Solo Mission: The 302nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 302nd episode, Bret Weinstein podcasts solo, giving Heather Heying a much-needed break while she recovers from the flu. He shares his thoughts on modern marriage, discusses the troubling Italian farm-family story, and explains what Sarah Hurwitz's revealing comments mean to outsiders. To finish his mission, he answers questions submitted over X and Locals during the stream. ***** Our sponsors: Masa Chips: Delicious chips made with corn, salt, and beef tallow—nothing else—in l...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I think it's number 302.
If so, that's not prime.
I need no help to figure that out.
I'm very proud of myself.
Here's the thing.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
Dr. Heather Haing, who usually would be broadcasting with me, is not here because she is down with what appears to be the flu.
It's not a good one.
And in any case, that puts me in the position of live streaming alone, which I don't like.
And let me tell you a little bit about why I don't like it.
I just feel like language is built for conversation.
And there are a lot of ways in which we now use language in which it isn't really conversational because we're talking to, you know, an audience that's not in a position to respond, may not even be here, as is the case with this live stream.
I don't like it.
When Heather and I were professors, we used to lecture in such a way that there was constant interaction with the people in the room.
And even when they weren't interacting, we knew them very well.
And so it was possible to, in our minds, be in dialogue with everybody in the room, really.
I know that sounds strange, but that's how it felt.
When we would guest lecture in other people's classes, we would have to specifically invite them to interrupt with questions as we went along because it made everything go better.
It was more productive for everyone.
So I do not like talking into a void, even if I know that there are people listening and have some guess as to maybe what some of them are thinking.
It just doesn't feel natural.
In fact, years ago, there was a nomenclature in Silicon Valley where certain people were described as read-only.
It was a reference to files that you could read that would sometimes, you know, come with a program that you had bought or something, which couldn't write to them, right?
So a little file that contained information.
And certain people were understood to be read-only.
They might be smart and insightful, but they didn't take anything in.
It didn't change their position on anything.
And so it was a derisive term.
And I thought, you know, justifiably so.
So in any case, I don't like talking into a camera when I don't know what people are hearing and they're not in a position to respond.
So, you know, Heather and I talking to each other is a pretty good substitute.
We can have a discussion in front of you and it does the job.
But I will tell you, even, you know, when I'm alone, I do talk to myself a lot.
I talk through things to myself as if I'm two different people.
I probably sound like I'm insane.
In fact, if the NSA pays attention to me, they probably think that I am insane for doing that.
But nonetheless, it is again necessary to have that dialogue.
And something about this dynamic just doesn't nail it.
So anyway, we'll see how it goes.
It should at least be an interesting experiment.
It is going to start with a miniature, highly concentrated experiment in which I attempt to do the job of paying the rent that we always do at the top of one of these broadcasts by reading the ads.
But in this case, I have to read three ads in a row.
And as longtime viewers know, reading, you know, like letters on pages is not a strong suit.
I'm perfectly capable of doing it.
My reading comprehension is excellent, but the actual slogging through text is, well, it's a chore to say the very least.
But my sense is it will at least be somewhat ridiculous and possibly hilarious.
I hope it works.
So anyway, oh, maybe I should tell you what we're going to do before I get to the ads.
What we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about marriage.
I can talk about marriage here without Heather, and there's no fear of being contradicted.
Not that she would contradict me.
I think we're very much on the same page on the topic, but nonetheless, this is an opportunity to say things, and there's no risk of embarrassment or whatever.
Then we are going to talk about the interesting and I would argue tragic story of this Italian family that has just had their children removed.
Oh, they're not an Italian family.
They're a British family living in Italy, kind of off-griddish, and they've had their children removed by the Italian equivalent of Child Protective Services.
We're going to talk a little bit about the meaning of that story.
And then we're going to talk about the interesting comments of Sarah Hurwitz, who showed up all over my feed this week.
I don't know if she showed up on yours saying things about the conflict in the Middle East that I thought were interesting, but I thought they were interesting in a different way than most people did.
So anyway, we're going to take a little listen to her comments and then talk about what they might actually mean.
And then we are going to get to questions that you all in the audience might have.
If you have questions, you can submit them in response to the post that I made on X this morning.
If you want priority given to them, you can subscribe to me on X or you can subscribe to our locals community.
Jennifer is monitoring those things.
And so it is not too late to submit your questions.
We already have some good ones, but I would love to see some more good questions and we will get there.
And, you know, all of that is going to happen.
And, you know, for no extra charge, you have the snoring of the dog in the background.
I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm hearing it on your behalf.
So it's all good.
You know, when people say that, I think, what world are you paying attention to that you think it's all good?
But here it is.
I just said it and lightning did not strike.
So, all right, without further ado, the paying of the rent by the reading of the ads.
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I mean, you can't see the chips.
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Where the hell am I?
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I don't know, Jen.
I think that went pretty well.
There were some hiccups, but we recovered.
It was fairly effective.
All right, let's see if the trend continues.
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See, in this one, I'm going to have to read Manuka and Manocora as two different words because that's what they are.
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Now, I would say all the forests of New Zealand are remote, but I'm being finicky.
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There are footnotes in this ad I will have you know.
That footnote number two there, manuka honey is even better.
And then if you want to go to the literature, it's right at the bottom of the ad.
Very thorough stuff, Heather is something else.
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See, I did it.
I read the two words just smoothly.
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Here's the thing.
It doesn't even say spoon there.
I just, I'm such a pro.
I just inserted it mentally where it needed to go before I even got there.
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Did I already say that?
Wow.
All right.
I am taking away my pro status.
I'm now going to skip to the last sentence, which says, that's ManuCora.com slash Darkhorse for $150 off your first starter kit.
All right.
Jen, I'm giving myself a B minus on that one.
You know, B minus, it'll do.
It'll get you there.
I've ridden the B minus to success before.
It's going to work here as well.
All right.
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Well, here's the thing.
We have survived the reading of three consecutive ads.
I consider that a triumph.
Now's the part where I have to start talking to you, even though Heather is not here for me to talk to her.
But in any case, it is what it is.
First thing I wanted to talk about is I've been watching many online persons.
Actually, let me call them men, because that's what they are.
Men who have begun to doubt the viability of male-female relationships based on the total hellscape that they are encountering in the mating and dating world.
And I will say a couple things about this.
One, I am so personally relieved that I don't have to deal with the hellscape of the modern mating and dating world.
I cannot even tell you.
On the other hand, the relief is diminished somewhat by the fact that Heather and I have two wonderful offspring, boys in their own right, who are now fine young men and are going to have to navigate this landscape somehow.
And I don't know how they're going to do it.
So even if I'm personally relieved, I'm troubled on their behalf and frankly, on the behalf of their entire generation.
So here's what I'm wrestling with.
I'm watching all of these online male personalities who are fed up with the mating and dating environment, and I'm watching them almost to a person reach conclusions that I just don't think are right.
In fact, I feel certain that they are not right.
Now, why would I say that I am certain?
Permit me a detour.
The way that science has matured, modern science, when it is done correctly, is done in a falsificationist mindset.
So falsification comes to us from Popper, who added that to the philosophy of science.
And when you have this mindset, you understand that many things can be demonstrated not with a huge sample size, a huge population, but with a single observation that proves they aren't right.
Now, I'll give you the example of the, I think it was 1919 expedition to Brazil by, I believe, Eddington, who went to Brazil because you needed to be in Brazil to watch the total eclipse of the sun in that year.
So 1919 was the first opportunity to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.
And the particular prediction of that theory, at the time, I would say it was a hypothesis.
Physicists are terrible about this distinction.
It is now a theory, so it's a little bit ambiguous how we should refer to it.
But in any case, the hypothesis or the conjecture that Einstein had put forward in general relativity made predictions, as all good hypotheses do.
One of the predictions was that light would be bent by gravity.
Now, if you think about it in your own mind, you will realize what a shocking prediction that is, right?
Nothing in our experience suggests that gravity bends light.
And the reason for that is because gravity is so very weak, right?
Every two objects that have mass have gravitational attraction to each other, but we just can't detect it.
It's so minor.
You need something absolutely massive in order to feel its gravity.
Something like the moon, which has a sixth of the Earth's gravity, or the Earth, which has the Earth's gravity.
But in order to see the bending of light, you really need a lot of gravity.
The way to get that is to use the sun.
But the problem is the sun is very inconvenient for monitoring the bending of light because it's putting out so much light of its own that you can't see any of the light that it's bending.
What solves that?
An eclipse.
So Eddington goes to Brazil to observe the total eclipse of the sun, which is the brief moment at which it is possible to watch the bending of light from stars well beyond the sun as it comes around the gravitational mass of the sun, so-called gravitational lensing.
What did Eddington find?
The stars were not where they were supposed to be.
Their light had been bent by the sun's gravity.
It is presumably always bent by the sun's gravity, but you cannot observe it unless the sun is blocked out by the moon.
Hence, this observation.
Now, my point is, the idea that light is not affected by gravity was falsified in a single observation.
And you could say, well, all we can say is that in this case, light was bent by gravity.
But in fact, if the idea is that light is not affected by gravity, the one observation says even that's not true.
Light is at least sometimes bent by gravity, right?
So, point is, our worldview, our view of the rules of physics changed based on a single observation that could not be accounted for by any competing hypothesis.
This is in fact part of why Einstein's theory of general relativity is a theory.
It has matured from a conjecture or a hypothesis into the presumed correct description.
Now, could it be falsified still?
Yes.
And in fact, there's lots in quantum mechanics that suggest that there may be something wrong with the Einsteinian perspective on physics.
That is obviously not my specialty, so I will leave it to someone else.
Okay, why did I detour us to talking about the eclipse?
Because the conclusion of the manosphere about marriage seems to go like this.
The change in the relationship between males and females has been disastrous.
It has resulted in, among other things, objective changes in our rate of reproduction.
People are not reproducing sufficiently to maintain the population that we have.
That has implications for us economically.
And at some level, it is fair to say it is an indicator that something is very wrong.
We have a three and a half billion year history of continually reproducing, not as a species, because obviously three and a half billion years takes us back to the beginning of life itself, but the reproduction has been an unbroken pattern in that time, and we're threatening to break it.
So something's way off, and it has something to do with the way human beings are now relating to each other.
So I would agree that something's wrong.
The problem is the conclusion of the manosphere seems to be that the right thing to do is to return to traditions that work.
The trad viewpoint has taken off, and understandably so.
When you find that you're doing something that is not working, returning to the last thing you did that worked is not insane.
But in this case, it kind of is.
We can't really return to the place from which we came.
Why not?
Well, because birth control changed everything, and very few people are ready to surrender that, right?
Even people who take what they call a traditional view of marriage are loath to give up the ability to plan when and how many children they're going to have.
So my point is, unless you're willing to abandon all of the technological modifications that have enabled modern life, you're not going to be living a traditional marriage.
So trad, I would argue, is a fiction.
There may be things in tradition that are worth returning to, and there are other things that either shouldn't be returned to or can't be returned to.
So all of this is a long way of saying.
My own marriage seems to be a falsification of the idea that tradition is the only way to solve the problem of modern mating and dating.
Heather and I have been married since 1998.
We've actually been living together since, if we were here, she would know the exact year, but I think it was 1989.
So in any case, we've been together forever.
Now, one of the things that I have come to understand as an older person, I'm now 56, is that almost everything I was told about marriage and what it was supposed to be like just wasn't an accurate representation.
That in some sense, what one needs to do is to discover how marriage works and ignore the mythology of it because the mythology is at least now, I think, more misleading than it is informative.
So what I'm getting at is my marriage to Heather is, I don't, I'm struggling not to say it is not the least bit traditional because there are elements of it that are a bit traditional.
But overarchingly, I don't think it's traditional at all.
In fact, Heather is so wildly not traditional that I think she falsifies that idea just on its face.
Heather has been gender non-conforming since I met her at 16 years of age.
She plays like a boy.
She, in many ways, views the world in more traditionally masculine terms.
She competes like a boy.
She did very well in science in part because this was not foreign to her.
She worked under very difficult conditions in Madagascar of all places where she had no support network.
I did my work at a research station.
I might have liked the opportunity to do it somewhere where there was no research station, but the fact is a research station makes things easy.
Heather did her work in Madagascar on an island off the coast of Madagascar with no research station, supplying herself, dealing with all of the complexities of living in a foreign culture, right?
This was a difficult place to do science.
And the science she did was award-winning.
It was excellent.
So this is not a traditional woman.
And so what that leaves us with is the observation that a person who had that approach and succeeded in demonstrating her capability at doing all sorts of things that, I mean, literally, my advisor told us that when he began working as a biologist, it was understood that women couldn't do field work because where would they pee?
Right?
That was the level of sophistication.
So anyway, Heather did field work under very difficult conditions.
Obviously, she's perfectly capable of, and therefore women are perfectly capable of doing stuff that most men couldn't do in the field.
So not a traditional woman.
On the other hand, she has been a fabulous mother to our two marvelous children.
And if you met our two marvelous children, it would leave no doubt that they had had an excellent family life, that they did not suffer from having a mom who had a male outlook on science and fieldwork because they got proper mothering from her.
So to make a long story short, the marriage works great.
It is not traditional.
Heather and I have actually, we didn't plan it this way.
I don't think either of us would have said it was a good idea, but we've actually had the same job consistently since we went to grad school together, taught at Evergreen together.
In fact, we've just had the same job title continuously.
Now we podcast together, co-authored a book.
So there's been parody.
That's not a traditional arrangement for a marriage.
So in any case, I think it's a falsification of the idea that the only way for a marriage to work really well, and our marriage does work really well, you guys see that on Dark Horse all the time.
There's way too many hours of Dark Horse for us to be hiding any animosity.
You see us when we're frustrated at each other.
It all works pretty well.
And the stuff that you don't see works great too.
So it's a falsification of the idea that TRAD is the answer to this.
I don't think TRAD can be the answer because TRAD would involve the abandonment of things like birth control that allow you to decide on family planning.
And it would create traditional gender roles, which I think are fine, but they're not the answer.
They might be part of an answer.
All right.
I think that's more or less what I wanted to say on that topic is just that I want the manosphere that has concluded that TRAD is the answer to this problem to confront the possibility that there is at least a very different answer and that we have observation of it.
Oh, I will also just finally point out that as I've been thinking about this, I've noticed how many men there are who seem to have discovered the same pattern, men who have non-traditional relationships that are highly functional.
Many of them, you know their names.
I've run into a number of these people in, you know, heterodox podcasting, in medical freedom movement circles.
Think about who they might be.
And anyway, ask yourself the question, do they not pose a challenge to the idea that trad is the answer to this problem?
All right.
Topic is finished.
Yes, talking to a camera is exactly the awkward experience I was expecting it to be.
So, all right.
Next topic was going to be the topic, which I've only just become aware of, but the dimensions of the story, I think, are pretty easy to understand.
It is a story of a British family that moved to a remote part of Italy in order to raise their children.
I don't know how off-grid they are, but it's definitely kind of frontier lifestyle.
The kids don't go to school.
They, you know, they participate in the chores of living under much more primitive conditions.
Maybe we should show the little video of the parents talking about the situation.
They do not have the right to take our children.
For four years, they've been living happily off-grid in a patch of woodland in the Abruzzo region of Italy.
But this couple is now at risk of losing their three children to the Italian authorities.
That is why we are standing strong, because legally, they cannot take our children.
And I think if they did, they would have an international uproar.
I think it is time that we as a community, as a species, that we stop relying upon systems to tell us what to do, that we start getting connected again to our own intuition and our own inner compass of integrity, compassion, connection, be there for our neighbours.
be there for each other.
So what exactly propelled them to go and live in the forest with a donkey, a horse, two dogs, and a bunch of chickens?
For our children, so that we had the time to be here for them and were not stressed and we've got to meet the end of the monthly bills, that we were able to actually be present and be at home and provide a family and an environment that was peaceful, happy, that they had a home for the rest of their life and they were free and that we were free too.
All right.
So that report is from, I think, a week ago as something was brewing.
I believe what has happened is the family was forced to go to the hospital as a result of what was reported as food poisoning of one or more of the children.
This allowed the Italian officials to move ahead with what was apparently already an existing plan to take the children away on the basis that they were not being properly treated by these parents.
So let's see.
Do we have a tweet to this effect?
Okay.
So I will read this for people who are just listening.
It says, By the way, the account, I don't know who the account is, but the account is pro-vita and familia, presumably Italian, pro-life and family.
And this is a translated tweet, auto-translated, so I can't verify it, but it's probably auto-translation's become pretty good, so it's probably fine.
It says, SOS, they have taken the children away from the family in the woods.
A couple, Catherine Birmingham and Nathan Trevillon, live with their three children in a small house in the woods of Abruzzo with a simple lifestyle and unconventional educational past.
There is no abuse, no mistreatment, no confirmed neglect.
Yet, the juvenile court in La Aquila has ordered the removal of the children and the suspension of parental responsibility.
Imagine seeing your children torn away from you, not because you made them suffer, but because you don't fit the standard decided by others.
It's a very deep wound in the primacy of parental education and an overwhelming power of social services that, if it goes unchallenged, can strike anyone who chooses a different and unconventional path.
Okay, so we will link that tweet if you want to find out more.
I wanted to make a couple of points.
One, I think this is actually a, it properly belongs in the same category as the story that Heather and I reported on a couple of weeks ago, or actually maybe at our last live stream, we reported on the fact that the ostriches in Canada had finally been killed by authorities who had been trying to accomplish that for months.
And at the time, I said something like, first they came for the ostriches.
This story belongs with that story because what it is really a demonstration of is two things.
One, a profound misunderstanding of complex systems as it relates to things like immunity in the case of the ostriches or child rearing in the case of these children in Italy.
Somehow, what we have are bureaucrats who are so convinced of their own insight and power to make things better that they override the most obvious principles of biology at the drop of a hat.
And they are incensed by the idea that anybody would challenge the level of expertise or the possibility of expertise, frankly.
So in the case of the ostriches, you had some cases of bird flu within the flock, and then the flock recovered.
To any properly biologically educated person, that suggests a flock that is now stronger.
The remaining flock is stronger as a result of the fact that it has been put through this immunological challenge.
And the animals that had succumbed to the disease are no longer part of the flock.
Animals that were immune to the disease in the first place and therefore didn't get it remain in the flock.
And animals that did get it and recovered now have an immunity to it.
So if bird flu is your enemy, this flock is an asset.
Yet officials saw it differently.
Their absurd claim was that these animals, for which they had no test of modern bird flu persisting in the flock, was a danger and needed to be destroyed because it had encountered bird flu.
Obviously preposterous at a biological level, yet the animals are dead because at a bureaucratic level, this somehow makes some kind of sense.
Now let's look at the even more absurd case of this family living in Italy.
Here you have two clearly loving parents investing mightily in an environment that is demonstrably positive for children.
These children are not going to be addicted to their phones.
They're going to be exposed to a far lower rate of toxicity as a result of their much more natural environment.
They are going to have teachers who love them dearly because those teachers are their parents.
So these are kids who are very lucky to have parents this dedicated who are capable of providing them an environment this nurturing.
Imagine what you would have to believe.
And I think I didn't say this, but as I understand it, the children have now been taken away as a result of going to the hospital with food poisoning.
Children have been taken away, and there are processes in motion to permanently remove them.
Now, how dumb would you have to be to think that children who are bonded to two parents that love them as deeply as these parents clearly do would be better off removed from those parents, even if there was something wrong with the environment that they're in?
The nature of the parent-child relationship is such that there is a 0.00000% chance of making them better off by prying them away from their parents and putting them under some other competing circumstances.
There's no way that comes out positive.
And to imagine that it does is to evidence a level of failure of intellect that is almost impossible to imagine.
These children are better off with their parents.
Were there something about their environment that was actually troubling, then it is far better to attempt to persuade those parents to alter that feature of their environment.
But frankly, much like we see a kind of mind-numbing belief that something like vaccines are so inherently safe that there's no cost-benefit analysis to do because there's no cost, right?
That obviously can't be true.
You inject something with ingredients.
Those ingredients have physiological effects.
Not all of the effects are going to be positive.
Even if you thought that the net effect was positive, the idea that there's no downside is ridiculous.
So in this case, the idea that the state is in a position to provide a nurturing environment to children, as if children were like little robots that needed an environment that prevented rust from growing on them.
No.
In fact, the state has already profoundly harmed these children.
Imagine what it would be like to be a child in a loving home and to have the state come and take you away and to know that the state wanted to take you away permanently.
Like, how do you recover from that discovery?
That discovery is going to haunt you for the rest of your life.
That is going to be a trauma.
Even if the state realizes that it has made a mistake and relents tomorrow, the children now know something about the state coming and taking you away from your parents against their objection, and they are never going to forget it.
So in any case, I think what I'm getting at is this.
The state, and I don't mean any particular state, it's obviously true of the Italian state.
It's obviously true of the Canadian state.
It's obviously true of the American state.
Frankly, it's obviously true of every state in what we might refer to as the West.
And I presume it's true, clearly true in China.
So maybe it's just simply universal.
The state comes to believe in its own capacity to do good.
Now, do I think states can do good?
Yes.
But I think, as we've talked about many times on Dark Horse, the problem with a liberal mindset is that it tends to focus on good that can be done, and it tends to completely ignore harm that is likely to happen if you attempt to do good.
So in this case, the state is completely willing to do harm to children.
Is the state, you know, out of an abundance of caution trying to protect children?
Well, maybe in its own mind it is.
But what it's actually doing is harming children in an obvious way, right?
Any child psychologist could tell you that this would be a profoundly traumatic experience, even if it lasted one night, right?
Being taken away from your parents by force is a traumatic experience as it should be, right?
So the state thinks of all of the good that it can do and does not think about all of the harm that it is almost certain to do as it tries to do good, right?
That's sort of the most generous interpretation of this insane story is that a state that thinks it is acting in the interests of children is harming children in an obvious way that it is incapable of seeing.
Somehow that's the story.
Now, the real question for us is, what do we do with all of the sporadic evidence from different places that the states that we have empowered make this error?
What do we do with that?
How do we rebel?
I mean, I, as an American, have no influence over the Italian state.
I have a very clear perspective on why it's insane.
I think it's very clearly connected to the same insanity that took place in Canada with the culling of these ostriches.
But how do we impress upon the meta-state that includes all of these actual states that it's not allowed to do this, that it is in violation of something fundamental, of something, I hesitate to use the term, a natural law.
The natural law says that parents are by far the best chance that kids have.
Now, let me point out the difficulty of just simply saying, let's leave it at that.
The difficulty is there are circumstances in which some parent is so badly equipped to do that job that even the fact that they would be expected to do right by their kids doesn't work.
Obviously, there are parents who physically abuse their children and far worse.
In such a case, does it make sense to take the children away?
Yeah, it does.
But imagine the gap between a case that bad where the child's best bet is not their parent and all of the intermediate cases where even bad parents are a better bet than the state's substitute for them, right?
That's the gap that's difficult.
That's the gray area.
How do you deal with parents who are completely falling down on the job of being parents but are still better than the state would be, right?
There's a lot of that.
So I wish I knew the answer to it.
I don't.
But nonetheless, the idea that the state thinks that that's the category, that it's actually in the category where the state is better than the parents of the children, when what the parents have done is taken their kids off grid and raised them in circumstances that would look normal 200 years ago, right?
I'm sorry.
It's not the state's right to decide that it knows better.
In fact, the idea that the state has that right is absurd on its face in light of how many harmful things the state mandates on children.
So I think we've gotten to the end of that rant.
It's hard for me to know because I'm here talking to myself.
I could go on all day talking to myself.
In fact, most days I do.
But nonetheless, this is galling, and I think we need to figure out how to deal with the category of states overstepping their capacity to do good, wildly overstepping it, and doing massive, obvious harm in order not to set the precedent that we get to say no.
That's what they're doing, and it's got to stop.
All right.
Next story.
I don't know why exactly Sarah Hurwitz showed up all over my feed this week.
Now, I did see some comments, but it seemed that once the comments that brought her to public attention had spread a certain distance that she became a topic of conversation and many other comments seemed to emerge too.
But let's start with a video of the comments that I think started this ball rolling.
I will say she was an Obama speechwriter.
So she's sort of highly placed in Democratic circles.
And she was at a Jewish conference.
I'm wondering if Jen remembers which conference it was.
Maybe she'll look it up while we're watching the video.
Okay, it's in the video.
All right.
I think that since October 7th, or really before then, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews in Israel.
And I think that is especially true of young people.
So we are now wrestling with a new, I think, generational divide here.
And I think that's particularly true in that social media is now our source of media.
And this, you know, it used to be that the media you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream.
You know, it generally didn't express extreme anti-Israel views.
You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media.
But today, we have social media, which is a global medium.
It is shaped.
Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews.
And so while in the 1990s, a young person probably wasn't going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them.
They find them on their phones.
It's also this increasingly post-literate media, less and less text, more and more videos.
So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.
And this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.
So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.
And, you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart, I think, bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit.
Because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential.
But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews.
And they think, oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right?
Powerful white people against powerless black people.
So when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel.
You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.
Okay, so first let's talk about what other people saw there.
I think what they saw, first of all, you will frequently find the sentiment, oh, she said the quiet part out loud, right?
Meaning that there's a certain part that you don't say, you know, that's written like a stage direction on a play.
And instead of dealing with the stage direction, she just read it as if it was an instruction and confessed effectively what the play is about.
I don't think that's what happened here.
And I think it's important to get past that layer in order to understand what is happening here, which I think is very important.
So did she say the quiet part out loud?
I'm going to argue that she didn't.
That's not what she did.
I think she made a different mistake.
And for longtime viewers of Dark Horse or people who have followed me, you will have heard me say that before the Evergreen meltdown,
I was watching Jordan Peterson deal with what was going on in Canada with his own career as a professor as he was being, as he was standing up for what I think most of us now realize are proper values and was being cornered by people who were increasingly irate over his behavior.
And there's a particular set of videos at the University of Toronto where Peterson is, he's supposed to give a talk.
And in one of the two videos, there's one video outside the lecture hall and there's another video inside the lecture hall.
And it's the one inside the lecture hall that I'm particularly responding to.
Jordan is sitting on the stage waiting to give his talk.
The room is filled with protesters and they have air horns and they're shouting and they have signs and there's no way for Jordan to deliver any sort of talk at all.
And what he does instead is he calmly sits there and he stares them down.
And what I gleaned from watching Jordan was that inside that room, Jordan lost badly.
Didn't matter because the room, the one that matters, is much bigger than the room he was sitting in.
And he knew that.
So I coined the idea, the room is not the room.
I think the mistake that Sarah Hurwitz has made here is that she has forgotten, if she ever knew, that the room that she is sitting in is not the room.
That in the room in which she is sitting, she did not say the quiet part out loud.
She said something that sounded sophisticated to an audience that had a shared experience of October 7th of the aftermath in Gaza.
And that what is striking is that in general, we're not supposed to be in that room.
That room is like a dinner party of people with a closely knit culture and a shared worldview.
And things from it are positively shocking when they are shared with the wider world.
So, okay, you can take that for what it's worth.
But here's where I think it goes.
And this has actually been personally a problem for me because I have a perspective that doesn't match either of the two common perspectives on the conflict in the Middle East, the current one.
What I've been saying is that we are in danger, that Israel is in danger, of being dragged backwards into the Old Testament and dragging the world back with it.
And what I mean proceeds from my own work in evolutionary biology.
What I would argue, and have argued many times, is that there are two bases on which a civilization can function.
A civilization is a cooperative endeavor.
And the most ancient way for a civilization to function is based on shared genes.
That shared genes bind people together, and that those lineages of relatives move forward, not knowing anything about genes until very recently, but they move forward on the basis that when they act in such a way that projects those genes into the future, it's a self-reinforcing evolutionary process.
Later, we end up with an alternative basis for a cooperative civilization, which is based on another evolutionary property called reciprocity.
Reciprocity is the I scratch, your back, you scratch mine version of wealth creation.
And at the point that you start building civilizations on it, something remarkable happens.
Effectively, if you start putting genetic relatedness aside and you start cooperating on the basis that there's wealth to be produced if you ignore genetic relatedness, you get a huge burst of what I hesitate to call economic growth, but that's what it is.
Economic growth is a particular way of viewing a population getting richer.
What does it mean to get richer?
It means that you can have more people who are well-fed.
It means that they have more liberty to do the things that they might want to do.
It's everything a civilization should want, to be rich, not in a narrow sense, but in a broad sense.
And a civilization that is based on reciprocity is inherently richer than if you tried to get cooperation based on genes amongst those same people, right?
If I'm free to collaborate with anybody, irrespective of what color their skin is, what shape their nose is, where they come from, what slang was spoken in the home they grew up in, I'm just better off because the number of people I can collaborate with contains all the people I can collaborate with based on genes, plus everybody else.
So it's a wealth-generating way of viewing the world.
The problem is it's better in every way.
It's fairer.
It's safer.
It's more productive.
It's more liberating.
It's more fun.
It's better in every regard except one.
It's fragile.
Reciprocity-based collaboration comes apart.
And when it comes apart in difficult times, it falls back into lineage against lineage violence.
So my concern about what's going on in the Middle East is that that's what we are watching.
We are watching populations that see the world in lineage terms fighting each other.
And so the problem with what Sarah Hurwitz is saying is that it misses the lineage dynamic.
Her conjecture here is that the imagery that is part of Holocaust education, if you impose it on what's going on in Gaza, paints the Israelis as the villain and the emaciated Palestinians as the victim.
Now, my point is a different point, and it's not a comfortable one.
It's one that I get shouted down by both sides if I try to voice it, which is what you really have is two populations, both of which would like to displace each other.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who is Palestinian is interested in displacing the Israelis, and I'm not saying that every Israeli is interested in displacing the Palestinians.
But the people in power are of this mindset, and the people who are of a different mindset are in no position to do anything about it.
This is where I think the world has an obligation to get in the way of the attempt to displace.
How to do that?
I don't know.
I'm glad it's not my job.
But nonetheless, the window into a particular Israel-focused version of the conversation is telling because it allows us, the wrong thing to do is to judge it as if she said the quiet part out loud.
That's not it.
What she did was spoke to a room and you accidentally got to listen in or she screwed up not realizing that the room isn't the room.
And so you as an outsider to that room now get to understand, well, what is it that these people think if that makes sense?
If what she said makes sense, what would you have to believe?
That's the key value of this incident is it reveals that there is a conversation to which we are generally not invited.
You know, you might argue that I'm invited because I'm Jewish, but I don't find myself invited to it.
In fact, I find that my attempt to understand at a deeper level what the conflict in the Middle East is about is rejected as if I'm the enemy, which is preposterous.
Whether or not what I'm saying is true or productive, I'm certainly interested in making progress.
I'm interested in seeing an end to this violence and not a temporary end, but a permanent end.
I'm interested in seeing all of these populations benefit from the massive uptick in wealth production that comes from putting aside these lineage versus lineage dynamics.
Again, maybe I'm a crazy person, but that's my viewpoint.
I come by it honestly.
I show my work and I am open to being corrected on the basis of something other than implicit threats and stigma.
So anyway, I think that's where it stands.
The punchline is, if you think that this was Sarah Hurwitz saying the quiet part out loud, think again.
This was really a revelation of a different conversation, and it's one that the future may depend on us understanding.
All right.
That's the end of what I was prepared to talk about.
What we have decided to do is to take some questions from X, from locals, and to give priority to the locals people and the subscribers of mine on X.
But in any case, we've got, I think, things from all three of those categories.
And Jen is going to put them on the screen, and I am going to respond to them or run and hide if they're terrifying.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Okay.
First one says, it starts with the word also.
I find that confusing, or maybe it's, oh, I see.
The person has quote-tweeted themself.
So it says, also, have you actually watched Nick, I assume that's Nick Fuentes, full show on Rumble, or have you mostly based your opinion on him and the movement off of clips and articles you have seen?
The clips and articles paint a very different picture than his full show.
Additionally, are you open to interviewing him?
Okay.
Interesting question.
The answer is neither A nor B.
I have been watching Nick Fuentes inadvertently for a couple of years now.
I do not go and watch his show, but I am not watching clips that are selected by my audience.
I am haphazardly encountering him.
So I do have the sense that the clips that people who are of one opinion or the other about Nick Fuentes circulate are misleading.
And in fact, for a couple of weeks, I was trying to raise people's awareness of this, that in fact, I think it is important to see the stuff that's so troubling, and it's important to see the stuff that makes him so compelling to such a large number of people, and to understand how those two things interact.
So anyway, yes, I do, and I have explicitly given people the, I don't know if you'd call it an instruction, but the instruction that if you want to know what's going on rather than just reinforce your preconceived notion, you need to go check him out somewhere that your people are not already circulating clips.
You need to see what the phenomenon is, because whatever else it is, it's powerful.
Okay.
And then finally, additionally, are you open to interviewing him?
Yes, I am open to interviewing everybody.
Frankly, I'm not a journalist, but I think journalists have the right idea here.
You interview people who are significant in some way, and it's not an endorsement of them.
But also, I would say, in light of the fact that the, I probably should know the answer to this, but I think it was the House of Representatives just passed a resolution essentially sanctioning Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.
My feeling is, no, you fucking don't.
The Congress does not sanction journalists and citizens for speech.
If that is not a violation of the First Amendment, it is certainly a it is tantamount to a violation.
The intent is for the Congress to shape speech, which is not its goddamn business.
And what that means is that, well, it's an extension of the principle that I've said many times.
Read the books they wish to burn.
Right?
Read them.
I'm not telling you those are good books, but I am telling you, you ought to know why they want to burn them.
That's an important principle.
So anyway, am I open to it?
Sure.
I'm open to it.
Especially, yeah, especially in light of the Congress's absurd behavior on this front.
All right.
Question for Brett.
That's me.
What is the purpose of modern day toenails in evolutionary terms?
I get the continued utility of fingernails, but why do we still have toenails?
All right, that's good.
I will tell you, I don't necessarily know the answer is not obvious to me in either case.
I've got thoughts, but let's just say the most basic level of this is pretty straightforward.
That we come from a clade that has nails.
And in general, so nails pass what I would call the adaptive test.
They are, to make it short, they are complex.
They are made of materials that could be used for something else.
The amount of that material that each of us has varies, so selection could reduce the amount that we spend on it, and yet they persist over evolutionary time.
So we come from a clade of creatures that invests in nails.
That tells us that they are adaptive, that they are worth more than they cost, but it doesn't tell us in what way.
Now, that doesn't mean that they continue to be worth more than they cost.
It means that historically they have.
And you can imagine that there's a certain reluctance to surrender adaptive traits, even if they go from being beneficial to vestigial, to not having a purpose, because you don't know how temporary that reversal is.
So evolution tends to have a kind of inertia to preserving adaptive traits.
And it could be that in the case of either fingernails or toenails, that the inertia is the explanation and that they are not useful to us.
But I have wondered, if you think about the enervation of your fingers, which is tremendously important to the ability to manipulate objects in a fine way, and it has been key to the industriousness of humans.
I mean, in fact, it's not just your fingers.
Your entire hand has been modified in a way that allows you to manipulate objects with incredibly fine detail.
So that has had a benefit.
And I have wondered whether or not the sensory innervation of the fingertips is not augmented by having effectively a flat backing that actually allows for calibration.
Now, I know of zero evidence on this.
I've never gone digging, and it's possible that I've just said something ridiculous that somebody who knows a lot about finger physiology will say, no, that can't be because.
But I have wondered if that was what was going on there.
As for toes, A, it might be similar, right?
If you think about, you know, I often watch Maddie, our dog, walking on surfaces that would frighten a regular person walking barefoot.
And she seems to do all right.
Presumably, there's, you know, there's obviously a toughness to the bottom of her feet, but there's also some sort of ability to sense, you know, if you step on something sharp to not put weight on the thing that would cause it to puncture the pads on the bottom of your feet.
So anyway, our ancestors were barefoot.
I wonder whether or not the same kind of sensory acuity in the toes and in fact the bottoms of the feet, which are terrifically sensitive, might not be part of how you walk barefoot through a sharp world and don't lacerate yourself routinely.
Who knows?
But it's also possible that, you know, in the period of time that we have radically altered the use of our hands from that of our feet, that we have simply retained the structures of a more quadripedal ancestor because they worked and because being bipedal is weird.
All right.
If it's not too personal, is Heather taking ivermectin?
That's a good question.
I will tell you, Heather is taking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as am I, because what happened.
So Heather and I were together as she was coming down with this.
It wasn't really clear that she was coming down with something, or if it was something, how serious it was.
It sort of seemed like either she was a little dehydrated or she was coming down with a cold.
Neither of us expected this to be something severe like flu.
At the point that it became clear that she was sick with something like the flu, I started taking ivermectin prophylactically.
Now, I don't know if that's why I didn't get sick.
I expected to get sick based on the fact that we were together for a night of her being very, or at the first stages, which would typically be the most contagious stages of what turned out to be a very serious infection.
So anyway, yeah, taking ivermectin because as longtime viewers know, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective across RNA viruses.
And while there's no guarantee that Heather has a single-stranded RNA virus, the chances are pretty high because a lot of them are.
And ivermectin's pretty darn safe.
So taking it to reduce the severity and potentially prevent contraction.
I don't know if that's why I didn't come down with it.
Maybe I just got lucky or maybe I'm immune to this one for some reason.
But anyway, yes is the answer.
Was the clip used by trigonometry during the Sam Harris interview out of context, where it appears you suggested 17 million people may have been killed by the vaccines worldwide.
Are you considering a libel lawsuit against Sam Harris or the trigonometry guys?
I am not considering any lawsuit.
I'm not sure I've seen what you're talking about.
I did say that I had seen a credible estimate of 17 million.
I have since talked, so that estimate, so there was a methodology for that estimate.
I have asked others who are sophisticated in terms of data analysis whether their estimates suggest that that's in range.
Ed Dowd in particular told me that it was at the high end of the range he and his data analysis partners had calculated.
So in any case, I don't know where the answer is.
What I said is that I've seen a credible estimate.
I believe that to be true.
Is that estimate accurate?
I don't know.
I will say that the number of people killed goes up because people are still suffering profound pathologies from these things.
And anyway, I don't know what these guys are on about and where they get their confidence that this is somehow preposterous.
We injected billions of people with these things.
They do haphazard damage around the body for reasons I've discussed many, many times.
And, you know, let's put it this way.
If these were high-quality people, they'd be very interested in getting to the bottom of the question of just how many people were injured.
And instead, I think it's more fun to just pretend that because that's a large number that it's preposterous, which it isn't.
To me, probable first-time dad here, six weeks pregnant.
Yeah, all right, I could correct that first sentence a little, but I'm not gonna.
What are your absolute non-negotiables for navigating the medical system and ushering in resilient, connected kids in this mismatched world?
Any go-to mantra or resources that's been your North Star as a father?
Yeah, I think I know what you're asking.
I will answer the question I think you're asking.
The chances of your child being healthy are primarily dictated by whether or not their developmental environment is purified of hazards, especially modern hazards.
So that is to say, ill health arises because developing fetuses and children are exposed to things that are unanticipated by their evolutionary environment.
That should be your primary obsession is making sure that you minimize that impact as much as possible.
That means all kinds of things.
When the doctor suggests that your pregnant wife, presumably, be inoculated during pregnancy, you should give a good, hearty, belly laugh and say, good one, Doc, right?
Because obviously you'd have to be nuts to think that was safe.
You should be concerned about toxins that get into your wife's blood while she's pregnant, that get into your child once presumably your child is breastfeeding and continue to get in once your child is eating things that are not breast milk.
All of these things are hazards.
If you do this job correctly, if you minimize the interaction between your developing child and toxic, novel substances or information, you know, it can come through a cell phone, frankly.
Radiation, you know, you should think very carefully about where the router is in your house, how close it is to the crib that your child is sleeping in, all of those things.
Should your child be in a crib at all?
Probably not for a good while.
Your child should sleep next to you and more importantly, their mother.
They should develop a routine where they're breastfeeding during the night without waking your wife up completely.
All of these things are very normal.
But if you do that job well, you reduce the encounters with toxic stuff, novel stuff, you give your child foods that cause their jaw to form properly in response to the resistance of the things that they are being invited to chew on.
If you do all those things, then the idea that medical intervention is going to be necessary is pretty remote.
Yes, something weird could come up.
You could have some weird genetic anomaly, or you could have some, you know, despite your best efforts, your child could encounter some toxic thing that disrupts some process.
But by and large, avoiding intervention and providing a nurturing environment is the job of a parent.
Intervention could only be necessary when something has gone wrong, and the medical system doesn't understand this.
The medical system thinks health comes from doctors and pills and injections and things like that.
And it's just not true.
It's biologically preposterous.
So anyway, I think the key thing is can you develop the immunities that will allow you to stare down authorities who are mistaken about health?
That's what I think.
Any interest in talking about what's going on with Candace Owens and those who are trying to take her out?
Well, Well, first of all, I don't know that anybody's trying to take her out.
I know that somebody told her that there are people trying to take her out.
You could imagine that her enemies might have put somebody up to telling her that somebody's trying to take her out because it might cause her to go on a ramp that people would assume was crazy, right?
Who knows what's going on?
Who knows whether this is a psychological operation?
This is a report of a real operation.
Who's to say?
But I will say, I mean, I have no interaction with Candace.
She long ago blocked me.
And I don't know.
Frankly, I don't know why Candace does what she does.
But something's gone on over there.
And I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what it is.
When you get a really bad something, do you take the flu A flu B COVID test?
The message of test accuracy and safety is so convoluted.
I'd love to hear your take.
I don't.
For one thing, my experience when I did take COVID tests was that something is not right about these tests.
There were times when Heather and I clearly had a COVID derivative and the test didn't come up positive.
So I don't know what those tests are.
I don't know why they're so crappy.
I don't know what I would do differently if they came up positive.
Frankly, I would love to know when it's a COVID derivative because frankly, Anthony Fauci and Ralph Barrick and maybe Xi Jing Li, there's a bill that humanity is racking up.
Apparently, it's going to continue to grow forever because we're never going to be rid of this goddamn thing.
And that bill belongs to them.
I'd like to know how big a bill it is.
And, you know, at the point, you discover, oh, actually, yeah, I got three derivatives of COVID in a year and they were cold-like.
Well, okay, what did that cost you?
If you got some COVID thing, something with the, you know, Wuhan spike protein on it three times in a year and it compromised three weeks so that you were, you know, you enjoyed life half as much as you usually do and got half as much done, that's a huge cost.
Now, what happens when you iterate that over all of the people who are now getting this disease that they wouldn't have gotten if this hadn't been cooked up?
It's a huge bill.
I think we have a right to know how big that bill is.
So it would be cool if we had tests that worked, but I'm not convinced that we do.
The tests remain crappy and I don't take them.
Well, you say that.
So the question is, have you heard any of Stephen Meyer's scientific explorations into the God hypothesis?
I know Stephen Myers.
I like him quite a bit.
He's a good guy.
I've been in conversation with him about why the evidence that he thinks points towards God.
He knows very well that I think it points toward a hidden layer of Darwinian evolution that does not require God as an explanatory process.
Anyway, I enjoy interacting with him, but you have the God hypothesis in quotes.
Maybe that's a book.
I haven't read it.
But anyway, there it is.
Okay.
My question.
Why do you think FBI seems not to want to dig into the Trump assassination attempt?
Oh, well, I mean, I have to wonder why you didn't capitalize FBI, but let's assume that your, well, no, your shift key works because you capitalize my.
On the other hand, that could have been auto-capitalized.
Yeah, at the beginning of sentences, my and why.
So I'm going to assume your shift key is broken and that auto-capitalization is dealing with your sentence structure.
Why is the FBI not investigating the Trump assassination?
Look, Kash Patel's bulging eyes are nature's way of telling you that the FBI is compromised.
That's just a feeling I have.
But look, the FBI, long before Kash Patel got there, was in the business of cooking up things like terrorist plots and then luring Americans into participating in them and then arresting those Americans and pretending that they were preventing terrorism or something.
So the FBI has long been compromised.
It continues to be compromised under the Trump administration, which I don't understand.
Why is Trump not interested in them looking into the assassination and firing anybody who refuses to do it?
I don't know.
Something weird is up.
But anyway, The FBI is a failed institution.
And that would be a more profound statement if it wasn't embedded in an entire planet of failed institutions.
But it seems to be just another one.
And in what way it was caused to fail, I have no idea.
Okay, one more.
Question, colon.
Brett, that's me.
Notwithstanding your grit in being a force against the human evil, you sometimes hint at foreseeing a dark future for humanity.
All right.
There needed to be a comma in there.
Notwithstanding your grit in being a force against human evil, comma, you sometimes hint at foreseeing a dark future for humanity, period.
Living in these nihilistic times, comma, are there any ideas, comma, text, comma, I should stop reading those commas out loud, philosophies, perhaps, other than being a husband and father from which you draw the strength to not give up on humanity.
Yeah, you know, it's simple, actually.
For one thing, I am a husband and a father.
And to the extent that I think humanity's in bad shape, it's my job to try to do whatever I can.
I suppose if I thought there was no hope, I would take a different tack.
But given that I don't think there's no hope, I think we're headed in a very bad direction.
But I think, you know, first of all, you've probably heard me talk about adaptive landscapes or fitness landscapes, in which we know that going from a low state to a higher state often involves going through what we call an adaptive valley.
So things can get very rough before they get better.
Hopefully we're in a very rough patch before we figure out what we're supposed to be doing and things start getting better.
It would be really cool, for example, if the dark catastrophe of the Middle East were to cause us to realize what role lineage selection and lineage against lineage violence were playing in history and to put our minds to the question of how we can stabilize the alternative to lineage against lineage violence,
which is reciprocity, so that it does not break apart every time we run into austerity.
I think actually there's some evidence that ancient cultures had some insight into how to do that.
And we just haven't given the question much thought.
So I don't give up because I don't think it's hopeless.
Do I expect us to fix this?
No.
But I think it's my job to try to change that no into a yes.
And what else is there?
I mean, you get a life.
You presumably should be asking all the time, what is the best use of the opportunities at my disposal?
And I think the best use of the opportunities at my disposal is to try to wake humanity up to the direction it's going and to what alternatives might exist.
I just, at the very least, it's an interesting puzzle, gives life meaning.
It lets me know that I'm not letting my kids and my wife and other people that I care about down, right?
What else is there?
What else am I going to do?
All right.
I think that might be it for the 300 second live stream of the Dark Horse podcast.
I think it would be a mistake for me to deliver Heather's excellent advice in closing this podcast.
But you all know what it is, and I hope that you follow it.
And anyway, until you see us again, I'm signing off.
And I hope you're well.
Yeah, okay, I'm going to give myself a C, a C plus on closing out the podcast.
I think that did not go brilliantly, but we did survive it.
