A (2:03)

Yes.

B (2:03)

Pretty great.

A (2:04)

Which is pretty great. It's been decades since I've seen an armadillo, and I would like to have seen an armadillo.

B (2:09)

Yeah, they're not, they're not the brightest of mammals.

A (2:11)

That's not their strong skill, I must say.

B (2:13)

I, I was walking. I was actually on the phone with our son. Our son. One point. And walking. And sort of came up short. It's like, yep, that is the back end of an armadillo trying to get into a hole by a stump. And the armadillo was panicking, panicking, panicking, and then clearly decided that it achieved its goal of becoming invisible. Two thirds of the armadillo was still patently visible, and it was still even, like, shaking its butt a little bit.

A (2:37)

Yes. They are, as you say, not the brightest animals. And in my experience, their vision isn't so good either.

B (2:44)

Yeah. Later, by our friend Mike's hives. He's. He's. He's a bee guy. He's actually. He makes the most amazing honey out of Bastrop county in Texas. And the bees make the most amazing honey and he facilitates their making of the honey. But I saw. I was walking near them and an armadillo came running towards me as if I wasn't there. And it's not that they aren't scared of apes. They are.

A (3:10)

Right.

B (3:11)

He did not see me. He or she.

A (3:12)

Metaphorically speaking. When God invented the armadillo, he quickly realized it was going to need some armor. Yeah.

B (3:19)

Yeah. Or to protect it from itself.

A (3:21)

Right.

B (3:21)

Or its own bad instincts.

A (3:22)

Yes. It was going to have some run ins and it needed a plan B rather than just escaping based on its insight into the world or speed.

B (3:31)

Yeah, well, yeah, actually, no. Let's. Let's. Let's pay. Let's pay the rent up top. Let's. Let's do the top of the hour ads as we always do. 3. Three sponsors whom we very much like. And that's why you hear us reading, reading the ads right now. And then we'll get into some of the heart of the matter.

A (3:52)

Totally. Totally. All right. I'm going to do my best at reading. Not always a strong suit, but we'll see. Our first sponsor, Heather, is crowd health. And crowd health isn't insurance. It's better. As you well know, health insurance in the United States is a mess, to put it mildly. From overpriced premiums to confusing fine print, endless paperwork, claims that don't get paid, customer service that is unhelpful and hostile. These complicated systems aren't functional and they wear us down. We used to contend with this madness, but not anymore. There is a better way. You can stop playing the rigged insurance game. You can have crowd health instead. Crowd health is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense. With CrowdHealth, you get healthcare for under $100 for your first three months, including access to a team of health bill negotiators, low cost prescriptions and lab testing protocols, and a database of low cost, high quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth. And if something major happens, you pay the first $500 and then the crowd steps in to help fund the rest. It feels like the options we used to have before Obamacare messed everything up. And after we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace. It was awful. Our family of four had health insurance for emergencies only, and we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that was unresponsive and unhelpful. Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever. Heather went looking for alternatives, and she found crowd Health. We have now had two sets of great experiences with crowd health. Our younger son, Toby broke his foot in the summer of 2024, and Heather slipped on wet concrete and split her scalp open a year later. Both times we went to the ER and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff. In both cases, Crowd health paid our bills with no hassle. Their app was simple and straightforward to use, and real people who worked at crowd Health were easy to reach, clear and communicative. With crowd health, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but any event that costs more for but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy or an accident, you pay the first 500 and they pay the rest. Seriously, it's easy, affordable, and so much better than health insurance. We can still hardly believe it. The health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in their same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. Don't do it this year. Take your power back. Join Crowd Health to get started for $99 a month for your first three months using the code darkhorse@joincrowdhealth.com that's joincrowdhealth. Code darkhorse. Remember, crowd health is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. Join CrowdHealth.com didn't quite nail it, but close.

B (6:43)

Wasn't bad. No, wasn't bad. All right. Our second sponsor this week is Armor Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. Here at Dark Horse, we talk frequently about the fact that we live in an age of hypernovelty. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, and even we can't keep up with the rate of change that we are enacting on ourselves. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artific light, seed oils, microplastics, endocrine disruptors in our air, water, food and textiles. And there are myriad other modern stressors like overcrowding and having too little control over our own choices in life. Here's something you can control. Strengthen your immune health with a BioActive whole food that is armor of Colostrum. All of this hypernovelty can disrupt the signals that your body relies on negatively impacting gut, immune and overall health. Armor Colostrum works at the cellular level to bolster your health from within. Colostrum is nature's first whole food, helping to strengthen gut and immune health and fuel performance. Armor Colostrum is a great add to smoothies. I love it with banana and mint and cacao and raw milk. Bovine Colostrum can support a healthy metabolism and strengthen gut integrity and Armor Colostrum is a bioactive whole food with over 400 functional nutrients including but not limited to immunoglobulins, antioxidants, minerals and prebiotics. Armor Colostrum starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass fed cows from their co op of dairy farms in the US and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed. Unlike most colostrums on the market which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, Armour Colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing casein and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate free. People who have used Armor's Colostrum have reported clearer skin, faster and thicker hair growth and better mental concentration. In addition, people using Armour's Colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep and fewer sugar cravings. Armor Claustrum is the real deal. We've got a special offer for the Dark horse audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armor.com darkhorse or enter darkhorse to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's armra.com darkhorse and our vinyl sponsor. I'm trying to trick my computer.

A (9:00)

It's an elegant solution.

B (9:01)

It's there. There are no elegant solutions here. Dark Horse.

A (9:05)

Apparently there are no elegant solutions, only trade offs. As Thomas Soul says. Well, well, he doesn't really say exactly.

B (9:12)

No when I feel like we could come up with elegant solutions, but somehow this is where we're at. It's probably not even a solution. It's probably just kludgy without even solving anything. Which, you know, the worst of both worlds. Our final sponsor I've got an Our final sponsor this week is Clear. That's Clear, a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. It's widely available in stores and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic. It's Clear, but it's spelled X L E A R pronounced Clear. Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, which seems obvious to us today, but was not then the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Clean up the air and water and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person. But it's rare that we get sick through our hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose. Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter Clear Clear again. X L E A R is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, also spelled with an X A5 carbon sugar alcohol. Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars in RNA and DNA. While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons.

A (10:43)

Sugars Car bones Car bones are a thing, but never heard of a car bone?

B (10:49)

Yeah, I don't know. Most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like glucose and fructose. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues. However, in the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including Strep, SARS, COV2, and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast and easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to Brett's conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the inside rail in November of 2024. Or Brett's conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory, in May of last year. We recommend those conversations, and we highly recommend CLEAR as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an X X L E A R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.

A (11:52)

Excellent. You know, when I hear Lon Jones sort of sounds like a Wild west gunslinger to me.

B (11:58)

Yeah, totally. I know you have lots of places you want to go today. I know there's some places that we want to go today, but given your introduction with a possible Vladimir Lenin quotation about some decades, nothing happens. Nothing happens. Or a week's worth of something happens.

A (12:18)

No, no. In some decades, nothing happens. And in some weeks, a decade happens.

B (12:22)

Okay. So in light of that, I was thinking that I might finish by reading this famous poem by William Butler Yeats. But maybe we should start here. All right, Just as a framing. So it's the Second Coming by William Butler yeats, published in 1919. So he was. He did not know that he was between world wars, but he was just post World War I. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs, while all about it real shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. The center must. The center. Sorry, the center cannot hold is the phrase that most everyone in modern times is familiar with, whether or not they know that. It comes from Yeats. And it feels, you know. There is much ink has been spilled over the interpretation of this poem as. As is true of many great poems, because unlike prose, they are not meant to have. Unlike most prose, they are not meant to have a single interpretation. But variously, history is cyclic. We are exiting one horrible age and entering another. But there is no promise that the new one shall have a better moral center, a stronger one, or that it itself shall redeem us. Those are some of the interpretations of what this poem as a whole means. It is the origin of the phrase slouching towards Bethlehem in which we are inexorably returning to someplace that perhaps brought light at one point but may not again. The center cannot hold. That is certainly what it feels like right now. In the world.

A (14:58)

Yes, it's a brilliant poem, maybe my favorite. And I agree it is not designed to have a single interpretation. It's what the kids call a vibe. But it obviously resonates across many decades, more than 100 years at this point.

B (15:20)

Right.

A (15:21)

For a reason. And I have to tell you, my head has been absolutely spinning in light of everything that is emerging and trying to just make sense, even basic sense of it, and hadn't thought of this poem the whole time, but you're right, it puts it in. In stark relief where we are and the center cannot hold, but at some level it must. Right?

B (15:48)

I mean, that's. That's where we find ourselves over and over and over again. It's not working, and it must work, you know, and. And this is the argument of people in many places on the continuum across many domains. You know, sure, the institutions are fail, failing, but we need them. And then there's a, you know, there's a disagreement over, yes, we need institutions, but do we need these ones? You know, aren't these institutions too flawed? Don't we need to Phoenix them then? Don't we need to watch them as they destroy themselves and from their ashes build new ones?

A (16:22)

Yeah, build something that functions. Because we can't. We can't live like this, obviously. We have total collapse of all the things on which we're depending. But the edifices still stand, which is the worst of both worlds, because it leaves you without. You know, we don't seem to have an FBI. We might need something to do, investigation on behalf of the public, but you can't set one up because there is one. So anyway, hard to know.

B (16:50)

And that's actually, I think, part of what bureaucratic bloat is at a smaller level, maybe usually at a less important level in corporate bloat, like, oh, we had a thing that did this job. And usually people think of this like, oh, it just. Like it's scaled up. We needed more things, but we've seen this most directly. But I certainly have seen it over and over and over again at the academic level, where you have something that works, but one piece of it starts to fail. So you have the creation of a center or, you know, like something else that's kind of doing the job and then that is failing. And so you have this. And, you know, you just get colleges upon colleges and systems upon systems and centers, and, and. And it feels incomprehensible if you walk in at. At the moment that everyone, you know, walks in at, you know, whatever point they Enter it. Unless they were part of the creation. Like what is this mess? What is this madness? Like, why do we have this? And you know, even if each decision, and you know much of what we will talk about this week were not decisions made in good faith or good conscience, but even if each decision to fix a wrong, to right a wrong, was made honorably, that doesn't mean that the system that you end up with is functional or honorable.

A (18:01)

Yes, and sometimes the systems that we assume were set up honorably weren't sure. Anyway, upcoming podcasts will cover one such instance that I've just learned where I assumed something had been set up in good faith that just wasn't. But. Maybe an overarching theme so that we can understand the rest of what we have to cover today is as longtime Dark Horse viewers know, we talk frequently about the distinction between complicated systems and complex systems. And all of our institutions are set up to function within a complex system. Humanity, civilization, the are complex systems inherently. And what I think we are seeing is the fact that you can't set up a static system or even one that you have built the provisions to update that's going to accommodate the kind of parasitism that evolves in a complex system. In other words, you need to have something analogous to an immune system in order to prevent your well intentioned institutions from being overwhelmed by the things that would love to get a hold of them and use them for their own purposes against the public spirit. And that's where we are. There's a reason that we're watching it across every institution. There are certainly conspiracies aplenty involved in the failure of those things, but the idea that there would be things trying to gain access and that they would eventually find their way in is pretty well guaranteed if you don't have a complex system fighting it, something analogous to an immune system. And I don't think we've ever figured out how to build such a thing. So we are living in an era of jaw dropping corruption.

B (19:45)

Maybe just to return to my brief focus on bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is made up of entities that are complex systems, individual humans, but it is inherently a complicated system itself. And so the beings who are running it may assume that what they're involved in is complex like they are, but it, but it is not and therefore cannot solve the problems of complexity.

A (20:09)

Yeah, there's a reason that we analogize them to Cox. Right. It specifically tells you them, the people who staff these systems. Right. They are cogs. When we dismiss, you know, their functioning, we talk about them you know, COG is a simple entity, you know, maybe not at the material level, but it can't keep up with a complex problem like corruption. So anyway, it's an arms race and there's a reason that we've lost it across the board. And it is, it's that the complexity got the better of the complicated, and that was predictable enough. Of course, our founders didn't know about complexity. Right. We had not.

B (20:49)

I'm sure some of them intuited something about complexity.

A (20:52)

They feared things that we would now understand as complex, like private interests overwhelming government in the spirit of the public. But they didn't have the tools, and we still don't have the tools to describe a system that resists this. All right, I think the first thing that we should address is the emergence of Robert Trivers email. There are actually several emails in the new Epstein release. And we should talk about our relationship to Bob, and we should talk about what we see and what we think others see, especially in the email that has gotten so much attention.

B (21:31)

Do we start with the email or.

A (21:33)

Do we go the should. I think we should put Bob in context so people understand where we're coming from. So Bob was my undergraduate advisor.

B (21:43)

He was my de facto undergraduate.

A (21:44)

He was your de facto advisor? Yes. Your actual advisor.

B (21:49)

Doesn't matter.

A (21:50)

It doesn't matter.

B (21:50)

I was, I, I was not able to be a biology major, so he was my de facto advisor and I was his research assistant for over a year.

A (21:58)

Yep. So at the point that you and I landed at ucsc, I was evolution crazed. And I had showed you why this was such a powerful way of viewing the world. And you were becoming evolution crazed as.

B (22:17)

Well, to use that word. But.

A (22:19)

Okay, well, let's just say at the point you discover that there's a framework that allows you to think about all sorts of things that you might be thinking about otherwise, but not know how to work with it. It's very, it's exhilarating to find a framework that makes these questions tractable. We landed at UCSC and I remember you saying to me, do you know who's here? And I said, no. And you said, robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Darwin. And I was shocked and delighted. And you and I signed up for his amazing social evolution course. He was a master lecturer and he.

B (23:04)

He'S a brilliant teacher.

A (23:05)

Brilliant teacher. And he, you know, covered all the most fascinating topics. Especially he was very focused on human beings. And it was just a mind blowing experience to be in this class and to hear this great thinker expound on all of these topics. He was very scientifically rigorous. He was very aware of what he didn't know. He had all sorts of the best characteristics of a scientific mind. And anyway, we began and he was.

B (23:34)

Generous with both his mind, his thoughts and his time.

A (23:38)

Not only that, but as you've discussed publicly, he warned us when we went off to graduate school that we should make sure that our experience maintained contact with undergraduates. Because he said, they will ask you questions that people who are more expert will not. And they will push you around and they will keep your mind alive and agile in a way that if you went to somewhere like Rockefeller or something where there were no undergraduates. The point is, everybody's learned what questions we don't ask because we can't figure out how to answer them. And so your mind can become stale.

B (24:18)

And this will maybe be less obvious to people. But he also said, go to a place with a museum. What is the advantage of being in a museum? I said to him, but Bob, I want to be an animal behaviorist. In museum. Everything's dead. Not so much behavior there, right? He said, sure, fine. But a, you know, there's. There are questions to be asked of the collections of the organisms in the collections that you probably haven't imagined. But more important by far is that a museum is a place where people come. And this is part of the, the tragedy of the death of research museums that increasingly when people need to see collections, want to see collections to answer scientific questions that they have, they go to someplace off site and. And run into no one but you. Museum. As the Museum of Comparative Zoology was at Harvard when he was there as a graduate student and very early in his career and at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, where we ended up doing our graduate work, were world class, you know, some of the absolute best research museums in the world. Museums of zoology. And people would come through all the time to do research. And so you just run into people if you were hanging out in the, in the range, hanging out in the collections. I was a curatorial assistant for a couple of summers and they just the number of people who would come through from other universities, including from Europe, and they would have some particular question that they were there to do. They were measuring scales on lizards from a particular spot because I was in the herp division where we had collections of reptiles and amphibians. But of course, no one of any note is only going to be focused on their particular research question at a time. And so Bob's Point which had been invisible to me before was you want to be exposed to as much ideas as possible in order to stay as vibrant as possible and to just to be learning and to be thinking scientifically as broadly as you possibly can. The narrower your focus, the narrower the particular place where you are with regard to how many people come through, the fewer interactions you have with people who haven't yet been exposed to the ideas of your field. And this is the point about teaching undergraduates. The less good a scientist you will be no matter what your chops are to begin with.

A (26:36)

With absolutely. And these both prove to be highly predictive. You know, I think the teaching of undergraduates is great and they do ask you questions you won't get anywhere else. And our training in a museum that has sadly been crippled since we left as the, you know, bean counters have decided museum work isn't important. But while we were there, it was a great experience. Wouldn't. I wouldn't trade it it. Okay, so Bob is a friend of ours and several people have on X asked, you know, well, what do you think of the Trivers revelation? Why aren't you speaking? And I will say the situation is a delicate one and I'm going to share something with you that will explain to you why I wasn't eager to rush into that frame. Bob is in. He's on hospice. He is dying. In fact, he has lived longer than he was expected to live. This is not a new issue. He is completely not cognizant anymore. He could die anytime. And at the point he does, I would imagine that there's going to be speculating about whether the timing of his death, in light of the embarrassing release in the Epstein files, is a little too convenient. It isn't. It's just a coincidence. I've known since early December that this was the condition. So anyway, Bob is. He's going to die and he's never going to know that this discussion was happening. That said, you and I had the same reaction. You and I separately became aware of the Trivers email that was widely circulating at the end of last week, which.

B (28:33)

If we're going to talk about, we really do need to share it.

A (28:35)

Okay, we will do that. But you and I had the sense watching this that, yes, that is not. It's not a defensible email, but it does not mean what the people who were interpreting it seemed to think. As far as we can tell, knowing Bob, this does not read to us the way it seems to be reading to others. And you have, I think, very astutely pointed out that it is an exercise that we have to go through to say, if we didn't know Bob Trivers.

B (29:12)

Yes.

A (29:12)

Would we be reading this the way others are? And I don't. I can't answer the question for myself. I don't think so.

B (29:18)

But, but I mean, this is at the point that I became aware of the email and it's just been a couple of days. I guess that is the question I keep on coming back to because I'm so surprised by the response that people are having. And we can never know if we had seen this email without knowing who had written it, what we would have thought. But knowing that it comes, you know, and put aside the fact that he is a friend of ours, but knowing that it comes from one of the greatest evolutionary minds ever to exist reads as academic speculation. It is not history. It is not fantasy. It is nothing of the sort. It is. It is evolutionary thinking about horrible things. So I think maybe we should share it rather than. Because some people won't have run into it. Let me say one nonsensical conversation.

A (30:15)

I don't know if I said, in explaining how we end up in this conversation now rather than before, I needed permission to talk about Bob's condition. It was not public. I now have that permission from his family. And so I'm, I'm entering that piece of information so that people have it and so that his death does not cause the speculation that otherwise I'm sure it would. So, okay, let's show the email.

B (30:41)

Yeah, so it's. It's on my screen or you. You have it, I guess. This is Robert Trivers writing to Jeffrey Epstein with the subject trans on December 17, 2018. Clearly, I think, responding to a question, the question of which is not in the files as far as either of us has found. He writes, it is very simple. I will compare male to female with female to male. With greater molecular control over development, we are increasingly capable of producing novel phenotypes more found in men by blocking testosterone receptors or by castration and at the same time increasing estrogen production. The one blocks male features, the second encourages female features. More masculine women, heavy testosterone dosage, incredible external effects, heavily bearded men. You would never guess they had a female bone in their body. First kind, male to female is four times more frequent than female to male. The first is attractive. He is a woman with a cock. So that if your fantasy is to suck a man's dick, otherwise you are completely heterosexual. It would be much nicer if the rest of the Organism is female, then you get the best of both worlds. So many transsexual women are very attractive and easily make money, which in turn, they assert promotes their prostitution since they have to pay hefty fees for injections every week. But they are sexually happy once you have reached manhood. Even castration does not prevent the cessation of organism. He means orgasm. There. Contrast the poor female to male versions. They are unhappy and lonely. They are men with mum pums, the worst of both worlds. If you like smelly masculine men, you want that hard cock that comes with the show. You do not want one of nature's more complex and variable structures, the pum pumice. I don't know which one is right.

A (32:21)

I couldn't tell whether that was a typo. He's. So we will get to Bob's long standing connection with Jamaica, but he's using.

B (32:29)

Right, but I don't know which one of those. Which one of those is the one he means? Mum pom pom pom, whatever. It's obviously a word for vagina.

A (32:37)

Yeah.

B (32:39)

You do not want one of nature's more complex and variable structures. That is an acquired taste. And not with a man. There are hundreds of female trans videos and websites. I have never seen a male one, by the way. We are now pushing the intervention earlier. So you notice your 3 year old son has trans tendencies, so now you intervene with hormones. I would be frightened to do that, but who knows? Before you start your thing on this, I just want to say again that there is. There is no fantasy here. There is no. There is no description of what has happened in Bob's world, nor what he would hope to happen. This is a man who, when intact and again he is now dying, was not into girls. He certainly wasn't into boys or men. He was sexually attracted to women perhaps more than others. He was very sexually active. He had a active libido, healthy libido. But none of this describes desire or hope or action on his part in any way.

A (33:44)

Yes. And I think, you know, if you look at the discussion that's happened about it, there's a lot of focus, understandably on the very end of it where he's talking about intervent interventions in children, which of course, one thing I would just say up front is it's hard to remember how long ago 2018 was in this discussion. Right. It doesn't seem like it could possibly be that long ago, but it is fairly long ago. And what he's talking about when he says we. I think some people imagine that he was somehow involved in some such effort. He's talking with the sort of scientific we. Right, yes. That those who are involved in these interventions are pushing them earlier. And you know, of course he never intended this email to be read by anybody other than Epstein presumably. And so he wasn't using, you know, careful language at all, obviously. And you know, frankly, I find the email grotesque in, in several places. But he's clearly referring to, he talks about websites about trans women and the phenomenon of people who, who transition and are actually happier having done so does exist, which is what he's referring to. So.

B (35:05)

And this is a man whose contributions to evolutionary biology are legend and shall remain so, but quite separate from most of his major contributions. He had a long standing academic scientific interest in sexuality in all organisms. Honestly, I remember conversations about the lesbian gulls and the different considerations, the different environmental conditions under which female, female sexual attraction evolves in non human species and how facultative it is and how common it is and how much rarer the evolution of male, male attraction is in non human species. And of course that interest, that academic, that scientific interest extended to humans as well. He had great and long standing interest in all things human, including all things human sexually. That is quite different. Having a research interest and having a, you know, a personal interest in experiencing things are completely different.

A (36:09)

Yes, in fact. So I would say not only did he have an interest in all things sexual as an evolutionary biologist, obviously it's an important, it's one of the most important factors, but he had an interest in anything that was non standard because obviously there's an evolutionary question of why we aren't just simply all straight. Great. Right, yeah. So I remember a discussion from that wonderful social evolution course where we were lucky enough to experience one of the great evolutionary biology courses ever taught on Earth. I promise you it was that. And I remember him saying that one of the interesting things he had noted, apparently he had done anonymous surveys of students. I don't think they just covered this topic, but he said, you know, now this class is not representative of the larger college. The number of gay people in this course is much lower than you would expect based on the population of the college, the larger college. And he discussed a hypothesis for why that might be. And his point at the time was that he thought that gay people were likely to think about the topic of evolution as hostile to them because it is so focused on reproduction. And Bob was very broad minded. And Bob knew better than to think it was only about direct reproduction. In fact, he, my Understanding of how Bob became an evolutionary biologist. You tell me if I have any of the details wrong as you know them. But he was a man mathematician in training and he spotted basically the math inside of evolutionary biology. And he wrote to W.D. hamilton, maybe the greatest biologist or evolutionary biologist since Darwin, and was encouraged by Hamilton. So Hamilton did not go on to be his formal advisor, but they became friends and colleagues. And in any case, Hamilton is famous, among other things, for putting the mathematics to the logic of indirect reproduction through kin. So the model called kin selection is a formulation of W.D. hamilton. And so anyway, Bob was. One of the messages that will come through here is that Bob was not. You can't peg him as one thing or the other. He's an evolutionary biologist, but does not have the biases of many other evolutionary biologists. The collection of things that he did and did not believe and suspected about evolution was highly unique to Bob.

B (38:58)

Yeah, he had lived an interesting life because he was the son of a diplomat, I believe, and so had lived a number of places. That's not the story I remember, but I can't quite place. There was some famous anthologist under whom he worked almost by chance.

A (39:13)

Irv.

B (39:14)

Oh, it was Herb devore. Yeah. And having otherwise been thinking about the law, I think, and maybe also math, but my memory of the details hasn't been re upped in a while, so I don't remember all of it. But yes, he was, as the great scientists always are interested in and capable of making inferences in and observations across many, many domains. And you know, the curiosity is almost boundless and curiosity can look dangerous when taken out of context. But this, I mean, this is an issue that as evolutionary biologists we have seen a lot. And you know, we're perhaps first introduced to people's fear of evolutionary questions. Indeed, as undergraduates, when people in the social sciences would say things like, you can't ask those questions. You can't ask what the evolutionary foundations of, of genocide might be or of rape. And you know, an evolutionary take is actually the more we know, the better able we can then take what we understand about a thing that has no inherent moral valence as it happens. And we can apply our understanding as humans with morals and say that is despicable. And if we understand it better from an evolutionary perspective, we are better able to reduce its instance, its incidence in the wild in humans. Like it is. It is through knowledge, knowledge that we can actually get these horrifying human behaviors under control. And I'm not saying that that is there's any evidence of exactly that in. In this email. But in general, that is the. That is. That is an argument that evolutionary biologists find themselves having to make, and it is a legitimate argument over and over again as we ask questions about ethnic conflict, about rape, about. About genocide, things like this.

A (41:12)

Yes. So a couple things. One, there is another email. I don't think there's anything especially tantalizing in it, but there's another email in this tranche. It's not part of the same email chain, so it doesn't tell us what question he thinks he's answering in the email that you've just read. But there is another email in which he discusses the lesbian gulls, and it appears to be his description of a book that he is writing about other kinds of sexuality other than straight. So, anyway, that discussion is one that he is participating in. I will also say you and I first met Bill Hamilton through Bob at a party that Bob threw in Santa Cruz.

B (42:03)

At a party?

A (42:04)

Yeah. It was. Well, let's just say nothing wild happened there.

B (42:08)

Oh, no, no. It was actually. It was actually a fairly boring party, except for the people who were there.

A (42:13)

Except for the fact that W.D. hamilton was.

B (42:16)

And. And the Newtons.

A (42:19)

Right.

B (42:19)

Of Oakland. Right. So I, you know, I see it on your. On your page there. So you were going to bring it up, but Huey P. Newton, the radical black activist.

A (42:29)

Black Panther.

B (42:30)

Black Panther had a PhD in biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz because Bob Trivers had encouraged him in his interest in doing so and was his mentor there. And after Newton was killed, after Huey Pugh Newton was killed, which is long before, or at least somewhat before.

A (42:52)

Somewhat before.

B (42:53)

Maybe not that long before we met Bob. Bob remained friends with. With Huey P. Newton's family. And so, you know, this. And Bob occasionally threw these parties, which, again, there was nothing remarkable about them except for the fact that they were in a small apartment. Bob, you know, Bob had. They were a small underlit apartment in which the, you know, he would. And this is how I remember him referring to them. The Newtons from Oakland were always there. A group of three, four, five people. I don't. I don't really remember much more than that except that the Newtons from Oakland were there. We were always. Was there when we were there, a few graduate students and then some evolutionary luminary like W.T. hamilton. And then outside you'd be smoking pot, and inside, I don't know, just sort of standing awkwardly around.

A (43:35)

There was Jamaican music, of course. Of course. Well, but so this Is this is a place where you think you know what Bob is, but it's unlikely, Right? So, okay, not only was Bob very close with Huey Newton, Bob himself was a Black Panther there. Bob was thrown out of the Black Panthers. A story I don't completely understand, but I think he was thrown out for his own protection or something like that. So you would think not.

B (44:01)

Not for the obvious fact that he wasn't actually black.

A (44:05)

Well, I mean, I guess we're gonna go here. But the thing is, as. As you well know, but those in the public will not. Bob preferred black culture. He did not pretend to be black, but he sought out. I mean, he built a house in Jamaica. He was married to a Jamaican woman. He felt more at home in that culture. He understood it. And I went into the field with him, into Jamaica. So I saw him in his element there. I lived in his mother in law's house while I was there. And they took me in and took care of me like a member of the family. So anyway, I got to see Bob in his element. But my point about him defying expectations, you would think from the connection to the Black Panthers and Huey Newton, you would think potentially from the reading of that email that is so common, that Bob was a radical liberal. Right? He was nothing of the kind. In fact, he. You know, I was quite a young person at the point that I was in the field with. This would have been 1991, something like that.

B (45:24)

90, I think, maybe.

A (45:26)

Maybe 1990. But anyway, you know, he and I argued over this and he thought I was naive for being as liberal as I was. He was not especially political, except when it came to the disdain for the way American blacks had been treated by the system.

B (45:46)

He had deep disdain.

A (45:49)

He had deep disdain. But even there, you think, okay, he's not a radical liberal. It's not even obvious to me that he was a liberal at all. But, you know, on this one issue, maybe he was a radical liberal. No, not even there. Right. And I was. He was technically on. On Twitter. I think he almost. He, you know, he was too old to ever take it on or something, but he had an account and I went to that account yesterday just to see what was there, and it did not surprise me terribly. But one of the things I found there, and I forgot to give it to Jen to show it, but he posted a video of a black man. I don't know who it is. Very well spoken, talking to a. I think it's a white, white podcaster. Somebody I don't recognize. But the black man is describing the fact that liberals are abusing the concept of slavery and that they are pretending that this is a uniquely white on black phenomenon. And that's not what it is. And this person describes sort of global frequency with which slavery has happened. The involvement of blacks in enslaving other blacks and selling them sometimes to blacks, sometimes to whites. But anyway, the point point is Bob's sympathies with American blacks was not of a kind that you commonly encounter.

B (47:14)

He was not ideological as far as I ever saw in any, in any context. He assessed situations as they arrived and came to his own conclusions. And that's, you know, the conclusions were not always the same ones that we would, that either of us would come to. And I do think there's some evidence that he, you know, know, wrote some things, I can't remember some sort of like woke sounding anti Trump rants at some, at some points. But this is not, he can't be slotted in to any political category for sure. And I think really to any category other than, you know, brilliant evolutionary biologist.

A (47:57)

Yes. Now I wanted to add one other thing. One of the places that Bob was way ahead of most evolutionary biologists is that he did not suffer from believing the trope that is now widely used to discredit what is now called evolutionary psychology, what would once have been called sociobiology. The claim that many of the things that these biologists are talking about are cultural and therefore not evolutionary. Bob was way ahead on this front. Bob understood that culture was an evolutionary phenomenon even if we didn't understand the exact interaction of them. So he took human behavior very seriously. And in any case, just you said it very well there. You can't slot him into any known category because he was very much a one off individual for both better and worse. But in terms of his insight into biology, he had deep interest in non usual human sexuality precisely because it inherently raises an evolutionary question. That, that's in the emails, the one that you read is confusing because of its grotesqueness. But it's in the other emails where he's discussing, you know, his book project. He specifically says that he wants to include lots of animal examples of unusual sexuality, but he's afraid of boring the people who are human focused. So you know it. This is the context in which you and I are reading it. And I will say I was talking to a good friend of Bob's a couple days ago and he was telling me stories in which Bob, he basically said that Bob would humor any perspective and take it seriously in order to have the argument. And that's how I remember Bob also. So I wish we did know what question he was responding to in that email. It doesn't fully vindicate it, but would go a long way to saying what exactly he was getting at. But yeah, let's see. What, what else did I. Oh, well.

B (50:04)

You would, I think when we were talking before. Like what. You know what, what do you want to say? I will say that I have. I have known for a while that Bob was nearing the end of his life and so have been thinking about writing an obituary for a while. And so I have written some things. I'm not going to share them here, but I think both you and I have have much more to say. But I think you were planning to mention that he was. He is still. But he's at the end of his life now, extraordinarily complicated, had had mental instability, had always had money troubles. And so, you know, anyone who knew him, I, I remember an animal behavior conference in Atlanta in gosh, would have been like the late 90s years since we had been in, you know, near daily contact with him at Santa Cruz. But I think after, I think after, maybe before we had actually invited him to be the man who would marry us. He was the officiant at our wedding. So this, this is a man who we obviously felt. Felt strongly, positively about that, that he would oversee. Oversee that. But he was given the plenary at the animal behavior conference in Atlanta in whatever year. I don't remember what year this would have been, but late 90s. And he was not totally having a stable moment. His talk was great as I remember it, but he was dressed entirely in gold lame.

A (51:36)

That does sound like Bob.

B (51:39)

And I had seen him the day before. I'd been wandering and he sort of slammed me across camera app. He's like, heather, hi. And went over and we spent a couple of hours talking. Both him hashing out what he was going to say in his talk, but also it was clear that he was having a manic moment and that as soon as he gave his talk he was going to fly to Jamaica because that's where he felt most at home. And I was shocked then that his brilliance was not sufficient and there was nothing untoward about anything he was doing. It was like he just literally showed up in entirely gold Lemi suits, which was not common, like I'd never seen it before. It was fun, but the audience included some graduate students who were very disrespectful of him and who were clearly laughing at the fashion Choice, as opposed to at the. At the. The man whose brilliance was still on display, on clear display. And I thought then, this is a man whose struggles in parts of his life may cause him not to be recognized for the extraordinary contributions that he's made to the human understanding of not just the human condition, but all of life on earth.

A (52:53)

Several things to add. One, the gold lame definitely is indicative of exactly what you're saying, but it is also connected into the sort of Jamaica thread of his life. Because it is the kind of choice that would be much more. I mean, it's still a little extreme, but it would be much more natural in the more demonstrative culture of Jamaica. I mean, that's one of the things. Jamaica was very eye opening to me. And watching the way, the exuberant way in which people lived and did everything was very eye opening. So anyway, if you dressed up, you dressed up, right? So anyway, you could imagine.

B (53:38)

I don't even know where you source a gold. I may suit, honestly.

A (53:42)

Yeah. This is before, you know, he couldn't just Google it. Yeah, he couldn't have just Googled it. I mean, frankly, the town where his family lives, Southfield, when I was there in 1990 or 1991, there was literally not even a phone. Right. It was that, you know, I rode my bike to the junction to call you, because the junction, you know, the junction of the roads was also the junction of the telephone lines. And there was a payphone there, which didn't always work, even though it was like, I don't know, it was eight or 10 miles. It was a long ride to discover that the payphone wasn't working. But. But you're worth it. Thank you. So I did want to say something about the choice of Bob as the officiant at our wedding. Okay. Because you and I were very deliberate about that. And it went off great. He did a great job. But the reason that we chose Bob was that we were revolutionary biologists. A religious officiant didn't exactly seem like the right thing to do. But Bob, again, not being the person that you would expect when you hear, oh, you know, Harvard trained evolutionary biologist, Bob was a religious guy. And so he understood the intersection between.

B (54:56)

He understood himself to be a Christian, I believe.

A (54:59)

I don't. You know, I was struggling with that yesterday. I feel almost certain that that's what he would say. He was, but I don't remember him ever saying it. And I don't know it for sure.

B (55:08)

Certainly he had spirituality and he talked about Jesus with a familiarity and A respect.

A (55:15)

Right. So anyway, he seemed like the right guy for the job, assuming that he was going to show up in his more functional phase. But anyway, and he did a great job. He threaded the needle with respect to treating the, you know, the spiritual responsibility of the officiant properly and also not pretending that we were believers in the standard sense, including.

B (55:41)

He insisted on a. On a meeting. Right. That doesn't sound important enough. But on a meeting with us in advance of the ceremony to discuss. To discuss us. To discuss our relationship and specifically, as I remember, to ask us if we intended to have children. Because he was. He was there, he was going to be our officiant regardless. But he felt that people who were choosing to be married should have children. And he wanted to know if he wanted to. He thought he knew already, but he wanted to make sure that this were true before he performed a marriage ceremony that might, if he had been wrong, been meant something else entirely.

A (56:26)

Yes. Had we said that we were not planning to have them, I am certain we would have gotten a talking to and that it would have included, I don't know what the right word is, like a highly sophisticated zinger, the kind of thing that lands. And you never forget that it was said, you know, that kind of thing. You know, like, there was a wedding in Jamaica when I was there. I think I was invited to go to it, though I didn't know the people. It was crazy. Curried goat was the wedding feast food. It's delicious. But anyway, it started to rain at the beginning of the day, and it was clear that this outdoor ceremony was going to be, you know, soggy at best and maybe drenched. And I said, bob, you know what. What do we think about the fact that it's raining? And he said, it's a blessing, Brett. You know, like, you can't figure this out. Like, of course it rains on ceremonies. You have to treat it as a blessing. Right. And of course they would.

B (57:30)

And as I remember, there was an errant, single, giant lightning strike and thunderclap at the moment of Bob finishing his officiant duties and us getting married.

A (57:43)

He slam dunked the assignment.

B (57:44)

Maybe that was a blessing.

A (57:45)

The universe was clapping. Yeah, exactly.

B (57:47)

Not in Jamaica, in the Eastern Sierra.

A (57:52)

So I do want to say, I think the. His relationship to his mental health issues is not the relationship of Nash depicted in A Beautiful Mind. People will have seen it, you know, Nash, at least, as the story goes.

B (58:11)

John Nash, the mathematician.

A (58:13)

Yes. Effectively mastered his. I think it was schizophrenia by sort of learning to recognize what. That he was Seeing wasn't real and he sort of had control over it. Bob didn't. And it probably, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't. I'm not 100% certain what it was. But the fact is Bob was well known in academic circles to have issues. It interface, it interfaced terribly with his ability to hold down a position. The community correctly viewed it as their obligation to take care of him in some way. But, but Bob never made it easy. He was his own worst enemy. And I feel certain that Bob would agree to that statement with a laugh. Of course. He's his own worst enemy. Right. But I do think this highly unusual individual has to be understood. You can't make almost any leap about what you think he must have been thinking or what he would and wouldn't do. It's just not a reasonable conclusion with somebody as unusual as this.

B (59:23)

But just to, to. I don't want to have to keep coming back to it, but just to repeat, you know, his own worst enemy. Yes, but a man with no interest, no interest sexually in anything but adult women.

A (59:35)

Yes.

B (59:36)

And you know, there's, there's stuff on record about him talking about girls becoming women physically earlier than they used to. And this is a comment that many people have made. There is, is. There is a difference between being interested in girls and being interested in women and that. And that doesn't mean that being interested in 16 year olds who have the bodies of women and the mind still of children is okay. But it's very different from what most people think of when they imagine pedophilia, for instance, that has zero relationship to the man that we know.

A (60:14)

And I will also say I've now forgotten what the term is, but I think there is even a technical term that distinguishes states. And I don't remember what it is, but it's a distinction that nobody likes to hear made because frankly, I think it's disgusting for older men to target younger women, legal or not. But, but nonetheless, Bob has to be taken as he was and he was very much an evolutionary biologist, clearly answering a question and doing so without the expectation that it was going to be read by people, obviously. And it's not surprising that people reading it it with the sense that Epstein is this terrifying, obviously evil human being. Right.

B (60:58)

And this is 2018. It was known. Right?

A (61:00)

Like, yes, right, it was. And Bob, his, his terrible mistake defending Epstein, post conviction.

B (61:08)

Yeah. Back in like 2014 or something.

A (61:09)

Yeah. He regretted very quickly, knew it was a mistake. But. Okay, I have a note. I Can't read nothing new there. Is there anything else that needs to be said here?

B (61:30)

You know, the. Not, not. Not that I can think of at the moment. I think there's so much to be said about him and I, you know, I, I have been. I didn't see this coming. I didn't see this email coming. But, but we both knew because the world knew that he had had a friendship with Epstein and that. And that he had received some money for some research that was completely unrelated to anything about sexuality. It was like knee function and running and you know, it's fluctuating asymmetries which is a common subject of his research in Jamaica, I think, you know, I, and, and perhaps you will probably put something out that will, you know, will, will act as a kind of obituary when he does die, which will be soon. And I am, I am glad that he isn't aware that this is happening now.

A (62:31)

Yeah.

B (62:32)

And I, I would in. I guess this isn't about Bob. But one thing that, that seeing people's responses has made me wonder. People are so sure of things that I am sure are not true about what this means. How often are we all doing this? How often can we read words that absent context seem to mean something that they absolutely do not mean? You know, could, could we be wrong about Bob? Not as a human being, you know, could, you know, are there things we don't know? Of course. And am I asking for people to accept justifications of bad behavior? No, no. But the certainty were the. Which many people with whom I am, you know, otherwise aligned on the anti trans bandwagon have, have taken to this and said this is, you know, this is the most vile email I've ever seen. This is so despicable. I cannot see it that way. And again, I don't know if I could possibly, possibly have seen it that way if I didn't know from the beginning who was writing it. But it, it makes me want to ask everyone to have some humility and be suspicious of your own certainty always.

A (64:00)

I think that's an excellent point and I would just point out that the stage is set for this kind of leaping to conclusions by the vacuum of proper prosecution. Right. The fact that these emails had to be pried loose. Right.

B (64:18)

That they were complete and they're acted weirdly and it's just the whole thing is odd. But, but we are not denying in any way that like that email, it's obviously, I mean honestly, it, it sounds like Bob.

A (64:31)

Yeah.

B (64:32)

As much as I wish he hadn't written It. And there's stuff in there that I am surprised that he said there's nothing in there that. That sounds like it was created by something trying to get Bob in trouble.

A (64:43)

Right, right.

B (64:43)

It sounds like a, you know, sort of clinical, scientific discussion of a thing that people are doing to other people. Aside from, like, fully. Aside from the moral valence, which I believe that Bob would agree, but I do not know is horrifying. Right? The. The moral valence of. Of transing. Of transing children is horrifying.

A (65:09)

Yes. I have no. No doubt that he would agree to that in a proper discussion. And I would say, I assume I speak for you here, but I wouldn't be defending him. Him if I thought he had been involved in abusing kids. There's no. This is such a bright line, you know, no one deserves that defense. So anyway, truly don't think that that's what's going on here because it's not who Bob was. Bob does care about children, has his own children now grown. But. But anyway. Okay, so shall we move on to other phenomena in this neighborhood?

B (65:49)

Yeah. And so one. One. The only other thing that I definitely wanted to talk about is that actually the gender madness seems to be falling apart. I don't know if we want to go there next or.

A (65:59)

I would like to save that till last. I think it's really important and I was hoping we would talk about it. I'm glad you delved into it, but anyway, I think it's a good bookend for this. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about the week that just was including this massive Release of files. 3 million Some documents in this latest tranche. And I will give you my.

B (66:28)

It's a great word, by the way.

A (66:29)

Tranche. Yes. Do we all know it because of the big short.

B (66:33)

I certainly know I've never run into it in another context. I'm sure. I know finance guys do, but, yeah.

A (66:38)

People now use it. But I have the sense that it. It came from there. But I know finance people used it before. But anyway, so here is the thing that I am trying to track as I'm watching this flood of discoveries in this massive tranche of mostly emails, but not entirely. There are audio files, there's some video. There is so much that is worth remarking on in these files that I think it is guaranteed that we will make the following error. And I think we are making the following error collectively. What's in the files is impossible to look away from, except in a few strange cases where people seem to seem to be prone to do that. But there's so much present there that it cloaks whatever isn't there. In other words, we do not understand the relationship between what these files were. We don't know what fraction of the actual sum total of the files it represents.

B (67:54)

Well, I mean, this is, this is my question to you. When you've. And having missed the release because I was blissfully in Texas moving chickens around.

A (68:01)

Moving chickens and dodging armadillos.

B (68:03)

Dodging armadillos. My question is, is there any way to know what fraction this is? Like, what, what is the complete solution set? We don't know that. That. We don't know what fraction this is. We don't know how the choosing happened. We don't know if things were. I mean, obviously, you know, from just the one email that we've talked about here, there was something that follows from that isn't here.

A (68:28)

Right, Right.

B (68:29)

So this is this very parched out, selective tranche, as you say.

A (68:35)

It is a selective tranche. And the image in my mind is like a bunch of. I don't know if they're bullet holes, but something has put a bunch of holes onto a screen and what you can see is the outline that there was a person standing in front of it.

B (68:55)

Right.

A (68:55)

The places where there are. No. So the point is we can see the part. We can see. What we can't see is the part that we can't see, obviously. But the implication, you know, why, why did we go through all of this nonsense where we were being told that there was nothing important in the files, that we were imagining this? Like, what even was that? And can we fire Cash Patel already? Like, I don't understand. Obviously he's not on our side for some reason. Is he compromised? Is he afraid? I don't know, but he can't do the job. So anyway, keep in mind that as you focus on the things that we're focusing on, on all of which is understandable that we would be focused on it, that you need to remember that this is very likely a game in which you're being fed certain things in order that you not notice the things you don't have. And I would say one of the patterns. So I'm wrestling with what is here and what story it tells about what isn't here. And one of the things that I, I think is becoming clear and we can talk about, you know, Mike Benz was on Joe Rogan talking about this, and he talked about his own process for remembering things. He has like an encyclopedic access to a bunch of factual data that the rest of us struggle to keep track of. And he. He talks about how he does it, never mind the particulars. He basically describes having a structure in mind and fitting things to it. So my. I felt a resonance with what he described because I also think. I carry around a model of what I think is going on in the universe, whether it's biology stuff or whether it's, you know, human political stuff. But I have a loose sense of what I think is going on. And every time I see something that fits, I add it. And every time I see something that doesn't fit, it's even more important because then the point is, huh, Is that thing not right or is my model not right? Am I missing something here? And it tells you kind of where to spend your time? So one of the things, the patterns that I think is emerging as people are sorting through this stuff and posting, posting, posting, you know, have you seen this? Have you seen that? Is there is an awful lot of stench of all of the things that we have feared weird without proof of much. And that pattern, I suspect, is not an accident. I think it is the result of two things. One, the people that Epstein was interacting with were mostly sophisticated in the sense that they. They are aware, they think in terms of legal discovery. And so while they can't help themselves, sometimes, they generally avoid putting things in print that could come back to haunt them later in a lawsuit. So that's one of the reasons. That's the more organic reason. But the other reason, I suspect, is that aside from a few people who are seemingly deliberately being thrown under the bus, what we are, I think, being given is supposed to satisfy us. See, we were right without allowing anything to change. Right? That's the thing. Goliath is the force that opposes all meaningful change. And you can imagine that Goliath has been forced to cough up more than he would like to about whatever the Epstein operation was, but that he would like to change as little as possible. So we are. Are in a negotiation that we didn't ask for. We in the public feel like this is not a negotiation. We are entitled to know what this was. We are entitled to know all of it. Victims are entitled to be heard, to be compensated, to be validated, and not gaslit. And this tranche, as much as there is important stuff in it, isn't doing the job because, you know, the smoking guns are mostly not there. Right? But again, it's designed. The fraction that we are seeing is designed to give us enough that we will feel that we've, you know, Massey finally forced the stuff into the open, which he did, but he forced them to cough up a fraction that they were in charge of. And that's, that's the overarching message that I'm getting. So I wanted to just point out a few things that show up here that I think, think are potentially meaningful. One of them is the phenomenon of well positioned people talking encoded language that is known to be connected to pedophilia is conspicuous. So the number of places in which pizza is discussed here is large. It has exactly the same feel as the Podesta emails, where it certainly seems to point to the worst possible stuff going on in and around Epstein on his island that may be at his ranch. I hadn't even heard of his ranch until now, but apparently had a very large ranch. Anyway, but maybe we should look at some of these pizza emails. So here's one from Roy Hodges. I don't know who that is. He says, I wanted to let you know that the crew really appreciate, appreciated the pizza today. Thank you for letting us do that. Okay, so that could be innocent but kind of unusual to talk about pizza. Then here's one. Redacted. Who it's from is redacted. It says, this is better than a Chinese cookie. C attached. Let's go for pizza and grape soda. Again, no one else can understand. Go. No. So grape soda is apparently also a code word. Now, of course, you know, is there any chance at all that this is actually a discussion of pizza and grape soda? I suppose you have to leave that possibility open. But in light of. Sure, yeah. It's not plausible.

B (75:34)

Right.

A (75:35)

And mind you, this is after those of us who have understood, you know, I've been saying forever, look, the problem with the Pizzagate story is that there are two Pizzagate stories and one of them is ridiculous and the other one isn't. But when you attempt to talk about the fact that actually there is something troubling in the Podesta emails and all of the rest of it, the point is, oh, you, you know, you believe some ridiculous story. I guess you're, you know, you're a mental lightweight. Yeah. Okay, you want to show the next one? Okay. This one is from redacted to Jeffrey Epstein. It says. You mean radiating a soft glow. By the way, there's this weird equal sign that shows up in a lot of these. I don't under. It's like a font issue.

B (76:18)

Yeah, that may just be the way it's been like optically optical character Scanned.

A (76:22)

Whatever. Whatever it is. So you mean radiating a soft glow with the look of bliss and excitement. Yeah, that's the pizza. What? Right. This does sound like somebody responding to.

B (76:38)

An email from Jeffrey Epstein with the subject, the pizza monster.

A (76:41)

Oh, the pizza monster, of course. All right. Do we have another one of these?

B (76:47)

That's it.

A (76:47)

No. Okay. So anyway, the point is, if you have been thinking and saying, hey, there is pedophilia going on here. This is not just, you know, inappropriately young women. This. This is about the abuse of children, then the answer is, well, you feel vindicated looking at this stuff. On the other hand, it's yet more totally creepy discussion of pizza and grape soda. And so it runs through your fingers like water. So again, it's, like, perfectly designed to satisfy the people who have been saying, look, you have to look here. And other people have been telling them you're imagining it. And then it's like, no, I wasn't imagining it. See, it shows up right here again. It's like, okay, yeah, but what we need is prosecution, right? We need people who do these things to be locked away forever.

B (77:42)

This is tantalizing. It's not evidence. Yeah, it's actually. I mean, ironically, it's titillating, right?

A (77:48)

Yeah. It would be evidence if it were connected to something else. But on its own, it's not sufficient to cross any burden. Okay, so other things that show up in the files are. Okay, here's one. You want to put up the email from the redacted person where they talk about the torture video. Okay, so this is from a redacted person to Jeffrey Epstein on February 4, 2004. I mean, February 24. Sorry, sorry. It is February. This email is from April 24th of 2009. It says, where are you? Are you okay? I loved the torture video. It's from Jeffrey Epstein to a person. Now, of course, that validates the sense that many of us have that this probably even goes beyond the sexual abuse of children and onto torture and maybe murder. But again, have you ever used the word torture metaphorically? Of course. Everybody uses that word metaphorically sometimes. So is this incriminating? Not on its own, it's not.

B (79:10)

But, you know, and that's 2009. Was it?

A (79:12)

Yeah.

B (79:13)

Now, in 2026, so much of porn apparently is, you know, actually. You know, actually involves at least mild forms of torture, of pain, pain induction, bdsm. That, you know, the dude was disgustingly ahead of his time is one of the.

A (79:31)

Is one of the interpretations. Yeah. Okay, so, all right, you want to put up the bitcoin one. So bitcoin shows up in a bunch of these emails in a way that I think matches the same kind of pattern. So this is from April 25, 2015, from Jeffrey Epstein to Jochi Ito. And I'm having trouble understanding who wrote what, but it says the way that Bitcoin is organized currently is that there are five core developers and around 100 contributors to the core code. The five core developers are like Linus Torvalds or the Linus Torvalds of Linux. They decide what changes are made to the core code. One of the five is the lead developer, Vladimir and his chief scientist, Gavin. Gavin, Vladimir and Corey, an important contributing developer, were being paid out of a non profit organization called the Bitcoin Foundation. A few weeks ago it blew up when one of the board members declared the foundation bankrupt. Many organizations scrambled to step into the vacuum, created the foundation and take control, in quotes, of the developers. We moved quickly and the three developers decided to join the Media Lab. That's the MIT Media Lab. Presumably this is a big win for us. Okay, so there's certainly plenty of discussion around the capture of Bitcoin here. We have discussions and this is far from the only bit of it, you know, in this new tranche of the Epstein files. On the other hand, what does it actually say? Well, enough to give the people who think that there is something nefarious going on, something to chew on, but not enough to make the case. Now I do think Bitcoin is down a bit today, maybe because of this, but. But nonetheless it has more of this. It gives you something to keep you busy, but it doesn't go where it would need to go. Yeah, all right. And I will also say that one of the things that I noticed in these emails is the. I just don't even know how to describe it other than a kind of stench of Jewish supremacy. And it's disgusting, but nonetheless, it's sort of here in black and white. So here you want to put up the. The email to, I guess Roger Shank. It's February 23rd of 2009, starts by. Sorry.

B (82:24)

The month doesn't really matter, but they keep on being on Friday.

A (82:27)

It turns out they do. I've tried swapping months and it does not work. This is the way the Jew. It's not well written. This is the way the Jew.

B (82:38)

This is from Jeffrey Epstein.

A (82:39)

Yes, this is from Jeffrey Epstein. This is the way the Jew make money. Money and made a fortune in the past 10 years selling short and shipping futures.

B (82:48)

Shipping futures. Selling Short the shipping futures.

A (82:52)

Selling short the shipping futures. Let the goyem deal with the real world.

B (82:58)

Okay, so I've seen some discussion that goyum is an epithet.

A (83:04)

Yes.

B (83:06)

I didn't know that. Oh yeah, that's interesting because I have, I. I have been referred to as member of the Goyum by various people. I never took it as an epithet.

A (83:21)

It's an epithet. It can be said by you. Yeah, it can be said ironically. So it's one of these words that context matters a lot, but it's definitely an epithet. Gentile is different. Different.

B (83:35)

And shiksa is different.

A (83:37)

Shiksa is an epithet. Yeah. So anyway, so then this last email shows the same pattern. This is from Jeffrey Epstein's email account Jee Vacation Gmail to Peggy Siegel, subject re Yachtslay Lut. He says no goyim in abundance. JP Morgan execs brilliant wasps. Okay, and then the question he's responding to is, is it going to be 100% Jew night? Even Perlman and Yum Yum has some goyum. I'm getting my quote Media Elite list exec out for Saturday and will email some names. What about Charlie Rose? Love him. What about Jane Fonda? My new best. Nothing like an ex Jew hater with a Jewish boyfriend to mix it up. Peg. All right, so this goes on, but nonetheless. You are listening in to private conversations that were not intended to be viewed by anybody else. Nonetheless, it's damning that this is the way they are talking. And frankly, I think it's actually central to what's going on because to the extent that what we clearly have is a hyper entitled network of people who feel they have the right to abuse others, obviously this is connected to the sense that you and they are not the same. Same, right?

B (85:29)

Yes.

A (85:29)

So the idea that you have supremacists rules are different. The rules are different because those other people aren't really people. And obviously the west is based on the. Exactly inverse interpretation that everybody and frankly, Christianity is too. The fundamental dignity of people is central. And to the extent that anybody is exempting themselves from. From this agreement, it's not surprising to find them taking advantage of anyone and everyone else. So what will we be able to prove from this? Not much. What does it confirm about what we suspected? A lot. But not. You know, maybe the point is this gives you a preponderance of the evidence without crossing reasonable doubt. Maybe that's.

B (86:28)

I think, I think that's right. I think that's it. I think that's exactly right.

A (86:32)

Yes. Now okay.

B (86:33)

On several fronts.

A (86:34)

Yes, on, on, on a number of fronts. But I mean, that's an interesting gap. That gap should have a name, the one between preponderance of the evidence and reasonable doubt, because a lot.

B (86:44)

It probably does.

A (86:45)

Yeah, it probably does. Good. If it doesn't. So one last thing before we leave the Epstein files is I wanted to talk about what I think Mike Benz posed a very good challenge in his Joe Rogan conversation, which came out in the last couple days. Do you want to show his discussion of the blackmail question?

C (87:11)

I've never been convinced, convinced that the central role of the Epstein young girl in my view, sidebar of the Epstein money laundering story is that it was for blackmail. Part of this is because the moment Jeffrey Epstein formally officially threatens somebody with blackmail and that person tells his wife and that wife tells her friends and that gets out to somebody else that knows Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's access goes away overnight. That's the sort of thing that even a rumor of that spreading and nobody else is going to want to do business with them.

A (88:01)

So you think people just assume it's blackmail because that is how you would blackmail someone, especially underage girls.

C (88:09)

I think it is very possible that there could have been indirect blackmail, meaning Epstein passes it on to an intelligence service, to a corporate espionage client or something, and they use that for their own purposes. But even then, I mean, imagine for example, if, you know, like on the Bill Gates thing, like there was an Bill Gates gets an email. I have a video of you sleeping with this person or somebody much lower level. The moment they send that to the press in order to, they figure they have nothing to lose. I mean, there's not been anybody in the seven years that's transpired who said I was personally blackmailed by Jeffrey Epps. I think because the moment you do that, nobody comes to your parties anymore. You lose all the access, you lose all the deal flow, you lose all the goodwill that you've generated. Because this rumor, people are very risk averse, especially at that level.

A (89:17)

Right, but just to have it over their head and never use it though, right?

C (89:22)

Well, I think that what you could have is because he does his own nefarious stuff, he could compile it so that if they ever go out, if they ever threaten him with something, he's now got something on them.

B (89:39)

I honestly can't tell which position Benz is taking. He seems to be taking both positions.

A (89:43)

What he is saying is that the explanation that many of us have explored that this was a blackmail operation designed to capture Kompromat for the point. For the purpose of steering anything and everything in the world.

B (89:57)

Yes.

A (89:58)

That. That does not add up, because if you attempted to execute once on the blackmail, the rest of what you had banked would. Or your ability to bank more at least, would evaporate.

B (90:14)

So that seems like a generic. So, hey, he does seem to also argue that it is. Or maybe it's just what Joe is saying to him is maybe Joe is responding the way I was. Like, I can't tell what you're saying, man. Are you saying this? You're saying that. But it seems like that's an argument against blackmail always, isn't it? Well, in any sort of operation.

A (90:33)

An operation. Yeah, an operation. So there are two. So I'm. Again, this is where I think it is important to see pieces of evidence figure out if they fit the model you're playing with to the extent that they don't see if the model needs adjusting if the evidence isn't what it appears, that sort of thing. And so I get two possibilities from what I think is actually a very good question that Ben is pointing to. So the question is, how could you build a compromise collection project that didn't blow itself up on first use? One thing he says, and then he doubts it because it doesn't really add up much better, is that Epstein could forward whatever he's got to somebody else, but it's still.

B (91:29)

It's got the same problem.

A (91:30)

It's got the same problem. So here's what I want to propose as a model that I think satisfies Benz's. I don't know how you pluralize Ben's. Ben's challenge to that model, but also fits all of the evidence that this looks like an operation to accumulate compromise. Right. Including the fact that in. In the files are things in which we actually get to hear Epstein. And frankly, he's kind of a mental lightweight.

B (92:08)

He's not deep.

A (92:09)

He's not deep. Not deep. Somebody described him as.

B (92:12)

You have all these amazing scientists hanging around him because of the. Because of his insights.

A (92:17)

Right. And, yeah, they're humoring him. The good ones are humoring him. Maybe there are some fakers among the scientists who don't understand that he's not deep, but whatever. Okay, so here's the model. I want to propose that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was. Was a control architecture designed to ensnare people across discipline and zones of business. And the way it worked was he dragged people in. He figured out what people, what limits that they would push that would compromise them in other Words. He created an environment in which people seemed to. To feel no concern about doing awful things. And he dragged people in as far as they would go so that where they were was way beyond their own normal standard. Right. That they did things that they then couldn't defend and that the control mechanism comes from the thing. Like imagine that you were an affiliate of this and. And you and I never would find ourselves in that position. But somebody who would allow themselves to let their guard down and say things that they shouldn't say, like Bob. Or do things they shouldn't do, like all of these people who went to the island, they then live in fear. Oh, was he recording that stuff? So the point is they self censor and they become very sensitive to the message about what it is that whatever it is that was running Epstein believes about the world. Here are the positions that we hold. And so the point is they become eager to please the thing that has got them with their guard down, having done things that aren't defensible and then telling them, oh, here's our position on this. That or the other able to steer people without actually blackmailing. Right. Because people will fear. Further, another piece of this model would be that it is willing to ratchet up that it is willing to embarrass people by. To the extent somebody is not responding to the message about what it is that Epstein and his friends want to happen in the world, that something slightly embarrassing emerges on you first. So shot across the bow. So anyway, I guess I don't know how good this model is, but the idea is it would explain the fact that we don't have, I think any credible examples in which this thing is actually blackmailing people yet. It seems to be a blackmail accumulation enterprise. It.

B (95:06)

I at least haven't heard another alternative hypothesis that is more explanatory. You know, he. Epstein wasn't doing this in order to, you know, pleasure a bunch of the world's rich people out of the goodness of his heart. Right? That's not what was going on.

A (95:23)

No, it wasn't what was going on. His. The fact that he was a shockingly rich guy is mysterious. As Eric points out regularly. It does not add up that he made a fortune. It seems like somebody handed him a fortune. So it looks like an operation. It looks like an operation to collect Kompromat on people. It looks like it has like it's a fractal. Right. You have, you have everything from, you know, embarrassing said in emails through what looks like it is likely to involve sexual abuse of actual Children, torture, maybe murder. So it looks like it has every level of depth. And that's actually if you were trying. If your real point was money and power in the world. And the idea was all of that stuff was a means to an end, to gain power, to gain leverage, and you couldn't blackmail because you'd blow the whole thing up, Then it would look something like this, where the idea is, it's really people, you're aligning their incentive to be of, like, mind with you about whatever it is you're trying to accomplish in the world. If the answer is, oh, now's the moment to pump Bitcoin, right. If the person that has the goods on you is suddenly wild about Bitcoin, how hard is it for you to leap on the, hey, I'm another wild about Bitcoin person. Right? So, anyway, that's kind of what I'm getting from this. I don't see a lot of proof. I see a lot of confirmation of stuff. Right. Of, you know, not a trivial kind of important kind. But. But mostly what I get is that we still haven't nailed the structure, its purpose, and most importantly, we still don't know what role it has been playing in our history. And I think, you know, I. I forgot. In all of the preparing for this morning, I forgot to dig up my own tweet where I said, effectively, I think Trump is negotiating with us over Epstein. This is not negotiable. There are no higher priorities. Because I really think that that's true. Whatever this thing was is playing some role in our ability to govern ourselves at a global scale that we don't know. Right. I mean, Ukraine shows up here. I've been saying forever, somehow, that's more than just a war. That's a. That's a place to empty the American treasury into, you know, into a black hole in the universe. It's a potential source for humans to traffic. It's a potential source for organs. We don't know what it is. We only know that it's sacred and we're not allowed to challenge it. Or we become, you know, you know, Putin's friends. Right. So, anyway, we need to know yesterday what role this is playing in our lives. Because it's big, and this confirms that it's big, but it doesn't tell us how it's big, and it doesn't tell us how big. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Can we do one other thing before we get to. Yeah, the one other thing is I wanted to point to something. I think it may actually be from just before last week. But nonetheless, it's so in keeping with what the hell are we living through that I wanted to show it. So this is a video of the new CEO of TikTok describing his upgraded procedure for keeping people safe from hate or something.

D (98:57)

We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course you can use it in the sense of you're a proud Zionist, but if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a. As a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against. Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity. We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends. There is no finish line. There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There's no such thing as an end game.

A (99:55)

All right? So I find that chilling. For one thing, there's an echo in there of the worst of woke.

B (100:05)

Sure.

A (100:06)

Right. Where he says, you know, there's no finish line. Right. The fight against racism will never be over. Right. That's what they used to say. And the answer is, you're creating an environment in which you have license to take liberties and you've written a set of rules to the game in which we don't even get to ask you, well, have you accomplished the goal yet? Because you've already told us, well, that's not ever going to happen. I'm always going to have the right to use this.

B (100:32)

There's no end game. This will never be over. Our rules may change at any moment. That's at our whim. And as long as we call it hate speech, we win.

A (100:41)

Right. I can. Can use the word Zionist, but you can't. And I will tell you, I don't mean that between you and me, but I mean, that's what he's effectively saying. And I will say in using, well.

B (100:52)

No, I could use it about myself. If I. If I felt that I was a Zionist, I could say that I am.

A (100:57)

You can use it in a positive context and you can't use it in a negative one.

B (101:00)

Right.

A (101:00)

Which is insane, for one thing.

B (101:03)

Yes, it is.

A (101:03)

You have a bunch of people who are proudly using that term for themselves. Now, I will just say, for my part, part, I have been very cautious about that. Term because of the linguistic flexibility that it seems to accompany it. Right. It can mean. I think it can mean three things. It does get used by people who hate Jews for whatever reason. And it gets used as a synonym. Right.

B (101:34)

Synonym for jewelry.

A (101:37)

It is used in a technical way for the movement that initially pushed for the creation of Israel and defends it in its effectively current form. And it seems to be used for a radical plan that goes by the name of Greater Israel in which Israel is bigger than its current borders. Right. So I don't like the term because. Because there's always.

B (102:07)

It doesn't have an agreed upon definition.

A (102:08)

It doesn't have an agreed upon definition. But to the extent that people who hold one of these positions are describing themselves with that term, I have to be liberated to use that term too. And I'll make my caveat. But the point is, if you're defining your team that way, then I get to say things about your team using the same term. It can't be a magic term.

B (102:31)

So there. There can't be magic terms.

A (102:35)

Yeah, there can't be magic terms. Right. And you know, it does. You know, let's.

B (102:41)

I mean, I, when you told me about this, and I'm, you know, I'm not going to say it on air because I don't feel like it, but I said to you, this is the N word.

A (102:50)

Yep. Right.

B (102:51)

And you know, I feel in the same way about want. I don't like it when I hear that word coming out of men's mouths. I don't like it when I hear it coming out of women's mouths.

A (103:01)

Yep.

B (103:01)

But it's not protected. It's not. What did you say? Special.

A (103:05)

It's. There's no, it's not magic.

B (103:07)

It's not magic. There are no magic words anywhere. Everyone can use any word they want and let, you know, let us reveal ourselves. Let us reveal who we are.

A (103:16)

Yeah, I agree with that. And let me just say, look, I don't want to be called a kike. I don't want to hear other people called a kike. Like, but I do want people to have the right to use the word because the world in which words get forbidden is not a good world. Our founders well understood that. And so anyway, I mean, the, the tenuous agreement that long existed over the word nigger and the permutation nigga. That tenuous agreement was informal. Right. And at an informal level, you could.

B (103:58)

Say and understood culturally.

A (104:00)

Yes. You could understand that.

B (104:02)

No, I'm not saying it was understandable. No, I'm saying it was understood culturally. We all knew the rules of the game in which we were playing, and also that we could opt out, but. But that people would know that we were opting out of that game.

A (104:16)

Well, and the point is, there's opting out and there's other things that might superficially seem like it but aren't. Right. So the point is, it was agreed for decades that you were not allowed to use that word in earnest and that black people were allowed to use it for what they wanted informally. It wasn't a rule. You weren't going to be ruined if you violated the rule. But it was understood. However, the ability to discuss the word existed. The ability to include it in a script in which it was necessary for historical authenticity was allowed. The ability to read Huck Finn was there. The ability to sing along with Bob Dylan in Hurricane was there. The point is, it had a natural boundary, which is you're not allowed to use the word in a earnest. But to the extent that it is a word that has to be discussed or described or whatever the. You know, in good faith, you can use it as needed, but don't go out of your way to use it and don't use it in earnest. Yeah, right. But the point is that ship has sailed a long time ago and the prosecution effectively, of people for using it in ways that were at one time clearly tolerated has. Has broken the dam. And now we have Zionism of all terms. Like an actual historical fact. Yeah, right. A movement that we can't discuss unless we're on board with it. Like what? You don't get to write a rule like that. It just. It's intolerable because it breaks logic. Right. It makes it impossible. We can't. You know, it's like having to.

B (105:57)

That's no barrier.

A (106:01)

It is to me, but, you know, it's like you cannot forbid me from talking about Bradley Manning and his turning over of documents to WikiLeaks just because Bradley now wishes to be referred to as Chelsea. And I can adhere to calling Bradley Chelsea now, but I can't go back into history and pretend he was Chelsea then, because he wasn't.

B (106:24)

Yes.

A (106:25)

Right. So anyway, I don't know what the hell is going on with Tick Tock, but it is insane that that presser, whatever his name is, feels like he's speaking coherently.

B (106:37)

That's the CEO.

A (106:38)

Yeah, CEO of TikTok. It feels like he's speaking coherently there, where he's obviously advertising dystopia that he is now enacting Pioneering. Like, come on, you don't get to do that. We, we have.

B (106:51)

I don't think anyone is pioneering dystopia at this point. I mean, lots of little new pioneering like innovations.

A (106:58)

Little ones.

B (106:59)

Little, little ones. All parallel. All happening at the same time.

A (107:02)

Yeah, all happening at the same time.

B (107:03)

Well, dystopian innovations across the board, across the land.

A (107:07)

The more AI enabled that the dystopian pioneers become, the more we will discover what the true limits of dystopia are.

B (107:14)

Fantastic. Shall we go back to William Butler Yates then?

A (107:19)

Always a good plan. All right.

B (107:22)

So, okay. So here, here's. Here's a silver lining.

A (107:25)

Okay.

B (107:26)

I guess. I think, I think so. Actually I was, I. We didn't get to last week, but before, you know, over a week ago there was this announcement. Local to us. Not super, super local, but local. Ish. Hold on. Don't do my screen yet because my computer is freaking out. Okay, now you can if you feel like it, if you can. This is in. I don't even know. Where was this published? Seattle Times Health Reporter. I think this is in the Seattle Times. Marybridge Children's Hospital to close gender clinic. So this is published on January 27th of this year. This is here in the Puget Sound, west of the Cascades on the very, very blue part of Washington state. And just a couple of paragraphs here. Marybridge Children's Hospital in Tacoma plans to shut down its gender clinic this week under mounting federal pressure to ban all gen affirming health care for trans youth. Hospital leaders announced the decision in a Monday memo to employees writing that, quote, recent developments at the federal level threaten to halt Medicaid and Medicare programs payments to the entire MultiCare health system, which owns Merrybridge, if it continues to offer gender affirming health services to minors. This was an incredibly painful decision and one that I wish we did not have to make, MultiCare CEO Bill Robertson wrote in the memo, which the hospital shared with the Seattle Town Times. We recognize how important this care is to our gender health clinic patients and have a sense of the impact this will have on these patients and their families, end quote. But without federal Medicaid and Medicare payments, Robertson continued, quote, our organization would cease to exist, end quote. According to the hospital, more than 60% of all Marybridge patients rely on Medicaid. Known as Apple Health in Washington, Marybridge cut its gender clinic waitlist of about 150 families in September, confirming that then that the clinic would continue to serve those who were already receiving gender affirming medication like hormone therapy and puberty blockers, but would not start any new medical treatment. This week's news means cutting off care to the clinic's remaining patients. Roughly 320 young people, including 180 under 18, who will now have to get their prescriptions renewed or find gender affirming mental health care elsewhere. And it goes on. But the language here is, is insane. Gender affirming health care. Gender affirming medication. No. At best, fantasy affirming medication at. At best. Right, yeah. Mental instability affirming medication. Celebration of mental illness medication. Right. That's what they're not going to be doing for these many children and other young people. People anymore. But only at this point, end of January, under duress from, from the Trump administration, from the federal government who said, we're going to cut off Medicare and Medicaid payments unless you cease and desist. You got to stop. So if I can. Oh, actually, yeah, maybe we can just go right here to. Then this week, just, just Yesterday, I believe February 3rd, we have here, the American Society of Plastic Surgery makes a position statement. It's the ASPs, the very first major medical organization, and it may just be the very first medical organization, full stop. To put out a position statement on gender surgery for children and adolescents, the summary of which is the clinical management of children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria or gender incongruence has undergone rapid change and ASPs again. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons wishes to offer guidance to members providing gender surgery services for this population. This position statement discusses the views of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons on breast, chest, genital and facial gender surgery for individuals under the age of 19. Funny, the summary doesn't say what their position statement is. They're still hiding. They're still hiding here. But you have to scroll. You have to scroll. You have to scroll. You know, caveat after caveat after caveat. Hiding behind what they've already said, explaining why they didn't come to this suit sooner. Finally, the ASPS position. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender related breast, chest, genital and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old. It's too little, too late, but it's utterly necessary and it's about time, right? It's like the changes to the childhood vaccine schedule. Oh, my God. We got a lot further to go, but good. They're making no statement. They're the association for the Society of Plastic Surgeons, so maybe they wouldn't have any say about the endocrinological interventions. But with regard to surgery, which is, after all, their bailiwick they're saying until you hit 19, excuse me, until you hit 19, you shouldn't have facial feminization or I guess masculinization. I've never heard of that happening. Maybe that happens. Although that's, that would be an adding rather than a subtracting. So we, that's not as easy to do genital or top surgery, when it's called top surgery. So again, again, too little, too late. And they hedge and they hedge and they hedge and they explain themselves away, about which I have very little patience. But they ultimately get there. And then in the wake of this, if you can show the National Review, in the wake of this ASPs statement, position statement, asked the AMA what, what they thought and the AMA, the American Medical association, said in a statement in National Review that because the evidence for gender affirming surgical intervention in minors is insufficient for us to make a definitive statement. The AMA agrees with ASPs that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood. The AMA supports, quote, evidence based treatment, end quote, including other types of gender affirming care for minors. The organization added. And that screenshot is part of a tweet that I believe it was Lior Sapir had in which he says the American Medical association agrees with the ASPs about surgeries. If the AMA was wrong about surgeries, could it also have been wrong about hormones? Good question. Of course they are. And as Leora Sapir knows very well, he's on the side of reality and moral rightness in this fight has been from the beginning. So it's happening. It has felt like it was happening for a long time. And I have been suspicious that there would be clawing back and it's not over by any means, I guess. I mean, the other big piece of news which I actually don't have a screenshot of or a direct reference to, is that the first lawsuit providing, basically, I can't think of any legal terms at the moment. Restitution, that's not the right word to someone who got transitioned because their parents were told that if they didn't, they would commit suicide. Has received, I think, $2 million in damages.

A (114:42)

Yep.

B (114:43)

So all of this is happening a couple years after we have the cast report out of England and after boy, after so many people have been working so hard at revealing the truth for so long. But frankly, the asps, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons Surgeons, actually coming out with a position statement, weak as it is, is hugely important. And among other things, the aclu, among other once important and now deeply corrupt Organizations cannot continue to claim that all of the medical organizations support, support gender affirming care, which by the way, most many of us have been objecting to that term, gender affirming care forever. This was again, mental instability affirming care at best.

A (115:32)

Yes. And I will point out, as we've talked about before, it is actually not just offensive and absurd, but it is linguistically insane. It's as gender, gender denying as it is gender affirming.

B (115:49)

Of course.

A (115:50)

Right. You're affirming one gender and denying biology.

B (115:55)

While denying who you are, abandoning your own identity in the name of creating identity.

A (116:02)

Yeah, so anyway, it was obscene and I agree with you. Like I cannot stand the fact that we're gonna be mealy mouthed about reversing our position now.

B (116:12)

Well, here's why we only got to it now in 2024. The evidence wasn't all in.

A (116:16)

So yeah, we're all really busy. We have lots of stuff on our desk. So we've been maiming children, you know, because this just hadn't gotten to the top of the pile.

B (116:23)

Just what we're doing and what could you do?

A (116:26)

But I want to point out a couple things. One, once again, the institutions are brought to reality. Kicking and screaming, they can no longer sustain their stupid fitness fiction. And so the public and its understanding is dragging the institution so that they will finally acknowledge this is the exact inverse of what experts and authorities are supposed to be. It's not supposed to be that we wake up and force the New York Times to report shit. It's supposed to be that they actually have a bunch of people who are trying to figure out what's going on and send them into the field. And look, we're not supposed to be dragging the medical societies to the recognition of biology. They're supposed to be to take that on board as part of their mission. So the fact that this is trailing is one thing worth noticing. Once again, the public has woken up to the obvious well ahead of the institutions. And the institutions are only coming around once they can no longer sustain their lives. Second thing is, okay, this is the second time that we are seeing this inside of a couple months. Yep. Right. Climate. Like we started turning around on climate because you know what, the race is on. We're going to need energy for AI now, you know, so let's figure out every kind of energy we could have. You know, oil is good, there's a lot of energy in there. And hey, nuclear, that's pretty fancy. So the point is, well, we can't very well go sustaining Our mythology that allowed us to intimidate you and control you and get you to fight each other. Because actually, we now have a new age agenda that is incompatible with the story we've been giving you for decades. Right? So there's that, too. And then the third thing is, okay, here, we're seeing zero as a special number, right? The fact that the dominoes will start to fall. The dominoes are starting to fall. Because the last thing you want to do is be the last person on board with the new reality, which is, oh, we were maiming children. We stopped. Stopped. Hey, we were early. Yeah, that's the thing. We were early. You know, we were ahead of the, you know, America.

B (118:38)

I mean, we did do it for years, right? And we did know exactly what we were doing, because how could you not? But we stopped. Can't you congratulate us for stopping?

A (118:48)

Right? Which also reminds me of COVID Right.

B (118:52)

They were literally kind of middle ground scramble.

A (118:55)

This is a middle ground scramble. And they're trying to formulate the position in which. Well, now we understand that the data isn't quite as persuasive as we want. Thought it was about the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the answer is no. You. You were maiming children for money, and you had a cover story, and it was false. And we've been telling you that, and you've been ignoring it, and you're still not owning up to what you did.

B (119:17)

And frankly, your cover story, it was lots of COVID stories. And some of them, maybe all of them, were completely despicable. Threatening parents with the idea that their child would commit suicide unless you maintain them. I don't. I don't know what's more disgusting to do to a parent. It's, oh, I have a choice between, you know what? This is what people would say. I could either have, you know, a dead son or alive daughter.

A (119:45)

Right.

B (119:45)

Or, you know, usually the other way around. But, you know, bullshit. It was always bullshit. And the fact that people would. People, young people who were confused about their own identity, who are going through the throes of adolescence, as everyone does, because in a world where they had been told that they could, and probably they should, they would certainly get a lot more social cachet if they did so decide that they were the opposite sex. They knew that the magic words to say to their parents in order to get their gender affirming care, which is to say their mental instability affirming care. It's actually what it was, was, mom, dad, I'm gonna kill myself if you don't let me do this. So this was a disgusting tactic that was, was created by who knows whom and then spread like wildfire across a population that was then duly maimed by plastic surgeons, the professional organization of which is finally saying, yeah, actually maybe wait at least until you're 19 because then at least they get to sign their own paperwork. Right. Like there's no, there's obviously nothing magical that happens on your 19th birthday.

A (120:49)

No, that's probably. Actually, actually it is. The idea is if you're a kid and somebody coerces your parent into consenting to maiming you, one can imagine the lawsuit in which you say, hey, I had a right not to be maimed and you lied to my parent. Whereas if you sign a bunch of stuff that says there in the fine print, if you know just how to squint at it, well, then the answer is, well, we did tell you that. Yeah.

B (121:15)

Even if, you know, even if you got your first, first cross sex hormone prescription after a half an hour conversation with a person you've never met before, which we know happens over and over and over again, and in some cases we're then directed to the pipeline for surgery, for cross sex surgery, which isn't a thing, but, you know, gender destroying surgery right away as well. Well, if you're legally an adult, then it's, it's a kind of liability protection fiction.

A (121:43)

Yeah, actually, I think, I think it is. Yeah. There's a lot to say here, but the fact is they knew they're not telling us a true story. And it is, you know, it's a ghastly crime against humanity. I wanted to add one thing, which is I just want people to take a moment to put themselves in the shoes of, of a normal parent who loves their child, finds that their child is troubled, which is very easy to be in a world that makes as little sense as this. And your child is convinced that they might be trans and the doctor is telling you, well, wouldn't you rather have a live daughter than a dead son? Think about what that does to you. If you're afraid, if you've got a troubled child, you have to be afraid of suicide. Right. It happens a lot.

B (122:34)

Lot.

A (122:35)

So you're thinking, oh, a doctor has just told me that suicide is likely. If I don't consent to this, I will literally not be able to live with myself. If I say no, even if I think that's the right thing to do for my child, that's my instinct. I'm not an expert. And what if I say no and Then the worst happens, which it might.

B (122:57)

How will I live with myself?

A (122:59)

How will I live with myself? So the answer is, is you default.

B (123:03)

Into whatever intervention you say, Doc.

A (123:05)

At least I've done what I can. And the point is, actually what you did is consent to have a doctor ma', am your child. And it is your job not to do that. But it is also understandable how experts who represent themselves as knowing something about your child's mind and what might help it can trick people into doing this.

B (123:24)

Yes.

A (123:25)

I mean, they're destroying people and families and. Anyway, I think it makes sense to just spend a minute in those parents shoes because it is not a comfortable place to be.

B (123:34)

No, no, not at all.

A (123:37)

All right. Full stop. I have one. Do you have more?

B (123:41)

There's one last little thing I want to say before we sign off.

A (123:44)

Okay, let's do your thing. And then I have a little correction.

B (123:47)

You sure you don't want to do that first? So if what we just talked about.

A (123:51)

No.

B (123:52)

Okay.

A (123:53)

Yeah.

B (123:55)

So last week I introduced a new project on Natural Selections, my substack Covid era stories. You can share my screen here if you like. And. And just read the. The invitation to contribute stories. The response has been remarkable. Thank you. We have received many, many, many so far. And yesterday I published the first one, the Symptoms I Carry by Heidi Brandes. It's extraordinary. I recommend it. We'll put a link to the. To the page in the show notes. And I continue to encourage stories both because you might want to see them published. And you know, we aren't going to publish everything that we receive, but we will publish many of them. I will publish many of them, but also because the act of writing about things that you experienced is often legitimately therapist therapeutic in its own right.

A (124:49)

Excellent. All right. I haven't read it yet. I'm excited about this project.

B (124:53)

It's fantastic. I would. I will say that this first story that we. That we ran doesn't involve death or injury from COVID or the vaccine, but describes deep destruction of relationship, which is something that so many of us experience. Experienced.

A (125:14)

All right, my little correction. In our recent discussion of the Predi shooting in Minneapolis, we talked about the issue of the accidental discharges of the P320 pistol. And I got something wrong, which many people pointed out, which is I said it has a light trigger. That's not correct. What appears to be the case is the failure to be drop safe was the result of the fact not that the trigger spring was light, but that the trigger itself was too heavy. And carried momentum. That is not relevant to the accidental discharge that may have happened before the shooting of Preddy. However, there is still plenty of evidence which you can find yourself online, of accidental discharges that are not based on a disc drop. There's one video I saw yesterday of six police officers attempting to arrest a young man who is resisting. They are trying to get him handcuffed and one of their guns goes off in its holster not having been removed. Nobody touching it. So anyway, the problem of accidental discharge is still potentially relevant to the producer shooting. It is not the light trigger that would have caused it. Enough people pointed it out that I just wanted to make sure that if you were misled by my presentation, now you know what I know.

B (126:45)

Awesome.

A (126:45)

I now know is what I mean.

B (126:47)

What you now know. Yep. All right. We will be back here same time next week. Check out our sponsors which were crowded health time. Oh no, no no. What were they? We had some confusion. Clear armor and crowd health.

A (127:05)

Yes.

B (127:07)

And we appreciate you our audience very very much appreciate you subscribing, liking sharing things that you find here. Full episodes clips that our amazing producer Jen is putting out all the time. And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love. Eat good food food and get outside.

A (127:26)

Be well everyone.