Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Is Racism Necessary? The 348th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Is Racism Necessary? The 348th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:04
  Hey, folks.
• 0:05
  Welcome to the DarkHorse podcast livestream.
• 0:08
  It's 348.
• 0:10
  No chance of it being prime.
• 0:12
  And it is, of course-- I'm going to say it's October 20-- It's October 21.
• 0:20
  October 21, of course.
• 0:21
  You're now entering the darkest four months of the year.
• 0:24
  The darkest four months of the year.
• 0:25
  Had a glorious sunrise this morning, and we've had unusually beautiful October days.
• 0:29
  This has been the most beautiful October I've ever experienced anywhere.
• 0:32
  Yeah, it's really, really been lovely.
• 0:34
  And it has that hint of any moment it could collapse the way it does in the Pacific Northwest and then be winter through, I don't know, June.
• 0:44
  Yeah, and we were promised by Cliff Mass, a local meteorologist.
• 0:50
  Not us personally, but he actually recently put out an analysis that says basically between October 15 and 20, I think, were his days up here in the Salish Sea region, the Pacific Northwest.
• 1:01
  There's going to be a moment when it turns, and you're not getting it back.
• 1:05
  It's just not going to warm up again and you're unlikely to get long periods of sun.
• 1:10
  But here we are just eking out those last moments of absolute gorgeousness.
• 1:15
  We've been out there biking.
• 1:16
  It's just extraordinary out there right now.
• 1:18
  Yeah, it's been really, really delightful.
• 1:21
  And in keeping with that delightful theme, we are going to be discussing today, among other things.
• 1:27
  Well, you will-- We're going to be discussing maps, and then you're going to be discussing some things that are less delightful, I think.
• 1:36
  And then I'm going to come back to a little bit of delight.
• 1:39
  Yeah, I will just say, for those of you, I'm going to explore with Heather the question of whether there might be some necessity to racism.
• 1:52
  Believe it or not-- now, I'm not embracing that.
• 1:56
  But if you want to stay tuned and hear a discussion in which we will talk about what racism might be about and all of that, it's common.
• 2:05
  And who knows?
• 2:06
  This might be the last DarkHorse.
• 2:08
  I hope not.
• 2:10
  I hope not.
• 2:10
  I hope not, too.
• 2:11
  So join us on Locals.
• 2:13
  We've got the watch party going on there, as always.
• 2:14
  There's no Q&A today, but we just did, too.
• 2:17
  They're available on Locals.
• 2:18
  And we discussed, among other things, what happened to MAHA, using AI to help with medical diagnoses, medical media coverage of the school shooting in Bend, and a lot more things that we're not discussing in our regular livestreams, what we are discussing in our Locals Q&As.
• 2:33
  Those are all still up.
• 2:34
  Join us there.
• 2:36
  And also, we have been selling copies of our books, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
• 2:44
  We've got a few more copies in stock.
• 2:45
  We've also got copies in translation.
• 2:48
  We sold out Czech, and we're almost sold out of several of the others.
• 2:51
  But we've got Spanish, French, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Thai editions.
• 2:55
  And we've also-- and I don't have my pile of books here.
• 2:57
  They're all the way over there.
• 2:59
  There's just no getting to them from here because of the lava between here and there.
• 3:03
  But also, Antipode, which is Seasons with the Wildlife and Cultures of Madagascar, or something like that.
• 3:10
  I don't remember what the subtitle is, but that was my first book published in 2002.
• 3:14
  And Wildlife of Madagascar, I thought.
• 3:15
  No, it's not.
• 3:17
  It's cultures or culture.
• 3:18
  But I don't remember what the first word is.
• 3:19
  Seasons with travels with something.
• 3:22
  Excuse me.
• 3:24
  So we've got those for sale on the DarkHorse website, darkhorsepodcast.org/books.
• 3:31
  They're now $50 apiece, and you can ask for them to be just signed or personalized.
• 3:37
  That $50 covers shipping within the US.
• 3:40
  It's more if you're shipping outside of the US.
• 3:42
  And also, our store, which has merchandise, is going to be shutting down.
• 3:49
  And we're going to reopen it up with some new stuff in the new year.
• 3:54
  But the last day to order anything with our existing merchandise is October 25.
• 4:00
  So you go to-- that's also at darkhorsepodcast.org.
• 4:04
  Where is that?
• 4:05
  I don't see that on this piece of paper.
• 4:07
  Where to go?
• 4:09
  It's darkhorsepodcast.org.
• 4:11
  Yeah, that's not on here.
• 4:12
  It says darkhorsepodcast.org.
• 4:14
  OK, so it's darkhorsestore.org.
• 4:16
  OK, darkhorsestore.org is where you can go to get things like the DarkHorse logo hoodie in black or navy.
• 4:24
  Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply shirt.
• 4:27
  Welcome to Complex Systems.
• 4:29
  The Epic Tabby tote, which is one of the bags that I use every time I go food shopping.
• 4:37
  Everything that should be made of cotton is made of cotton, 100% cotton.
• 4:40
  It's all great.
• 4:42
  Products are fulfilled and shipped out of Nevada.
• 4:45
  And again, the last day to order at darkhorsestore.org is October 25.
• 4:52
  So if you were thinking-- excuse me.
• 4:55
  If you were thinking about doing that for, say, holiday presents, get your orders in now.
• 5:01
  Yeah, it's a good time to get a shirt that assures people that you won't be complying.
• 5:07
  Because if you don't get that shirt down, then they ask you to comply.
• 5:09
  They may be confused when you don't.
• 5:12
  That's right.
• 5:13
  They might.
• 5:13
  They might really, really be confused.
• 5:17
  All right, so and then just a few more pieces of business before we get into the meat of the show.
• 5:24
  Our sponsors carefully chosen, as always, right at the top of the hour, three ads, and then no more from us during the show.
• 5:33
  Our first sponsor this week is CrowdHealth.
• 5:36
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• 7:10
  Now you, sir, are up next.
• 7:12
  Yes, I am up next.
• 7:13
  With these fine people.
• 7:14
  (Laughter) I have to talk to the audience first.
• 7:19
  There are things we have to cover.
• 7:20
  So-- OK.
• 7:22
  I was told to do that.
• 7:23
  You were.
• 7:24
  I mean, it's supposed to be on camera.
• 7:25
  No, no.
• 7:26
  You'll see.
• 7:26
  It's all going according to plan.
• 7:29
  Excellent.
• 7:30
  So you at home, I am wondering if you're having the following experience.
• 7:35
  You've been, I don't know, staring into your screen, watching a little DarkHorse.
• 7:39
  And you start thinking, hey, wait a minute.
• 7:43
  Isn't Bret in his early late 50s?
• 7:46
  And yet he seems so manly.
• 7:49
  And you're probably thinking, how can that be?
• 7:50
  And then maybe you're thinking, wait a second.
• 7:52
  Isn't that exactly the time when you would be expecting senescence to be crushing his masculinity?
• 7:58
  And yet, if anything, he seems to be even more masculine than before.
• 8:03
  Now, Heather, you will not have had that experience because you don't sit around watching DarkHorse.
• 8:07
  You have other things to do, like preparing for DarkHorse, among other things.
• 8:12
  And I'm imagining that you're having the experience of thinking, well, I'm all for monogamy.
• 8:19
  But being married to Bret is kind of like being married to two men at once.
• 8:22
  He's just that manly.
• 8:26
  All right.
• 8:26
  You're-- No, there's just-- there's props rolling around in the table.
• 8:30
  All right.
• 8:30
  Just roll with it.
• 8:31
  Just roll with it.
• 8:32
  I was going to say something nice about not wondering these things.
• 8:35
  But if you're going to set me up that way, I'm just going to sit here and let you dish out whatever you got here.
• 8:41
  No, I just-- well, all right.
• 8:42
  Thank you for not laughing at me.
• 8:44
  But in any case, people are probably wondering-- When have I laughed at you?
• 8:49
  You know, on occasion.
• 8:50
  But in general, you laugh with me, which I appreciate.
• 8:53
  And by the way, that reminds me.
• 8:54
  Men, marry well.
• 8:56
  It is the most important thing.
• 8:58
  Marry someone who will back your play.
• 9:01
  All right.
• 9:02
  In any case, people are probably wondering what the heck is going on.
• 9:05
  What is my secret?
• 9:06
  And in fact, they're at the same-- I know I'm not wondering.
• 9:09
  Right.
• 9:10
  Because you know.
• 9:11
  OK.
• 9:12
  I actually have two secrets.
• 9:14
  The first secret is that's just how I roll.
• 9:17
  And the second secret is Mars Men.
• 9:20
  And what is Mars Men?
• 9:21
  Mars Men is a natural supplement.
• 9:25
  It does not contain any testosterone.
• 9:27
  But what it does contain are ingredients that cause you to have your own set point to go up so your testosterone is elevated.
• 9:36
  Now, why wouldn't you just take testosterone?
• 9:38
  You wouldn't just take testosterone because, A, it's risky.
• 9:41
  And B, when you take testosterone without adjusting your set point, it causes your own body to naturally produce less.
• 9:49
  So if you withdraw that testosterone, now you'll have a deficit.
• 9:52
  Much better to adjust your set point with something like the ingredients in Mars Men.
• 9:59
  OK.
• 9:59
  So what is all of this about?
• 10:02
  Testosterone.
• 10:03
  Well, for those of you who are more scientifically-minded, is a hormone that in numerous academic studies has been associated with both kicking ass and taking names.
• 10:15
  So if you are interested in either kicking ass, taking names, or maybe even both at once, then Mars Men is for you.
• 10:22
  Is that a result from just the scientific studies or also the clinical studies?
• 10:25
  Actually, interesting that you pointed out.
• 10:27
  Clinical studies, the randomized controlled trials, and anecdotal experience of numerous men.
• 10:35
  Both kicking ass and taking names.
• 10:37
  Kicking ass and taking names, usually in that order.
• 10:41
  Sure.
• 10:42
  Yeah.
• 10:42
  So anyway, Mars Men is natural stuff.
• 10:46
  It's third-party tested.
• 10:47
  And there are some things that I have to say about it, the rest of that.
• 10:51
  That's not stuff I have to say.
• 10:53
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• 11:01
  That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out.
• 11:06
  It's also available-- not available.
• 11:09
  Does it say available?
• 11:10
  No.
• 11:11
  I said available.
• 11:12
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• 11:16
  After you purchase, they will ask where you heard about them.
• 11:18
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• 11:24
  You're back up.
• 11:25
  I am.
• 11:26
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• 11:29
  Here, I'm going to put this prop on here.
• 11:31
  And you're not going to hide it.
• 11:34
  But I might wield it.
• 11:35
  You can wield it.
• 11:36
  Go for it.
• 11:37
  That's the earlier point about masculinity.
• 11:39
  Yes, wielding spray bottles.
• 11:42
  Not the most masculine thing you can wield, but if you've got enough-- I mean, it's not super light.
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  You improvise.
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• 13:52
  Hell yeah.
• 13:53
  Hell yeah.
• 13:56
  All right.
• 13:57
  On to the kicking ass and the taking of names.
• 14:00
  Well, OK, sure.
• 14:02
  So maps have historically been used to kick ass and take names with.
• 14:08
  That is unfortunately true.
• 14:11
  Right.
• 14:11
  Yeah.
• 14:11
  Right.
• 14:12
  So the UN just voted to adopt a new official map.
• 14:17
  That's not-- I'm not really interested in focusing there.
• 14:19
  And this is just a-- we're just going to keep it at a time on different projections, on ways that maps of the world have been made, as opposed to like topo maps or smaller scale maps.
• 14:32
  But map makers have a problem, because maps are inherently a two dimensional thing.
• 14:38
  And the terrain that they are mapping is not-- is a sphere.
• 14:43
  And so just as if you've ever tried to wrap a spherical object, like for Christmas or something, wrapping paper, you know that you can't do it without creases.
• 14:53
  And maps don't come with creases.
• 14:55
  And so what are you going to do?
• 14:56
  How are you going to represent the fact that you've now got a two dimensional representation of something that wasn't two dimensional to start with?
• 15:03
  So we have, of course-- can you see my screen?
• 15:09
  Also, you can show that now.
• 15:10
  The most famous map that we have is the Mercator projection, which everyone has heard of that, even if they don't know what it means.
• 15:20
  This is a version of the Mercator projection.
• 15:23
  And you can see, even before I put up the little bullet points here.
• 15:27
  And this is-- all the maps I'm showing are from a Scientific American article that just came out yesterday, called The Mathematical Impossibility of Making a Perfect World Map.
• 15:36
  And it's pretty good, although their description of how each of the projections are made is a little bit too simplified.
• 15:40
  So I'm not going to go into it, because it's kind of mathematically complex.
• 15:45
  But so a guy whose last name was Mercator-- and so this came to be known as his projection-- developed in 1569, this projection.
• 15:53
  And very roughly speaking, this isn't entirely accurate, and it's very imprecise.
• 15:58
  But imagine if you have a piece of paper that you've taped together at both ends to make a cylinder, and you drop it over the globe, such that the only place the paper is touching the globe is the equator.
• 16:11
  You then are going to project the points that are not actually-- where the globe is not actually touching the paper-- to folding it down south of the equator and up north of the equator, such that you end up with this projection.
• 16:28
  Again, that's not quite exactly the truth.
• 16:31
  But of course, if you imagine making a cylinder represent-- and then you're unfolding the cylinder, which is what's happened here-- represent a globe, you're going to get much greater representation of things at the poles than at the equator than are true in reality.
• 16:49
  So Antarctica looks enormous.
• 16:52
  And the way to really assess how not right this is is that Greenland looks about the same size and even roughly the same shape.
• 17:02
  So you can really eyeball it as Africa.
• 17:05
  And actually, Africa is 14 times the area of Greenland.
• 17:09
  So the Mercator projection is what everyone really is most familiar with.
• 17:15
  And the pros are that the continents and the countries, all the landmasses, have accurate shape.
• 17:22
  And it's also useful for navigation.
• 17:25
  But the sizes are exaggerated.
• 17:27
  And so-- The sizes are exaggerated increasingly as you move to the poles.
• 17:32
  Exactly.
• 17:34
  Exactly.
• 17:34
  And so you can actually spot check that in your own logic.
• 17:38
  If you look at that map, think about what it's like if you were actually standing at the North Pole.
• 17:42
  At the North Pole, you should be able to walk a small circle around the North Pole and cover every time zone.
• 17:48
  Whereas if you look at what the North Pole looks like here, you're covering-- The same distance as you would at the equator.
• 17:55
  As you would at the equator.
• 17:56
  So it is increasingly distorted toward the poles.
• 17:59
  In fact, I feel like my prop might be useful here.
• 18:02
  I mean, I really-- I brought this in part to finish up this little segment and say like every home should have a globe or two, even if it's woefully out of date.
• 18:14
  We have two.
• 18:15
  Both of them are from my childhood home.
• 18:17
  This one still has the USSR on it.
• 18:19
  You probably can't see it, but it still has the USSR.
• 18:22
  The fact is that the landmasses haven't changed that much in the last several decades.
• 18:26
  The names of things have.
• 18:27
  So this is an historical object.
• 18:29
  Like there was a tape, I think, on the equator that has long since peeled off.
• 18:33
  But you can see by looking at this-- I'm trying to do this for what you could see-- that is Greenland.
• 18:41
  Little tiny object there.
• 18:43
  And now facing the audience is Africa.
• 18:47
  And on a globe, hopefully, this is relatively accurate.
• 18:54
  And so yeah, if you're at the North Pole, you walk a diameter around the North Pole and it's a point.
• 19:00
  And the equator is, of course, the widest point.
• 19:02
  The longest path that you can take circumnavigating the globe.
• 19:08
  So a globe is inherently better than a map if you were trying to represent the entire Earth.
• 19:16
  But you can't scale it up to make it useful if you're trying to go on a hike or across an ocean.
• 19:20
  So OK, that's the problem with the Mercator projection.
• 19:26
  There has been another projection that probably many of us have seen.
• 19:30
  You also sometimes see it flipped so that the global south gets better representation.
• 19:35
  The fact is there's a lot more land in the North.
• 19:37
  And so having the North appear to be on top in maps-- I think that objection is a silly one.
• 19:46
  Well, more importantly, if the global south wants the map flipped, they can take it from our cold, dead fingers.
• 19:53
  There just aren't enough of them.
• 19:55
  So I think we're safe.
• 19:57
  OK.
• 19:58
  OK, Kiwis are coming for us.
• 20:01
  So this is the Gall-Peters projection, which probably many people have seen as well.
• 20:07
  And it looks weird to us, right?
• 20:09
  It looks weird in part because it is weird.
• 20:12
  And so this is developed 1973-ish, actually one of the people for whom its name developed it about 100 years earlier.
• 20:20
  And so it first sort of comes to prominence 50-ish years ago.
• 20:25
  And the advantages of this map of the world compared to the Mercator projection are that the sizes are correct relative to one another.
• 20:33
  Like Greenland is appropriately sized compared to Africa, and so is everything else compared to everything else.
• 20:40
  But the shapes are wrong, especially close to the equator.
• 20:43
  And so you end up with a correction on size and a loss on shape, and the errors are in the opposite place.
• 20:53
  So the Mercator projection, the errors get bigger the closer the poles you get.
• 20:57
  And with the Gall-Peters projection, the errors get bigger the closer the equator you get.
• 21:02
  So that's...
• 21:03
  And the math is sort of interesting, and I did not follow it through enough to explain it fully, but it's a little bit like they've done the cylinder trick, but in a couple of different places and then corrected for it.
• 21:16
  And you end up with these apparently straight lines on the map, but you can't navigate with this map.
• 21:24
  So the UN just adopted the Equal Earth protection.
• 21:30
  Projection.
• 21:31
  Projection, the Equal Earth projection, which is one of many maps which basically don't take a simple algorithmic approach.
• 21:41
  They do a number of things, and they're not claiming that this is a navigation map.
• 21:46
  Frankly, we've gone beyond needing to use paper maps to navigate, to be seafarers, right?
• 21:52
  So this is based on a 2019 paper published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
• 21:59
  And it minimizes distortion of both shapes and sizes.
• 22:03
  So it actually kind of...
• 22:05
  It doesn't even split the difference.
• 22:06
  I think it's better...
• 22:08
  It's far better than the Mercator projection with regard to the error, with regard to size exaggeration close to the poles, and it's far better than the Gall-Peters projection with regard to shapes.
• 22:21
  And it does still mess up some things at high latitude, and it's even hard to tell.
• 22:28
  It gets kind of sheared off.
• 22:30
  And so it's definitely not perfect, but the point is there is no perfect.
• 22:34
  You can't get...
• 22:36
  Given that our Earth is not even a sphere, but is a three-dimensional object, and we're trying to make two-dimensional objects with which we can understand it, and we can get some perspective, this seems like a pretty good map.
• 22:52
  And there, of course, is various objections.
• 22:55
  Apparently, the US was the only nation-state that voted no on this resolution.
• 23:01
  There were some abstainers, and I guess it was brought by the representative from Togo, which is in the middle of Africa, which the middle of Africa, African states, African countries, are the most ill-treated by the Mercator projection.
• 23:18
  Right?
• 23:19
  It's really hard to tell that actually Africa is a giant landmass that just has a lot of stake in the world.
• 23:30
  And so I don't know why the US voted no, but this map feels better.
• 23:37
  It has drawbacks.
• 23:39
  There are limitations to it, as there are to all maps.
• 23:44
  But it's an interesting little exercise, I think, in considering how it is that we take something that exists in one domain, three dimensions, and move it into a different domain, two dimensions, and try to please as many people as possible while keeping in mind what it is that we're trying to do, which is offer a representation of the world that best informs as many of us as possible.
• 24:08
  Yep.
• 24:09
  Now, I don't know how I feel about this vote.
• 24:13
  I'm inclined to be suspicious because the UN and what it's up to, I don't see that there's a lot at stake in what map, and the Mercator projection has always been annoying.
• 24:27
  Its effects are particularly glaring and misleading and possibly important because when you misunderstand the relative sizes of these things, it has implications for warfare and population size and all of that stuff.
• 24:44
  Yes.
• 24:44
  On the other hand, look, we're going to need a paper map that we agree to.
• 24:52
  On the other hand, we do have something that is effectively a perfect map.
• 24:57
  We have two things.
• 24:57
  We have the ancient version, which you have there on the desk, and we have a modern version, which in principle at least has no defects, which is Google Earth or equivalent.
• 25:08
  Well, it requires a screen.
• 25:09
  Right.
• 25:10
  It requires a screen.
• 25:11
  That's why I say you need a paper map because you can't guarantee a screen.
• 25:14
  But the nice thing about Google Earth is that, well, it actually does have a distortion that probably is cognitively important, which is the effect of zooming in misleads you in terms of proximity.
• 25:35
  So in other words, it doesn't misrepresent anything, but the experience of it radically misrepresents something.
• 25:41
  Because it doesn't take any time to go...
• 25:43
  Or it appears to take time.
• 25:45
  But the point is the amount of time it takes, you know, you're zooming in from outer space.
• 25:49
  Yeah.
• 25:49
  And I think your fourth click covers a great deal more, no, a great deal less distance.
• 25:57
  But in any case, it...
• 25:58
  So clicks, it's not a linear scale.
• 26:00
  It's not a linear scale.
• 26:01
  So, you know, you're going to have a distortion no matter what.
• 26:04
  But it does allow you to explore a two dimensional rendering that recovers all of the three dimensional reality.
• 26:16
  And probably cognitively, that's the killer experience.
• 26:21
  But you're right.
• 26:21
  We used to have a solution in almost every home.
• 26:24
  Yeah.
• 26:25
  And I guess in terms of, you know, I wanted to say something about this because I feel like this is a point which I would advocate for strongly.
• 26:34
  Every home should have a globe.
• 26:35
  Yeah.
• 26:36
  And again, it doesn't, you know, this isn't anything special.
• 26:40
  And this is, you know, this has been around for many decades.
• 26:42
  Again, this was in my childhood home enough that it still got the USSR on it.
• 26:46
  But that alone is fascinating, right?
• 26:47
  Like there are other countries here that are not still, especially, you know, in Africa, that are not still what they were.
• 26:54
  But the fact is that the overall physical nature of the globe is the same.
• 27:00
  And you get a sense, like I used to spend time with this and with our other globe.
• 27:05
  And also, there was a nearby school that had maps of both the world and the US painted on the playground.
• 27:14
  I would spend a lot of time with our boys with maps in various forms.
• 27:19
  But I would not have felt particularly comfortable just spending time with 2D maps.
• 27:23
  Because it is not true in the same way that a globe is true.
• 27:31
  Two things.
• 27:31
  One, this is a phenomenon that I think you could make a lot of arguments for why it's important that everybody have a globe in their home.
• 27:44
  You're probably going to miss the reality of it.
• 27:46
  It's probably not easily phrased.
• 27:49
  But and then the second point is going to be, unfortunately, in a home that has a globe, but also is plugged into the internet in the way that almost every home now is, I can quite imagine a child growing up and the globe being just another thing in the living room that they'd never think about.
• 28:10
  Whereas when you and I grew up, it's inevitable that at some point you're going to ponder that globe.
• 28:16
  I had a moon globe too, which I spent a lot of time with.
• 28:20
  But the point is the natural fascination of, wait a minute, it is kind of odd that I live on the surface of a sphere that I stick to.
• 28:30
  And people who, if you went straight down through the center on the other side are sticking to it and are facing each other.
• 28:37
  And just the relationship between South America and Africa, that they obviously are in some way related to each other.
• 28:48
  And there's actually a process which was fought over about how the plates have separated.
• 28:56
  And the fact that a globe is always set at 23 and a half degrees, which is the average tilt of the earth and which then explains changing day length over the seasons.
• 29:09
  And that's not explicit by looking at this, but you can begin if you sit, as I did, for hours over a childhood, looking at this and considering what it means that when the sun, when the earth is, when the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun, that tilt means that you get very much more longer days.
• 29:31
  And when it is tilted away as it is now in the northern hemisphere, our days are shortening fast.
• 29:36
  And we're just, we're plunging into darkness.
• 29:39
  And you can get that sense from a globe in a way that you of course can't get from a map either.
• 29:44
  Yep.
• 29:45
  And by and large, all of the experiences that ought to naturally provoke a child into thinking about important things that are not fundamentally human.
• 29:58
  You know, the, I was on my bike ride yesterday, I was watching the sun go down and I was watching a, I guess, a waxing gibbous and, you know, moon.
• 30:12
  Yeah, the moon.
• 30:13
  You can see, you know, the sun is over there and the side of the moon that's lit is over towards the sun.
• 30:20
  And you can imagine before it was understood how these objects were interacting with each other, what it would be like to think, well, okay, what is that object up there?
• 30:29
  And that thing is lighting it.
• 30:31
  Therefore I'm looking, I can't see the part that isn't being lit by it, but what would that be like?
• 30:37
  There's some place from which it's a full moon.
• 30:40
  Just happens that we're not there.
• 30:42
  You know, that sort of relationship, those being provoked into thinking those thoughts and seeing how far you can get explaining.
• 30:49
  There's some place from which it's a full moon, but we're not there and neither are any humans.
• 30:53
  Right.
• 30:54
  The earth is not there.
• 30:55
  Yeah.
• 30:55
  Right.
• 30:57
  So anyway, all of those things are important sort of training for the mind.
• 31:01
  And when they can't compete with the, you know, nonstop 30 second reels of people doing superhuman stuff on the internet.
• 31:11
  Sorry.
• 31:11
  I just, you have to tell me what you need.
• 31:17
  Oh, okay.
• 31:19
  I can do that.
• 31:21
  So anyway, the, the real stuff, you know, magnets have a hard time competing with, you know, people doing death-defying Red Bull bullshit.
• 31:34
  Right.
• 31:35
  You really hate Red Bull.
• 31:37
  Yeah.
• 31:37
  I really hate Red Bull and I'm not wrong about it.
• 31:40
  You know, it's a, and believe me, I'm as fascinated by what people are doing with, you know, Red Bull airfoils and everything else as the next person because it's fascinating.
• 31:51
  But sorry, that was on the side.
• 31:53
  I just, the message is so destructive and literally destructive of people.
• 31:58
  Right.
• 31:59
  The prizes that are awarded for succeeding in doing something death defying are so high that people actually die and get maimed.
• 32:07
  And it's, it's a tragedy.
• 32:08
  But anyway, I can get off my lawn.
• 32:14
  But point being, Those dark squirrels.
• 32:16
  Right.
• 32:16
  Exactly.
• 32:18
  There are certain experiences that you should have.
• 32:20
  You should definitely have, you know, many evenings as a child staring into the dark night sky, looking at the Milky Way and trying to understand what it means.
• 32:28
  Yes.
• 32:29
  Watching, Yes.
• 32:31
  Shooting stars, trying to understand what they mean, finding satellites and understanding the implications that they have playing with magnets, looking at rainbows, you know, they're all, you know, static electricity.
• 32:42
  So many things about your world are surprising and provoking of careful thought.
• 32:48
  And the fact is curated reels of stuff are, you know, there's interesting stuff in them, but you can't distinguish necessarily and ever less so with every passing day.
• 32:58
  You can't distinguish the stuff that actually happened from the stuff portrayed as it happened.
• 33:02
  You're de facto.
• 33:04
  You're inherently a consumer.
• 33:06
  Right. It's turning everyone into a shopper as opposed to a producer or an experiencer or a maker of their own world and their own experience, their own life.
• 33:15
  Yeah.
• 33:16
  And that consumer mentality is destroying everything, including really the ability to think, you know, if your ability to think is forged in the world of real things, it is at least real.
• 33:28
  And if it's forged based on what are effectively reports from the world video or otherwise, you don't know what it is.
• 33:36
  And it's just not healthy.
• 33:38
  Yeah.
• 33:40
  Yeah.
• 33:42
  Are we done with the globe?
• 33:44
  I think we should keep it, but not here.
• 33:46
  Not here.
• 33:47
  Not here.
• 33:48
  All right.
• 33:50
  That's my that's my pitch to put a globe in your house if you don't have one.
• 33:53
  All right.
• 33:54
  Yeah.
• 33:54
  Put a globe in your house if you don't have one.
• 33:57
  Totally.
• 33:57
  Of course you should have a globe.
• 33:58
  Of course.
• 33:59
  And I would have recommended moon globe too.
• 34:01
  Kind of cool.
• 34:03
  OK, so I had some thoughts partially stemming from my conversation with Anthony Rubin of Muckraker, which the conversation which came out yesterday came out yesterday is getting a great response and.
• 34:23
  Do it right now, but I would absolutely suggest that you not only listen to my conversation with Anthony, but that you also check out the documentary, which spurred me to interview him.
• 34:36
  Actually, I don't interview people to talk with him because it's jaw dropping and it tells you that something is afoot relative to Western civilization that you've certainly heard about here and elsewhere.
• 34:48
  But one really needs to take a good look at what's taking place and think about why it's taking place because frankly, the West is, I would argue, at war.
• 34:57
  And somehow.
• 35:00
  We are not the evidence that we are at war is available, but the number of people who know that we are actually in a sense literally at war is small.
• 35:13
  Why is that?
• 35:14
  I think because the fear of being accused of being racist is so profound that to notice that we are at war requires you to say things that at least create in people's minds the jeopardy that would come from that accusation.
• 35:31
  So anyway, I've been thinking about what this all is and yeah, go ahead.
• 35:37
  Have we have people historically relied on experts to tell them when they're at war?
• 35:45
  I mean, I wonder if that's not a new situation as well.
• 35:49
  I know you're going someplace very particular, which is different from this, but we have become so accustomed to relying on outside authorities to inform us of when we need a shot, when we need to take our pets in, when we need like when our kids start school, when they like what the benchmarks are, like we rely on outsiders to run our lives.
• 36:10
  And so being told, having no one mention that we're at war, it just doesn't occur to anyone.
• 36:17
  It's not a question that people are accustomed to asking.
• 36:20
  Yeah, it's so unthinkable that you could be at war at home.
• 36:23
  You know, you can be at war, we're at war in Iran and one could, you know, miss that fact by not paying attention to the channels in which it's discussed.
• 36:33
  But you know, the invasion that is occurring in Europe and in the United States is, it is strange that you would need somebody to tell you that you were at war.
• 36:47
  It's obviously not a kinetic war most of the time, but the invasion that is basically an unopposed invasion.
• 36:57
  And so there's something weird about the cognitive state that we find ourselves in that results in you needing an expert to tell you.
• 37:04
  Well, if it's an unopposed invasion, is it war?
• 37:07
  If you surrender right away, like that's it, I accept.
• 37:11
  Then we're occupied.
• 37:14
  Well, then we're occupied, we're being conquered.
• 37:16
  But whatever your metaphor, something has happened that ought to be primary on all of our minds.
• 37:23
  And yet it is controversial at best, largely unnoticed by most and actively defended by who, if they understood it, I'm not saying all of the people who defend it would switch sides, but many of the people who defended if they understood what it actually was would switch sides.
• 37:41
  They're just on some kind of autopilot where they've got a proxy for what they think should be and what they see looks enough like the thing that they're demanding that they haven't stopped to consider what its actual effect is on their well-being, their neighbor's well-being, everybody.
• 37:56
  Yeah.
• 37:57
  So in any case, I ended up having a couple of thoughts that I thought were worthwhile and I think they're connected, but I'm going to present them as separate and we'll see whether they they connect up.
• 38:09
  One is that there are a bunch of phenomena that my feeling is the first step in the direction of whatever the thing may be is not only okay, but may even be just good, but that having stepped, and of course people will say, "Oh, you're just talking about a slippery slope." Yeah, I think I'm talking about a little more than that because I think what I'm talking about is things that function in a self-exacerbating way in a complex system and a slippery slope is effectively a simple observation, right?
• 38:52
  You step beyond some slant and the friction necessary to keep you on your feet disappears and you end up at the bottom of the hill.
• 39:02
  What I'm talking about are things like, and I'm going to try a difficult one first, but let's talk about abortion.
• 39:13
  Now, to my way of thinking, and I know to your way of thinking, there is not a huge moral implication to ending a non-implanted zygote, a single fertilized cell that if left to its own devices would become a person, but ending that cell, you can argue, and from a religious perspective, you may end up arguing that that cell was set in motion by God himself and therefore who were you to alter anything about its trajectory?
• 39:48
  On the other hand, you'd find out that a huge fraction of fertilized zygotes don't make it to even late in pregnancy.
• 39:57
  They end up arrested by nature.
• 40:01
  Even a large fraction of implanted.
• 40:03
  Right.
• 40:03
  Oh yes.
• 40:05
  So anyway, and I would even complicate the story further by saying that from my perspective as a evolutionary biologist and somebody interested in game theory, I even think that there are cases in which abortion is not only perfectly tolerable, but is, I don't want to say morally required because I can't tell other people how to live.
• 40:29
  But in the case that somebody is raped and impregnated, I've argued that you cannot just simply say, well, you know, it's a child like any other, even though it is, because you are creating a conduit by which the strategy of rape can be elaborated by selection to the extent that rapists succeed in producing offspring.
• 40:59
  It's a successful strategy.
• 41:00
  And so blocking that strategy not only involves pursuing racists and locking them up, rapists and locking them up, but also making sure that their strategy doesn't succeed ever.
• 41:14
  So let's just be clear here.
• 41:17
  I'm reminded of the kerfuffle around your conversation with Nathan Cofnas and the discussion of, you know, well, aren't you arguing therefore that it's heritable, that it's genetically heritable?
• 41:32
  And you are not.
• 41:34
  You are not precluding the possibility that being rapey has a genetic component, it may well, but you are, I believe, although you haven't done so explicitly here today yet, arguing that if it is understood that rape is a strategy that results in children and, you know, everyone who doesn't think evolutionarily is going to be like, that's not what rapists want.
• 41:57
  That's not, they're not trying to make kids.
• 41:59
  I don't care what their conscious story is.
• 42:01
  The conscious stories that people tell themselves about their motivations are very rarely true.
• 42:07
  Right?
• 42:07
  So if it becomes culturally understood that sometimes rape works in that children get produced, that is the result that you were trying to preclude.
• 42:21
  Well, let's just say the potential for rape is clearly genetically carried.
• 42:28
  I think most of what produced rapists is cultural.
• 42:32
  And so I would argue we have an obligation to actually block both channels in which this might be taken on by people and annoyingly to many people out in the world.
• 42:44
  I also think that there's an obligation not to create literal rape culture with rape porn and rape play.
• 42:52
  I think it just, you are, you're turning rape sexy.
• 42:57
  And if you really are serious about preventing people from being victimized in this way, that is the last thing you would do.
• 43:03
  So in any case, let's just say a.
• 43:08
  You're arguing for a moral, a moral reason for abortion in the case of rape.
• 43:16
  I am.
• 43:17
  Yes, I'm arguing that morally, I think blunting the rapist's strategy is a moral good and that in the case of someone who has become pregnant and acts very early, that the moral compromise is small, is tolerably small.
• 43:39
  The moral good that comes from, you know, not having your life trajectory deviated over an error is probably positive.
• 43:49
  However, the point of this whole story is what?
• 43:56
  Error?
• 43:57
  Yeah, somebody gets pregnant who didn't mean to be.
• 44:00
  I mean, if you've actually been raped, you didn't make errors.
• 44:03
  I'm not talking about rape.
• 44:04
  I'm saying that when somebody becomes pregnant, who is not in a position to start a family.
• 44:10
  OK, so you're adding to your list of conditions under which abortion is morally acceptable.
• 44:17
  Right.
• 44:17
  So tolerable early on.
• 44:22
  But the problem is, I think what we've seen is that the perceived right to an abortion gets extended to a place where it is obviously not only morally horrifying, you know, bills to permit abortion right up to birth based strictly on some consultation between a woman and her doctor, but that actually abortion becomes championed as a good in and of itself, which is an absurdity.
• 44:57
  And I think the point is, look, once you've said a single cell doesn't have any nerves, doesn't feel any pain, absent a strict sense that God set this in motion and you dare not interfere, I don't see the big moral compromise.
• 45:20
  The problem is that once you allow and you say, well, we have to now draw a line somewhere because it's not a big deal when it's one cell.
• 45:30
  It's an impossibly big deal when it's a baby who could just as easily be outside the womb.
• 45:38
  And so we've got to draw a line somewhere.
• 45:39
  Once you get in the business of drawing that line, it is a power that humans cannot be trusted with, that you end up in hell and you end up with, you know, a human tragedy inevitably unfolding.
• 45:59
  So the point is now I have to rethink my position on should this be tolerated at all if I know that if it's tolerated, it's going to be extended into territory that frankly, none of us should be the least bit comfortable with.
• 46:13
  And I think there are a lot of things that are like this where the first step is tolerable or maybe even positive, but the place that it goes is completely horrifying.
• 46:27
  And so anyway, I was struggling a little bit to come up with a good list.
• 46:31
  You may disagree with some of them, agree with others.
• 46:33
  I don't know.
• 46:34
  But I was thinking about lobbying, right?
• 46:37
  Political lobbying is literally named after hanging out in the lobby to get the attention of congresspersons to persuade them of something.
• 46:48
  Now, I can imagine going to the lobby and trying to get a word with a congressman to tell them about something that's going wrong in their district, to alert them to some way of viewing something that they haven't understood.
• 47:07
  There's nothing wrong with that.
• 47:08
  It's actually perfectly in keeping with our democratic republic that I might want to call somebody's attention to something.
• 47:17
  But the problem is lobbying is now one of the only processes that actually wields any power in our system.
• 47:25
  It has been demonstrated that what the public wants actually has almost no power.
• 47:31
  Almost none of the legislation gets passed is actually about our interests.
• 47:35
  It's all described as if it's in our interests, but it's not in our interests.
• 47:39
  So our system is run by so-called lobbyists who are involved in turning the system against the people for whom it is supposed to function and making sure that nobody who sees the world in, who's actually advocating for the public has a substantial influence.
• 48:01
  So that's an abomination.
• 48:02
  What do we do then with the question of, well, is it intolerable to have a citizen physically hang out in the lobby of Congress hoping to talk to a congressman?
• 48:12
  Right?
• 48:13
  Like, I'm all for that, but I'm not all for what happens.
• 48:16
  What happens is, you know, it's the end of the republic.
• 48:19
  It's actually, you know, do or die for the West.
• 48:23
  But in both of these cases so far, I know you have a long list there, you have said humans are incapable of drawing the right line.
• 48:38
  I guess I might phrase that differently and therefore conclude something different, which is that there is no single correct line and a functioning democracy is actually a back and forth between different perspectives on where the line should be.
• 48:54
  And that line, but there are like moral constraints on it.
• 49:04
  And I guess the discussion is the democracy.
• 49:10
  I'm not against, I mean, I'm obviously all for people discussing every issue.
• 49:19
  My point about this line.
• 49:21
  I meant the discussion of where the line is on any given issue.
• 49:24
  Right.
• 49:25
  But notice where the line now is.
• 49:28
  On lobbying.
• 49:29
  Yeah.
• 49:29
  Abortion.
• 49:30
  The line is drawn in an unthinkable place that no rational person could defend.
• 49:35
  If you believe in the consent of the governed, then a system which doesn't care about the governed is obviously, you know, a non-starter.
• 49:44
  And so whatever lobbying started as ends here.
• 49:47
  And now maybe you could make an argument that there was some way to arrest that process.
• 49:52
  But my point is absent a demonstrated capacity to allow tolerable lobbying and draw the line somewhere and hold to it.
• 50:00
  I think what happens is because power begets power, the line will inherently move in one direction.
• 50:10
  And because it inherently moves in one direction, the only question is how quickly you will have a place where the governance structure doesn't pay attention to the people's wellbeing at all.
• 50:18
  Right.
• 50:19
  So, you know, it's a candidate for whatever this thing is in a complex system.
• 50:28
  You have an essential process, which is governance, and you have no natural.
• 50:37
  Right.
• 50:37
  Negative feedback, no brake.
• 50:39
  And that results in a process that starts tolerably ending intolerably.
• 50:43
  And I think there are a lot of these that we can see.
• 50:49
  You could take advertising too.
• 50:51
  Advertising.
• 50:53
  At baseline, is there any problem with my telling you that I've come up with a solution to some problem that you face and telling you, you know, here's where you can get it if you want it.
• 51:05
  And here's what I'm charging for it.
• 51:06
  And your choice as to whether or not you think.
• 51:11
  Obviously not.
• 51:12
  Obviously it's a completely natural phenomenon.
• 51:14
  It's inherent to a market that you know that what I have and you can compare it to what other people have and you make your decision.
• 51:21
  On the other hand, we now have a civilization in which we get up in the morning, are being immediately manipulated by advertisers that we know about, advertisers we are completely unaware of who have an asymmetrical advantage.
• 51:37
  They know all kinds of things about us.
• 51:39
  They purchase from brokers information on our search histories.
• 51:43
  They know all kinds of stuff.
• 51:45
  We are powerless to fend them off because all we have is that which we're consciously aware of.
• 51:50
  Nobody could possibly have enough bandwidth to keep track of all the manipulations that are being thrown at you.
• 51:56
  So okay, advertising starts out fine, ends with a dystopia.
• 52:03
  I would argue, you know, constitutional violations are this way.
• 52:09
  Once you have a governmental body that has license to, you know, violate your right to privacy in order to keep us all safe, then of course everything will eventually be deemed a necessity by virtue of the fact that we will of course want everybody to be safe and we would live well exactly how we live now.
• 52:35
  Where we literally have an agency of government that seems to be banking every single thing we say to each other in any electronic form at all, right?
• 52:44
  That seems to be setting itself up to track our every movement, right?
• 52:49
  You know, do I want the government of homeland surveillance?
• 52:54
  Yeah, exactly.
• 52:55
  The Orwell department.
• 52:57
  So you know, again, complex system, the first step is obviously tolerable.
• 53:02
  You need an agency, you know, you can't have people plotting overthrow in the middle of civilization and not notice it and do something about it.
• 53:11
  But what, you know, in that case, what you really need is there's got to be a court every time and the court has to have a very high bar for allowing the agency to violate your right to privacy.
• 53:22
  And of course we have the inverse, you know, when there's a court involved at all, the court's a FISA court, it's secret, it rubber stamps, and you know, soon enough you live in hell.
• 53:33
  Informed consent violations.
• 53:36
  In 1947, as I always reminding people, in 1947, the Allies hanged seven doctors for violating patient informed consent under the Nazi banner.
• 53:48
  That's how serious a problem it is to violate informed consent, even though informed consent had not yet been codified.
• 53:56
  It was taken as so obvious that this was a right of patients not to be experimented upon without their consent that we literally ended seven doctors lives over it.
• 54:07
  Now you'd be shocked where we are.
• 54:10
  We have obviously gotten comfortable with violations of informed consent.
• 54:15
  There are the famous cases like, you know, Tuskegee.
• 54:19
  There's also lots of MKUltra stuff where people were given LSD without their knowledge to see how they would behave.
• 54:27
  There's all sorts of interesting connections to horrifying crimes, everything from Charles Manson to the Unabomber, Sirhan Sirhan, plausibly, not proven, but anyway, all sorts of connections.
• 54:48
  You know, do we want people to be able to run experiments?
• 54:54
  Yes.
• 54:55
  But once you grant a right to violate informed consent, there are no limits.
• 55:01
  Now here's an interesting one that came to my attention in my recent conversation with Josh Walkos.
• 55:08
  He alerted me to the fact that there was a process, an official one, called an exemption from informed consent, EFIC.
• 55:19
  And it is the result of FDA rule 21 CFR 50.24 adopted in 1996.
• 55:28
  Now listen to this.
• 55:29
  It lets investigators enroll unconscious or incapacitate incapacitated patients in trials without consent.
• 55:37
  When the condition is life threatening, existing treatments are unproven or unsatisfactory, or there's no time to reach a legal representative and the trial can't practically be done any other way.
• 55:47
  That's the key phrase.
• 55:49
  Instead of individual consent, the sponsor must do a community consultation.
• 55:54
  That is something like a town hall and there must be public disclosure before and after.
• 56:03
  Now what this has resulted in, the case that Josh told me about, which I had never heard of, was something called the PolyHeme trial.
• 56:12
  PolyHeme?
• 56:13
  PolyHeme.
• 56:14
  Okay.
• 56:15
  PolyHeme is fake blood.
• 56:18
  So PolyHeme was a product of Northfield Laboratories 2004 to 2006.
• 56:25
  Their trial covered 30 trauma centers.
• 56:28
  It was a hemoglobin based oxygen carrier, essentially a blood substitute.
• 56:34
  Enrolled trauma patients got PolyHeme in the ambulance and controversially for up to 12 hours in hospital, even after real blood was available.
• 56:46
  So what this involved was a public meeting.
• 56:53
  So it was posted.
• 56:54
  If you want to hear about PolyHeme, there's a trial going on in your area.
• 56:57
  You want to hear about it, come to the public meeting.
• 56:59
  Okay, here's PolyHeme.
• 57:00
  It's fake blood.
• 57:01
  We don't know how it works.
• 57:02
  We're running a trial.
• 57:03
  If you don't want to participate in our trial, you got to wear an armband.
• 57:07
  Okay.
• 57:08
  That way, if you're in an accident, then we'll see that you don't want to take PolyHeme and we won't give it to you.
• 57:13
  But if you don't wear an armband, then we're going to assume you're fine with it, you're consenting.
• 57:18
  So that's messing with the default hypothesis, the default assumption, the default condition that is stealing from our freedoms and establishing that we have to nothing that is brought to the world should require action to opt out of.
• 57:40
  Everything should be opt in.
• 57:42
  Even if they had alerted every single person somehow.
• 57:47
  But the idea of...
• 57:48
  No, regardless.
• 57:49
  It cannot be a human being's responsibility to opt out of some new ridiculousity.
• 57:59
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 58:00
  And especially when you need to know their freaking secret handshake and the only way you would know their secret handshake is if you went to their freaking meeting, right?
• 58:08
  Oh, well, of course we told you about it.
• 58:10
  We held a meeting.
• 58:12
  You didn't come.
• 58:12
  That's kind of not on us, you know?
• 58:14
  Now, what happened in this trial was that they actually increased the rate of fatality substantially.
• 58:21
  So people actually...
• 58:22
  The clinical trial.
• 58:23
  The trial in which...
• 58:24
  The jury trial.
• 58:25
  No, no.
• 58:25
  Which trial?
• 58:26
  The trial of PolyHeme.
• 58:28
  The clinical trial.
• 58:28
  The clinical trial resulted in people dying at an increased rate compared to regular blood.
• 58:34
  Okay?
• 58:35
  So they actually killed people who didn't know that they needed to not consent to this crazy experiment replacing blood with some artificial alternative.
• 58:43
  The company went bankrupt and all.
• 58:45
  But point is, people actually died.
• 58:47
  People lost their loved ones to some experiment that they didn't know what was going on and didn't know that they had to opt out of.
• 58:53
  I mean, ask yourself this question.
• 58:57
  Is there such a trial going on in your area right now that you're opting into by not wearing some sort of an insignia that says you're opting out?
• 59:04
  Certainly don't like the idea that I might be driving around consenting to stuff that I'm not even aware is happening.
• 59:10
  That's obviously preposterous.
• 59:13
  So anyway, okay, that's where we are.
• 59:18
  You know, you could make the argument that the first step, you know, if, you know, how much leeway does a paramedic have to, you know, adjust how they're performing CPR on you to the circumstances around you?
• 59:38
  So you want somebody who knows how to save your life with enough discretion to do it.
• 59:42
  But the point is the discretion then results in, you know, didn't say Simon says, you know, some secret rule that you don't even know about governing whether you're going to live or die.
• 59:54
  And this, of course, is like the end user license agreements that we're constantly signing.
• 1:00:00
  Yeah.
• 1:00:00
  Right.
• 1:00:00
  You have no idea what's in those things.
• 1:00:03
  And the way they're presented, A, they're deliberately made so opaque that you couldn't possibly, you know, if you decided to protect yourself from what might be in the end user license agreements, then effectively you're deciding not to use any of the stuff that requires them.
• 1:00:20
  It's not like you have a choice, right?
• 1:00:22
  You just simply read it and you click OK because that's the key to how modern life exists.
• 1:00:27
  No, no one actually reads them.
• 1:00:29
  Right.
• 1:00:29
  You don't even just simply read them.
• 1:00:32
  You scan to the bottom of the page.
• 1:00:34
  You find the place that you can click and move on with your life.
• 1:00:36
  Yes.
• 1:00:37
  You find the place that you can click and they are designed to produce exactly that effect.
• 1:00:42
  Yes.
• 1:00:43
  Because they're not only opaque, but they're also extraordinarily long, unnecessarily long.
• 1:00:48
  Right.
• 1:00:48
  And you can imagine the initial end user license agreement could have been a very reasonable document that said, you know, imagine you're signing up for an email service and there's an end user license agreement that says, be aware that the information that you send over email is being passed over equipment that this company does not control.
• 1:01:14
  And therefore the security of it cannot be guaranteed.
• 1:01:17
  That's something you should know.
• 1:01:19
  And clicking that you do know it is probably a good idea.
• 1:01:22
  But the point is that first step leads you to EULA land where you're literally signing away rights that you would never reasonably sign away without even knowing that you're doing it.
• 1:01:33
  Right.
• 1:01:34
  OK, so we can't go through my entire list here, but I'm wondering if, you know, what do we make of a secular orientation?
• 1:01:46
  Secular.
• 1:01:48
  I think a secular orientation is a perfectly defensible thing.
• 1:01:51
  On the other hand, a secular orientation that opts you out of all of the agreements that cultures ordinarily inherit from their religious tradition to abide by certain rules results in insane free for all where everybody is setting their own rules.
• 1:02:05
  What if it's true that civilization cannot exist if we all set our own rules, that we have to have some sort of cultural agreement and that, you know, the secular portal is the door through which chaos enters.
• 1:02:21
  Right.
• 1:02:22
  So you can all see where I'm going with this.
• 1:02:24
  My point is.
• 1:02:27
  Certain things that seem like no big deal result seemingly inevitably in things that we should all agree are a very big deal and that that is a process that we should have named and we should understand when we are making the argument.
• 1:02:41
  Hey, I don't want you to do that.
• 1:02:42
  It's not because I'm nannying you.
• 1:02:43
  It's because I know what will happen to generations later if we do this now, which I will grant is effectively an argument that conservatives frequently level.
• 1:02:52
  Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  Now, I found myself putting on this list.
• 1:02:58
  Utopianism.
• 1:03:01
  Utopianism, I think we can just I'm not asking anybody to, you know, it shouldn't be illegal, but we should certainly regard it as a moral failure.
• 1:03:10
  Right.
• 1:03:11
  Or at least an analytical failure.
• 1:03:12
  If you're a believer in utopia, it's because you don't understand why utopia is impossible.
• 1:03:17
  I would say analytical.
• 1:03:18
  Yeah.
• 1:03:19
  But it results in moral failures.
• 1:03:21
  It results in struggle sessions and all the rest.
• 1:03:24
  Now, here's one I really struggle with.
• 1:03:27
  I found myself putting on this list unchecked liberalism.
• 1:03:33
  Now I'm a liberal.
• 1:03:34
  I believe the West was founded by liberals.
• 1:03:39
  I think there is a tremendous amount of good that's been done by liberals and that conservatives end up defending the gains made by past liberals.
• 1:03:47
  So I'm not against liberalism, but I am against liberalism that does not proceed with an understanding that change for its own sake is not good and that change is inherently dangerous in a complex system.
• 1:04:00
  You have to if you're going to change the system, you have to understand that both those things are true and you have to monitor what the consequence of the change that you made was so that you know whether it was actually even productive.
• 1:04:11
  But in a functional system, individuals can be dogmatic because the loyal opposition exists.
• 1:04:19
  In a functional system, you can have a position that actually, if you were allowed to rule the world, would be destructive because there are other people on the other side who may themselves hold positions that would destroy the world in an equal and opposite way if left unchecked.
• 1:04:34
  You are each other's checks.
• 1:04:36
  Now, I think it is more extraordinary and more valuable to be the human being who is a generalist and can see the limitations of your own preferred political system.
• 1:04:48
  But I don't think that individuals need it so long as the system has representatives from all positions in it who have equal power.
• 1:04:59
  In principle, I agree with you.
• 1:05:01
  But that argument would be stronger a few hundred miles to the east because what we have here in Washington is a system where the liberals who individually do not seem to understand this principle are in charge so dominantly that they are actually taking apart a functional civilization.
• 1:05:26
  Right.
• 1:05:27
  There are either not enough or whatever Republicans there are in the Washington state legislature are either not numerous enough or not empowered enough to be effective checks on the Democrats.
• 1:05:44
  Right.
• 1:05:44
  So my point would be actually, I think, although, you know, again, I think you've made the point perfectly, the step in which a person becomes committed to change as an individual is not in and of itself a problem as long as the system is balanced.
• 1:06:00
  But it is the step that leads you to a crazy place where a bunch of liberals end up moving to the same location and suddenly liberalism becomes unchecked because none of them are running the program that says actually this is not, you know, change is not in and of itself a good.
• 1:06:16
  So it's all about this is an argument for this is argument for being a generalist.
• 1:06:20
  This is an argument for being having a scientific mindset in which you try to falsify your own ideas regardless of whether they are seemingly scientific or political or moral or whatever, that you you keep on bringing to bear the full weight of potential evidence against yourself as opposed to adopting a position in which you simply congratulate yourself for having arrived at the truth.
• 1:06:43
  Yep, exactly.
• 1:06:45
  And so this goes back to prior argument or prior discussion on argument, but prior discussion that we had about about the role of humility.
• 1:06:55
  And I will say that particular term was brought to the fore in my thinking, maybe in our thinking by Jordan Hall, he's been talking about radical humility and its importance in, you know, careful thought.
• 1:07:10
  And I think that this is a good demonstration of it that, you know, there's nothing wrong with a liberal unless that liberal does not understand the limits of liberalism and finds him or herself gathering with so many others that they are unchecked.
• 1:07:27
  Yeah, an argument in favor of generalism, exactly as you say.
• 1:07:31
  And you know, I think it's a question of enlightenment.
• 1:07:33
  You know, it is a kind of utopianism to imagine that change for its own sake is a good idea.
• 1:07:38
  And you might argue that the transhumanists, while slightly more sophisticated, are involved in the same kind of error.
• 1:07:47
  Who are they more sophisticated?
• 1:07:50
  Your garden variety liberals?
• 1:07:54
  Yeah, I don't think so.
• 1:07:56
  Democrats?
• 1:07:57
  No, I think they're, they're just as confused and more dangerous in some ways.
• 1:08:02
  Well, I think they're more sophisticatedly confused.
• 1:08:06
  You know, they, that's part of what makes them more dangerous because they, they can, they can dodge and weave arguments for longer.
• 1:08:14
  Yep.
• 1:08:16
  All right.
• 1:08:16
  So now let me, you know, the first idea is now on the table.
• 1:08:19
  The idea is that there's certain processes that start out innocuous and maybe even good, but that in some inevitable way become dystopian as a result of a ratchet or a self exacerbating characteristic.
• 1:08:38
  Okay.
• 1:08:39
  Now to the, the question of what I started with was the question of whether or not racism is necessary.
• 1:08:49
  And I don't really mean racism.
• 1:08:51
  Yes, that was deliberately provocative.
• 1:08:53
  What I mean is first of all, I will just say, I think we have demonstrated rather powerfully that I myself am not a racist.
• 1:09:03
  How did we demonstrate that?
• 1:09:05
  Well, the accusation that I was a racist was aired publicly and all sorts of people who clearly didn't like me and would love to have taken me down went looking for evidence of racism.
• 1:09:16
  And they didn't find any, because I'm not one.
• 1:09:20
  Not only am I not one, I'm careful enough that I hadn't said anything awkward that would have allowed them to portray me as one in any compelling fashion.
• 1:09:28
  Yes.
• 1:09:29
  Okay.
• 1:09:30
  So I'm not in favor of racism, but I am watching this invasion of the West.
• 1:09:37
  For those of you who have not yet seen my discussion with Anthony Rubin or the Muckraker documentary, both of which you should see the invasion of Europe by Africans who appear to be overwhelmingly both Muslim and military age males overwhelmingly is a clear threat to European civilization.
• 1:10:11
  It is also clearly an exact parallel for what I saw taking place in Central America.
• 1:10:19
  The trip to the Darien Gap revealed a cloaked invasion.
• 1:10:25
  In the case of the Central American version, there appeared to be an actual flow of refugees and an invasion intermixed so that you would mistake one for the other.
• 1:10:36
  And the influx of illegal migrants across the southern border of the US was jaw dropping in its scope.
• 1:10:45
  And that raises all kinds of questions.
• 1:10:47
  Can there be a civilization that takes on a huge numbers of people that don't share its values that don't aspire to assimilate into its culture?
• 1:10:55
  These are not people who are looking to become American because they admire America.
• 1:11:01
  These are not people looking to become British or French because they love Britain and France.
• 1:11:06
  These are people who are being not only allowed to migrate into these Western nations, but are actively being facilitated in their migration.
• 1:11:18
  They're being incentivized and facilitated and protected by the UN and a bunch of NGOs that just like a liberal who views change is good for its own sake, these the UN and these organizations appear to view migration as an inherent good.
• 1:11:37
  Yes.
• 1:11:39
  So it's an uninvestigated starting point.
• 1:11:42
  But that is the assumption that is inviolable.
• 1:11:45
  It is the assumption that is inviolable and it is resulting in me who, you know, like you, has traveled the world, has absolutely delighted in participating in other people's cultures to the extent we've been invited in.
• 1:12:02
  It's been a lovely mind broadening experience.
• 1:12:05
  I'm not against other cultures.
• 1:12:08
  It's one of the most extraordinary things that humans can experience.
• 1:12:11
  Right.
• 1:12:12
  Is to be dropped into or drop yourself into with deference and humility, someone else's world and see how many different ways there are to be human.
• 1:12:27
  At the same time, as much as that is one of the greatest experiences that you can have, we come home.
• 1:12:34
  Why do we come home?
• 1:12:35
  Well, we come home for another group reasons.
• 1:12:36
  One, it is home and you would feel that way about any place that you had grown up in general.
• 1:12:42
  But two, because as much as other cultures are fascinating and delightful to explore, there is also something marvelous about Western civilization.
• 1:12:54
  And I think it's something that our species is depending on, that Western civilization doesn't have to be our version of it.
• 1:13:05
  But the values that allow Western civilization to function where we do not prioritize what lineage you come from, everybody is equal in the eyes of the law.
• 1:13:17
  There's no advantage.
• 1:13:18
  There's no disadvantage that comes from where your people originated.
• 1:13:23
  That structure, the dignity of all individuals, private property, is the only one that could actually stabilize the globe, that could allow us to compete in non-violent ways rather than violent ways.
• 1:13:37
  So if that is true, then there is something very frightening about any process that threatens to disrupt Western civilization.
• 1:13:45
  And Western civilization seems to be actively targeted by this invasion being fostered by the UN and these NGOs.
• 1:13:52
  And the question is, why do those in the West not react like they're being invaded?
• 1:13:58
  And this led me to a very uncomfortable thought.
• 1:14:03
  The uncomfortable thought is the West, which I've just argued is the thing on which humanity is depending for its medium-term survival, the West depends on turning off your...
• 1:14:23
  well, let's put it this way.
• 1:14:24
  I'll try to say it carefully.
• 1:14:25
  The West depends on you turning off your racism.
• 1:14:27
  You have to be willing to collaborate with people who are not from your home population.
• 1:14:32
  And it's super productive when you do that.
• 1:14:36
  However, when you have turned off that racism, you lose your xenophobia.
• 1:14:44
  Now I'm going to argue that we should probably be drawing a careful line between those two things.
• 1:14:49
  Racism is bad.
• 1:14:51
  Prejudice against people based on what population they come from is irrational and counterproductive.
• 1:15:00
  However, you need to have the immunity that recognizes when you're being invaded.
• 1:15:08
  So think about this by analogy to your immune system.
• 1:15:12
  Your immune system, probably more times than it comes in handy, reacts to things that would be better if it didn't.
• 1:15:25
  You react to all kinds of stuff that isn't really a threat to you.
• 1:15:28
  But that is a price you pay for the same reason that your smoke detector goes off when you make toast in order to be damn sure it goes off if there's a fire in your house.
• 1:15:36
  You have to pick a failure mode, and the failure mode that you prefer is more sensitive to things that it shouldn't be than less sensitive to pathogens who could come in and kill you.
• 1:15:47
  Yep.
• 1:15:49
  So if we distinguish between racism, which would be an inherent bias against people who come from a different population, and xenophobia, which is literally a concern about foreigners, the point is actually what we all get taught in the West has blinded us to an influx of people who don't look like us, don't talk like us, and don't share our values because we've been induced.
• 1:16:22
  We've been so carefully taught not to be racist, a good thing, that we over-apply the lesson and we don't understand, "Huh, I wonder what happens if you bring tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who don't subscribe to the idea that every individual is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is entitled to be equally treated, that their life is equally valuable to yours.
• 1:16:50
  What if you flood a system that is based on those principles with people who don't subscribe to them and nobody reacts because they've been told that's your mind playing tricks on you, right?
• 1:17:02
  There is nothing to worry about.
• 1:17:04
  Those people look different and that's fine.
• 1:17:06
  And the answer is it's not the fact that they look different that makes it not fine.
• 1:17:09
  It's the fact that they don't like us.
• 1:17:11
  They don't subscribe to our values.
• 1:17:15
  And they have no incentive to keep the system going.
• 1:17:18
  Now it raises questions as to why the UN is so thrilled to, you know, to upend Western civilization.
• 1:17:26
  Yes, it does.
• 1:17:27
  But it does not, we should not need the UN sign off to say, "Hey, actually, you know what?
• 1:17:32
  I'm not a racist and I'm worried as hell about this.
• 1:17:36
  This is the destruction of my civilization." And the point I've made before, it's like we're out on a boat in the middle of the sea and somebody has decided to sink it.
• 1:17:46
  And it's like, okay, you have a plan for us not drowning?
• 1:17:50
  Yeah.
• 1:17:51
  Now, and your point is about retaining the ability to recognize difference, being able to say in the face of the absurd, the woke position of you're not allowed to talk about that, say, "No, actually, I can see that there's difference." And to then downstream of that say,"Well, when the difference is just phenotypic and these are people interested in collaborating just as I am, be it over a beer or in a business deal, then great.
• 1:18:26
  You look different.
• 1:18:27
  You come from someplace different.
• 1:18:28
  Let's share stories.
• 1:18:29
  Let's learn from each other." As opposed to the difference being, in fact, an indicator that there is no collaborative nature underneath.
• 1:18:40
  And so I do think in part also, this gets to the different ways that this term colorblind ends up being used, not colorblind in terms of what you can see with your eyes, but in questions of race.
• 1:18:52
  That many times people assume you're talking about, "I just can't see.
• 1:18:59
  I just can't see the differences." And that is both a position that is mocked by the left, but it's also the one that they seem to be trying to employ.
• 1:19:08
  That you're just not allowed to notice.
• 1:19:09
  They're trying to induce it.
• 1:19:10
  Yeah, they're trying to induce it in everyone you are not allowed to notice.
• 1:19:14
  If you noticed, you are a racist.
• 1:19:17
  If you notice that people look different, you are a racist.
• 1:19:20
  As opposed to,"I am going..." Yes, obviously, I can see differences between people because that is what humans do.
• 1:19:28
  And in fact, I'm intrigued by the differences between people because we are a population.
• 1:19:33
  We are not a uniform thing replicated clonally over and over and over and over again.
• 1:19:38
  And I am interested in those differences and I am not going to ascribe differences in the willingness to collaborate and be human with me to the phenotypic differences a priori.
• 1:19:53
  But at the point that you have masses of people coming from particular countries through a portal that is left open by some agency that's pretending to care about us and a bunch of NGOs whose only interest is migration no matter what.
• 1:20:10
  Then you start to put the observations that you've already made because you're a human being who has eyes and you say that actually those phenotypic markers do seem to be meaningful now.
• 1:20:51
  And I believe in those values that make up the West.
• 1:20:54
  And they don't have to have come from a country you would call Western.
• 1:20:57
  But the point is, I think anybody who subscribes to the ideas, the values of the West is actually on team future humanity.
• 1:21:08
  And anybody who opposes this thing and wants to go back to genociding each other based on lineage differences is the enemy.
• 1:21:16
  And I hope there's nobody in the category them.
• 1:21:18
  I would like everybody on Earth to recognize the inherent superiority of Western values.
• 1:21:24
  And unfortunately, they don't.
• 1:21:26
  Not everybody in the US subscribes to these values.
• 1:21:29
  Some of the people, the reason that we are under attack is because people within the US have a different view and they have a very lineage based orientation and they would like to upend the civilization and replace it with one that puts their lineage in charge and no thank you.
• 1:21:46
  So the point is, okay, what is the relationship between that map?
• 1:21:51
  It's the West versus everybody else.
• 1:21:53
  Well, the West involves sidelining your instinct to categorize people based on phenotypic differences that tell you where they come from.
• 1:22:03
  That's necessary for the West to function.
• 1:22:05
  But then it blinds you when you have a huge influx of people who look similar and speak with the same accent, who actually have a radically different set of values where you would be reasonable to conclude.
• 1:22:18
  You know, if I'm talking to, you know, a Somali male of middle of military age, you know, in Paris, right?
• 1:22:31
  A recent immigrant who showed up without family.
• 1:22:34
  Right.
• 1:22:34
  The chances are I'm talking to somebody who came from a culture with a set of values that is actually incompatible with my society.
• 1:22:45
  Right.
• 1:22:45
  Could you be wrong?
• 1:22:47
  Of course.
• 1:22:47
  And the point is you would know that you were wrong through conversation.
• 1:22:51
  You would find it out.
• 1:22:52
  But you can't blind us to the fact that there is a radical demographic shift taking place that is carrying a radical cultural shift that you literally can't see because it's not visible.
• 1:23:05
  Right.
• 1:23:05
  The proxy is the population of origin and the danger is the cultural values that are being brought in.
• 1:23:13
  Plus one other thing, you know, it's an old trope from films and other stories.
• 1:23:21
  The danger of the drifter.
• 1:23:23
  Right.
• 1:23:24
  Yeah.
• 1:23:24
  Drifter is a conspicuous, ominous phenomenon because why is that person without a home?
• 1:23:33
  Why are they going from town to town?
• 1:23:35
  It's not an obvious way to get by as a human being.
• 1:23:38
  It has major downsides.
• 1:23:40
  And the answer might be because there's a trail of bodies where that guy shows up, people lose their money, somebody gets hurt, and they can't stay in a place because their reputation doesn't allow it.
• 1:23:50
  So the suspicion of a drifter is a thing.
• 1:23:53
  Now, obviously, you could be itinerant for reasons that are not about you being a bad person, but it is not insane to imagine that, oh, wait, I don't know your story yet.
• 1:24:05
  I'm a little concerned.
• 1:24:07
  Right.
• 1:24:07
  That instinct to be concerned actually applies very well because do we really think that the young men from other parts of the world who are showing up in Britain, in France, in the world, in the world?
• 1:24:23
  In Britain, in France, in Germany, in Spain, that these folks who you can see in this documentary appear hostile to being many of them, not all of them, but many of them appear to be hostile to being filmed, to having discussions, explaining what they're doing.
• 1:24:41
  Do we think that those people were the best and brightest who were doing the best at home and decided to upend their life anyway?
• 1:24:49
  Or do we think, as we've seen in the Central American example, that countries have offloaded some of the burden of their prisons sometimes?
• 1:25:00
  Because why wouldn't they?
• 1:25:02
  Some state that you don't care about has an open border and you're paying all this money to support people, why not just offload them?
• 1:25:10
  So in any case, what I'm trying to do here without this being the last DarkHorse podcast is say that I think we need to go back and rethink the limits on what we are allowed to think.
• 1:25:24
  The last thing you want to do is leave this as a fight between the naive people that you were talking about before who want to train you to be incapable of noticing differences between people and a battle between the race realist, maybe it's not the race realist, maybe it's the white nationalist that I'm most concerned about, who actually are like, "Well, okay, look, in the end, this all comes down to..." The phenotype is the only arbiter of value and we know who's got value.
• 1:25:57
  Well, I mean, let's give them their due.
• 1:26:00
  Their argument is, "Hey, look, everybody else is playing this game.
• 1:26:04
  Everybody else gets a country.
• 1:26:05
  Everybody else is allowed to defend their people except white folks, so this is ours.
• 1:26:11
  Let's defend it." I get it, but the point is that's the non-Western world, in which case, yeah, I guess white people have as much right to do that as anybody else, but the point is the alternative is the world in which we figure out how not to do that without leaving ourselves vulnerable to the invasion.
• 1:26:27
  It seems analogous to encouraging women to act like men at their worst.
• 1:26:31
  Like,"Okay, boys are going to whore themselves around and we don't use that word with them because it's boys?
• 1:26:37
  Well, girls, go for it.
• 1:26:39
  It's awesome.
• 1:26:39
  Everyone else is doing it." That's not a good argument.
• 1:26:42
  It's not a good analytical argument or a good moral argument.
• 1:26:44
  A hundred percent.
• 1:26:46
  All right, two final points.
• 1:26:49
  In thinking about this very uncomfortable question about,"Is racism different from xenophobia and do we need to hold on to enough xenophobia to be able to notice when we're being invaded?" I started thinking about your point about childless women, that the mama bear energy is built in for women and that when you don't have a child because the dynamics of civilization have changed so that not having a child is a normal thing to do, that women adopt these causes and the mama bear energy gets exerted on behalf of whatever it is that they think should be true.
• 1:27:30
  And mothers love their children even when their children do great harm.
• 1:27:34
  Right.
• 1:27:34
  And so mama bear energy for causes often end up, those women end up defending causes even as they can see that their causes were poorly chosen.
• 1:27:47
  A hundred percent.
• 1:27:48
  Now, my point would be, okay, childlessness results in the displacement of mama bear energy towards causes and a blindness to the harm that they are doing in the process, just as you've described.
• 1:28:02
  I want to connect that to the interesting fact of oxytocin.
• 1:28:07
  Oxytocin is a hormone that most of us think of as the love hormone, the cuddle hormone.
• 1:28:13
  Right?
• 1:28:14
  And in fact, it is that, but that is the wrong way to think about it because that is not fundamentally what it is.
• 1:28:20
  It is the in-group out-group hormone.
• 1:28:23
  Okay?
• 1:28:23
  Oxytocin causes you to bond with those close to you and it causes you to suspect those who are distant.
• 1:28:33
  It highlights the in-group out-group difference.
• 1:28:35
  The ultimate in-group is your own child.
• 1:28:37
  Right?
• 1:28:39
  Okay.
• 1:28:40
  Now, when you are childless and the oxytocin is playing whatever role it is in this modern untested way of viewing the world, I think what's going on is that when you embrace the cause of multiculturalism, you are effectively using mama bear energy to pry open the in-group designation to be all encompassing.
• 1:29:11
  It's a utopian idea.
• 1:29:13
  It's insane.
• 1:29:14
  Right?
• 1:29:14
  You don't want to, you know, extend, you don't want to fling the gates of the city open to, you know, marauding hordes.
• 1:29:27
  And multiculturalism, this is again a point I don't think I've ever landed, but I think it's important.
• 1:29:34
  I'm all for what I would call cosmopolitanism, which is to say, I don't want to pretend that we're all the same.
• 1:29:40
  And I like that there are differences.
• 1:29:42
  It's part of what contributes.
• 1:29:44
  And I like frankly, being in a civilization in which there are people who bring different stuff from different parts of the world and pool it together collaboratively.
• 1:29:52
  That's what the West is.
• 1:29:53
  It's cosmopolitan.
• 1:29:55
  I don't want those people if they're not interested in joining.
• 1:30:00
  Right?
• 1:30:00
  In other words, it's one thing to bring whatever tradition and wisdom you have from your ancestor population.
• 1:30:07
  It's another thing to do it and to remain as part of that population while here.
• 1:30:12
  Right?
• 1:30:13
  I want people who want to do both.
• 1:30:16
  I want to bring what they know and assimilate and be part of this emergent West in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
• 1:30:24
  That is the opposite, as much as they sound like synonyms, that is the opposite of this multiculturalism, which really stands for not expecting assimilation.
• 1:30:34
  Multiculturalism is about fetishizing the differences.
• 1:30:37
  Rather than bringing them and pooling them, it is about preserving them in state, bringing in enough people at once that you don't have to learn English.
• 1:30:48
  Right?
• 1:30:49
  You're going to keep your language.
• 1:30:51
  You're going to be able to live how you want.
• 1:30:52
  Hold on to your values.
• 1:30:54
  And the point is nobody has proved that you can have a civilization that lasts, that does that.
• 1:30:59
  I wonder though, I don't know my early 20th century, I think, call it American history well enough to answer this, but I think put Chinatowns aside because mostly we brought Chinese people over or Chinese people were brought over against their will and were not accepted by existing Americans.
• 1:31:24
  They needed to establish different ways of being, but Little Italy, Little Korea, little, I don't know if Little Ireland ever happened, but certainly there were clumps, at least in the Eastern seaboard as people arrived, where you found your people.
• 1:31:42
  And that was, you know, and there you could find the kinds of foods that you were used to and the, you know, maybe the language that you were used to.
• 1:31:50
  And, you know, that was, but over time, such communities kind of dissipated because those people did assimilate.
• 1:32:01
  But it was a different time.
• 1:32:02
  You know, there were fewer people and it was easier, I think, to both be in a small community in a larger city and go out and then come back to something that felt safer and like the homeland.
• 1:32:15
  Yeah, I've thought a lot about this too, because of course, you know, I like that there's a Chinatown, right?
• 1:32:20
  There's nothing wrong with it.
• 1:32:21
  Why is there nothing wrong?
• 1:32:22
  I think thinking in Chinatown maybe is different enough because of...
• 1:32:26
  I think the point is there are cultural gaps that are large enough that you can't jump them in one generation.
• 1:32:35
  And what I don't think has characterized Chinatown, Japantown, Little Italy, is the expectation that the kids don't leave and become American.
• 1:32:47
  And so, again, I would say it's part of...
• 1:32:51
  it's a cosmopolitan phenomenon and it does contribute something, right?
• 1:32:57
  But the point is, were, you know, were the parents in Chinatown inclined to have their children speak Chinese and not English, I'd be very concerned about it, right?
• 1:33:06
  To the extent that a population that speaks Chinese, you know, creates a miniature of its culture, you know, in situ, but its kids go to school and, you know, assimilate.
• 1:33:23
  I think it's just a question of how big a gap can you jump in one generation.
• 1:33:29
  So I don't see it as a threat, but I think it's a very, you know, it is not the case of you come over and you, you know, you immediately join and become American because frankly, or become European because frankly, you know, depending upon where you come from, that's a bigger or smaller jump.
• 1:33:50
  Yeah, and I think the people who have been encouraging, who are just like pro-migration, no matter what, open borders, you know, all of this, have this sense from an earlier moment in time when it was so hard to immigrate to a new place looking very much not like the home population, that spreading your arms open was a generosity and did, you know, bring some risk, but was sort of the only way to actually encourage immigration when that was something that should have been encouraged.
• 1:34:24
  And, you know, of course, the US has this long history of doing so.
• 1:34:27
  And it's not that Americans ever claimed to be excited to see everyone who showed up on our shores.
• 1:34:34
  But unlike Europe, we looked diverse from the beginning.
• 1:34:43
  And so there was the possibility of lots of little outposts from wherever people were coming from, and then also the creation of some kind of a hopefully cosmopolitan culture.
• 1:34:58
  And it's, you know, Europe obviously has a different set of dynamics, both in terms of its much longer history, its more homogeneous cultures, and its proximity to the migrants who are currently flooding in from the south.
• 1:35:14
  Yeah, I would say, I think there are certain hard headed principles that you could just point at the whole problem and say, you know, these things are so secure, one doesn't need to worry about them, you know, at the very least, we should have an honest discussion about migration.
• 1:35:35
  Illegal immigration should result in deportation.
• 1:35:38
  It just simply should.
• 1:35:40
  To the extent that migrants are something that benefits the home population, we should be open to them.
• 1:35:45
  We should be very careful not to flood any, you know, you don't want to flood any part of the country with so many migrants from the same place that assimilation doesn't happen.
• 1:35:56
  That's a failure.
• 1:35:57
  Yeah, so how many, how many people should come in from the point of view?
• 1:36:02
  Well, it's a question of how many is good for the home population, right?
• 1:36:09
  They must be legal.
• 1:36:12
  They must not fail to assimilate by design.
• 1:36:17
  All of those things are just obvious.
• 1:36:20
  And to the extent that we're having some other conversation where the UN is literally conspiring to violate our, you know, sovereignty, that's insane.
• 1:36:30
  The world can't gang up and flood your country with migrants from elsewhere because it has some stupid utopian notion that the world gets better, the more people are uprooted.
• 1:36:42
  Come on.
• 1:36:43
  A, that's dumb.
• 1:36:44
  And B, not your right to say.
• 1:36:46
  Yep, that's right.
• 1:36:49
  I think I've said it.
• 1:36:51
  All right.
• 1:36:52
  I think we're going to save the last little piece that I was going to do for next week.
• 1:36:56
  All right.
• 1:36:57
  And a reminder to check out, if you're interested in books signed by us, written by us, go to darkhorsepodcast.org/books, and you can find them there.
• 1:37:08
  We've got Hunter-Gatherer's Guide in English and in translation of various sorts and Antipode, my first book about my time in research in Madagascar.
• 1:37:16
  And you can go to darkhorsestore.org, I believe it was, to order by October 25th.
• 1:37:23
  That's this Sunday.
• 1:37:26
  Any of the DarkHorse merch that you may have been interested in getting for you or a friend after October 25th, there are no more orders and then we'll re-up the store sometime in 2027.
• 1:37:39
  Our sponsors this week, just a reminder, were CrowdHealth, Mars Men, I see it rolling around the floor here, it's Branch Basics.
• 1:37:50
  All awesome.
• 1:37:51
  Try them out.
• 1:37:52
  And until you see us next time.
• 1:37:55
  Be good to the ones you love, eat real food, and get outside.
• 1:37:58
  Be well everyone.