Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Report from the Foxhole: The 276th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Report from the Foxhole: The 276th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:04
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream evolutionary lens number 276,(...) I think. You're right.
• 0:13
  I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr.
• 0:15
  Heather Heying. It is almost exactly halfway through spring. Am I correct about that? You are not correct. I am not correct about that. Nope.
• 0:24
  Which direction am I wrong?
• 0:26
  We're closer to the solstice than we are to equinox. But how much closer?
• 0:30
  Oh, you know, by a week or so.
• 0:33
  So, you know, we're. Shouldn't it be May 10th-ish? I guess we are a little bit beyond, but.
• 0:38
  It should be May 7th-ish.
• 0:40
  All right. Well, we are where we are and it's very beautiful here. I'll tell you that much. It sure is. Yeah, it's beautiful.(...) Let's see. There are, we are going to be talking today a little bit about what the right gets wrong. And that will involve a discussion of a certain amount of environmental stuff, which I promise will be spectacular, especially if you're watching. If you're not, you may want to come back and look it up so you can see the visuals.
• 1:08
  Yeah, visuals are going to be great.
• 1:10
  They are going to be great.
• 1:11
  We've been watching some great animal, wild animal behavior lately.
• 1:15
  Totally wild. Totally animal behavior, which is.
• 1:18
  Totally wild animals, except some of them may seem to be interested in not being so wild if that'll get them treats.
• 1:25
  They seem to be interested in feeding domestically. But anyway, we are not giving any animal treats, as you will see, but we will come back to that. A couple of things just at the top here.
• 1:35
  There are some things in the world that our audience may be interested in looking at.(...) I was recently on Diary of a CEO. Yes, that is a strange name for a podcast, but it is apparently the biggest British podcast. I love how it is done.
• 1:51
  This is your second time on it.
• 1:52
  Stephen Bartlett does a fantastic job and he has a top notch team. So anyway, it's a very good podcast. If you don't know it, check out the roundtable that he had with several of us.
• 2:08
  So that's the host, host Bartlett on the right there. And then it's you and two other.
• 2:13
  Two tech.
• 2:15
  I think they're both CEOs of some renowned.(...) Anyway, we had a very good discussion.
• 2:21
  Yes, the comments are interesting. Here is one of the comments on the YouTube video. It says, I feel like I'm listening to the beginning of a sci-fi movie where no one listens to the nerd who warns everybody what's coming.
• 2:34
  And yeah, I am that nerd.
• 2:39
  Though I am not a good. Some people are listening to you. Yes, some people. Some people are listening. And, you know, it was a great discussion. I actually really liked everybody on the panel. I thought it was it was quite a good discussion that we did.
• 2:48
  I haven't listened. I'm not I'm not taking sides, except I'm always on your side. Yes.
• 2:53
  From an uninformed position.
• 2:56
  No. But the idea that you were surprised that your friends with someone who might turn out to be the villain isn't actually that surprising. Right. That is the best.
• 3:04
  The best villains actually come in in wooden horses and such.
• 3:10
  Absolutely.(...) And that allows you to then move on to the sequel in which you are actually the prequel in which you reveal the origin story of the film. But in this case, I'm quite fond of these people. It was good discussion. Also in the world, as of I think yesterday is a discussion where Dave Smith was on Tucker Carlson's podcast. And my podcast from last week with Tucker Carlson came up. I think we have a brief clip of that.(...) Jen, you want to play?
• 3:41
  Really, really like Bret. But I think one of the areas where he failed kind of in that conversation with you and that very friendly debate is that he had to say several times throughout it. Yes, yes, I live as if what you're saying is correct, but I view things this way. So, yes, I'd much rather live. But if you're.
• 4:04
  If you're like thesis involves you having to engage in a performative contradiction, then something's not right. With your theory.
• 4:14
  All right. So Dave Smith has thrown down the gauntlet with respect to my discussion with Tucker about questions of the existence of a creator or a possible atheist alternative. In any case, Dave, go ahead.
• 4:30
  Oh, I had not seen that before. I have a lot of reactions to it.
• 4:33
  I don't know. I don't know where you're going.
• 4:35
  Well, here's here's where I'm going with it. Dave Smith, I double dog dare you to podcast that to my face. In fact, that's an invitation, friend. Why don't you come on DarkHorse and we will talk about why that is not the correct interpretation, though I certainly understand what you're saying.
• 4:55
  So I think to remind everyone of something that you and we both say, you know, all true stories must reconcile.
• 5:05
  That does not mean that the truest story is the best to live by under all circumstances. There is absolutely no expectation that that is true. And frankly, the expectation that the there is a single truth that is also the best way to understand your world at every moment.
• 5:31
  Fits into a fairly reductionist viewing of the world that also is part of why so many people, especially on the right,(...) are deciding that science isn't for them. And it's not because science isn't for them. It's because the version of science, the reductionist, crazy, metric, heavy, data driven version of science, that is what has been pushed on us for, you know, I don't know, since the Industrial Revolution at some level, since the Enlightenment, some would argue. But certainly, as became really clear during Covid, is is not what science is. And so that, you know, the the you know, and we had I had a friend of ours in grad school once say to me with regard to some piece of information that he had sought quickly and said, and I said, oh, you know, I'm not sure that that was the right thing.
• 6:20
  You know, I would I would have left that open longer to encourage more questions.
• 6:24
  He said, I'm a scientist. I always want data.
• 6:27
  I don't I don't think that's how that works. So I feel like this fits in that sort of reductionist want answers right away and then to be static about about knowing what they are and not veering from them misunderstanding of the world.
• 6:43
  Yep. I agree. Although in this case, Dave has accused me of a performative contradiction, which in philosophy space is more or less like saying, yo, mama.
• 6:55
  And so anyway, I definitely want him to come on the podcast where he will discover that I have him right where he wants me. So anyway, Dave, please come on to our course and have this discussion and we will talk about the distinction between how to live and the factual underpinnings.
• 7:15
  I think it'll be a great discussion.
• 7:18
  Cool. All right.
• 7:20
  That is it from my perspective at the top. Shall we move on to ads?
• 7:27
  Oh, yeah. So we're doing a Q&A today after the live stream. So join us on locals now for the watch party. But also for the Q&A, we answer questions that come in for we'll start with a question from our Discord server, which is also available on locals. And then we'll answer questions that are coming in as as we do it.(...) So join us there and then.
• 7:48
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• 7:59
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• 8:06
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• 8:16
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• 8:24
  Whenever I read that line, I think those are in two sort of different applications. One of them is systemic and one of them is topical.
• 8:31
  Well, you know, I was I was being delicate, maybe, but I'll just ask you, do you know whether they mean in the case of wound healing that consuming it does that or applying it?
• 8:40
  Well, I wrote that sentence. There's no they there. I and you know, I do have a I do have a citation, of course.
• 8:49
  A citation on a citation because I have citations, but I don't think they do so well with honey because it just never shows up in their ancestral environment.
• 8:56
  That that is true.
• 8:57
  Yes.(...) Yeah. Or unless you're back to where their hippos now lost 27 percent of our audience. Okay.
• 9:05
  The Ahmed and Othman 2013 review that I am citing here, review of the medicinal effects of Tuolong honey and a comparison with Manuka honey.
• 9:15
  Out of Malaysia, out of the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences.
• 9:20
  I as I remember it, the expedition of wound healing must had ought to be topical because while it is possible that Manuka honey or other honeys(...) would help with the healing of wounds internally.(...) There's a lot inside your functional digestive tract, your GI tract, that is designed to take out anything that shows up with active, you know, active ingredients that are looking to seal up things.
• 9:51
  So topical application, also a tropical application in Malaysia. Am I right?
• 9:58
  Malaysia is tropical and not subtropical.
• 10:00
  At least part of it is.
• 10:01
  Yeah. All right. So probably tropical as well. Yeah. All right. I have now thoroughly interrupted your flow.
• 10:07
  Now we're good. I'm happy to have you read it.
• 10:10
  I'll be over here if you need me.
• 10:12
  So for all of those awesomeness is about honey, Manuka honey is even better. All of the health benefits attributed to regular honey appear to be even stronger and Manuka honey from fungal infections to diabetes to gastrointestinal tract infections. Manuka honey can be useful in treating the problem. So again, I haven't dug deep into the research, but the idea that gastrointestinal tract infections can be treated effectively with Manuka honey is suggestive of a kind of systemic application of honey for wound healing.
• 10:43
  Potentially infection is not wound, but infection is often cause wounds. So I don't know. Just, just supposing that there's possibility there.
• 10:52
  I am. I'm going to resist the temptation.
• 10:54
  But you're not. Down the rabbit hole because it seems the topology of the body being what it is that consuming honey to, to mend a bit of damage on the inside of your gut is effectively topical.
• 11:10
  Not as we're donuts. No, yeah, because we're donuts. And it's if it was in the circulate, if it was coming in the other side of the gut from.
• 11:19
  Okay. But food is topical then. I mean, you, you, you extend your.
• 11:25
  It's insanely geeky biological metaphor and you will say, no, it's not a metaphor because the GI tract is effectively on the outside of the body. And therefore we're effectively donuts. We're walking tauruses.
• 11:37
  Then, then everything that you drink or eat is also on the outside of the body and therefore a topical application.
• 11:43
  You have left me speechless having said everything that I would have said.
• 11:48
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• 12:02
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• 12:14
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• 13:05
  That's interesting. I would like to know and probably it varies by metal.
• 13:10
  Probably varies by metal. Usually a metal spoon that you'd be using on honey is stainless steel. Yeah.(...) And so, you know, wood apparently doesn't have these problems. I wonder about ceramic. Yeah.
• 13:20
  Most of us have like a, you know, like a, like an East Asian soup spoon or something.
• 13:25
  I do not understand how those are to be used.(...) The square bottom spoon, it doesn't add up to me.
• 13:31
  Yeah. It seems like a lot for honey anyway.
• 13:33
  So, yes, true.
• 13:34
  Keep it, keep it out of your honey jar.
• 13:36
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• 14:00
  It comes with a honey guide book.
• 14:03
  Yeah. I, you know, it doesn't say that, but obviously it would be, and it doesn't come with a honey guide because how are they going to pack that and have them still no doubt. No, I want a dead bird smuggling violation and smuggling violation. You're breaking laws. Yeah. Dead birds. You don't want that. So, um, we can call it a honey guide book, but it's not an actual honey guide.
• 14:21
  Fair enough.
• 14:21
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• 14:54
  Since I wasn't reading the N I don't have it at my fingertips. Yeah, they call them a lot of stuff. Oh, do you do anyway? Yes.
• 15:00
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• 16:08
  (...) Excuse me. And with each shipment of olive oils or vinegar, you get the history of this particular varietal where it came from, how it was grown, how it was harvested, who was doing the growing and harvesting, which is lovely actually to actually be connected. And, you know, in this indirect way to the food that you're eating as an introduction to T.J.
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• 17:00
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• 17:17
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• 17:21
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• 17:31
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• 17:32
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• 17:33
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• 17:33
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• 19:42
  All right. Shall we talk about the situation emerging here in the spring in the San Juan Islands?
• 19:52
  I will try to bring the audience up to where you and I have been for the last couple of weeks.
• 19:59
  We have an amazing phenomenon here in the spring.(...) We have a large population of species wise. There are red foxes.
• 20:10
  Many of them are actually black and there are other color morphs. But anyway, we have this large population of red foxes.
• 20:18
  Heather wrote about them for County Highway last year, I think at this time.
• 20:24
  In any case,(...) in the spring,(...) they having over the winter paired up, they are monogamous creatures. They pair up and they give birth to litters of foxes that live underground for several weeks and then they emerge into the world above in late April or early May. And that is obviously just happened. And it is an utterly remarkable thing to see. It's really there are a few things more miraculous or cuter than wild puppies.
• 20:59
  Yeah, it really is extraordinary. And, you know, they live on. I will say the history of them on the island is interesting. The the lore goes that rabbits were introduced to the island in order to feed the lighthouse keeper and so that he would have something to hunt and have as fresh food throughout the winter.
• 21:19
  Yeah, now apparently you can't eat just rabbit that causes health problems, but you can eat a lot of rabbit and apparently hate a lot of rabbit. And they introduced foxes to control the rabbit population. And those two populations are still here. Now, this last winter, there was an amazing die off of rabbits. And we are told that the explanation is a hemorrhagic fever, which periodically takes out the population.
• 21:45
  Oddly, there was a a viral infection that took out the deer population about five years ago, four or five years ago. The deer population seems to have fully rebounded.
• 21:58
  Yeah. Well, there are no there are no predators of deer on the island, except in limited places where people can hunt them.
• 22:05
  You hunt them. Occasionally somebody will hit one on a motorcycle. But I can't imagine that would ever happen. No, no, but in theory it could in any case. So Fox kit season is a very special time around here. Now that interfaces rather badly with the let's just put it this way with market forces and the current fashions. So Jen, we put up the picture at the lighthouse.
• 22:38
  So this is a it's a small tragedy, really. This is a group of photographers that is standing outside of a Fox den that has been a Fox den for many years.
• 22:54
  And so it's a known spot. Yeah. There will almost certainly be kits emerging above ground in late April, early May, every year.
• 23:01
  And it's not the worst tragedy it could be. They do a pretty good job of staying a little bit back from the den entrance.
• 23:12
  But there is something a little bit sad about the fact that this very special place has a you know, this is 20 photographers standing there documenting every instant of the lives of these these fascinating young creatures. And we could go on at length with why this is troubling, why, you know, in some ways these Foxes are ambassadors for nature.
• 23:39
  And so the photographs that these people make are going to cause people to think positive thoughts about wild creatures that they might not be otherwise thinking. So arguably there's there's a sense in which it's it's acceptable.
• 23:53
  Well, I mean, there's always pros and cons in the argument, arguments around ecotourism and phototourism, which is kind of a subset of ecotourism in this context. And I think, you know, we both have. But I've but I've explored the question of ecotourism a fair bit. And, you know, it does. It opens up people to the reality, hopefully the complex reality of what is actually happening out there in the world.(...) But all too often, the market forces then make that complexity less complex so that those who are, say, running tours can more reliably guarantee that something which is not actually guaranteeable in full wildness will be seen by those who have paid to come see it.
• 24:41
  And we obviously we've we've gone a lot of places and seen a lot of things. But, you know, years ago when our kids were young and I think my parents stayed with them for a week while we came up to the islands, the islands where we live now and rented a place sort of near where this picture you just showed and walked every night into the National Park.
• 25:02
  And a female fox.
• 25:06
  I don't I can't quite remember enough of the details to know why we were convinced that she was a female fox. We had the sense that she had young in a den, but I don't I don't remember why we thought that she was a female fox for sure. But she started coming out. We would go out at dusk and she started coming out and sort of following us at a distance and we would sit on the rocks and she would sit a nice distance away.
• 25:29
  And, you know, it seemed like, gosh, does this mean that other people have fed her? Maybe.
• 25:35
  And we don't. That's not what we do.
• 25:37
  Although at one point we had we had bottles of beer and I knocked my bottle over and quickly picked it up. But it sort of ran down the rock a little bit and she went to the base of the rock and lapped up a little bit of beer. So there was so that did happen.
• 25:51
  But this became you know, there was a relationship there for five days or so that was miraculous. You know, it is miraculous to form a relationship with an actually wild animal.(...) And so when you show that picture and you say this is a small tragedy, it's not that, you know, these are people who are driven by an interest in something that is very much what we are driven by as well.
• 26:17
  Well, you will see you in the audience will see some interesting pictures that we've collected over the last few nights and some interesting behavior. I promise you at the Fox level, this would be this will be fascinating.
• 26:30
  But the reason that I think that what happens near the lighthouse is a tragedy is because part of what's going on here is that somebody has monetized the foxes.
• 26:43
  And when you see a picture of a wild fox, especially a kid,(...) there is this desire. I there's something I want. I want to stand there and see this animal.
• 26:54
  And you and I feel this as well.
• 26:56
  Absolutely. But the point is that.
• 26:58
  And even not just I want to stand there and watch this animal. I want that animal. Right. You know, to resist that, but it doesn't keep you from feeling like, oh, my God, that's one of the most adorable things.
• 27:09
  Right. And, you know, figuring out where where the line is, is something not everybody did as well. I'm sure people do feed foxes, which probably gets them killed because they end up associating the road with, you know, people who are going to give the fox something in order to get it to stick around close enough to get a good photo.
• 27:28
  So anyway, the problem is photographers have started selling like classes. You know, I'll teach you to take really good photographs of, you know, wild foxes when really the point is you're paying because somebody is going to show you where the foxes are, which means that the thousands of dollars that it will take you to go on vacation.(...) You've got a guarantee.
• 27:50
  And then that guarantee causes you to want to come back with the photo that proves that you were this close to the animal. And this all becomes kind of influencer fodder and, you know, a case where the actual love of nature, I think, is interrupted by the desire to consume nature, which we have talked about before, that this that the, you know, and you will see I am. I love I relate to nature through my camera often.
• 28:22
  It is not exclusively not exclusively, but it is a way. Especially with animals, I love to document them. Doesn't matter what can be talking about insects, birds, mammals. I like it also. I'm not faulting people for wanting to take pictures. But as you will see, there's a lot to be discovered about these animals and.
• 28:45
  The fact that, you know, there's a place where they're so reliably findable that you can monetize it by offering a service, you know, teaching people to take photos of them. That results in that cluster of people. There is there is a small tragedy in there, but I actually do not.(...) My primary point is about the fact that in dispensing with the idiocy on the so-called left, we now find ourselves headed in the direction of the right. And one thing that you and I have noticed a lot is it's not that there are no exceptions. In fact, there are some profound exceptions, but on the right, there is often a failure to appreciate the importance of a broader environmental viewpoint that the Earth is actually in really bad shape.
• 29:39
  I didn't say anything about climate, right? The Earth is in really bad shape in the sense that what we're doing to nature, what we are dispersing into nature in terms of unnatural chemicals, that disrupt animal physiology, what we are doing to nature in terms of altering the vegetation. It's very patchy. It's hard for animals to get from one place to another. We're disrupting all kinds of stuff on which they're dependent.
• 30:05
  And there's a reductionist view that treats all the things that we have named as commodities.(...) So, ah, OK, so we lost a few thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of hectares of tropical forests. Well, but we just plant some forest up in the, you know, make it boreal forest up and says, "Gosh, why it'll be fine." Well, forest isn't forest. Forest isn't commodity. And it's not to say that, you know, counting how many board feet of some particular species that you can get out of a particular stand of trees doesn't have real economic truth and value. But forest isn't forest any more than, you know, a wild fox is the same as a domesticated dog.(...) So, again, I think you sort of, you tried to preempt the antagonism that will come back, which is wild nature is not doing well.(...) We are both, you know, paving over paradise and putting things into it, most of which none of us agreed to in the first place. But there's also a sense,(...) not on all of the people who think of themselves on the right, but almost entirely on the right, that it's here for us anyway.
• 31:23
  That we should be free to do whatever we want with nature because that's what it's here for.(...) And, you know, you and I slightly disagree on how we might frame what we should do. And your framing actually says, you know, what we should we should act like.
• 31:45
  It is we are we are needing to do things for humans.
• 31:49
  If we prioritize value to humans, you end up arriving at what I think is the correct moral understanding, which is that we are obligated not to degrade. The planet, if future humans, their the value they derive from planet Earth is as important to us as what we derive. Then the idea is you're not allowed to wreck the place.
• 32:11
  And for me, the risk there is that people hear that and hear it as a literal rather than a metaphorical stance. I mean, a little bit like what you were suggesting about Dave Smith's understanding of what you said about God and religion on Tucker last week.(...) So it is not that we are arguing that we can't mess,(...) that we have no rights, that other organisms should be understood to have equal rights as humans.
• 32:40
  But the the binary nature of environmentalism is insane. And and as such, and this is, you know, this part of it isn't, you know, is a mistake that people on the many people on the right are making, but it was handed to them by people on the left making a mistake, which is the conflation of environment with climate change.
• 33:04
  Yep.
• 33:05
  So.
• 33:08
  You get people, you get market forces causing people to monetize wild foxes.
• 33:13
  (...) The instinct is, well, I'm going to travel a long way. I'm going to be spending my time and effort. So, you know, so you get a long lens and you stand around the den and you document this thing that is utterly amazing.(...) And, you know, then you post it on your Instagram and everybody is envious that you got to see the thing or, you know, maybe you're semi professional and you try to sell these things. You know, you can sell all the images, but nonetheless, the point is this is actually a degraded relationship with nature that is manifesting in this way. And part of the problem is we are supposed to be having regular encounters with nature. All of us nature is supposed to be a large fraction of what we interact with. And the relationship that develops is that things like a fox as amazing as it is, is actually.
• 34:11
  It's it's a common enough animal that in many places with people, it's a nuisance.
• 34:17
  In fact, I was surprised when I was in London the last time I was walking home at night like eight or nine at night. And a fox, you know, happened across my path, clearly living right in the city of London.(...) So anyway, the point is people should be having a lot more encounters with nature. And when you when you do to nature what we are doing, you restrict it to the tiny remote places, which then get ruined because when people want to encounter nature, they have to go to those places which degrades them further. And so the what you have to do to see this stuff is getting more and more remote. And that is that is itself an unnatural relationship.
• 34:58
  So maybe we should we should show something. None of these images are the foxes at the lighthouse.
• 35:04
  If you pay a little attention, you know, we are lucky enough to live here. So, you know, we're back and forth across the island. We can notice patterns and see where animals are and you can we can figure out where they are.
• 35:16
  So and they're interestingly actually the first the first spring that we lived here, you saw kids emerge in late April at a different den, different neither neither where we're going to show you pictures from nor the one at the lighthouse. And the following year, there were again kids coming out of that same den and we don't see them now.
• 35:37
  So probably because that was rabbit fed. Right.
• 35:40
  It was very much in the central center of where all the rabbits were. And we've seen a couple of rabbits this year, but you used to see hundreds.
• 35:49
  So, you know, part of part of what being an animal behaviorist is, which is to say an observer of nature and all of us. And this is what I'm writing for my book. But like all of us can and should develop the skills to see what is actually in front of us and then learn how to interpret what it means. And so when you live in a place and you have your eyes open, you learn to detect the patterns that indicate something like there, you know, there are kids somewhere near here that are going to be emerging soon.
• 36:18
  Right. And you will see even in, well, you know, Heather and I have been looking at these things, you know, we see them many times a day. We go and watch for a long period of time.(...) There's still lots of mysteries, lots of stuff. I can't answer about the foxes that we are coming to know pretty well. We have tells you something. It is part of the magic of nature is that this is unexpected. And even for animal behaviorists confronted with animals that they begin to be able to recognize, it is not like, oh, well, this is that behavior. And this is that behavior. Yeah, you'll see we've got at least one. What the heck is that behavior?
• 36:53
  Well, before before we show any pictures that you said that they're monogamous, but just a few more things. So they're they apparently pair bond for for multiple seasons. It's not serial monogamy as far as we know. They probably there will be situations where a last year's offspring will still be hanging around. I don't know that these red foxes are known to ever have what's called helpers at the nest, a term borrowed from ornithology, of course,(...) wherein a young adult who is not yet pair bonded him or herself stays with the parents and helps provision this year's this year's young.
• 37:30
  On average, a pair of pair bonded foxes will over their entire lifetime only fledged to into and again, fledged being a word for more mythology, but fledged to into full reproductive adulthood.(...) And so when we see a litter of four, which is the one that we've been watching,(...) and we expect that there will be many years of reproductive viability for this pair of foxes, the chances are that none, none of these kits will survive. And yet at the moment, we're watching four individuals who all seem Hale and Hardy and full of play. And it will feel we will mourn their loss if if if and and when they begin to disappear.
• 38:18
  Yeah. And I will just say the logic behind saying that only two are likely to make on average two offspring of any individual will make it to reproduction.
• 38:28
  That is the logic that comes from if the population is below the number that can be held in a particular habitat, it will rise until it reaches that number, which we call carrying capacity. And at that point, every individual will on average replace itself.
• 38:44
  And you might actually expect that the carrying capacity for foxes has dropped because the rabbit population got way beyond decimated last year. The carrying capacity is going to be low this year. So we would expect even less survival, even less survival.
• 38:59
  And then we've seen the opposite with the deer. The deer died off to 10 percent of them were left or something like that the year prior to our moving up. And that they've been having a great set of years in the aftermath. They don't eat rabbits.
• 39:14
  There's no competition. Right. And now they're getting back up to the numbers where, you know, they're going to be a carrying capacity. Life's going to become harder. But the boom times are when there are too few individuals. So the the foxes are likely to go through a bust this year. But as you say, the the den we've been watching it so far for healthy kids that are all doing well, mother looks a little bit increasingly desperate. But anyway, let's you want to put up the trail camera footage.
• 39:50
  So this is we were trying to figure out where these animals live and what their pattern of movement is. And as I've talked about, when we lived in Portland, trail cameras can be great fun if you're interested in animal behavior, because you can, you know, follow a hunch and you can put the thing out and see what's going on. So anyway, there you had one of the parents and four kids.
• 40:14
  What is the name for the style of locomotion bouncing after a lumping? Yeah.
• 40:20
  And that was actually that's surprisingly that's in the forest. And so even though it's seven in the morning and it's well light, like the sun has come up an hour and a half earlier, that's in black and white because the level of light was still low enough that the camera cameras just picking up black and white at that point.
• 40:35
  Yeah.
• 40:36
  So one of the fascinating things about watching this particular den is how much the parents and actually we see more than two adults associated. And you'll see a little bit of that. It's confusing as to what it might be. My guess is last year's surviving kit is somehow helper at the nest.
• 40:59
  But in any case, how frequently the kids are left to their own devices and the kids are almost fearless, which you would think would be a huge danger to them. And for one thing, there are other unrelated foxes. There are there are eagles which take out baby foxes. So there's a lot of kinds of hazards. But anyway, let's let's look at a picture of one of these kits. OK, so here is one of the kits and it has a little burrow that it can dive into. But here it is sitting above the burrow looking almost, you know, rather naturally adorable.
• 41:44
  I feel like we've spent at least an hour every day for the last several days looking at these guys actually in real time. And still, I could just I could just look at the picture.
• 41:53
  Yeah, I mean, it's really it's really engaging. And, you know, part of that, you know, there's definitely a way in which many different wild animals as babies are super engaging for reasons many people have talked about. But it's just it's likely to be especially profound with something that is so clearly a puppy, as you've pointed out.
• 42:12
  Yeah. It's very easy to relate to these creatures.
• 42:17
  All right. And do you want to show the mother? We've got a couple where the mother actually was sitting on our here.
• 42:24
  She is in our garden.
• 42:27
  You can make out the flowers behind her.
• 42:30
  And then there was a point where she was sitting in our lawn. Actually, you can't quite tell in that photograph, but it's exactly the iconic, you know, she's curled up, curled into a into a little ball.
• 42:42
  She walks through there.
• 42:43
  You can see it.
• 42:44
  And yes, that's me photographing you photographing the fox.
• 42:49
  The fox is not photographing anyone.
• 42:52
  No, no.
• 42:53
  Yes.
• 42:55
  But she's just and she does as she walks through.
• 42:59
  And then we'll just curl up like you have. We happen to know that, you know, you have babies over there. Yeah. And like not not right. Not right there. But, you know, a ways away, you know, a considerable walk away.
• 43:11
  And yet she just comes and, you know, it seems like she's asking for food. But given that we've never fed her, why is she asking for food so much from us as opposed to other people? We have lots of it's not it's not obvious begging behavior, but it is standing around in proximity to us without explanation. And it's not fearful of us. Yeah. One wonders what it is. And I will say we are trying to navigate.
• 43:37
  She has gotten into three confrontations with Fairfax, our cat, none of which have ended badly. But given that she's feeding for kits and times are not great with respect to prey on the island, we're a little concerned.
• 43:57
  And we did actually we saw her hunt. I don't know if you have a picture of that here. I don't. If not, then we saw her hunt actually successfully hunt a mouse that came out from under a deck We were grateful.
• 44:08
  Yeah. She detected it. We had no idea what she was looking at. She became very intent. And then the next thing we knew, we saw a mouse running and she got it and she tried it off with it in her mouth.
• 44:20
  So that's great.
• 44:22
  But and, you know, we certainly when Fairfax brings in mice that we, you know, prefer that we don't have rodents living under our house, but we'd rather that goes to feed the foxes.
• 44:31
  Absolutely.
• 44:32
  Since, you know, we've got canned food for the cat. He's not going to starve.
• 44:35
  All right. So now let's let's put up the so Heather and I were I forget we were even doing but, you know, sometime in the evening, we started to hear something and got up and looked.
• 44:54
  And in the garden, the most remarkable interaction started happening. Now, I will say I need a little forgiveness on the quality of the video. I grabbed my camera as it is with a giant lens that was way too long for the light level. But there was just, you know, I grabbed and just about sent back the camera from being serviced. So it's not set up right.
• 45:14
  Yeah. And I don't take video with it anyway. It's a it's a good video camera, but I don't know how to do it. So I did my best. And anyway, we got something useful. But anyway, it worth looking at.
• 46:02
  (Kitties Meowing) Okay, now a couple things I want to point out there.
• 46:23
  One of those is the mother of the kits.
• 46:26
  The other one, it's a little hard for the audience to understand how conspicuous the similarity in the way those two animals look is. It's not random.
• 46:37
  So you said red foxes, that's the common name for its Vulpus Vulpus, I think.
• 46:43
  There's a lot of variation in the phenotypes and the morphology of the of the red foxes, all of which belong to one species on this island, and red and black don't do full service. So the mom has both three little white tipped paws and white on the scruff of her neck and is particularly slender and it's just, you know, she's got a very distinct look such that we now know when we see her that's her, right? We don't mark them, we haven't, but there's enough variation.
• 47:13
  And this other individual, whom I am a little bit less confident that when I see that other individual, I'm sure I'm looking at that one, but looks like a slightly fluffier, slightly more filled out, like, you know, not a lactating mother version of the same fox.
• 47:29
  Right. And so I would say my instinct is strongly that these two animals are very closely related, either mother, presumably daughter,(...) or siblings is another possibility. But they're so similar looking that this is not the the agonism that you see in this clip is there's a tension between two individuals that have some deeper, longer standing relationship. So it's not fully agonistic.
• 48:03
  But the other thing I wanted to point out is actually, can you put up the picture that I shot of that interaction?
• 48:12
  So I want you to take a look at this posture. It's a little hard to make out here, but they are gripping each other at the forearms, and they have their mouths agape, and they're facing each other in this strange pose.
• 48:33
  Oh, I also also highly synchronized in terms of their vocalizations.
• 48:36
  That was the other thing is what the heck is it's like the one of them is making the noise and the other is doing their best to imitate it like in real time, not wait and repeat it, but to imitate it at the same moment.
• 48:49
  Yeah, this wasn't called a response. I don't know what that is. It was not calling a response. It was it was like as close as possible to synchrony. It was like they could manage.
• 48:56
  Yeah, it was like that thing that kids do when they try to say what you're saying as you're saying it was that thing. But anyway, I don't know if these behaviors are probably well understood by people who have studied foxes, but I think it's fascinating that there's all of this mystery happening in this commonly seen animal. We've seen all kinds of behaviors here. We've seen courting behavior, which is totally fascinating and strange. We've seen nursing behavior, which unfortunately it was a little dark and we didn't have a camera that amplifies light very well.
• 49:31
  But they are standing up. She had three kits at her and it's the mom on the right in that picture.
• 49:39
  Three kits all nursing at the same time and she stands up to do it, which is not, you know, you think, oh, it's a dog. It's a canid. It's lying down. I don't know if they sometimes do that as well. But what we saw a few nights ago was she showed up and all the kids were just playing. They were just doing their kit thing and she showed up and they all started nursing and she just stood there.
• 50:00
  Yeah. Now, Jen, can you put up the picture of the kits, the two kits?
• 50:08
  Now here we were lucky enough to watch this play interaction.
• 50:13
  Again, this is actually really late. It's quite dark.
• 50:19
  It's amazing. It's that clear.
• 50:20
  It was like eight thirty. Yeah. So anyway, here you have these two kits engaged in a behavior that looks an awful lot like what those two adults were doing.(...) The kits are silent about this, which you would expect because they can't really afford to call attention to themselves. On the other hand, they are behaving in a lot of conspicuous ways.
• 50:41
  So, you know, the ability to dive into the little burrow there makes them a little safer, but they're still vulnerable. But anyway, I was just struck by the similarity between those, you know, between the kids playing it, whatever this is, and the two adults doing it for real.(...) I thought that was pretty, pretty remarkable.
• 51:05
  So anyway, to sum up, I think my concern is that we are blowing it as a species with respect to the world.(...) And we don't even, even people like you and me who are obsessed with nature and spend a lot of time pursuing it,(...) don't,(...) it's hard to intuit what the world was like when people lived with nature around them constantly.
• 51:36
  And, you know, we've moved way out of our way in order to have that phenomenon. And it has turned interacting with the rest of the world into kind of a pain in the ass. But in terms of getting off, that's the trade off is, you know, in order to live in a remote place, you live in a remote place and you pay a cost every time you try to do normal stuff in the rest of the world. But the point is that's a degenerate relationship.
• 51:59
  We are supposed to have nature around us.
• 52:00
  And(...) people would be differently fascinated by it. Some people wouldn't care that much. A lot of people would notice it, but having to go way out of your way in order to see nature and then finding that there are tons of people who have landed in the same spot because the market has turned, has monetized nature in this way is tragic. And it is something that I think we have to reverse. It's like one of these inadvertent patterns that destroys our own understanding of ourselves. I've argued this from the point of view of light pollution. Like there's lots of reasons that light pollution is bad. But one of them is that the,(...) your birthright to look into the sky and find something thought provoking and fascinating and dynamic.
• 52:56
  Right. That's your birthright.
• 52:57
  We have this in the hunter gatherers guide in the sleep chapter. Like it is, we don't know what we lose when we lose the night sky. Right. Light pollution certainly gets in the way of sleep. You can point to that. You can count it.
• 53:09
  That's true. It's bad. It's a problem.
• 53:11
  But what else do we lose?
• 53:13
  Right. What do we lose? Philosophically. Just even, you know, we lose the night sky. Just even, you know, think about what fraction of our problem as human beings comes down to people who are too self obsessed, too full of themselves, think that they're too central.
• 53:26
  Right.
• 53:27
  The night sky is a counterpoint to that, a natural one. And the destruction of our capability to see it and to be provoked by it is something that happened without us even having a discussion about whether there was going to be a problem.
• 53:43
  Well, I think any wild nature is an antidote to the egoism of all humans, but especially of modernity, either because you are looking into the infinite or you are looking into the for all intents and purposes, the infinite. If you're looking at an ocean or you're looking at something smaller, you're within a forest and it's still not about you, or you're even looking at the very close up, the macro, some, you know, some insect, some, you know, the way that a fungus has taken out the structure of a leaf and left only the latticework behind. Right. Like any of these things you spend time actually looking at them and you realize this isn't about me. Like it is an antidote to the egoism of modernity.
• 54:29
  Yeah. It's miracles everywhere. And so one thing, you know, again, I, I'm aware, I'm aware of the apparent hypocrisy of talking about the tragedy of other photographers doing what they're doing when obviously I'm not shy about shooting photographs of these things and I will, I will pursue them because I think it's, it's, it's valuable in its own right. But the,(...) I'll just use as an example, when you and I have traveled, we have regularly been offered the opportunity to get near the amazing hard to find animal that has been habituated somewhere. I remember in particular in Madagascar, there's a favorite creature,(...) the injury, which is the largest of the endriads. It's an animal. It's an, I should have brought a picture of it. We have several good ones, but it is an unbelievably strange, that's not, that's a safak, which is closely related.
• 55:36
  No, that's actually an injury. I have a shafaks as well, but that's an injury.
• 55:39
  Oh, see if you have another injury that doesn't make the, that's your picture of the injury that I've got. And I've got song.
• 55:47
  I mean, we may have to go with this picture, but, um, so that's a shafak.
• 55:51
  Yeah, that's a shafak. In any case, the, the thing about something like an injury, an injury is an amazing creature for several reasons. Yeah. Why don't we put it up to this? This is not the picture of the injury that you, uh,(...) want to see it sort of, you don't see the, the strange ears that it has and all that. But in any case, this is an animal that a it's monogamous. They live in these tiny little family groups.
• 56:16
  It's also monogamous. It has a song that sounds, I swear to you, like humpback whales. Right. So imagine a tropical forest in which there's humpback song and it comes from a, I don't know, 40, 50 pound animal with this.
• 56:35
  Two of them. It's the individuals in a pair bond who sing at each other.
• 56:38
  Yes. As all the arguments primates don and dusk do. Um, but anyway, they are notoriously difficult, uh, to see and even worse to house. In fact,(...) maybe this has changed, but when you and I were interacting with Madagascar, there were literally none in captivity anywhere because the story was, although every zoo in the world would want one or two,(...) um, if you put them in captivity, they die and whatever it is that caused them to die was so, um,(...) they were so sensitive to it that even the attempts to take a piece of habitat that they were already living in and isolate it from other habitat killed them.
• 57:24
  I think if, if memory serves the, it was the Yerkes primate center that had come closest out of, uh, in North Carolina, um, or in Atlanta, somewhere in the South. Um, and they had brought in, you know, they're for liver. So they, you know, they're eating the leaves of many species of trees and they had brought in several of the actual species of trees from Madagascar. And the conclusion then, and like you, I have not looked into it very recently, uh, was that they actually needed, um, that there was, there was something(...) limiting, um, in their diet that even these very diversely populated with trees, zoo enclosures still hadn't gotten for the injury. Like they were still missing some species that had some ingredient in their diet that they needed.
• 58:07
  Well, I bet it, I bet it goes the other way. Um, the problem with filivorous creatures is that plants like fungi are so good at chemistry and so good at producing toxins that disrupt the various pathways in the body that either a creature specializes on one thing and totally detoxifies it so that it can eat it, you know, with no harm, or if it's going to be a generalist, it has to eat tiny amounts of a bunch of different things in order not to be too toxified by any of the various toxins.
• 58:44
  So if you're only eating leaves of 40 trees and the most amazing zoological enclosure has brought in only 20, they may be getting double the dose of, of something that is too, too much for their liver. Like, but you would expect that liver, I don't know, right? But you would expect that liver toxicity, liver failure, which is what would tend to liver or kidney failure, which is what would tend to happen in that case would look different from malnutrition.
• 59:10
  Yeah. Totally. Um, so I, I don't know if any progress has been made on this puzzle. I sort of hope that they're not continuing to try to put them in captivity because although they're disappearing from the wild.
• 59:22
  That's a fair point. But anyway, the point I wanted to make is when you and I traveled to the part of Madagascar, where these animals live, there was a troop that was well understood to be habituated, that you could just go there and stand under it and marvel at them.
• 59:41
  And you and I made a point, as we always do, of trying to find these animals in the wild. And in fact, I remember us, you know, we were still quite young when we were in Madagascar, but we made a kind of a, a prototype rule, which is that you should try when you are traveling to someplace to see nature, you should set your sights on some creature that you really want to see under absolutely wild conditions. And you should do everything in your power to go see it. And even if you don't manage to see it, what you will see in the attempt will be worth it. So we did end up seeing a wild injury. In fact, we camped in a place where there was an active troop. And that was a very cool thing to be able to do. Just you and me present in this place with, I think it was for injury. It was, it was amazing. But anyway, I want to contrast that with the monetized, hey, we know where there's a den and we'll teach you to photograph it.
• 1:00:44
  There's that. And then there's the interest in what's going with the animal.
• 1:00:48
  Can you let me first tell a story I thought you were going to tell?
• 1:00:53
  About Madagascar because I'm at the moment posting chapters of Antipode, my first book, which is about my life and research in Madagascar.
• 1:01:02
  And last week's chapter is called, But They Are Wild.(...) So you will remember this story. Let me just read a couple of a tiny bit here.(...) My first trip to Madagascar when we were in the dry South, Bret and I wanted to see nature untamed.
• 1:01:15
  And so this would have been in 1993.(...) We'd heard about a private reserve that promised snakes and forests and chafaks.
• 1:01:21
  So we signed up to go. Our guide was merely glorified driver with no ecological knowledge. And he took the two of us along an interminable stretch of road. We were watching the clock thinking the road might be the extent of what we saw in this all day nature tour, spotting a troop of ringtail lemurs playing in the spindly spiny native plants reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, like so much in Madagascar, we grew excited and asked the driver to stop.(...) You don't want to get out here.
• 1:01:43
  This is forest, he exclaimed.
• 1:01:45
  Yes, we agreed, confused at the implication. And there are lemurs here.
• 1:01:48
  We want to see them. The driver shook his head. Not these lemurs. These are no good. Why? We persisted. There's a whole troop. Look, a baby on its mother's stomach and juveniles chasing each other.
• 1:01:57
  These are wonderful lemurs. But they are wild. He said, we were silent. I'm taking you to better lemurs, lemurs that know people and approach when you give them bananas.
• 1:02:07
  Yep, that's the same phenomenon thousands of miles away. And it's, um, I certainly understand the desire, but it would be wonderful to be wonderful if people came to understand what they are losing, you know, in the photographs that we showed.
• 1:02:28
  It's not just that these are amazing animals and they look great when you know what you're doing and you point a camera at them. It's that they actually,(...) as you point out, exist completely independent of us. They would be here.
• 1:02:43
  Maybe they wouldn't be right here, but they would be lots of places without us.
• 1:02:47
  These marvelous things would be happening without notice.(...) And the problem is that we as a species have become so self-obsessed that it's like, yes, I must go see that thing. I must check it off my list. I must bring back the photo that makes my friends wish that they had been there too.(...) And, um, that, that is not a healthy relationship. But in order to get back to a healthy relationship, nature has to not be so damn exotic. It's not supposed to be right. It's supposed to be everywhere. And our, um, industrialization and the, as you point out, the misunderstanding, you know, it's not even just one forest is equivalent to another. A forest in which there is enough human activity that all of the large animals have been hunted out looks exactly like a forest that's full of animals.
• 1:03:41
  You have to at one level. Yeah. And, you know, if you count up forest in a different way, say, okay, I get it.
• 1:03:46
  Geography matters. Latitude matters.(...) Um, so we had 10,000 hectares of, um, lowland rainforest on the Amazon. Um, but we had to get rid of that. Um, or, um, you know, we had to dice it up. We had to put a road through. And once there was a road through, we just like, so, and we've saved a bunch of pieces elsewhere. So you still got your hundred thousand hectares of forest, but if you've got them in clumps as opposed to one giant piece, it's not the same forest. It can't possibly act as the same kind of ecosystem and anything, uh, that has large, a large range, uh, which is to say most of the really charismatic stuff that humans really love to think about isn't going to be able to survive. But even the smaller things like that, you know, there's, there was abundant research showing, um, that even things that you don't think tend to migrate, but actually do make, make transit reliably either every day or, um, or seasonally, or unwilling to cross roads. Um, and it's not just like when they try, they often get killed, but are unwilling to cross roads or even, and I remember this research was being done when you were at, um, La Selva, uh, the, um, the big field station in Costa Rica one year, uh, that the, uh, STR, Sandero Tracios, right?
• 1:05:02
  It's a big reserve and there were trails, one of which was paved and, um, you could bicycle out to the, this was a research forest.
• 1:05:13
  This is a research forest.
• 1:05:14
  There was one large paved, there's one large paved road for research purposes.
• 1:05:18
  Um, so you could, you could walk, um, or you could, you were actually allowed on that trail only to bicycle. Uh, and there was compelling research done that showed that even that trail, even that trail, which was merely paved and sometimes had people bicycling on it, uh, was a sufficient barrier to dispersal for many of the harps, many of the lizards and snakes, uh, who wouldn't cross it. And therefore what you've effectively done is you've made two very small pieces of habitat where once there was one larger one, and it's going to have effects downstream, which you aren't going to capture if you just rely on the metrics of how much forest have, do I have, how much is not sufficient. Just like, you know, the mean, the average is not a sufficient measure for a lot of things.
• 1:05:59
  And yet our metric heavy understanding of the universe tends to grab onto some metric and go, that's enough. I've got the number, therefore I have knowledge.
• 1:06:06
  All right. Try this on for size.(...) We've talked a lot obviously about the difference between complicated systems and complex systems. And part of the problem I find with people's grasping this distinction, which is a profound one, is that for most of us, highly complicated systems look like complex systems. We don't understand that it is an actual difference in type. Yeah.(...) Similarly, one of the things that is true in something like a tropical forest is that people's expectations based on watching nature documentaries is that they will walk into this forest and they will see predation attempts and mating and all of this. They will see all the creatures that they're expecting to see, and they walk into the forest and they see nothing. Right. So do you see nothing because the forest is empty? That's one possibility. And in fact, for most people walking into most tropical forest, that's what they're experiencing,(...) but learning to see what is there and not wanting to be seen. And that's why you don't see it. That is a whole different art. And so a intact forest requires skills you don't think you need. In other words, you think you're going to look for monkeys. That's not how you're going to see them. You're going to hear them, and then it's going to take you a couple of minutes to figure out where you're hearing them from. And then once you find them, you can see them. But so the idea that an empty forest and an intact forest look superficially alike in the same way that a complicated system, a highly complicated system looks like a complex system, I think is telling.
• 1:07:41
  Very much so.
• 1:07:44
  So I was trying to show one of these typical, these absurd typical posters that many people have seen of tropical rainforest. I can't somehow do it full screen, but you can show my screen here.
• 1:07:58
  People will be familiar with this sort of view.
• 1:08:01
  Everyone can look at this and go like, obviously that's not going to happen. I'm not going to see a macaw at the same moment that I see a poison dart frog at the same moment that I see a couple of jaguars and a marmoset and a toucan.
• 1:08:14
  Everyone knows that's not going to happen, a howler monkey. It's insane.
• 1:08:20
  But we do take some piece of that. And I saw this over and over and over again, because I ran so many study abroad programs with students who I had carefully tried to prepare for, frankly, the boredom that is involved in actually studying animal behavior, even in a place as amazingly alive and biodiverse as the Amazon, where we took students on that final study abroad that we ran. And I took them a few times before and other places in the neotropics.(...) But there's no understanding in advance whether or not you are going to have just the patients to sit and to disappear into the forest sufficient that it can begin to come alive around you.
• 1:09:07
  And when you consider that, oh, well, of course I want to see them while eating would be cool, but I want to see them having sex. I want to see them with babies. I want to say, well,(...) if you watched humans,(...) you know, how often would you see the things that you want to see in the wild? Because, you know, it's not just humans in our cultural mores that keep us doing some of these things out of sight of viewers. Right. And also how much time do you actually spend in an average week having sex? I count up the minutes, right? And it's like, you're gonna have to be really, really lucky to see that ever. Right.
• 1:09:40
  Even if they're not.
• 1:09:41
  It's like fossilization.(...) The commonality is, you know,(...) the sample that you're taking is such a tiny fraction of the biota that almost nothing gets trapped in the sample.
• 1:09:54
  Yeah.
• 1:09:56
  So we live too fast. You know, we have expectations based on our dopamine culture.(...) And we have expectations based on visuals like this. And even, you know, extraordinary nature documentaries like anything that Attenborough is narrating, where what is understood at the analytical level by most of the viewers of such programs is that every moment that you see on screen emerged from at least hundreds, if not thousands of minutes of waiting for that opportunity to show up. And already those photographers and cinematographers were taken to the right place at the right time and maybe exactly the place that, you know, the researchers and do on, you know, working on that species said, well, because you're, you know, the BBC, I'm going to take you to the spot where I happen to know because I've been studying this animal for four years. And so I know where they are likely to show up. If you spend two weeks, you're probably going to get a good two minute shot.
• 1:10:55
  And even then a lot of it is faked.
• 1:10:58
  And even then a lot of it is faked. And we saw that directly when you were working in Panama, we've seen it. We've seen it. I've seen it in Costa Rica when I was running some study abroad, or in Panama, actually a different part of Panama.
• 1:11:10
  Even then a lot of it is faked. I don't I don't know that the Enver documentaries but we know that a lot of a lot of what you see in these so-called nature documentaries are faked.
• 1:11:22
  I think Attenborough is way better than most.
• 1:11:25
  And I would love to talk to him because I mean, in order to put together a documentary that people are going to watch, it has to be compelling. But I do know he came to I think it was La Selva while I was there.(...) And I he was there, he overlapped, but I was not there while he was on site. What I was told by others was that his crew created a rainstorm with fans and water in order because they happened they were telling the story of the rainforest and why it is the way it is. And they happen to be there during a very dry period. And anyway, so you know,(...) I'm not totally troubled by it. I don't think that one is(...) where as distorting in the way that some of the.
• 1:12:12
  No, it's not.
• 1:12:15
  But I'm recalling that so you know, the rainforest, oh, it's just always it's always wet. Just like in the Pacific Northwest. It's always wet like come in August. You know, no, it's not always wet.
• 1:12:29
  You know, one of the half true jokes about seasonality in the lowland rainforest of the neotropics and everywhere really, but we know the neotropics better than the others is that the seasons are wet and wetter. But it is also true that there are sufficiently dry seasons that they are noticeable. And I remember specifically being in lowland tropical rainforest, a jungle in common parlance on the west coast of Costa Rica with three of my students actually following my first study abroad. We'd been in Panama for several weeks. I'd come home and they had gone to a spot that one of them knew from previous previous encounters.
• 1:13:11
  And he was friends with a family who lived there on the land and happened to be there for the moment of the beginning of the rainy season.(...) And you know, you can't you can't predict that you can know when I'm going to possibly it will come. But when I arrived to visit these students, it had that feeling in the air like the pregnant sky.
• 1:13:33
  And it was so hot and so humid and simultaneously so dry. And I was there for a couple days under these conditions.
• 1:13:42
  And none of these guys had ever,(...) one of them had spent some time, but none of them had spent as much time as they now had in the rainforest. Like, oh my god, it's impossible to be here. Like this isn't like this is a brief moment.(...) And I think it's going to break. And you know, as I remember it, the morning that it broke, I woke up like, ah, it's going to happen today. Like I think it's good to be out there. Like let's go out into it. And sure enough, it broke and it was just torrential. And you got to be careful under those conditions. You got to make sure that you're not in a lowland area that might suddenly flood. You got to make sure if you've crossed some low paths that you flagged it well or really know how to get back because the landscape changes dramatically, very quickly, and sometimes as impassable in the way that you came.(...) But everything changes about the ecosystem in that moment.
• 1:14:29
  And that's something that I don't think any documentary really could convey.
• 1:14:34
  But I guess I worry that, and here, this is a tight, this is so far down the list of concerns here, but that a camera crew that is willing to create the conditions that are expected by the audience for rainforest and so feel like, well, I've been in the standard conditions of a rainforest, have precisely missed one of the reliable, but not precisely reliable moments of transformation in a rainforest that happens every single year.
• 1:15:01
  That's true.
• 1:15:03
  I will make one more related point and then we should probably move on.
• 1:15:09
  One of the problems and people like Tucker and Dave Smith were skeptical about Darwinian evolution. One of the things that they miss is that the average year(...) doesn't contain very strong evolutionary forces, but that profoundly anomalous years are a regular feature of every habitat. And so, I remember I was in Panama doing my research during one of the profound droughts, one of the most serious droughts that had existed the entire time that the field station had been there, which was a hundred years old.
• 1:15:52
  And the point is, yes,(...) a huge fraction of the populations becomes really stressed. Large fractions of many populations die off completely. The ones that are left are the ones that have the characteristics that make them tolerant to that condition, which you're not usually there to see. And so, anyway, the point is,(...) you can walk into a rainforest and you can talk about natural selection and how it formed all of the creatures. But until you've seen how different that habitat can be under different circumstances, you don't really understand what force is shaping these things because that force is not there most of the time. You get stabilizing selection, which you don't get directional selection. You don't get the intensity of selection that would cause you to understand why the creatures are built so well to deal with things that don't seem to be happening.
• 1:16:46
  Yeah.
• 1:16:48
  Should we spend a little time talking about the kinds of science that is being funded and defunded or should we hold that hold off again? It's already one.
• 1:17:03
  So, we've probably been going for a while. I think we should do it. All right.
• 1:17:08
  So, I think this is related in that, of course, we are all familiar at this point with Doge and attempts to clean up what is happening with regard to the funding of science in the United States.
• 1:17:33
  And science,(...) supposedly one of the two preeminent science journals in the world, recently published in their Science News, actually in their careers section,(...) US scientists' lives and careers are being upended. Here are five of their stories. As the second Trump administration sends US science into upheaval, countless researchers are fighting for their futures.(...) They've got five brief profiles here.
• 1:17:58
  And I want to just spend a little bit of time with four of them and talk through what seems to be going on. And I'm going to go in the reverse order because the last story actually feels like, and I don't know exactly what kind of research the guy was doing, but from the description in this profile, I think, yeah, this is one of the effects of simply stripping science funding.
• 1:18:25
  This is one of the examples of stripping science funding in a way that is not informed enough about what effects you're going to have such that we have real problems here. And so this feels like a continuation of the discussion of what the right gets wrong.
• 1:18:42
  But then as we move closer to the top of the story, we see examples of science and science in quotes, having their funding stripped, which feels like, yeah, actually, right. Like, why was this under the auspices of science at all? What is like, why are we supposed to feel for(...) people who were using taxpayer dollars to ask questions that aren't real questions and aren't science scientific anyway?
• 1:19:07
  So I'm going to start at the bottom.
• 1:19:10
  For some reason,(...) anyway,(...) I just have to use the actual thing here, the actual URL.
• 1:19:17
  So story number five in this piece in science published earlier this month, fed up with whiplash.
• 1:19:24
  Baffling, jarring, draining, that's how entomologist Brian Lovett describes the experience of being abruptly fired from the US Department of Agriculture in February, unexpectedly rehired 10 days later, and then faced with looming layoffs again.(...) It all led him to reluctantly take an offer of deferred resignation last month, a turmoil and callous treatment make him fear for the future of federally supported science.
• 1:19:45
  Government scientists, he says, quote, are canaries in the coal mine for American research, end quote.
• 1:19:50
  Lovett's introduction to the USDA came as a PhD student when he learned about the agency's decades old collection of insect killing fungi. The fungi promised an environmentally friendly way to control agricultural pests. And they also raised intriguing questions about evolution and ecology. Lovett was hooked. He went on to an academic postdoc, but when a principal investigator position opened up at the USDA research unit that keeps and works with the fungus collection, I jumped at it, Lovett recalls. So part of the stuff that's sort of in code there is like fungus collection. We're talking about natural history collections, which are themselves largely being defunded and dismantled. And once you dismantle such collections, you can't remantle them.
• 1:20:28
  And okay, so just a little bit more here.
• 1:20:31
  Not long after President Trump took office this year, he recalls a mounting sense of foreboding at the unit. On the 14th of February, he received an email firing him. He was still a probationary employee and therefore less protected than longer serving federal employees. He couldn't return to the lab to speak to his group or help them shut down the experiments.
• 1:20:49
  Lovett found new supervisors for his staff and started to hunt for jobs immediately. But 10 days later, he learned he had been reinstated.(...) The email from USDA human resources had gone to his government email, which he could no longer access. But his supervisor forwarded him the message. Eventually, some 5000 USDA employees got their jobs back some after the Federal Merit Systems Protection Board paused the firings, and others after a court ruling weeks later.
• 1:21:11
  But it wasn't the old job. Like federal employees across the government, Lovett was told by Elon Musk's doge to email a list of five accomplishments every week.
• 1:21:19
  He worked to get job extensions for lab members whose jobs might be in jeopardy, including a post doc who told him, I don't know if I'll be here next week. As she handed over sequencing files and scripts so her work could continue if she was a bubbly let go. He expected he too would be a target again in the inevitable next round.
• 1:21:37
  So that, that seems like a very good example of a chaotic process that was made far more chaotic than it needed to be.
• 1:21:48
  And the idea of, you know, send us five accomplishments every week is a I get what they're trying to do. There's a lot of people who are treating federal grants as a welfare program, right? But you cannot tell whether the research is worth doing based on whether the person doing the research can report five, you know, you might well be doing very important research and have to struggle to answer that question, which would then make it look like bullshit to the person reading it. It's not, it's not a good metric.
• 1:22:24
  Yeah. And, you know, and there are always problems with assessment in education, in science, you know, like, did you do what you claim? Did you learn the thing? There are always problems with assessment. And there's one way in which that, you know, send us five things that you did.
• 1:22:39
  Thing seems like a decent first pass for some kinds of employees, but not for people doing actual science.
• 1:22:47
  Yeah. And it also, there's something so desperately wrong with our grant driven science culture. Part of what's wrong with it is that it takes the people who do know what they're doing and wastes a huge fraction of their time justifying it. Yes. And this extends that even further so that to the extent that somebody has valuable research, you're wasting their time answering your question about why it's valuable research again. Right.
• 1:23:18
  So anyway, yeah, that doesn't, you know, that said, I can't assess from that, obviously, whether or not there is a plausible fungal response to meaningful insect crop pests. Maybe there is, if there is, that sounds great to me. If there isn't, this might be pointless research. I can't tell.
• 1:23:37
  And just to, I'm not going to show the website, but you can, you can quickly find(...) the entomologist in questions website. And you found that he described himself not just as evolutionary biologist and ecologist, but a genetic engineer. And so there's genetic fiddling going on over in this research space that is not referenced at all in the science article.
• 1:24:04
  And one thing that many people have learned and that we knew before this during COVID is you mess with these systems at your peril.
• 1:24:14
  And the idea that there is something good that could happen in this space, if it exists absent of the acknowledgement that messing with systems that are complex might result in Franken monsters, Franken fungus, Franken, whatever.
• 1:24:29
  That spread disease nonsense.
• 1:24:32
  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So.
• 1:24:35
  But I will say, I haven't looked at this, but given the size of the job that Doge is doing, it should be a slam dunk for science to come up with five jaw dropping examples of people who have been let go, who shouldn't have been. That's the best one by far. That's what I'm worried about. If that's the best one by far, then what, you know, what is going on in the land of science?
• 1:25:01
  That is going on the land of science.
• 1:25:02
  Well, let's take number three on, on science's list on this article, data blackout. Political scientist, Andrew Flores, so right away we're in, we're not in natural science space, right?(...) Political scientist, Andrew Flores may soon lose a major source of the data that have fueled his research for much of the past decade. In 2016, he and other LGBTQ advocates persuaded the department of justice to include questions about gender identity on its annual national crime victimization survey.(...) Questions allowed Flores, an associate professor at American university, to show that sexual and gender minorities are five times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than the overall US population and nine times more likely to be targeted for violent hate crimes. But in March, Doge announced plans to remove all questions about gender identity from the survey. If that happens, Flores and his colleagues will lose data they rely on to document how the LGBTQ community experiences crime.
• 1:25:57
  Flores says he's been interested in politics, but he's always been interested in politics, but it wasn't until graduate school that he melded that interest with what he calls the science part of political science. He began to study public attitudes toward the LGBTQ community and then shifted to broader questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, including crime victimization.
• 1:26:17
  So here's where it sort of gets interesting because so far- It's a train wreck. It's a train wreck.
• 1:26:23
  It's not the federal government's responsibility to take data on reality, like questionable categories with regard to reality in the first place. And the fact that you lost access to these questionable reality data is actually not the problem of the American taxpayer. However, and so nothing we've heard so far suggests that he's any good at what he does. But Flores says he's often asked whether his research is driven by his identity as a gay Latino man.(...) Maybe the questions I ask are influenced by who I am, he says, but the way I do my data analysis isn't corrupted or affected by those things. At the end of the day, I'm an empirical researcher, someone who's just trying to describe the world around me. So I think this man appears to be trapped in identity politics ideology land.(...) I don't respect the questions he appears to be asking. I'm only taking science's word for it, right? I'm not taking science's word for it, right? In terms of what questions he's asking. But the one thing from his mouth that we have here describes what is true, right?
• 1:27:30
  Describe that it is true that, you know, what is the value of having diversity by whatever metric you are using to assess diversity among scientists asking questions. It's not that different scientists will get different answers to the same questions, because if they do, someone isn't doing the science right. The value is that different scientists will ask different questions in the first place. And then you should be able to pull any scientist who has the skills to do the work and have them have them repeat the experiment that we in whatever it is that you were doing and get the same answer. That's part of what the value of science is. So I don't value the questions he's asking.
• 1:28:11
  But he does seem to understand something about, you know, what it is that it means to actually do science.
• 1:28:17
  Well, we end up where we are, but I ain't having any of it on the following basis.
• 1:28:28
  The idea that Jane Goodall might ask different questions about chimps than George Schaller asked about great apes makes total sense that the diversity of Jane Goodall brought us something of value. Right. I think it really did.(...) But in this case, you've got an LGBTQ guy asking LGBTQ questions. And then what he says is that the analysis has to be objective. But I'm more worried about the gaping flaw in this research that comes from self-reports from a community that, you know, the community is not trustworthy.
• 1:29:19
  Are there individuals in it that are trustworthy? Undoubtedly. But the community is not trustworthy with reporting how it is being treated. It is reporting, you know, a genocide of trans people, for example, a genocide that doesn't exist.
• 1:29:32
  And so they're much more likely to conflate a thing that happened with what it means.
• 1:29:38
  So, you know, we all walk down the street sometimes and get a weird look or get brushed or, you know, get brushed aside by someone and think, God, is that a hate crime? Like most of us don't have that, like, was that a hate crime? And, you know, maybe it's because, oh, you know, couldn't possibly be a hate crime. You're a straight white man.
• 1:29:55
  But it seems like the first hypothesis and not even hypothesis, it just seems like the thing that gets jumped to for many people who have some alternative gender identity, that anything that happens to them that's bad was clearly because of the alternative gender identity.(...) And therefore the self-reports are not reliable. Right. And therefore the data that we're now being collected by federal surveys are not reliable. And the only thing that happened here as a result of Doge that we're hearing is that, you know what, guys, these federal surveys, we're not going to collect that crap data anymore.
• 1:30:30
  We're not going to ask that question.
• 1:30:31
  Right. So that's that is in this case, the extent of of the loss.
• 1:30:36
  And I would also just point out, touching on a conversation, we've also had a number of times, the idea that you're going to do an objective analysis, which maybe he is going to do an objective analysis of flawed data. That's a systematic bias in the studies that are being done that will spit out a conclusion that has been sanitized by the statistics that were done to analyze it.
• 1:30:59
  So this sounds to me like, you know, it's one thing to bring diversity to the study of whatever, including science. It is another thing to study the thing that you are.
• 1:31:13
  That introduces the question of bias and then analyzing data that's unreliable takes it to the next level. So anyway, yeah, interesting that that shows up in sciences.
• 1:31:27
  Five egregious things that Doge has done that is that is getting in the way of scientists doing doing the science.
• 1:31:34
  Yep.
• 1:31:35
  Okay. Example number two that they give.
• 1:31:40
  Goodbye, research dreams.(...) As a PhD, as a PhD student studying infectious fungal diseases, Katrina Jackson went to all the right conferences, published in all the right journals and networked with all the right scientists to set herself up for an academic research career. Even the pathogen she chose to study as a postdoc. I didn't look up how to pronounce this. I think it's going to be coccidioides, which causes the lung disease valley fever was a deliberate choice. In 2022, for the first time, the National Institutes of Health allocated$4.5 million per research into the rarely studied fungus, which kills thousands of people in the United States each year.
• 1:32:15
  I thought it would be a really good field to join. Jackson says little is known about why infections can become so severe in some people, which strains are most dangerous to humans and how the immune system fights the fungus. Work on vaccines is just beginning. I would have questions for an entire career, but that path is closing for her. Just nine months into her postdoc, Jackson learned she would be laid off alongside three others in the same lab led by Bridget Barker at Northern Arizona University. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, NIH hasn't approved future years of funding for the team's multi-year grant, meaning the money for Jackson's position will run out in July.
• 1:32:46
  I did not know about this particular disease, valley fever.(...) I clicked on that link there and find this article that was published again in Science early in 2025. It's one of their features, one of their science news pieces called Dust Devil, climate change may be driving an expansion of valley fever, a deadly fungal infection spread by airborne spores.
• 1:33:11
  Spoiler here, there's no evidence that it's climate change, but that's really not the point here. Maybe not.(...) There are a lot of points to be made here, but let me just share a few pieces from this article.(...) Let's try to make it bigger.
• 1:33:25
  Oh God.
• 1:33:27
  Okay.
• 1:33:29
  That didn't work at all. Okay.
• 1:33:34
  Hopefully you can see my screen. I'm going to try this.
• 1:33:38
  Okay.
• 1:33:40
  Now that took out my, I don't know what my computer's doing. The threat of coccydeoides is not new. So it begins, the article begins with a story of some man who's been badly affected and that's reasonable. He legitimately has been very badly affected and had his life deeply compromised by this. The threat of coccydeoides isn't new. The disease it causes was first described by Argentinian medical student Alejandro Posadas in 1892.
• 1:34:06
  Valley fever is familiar in the Southwest where it has infected wildland firefighters, carrot-beaten radish pickers, solar power farm builders, and cast and crew members on a Ventura County film set.(...) Most don't get as sick as Mark did. In the roughly 40% who get symptoms at all, the fungal spores nourished in the warm, wet confines of the lung, morph into structures called spherules that burst to release boatloads of tiny endospores that become new spherules continuing the cycle. Most of these people have a flu-like illness lasting weeks or months, but five to 10% of cases result in lifelong lung infections, sometimes forcing people to be on powerful antifungal medications permanently.
• 1:34:47
  Let me just say before I read the rest of these two paragraphs, it's really not clear the way this is written. If that five to 10% of cases refers to the five to 10% of cases of the 40% who show any symptoms at all.(...) This is written in a way that, frankly, is either just vague because it's badly written or vague because it is trying to make the problem seem more severe than it is. I don't know which it is, but it's ambiguous and there's no excuse for ambiguity when using numbers. No excuse.
• 1:35:21
  In about 1.5% of illnesses, the fungus disseminates, attacking bones, joints, or skin. Again, in about 1.5% of illnesses, is that infections, which includes the vast majority that aren't symptomatic? Or is that just in the case where you know it because you've shown up with something, "Oh, we're going to call that an illness and in 1.5% of those, does it go really bad?" Again, I don't know because it's written badly either intentionally or not. In about 1.5% of illnesses, the fungus disseminates, attacking bones, joints, or skin, or causing meningitis. Invasive disease is more common in men. They skew not entirely explained by higher occupational exposures. Black people like Mark are at strikingly higher risk for unknown reasons. Cases are escalating fast.
• 1:36:04
  Diagnoses reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CEC, have ballooned from about 2800 annually at the turn of the century to about 20,000 in 2023 with at least 200 people dying each year. Again, that number is counterpoint to what the other science news article that I was reading from said, which is that thousands of people were dying every year.
• 1:36:25
  Arizona and California were roughly 97% of US cases reported have seen dramatic increases recently. It goes on and on.
• 1:36:29
  What we see in the rest of the article is there's a rise. There's a rise in cases being reported to the CDC.
• 1:36:41
  The numbers are still very, very low.
• 1:36:43
  Frankly, that's a match for $4.5 million that the NIH had earmarked for studying this pathogen. It's not big by NIH standards at all. Maybe(...) this is worth looking into by the NIH. However, we see a focus on looking for a vaccine as opposed to looking at what the natural history of the thing is because some of the other things that are revealed in the article are we actually don't know why it shows up some places and not others. It's really hard to find a nature. How about you do some of the basic research first on what this actual thing is? How about you look into the high demographic skew in terms of people who when infected show symptoms just like COVID had, like men more than women, and in this case, black men specifically more than any other demographic. Again, not if we're to take their word for it, not fully explained by work exposures.
• 1:37:47
  That question alone brings me to what was one of the things that Kennedy said that he wanted to do. He said he wanted to move the focus away, not off of, but away from infectious disease onto chronic disease.
• 1:38:07
  Recognizing that there is a pathogen that is apparently spreading in both numbers and geography and that does kill some number of people every year. Still tiny numbers, but still does kill some number of people every year, but kills them in such a skewed way, suggests that we should be, yes, thinking about the pathogen, thinking about the germ theory of disease part of this, but the terrain theory, like what is it about the host that makes you susceptible? What is it about both the environment that makes the thing more susceptible to being there?
• 1:38:41
  Maybe there's climate change. I don't know. But what about the host? When you have a pathogenic disease, you have both pathogen, germ theory of disease, and host, terrain theory of disease. Both of the things apply. There was no mention here of whether or not there is something either demographically or behaviorally or health wise about the people who are worse affected that could be done, which is a far better approach to something that is super rare than working to get a vaccine and pushing that on a whole hoard of people who will never be exposed to the thing and don't need another vaccine in their system.
• 1:39:19
  Right. So I see two red flags. One is climate. It will be assumed that climate, anything that is growing in severity will be blamed on climate exactly as it was with COVID. Right. The fact is any death was going to be categorized as COVID because somebody behind the scenes decided that the most important thing was to scare people enough about COVID to what? Get their damn vaccine. So that's the other thing here is so COVID was a racket. Climate is a racket and vaccines are a racket. That is not to say that there couldn't be good vaccines. It's not to say that there is nothing to anthropogenic climate change. It's not to say that COVID isn't a real disease. But the point is these things became gold mines to certain people. And so the racket nature of this, and if you go back to the description of the person who lost their career trajectory. It's so mercenary. Right. Oh, she did everything right. Did everything right.
• 1:40:23
  I'm interested. Do you care about these questions? And, you know, you know, and, you know, to be fair, science in the United States, when it is effective, when it is being done right, is competitive enough that making some choices based on where will there be funding? Is this a research area where there is any interest at all? Is there a way that it starts with like, she did everything right. It's like, actually,(...) she's supposed to be driven as a scientist by what is of interest to her.
• 1:40:56
  And, you know, maybe that's just the way it's written. Maybe, you know, maybe that has nothing to do with her. But there's another piece from this, from this article written four months ago, linked in the article written a couple of weeks ago, in which they're trying to figure out like, what, you know, what, what might it be? Like, how is it, why is it spreading now? Why is this?(...) Why are the spores spreading this fungal pathogen? One idea is that they hitch a ride on wildfire smoke.(...) When wildfires burn, they mobilize massive quantities of dirt, head says, along with a plethora of diverse living bacteria and fungi.(...) No studies to date have found cox- I think they're pronouncing it coxy, the fungal pathogen. No studies to date have found coxy in smoke, but a 2023 analysis of data from 22 cal. hospitals, 18 of them in or around major coastal cities found a 20% increase in admissions for valley fever following wildfire smoke exposure.
• 1:41:52
  Now, I read the whole piece to make sure it's not in there. Yeah. But the idea that people are being admitted to hospital with valley fever in greater amounts in places where they've been exposed to wildfire smoke is apparently an observation that is true.
• 1:42:10
  The hypothesis we are given is that therefore the spores are traveling on smoke, even though they've actually looked and they haven't found any, as opposed to being exposed to wildfire smoke damages your lungs and makes you more susceptible to both infection in the first place and being symptomatic of the infection that you were more susceptible to in the first place because of the wildfire smoke. That is so much more likely a hypothesis about why you would see higher numbers of valley fever admissions to hospitals in areas where people had been exposed to wildfire smoke and it shows up nowhere here. So again, this is a germ theory versus terrain theory of disease question. And no, it's not one or the other, but there is no, no attention paid here to the idea that actually people who have had their lungs damaged by wildfire smoke are probably going to be more likely to have respiratory infections of all sorts, including valley fever.
• 1:43:10
  Absolutely.
• 1:43:11
  It couldn't be more obvious frankly, and it's totally missing. That's strange.
• 1:43:16
  Also, I would say, and maybe you will remember from having read it, is there anything in there about the life cycle of this fungus?
• 1:43:24
  They don't really know as far as I remember.
• 1:43:27
  So then this is another, but this is what I was saying, like the, let's get the natural history figured out.
• 1:43:32
  Right. Because the idea is in the soil. And so that, you know, they've got like, but that's the question. Can it get from one person's lung to another?
• 1:43:41
  I'm doubting it.
• 1:43:43
  I doubt it. I don't know.
• 1:43:44
  And I don't know if we know.
• 1:43:47
  So my guess based on what I've heard is this thing lives in the environment and the environment is changing in a way that is causing this thing to be more prevalent, which would explain why you get more cases of it. That does not inherently have anything to do with climate change. We're doing a tremendous number of things to the environment, including that thing, huge numbers of toxins into it that are going to alter which creatures live in the environment.
• 1:44:13
  Which creatures went out in competition.
• 1:44:15
  So anyway, you're right. Natural history is the right way to go about it, but that's not as lucrative as the health and actual human health, which is to say again, to go back to Bobby Kennedy's position, it was so startling to people. It's like, maybe we should not focus almost exclusively on, uh, on infectious disease, but also focus on chronic disease because that's about human health. Yeah. Like, you know, the people who are chronically ill are also probably our prediction, obvious prediction. And I, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but also more likely to, when exposed to the spores of this fungus, get symptomatic from it, as opposed to those who had a really healthy body, which is to say had a healthy host that could resist, uh, the infections that came in.
• 1:44:59
  But if we go back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, the world is changing to the extent that the world is changing in a negative way because we are degrading it. And that is causing people to be encountering some fungal pathogen. Um, that is something that we need to know and studying it as a treatable and therefore lucrative disease creates exactly the opposite incentive.
• 1:45:24
  Indeed.
• 1:45:25
  Okay. We got one more.
• 1:45:26
  All right.
• 1:45:27
  Uh, so again, this is, uh, this article published in science in early May of this year, U S scientists lives and careers are being upended. Here are five of their stories. I went in backwards order. Um, the top one in this is equity in jeopardy.
• 1:45:43
  Adana Yanos knows it takes years to build trust, but only seconds to break it.
• 1:45:48
  That's especially true when doing, doing research with people of color, historical abuses and pervasive racism and healthcare systems make many hesitant to participate in studies today. The Columbia university epidemiologist has spent nearly two decades forging relationships with community partners, laying groundwork that enables her to study nuanced issues such as how neighborhood environments contribute to breast cancer severity in racially diverse populations. This isn't just research that I decided to do last year, she says, but that hard one trust may now be at risk on the 14th of March, the national institutes of health abruptly terminated two of Yanos's three grants. One was for a study of how societal factors affect whether a woman receives the best care for cervical cancer and presents barriers and, and I'm going to read that again.
• 1:46:32
  One was for a study of how societal factors affect whether a woman receives the best care for cervical cancer and present barriers to treatment. Actually, know what that sentence means is red. Um, if it enrolled of about 200 of its intended 960 participants,(...) Yanos is looking for alternative funding to restart recruitment and to compensate the members of the community who served as advisors for the work so far. But even if the NIH money were restored, she says the researchers could miss critical time points to follow up with the women already enrolled.
• 1:47:00
  Her other project, the breast cancer study is similarly on hold.
• 1:47:04
  The terminations were among $400 million in federal funding that president Donald Trump's administration pulled from Columbia, claiming it has not done enough to combat anti-Semitism on its campus.
• 1:47:14
  All of Columbia's NIH funds are frozen while the university negotiates with the government, but approximately 400 grants, including Yanos's two were permanently canceled.
• 1:47:23
  Yanos says she wasn't entirely surprised given Trump's animosity toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but she questions whether the administration understands the difference between the workforce diversity programs normally associated with the EI and research into health disparities. By studying how healthcare disparities contribute to cancer death, she says, we're improving public health for the entire population of the US.(...) So before I go on to the most egregious point of this, I will say that I do not agree with the canceling of grants mainstream. We've talked about this before, and I heard one piece of feedback like, oh, I work in a totally different field and I have contracts canceled. I don't care. I'm sorry that happens to you, but that doesn't make it okay. You have a contract, that's what a contract is, it's binding.
• 1:48:09
  As much as we've heard about several pieces of research here that I don't think are necessarily valid as good science, that doesn't mean that once awarded, you shouldn't be able to expect that it will actually continue to the point. So there are a lot of grants, NIH grants, for instance, that only promise, maybe it's a 10-year grant and you're going to get reviewed every two years. And the expectation normally is that if you've met benchmarks that you will get funded again, but it's not a guarantee, then okay, maybe you get to that and it says, you know what, it's not a guarantee. Yes, you met your benchmarks, but actually we're moving in a different direction.
• 1:48:48
  But a lot of people, including people I know, had grants pulled that mid-contract and just left them flailing and that's not acceptable.(...) However, many of the termination letters sent to investigators studying health equity call the research "artificial and non-scientific" and quote "harming the health of Americans."(...) To Yano's, that language is demeaning.
• 1:49:15
  Maybe, but that's not the point. I feel like it's kind of a personal sort of attack against me, against the work that I'm doing and against the progress that I would like to make, says Yano's, who is black.(...) And then here's the best sentence in the entire article.
• 1:49:28
  Scientists of color only make up 30% of NIH research grant recipients.
• 1:49:34
  30%? 30%.
• 1:49:36
  That's amazingly high. Yes. And I, of course, have not figured out a way to assess what the percentage of applicants for NIH research grants are who are scientists of color, or what the percentage of scientists at American institutions of higher ed are with regard to scientists of color versus not of color. And are you including in scientists, people who are studying things like LGBTQ questions that like, yes, you're called a political scientist, but I'm sorry that doesn't make you a scientist. But regardless, the idea that I don't think that there's any chance that 30% of practicing scientists in the United States right now are people of color.
• 1:50:19
  No.
• 1:50:20
  In which case, in which case, that sentence, scientists of color only make up 30% of NIH research grant recipients,(...) actually reveals the opposite of what it wants to reveal. And of course, we can't assess it because they don't get, you shouldn't, you shouldn't try out a number like that without the relevant comparison.
• 1:50:38
  Yes, it's journalistic malpractice, not to tell you.
• 1:50:39
  It has been numerate in all of this, right? But I suspect that that actually reveals that the NIH is preferentially giving research monies, has been preferentially giving research monies, to either studies that are more likely to be being done by scientists of color, because they're specifically about things like how does race affect whether or not you're getting appropriate treatment for cervical cancer?
• 1:51:09
  Which is not inherently bad question, but it's also shouldn't be the center of, it's not a scientific question. It's a social science question, right?
• 1:51:19
  And the NIH isn't, if the NSF were funding that, I'd have a bigger problem with it because NSF is specifically supposed to be doing natural and physical science funding, and the NIH is bigger, and it does include the social sciences.
• 1:51:32
  But the idea that the numbers that are being used here in a way that either are unassessable or actually probably reveal the opposite of what the authors are trying to suggest in the journal science suggests that the enumeracy that we see across all the other sectors of society has, is here too.
• 1:51:59
  Yes, and we have seen evidence every so often you'll see about a PhD dissertation in which somebody is researching, you know, gay masturbation amongst that or the other, where basically the idea is there's a large pool of money out there, and if you file a(...) application to study something that labels you as a member of some class that is supposed to be included at some higher level, then it is very likely to be smiled upon because, you know, it's effectively, I don't mean welfare in the sense of welfare proper, but it is effectively a welfare program, and that is an abuse of the scientific landscape. Yes, it is. Right. So I guess my reaction to all this is I am concerned that A, grants being cancelled midstream is going to create chaos. B, that there will be high quality pieces of work that get caught up in not being able to justify themselves in a way that a bunch of, frankly, non-scientists trying to, you know, slash the federal budget are not going to be able to detect. On the other hand, science has become a racket.(...) Yep.
• 1:53:19
  The university system is allowing research that is absolutely(...) valueless to take place on the regular.
• 1:53:29
  And so when you do that, when you allow those weeds to grow in your garden and then somebody decides to till it under because there's not going to be any way to separate the good quality stuff from the other stuff, then it's kind of on you.(...) Right.
• 1:53:45
  I'm concerned that there is no way to do this surgically. And so, yes, we can fret about the carnage that will happen because it's being done in a ham-fisted way. But just as I don't hold people responsible for bad choices that they make if they didn't have better ones available to them, there is no good way of doing this. And a lot of the fault falls on the university system, which allowed garbage to overwhelm department after department and is now facing scrutiny. Oh, my God. The scrutiny isn't perfect. Really? The research wasn't perfect either. The fact that you can go through a lot of what's being done and say this is without value means you weren't doing a good job of establishing what was valuable. And so now the fact that somebody else isn't doing a perfect job of establishing what doesn't have value, what did you expect? Yeah, of course, this was going to happen.
• 1:54:40
  Yeah. And to the point that you made early in me sharing some of these stories of, you know, science decides to find five scientists who have been badly affected by Doge.
• 1:54:52
  (...) And there's really only one of these stories. And I didn't read one of them and it was sort of an ambiguous land, just not as interesting.(...) But there's really only one of these stories that that really shows the chaos of what has been done in a way that has upended someone's research. And you know, even then, when you go looking at what he was actually doing, you think, oh, hmm, it's not just entomology, you know, it's not basic research.
• 1:55:19
  But point is, at least three of these examples that science found in its what should have been a really easy search, like I can point them to someone who would have been a better person to profile for this piece. Yeah. Right.
• 1:55:37
  How could it have been this hard? How could they have done it this badly?(...) And what does this that suggest either, you know, better about just the ideology of the people writing the journalism for science at this point, or what does it reveal about the vast majority of so-called scientists who've been badly affected by the doge cuts?
• 1:56:00
  Well, there is one other interpretation,(...) which is that the powers that arranged to have this article come into being shows these examples, because several of them telegraph their DEI status and therefore become unassailable in many circles.
• 1:56:22
  Yeah. If you wanted to put together an article that nobody could really attack because to attack it would open the question of whether or not you had a race problem.
• 1:56:29
  But you know what, if 30%(...) of NIH grants at this point are going to scientists of color, again, a staggering number.
• 1:56:39
  And Doge did a, you know, a slash and burn job on a lot of research grants. I'm sure there are actually excellent scientists who happen to have dark skin who are badly affected, who weren't doing work that was about the color of their skin, right? Like wasn't a race question, wasn't an ideology question. I'm just positive.
• 1:57:02
  There are lots of people still who are actually, you know, in a terrible system, and they probably made some bad choices, but are doing actually really good research. And given that 30% at the NIH alone are going to scientists of color, there are no doubt better examples that would have still been able to signal that, you know, the DEI nature of all of this that, you know, you can't disagree, but it would have actually revealed like, oh, look at that science that just got gutted. That's really too bad. And I don't end up having that feeling about this, which is, you know, it's destructive of our ability, those of us who actually care about science, who actually recognize science as, you know, the framework on which the West has been built in large part, to make that point to an increasingly disaffected right, who see it as the bludgeon that it's being used as.
• 1:57:51
  Yeah. In fact, they've made the inverse point, which is that 80% of the cuts are probably good, which may not even be true. But what I'm left with is it's rackets all the way down.
• 1:58:05
  Yeah.
• 1:58:05
  Right. Science. The magazine is of course a racket. You look into it expecting to find the highest quality science journalism, you know, and reports of the most important research. And it's like, you know, face palm after face palm, because like everything else, this has been turned into a shadow of its former self.
• 1:58:29
  That's right.
• 1:58:32
  Well, I think we've gotten there. I think we have.(...) We're going to do a Q&A though, shortly. We're going to take maybe a 10, 15 minute break and then we'll be back with a Q&A on locals.
• 1:58:43
  Check out our sponsors this week, Manukara Honey, Fresh Pressed Olive Oil and Careaway that makes, what did you say the word was kitchenware?
• 1:58:50
  Kitchenware. Yes. Which is not what you wear to the kitchen.
• 1:58:54
  No, I don't think they sell aprons.
• 1:58:56
  No. And if you wear their stuff to the kitchen, you just get laughed at. It's just awkward.
• 1:59:01
  Yeah. Even the dog looks at you funny.
• 1:59:03
  She looks at me funny anyway.
• 1:59:05
  So we'll be back next week at our usual time on Wednesday at 11 30.
• 1:59:13
  And, you know, consider joining us on locals.(...) I'm going to draw on my sub-stack, Natural Selections, and a reminder that we are supported by you. We appreciate you.(...) And you're subscribing, liking, sharing content that you find.
• 1:59:28
  Both our full episodes and clips is something that we appreciate.(...) And until we see you next time, make it to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
• 1:59:38
  Be well, everyone.