Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / By Any Means Necessary? The 275th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

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By Any Means Necessary? The 275th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. I'm led to believe it is number 275.
• 1:00:13
  I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein. I'm of course sitting with Dr. Heather Heying. I have also just come back from a kind of a painful excursion. It was a lovely interaction on the far end. I was on Tucker Carlson's program. But Tucker has made the parallel decision that you and I have made to live in a very inconvenient place.
• 1:00:35
  And so basically...
• 1:00:36
  Which means that both ends of the very short trip in both directions, it is just ridiculous to get to as well.
• 1:00:43
  It was like the trip became more viscous the farther along you went and the progress, you know, at the end it was snowshoes and stuff. It started out... It may even... Well, alright, maybe not snowshoe hairs. No, no.
• 1:00:58
  It took me four days of travel to get there and back. Really there's nowhere on earth I could go.
• 1:01:03
  For a wonderful conversation.
• 1:01:05
  Great conversation, you know, is a wonderful, you know, four hours of interaction, much of which ended up on camera. But anyway, it is interesting to see somebody who's made a parallel decision like this and what that does to the inconvenience on both ends.
• 1:01:20
  (...) But I do recognize people.
• 1:01:22
  Yes, well, as I actually mentioned to you, as I mean, you've just gotten back.
• 1:01:25
  We've barely seen each other.
• 1:01:27
  I am sometimes wistful for Portland. I love Portland and I've been back a number of times recognizing many of its, if not all of its deep, deep flaws, most of which are fully reversible if they were just, you know, people in positions of power to do something.
• 1:01:43
  But I was, you know, seeing your travel schedule and recognizing our travel schedule problems coming up and actually having the difficulty of getting off and back onto the island, having high-bashed a trip that we had been invited to do into the Amazon this March, which I'd really been looking forward to.
• 1:02:03
  I was thinking, like, you know, would it have been better for us to stay in Portland? And then I saw come up, I don't even remember where, my news feed to the seventh body this year has been pulled out of the Willamette in Portland.
• 1:02:16
  And you know, I honestly, I don't know, I didn't look into it as this is typical, the bodies just end up in the Willamette being the main river that goes to Portland. Columbia, of course, is there separating Oregon and Washington, but the Willamette is the river that separates West and East Portland. And it made me less wistful from living in the city.
• 1:02:35
  It's not a good. Bodies out of the river.
• 1:02:37
  It's not a good sign that bodies are being regularly pulled out of the Willamette. I will say, you know, I have the sense you miss Portland.(...) I think we should rethink it as missing Portland because basically, no, I've gone back. You haven't gone back. Right. Since we moved, you literally have not been back in the city.
• 1:02:54
  Yeah, but every time you do, you come back and you say, you know, it was really great.
• 1:03:00
  But I also realized that and there's always a, you know, you have to go back there in order to feel the dysfunction of the place.
• 1:03:09
  Absolutely. And I try to, this is part of what I do is animal behavior and place behavior, you know, just observing as anonymously as possible what is true about a place. And so, yes,(...) in the abstract, it's easier to think about the food and the culture and the arts and the people that I know and like.(...) And then to be there, you know, some things about Portland have gotten better since we left. You know, there's less visible homeless encampments and needles strewn and fentanyl zombies in downtown.
• 1:03:45
  Because people are now ending up in the river.
• 1:03:47
  You know, seven is a lot to bodies in the river, but it doesn't account for all the fentanyl zombies that we saw. Right.
• 1:03:54
  But it's still it's still a mess and it still is not, you know, people, businesses are not coming back to downtown having having left because they absolutely had to. So, you know, I think at this point, Nordstrom's is gone. REI is gone. Like, you know, the big the big retailers are gone. And of course, all the little mom and pop stores are, you know, either gone or holding on, you know, tenaciously, but it won't last forever.
• 1:04:21
  Well, it actually read the death of a downtown, which is utterly unnecessary.
• 1:04:24
  Yeah, utterly unnecessary. And, you know, there's a lot of downsides living in a city.
• 1:04:31
  The upsides are fleeing that city because of the terrible way in which it is managed. And that, you know, you're going to be paying the price of living in the city without some of the benefits.
• 1:04:42
  Yeah. But it doesn't be able to drive to an international airport in less than half an hour. It's useful.
• 1:04:47
  It's good.
• 1:04:48
  And indeed, I mean, this is nothing that we were going to talk about today. But when we understood that we had to leave Olympia and we were looking all over the country, indeed, in Europe as well, we had, as I've said, I think, you know, if anyone was looking at my account at Zillow, they would have thought I was completely insane because I had houses saved in like 12 different locations that we were actually legitimately considering.
• 1:05:11
  And our our two I mean, we have our sort of standards about wanting to live in a beautiful place that has access to natural beauty somewhat close. But the two main things that we required of even considering as a location was good schools and relatively close access to an international airport.(...) And then we moved up here.
• 1:05:36
  We actually, you know, our younger son did finish up his high school here and it was great.
• 1:05:40
  Surprisingly great.(...) But the travel got much, much, much more complicated.
• 1:05:45
  Well, raises two issues for me.
• 1:05:48
  One, having been in Portland, Maine, I found myself very near the place where one of my oldest and dearest friends landed.(...) And I went and visited him.
• 1:06:01
  And oddly, I didn't quite put it together until I saw him. He lives on an island off the coast of Maine accessed by ferries rather reminiscent of ours, but not exactly a very, a very served island, very sort of island off the coast. Of Portland, Maine.
• 1:06:18
  Now, but here's the interesting thing, which you and I have not yet had a chance to talk about. This is the second dear old friend that I have dropped in on almost unannounced in recent times.
• 1:06:33
  And these folks, part of the reason that they are oldest and dearest friends is that they're very wise.
• 1:06:41
  And these from high school, one from college. Yeah. And these two friends have something in common, which is that they have effectively rejected.
• 1:06:51
  Social media walked away. In fact, one of these friends, the day that I signed up for Facebook reluctantly.
• 1:06:59
  He left and he put up a message on leaving that said, Bret, turn around.
• 1:07:06
  You're going the wrong way.
• 1:07:09
  But here's the interesting thing. I find something very odd that unites these two people who don't know each other. Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  Which is having departed social media, but they don't know. Oh, that's true.
• 1:07:20
  Yeah. But they don't know each other well.
• 1:07:23
  I'm not going to keep both of their names out of it because this is, you know, a criticism in some ways. But having stepped out of social media, they are terribly confused by the state of the press that we all grew up with. In other words, if you still believe in the press, right, they still think The New York Times is a newspaper and that has created a whole range of conclusions that you would at least be aware were contentious if you were in one of these environments where the heresy is being circulated. So anyway, I find that a very confusing message because my thought is, you know, I sort of wish I didn't have to be on social media professionally. I do. But to discover that stepping away from it causes a totally different dysfunction.
• 1:08:18
  Right. Definitely being on it causes a dysfunction and stepping away from it causes a different dysfunction. That's a kind of a painful lesson. Right. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
• 1:08:26
  I guess I'm not certain of the hypothesis embedded in what you said. That the only way to learn to know about the dysfunction of the mainstream media is through social media.
• 1:08:38
  I was not nearly as aware as I as I might have been at the point that I joined social media for the first time a week after Everkin blew up on us on June 1st of 2017. Super reluctantly. And I said to you, God, I'm gonna have to go on Twitter and I.
• 1:08:55
  Yeah.
• 1:08:56
  And I had explicitly said no to all of it. Until then. And do feel like obliged to be on it.
• 1:09:04
  But living through what we lived through, certainly we were able to see the the lack of rigor in the mainstream media.
• 1:09:16
  Maybe maybe it's one of the two things.
• 1:09:18
  Maybe you have to live through a story by which you can absolutely account for what you know to be true and what you are seeing and put those two together and say, yeah, not a relationship there that there should be.
• 1:09:31
  But it's also true that we all have these are two very smart guys.(...) They have expertise in some things. And many people have noted and in fact, there's a name for that. I can't remember the observation that you read something in the mainstream media and in any kind of journalistic outlet about what you know, something you think, oh, my God, I got it so wrong. They got it so wrong. And then you turn the page and you read something about what you don't know anything. It's like, oh, well, I just learned something like. Why do you assume that they just don't know anything about your topic and they've got it all right and all the topics you don't know anything about?
• 1:10:05
  Yeah, that's called Gell-Mann Amnesia.
• 1:10:08
  Oh, it's Gell-Mann Amnesia.
• 1:10:09
  Yes, Gell-Mann Amnesia.
• 1:10:11
  Well, I will say this. I don't think that being on social media frees you from the delusion about the New York Times or whatever.(...) But it does. I don't know what I've discovered in talking to these two marvelous people is that there is no mechanism for cobbling together an alternative story to what's going on in the official outlets without social media. So the point is social media becomes a prerequisite to departing from the mainstream narrative. It doesn't mean you depart to somewhere that makes sense, but it does allow the possibility of cobbling together a version of events that is coherent. You know, in other words, sense making becomes possible in a social media environment that I think it is not if you are left with, you know, you turn the TV on or you turn the TV off. Right.
• 1:11:13
  I guess my bias is to look at none of it.
• 1:11:17
  Right. Of course.
• 1:11:18
  Like none of it. And, you know, if you're going to look at some of it, you have to look at it. The stuff that is understood to be biased from both sides and social media does a good job of just like it's the Wild West. You're going to you're going to be exposed to all of it. If you can get the algorithms to stop feeding you only what they think you want.(...) But, you know, the other possibility, and I think at least one of these men that you were interacting with recently has done this in the past, is to say, actually, I'm going to understand my world from from, you know, from first principles, from from from direct experience.
• 1:11:50
  Right. However, what if you knew that had you stayed out of the confusing, noisy, often wrong fray in social media, that you would have gotten a bunch of mRNA shots during covid because it would have seemed like the reasonable thing to do and you wouldn't have had enough to go on to figure out that it wasn't right. That I guess my point is it's not, you know, aesthetically, I get the choice, but the fact that it has material consequences is.
• 1:12:25
  So in part, you're making an argument and we haven't even done our ads yet. But in part, you're making an argument that basically it's the hyper novelty argument, again, as we make as we make in Hunter Gathers guide, that there is simply too much now. It's not only the hyper novelty argument that the rate of change itself is surpassing our ability to keep up even though we're the best niche niche switchers on the planet, but that therefore, as a result of that downstream of that is that there's simply too much stuff and you can only opt out of so much. You know, if you are not, if you have not become a hermit or Amish or, you know, whatever of the other traditions that might allow you to say, actually, my choices are inherently limited by a previous choice I already made.(...) Then you are faced with a barrage all the time. And indeed, actually, an interaction in in the bakery this morning, and I was waiting in line to get my coffee and there was a woman and her teenage son behind me and he was just having an impossible time deciding. And I took them to be tourists and now it turns out they go there all the time and he's just looking at the array of deliciousness. And, you know, this bakery, it's all gluten, but they have they have so many choices.
• 1:13:45
  And I said to him, you know what,(...) it could be easier if you take three and then just like let someone else choose three that you can then choose from.
• 1:13:54
  And and he ended up he ended up with something that was amazing, but it took him way too long because and as he said, as this, you know, smart young man said, I feel like I simultaneously want many fewer choices and many more choices. And that is the world that we are living in.
• 1:14:11
  Totally. Paralysis of choice is a real problem.
• 1:14:15
  And being limited to some reasonable choices is is the sweet spot when you can do it.
• 1:14:20
  I wanted to say one other thing about the oddness of us living in the lovely but very inconvenient place that we live, because there are certain things that aren't here. And so and because there isn't a city, there's a town, but there isn't a city right on the other side of the ferry,(...) getting to a city basically costs you a half a day at a minimum to do city stuff.(...) Really a day. More likely, but at a minimum, if you just went straight for it, it'd be a half a day.
• 1:14:49
  You could do a Costco run in half a day if you're lucky.
• 1:14:51
  That's about it. That's about it. But anyway, so I found myself in Portland, which is not a big city, Portland, Maine.
• 1:14:58
  It's a very little city, a cozy kind of a city. Nice, familiar, definitely like decidedly liberal in a way that is now become jarring. Coastal. Yeah. But I mean, it's even like it.
• 1:15:15
  There's hints of Olympia in this place.
• 1:15:17
  It's that, you know, resolutely liberal.
• 1:15:21
  But anyway, put that aside for a second.
• 1:15:23
  I was in this place. And one of the things that you learn when you live in an inconvenient place like we currently learn is that sometimes when you're doesn't matter where you are in the world, you're in a bigger city than you have access to at home. And so it's like, should I, you know, should I go to the Home Depot and look at tools? You know, it's like you would never do that on a vacation, but it makes sense to do.
• 1:15:44
  Well, you would do that in the third world. Like visiting hardware stores specifically in the developing world is fascinating.
• 1:15:51
  Fascinating.
• 1:15:52
  But a Home Depot in Atlanta.
• 1:15:54
  Like why would you do that?
• 1:15:55
  You don't think about doing the stuff, the city stuff, because you happen to be in a city and home. You have no access to it. So anyway, I was out in the evening in the one night I had in Portland and I walked by what looked like a very nice tailor shop. And I sort of vaguely thought I need a suit and I do not. I'm just worn out. But so anyway, I went in and to make a long story short, turned out to be a very good little tailor shop where they, you know, I got really good advice. I, you know, she I did buy a suit and she, you know, took careful measurements. A female tailor. Female tailor. That's actually a female tailor.
• 1:16:34
  And I talked to her about that fact. She was very forthcoming. This is her,(...) I think her father's is gone, but she took over the shop that her father had built and run for many decades. And I think her mother is the in-house tailor in any way.
• 1:16:49
  Very nice clothes. And so, you know,(...) there's a little more than we would typically spend on such a thing. On the other hand, the personal consultation was, you know, worth its weight in gold at some level, just somebody to tell you the truth about what kind of clothes you should wear and you shouldn't wear and why.
• 1:17:10
  And, you know, based both on your anatomy and also the things that you will be doing in the suit.
• 1:17:17
  Yes, exactly. She asked me what I did and she's like, ah, for you, no gray, right?
• 1:17:23
  She's actually bought a blue suit, which is something I probably would not have done otherwise.
• 1:17:28
  Yeah. And, you know, why no gray?
• 1:17:30
  Why no gray?
• 1:17:32
  I think her point was that it was too formal for the subject matter and people would tune me out if I was wearing a gray suit. And anyway, you know, I mean, she, I don't know. Let's put it this way. When I went to, because you gave me the lovely gift of bike building school for my 40th birthday in bike building school, one of the things that the master bike builder who ran the school said is sometimes you don't know to do this or to do that, but you should always make sure that you do whatever you do in the building or the designing of your bike for a reason.(...) And the idea is that if it turns out not to be correct, you can go back and figure out why you did it and switch. You know, your model gets better over time if you always have a reason for the things that you do.
• 1:18:21
  And so well, it's like preloading against Chesterton's fence.
• 1:18:25
  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It really it's an important insight. And so anyway, you know, I listened to what she said and, you know, obviously she's not a biologist. She doesn't. And, you know, even biologists probably doesn't call up exactly the right modality.
• 1:18:40
  But I don't know. I mean, I guess it's a strange word to show up here, but but I gave her a series of, you know, sorts of topics I might be dealing with.
• 1:18:52
  And she was like, OK, yeah, I think I would go with blue. I think I would want some pattern, but I wouldn't want it over the top. Nothing too frivolous.
• 1:19:00
  Anyway, I thought her advice sounded like very high quality advice, sort of, you know, Derek Guy, sort of, you know, somebody who's so conscious about the details of this that they're worth listening to, even if you end up disagreeing over something.
• 1:19:15
  So anyway, I did that and it was this weird thing. Like it seems like, oh, you're going to get a tailored suit 3000 miles from home.
• 1:19:25
  In a small city.
• 1:19:26
  In a small city. Right. But no, it turned out to be like, oh, this is incredibly convenient. It's one block from the hotel I'm staying in, you know, and at home it would be 40 mile if it exists at all, it would be 40 miles.
• 1:19:43
  40 miles isn't the right description.
• 1:19:44
  40 miles of boat ride.
• 1:19:46
  A boat ride that may or may not show up. Right.
• 1:19:48
  That I have to be, you know, at least a half an hour early for in both directions to be guaranteed. So anyway, interesting how it changes your view of being away.
• 1:19:59
  Away is sometimes more convenient than home. That was just an odd.
• 1:20:02
  Oh, for sure. Yeah.
• 1:20:05
  All right. All right. No longer the top of the hour, exactly. But at the top of the hour, we we pay the rent. Yes. So we got locals going on. Watch party there.
• 1:20:14
  Please consider joining us there. And we have, as always, our three sponsors. But so today we are going to talk about once we get to once we get past the sponsors, a little bit about what's going on.
• 1:20:25
  Mahaland, Mahaland. And also concerns laid out by science, the scientific journal, with regard to how the Trump administration is tearing apart scientists and and throwing them in the willamette.
• 1:20:44
  There's only five in the article. I don't know where you can compare the other two.
• 1:20:49
  Post us.
• 1:20:51
  Yes, we're going to we're going to just work our way through that and see how many of these concerns seem seem credible. But but you're going to start at the top of the hour by talking a little bit Mahaland, which makes our first sponsor particularly salient. Our first sponsor is Crowdhealth.
• 1:21:07
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• 1:22:35
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• 1:23:15
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• 1:24:25
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• 1:25:03
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• 1:25:10
  Awesome.
• 1:25:12
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• 1:27:18
  You know, every time you talk about Armora and you say the word seal, it is a test of my maturity and restraint.
• 1:27:26
  Not to bark.
• 1:27:27
  Yes, not to bark like a seal, which I do fairly compellingly.
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  Okay.
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• 1:28:02
  This is a fantastic product.
• 1:28:07
  Because I have begun writing little things in there.
• 1:28:10
  I know. I noticed.
• 1:28:13
  But no, this one. This one is it was implied. Let's put it that way.
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• 1:29:09
  Now that's a tough one because the two teas in a row there already require a certain delicacy in reading it. Which enhances... Literacy. A certain literacy and facility with like letters and sequences. Yep.(...) Which I do not have, but one day perhaps.
• 1:29:28
  The butter.
• 1:29:28
  The butter, exactly. The fermented teas in Nandaka are triple screened for toxins. The many mushrooms in Peeks Nandaka include, but are not limited to Chaga, Rishi and Lion's Mane. And unlike many other mushroom coffees, Peeks uses only the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms. So Nandaka is free of mycelium and grains, which other mushrooms are grown in. Peeks Nandaka provides sustainable all-day energy and makes you feel like you're doing something good for your body. If you're ready to make the switch and feel amazing, try Nandaka today. Right now you can get 20% off plus free a free rechargeable frother and a glass beaker when you shop exclusively at peaklife.com slash darkhorse. That's P-I-Q-U-E life.com slash darkhorse. Don't wait to start your mornings on a healthier, more delicious note while supplies last.
• 1:30:21
  Love the beaker. Yes. What? I love the beaker. I love the beaker too. It's a fine quality beaker.
• 1:30:28
  It's a fantastic addition to a bunch of Pyrex measuring cups.
• 1:30:32
  Absolutely.
• 1:30:33
  Anyway, it seems trivial, but they have it in there in the call to action. So it's worth mentioning that the beaker is actually a piece of the...
• 1:30:42
  Yeah, you feel good about using it each.
• 1:30:44
  Absolutely. Feels good in the hand. Looks good. Yep.(...) All right.
• 1:30:48
  So shall we talk about whatever the hell is going on in the land of Maha?
• 1:30:53
  Sure.
• 1:30:53
  All right.
• 1:30:55
  So this is an actively developing story, fiasco. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but what we have is some developments in the land of Maha and a tremendous amount of confusion over what they mean. And I don't pretend to know what they mean, but I did want to just alert people to the diversity of opinion surrounding what's going on and maybe provide some opportunity for how we might resolve this. Because frankly, people like you and me have invested mightily in getting to this point. We've put our reputations on the line. We've spent a huge number of hours trying to sort through the details of what is making us unhealthy as a nation.(...) And I think a lot of us in the medical freedom movement imagined that we had sort of gotten somewhere at the point that Bobby Kennedy got through his confirmation hearing and it was like, "Okay, finally we can breathe." But it doesn't turn out that we can. And in fact, while spiritually I felt that we could relax and I now feel stupid for thinking that, analytically I knew better. I knew that we were in a particularly dangerous situation, which I described to others as, "Well, we spent all of this time. We beat the odds as a ragtag fugitive fleet of medical heretics.(...) We managed to actually wield sufficient power and fend off the stigma so that we got to a place where actually there was hope that maybe we could change the state of health based on some alterations to the treatment of children with vaccines, with respect to food additives, with respect to things like seed oils." So what we didn't properly anticipate is that we had learned everything that we knew about how to behave as renegades in the context of a battle.
• 1:33:18
  And at the point that Bobby Kennedy ascended to the cabinet, suddenly we were going to be called on to play a whole different game that none of us had ever learned to play. So the point is all of the skills that were won in the battle to get there were now of dubious relevance to whatever this new game is.
• 1:33:39
  And it's sort of like some kind of a sports competition where everything up to the semifinals is rugby and then the finals is chess.
• 1:33:53
  And it's like, you're feeling real good.
• 1:33:54
  You've gotten to the semifinals. You've won the semifinals and you're ascending to the final. And suddenly it's like, oh, gosh, none of the stuff that I learned in this process is relevant. I'm now playing some totally new game at which I'm a novice. I think where we ended up.
• 1:34:10
  I'm reminded, I'm going to cite the reference because I haven't found it elsewhere, but I believe it's in Sebastian Junger's excellent book War.
• 1:34:19
  He describes the systems of leadership of the Navajo Nation.(...) I believe I'm getting this right as he reports it.(...) And he says, and I'm sure this is not unique among human cultures, but he says that there are different governance structures, which include different people during times of war and during times of peace. And there are some of the things that you would expect that are different between those two, such as the wartime leadership and governance has no women in it.
• 1:34:55
  And the peacetime governance and governing body does have some women in it. Entirely women, of course, shouldn't be.
• 1:35:07
  But then there are, I think if I remember correctly, some sort of shamanistic characters that can, you know, figures who can talk to each, but that there isn't exactly no expectation of that.
• 1:35:20
  (...) The same individuals who won the war would be able to lead a people in peace and vice versa. And at the point that the enemies on the horizon, those who have been successfully creating wealth for their people over times of peace are not likely to be the best people to deal with the enemy on the horizon. And so, I mean, I think that's, it's imperfect here, but there is historical and prehistorical reference for the idea that actually we shouldn't be surprised that we don't have it easy when the conditions change. And this is utterly consistent also with what you point out with regard to why Goliath is beatable. That Goliath is not nimble.
• 1:36:08
  Goliath has inertia and it's, you know, it's not going to turn on a dime. And so if you can be the ragtag fugitive fleet,(...) then you're more likely to beat it.
• 1:36:17
  But if the ragtag fugitive fleet itself is warring with each other, then Goliath will have plenty of time to catch up.
• 1:36:23
  That's it.
• 1:36:25
  We as the ragtag fugitive fleet can learn how to fight this battle, but we have to understand that it is a new battle and that the tools that got us here are, some of them might be relevant, but others will not be relevant. And figuring out how to, how to even understand the battlefield of the new battle is a big part of the puzzle. I will point out that your Sebastian Younger Navajo example is actually a great match also for the biblical lesson where in the Old Testament, God takes Moses right up to the promised land. But he doesn't let him in. Right. He's the leader for the desert. He's not the leader for the journey, not the destination.
• 1:37:08
  So anyway, I think there are a lot of places. I mean, this actually is one of the things that Jordan compelled me of when I went on tour with him recently.
• 1:37:17
  Jordan Peterson. He told me Bible stories and I gave an evolutionary spin. I became convinced that at least what's in those books is more relevant to modernity than I had thought. I'm still missing a lot of stuff, which worries me.(...) No end. But in any case, what we have now is a profound case of the fog of war, where we have some nominations that are utterly confusing to the people who, against all odds, have gotten to this point of of Maha, where it has a name and it thinks it has a direction, what it wants.
• 1:38:02
  So the nominations include Vinay Prasad, who was nominated to a position whose name I always forget something in charge of biologics. Actually he is going to be in a position of power to shape the process by which we decide what biologics are recommended, authorized, et cetera.
• 1:38:25
  And anyway, biologics, well, biologics is interesting. There's a reason that it is arcane and that is in some sense so that it does not result in the exclusion of something like the mRNA platform shots from the category because the category is vaccines and a very strong argument can be made that a gene therapy is not a vaccine.
• 1:38:49
  To lead its center for biologics evaluation and research.
• 1:38:53
  Right. So what are you to make of Vinay Prasad doing this? On the one hand, I like Vinay Prasad. I think he has a ton of potential and he's incredibly smart.
• 1:39:06
  (...) I think his heart's in the right place.(...) On the other hand, he has not been spectacularly courageous through these battles. On some topics, he's been better than others. And so there's a question about what to make of him. But I don't want to talk so much about Vinay today. Maybe we'll return to that on another podcast.
• 1:39:30
  But what I wanted to talk about today is what happened, I believe it was yesterday, where Casey means, so people will know, Casey and Kali means are siblings who from many of our perspectives showed up very suddenly in the Maha movement.
• 1:39:49
  Many of us became aware of them as a result of their Tucker Carlson interview.
• 1:39:57
  Casey, which is the woman, is confusing.
• 1:40:00
  Kali is the man. Casey is the woman.
• 1:40:02
  They're siblings.
• 1:40:03
  They're siblings.
• 1:40:04
  Casey also wrote a book that preceded that interview with Tucker substantially.
• 1:40:11
  So it's not with Kali.
• 1:40:13
  They're not co-written. It's like written by Casey means with Kali.
• 1:40:17
  So in any case, they show up as a kind of force of nature.
• 1:40:23
  It seemed to many of us that they showed up from nowhere. They didn't show up exactly from nowhere.
• 1:40:29
  There's a question about what to make of them.(...) And you can see at the point that Casey has been nominated to be the surgeon general, you can see this radical diversity of opinion on what to make of the means siblings in, we'll take two examples. So let's look first at Nicole Shanahan's remarkable tweet from yesterday responding to this. Nomination.
• 1:41:02
  Okay. So she says, yes, it's very strange. Doesn't make any sense. I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment and that people much more qualified would be. I don't know if RFK very clearly lied to me or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions and that isn't President Trump.
• 1:41:33
  With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.
• 1:41:43
  Now that is a, that is a most extraordinary tweet to come from somebody who former vice president presidential candidate, former vice presidential candidate who has been courageous in supporting RFK and here she says, I don't know what's going on with him. Did he lie to me? I mean, that's an amazing, an amazing thing to ask in public. And this I think speaks very well to some of the suspicion that exists surrounding the means siblings.
• 1:42:15
  Why is it that they seem to have come from something like nowhere and sped past all of the people who were battle hardened in the COVID era?(...) Now let's look at what Robert Malone says here, which is in stark contrast.
• 1:42:34
  So Robert Malone says, don't be naive.
• 1:42:38
  Casey Means wrote a book on nutrition and big ag, toxic, big ag, the toxic food supply, not mRNA vaccines.(...) She was provided, she has provided direction for the Maha movement, which is make America healthy again. It is about chronic disease and nutrition as much or more, not just about vaccines. There are many names for the anti-vax anti-MRNA movement. The freedom comes to mind, but these groups and concepts are only a small part of Maha.(...) Anyone who spoke against either mRNA vaccines or vaccines will not get through Senate confirmation.
• 1:43:15
  End of story. Trump will not nominate someone who can't get through confirmation or will have to make promises to senators in the committee that will tie up the Trump administration. What does that say?
• 1:43:26
  That will tie up what the Trump administration can accomplish.
• 1:43:29
  That will tie up what the Trump administration can accomplish. He needs the Senate to confirm his appointments.
• 1:43:34
  (...) All right. Now you can detect here what's going on. And I will say that what Robert is implying is that this is a mirror in some sense of what we went through with Bobby.
• 1:43:54
  Bobby steered clear of vaccines in the period where he was trying to get to confirmation.
• 1:44:03
  We had the same person in front of us, but he had to present with somewhat different priorities in order to get through Senate confirmation.
• 1:44:11
  Right. And that was extremely jarring for many of us because we saw somebody who many of us knew in person and had had conversations with him. So we knew that he understood what we understood about the hazards of these things and about the failure to test them properly and about the lying and the hidden harms and all of that.
• 1:44:31
  And to hear him speaking as if those things were not prominent on his mind was troubling, to say the least. On the other hand, it implies something about this new game that we've been drafted into. Right.
• 1:44:45
  You have to get to the playing field in order to have any chance of addressing an issue like vaccine hazards.
• 1:44:54
  You may have to get there by not talking about vaccine hazards. So now when we look at Casey Means, the question is, is Casey Means there because she won't talk about them or is she not talking about them because at this stage of the game, that's exactly what you would do in order to get to the place where you would have the power to do something useful.
• 1:45:13
  So that's the crux of the issue right there. That's the question that I think people are implying without knowing that they're implying it, which is that Robert's tweet assumes that these are honest organic agents. Right. That they, yes, they showed up suddenly to us, but they're real people and they are what they appear to be and everything is organic and recognize people that you won't get someone who is outspoken about vaccines to pass in a confirmation, which is probably true. Right.
• 1:45:46
  But embedded well at the very end of Shanahan's tweet, we see the other option, which you posit in what you say.
• 1:45:55
  And I think that's by far the bigger issue is we can fight amongst ourselves as to whether or not food dies was the right place to start and seed oils is as important as people think and whether or not vaccines and the vaccine safety and actual placebo testing should be pushed forward in the priority list.
• 1:46:18
  And if all of us are actually what we appear to be, then those arguments are natural and organic and the cards will fall where they may.
• 1:46:31
  But if they were created, if the people were created by something that needed to have, you were about to get here, I know, to have something that appeared to appeal to Maha while actually preserving the integrity of the Goliath behind the scenes, they look like they could be that.(...) And as far as I know, none of us have seen any evidence, nor do I know what the evidence would look like in advance that they're not.(...) So we like the bigger issue then, but they're not talking about the thing that is most important to me and Maha. The bigger issue is, are they what they appear to be?
• 1:47:17
  Right. And the key to this part of the brilliance of Goliath strategy here is that the requirements, you know, the kind of manners that you have to display in order to get through confirmation would cause the two things to be very hard to distinguish. Right? Is the person the antidote to Maha, you know, dressed in Maha clothing, or are they holding back what they understand and what they are willing to do in order to get past the people who in the Senate are guarding against Maha? Right?
• 1:47:57
  Yeah.
• 1:47:57
  How would you distinguish those things?
• 1:47:59
  And so anyway, I don't, I take this, I take both perspectives here very seriously.
• 1:48:06
  Robert Malone is no fool. And nobody who has been part of the medical freedom movement and dismiss his perspective here on any basis, who's done more than Robert, where would the medical freedom movement be if the literal inventor of the mRNA technology had not stood up and said, this is not fit for humans.(...) I took one, had an injury, right? Without Robert, we would be nowhere near where we are. So for Robert to see this as, hey, stop being naive,(...) give this person a chance, look at how much that they have done, I think it is at least a perspective that we have to entertain.
• 1:48:48
  And I will also say he points to Casey Means qualification for the job.
• 1:48:58
  Any on the side that is hostile to Casey point to the fact that she doesn't even have an active license.
• 1:49:07
  I actually don't think that this is a strong argument. My feeling is at this moment, what we need are people who understand what's taking place. And frankly, I'm willing to bend all kinds of rules because frankly, the heretics, you know, are not all highly credentialed.
• 1:49:26
  They're people who figured out how to get where they are. Some of them are highly credentialed like Robert.
• 1:49:31
  But in any case, this person, well, but she, she has the credential, right? She has the MD from Stanford, I think, but she doesn't have the experience, right? She doesn't have the clinical experience. She doesn't have like, and so I don't, I actually,(...) I don't know what the job of search in general is.
• 1:49:49
  It's not to do surgery.
• 1:49:50
  Of course. I don't, you know, but I'm, I'd be curious to know, you know, to read a 10 page per C on the history of and the current understanding of what the, what the role is, and then add to that what our understanding is of what is actually necessary right now. So is it, you know, is there another word for it?
• 1:50:15
  Like you know, the president is also the commander in chief is, you know, is the, is the attorney general the, you know, the, the leading legal counsel in the country. I don't, I don't, I don't know if there are other words for these other appointments, but you know, much less than the credential, which she actually does have.
• 1:50:34
  I do wonder about the experience that she seems to lack, but not knowing what the job is supposed to be. I don't know why clinical experience would matter.
• 1:50:47
  Although it feels like a lack to me at sort of a visceral level, but I don't know.
• 1:50:52
  I would say this is something we have to get good at. It is exactly the same issue as was brought up by Douglas Murray calling Dave Smith out for not having been to the middle East.
• 1:51:06
  And the answer is it's not a zero issue. Somebody who has, it's not the same issue because I don't, without knowing what the job is like art, you know, should, should you be able to voice an opinion about a place you've never been? Yes.
• 1:51:20
  Should you be forthright about never having been there? Yes.
• 1:51:23
  Should you listen to people who've been there and hear what they have to say about what they saw on the ground?
• 1:51:29
  Yes.
• 1:51:31
  I, you, I can't even frame this over here because I don't know what the job is.
• 1:51:35
  Yeah. So, so I, you know, I hear you in one way, but you know, without knowing what the job is, I can't even put like, well, it doesn't have kind of experience.
• 1:51:42
  I don't know if that's relevant. Well, I don't know what the question is.
• 1:51:46
  I mean, look, I would love it if there was a manual and it's precisely defined roles. And so then you could say, well, given the powers that the person does and doesn't have is, or isn't relevant.
• 1:51:57
  That's that's straw manning.
• 1:51:59
  No, I'm not hearing me out.(...) The problem is we are living in a system where many people are,(...) you know, what the president is doing is way outside the scope of what the constitution defines as the role of the president.
• 1:52:21
  I'm comfortable with a surgeon general, you know, in an era where, you know, the medical system is on fire,(...) right? We have absolute insanity passing as standard of practice.
• 1:52:35
  And I am perfectly comfortable with a, a surgeon general who reimagines the role.
• 1:52:41
  (...) Does it matter that the person has clinical experience in a way it does. In other words, I would say, especially with doctors, there's a reason that a, you know, look, you can be a sucky doctor at 60 having spent your career in the clinic, not paying attention to the patterns that are in front of you dispensing standard of care because it makes you legally safe.
• 1:53:06
  You can be a crappy doctor with a lot of experience, but it is hard to be a wise doctor with no experience.
• 1:53:13
  And having had clinical experience, there will be patients out there with stories.
• 1:53:20
  So I guess to move it to a place that I know more about, you know, would you want the president of a university to have never had any time in the classroom?
• 1:53:30
  Well, universities are mostly about research and not the students, I guess, we know that that's the case. And yet you are taking a lot of money from the students for tuition. Therefore, should you actually have not just abstract ideas about what education should look like, but actually have boots on the ground experience with students who also can potentially,(...) you can go back and say, okay, so you know, okay, so this guy only taught, you know, for five years and they were big classes. And so, you know, we don't have a lot, but like, what, what did any of you guys think? And I feel like the same, the same thing would be relevant for, you know, the, the, the experience part is not just for the person who had it, but for the effect that they had on other people and what those other people can report about what the experience was.
• 1:54:13
  So again, back to the Douglas Murray parallel.
• 1:54:20
  I think Douglas Murray had a point,(...) but it wasn't a decisive point. The point is you haven't been to the region.
• 1:54:26
  I have a point, but it's a point.
• 1:54:28
  It's a point. And it has a limited scope.
• 1:54:31
  And I would say in the case of this, it's a point.(...) This person does not have extensive experience, clinical experience. And there are certainly going to be many questions in which you at least want her to understand, I don't have the clinical experience and I need the benefit of somebody who does. Right?
• 1:54:50
  Because it is a handicap.
• 1:54:53
  It just, it leaves you in a position to not have any idea what you don't know.
• 1:54:57
  Right.
• 1:54:57
  But you know, the longer you've spent doing the thing that you are now nominally in charge of, and again, you know, medicine means so many things. It's really unclear what all, you know, might a surgeon general be in charge of.
• 1:55:12
  But I don't, I don't, the idea of someone with merely book learning, being able to really understand the intricacies and the complexities of the human interaction with their own health, their own education, their own legal troubles, just to take, you know, education, medicine, attorney general, since I mentioned that before.
• 1:55:35
  These systems, these three systems are inherently so complex and go beyond what is written in the textbooks and what you can be tested on in a lab practical in the case of medicine that it is the doing of the thing that does actually provide some of the wisdom.
• 1:55:53
  Yeah. The wisdom and in a connection to my conversation with Tucker, I went through with him, you know, we were talking about, he asserted that what I would get intuition was in some way divine.(...) And my point was, no, no, no, I think, I think we can build a model of it that just isn't in which your experience in some realm creates a lot of analytical capacity that is not conscious. And so a person who has had a lot of experience in some realm, you know, you want the surgeon who has done surgeries on the organ in question and seen every variation in that organ and every weird thing that can crop up and detect it early rather than, you know, at the point that you hemorrhage or whatever,(...) you want the intuition to be really well tutored.
• 1:56:42
  You prefer your surgeon to have excellent intuition about what to do over, if you have to choose excellent intuition over what to do, great hands over knows what to say about the description of the process that he will or has engaged in. I prefer the guy with the hands over the words.
• 1:56:58
  Yeah. In fact, I prefer I prefer the guy with the hands over the person who has read the latest on this particular procedure.
• 1:57:06
  Again with words like the linguistic layer is part of what makes humans utterly unique, but we privilege it above all else at our peril.
• 1:57:16
  Yeah. And, you know, and if you look at any realm at all that is physical in nature and difficult, you see sometimes a person who has no ability to articulate what it is they're doing. They can't explain it to anybody, but the point is, you know, they have the feeling of the tool. They know the material. They know what they can get away with. They know how much of a tolerance you have to build in, you know, that, you know, will allow the joint to fit together, but won't create a gap, that kind of thing. Right.
• 1:57:43
  Yeah. Well, and I, since we're here, I may have said this on air before I know I've said it to you, but in the wake of the boat accident that nearly killed me, that was nine years ago now, I have seen a number of professionals of health professionals right away. I saw a series of allopathic doctors who were useless mostly,(...) but I've seen a number of, you know, osteopath, naturopath, craniosacral therapists, physical therapists trained in different modalities, strain counter strain, acupuncture, and the others more than I'm forgetting. And the people, the people who fit with each of those different categories are actually all people that I immediately can envision. And they were all amazing, right? Very different, very different ways of approaching the body and understanding it. Two of these people, and I believe that if I asked a third among the people I'm thinking of, he would agree. But two of the women who helped me the most in my healing, who have great hands, but also great analytics, who are scientists to the core, who are trained to understand, who understand that you don't answer a question with a pat answer that sounds like you know what you're talking about and actually reveals nothing to the person asking the question.
• 1:59:09
  These women have both the hands and the analytics.
• 1:59:13
  And in one of their cases, she was training the person that she hoped to be her replacement in her practice. And she said to me several times, "I just don't think it's going to work because she's, she, my mentee is so smart and so book capable of learning. But the thing that I cannot teach is the hands. You either feel it or you don't. You can either lay hands on to use the religious typical language. You either lay hands on and you feel the energy, if you will, and know therefore where to go. And amazing if you have the analytics to say, "Oh, actually I'm feeling it there. I know what systems are there. I know I'm going to go farther there."(...) But you can't teach the hands.
• 1:59:59
  You can teach the analytics to some degree. Some people won't have capacity,(...) but the analytics are more teachable just like in science.
• 2:00:08
  You can teach statistics.(...) You can teach data analysis. You can't teach hypothesis generation. You can't exactly teach experimental design a little bit, but that's one of the things I'm best at.
• 2:00:21
  And it was amazing to see. And we try to steer students into experimental design that would actually reveal what their hypothesis was trying to test. And some people just would propose things like,"That would be a cool experiment. It has nothing to do with your hypothesis." So the same thing with the hands. And I don't need the surgeon general to have good hands inherently, but I need them to have good something. Something over in this intuitive realm, in this non-linguistic, non-analytical realm that has to do with experience, but also would reveal to both her and the people with whom she had interacted. Do you have this thing and did it get better over time?
• 2:01:04
  You need somebody who has... Even if the answer is that you're going to end up in a position like this consulting other people because you can't be a master of all of the realms that you're going to be in charge of. You have to...(...) Maybe the best skill to have for many of these generalist roles is, "Can you spot a bullshitter? And can you spot somebody who has insight?" Somebody who has insight and they're trying to tell you something, even if they don't know exactly what it is, that person is worth listening to.
• 2:01:34
  And that's where being skilled in places other than strict analysis helps because there are many, especially in elite circles and academic circles and intellectual talking hand circles(...) who will dismiss you if you are using languages grammatically incorrect, either in writing or in speech, for instance.
• 2:01:54
  And we used to see this a lot in our students.(...) Some of the most brilliant of whom had not yet benefited from having any decent schooling and so didn't know some of the basics, but the lack of basics was obscuring for many of their teachers the fact that they actually had great talent that needed to be honed. And so if you only...
• 2:02:18
  I think from what I've seen of me and putting aside the question of, I think the bigger question of, are they what they appear?
• 2:02:29
  Assuming that they are what they appear, the fact that she, by her own account, stepped out of the mainstream medical practice, allopathic medicine, because of what she saw as its failures,(...) says a lot about her ability to recognize failures and to hopefully see the wisdom of alternative kinds of practitioners.
• 2:02:56
  If the story is accurate and we don't know.
• 2:03:00
  I think Shanahan's no holds barred analysis is something we have to keep ever present. Is this constructed to fit into our blind spots so we miss what it is? Or is this a truly unique origin for a renegade who arrived from a different path? And I think that's really the issue. Is this a fellow traveler who didn't travel the COVID road that many of us traveled to the space we end up, but has arrived at many similar conclusions about the dysfunction? Because frankly, it doesn't matter where you start, the dysfunction is what it is. And if you watch medicine engaging problems in ways that are going to create injury and avoid cure...
• 2:03:44
  Well, and there's actually, there's again,(...) assuming they are what they appear to be, there's actually some value in this because I think, again, over an academia space, we have too many people who woke up to the problems in academia with DEI, diversity,(...) equity, exclusion.
• 2:04:03
  It is exclusion, diversity, equity and inclusion stuff. And with stories such as ours and such, and they now believe clearly, and I've seen this from the organizations that I've been involved in, that all you have to do is scrape the woke off the top, scrape the DEI off the top, and you're going to be left with that beautiful nugget of academia that was functioning so brilliantly back in 2010. Like, no, it was not. And if you think it was, then I do not trust you to rebuild higher ed, because you will build it in the vision that it was already in and it was so, so flawed. So the reason that comes up here is I actually don't, probably she said something, but I have no idea what her history during COVID was.
• 2:04:47
  But having separately and earlier and independently seen many of the problems with allopathic medicine is suggestive of a deeper resonance with being able to see the rot at the core as opposed to, ah, let's just scrape the stuff off the top that got in and then we'll be fine.
• 2:05:07
  Yeah. My, my feeling is if the story is true, it is a powerful recommendation.
• 2:05:13
  (...) I'm agnostic on the truth of it as I, as I know you are. The story being true. The origin story of the, of the, I was, I was on the road to a successful career at the height of medicine, you know, with the best possible credentials.
• 2:05:31
  (...) And I became completely disillusioned with what I was seeing around me. And it resulted in me walking away from that, what would have been a stellar career in medicine because I couldn't, I couldn't live with it. Yeah.
• 2:05:45
  If that story is true, then it's powerful. And if it's not true, it's a great cover story. And that's sort of where we're stuck.
• 2:05:53
  Now I did want to go and show you Robert Malone wrote an essay and there was a particular section of it that I want to.
• 2:06:01
  Like today in response to all this?
• 2:06:03
  Yeah. Okay.(...) And actually you will do a better job of reading it. Would you be willing?
• 2:06:07
  Sure. This is from Robert Malone's essay today or yesterday. Yep. And he writes, big pharma and big ag are throwing money behind some of the conservative influencers and appear to be using bots to throw dirt on Dr. Casey means and drive divisiveness and extremism within the Maha base.(...) There was a pattern of these posts just as Nick Sortor revealed that the pro soda for snap recipients and anti-canadie posts were orchestrated by influensible, a public relations firm offering influencers up to a thousand dollars per post to oppose snap reform. I hypothesize that the same is happening as these same corporations tried to kill Casey means his nomination.
• 2:06:43
  (...) There are way too many comments from one of the fake accounts coming in on this topic on acts in opposition to this search and general appointment. It reeks of bot farm activity.
• 2:06:53
  Swarms of paid bots are routinely used to drive influences into more radicalized stances. It is a trap that many have fallen into. Can we keep going?
• 2:07:01
  Yeah.
• 2:07:02
  An example, excuse me. An example, no matter what one thinks about the Israel Gaza conflict, many young conservatives have believed that thousands of their followers are anti-Semites. They've been pushed into writing and saying more and more outrageous things. So I'm going to need you to scroll because I've run out of room here. I've run out of words, Jen.
• 2:07:20
  Can't scroll.
• 2:07:22
  All right. Maybe this is sufficient.
• 2:07:27
  So what I find interesting here is that Robert is suggesting an explanation for the resistance to Casey means born of effectively an organized effort to slander her.
• 2:07:49
  That might be true. But it's fully separate from what Shanahan and you are.
• 2:07:59
  100%. And I have not seen that effort.
• 2:08:01
  What I've seen is a lot of people.
• 2:08:02
  So I also see that and say, I don't like, I haven't seen that, but that doesn't, that doesn't mean that it's not.
• 2:08:08
  It doesn't mean it's not there. And you know, multiple things can be true at once. I've seen a lot of people that I know personally very confused by the mean siblings and their sudden or seemingly sudden arrival, very troubled by the nomination in this case, because(...) these people who many of whom I know to be good people and well intentioned imagine much better choices from their perspective.
• 2:08:35
  And I also, I understand Robert's point, which is, you know, if you're, if you're better choice couldn't get through the process of confirmation, then it's not a better choice. Right? So anyway, I get that. But the interesting point is you've got the Maha movement divided over two.
• 2:08:56
  I wish there was an alternative to hypotheses of collusion,(...) right?
• 2:09:01
  You've got one in which the collusion is to create a false profit and advance them to a position of power in order to fend off the medical freedom movement. And the other in which there is a campaign to misportray somebody as a false profit created for this purpose. And so this is a Hall of Mirrors and it is a very dangerous place to find ourselves.
• 2:09:29
  Totally predictable.
• 2:09:30
  Goliath's interests are certainly served by us having that battle.(...) Right? You know, geez, which conspiracy is it? Oh my God, that is not a, an enviable position from which to do battle. So I don't know what to make of these things. I will say I do think being overly pure and demanding that the candidate who is nominated to the office, you know, is, says exactly what we would say. If what we would say would kill the ability to get there, then the point is we should expect the person not to be saying just as we knew, you know, Bobby's understanding of COVID and the mRNA vaccine hazards. And we tolerated his silence on these things and didn't assume that it meant that he had forgotten, right? We understood there's a political game. It has to be played.(...) And you know, we needed to be supportive of that.
• 2:10:25
  In this case, we don't know whether it's that moment, the moment that we should be reacting negatively because there's something better that could happen or needs to happen, or we should, you know, once again, sit on our hands and, and, you know,(...) allow this phase to pass.
• 2:10:40
  Well, there's obviously something very different about the two moments. I mean, it just almost doesn't bear mentioning.
• 2:10:47
  But what we saw happening as, as Kennedy was going through confirmation hearings could be read as a betrayal.
• 2:10:58
  But many of us actually knew him.
• 2:11:02
  And understood that while it was possible that he could have been threatened, as we talked about, as you talked about here, it was not possible in the opinion of many of us, including the two of us,(...) that he was not as he appeared as he had appeared to be.
• 2:11:25
  Yeah.
• 2:11:26
  That's not to say that he couldn't end up betraying the cause if, if threats came in for those he loved.
• 2:11:31
  Sure.
• 2:11:32
  But this is, this is a different question. Yes. So this, this question is who, like, who is it among us who is inherently, explicitly vouching for the history that these two claim to have had.
• 2:11:50
  And I, you know, I see what, what Robin Malone has written and I resonate with it, resonate with both of these positions. But I, I don't hear in that a personal endorsement. And I don't think that we should require personal endorsements to be necessary, but many of us knew for sure that Bobby was what he appeared to be, whether or not we would ever see him again.(...) Whereas I don't know who is saying that about the means.
• 2:12:22
  So the question is a different one.
• 2:12:24
  The question is a different one. And the scenario is also different because if you track Bobby's history,(...) Bobby paid a spectacular price to get where he is.
• 2:12:36
  And so he took penalty after penalty after penalty.
• 2:12:41
  It's not what you would do if you were in it for yourself, right? It was costly to him in a profound way, in a personal way, right? Where his family's have come out publicly against all kinds of ugly stuff.
• 2:12:55
  We can't say that. And it's not Casey means fault, but the point is actually, you know what Casey means went from obscurity to nomination to the role of surgeon general in very little time at all. So that doesn't mean that she's not what she appears to be, but it certainly doesn't give us the kind of confidence.
• 2:13:18
  If we had watched her get beaten up the way Bobby has been beaten up for many, many years, then we would have a different sense about what actually is this.
• 2:13:31
  So yes, but that's a different point than the one I was making, which is that or if there were a handful even of people whom many of us had separately come to trust, who said, actually, no.
• 2:13:45
  I've worked with her for many years. I've known her. This, that, you know, whatever it would be. Yeah.
• 2:13:52
  Whereas what we see are, can't you see that this is good for us?
• 2:13:55
  Yeah.
• 2:13:56
  Like maybe it is, maybe it is, but that's different from is this are these people with(...) their apparently the history may be deep, but the history looks shallow because of the lack of corroborating, consilient evidence.
• 2:14:18
  Yep. So where this leaves me is I want to know the answer to this question because this is either a moment in which we should back this person because this is a very positive thing, as Robert puts it, or we should oppose this person because this is the undoing of all of the work that so many of us have taken risks for and done so much work for. And frankly, it's the it would be the the death of hope for a vast number of injured people, future injured people who will be injured if we do nothing about, you know, for example, the shots that are doing the damage. So what I am hoping is that Casey Means will agree to talk on camera and we can find out what it is that she believes, how she came to those beliefs and what it means. I am aware that she is in a difficult situation. You know,(...) hopefully she will see this and she will listen to the entire thing and understand that I'm aware there may be, you know, if she if she is what she appears to be, there may be lots of things that are unspeakable at this moment because she faces a confirmation. But I still believe we can find out what's in her heart if she'll come talk. And I hope that she'll do it.
• 2:15:42
  So did you want to talk about I thought you also wanted to go to the middle ground scramble and not we're going to save the other discussion.
• 2:15:51
  Let's put it this way.
• 2:15:53
  There's stuff for our next livestream that I think is worth surfacing. It's in an adjacent territory.
• 2:16:01
  So given that we're going to save the other thing that we were going to talk about today, you don't want to go there now.
• 2:16:07
  I don't know. I'm not prepared to explore it fully.
• 2:16:13
  OK, so I think that that wraps it up then.
• 2:16:17
  All right.
• 2:16:20
  We were having technical difficulties, so it's hard to know what all you guys can see at the moment.
• 2:16:30
  But we will be back on Tuesday and a day early next week as we are a day late this week.
• 2:16:41
  We'll be back on Tuesday.
• 2:16:42
  Join us on Locals and gosh.
• 2:16:47
  Gosh, just thrown.
• 2:16:50
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• 2:17:06
  Be well, everyone.