set a precedent and they had to kill the animals, but they didn't want to champion it because they knew that the public would just become even more irate about it.
	And so, you know, when I heard this, my overwhelming thought was, first they came for the ostriches.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And that's the thing is this is some weird, strange African bird.
	You know, how many people are going to pay attention?
	Some number of people are going to roll their eyes like, who even has ostriches?
	Right.
	But you are going to pay attention when it's your cat and your dog.
	Right.
	And believe me, these authoritarian monsters is where they're headed.
	I mean, I remember us talking during COVID.
	Like there were a few of those little, why do I want to say trial balloons?
	Is that the right phrase here?
	A few little of these trial balloons floated during COVID.
	I can't remember what outlets, but some mainstream outlets were like, it's bad for humanity and bad for the planet to have cats and dogs.
	And so you should get used to the idea of not having them anymore.
	And I don't remember exactly where those things were published and exactly what they said.
	But people were outraged immediately.
	They're like, oh, no, that wasn't us.
	Never mind.
	Never mind.
	That is what they're setting us up for.
	That is what they're setting us up for.
	And you can tell the mentality.
	It's like the fact that dogs and cats aren't perfectly regulated, that this is some source of joy, idiosyncratic.
	You know, that we post our videos of our animals behaving in funny ways on the internet, that this is just maddening to the authoritarian mind.
	And, you know, A, who authorized you to experience any joy at all?
	Right.
	And, you know, B, we technically, we are going to take the right to take that from you on the basis that there is some theoretical argument for a health interaction.
	Right.
	These are monsters.
	They are not emotionally healthy people.
	They are drunk with their goddamn authoritarian power.
	And this is the warning.
	First they came for the ostriches.
	And the point is if you don't want this to go any further, that lesson has to do more than just back them off of talking about it in public.
	They decided to kill these ostriches after they knew goddamn well that there was no health benefit to be had.
	If they didn't know that to begin with, all of the arguments that many of many of us made about natural immunity were completely compelling.
	So why the hell did they have to kill these animals?
	Why did that have to happen?
	It had to happen because they wanted not to set a precedent in which reality allowed them to back off their plants.
	Yep.
	It's a display of power.
	Yep.
	It's a display of power.
	When I went looking in a few of the outlets to make sure that they, to double check that what I was finding was true, that they hadn't written about this, I was on the WAPO site, Washington Post, and I did find this today.
	The anti-vaccine movement spreads to pet owners.
	It's a cartoon.
	So I will describe it for those who can't see it.
	The illustrator is Edith Pritchett.
	Alternative treatments for anti-vax pet owners.
	Homeopathy, crystallite therapy mats, and tinfoil hats.
	So that's really cute, isn't it?
	That's very funny.
	Yeah.
	She can fuck right off.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, in the comments are what you would expect.
	I'm not going to go through them, but the Washington Post readership who appreciates a comic that thinks it's insane that some people have begun to question giving their animals almost all of their shots every single year of their life when there's literally no vaccine other than the flu vaccine, which is insane, that anyone is suggesting like that for humans.
	So what could possibly explain the periodicity on pet vaccinations?
	Put aside for the moment whether or not you think any of them are good for your animals.
	But the regularity with which those things get given, which really just gets pet owners into the vet once a year, and that's, you know, that's several hundred bucks right there because you have to do the exam and you have to do this, this.
	And if your animal's healthy, just like if you're healthy, you shouldn't need to be going into the doctor or the vet, depending on what species you are, with regularity.
	You just shouldn't need it.
	So, yep, tinfoil hats is clearly what is happening behind the scenes of any human being who is questioning vaccines for their pets.
	That's what I find on WAPO instead of any treatment of the ostrich farm executions.
	It's complete madness.
	And, you know, anybody who had pets 30 years ago knows that they're facing, you know, as we've talked about multiple times here, you know, out animals becoming allergic to meat.
	Yes.
	Really?
	You got to, you know, you've got to go find unique meat because the animal got allergic.
	I wonder what that might have to do with the adjuvants and those.
	Well, you know, I mean, domestic cats in the wild get allergies all the time.
	Yeah.
	It doesn't happen.
	It doesn't happen.
	And, you know, and anecdotally, but I mean, these data should be collectible.
	But anecdotally from a lot of animals that we have had and that we know of people and we know people who have had animals throughout these last many decades, our animals don't live as long as they used to.
	Yeah.
	They just don't.
	They don't.
	And I'll tell you, you know, vets and pharma have become partners in this racket.
	The idea that you need to bring your animal in to protect your animal from all of those circulating diseases is generating a tremendous amount of revenue.
	And there is cryptically a immunity from liability here because the ability to recover on an animal that was killed by a defective vaccine is limited to the value of the animal, which is what it costs to buy one, which is nothing.
	It's not worth fighting in court.
	So, you know, the incentive for these monstrous people to get formulations that are tolerably safe is effectively not there.
	That's right.
	I will say, and I've said this before someplace, maybe here, that the annual vaccinations for your pets schedule hadn't actually occurred to me, even when we were into COVID.
	And I can't remember exactly when this was, but I think that the vaccines were out and we had already been like, wait, no, we're not doing that.
	We were still living in Portland at the time.
	And our cat, Tesla, who at that point would have been like 12 or 13.
	He was over 10 for sure.
	And he's still with us.
	He's still alive.
	But he had a lot of health problems for a while until we figured out basically we gave him an elimination diet and cleared a bunch of the stuff that he has developed allergies to from his diet and he's doing much better.
	But we hadn't figured that out yet.
	And I found, because I was sick of the allopathic vets, I found someone who called himself a holistic vet in Portland, Oregon.
	And this was in the days when you couldn't go into places.
	Remember those days?
	Yes, it lasted a lot longer in Portland than anywhere else.
	And it wasn't because the vet wanted it that way.
	It was because this was required because people are stupid.
	But so I had to do this meeting.
	I had to like hand the cat out.
	And they took the cat in.
	I had to stay in my car.
	But at the end of it, the vet came out and talked to me and did not insist that I keep my mask on.
	And I put a mask on in the car and he didn't have his mask on.
	And he was kind of leaning in the window talking to me about maybe an elimination diet.
	Maybe it's this.
	I certainly don't recommend any drugs because that's not the kind of vet I am.
	And I said, well, you seem great.
	You're able to talk to me scientifically and clearly.
	And maybe I should bring him back at some point because he's going to, you know, maybe we should switch to you.
	He's going to be up for his annual vaccinations along with our other guys.
	And the guy says to me, you sure you want to do that?
	Like, what do you mean?
	What are you talking about?
	Like, vaccinations for the animals.
	He said, well, think about whether or not the vaccinations that you think do you any good, if they're doing you so much good, would you be getting them once a year?
	Right.
	I said, well, certainly not.
	No, certainly not.
	And, you know, we have not.
	We are, you know, dogs are required to get rabies vaccinations with greater, longer periodicity.
	But nothing else for any of our animals.
	And their health has improved.
	Yeah.
	I mean, effectively, it is vaccine superstition that has been seeded by the people who stand to gain by selling us these things.
	It's no better than that.
	And it's very dangerous because these things are bioactive.
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	So this is a debacle and a tragedy.
	And they shouldn't have done it.
	And we should remember that they did and what we think it means about what might be coming.
	Yep.
	100%.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Maybe that's it.
	I think we've arrived.
	All right.
	We will be back in a few short days.
	We'll be back on Wednesday again.
	You could look at me like that's my fault.
	302.
	Also not prime.
	Also not prime.
	Yes.
	302.
	302.
	Yes.
	You are right, sir.
	Let's see.
	We will be back in a few days.
	You've got a Patreon call tomorrow.
	Check out our locals where we also have the watch party going on whenever we do these live streams.
	And until we see you next time.
	Wait a minute.
	Nope.
	First, I wanted to give a shout out again to our sponsors, Timeline, Careway, and Fresh Pest Olive Oil.
	All I think would as we go into gift giving season all would make good gifts.
	And until you see us next time, how about that?
	Boom.
	Yeah.
	Nailed it.
	Gordian knot sliced open.
	Yeah.
	It's a hatchet.
	You can just sword.
	Yeah, that was the wrong motion.
	You would do that.
	Yeah, you wouldn't just fray the knot.
	That's quite useful.
	I mean, just anchor it.
	Yeah, you wouldn't do that.
	Yeah.
	Afraid not.
	Afraid not.
	Be good to the ones you love.
	Eat good food and get outside.

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