Rise of the Cosplaymanauts: The 272nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

This week in women: the UK Supreme Court declares that transwomen are not women, and women are lauded for putting on matching jumpsuits and being launched into space for a minute. In Britain, rapists can no longer pretend to be women; in the United States, we are asked to celebrate one of the oldest plays in the book—attractive woman attaches herself to wealthy man and attains power—and pretend that it represents female empowerment, while conveniently forgetting actually skilled women who have come before. Also: a hostage situation in Podcastistan: in which we explore the strange about-face of some prominent free speech warriors. Finally: the amazing institution that is Ralston College, whose themes are truth, freedom of inquiry, beauty, and fellowship.

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Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com

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Thumbnail courtesy of Blue Origin.

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Mentioned in this episode:

How women won the gender wars, by Kathleen Stock: https://unherd.com/2025/04/how-women-won-the-gender-wars/

Rapists aren’t women in the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/18/trans-rapists-can-no-longer-claim-to-be-women/

Federal contracts to SpaceX, ULA & Blue Origin: https://spacenews.com/spacex-ula-blue-origin-win-13-5-billion-in-u-s-military-launch-contracts-through-2029/

Best shot at space for Amanda Nguyen: https://www.thecut.com/article/amanda-nguyen-blue-origin-space-flight-controversy.html

MIT research team: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/amanda-nguyen-carries-mit-research-projects-into-orbit/

Former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, in Ebony: https://www.ebony.com/black-women-technology-nasa/

Douglas Murray in the New York Post: https://nypost.com/2025/04/17/opinion/douglas-murray-so-called-israel-hamas-ukraine-war-experts-spew-false-info-on-joe-rogans-podcast-there-has-to-be-a-standard/

Ralston College: https://www.ralston.ac

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome
• 2:59 Sponsors: Timeline, ARMRA, Brain.fm
• 17:10 This Week in Women Part I: UK Supreme Court
• 55:22 This Week in Women Part II: Blue Origin’s Cosplaymanauts
• 1:49:51 Douglas Murray and Podcastistan
• 2:11:47 Ralston College: truth, freedom of inquiry, beauty, and fellowship
• 2:22:13 Closing

Transcript

0:00

(Bell Ringing) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast, live stream number 272. That's right, 272. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. I am of course sitting with Dr. Heather Heying. We have been off, not really off, but occupied with other things. And so there's been a gap and we are back and there is of course no shortage of new things happening in the world that we should be talking about. We will talk about several of them. This week in women. This week in women, of course. Podcast to stand. The first weekly this week in women. The first weekly this week in women because it was a big week for women. It was a big week for women. Yeah, women. Podcast to stand, is that the term? Podcast to stand, we will be talking about podcast to stand. And then we're gonna finish up today talking a bit about where we were for a week while we were gone, which was at the amazing Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. And then we'll be back in a few short days on Wednesday to resume our Wednesday schedule. Yes, all right. Yeah, I know. And I got back to the island and got a cold. So apologies, my voice is huskier than usual and what? Spring cold isn't even a thing. Summer cold, but spring cold. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of people sick on the island. I'm a lot less sick than the other people I'm hearing about. But anyway. Yeah, I have a sinking feeling that the immune dysregulation of the COVID so-called vaccines has created a larger pool in which for evolution to experiment with pathogens and even those of us who'd dodged the shot are encountering a lot of new and more experimental bugs. Yeah, anecdotally people do seem a lot sicker than they used to be. We've talked about this before. We on average are less sick than we used to be, but still, I came back having been traveling for eight days, totally fine, and within 48 hours of being back, I was laid out by some thing that I presumably got here. I was rushing through an airport yesterday trying not to miss a shuttle. And as I passed this guy sort of meandering, you know how people walk? Some people drive that way too. I've noticed that. Anyway, this was just a guy sort of oblivious to his circumstance. As I began to rush past him, he turned and coughed, a giant cloud of I don't know what I plowed through. Yep, well. Yep, we'll see. There you are, you're a cloud. There it is. There it is, okay. So we've got our watch party going on at Locals. Please consider joining us there. And as always, three sponsors right up at the top of the hour. And if we are reading ads here on DarkHorse, you can be sure that we have actually, we actually truly do vouch for these products or services. In this case, I don't know, the third one is kind of a product and a service. So you decide, but the first two-- It's a floor wax and a dessert topping. Yes, yes. With more seed oils. Yes. I bet seed oils would be put to good use as a floor wax actually. There are a hell of a lot of things that they're useful for and they're lower toxicity than a lot of the stuff you could use them in lieu of. Oh, totally. That would be a feature. Safe for human consumption, kind of, but the year we moved on. You wouldn't wanna consume large amounts of them. No, you wouldn't. Were they to end, you know, it's the kind of thing that if you are in industrial food production, I want you lubricating the machines with, you know, food grade seed oil. In case a little bit-- Right, because you can't prevent, you know, so the point is if you're using a lubricant near food, I want it to be canola oil, whether it's canola season or not. You know, so we have a kitchen mixer, which I use a fair bit when I'm baking and there's something in the mechanism that occasionally is leaking a little bit. And every time that happens, I think, "What, that doesn't, I don't know what that is. I don't know what's in there. I don't know what they used." Presumably that's not food grade. And I don't, you know, we don't have any canola oil in our pantry, but I'd far rather that be what's inside that machine that I use to cook. Totally. And then I don't even know what. And this is why, frankly, libertarianism needs a little bit of an upgrade because you do want somebody, you don't wanna have to think about this, but you want somebody who is setting standards for food processors industrial grade or home grade or whatever they might be to actually insist on a lubricant that is non-toxic for exactly this reason. And the point is the manufacturers, if you don't have that regulation, will default to whatever is cheapest because the chances that you will even know that you've been injured by the lubricant that was in, how would you even know? Yeah. Right? So, you know, you get a random pathology and nobody's gonna know where it came from. So you need that-- Hope not in this world. You need that done correctly without the temptation to regulate everything so that nothing works because the amount of red tape is so great. So, you know, anyway, it's a question about how good governance is done. But the last thing you want is for nobody to feel responsible for the lubricant in your food machines being non-toxic. Absolutely. Yeah. So in the spirit of it's a floor wax out of dessert topping. Yes. Actually not in the spirit of that at all. Okay. Let's embark on our ads. The anti-spirit of that. Yes. Our first sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes Midopure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone, Eurylithin A. Found primarily in pomegranates, Eurylithin A has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies, many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells, but like everything living, they can decay or get damaged. The older we get, the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues. This is in part because mitophagy, which is the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get, like so much does. The age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhabits, nope. The age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged, thank you, or excess mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, which results in an overall decline in cell function. Mitopure from timeline works by triggering mitophagy. Quoting a research article published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2022, quote,"Targeting mitophagy to activate "the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging "is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline. "We present results for a randomized placebo-controlled trial "in middle-aged adults where we administer"post-mitot compound Eurylithin A, mitopure, "a known mitophagy activator at two doses for four months. "The data shows significant improvements in muscle strength, "about 12%, with intake of Eurylithin A. "We observe clinically meaningful improvements "with Eurylithin A on aerobic endurance "and physical performance, but do not notice "a significant improvement on peak power output," end quote. Furthermore, research published in Nature Medicine in 2016 found that in mice, the beneficial effects of Eurylithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age. So take two soft gels that might appear a day for two months, and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. Mitopure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up, regenerate new healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of mitopure. Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to get 10% off your order. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E.com slash darkhorse. I think I need a nap.(Laughing) Any more timeline? Maybe there should be a siesta segment. Yeah, there should be a siesta segment. A siesta segment. Yeah, which we just have like a camera on like animals sleeping, snoring. Yeah, all right. Yeah. I could see that. I think it would hit actually. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, everyone likes to watch a cat sleep.(Laughing) It's more interesting to watch dogs sleep because they do a lot of sleep. They do a lot more stuff, yeah. Our second sponsor this week is Armora colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. The original mammalian colostrum is the first food that every mammal eats. It is produced in the first two or three days of an infant's life and is nutritionally different from the milk that comes in afterwards. Colostrum serves many vital functions, including that of protecting and strengthening the mucosal barriers of infants before their own systems mature. Modern living breaks down many of Armora colostrum and immune barriers. In contrast, Armora colostrum balances and strengthens, helping to create a seal that guards against inflammation and everyday toxins, pollutants, and threats. Armora colostrum is a bioactive whole food with over 400 functional nutrients, including but not limited to immunoglobulins, antioxidants, minerals, and prebiotics. Bovine colostrum has been used to treat cancer, heart disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, among many other ailments. It is a general anti-inflammatory, and its use in adults has been clinically shown to increase lean muscle mass, improve athletic performance and recovery time, support healthy digestion, and reduce allergy symptoms. Armora 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 at the market, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, armora colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing calcium and fat to guarantee the highest potency in bioavailability. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free. People who have used armora colostrum have reported clearer skin, thicker hair, and better mental concentration. In addition, people using armora colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep, and fewer sugar cravings. I've been putting in smoothies with loads of fresh mint, raw milk, fantastic honey, and cacao na nibs, or sometimes just with raw milk. Actually, yesterday I had it with raw milk, frozen passion fruit, yum, a banana, and honey, and it was amazing. Armora colostrum is the real deal. Armora has a special offer for the Dark Horse audience. Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryarmora.com slash Dark Horse, or enter Dark Horse to get 15% off your first order. That's t-r-y-a-r-m-r-a.com slash Dark Horse. You remind me, I forgot to have my raw milk smoothie with armora yesterday. I'm out of the habit because it's been away. All right, our final sponsor this week is Brain FM. Attention is one of our most precious resources. It says attributes, but I think resources is better. Even the language that we use around it reveals some of the depth of that relationship. We can get someone's attention, give someone our attention, stand at attention, pay attention, feel attention in the air. Feel attention in the air. It's not at all the same part of speech, but-- And I didn't put that in there, you did. No, I put that in there. I could see from your-- I was hoping that it would throw you. That sharpie writing, well, I was blowing my nose at the time, so I didn't hear it, so you had to repeat it. Missed opportunity. There was attention in the air, and it was mostly in my sinuses. Yeah, that's not attention, darling. It produces tension, pressure, which is a kind of tension, or tension is a kind of pressure. I think pressure is a bigger category. Converged on the viewpoint, which suggests that it's probably true. It's not resulting in tension. And of course, there are nearly endless ways to be distracted by food in the fridge and clutter in the living room. Mucus. But mucus, for example, in the sinuses or elsewhere, by the necessary maintenance of machines, the gardening, the grocery shopping, the laundry, the appointments to be made and kept, and all of it is competing for your attention. Then there are the notifications that you have, your email, I have maxed out, by the way, the number of unread emails in one of my email accounts. I feel it is an accomplishment. What do you mean, what's it doing? Is it dropping off unread ones, or is it just not letting any new ones in? No, no, it is just the counter is all mine. So it's still coming in? Yeah, it's not disrupting any functionality. It's just, it stopped counting. It gave up, which I feel is a triumph on my part. It's only one of the-- We're so different. Yes, that is true, and thank goodness. Where was I? It just, it hurts my brain to think about it. It hurts my brain to think about it too. All right. It's terrible. So if you haven't heard back from Bret, you know why? No, no, it's an account, this account, the reason I have the other accounts is that this one is so compromised, there's no rescuing it. You recognized you're not, that simply getting a new thing. I don't know how you people do it. You have to have an account that you can, every time somebody, you know, do you want 10% off your order? Just give us your email address. Well, you have to give them an email address. You're ready to not use anymore because those things accumulate in there and they just start spitting stuff at you so fast. So anyway, it's like, it's my fly paper account, right? I see. Yeah, better that than the, you know, the carefully guarded account. Do I even know that this account exists? You do. I see. Yes, but you don't email me there, thank you. You're so welcome. I'm not a fly. True, irrelevant, but true. Yeah, it is. This is about the derail. Brain FM is, you need to be listening to Brain FM right now. You need to like sit down with that account with Brain FM in the background in your ears and just like delete, delete, delete, and then delete. If I was, I would remember that this is about the question of how to maintain attention on something. Do you want to pay attention? Be truly, add attention on the task that feels worthy, honorable, and suited to your skills and aspirations. Brain FM might just help. Brain FM is an app that provides intense music designed specifically to boost productivity inspired by and based in scientific research beginning in the 90s. The people behind Brain FM have created music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better. If that is what you want to do, or relax more deeply, if that is what you want to do, Brain FM's music demonstrably and quickly helps you find and stay in the state of flow. Research-based, no, not based, published. Based research published last year in the Journal of Communications Biology found-- I hope you're right. That it was based from home. I don't know, I don't remember. Think about it. I mean, I'm including in there, so I assessed it somewhat. I don't know if it's based. Based research published last year in the Journal of Communications Biology found that listening to music with strong amplitude modulation, the exact music to be found at Brain FM increases the ability of listeners to hold their attention on tasks. The amplitude modulated music found in Brain FM was found to be more effective than other auditory inputs at improving executive control and helping listeners engage in activity with sustained attention. Anecdotally, we have heard from several listeners who have had great success listening to Brain FM. Says one person of the dramatic effects of listening to Brain FM, I am now able to do one thing at a time and keep my brain in just the right place to facilitate being fully present. If you wanna stop giving away your attention to the lowest bidder, I think it's still the highest bidder. If you want to stop giving away your attention to someone bidding for it, consider Brain FM to help you focus, unitask, and get stuff done. Get stuff done, that's right, it's a family show. Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days. Did I not write stuff? No, you wrote stuff, it's a family show. Yeah, we don't always act like it. No, we sort of do, but it's the nature of family. It's more complex than the brochures. We hear from families who say the kids listen. They do. It's cool. Yeah. And so I apologize for all the F bombs that get dropped. See, I'm tempted to say in response, kids, if you're listening, stay in school, except actually I'm not sure that's a good idea. No, no, no, run wild. Yeah, think carefully about whether to stay in school. Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to brainfm slash darkhorse. That's brain.fm slash darkhorse for 30 days free. All right, what's been going on with women? This week in women. This week in women. Yeah, you can show my screen. This is the big, big good news this week in women. Trans women are not women. So that's this week in not women. No, no, no, because no. This is this week in women. Those two women in this photograph on the above the fold on the Daily Telegraph, which is a UK paper, are indeed women, as are these women here in this article at Unheard by Kathleen Stock. This is, I've read some articles recently from Unheard that I have been deeply unimpressed by. This is not one of them. Kathleen is awesome and she does an excellent job of describing what happened at the UK Supreme Court this week. I'm just gonna read the first paragraph here. "For much of the past 10 years, trans activist organizations have been directing an immersive theatrical performance across the UK with participation virtually mandatory. Women have been forced into supporting actress roles, propping up the leading lady fantasies of especially demanding and sometimes dangerous men. And the progressive establishment has mostly nodded along clapping like seals. But yesterday," so this was three days ago now, "but yesterday the Supreme Court brought the final curtain down, rejecting the arguments of Scottish government ministers, the possession of a certificate can change someone's sex. Eshooing the amateur dramatics to which we have all become accustomed, judges went with a famous line of Scots poetry instead, a man's a man for all that." So this doesn't change anything in the US legally, obviously. And, but what it does do in the UK is begins to absolutely shatter the collective delusion we have been forced to live under for a long time now. So I will say there's something confusing to me about the fact that the UK seems to be ahead on this topic and way behind on several other topics related to things like basic liberties to speak. Well, I mean, I think you've got a few things going on in the UK and I am not expert, but you've got a group of Scottish women who specifically have been fighting this fight. And I'm not gonna go into the details of that fight, but they have been tireless, courageous, honest, and put up with a whole lot of stuff, was it? That they should never have been forced to put up with, but they have been staunch in defending reality in a way that, yes, many of us Americans have as well, but they have been focused to a degree that I don't know that any organization in the United States has been focused. And furthermore, while there are people in the US like Martina Navratilova, who have been increasingly vocal in their rejection of trans ideology, we don't have J.K. Rowling. And let's see if I can get this to, oh no. Before we go to J.K. Rowling, here's another headline from the Telegraph that results from the decision by the UK Supreme Court,"Rabists can no longer claim to be women. Police forces are now expected to record sexual offenders by their sex and not their preferred gender following Supreme Court ruling." Well, that's a long time coming. And the picture here is of a male rapist who declared himself female and put on some fingernails and got himself a pink phone and put on some makeup and got himself a dye job presumably or a wig, I don't know, and got put into a women's prison after being convicted of two rapes. And this, I will say, is-- But that's not gonna be allowed anymore because reality triumphs. This was always going to be the most obvious, the easiest case to make that made it obvious that the whole cosplaying as women thing, that there was no mechanism by which this could be allowed because obviously, ultimately, it would allow male sex offenders into female prisons. All I have to do is self-ID? Oh, cool. Right, and I must say, you and I have been talking about that forever. I do not remember where exactly it started, but we've been talking about that before we had cases that we could point to and said, "This is the logical progression of this lunacy." And then, of course, it's like Bill C-17 with Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson, you become aware of him sitting in front of the Canadian Congress saying, you're gonna end up locking people up for using the wrong pronouns, and it's like, is that even, is that plausible? Yeah. And of course, we're long since at the point where courts are, in fact, doing all kinds of things based on the wrong use of pronouns. So this was always going to be the end point of this, and yeah, it's been how many years has it taken to finally get a definitive ruling that just simply says-- And we still don't have it in the US. Yeah. Yeah. So here's, oh, that's sort of out of order, but. Let me see. Well, I guess I don't have the one that I wanted to have, but she said separately, J.K. Rowling, that the people who won with this ruling are women and children and homosexuals and all women in places like rape crisis centers and prisons and bathrooms and sport and all of this. Here she is responding to someone named Dr. Helen Weberly, who has she, her pronouns in her Twitter account. Helen Weberly said, we must not teach our young girls and women that all that someone who has a penis wants to do is rape them. It's just totally and utterly the wrong message. Penises are there for us to enjoy, not fear, which is such an insane thing to say regardless. So Rowling responds, yes, what better message to teach a young girl that if a strange man gets out his dick in front of her, she shouldn't be afraid, but enjoy it. By the way, she includes Helen Weberly as a pro-puberty blocker doctor who runs an online gender clinic. So we can see the financial incentives of the people who are showing up. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. I hesitate to even dredge this up from the absurd past, but here you have a woman, Dr. Weberly, who is effectively taking on the nonsense that idiot men used to say about, well, if you're gonna be raped, you might as well enjoy it. That thing that horrible men used to say, here you have a woman effectively saying the same thing or justifying it in some new, slightly feminine way, but what the God damn, I mean. Yeah, no, and I have, you know, I spend time in this community-ish online. Like, you know, I've talked to a number of people who call themselves TERFs and, you know, and spoke at the GenSpec conference, the second one in Denver, year and a half ago or so, and now no de-transitioners and have friends who are psychologists in the community who are helping working with parents and also young people who have been confused into harming themselves. And I certainly have never met anyone. Like, yes, there are man-haters out there. Yes, there are people who think like anyone with a penis is actually going to try to rape you. I haven't met any of them, and certainly it's gonna be the rare position. And so, you know, this is not only resurrecting an insane and grotesque view from back when there was a sort of good old boys club that kind of thought it was okay to force women into sexual encounters, but it's also straw manning the movement that against all odds actually turn this around in the UK Supreme Court. Which is amazing. Yeah, yeah, totally amazing. So here we have a photograph that's going to become fairly famous, I think, in which JK Rowling is here with a drink and a cigar. She says, "I love it when a plan comes together. Hashtag Supreme Court, hashtag women's rights." And so, I mean, I think you asked, you know, why did it happen first in the UK? And it was a number of factors, but she's a big one. She's a big one. And in part, I think the insanity, the vitriol that has come at her, including from all the young people who became fantastically wealthy and famous playing parts in her books in the movie versions who turned on her two person. Not all the adult actors did, but all of the young people, right? And the trans activists and others, the sympathizers, the allies online who are saying, "You've totally betrayed me and I learned so much." It's like all of you failed to understand what Harry Potter was, failed to understand what you have. She is brilliant. She is not just an extraordinary writer, but she's an extraordinary storyteller and she's got depth of insight into human beings. And she is in part talking specifically about finding truth and standing up to those who would keep you from speaking yet. And so when the activists and the so-called allies come at her and say, "You've betrayed everything that you wrote that is them revealing that they are naive and don't understand much about what it is that they supposedly loved in our books." Yeah, they didn't understand any of it. They did not understand what was in those books. And actually, it's a tragic irony of actors, which is there is a way to do this that does not involve you understanding the character at all. And it's very sad that it's happened. I do wonder in thinking about why the UK, which is so backwards on the speech front, is a bit ahead of us on this front. I wonder if the combination of J.K. Rowling plus the Tavistock Clinic having been British and therefore having sort of revealed the industrialization of this process in a way that has an address and-- It was singular in a way. It's much more diffuse in the US and in Canada. There are many of them, but there is a single one that we can point to. And then I also wonder, maybe this is just me drawing connections based on the news that is significant enough to make it across the pond, but the grooming gang scandal, I think also might just simply reveal that women are not being protected in the UK. And so I wonder if that didn't shock people awake in the sense of like, oh my God, that's, you know, girls are being groomed. I mean, you know, that is such a jarring fact that it does make you begin to recoil from every discussion where people are using nuance as a weapon. Yeah, that's interesting. There is a fair bit of denial of the grooming gangs, even in the UK. And obviously we're beginning to get some stories in the US about some of the effects of letting violent criminals illegally across our borders. Famously, this actually, you know, another story this week of a young woman who was killed brutally and her mother stands up at the press conference in the White House to speak the truth that she knows about what happened to her daughter. But our country is bigger and it hasn't been forever that we have been letting people in across a porous border. And we're not so close to where everyone is coming from. Right? And, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but the, you know, the grooming gangs in the UK, I was just reading about this yesterday. I won't be able to cite statistics, but are far and away made up of South Asian men. Yes, who are hostile to the West. Who are hostile to the West, South Asian Muslim men. And am I therefore saying that all South Asian Muslim men are going to attack young women? No, of course not. Of course not. But it is denying the reality, letting people scare you into not wanting to be called racist and so you don't say these things is part of how we ended up here. And there is beginning to be this upsurge in the US. Like, you know what, I'm not gonna take this anymore. The fact is though, that is awful as the things are that are happening in the US. It's not happening at the rate or the density that has been happening across Europe for a long time now. Well, look, I think you and I specifically have a toolkit for this and it is the moment to lean on. The point is, this isn't about the religions or populations from which these people emerge. It is about whether or not you are going to prioritize lineage against lineage competition and violence, or you are going to join the West in putting those things aside and collaborating based on the fact that reciprocity is profitable. And if we just simply maintain that distinction, we should never, never be letting people in who don't like the experiment. If they are hostile to the experiment coming in, I'm sorry, you're not welcome. Here's what we're doing here. I don't like it, I'm coming anyway. Find someplace else to go. Find someplace else to go. It's not our obligation to take you if you don't like the experiment. That should be the primary prerequisite. Then we can talk about all the other things. Is there room? What is the plan? But if you don't like us, sorry, that's a deal breaker right there. And that doesn't mean that you can't critique at all. That is, that is not the argument here. The question is, are you on board with the basic program of we are not gonna fight each other based on race? If you're on board with that basic program, then we can talk. If you're not, then the point is, oh yeah, you're the last people we should have here or in Britain or any of these places. Fight each other based on race or sexually assault people based on race. Well, but this is part and parcel of the same thing because if you view other lineages as targets for displacement, then the point is you're basically, they are not of human status to you. It is not surprising that you will take advantage in every conceivable way. It is not surprising that you will find, you know, laws against rape and murder and all of these things inconvenient because, you know, they're protecting that which to you is not special. So why we're doing this to ourselves, they're here, I don't know, but it's an absurd mistake because it's not hard to calculate. It takes about a paragraph to figure out what the policy ought to be and how we've simultaneously managed to not write that paragraph and adhere to it is a big mystery. Indeed, and, you know, as we've said many times before, you know, race and sex are not the same thing evolutionarily in any way really. They get lumped because they are categories that have experienced class-based discrimination in the past, but they really don't operate the same way. And with regard to the UK Supreme Court's ruling this week, that trans women are not in fact women and you can't change your sex just by having a card that says so, you know, don't show this yet, this is not where we are. With regard to what the UK Supreme Court did this week, I just lost my place. I don't know, maybe we should go through here. Okay. Okay, so you could put this back up. So some of the trans responses to what happened were incredible. So India Willoughby is a guy who acts like he's a woman with whom J.K. Rowling has had many arguments online. And India Willoughby said, "Were frumps jealous?" I think that's a big part of this, to which J.K. Rowling translates, "The Supreme Court ruled I'm not a woman because women envy my gorgeousness." He truly is the gift that keeps on giving. And another, and there's a ton, but here's another dude who acts like he's a woman, sending a tweet to the police of Scotland who says, "I will scream rape at any of your officers if they try to force me out of a female space. I will accept no violation of my human rights as a woman." And I do feel like those two tweets, both very well encapsulate what insanity, you know, I was obviously not involved in the front lines here, like not in the UK at all, but the insanity that those of us who spoke on behalf of reality over these years have faced. Like it is exactly these sorts of thoughts that people have been telling us, "That's not true, that doesn't happen. You know, how dare you say that all men are rapists? How dare you say that someone just wanting to pee is a threat to your daughters?" And here we go. This man is delusional and willing to make a scene and probably beyond that, because he is claiming that he has human rights as a woman, which he is not. And? In the wake of a, you know, Supreme Court ruling that he finds distasteful because it takes away his cosplay. Mr. Molly is also incredibly stupid. I mean, just look at this tweet. I will scream rape at any of your offer. Can you, can officers, can you imagine having tweeted that? Like you just told us that you're going to lie about having been raped, right? So to whatever extent there was anything, you held any power in this situation, you have destroyed your own position by announcing that you are exactly the kind of person who will accuse people who haven't tried to rape you of rape, right? You have revealed your character almost perfectly. Yep. And I mean, I think this also, you know, this gets to the idea of like, well, you know, I feel like a woman. I'm sorry. I'm a woman. What does it feel like? What is it that you are feeling? It feels like a woman, because when I look at you, what I think you think it feels like is it's fun to be helpless and to put on things that make you less functional and to be able to ask for things that you haven't earned and to destroy functional systems. And frankly, the idea that any of those things have anything to do with what it is inherently to be a woman is grotesque, misogynistic and vile. And frankly, this person and the last, grotesque, misogynistic and vile. Yes, and I will point out sociopathic women exist. Of course. And this person is showing all sorts of evidence that to the extent that they aspire to be a woman, we know what kind of woman they aspire to be. Yep. The kind who would, a trans woman that is a man, pretending to be a woman, is in much less danger of being raped than a woman for simple biological reasons. So this person would destroy the observation of rape in order to escape responsibility for violating a norm. They would destroy the ability of a woman to invoke this who has actually been harmed by a man. And the point is, okay, that's sociopathic. You don't destroy that accusation quadruply so if you're not vulnerable to the crime. Yeah, no, that's right. And so, to go back to that second, here, telegraph headline, rapists can no longer claim to be women because in the UK, rape is defined as involving a penis. And so you just, you can't do it with that one. And if you got one, you're not a woman. Yeah. End of story. Actually, there's something, I mean, it seems pedantic, but in the end, I think it is not. Rapists can, of course, claim to be anything they want, but we're not listening. Yeah, and the headline, yeah, the headline doesn't quite get it. It doesn't quite get it. Rapists can claim whatever they want, as you say. They can claim they're rhinoceros, but the police are expected to put what they actually are into their report as opposed to, in this one way, go along with the delusion. Yeah. I'd have more sympathy at the rhinoceros claim, at least it's an announcement of the mental disorder. Well, precisely. And we could go on and on about this when we've talked about it ad nauseam, some might say, in the past, but it is often a mental disorder in young people that is then encouraged and facilitated and made permanent by the intervention of the so-called medical establishment with first puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones and then surgery. But this guy and many like him have a different kind of mental disorder. They haven't actually been confused into thinking that they're the sex that they're not and that declaring themselves a sex that they're not and living their lives as the sex that they're not will resolve a gender dysphoria, which is a new and made up term also. They're not confused, they're simply predatory. And by making that distinction and saying, oh, also there's lots and lots of ways that people end up wrapped into this confused mess, but those are two very distinct things. And not all men who think they're women are predators, but some are. Yeah, now I would point out somewhere early in this segment, you mentioned that a list of people who win from this decision and there's something missing from it, which is people who have genuine gender dysphoria and are not trying to take advantage of it in a predatory way. The fact is, whatever the mechanism is that generates that pattern, there are people who are not looking to upend Western civilization or take advantage of its blind spots. And the sooner that we deal with the predators, the better for anybody who isn't in that category. Yeah, exactly. So I just pulled up the tweet that I had not included in my screenshots before and you could show this here. So this is JK Rowling again saying, "Winners in the UK Supreme Court today,"women and girls, including trans identified women, "continue to benefit from tyranny rights, et cetera. "Gay people, freedom of speech, freedom of association, "those at risk of discrimination "for a belief in the material reality of sex." And then she continues, "The fact that so many UK trans activists "are shrieking about injustice says it all. "You never had the rights you claim you've now lost. "You had demands. "Your sense of entitlement grew unchecked "because cowards and idiots bowed down "to your campaign of intimidation. "No longer." And that's good. Yeah, that is good. And then suddenly one of the top, well, her response is to one of the responses,"Maybe drop this now? "The obsession has been scary," says some dude with he, him pronouns in his, whatever that's called. She says, "Sorry to hear women defending their rights "scares you."Maybe go fuck yourself."(Both Laughing) Sounds away with words. Oh man, is she good. So yeah, thank you. Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. And may this be another, and there have been a few of these moments, of like, aha, now it's out. Now the files are out. Now Tavistock is revealed. Now the UK Supreme Court has made a ruling that is obvious and it shouldn't be in retrospect, but may these dominoes continue to fall. And may we learn sufficiently that we don't find ourselves in some place so utterly insane again. Yeah. And certainly it won't look like this again. And that too is one of the lessons of, there are a lot of people walking around crying fascism right now, who can't see that what happened during COVID was using the same playbook that fascists use and people can claim fascism there. So, as you said during COVID, it's not gonna be Jack but it thugs. It's not going to be. So, have a little creativity and don't imagine that history is an exact repeat. All right, one last thought from my side before we move on to the rest of what happened this week in women. This week in women. This week in women. Yeah, mm-hmm. There is, so I'm sort of playing around in my mind with the idea that all right, these sociopaths have been decisively thrown out by the British Supreme Court from the women's team. Mm-hmm. They are now decidedly back on the men's team legally and at every other regard. But this though. You're welcome. Well, that's the problem is I don't really want them. They were already on, they were already on. They were already on. Sorry, they were always on your team. Yes, and they were cheating by pretending to be on your team. But the, here's the question. Men have a certain responsibility on planet Earth. And the boundaries of that responsibility are not written anywhere, but they're pretty well understood. And this is a massive failure of masculinity that we allowed this to happen. Oh yeah. Right, because you know, where exactly you draw the line is a little hard to say. I do think there are people struggling with the same thing. I do think there are people struggling with incurable gender dysphoria. I'm not sure how to be helpful to them other than just be compassionate about it. But you had a lot of guys taking advantage of the category of woman. And the point is the real appropriate response to that is come on, dude, cut that shit out. Oh, not a family show for this moment. So, but anyway, but the point is, where were the men? Most of them were missing an action. AWOL is really what they were. They were. Well, in part, the sort of the pseudo liberal, which I still call it that. At some point I'll drop the pseudo because they own the word now somehow. But the pseudo liberal agenda, which embraces, which is recognized because it was so difficult to do so. Errors and ills of toxic masculinity. Look, they're fighting, they're brawling in the street, they're going to war, it's terrible. Well, it's really obvious when men go rogue because it's explicit and out there and overt in my language. And the pseudo liberal ideology has said, okay, let's go over, let's have, we've all heard in fucking meetings, oh, wouldn't it be better if women were running the world? We've been hearing that for 20 years. And from the beginning it's like, no, no. It would be better if smart people who are wise to their own capability of making errors and the eddies that they can find themselves in and their ability to change direction when they find that they've done something wrong were ruling the world. And that's going to probably be a mix of men and women. The idea of like, oh, the feminine, the divine feminine is going to be the thing that we need to run the world. Well, no. So the toxic feminine has become the rule in many places. And to that point we will return here shortly, I think. And part of what the toxic feminine does is it assures men that women do not want strong men. Women do, because what's strong is brutal. Strong is equated with brutal. And so what the toxic feminine leadership model looks like is women convincing weak men that what men should be is weak. And so they kind of embrace their weakness. And then a lot of men are like, well, huh, I don't know why I'm not getting all that much attention because actually women don't like weak men. And it doesn't mean that a woman who says, I like a strong man is saying, I myself am weak. No, that is not the same thing. You can be strong and also like strength. In fact, if you are strong, you must want strength. Otherwise you're looking for a toxic relationship. So all of these men who've been compelled to sit back and kind of let this toxic feminine side flow over them and accept what the women are saying and then being surprised when it doesn't work out for them, like stand up, find your balls and like do something real already. Yeah, I exactly agree with that. But I do want to go back. You said that maybe they own the word liberal. You're not ready to, I'm not ready to see it yet. That's not a question of ready. It's a question of when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. And the reason for that is that I don't think, I think actually what happened to liberal, progressive, left, all of that is the same thing that happened to women, which is you have a group of cosplayers and what they're going to do is they are going to find any role in civilization that has power and they are going to commandeer it and they're going to shove the people out of it who actually deserve the label. So it is not an accident that you have, Joe Rogan and you and me and Matt Taibbi and Walter Kern and whoever else being declared as having left the left, which is not true. The values haven't changed. We've all grown up a little bit. But the basic point is these people are who they were and something else took over the camp. But it's like, I mean, I think I've used this analogy before. Just because somebody captures your equipment on the battlefield and they're now driving around with a tank that has your flag on it, doesn't mean they're friendlies. And so yeah, something commandeered the term liberal and the answer is okay, that means you have to do a bit more explaining when you invoke it presently. Their fundamental nature is self-promoting. And the point is what costume do I need to put on to get more power? I'm putting that costume on. And it doesn't mean that they are women or that they are progressives or any of those things. They're fakers every time they do it and they don't deserve to own any of these labels and it's time to just simply call them out across the board and say, you're not what you're pretending to be, go home. I agree with you. I guess for me, the words liberal and progressive are more like the word feminist, which is also a word that I have defended, have said, no, I still am, but I care less about it now than I did even a year ago. But feminist, liberal, progressive are human constructions. The words of course are all human constructions, but they describe ways of thinking about the world or themselves, human constructions, excuse me. Whereas woman does not. A woman only describes a human construction in so far as a woman is defined as an adult human female and therefore women couldn't exist without humans. But that's not a very interesting point. So a woman exists without there being people thinking about whether or not it exists. It's not a self-defined category. You can't leave it at will and you can't join it. Right, but that's separate. Not only does it exist in the world, regardless of whether or not we have words for it or we don't have thought about it, but it's also immutable. Once you are, you are. And you know, no one's born a woman, lots of people die women. And if you were born a boy, you can't become a woman. That because what girls do is they grow up to be women, as I have written about. Whereas liberal, progressive, feminist, conservative, libertarian, like all of these words have had meanings. And I think it is incumbent upon us often to say, to put a flag, I guess, in the sand and say, actually, this one I'm not moving for. I'm circling the wagons, I planted the flag, and I'm gonna defend this because, I mean, I think the importance with regard to the political terms is precisely because the fact that they skin suited the Democratic Party remains confusing to many people who have been Democrats all of their lives. And you know, we're not confused, but many people whom we know and love are confused because well, of course I'm a Democrat, I've always been a Democrat. But the Democrats slid out from under you and got replaced by something else. Yeah, the inversion of everything you believe. Right, so that is a reason to be very clear about the language and to defend the language so that you can reveal the skin suit nature of modern politics. Well, I think we need a rubric though. And I'm struggling for what the exact term is, but there's, you know, are you a liberal? Well, does that mean do I believe in DEI or does that mean that I believe in, you know, in the case of liberal, we actually have a term, classical liberal, which doesn't exactly match what you and I would mean, but it has a lot of the correct directionality. But so I wonder if, you know, is, you know, I'm a classical feminist. Well, it does invite the question, what does that mean? It means I believe in women's equal right to avail themselves of the opportunities in civilization. It does not mean that I wanna see, you know, the same number of, you know, I don't need parody in mining, but I do believe that you should have access to mining. And if you have the merit to get in, there's no reason that you're being female should keep you out, right? So, you know, is classical the term? Do we wanna say, you know, oh, I'm a, you know, gold standard liberal, right? What does that mean? It means here are the values that I hold and it doesn't mean that I subscribed to any of the modern nonsense. So at some level you need-- It's a non-fiat liberal. Well, you know, Pierre Corey had his Twitter account captured by hackers as I had some years ago, just last couple of weeks. And they did the same crap that they did to me. I'm not even sure that it's an organic hack, but they get into your account and then from inside the account, they pretend to be you and they take advantage of people and they contact people and they do all sorts of stuff, right? And so it's like, it looks like Pierre Corey, but it ain't, right? So one of the things that I think should be true, you should have a mechanism to freeze the account from the outside so that the people who take it over can't do anything with it. But you should also have the ability to revert the account to whatever it looked like right before they did what they did, before they unfollowed the people they unfollowed, before they followed the ones they followed, before they can't, whoever it was, you should be able to set the account back to the last place that it was known to be, to have integrity. And my point is that we need something like this to say, you know, to say, you know, the Democratic party departed, started departing radically from the values that it once held during the first Clinton administration. That's my claim as to when this modern madness began. I would like to be able to say, actually, I do adhere to the values of the Democratic party, but before this date and not after, right? So we need that kind of across all of the places where something predatory has taken over some label that matters so that we can just at least have that conversation, right? Here's where I'm claiming that the change happened and, you know, I'm not disavowing what took place before that, I'm not saying it was always insane, but I'm not taking responsibility for anything that happened after because that was madness. So anyway, some rubric like that would be useful and classical might be it, maybe there's a better term. Interesting. Okay, this week on women, part two, a crew of accomplished female astronauts went to space this week. Wow. Yep, and they returned triumphant, all healthy after all that time, having done all of the work in advance that is necessary to become a skilled astronaut. There's a lot to be said here. Yep. Blue Origin, which is the company founded by Jeff Bezos, which claims to be about research, which a little more on that soon, is of course really about commercializing space for rich people. That said, maybe commercializing space for rich people sets the stage for more people, plebes like us, to go into space someday. I'm enthusiastic about the idea of space exploration. I remember, actually, I remember in middle school, a friend of mine declaring, this was during the space shuttle years, so like early 80s, saying, we shouldn't be spending any money, NASA should be defunding, you know, you've seen these bumper stickers, right? Like NASA should be funded by bake sales and this sort of thing. She said, we shouldn't be spending any money on space until we solve all the problems here on Earth. And we've all heard this sort of thing, but I heard it first from a friend when I was like 12. And I thought at the time, that's bullshit. That's total bullshit. And we were both born a couple months before the moon landing. And we obviously weren't conscious of it, but we watched it. And not together. We were not allowed to participate, but we did watch. Yeah. And so that, in both of our families, were sciency and engineering-y and cared about it and thought it was exciting and wonderful. And so we grew up with that excitement. And then, you know, watched it fade a little bit as the space program seemed to not be caring anymore about reaching that far out in the space shuttle program was happening. And then, of course, it was met with some disasters and we kind of canned that too. And the US hasn't been doing much. And I'm sure there are people at NASA who would disagree, but we haven't had manned space exploration for a while. And so, you know, the fact of private endeavors going into space is not something I object to. And there were plenty of people who were saying the whole thing is a sham. None of that ever should have happened. But that's not where I am, as you know. It is also true that NASA is being defunded by Doge, in part, you know, that NASA is not being hit nearly as hard as, for instance, USAID, but NASA is taking some hits. And that leaves this niche wide open for private enterprise. Except, and here's the little tweak that you're not gonna be coming. And we are gonna get back to this like amazing moment in which all these skilled women go into space, not. But this, and here you can show my screen here, Space News reports that SpaceX, ULA, which is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin, just won $13.7 billion in US military launch contracts through 2029, with SpaceX taking home the largest amount and Blue Origin the smallest amount. This seems to run counter to what Doge is doing. I'm not sure how. Wait, wait, I'm not sure why that is. Because I don't know anything about this. This could be a boondoggle, or it could be that that's a good price to pay and that the value, I just, I don't have any way of knowing. It seems like a lot of money, but. Well, I don't know about a lot of money. Yes, it certainly seems like a lot of money. Doge is tearing apart lots of things that seem important and functional. And again, I'm not opposed to going into space and this is being described as military launch contracts. So this may be about, it's the DOD, that it was budgeted came out of the Department of Defense. But at a moment when Doge is tearing apart lots of things that seem important and functional, to simultaneously have these contracts being granted with almost no one putting those things next to each other and saying, let's just talk about whether or not there is consistency here. Seems important. I agree that that's a good question. There's something certainly awkward about Elon being involved in SpaceX and Doge and therefore, is there, the possibility of unfair competition where NASA is being torn, on the other hand. And it feels like, it's just like the possibility of quid pro quo, like both Musk and Bezos were at the inauguration, they were sitting and here they are getting contracts. You definitely want somebody watching to make sure that doesn't evolve. On the other hand, recent events certainly suggest that NASA does not have the capability to do certain things that at least SpaceX does. SpaceX is now bailing out our space program and rescuing astronauts from the International Space Station. And so I'm not happy that we're here. Yeah. I'm not against the idea of private space exploration, but the idea that we took a program that was the envy of the world and had accomplished great things on behalf of humanity and rendered it incapable through ineptitude bothers me, no end. I think, and this is a theme that we come back to and over and over again. People think, well, there's government funded stuff, there's public institutions, there's public systems and there's private, there's corporations. And the public private partnerships are everywhere. And they're very often, they've come in cryptically and they're actually a big part of what is advancing things in the world. And people have it categorized as well, that's either private or it's public. Separately this last week or two, Harvard started whining about how, my take now, but Harvard started whining about how the government should never be able to step in and tell a private institution what it should think and do. Well, but what the government did was say, actually, if you keep doing that thing, which we find destructive of your stated mission, then we're gonna yank the government contracts that you're getting. So we're just gonna stop paying you. If you're gonna keep on doing the thing that you say you're not doing. And so like Harvard is a private institution that is so dependent on the government that it can't possibly keep doing what it's doing, absent government help. This raises questions for me about SpaceX, about Blue Origin, about ULA, which I'd never heard of before, the Lockheed Martin Boeing collaboration, which is to say, and NIH, right? Some of the things that we learned, at least I learned during COVID with regard to what Francis Collins as head of NIH had created in his tenure at NIH with a lot of help from Fauci as head of NIAID. NIAID, yeah. With regard to the private-public partnerships that were actually funding a lot of the grants that were supposedly government grants, but actually came with this tether, this tether that meant that it was very hard to ask questions that, or get answers that, went against what the pharmaceutical funders actually wanted them to find. Yeah, and in fact, the dependencies tell the tale. Public and private are not good categories anymore because the FDA is dependent on private money and therefore in a terrible position to regulate drug safety, for example. And Harvard is so thoroughly dependent on public money that it's claimed that it's a private institution that should be immune from meddling as preposterous. Even the claim that we're a private institution, you can't meddle with us. Well, why is it considered meddling? If you're dependent on, you know. It's like a 16-year-old who uses his allowance money to go out at night being told he has a curfew. You can't put a curfew on me, I'm a free agent. It's like, well, then you don't get an allowance. Right, exactly. Okay. There you go. So anyway, I do agree that there's a danger of a feedback emerging. The number of feedbacks already in the system is huge. But we have yet to get to the. This Week in Women. This Week in Women. This Week in Women. Yeah. Yes. The women gathered in this spaceship, piloted it courageously. Oh yeah, yeah. Yes, I'm going to propose a term for them. Yeah. Fliesies. The what? Fliesies. Just go with it. Fliesies. Fliesies. Why? So that when they get back, we can call them floozies. No. All right. No, because I mean, that just picks up on, no. So yeah, as you just said, this is not a captain flight. There's no one on board who has to know anything nor does know anything about what happened here. It was super brief. Nobody on board had anything to do with the flight in any way. None of them are crew, despite the fact that they've been being called crew. No, they weren't crew, they were customers. That's what they are. Customers. And I think probably a couple of them didn't pay. A couple of them were invited to add Gravitas to the mission. But the idea that they're being called crew is more monkeying around with the language that makes them seem serious. But there's no skill here. None of them did anything, right? And the most vacuous among them are claiming that they did this hard thing and now that they're back on Earth, they're so grateful and they have a different perspective on life. And that's that last thing is the one piece of it that actually is plausible, right? Like I do think that, what actual astronauts have reported is that even if you're a tiny moment, the idea that you can see all of Earth at once, that's extraordinary. Like I'd love that. That'd be amazing. I don't think they got that high, did they? I don't, they got above the Carmen line, which is a hundred kilometers out and is the internationally recognized definition of when you leave Earth and are in space. But I don't actually know what their view was. But I do believe that it is quite possible that there was a profound experience to be had, even if super briefly up there. But the idea that they did anything special, that they are worth lauding for having, lauding for having gone up there is an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment like celebrating Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States and of pushing her towards the presidency. There was just no evidence of any skill and in the case of these six women, there was no requirement. No one ever asked them for to demonstrate any skill. It wasn't part of it. That's what being a passenger is. That's what being a customer is. Do you have a picture of this? No. We don't have a picture. But I can probably find one. Yeah, if you'd find one, that'd be good. Because I must say I'm sort of frustrated by the claim of this profound transformation that they experienced. Because for one thing, I think the experience you are alluding to, yeah, sure. The experience that you are alluding to is called the overview effect. Overview effect is something that astronauts who went a whole lot farther than these women did, experienced, it was a profound philosophical transformation that did not come from minutes in space and it did not come from people who were chosen for this flight for their looks. Well, I'm gonna talk specifically about some of the members of the crew here. Okay, well. Some of the customers here. Some of the customers. But I guess my point is, I'm not saying that they did or didn't have that profound experience. What I am saying is that I believe it is absolutely guaranteed that they were gonna say they did, whether they did or not, that that was part of the plan. And the idea that this is, this is effectively an advertisement for Blue Origin. Yep. Right? These are people that make the product desirable and that that is making a mockery of the idea. This is not a serious space exploration company if the idea is it's so image conscious that it's going to take a cluster of, preternaturally attractive women and dress them up into some sort of fantasy space capsule and Jeff Bezos is gonna be right there wielding his wrench and all of this. Like, this is nonsense. This is a PR stunt and you don't get to mess with something as important as the overview effect with this kind of garbage. The overview effect is important because humanity, humanity, a bunch of apes figured out how to escape the earth's gravity and they sent some representatives into space who had a profound experience that frankly wasn't understood before they had it and came back and tried to explain it to people. Some of them are trying to explain it. I mean, they're all very old at this point, but trying to explain it to this day, it's important, right? Representatives of our species had an experience looking back at our planet. Don't fuck around with that. That is too important for your fucking publicity stunt, Jeff Bezos. So four of the six of those women here, you can see again, are just rich or famous. That's it, are rich and famous or rich or famous. Katy Perry at least, third from the left is demonstrably a singer. So all these words have been used to describe the people participating. And I don't know Katy Perry's music. I don't have an opinion about it one way or the other, but she is actually a singer who has made a name for herself by singing. Lauren Sanchez on the left here is being described as a journalist. No, sorry, no, not a journalist. I also saw her described one place as a philanthropist. Well, only since you hooked up with a really rich guy. So in some ways, at least four of these six women are demonstrating, oh, hey, we get to celebrate women being wealthy now, or one of the oldest stories in the world, we're now gonna celebrate women hooking up with wealthy men and getting access to all the goodies. Like that's the thing being celebrated here, at least with regard to Lauren Sanchez. I don't know anything about beyond, I went looking for what she had done as the so-called journalist and find no evidence that she's ever been a journalist per se. That said, two of the six women, let's see, it's Amanda Wing, how are you telling me that last name is pronounced? Yes, last name that is spelled, N-U-Y-E-N. N-U-Y-E-N, yes, and Aisha Bow, I'm afraid I did not look into how you pronounce that. So second from the left, that's Amanda, and second from the right, that's Aisha. So I'm gonna need my screen back here to find the next thing I wanna show. So Amanda, and don't show it yet, both Amanda and Aisha actually have some background in engineering or aerospace. Now, Amanda, actually you can show this screen again here. Amanda, second from the left, one of the things that is said about her every time anyone discusses her is that she's the first woman of Vietnamese heritage to fly in space. Great, maybe I'll get to be the first woman in San Juan County to fly in space. It's like the particular nature by which we are identifying ourselves is so stupid. And similarly, Aisha Bow, second from right, is being defined as the first woman of Bahamian descent to fly in space. Again, who the fuck cares? Like I see it, okay, these are not white women. And they also have some background, and we'll get into it here, some background that is potentially relevant to actually engaging in space flight, not that that was relevant here, not that it was necessary here, but the idea that like the first woman of Vietnamese descent, the first woman of Bahamian descent, that's something we should be caring about. Like how do we get to such a stupid place? How did we possibly get here? I mean, you get it. There's a diminishing returns problem, right? Early on as these are actually difficult achievements, there is a tendency to celebrate somebody who comes from a surprising place and ends up accomplishing something or being part of it. But they didn't accomplish anything. Right, exactly. The point is this is an amusement ride. Well, I bet this is it, but I was exactly gonna say, this is like Disney on steroids. And it's like, it's actually like Disney on a lot of estrogen pretending to be on testosterone. And it's like, it's the same confusion. It's like, do we go with stupid tech pro culture or insipid and banal, you know, go girl female empowerment culture. They're both dumb. Like let's get beyond this. Let's actually return to a meritocracy and celebrate people who can actually think and solve problems and be creative and lead. Well, I do think part of it is a linguistic issue. Accidentally so. The term astronaut. So there was, if I understand my history correctly, there was a debate early on in the manned space program, the American manned space program, about whether or not the human beings involved were pilots of these crafts or passengers of these crafts. An astronaut came to be synonymous with effectively like the engineers on ships. These were people who were intimately involved with the spacecraft, ready to solve problems, ready to take over command at the point that it needed to happen. Of course the-- But without ground control, things were gonna go haywire. They were gonna go haywire. But the point is they were in some sense, they had roles on the spacecraft that were integral to the mission. They were not cargo. And the point is, so the term astronaut became that. And then what is the qualification for being one? Well, for that long period, all those decades in which you would never send anybody to space who didn't have an important role on the mission because every ounce that you sent up there was precious, the point is astronaut continued to mean that you were intimately involved in the mission somehow. And then probably at the point that during the Reagan administration, the teacher, was it Krista McAuliffe? I think so. The teacher was being, the one who was killed in the Challenger disaster was, and in fact her presence on the mission had brought a lot of attention to a part of the space program that was getting less attention. And so there were a lot of eyes on that mission. And then they died spectacularly in this national trauma event. And, but anyway, the point is her presence there was about a kind of optics. And arguably it had a noble mission, which was the idea was how do we get kids interested in things like engineering? No one pretended it wasn't. Right, it was all straightforward. But the point is, so the term astronaut-- She wasn't pretending to be an engineer or a scientist. Right, but was she an astronaut? The point is astronaut, what's the qualification? Oh, you go into space. Everybody who goes into space is involved in the mission. And then we start breaking that rule where it's like, well, actually now you're not really in the mission. You're there because the kids back on earth need to see a role model or something like that. And now it's gone from role model to spokes model. And the point is those people ain't astronauts. Those are space tourists. And if you call them space tourists, you're literally describing their role in the mission and not elevating them to some status of like, space trekking, intrepid human with technical knowledge that would put you to shame. It's not that role. And we need to start thinking of it that way. So four of the six were just famous or wealthy, or both. But two, as I said, Amanda Wang and Aisha Bo actually had some background that was relevant. They also happened to be beautiful. And I'm sure they wouldn't have been chosen if they weren't. But New York Magazine did a feature on Amanda Wing. And here it is, we're gonna read a little bit from it. So she has, before I begin reading this, she has a BA from Harvard. She interned at NASA in 2011 and 2013. She had dreams of, and this is weird, working at NASA or the CIA. So she was, so it's not that she was from way back, like she had a heart set on being an astronaut, but she did have interest and experience in this realm. And she's 33 now, and I do have a question about this photograph that they use, but I'll explain why. She doesn't look like a 33 year old woman there, does she? And well, I'm not gonna read the whole article. So what happened in 2013 is she was, the year that she was gonna be graduating from Harvard, she was raped at a frat party. And it threw her for a loop, as these things often do. And she had found herself thinking more and more about the difficulties that she had encountered in trying to pursue justice. And reports that she talked to a mentor, either I don't remember it, Harvard or NASA or something, and said, I'm finding myself drawn to trying to create a better way for women who have been subject to sexual attack to get justice. But I still have my science brain over here, and I'm not sure what to do. And I'm not sure what to do. And she reports that he said something to her like, you go do what you're thinking about doing, space will wait. Which at one level seems like this nice thing to have said, but I also have the sense of like, actually space doesn't wait for astronauts, that's not how astronaut works. Like that's, you don't go into space for the first time, having taken a break for many, many years. So it's unrealistic, and it's unrealistic to some degree in the same way that women have been being told forever, like, oh, you could just put off motherhood, it's fine, it'll be fine. It's like, actually, no, there's like a literal moment during which you're going to be fertile, and that will end. And I don't care if you don't like it, it's just true. And the same thing, space is hard on a body, and you're not gonna send a 50 year old up on a real space mission for the first time. Like that's not when you start becoming an astronaut. So she's 33. I find this cover photo particularly weird, especially given her the history that I just described to you. She's dressed like a fricking school girl. Yep. She is an adult woman who claims to be getting back to her science roots after spending a decade away, fighting for the rights of women to be heard in cases of sexual attack, and she's dressed like someone's fantasy of a school girl. So that's disgusting, frankly. I would also point out, if I understood what you said, her background is a BA in a relevant subject and an internship. Couple of internships, and there's one other claim of having done another internship with some Harvard Smithsonian thing or something, but I couldn't quite try, it was fake. And the thing is, there's a lot, and I'm gonna share some more about her bio here, but there's just a lot that's super fake. And I don't know. I haven't met the woman, I don't know. And the same will be true of the other Aisha Bao. The two women who had any background at all that was relevant to this, unfortunately, we have seen firsthand what DEI looks like in exactly this space. Yep. Because our son, Zach, co-led his rocketry team to win the national championships. And he had some female teammates who were amazing. And he had some who were completely dead weight, who are pursuing their so-called dreams now of aerospace engineering, because they just keep accruing these accolades and no one at any point says, you know what, honey, you're actually no good at this. You actually can't tell the front end of the rocket from the back. Or, you know, level up. I mean, the fact is, I don't know that these people couldn't have attained things, but nobody-- No one has held them to it. Nobody was requiring it. And I don't know if that's the case. Right, of course. I have no idea. On the other hand, having a mentor tell you, you can go do that thing, space will wait. Like, I'm sorry, you are a really daft 22-year-old who thinks they wanna be an astronaut, who thinks that space will wait. That's not how astronaut works. Right, and look, one thing I think we can say for sure is that that background did not justify her presence on this mission as in a technical capacity. No, but that's not the point. There was no technical capacity. I am saying, like, at first, when I first saw these pictures, I thought, oh my God, it's just a bunch of rich and famous people. And oh, how surprising, they're all very attractive. I'm like, oh, actually there's two. There's two who have some something. And so I went looking, so I just, like, and while Katy Perry, this is the New York Magazine article, while Katy Perry was floating upside down in space, cooing, oh my goddess, at the moon, Amanda Wing had a job to do. The Blue Origin capsule carrying Lauren Sanchez and the five women chosen to join her on a trip across the Carmen line had just reached zero gravity, and Wing had less than a minute to execute two experiments. She took Petri dishes out of a small pouch in her seat, which immediately flew in opposite directions, adding precious seconds to her timeline. While Wing decided which one to prioritize, Perry released the set list for her upcoming tour in front of a camera capturing video of their flight. One by one, the other women aboard, CBS anchor, Gayle King, film producer, Carrie-Ann Flynn, and Aisha Bow, an entrepreneur and former NASA engineer, displayed their own zero-g indicators, objects, astronauts float to show they've reached microgravity. So this paragraph is written to make Wing, Amanda Wing, look very serious on science, saying she's doing two experiments and she can't even keep track of them. Right. But the thing that she's presumed, like they just float another direction, she didn't see that coming? Right. So this was, look, I'm telling you, those experiments were added to this for a purpose. I've got, let me finish. All right. So I'm not gonna read the whole article. I will link it in the show notes. You can see that I will look to this and I look through a bunch more. Like what, oh, what's the science that you could possibly do in two minutes with Petri dishes in which the person in control of them isn't even in control of them enough not to have them fly off in opposite directions and now she has to prioritize one. What are they? What's the question? What is the hypothesis being tested? What is the so-called research? (Sighs) The opportunity would allow Wing to do her research and become the first Vietnamese woman in space, a dream that had been derailed when she was raped in her last year studying astrophysics at Harvard. That's the next mention. Okay, we still don't know. Keep going, keep going. It helped that Wing interned twice at NASA headquarters. It has flown in a jet with a higher gravitational force than a rocket in, I don't even know, IAS boot camp. I don't know what that stands for. She also got special permission from Blue Origin to do her experiment on the Petri dishes while floating. She was doing an experiment on Petri dishes apparently. I mean, it's clear that the woman writing this article has no idea what science is, so that's not Wing's fault. While other crew members would wear small biomarkers to measure their heart rates and blood oxygen levels, she planned to test a sample of new spacesuit fabric from NASA. Could it absorb a substance like period blood and an electric chip? Could it detect breast cancer and astronauts exposed to radiation? Leading up to the flight, she timed every second of the experiments like a highly choreographed dance routine except that she fucked it up right away. And also, what in two minutes, how's any of this happening? And there's no there there. She takes the science so seriously. No, she doesn't. And then they do a photo op. That photo will be an important moment to inspire young girls, she says. So she's back in the stupid."All of the women on board have echoed the sentiment ad nauseam. Any type of person can reach their dreams," Perry told Elle in a glossy pre-launch interview. "We are inspiring the world right now," Bo said after the capsule touchdown. "But listening to Wing talk about our experiments and our interviews was more energizing than any of these platitudes." Well then, how about sharing some of that supposed energy around science, none of which is evident in this article. "I'm not wealthy and I'm not a celebrity," Wing is quick to point out."I'm here to do a job." What job is that? She's jonesing to dig into the data from her experiments, but that will have to wait. So I've got more before you jump in here. So I go looking, like what could these experiments possibly be? And it's really hard to find anything. One is this article here in a site I don't recognize called We Are Resonate. "Amanda Wing, civil rights activist and first Vietnamese woman in space returns after her historic Blue Origin flight." And here's the picture of her and she does look happy. And we hear that, okay, I wish that would go away. She carried out two scientific experiments during the first flight, during the brief flight. "One experiment in partnership with the Vietnamese National Space Center and the University of Wisconsin Medicine examined the impact of microgravity on Brassica rapacids originating from Southeast Asia." Wait, what? They were in microgravity for like two minutes? Yeah. What two minutes of microgravity does to Brassica? No, no, no, Bret, but it continues prior research conducted at the Mir space station and a past New Shepard mission. So it's just a continuation of really important, good research because these seeds, it's gonna be, you'd wanna know, wouldn't you? What the effect of microgravity on seeds is? Because what do you need to grow stuff in space? And now we can know and she's gonna dig into those data. So this sort of alludes, it alludes to an interesting experiment that has been done many times in which you allow seeds to germinate in zero G. And see what kind, like tropisms are real, right? That's real. Right, so, hold on, tropism referring to what are the forces that a plant either grows towards or against? So you've got phototropism towards the light and gravitropism with the roots growing towards gravity. And what will happen without gravity, without the sun? Like how do the plants respond when they are normally cueing off of these external features? I can tell you how seeds respond to microgravity for two minutes. They don't. They don't, exactly. But she really wants to dig into the data except that then I find this on MIT's site, Amanda Wing carries MIT research projects into orbit. So that doesn't sound like she's doing much more than carrying research objects into orbit. And it goes on, I'm not gonna again go through the whole thing, but at the very bottom, it admits after the flight, which includes the first all-woman crew on a Blue Origin mission, MIT and Media Lab researchers will analyze the performance of the materials and work with Wing to publish the results. Of course they will, of course they will. So she's gonna have her name on a paper that's gonna make it look like she was doing something when with this entire, so there's something like someone, some other person, I think it was actually a woman, an actual female scientist, created, invented a new kind of fabric that may be useful. And specifically they were talking about like, what happens if you menstruate in space? I don't know, and you know, will they absorb and all this? But this person who went up into space for two minutes, isn't even going to be part of the figuring out what it means at all. I don't think you're gonna learn much in two minutes in terms of the material science, even if it needs to be done. Two minutes isn't enough. The seeds didn't need to be taken out. Why'd she lose control of the Petri dish? All she needed to do was bring it, right? Totally. What was the point of that, right? There's no point to that. It's obviously a stunt. And I do think that what you're looking at here, can you put the picture of the astronauts back? Yeah, hold on. I don't know where they went. Nope, hold on. So my claim is that this is actually a Rorschach test. If you are a straight man, this is Charlie's Angels Space Edition. Okay, this is a sex fantasy, something, something, zero G, whatever. And they doubled. There's even more of them there used to be. I think there were three angels, right there? I don't remember how many angels there were. I was never a straight man, but. That was the important part of the narrative. But yeah, congratulations on never having been a straight man, it's pretty good. You're welcome. Thank you. That's a genuine thank you and you're welcome in the wrong order. But okay, so this is Charlie's Angels if you're a dude. Right? Yeah. And this is Space Barbies if you're a girl of a certain stripe. Whoa. You're talking about a girl. I'm talking about the idea that it's like, oh, and there's the scientist and the Petri dishes and the seeds. Yeah, he's hard. Right, the point is, I mean, the thing about Barbies, right? I don't know. I ain't never played with a Barbie, but my sense is that the idea is it's poses that you strike and costumes that you wear. And the point is, oh, the scientist studious Barbie and the adventurous Barbie. Can you strike poses in Barbie? Do you know, Jen? Do they articulate? I don't know. They're not articulate. I literally got given a gift of a Barbie once and I never opened the box. But the point is the idea that the important thing about science is the scienciness of it. Yeah. And the important thing about the swashbuckling courageous thing is the outfits that you get to wear and the danger that you get to face. And the point is it's play. Yeah. We all understand the space tourist thing, right? We all understand, hey, if it was free, would I like to experience zero G? Would I like to look at the earth from higher than I've ever been? Of course. But is it like valid progress or is it some personal selfish thing that you get to do if you attain a certain status or whatever? Right. Right? It's the latter. But in terms of, you know, Jeff Bezos' ego and the valuation of his business, it has to be something else, right? This has to be, you know, Jeff Bezos, the strong virile man with the, you know, the hyper attractive new wife, head to head with Elon Musk for access to space and-- Hyper plastic. It's something that has to, you know, and it has to be mentioned in here somewhere. Not the resemblance between Jeff Bezos' version of a rocket and a penis is maybe more than it needed to be. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit much. It's a bit much. So anyway, so okay, he's got some psychological issues that he's working out on, like, you know, the front pages of newspapers and it's-- I feel that the ex got out in not a moment too soon. Yeah, well, this has a lot to do with hyper enabled males competing, you know, on a global landscape over very traditional caveman stuff. Right, and that, I mean, that is why I showed the big federal contracts that just got delivered to, or just got awarded to Bezos' company and Musk's company, because it does feel like, oh, it's just like, at some level, this is just all the same shit over and over and over again. And this quasi celebration of female empowerment, in which what we're actually celebrating in part is the ability of an attractive woman to attract wealth. Right. Great, fantastic, that was hard. Like, that is older than humans. Like, that is what some percentage of attractive women, attractive females will do. Like, that is, we all know this. And then they stuck a couple people in there who kinda sorta have some kind of background, and I'll talk a little bit about the other one, Asia. But in both cases, you just have the sense of like, you know, I hope I'm wrong. Well. I hope you're actually capable, but boy does this smell like DEI, faux female empowerment. You know, like, you know, I'll bet. I'll bet these are people who say things like, I have imposter syndrome just like everyone. And my feeling is, you know, I've gotten pushback from this, but you know, we all, if we have any capacity at all, should have both confidence and humility and be constantly testing our own understanding of the world against other people and against the world and against our own understanding itself over and over and over again. But if you have the constant sense that you actually aren't up to the job that you're doing and that you're kinda faking it, maybe you are. Maybe you're just actually an imposter. We've seen a lot of them. Yeah, oh, impostors are very common. Yes, now it's an imposter syndrome. Nope. Nope. That's just being an imposter. So it is also, I don't know how to formulate this exactly, but we were talking a few minutes ago about the idea that we need some designator for the classical version of something. Classical feminism where the idea is, yeah, women should have equal access to stuff. If they have the merit, they should have equal access to the opportunity. Yep. Well, okay, we've got that, we've got trad, where you don't have equal opportunity. And then we have this new thing where somebody who is behaving in an ancient way, which is attractive female, beds down with powerful male and gets spoils without merit that is otherwise evident. Without requiring merit. Right, they might have it. One said you may have merit, but she didn't require, she didn't need it. It was not what got her the job here. But the point is, okay, so then you bed down with the powerful, wealthy guy who happens to have a private space program. And he dresses you up as if you're a hyper-accomplished engineering type and launches you into space, and then it gets reported on as if you're accomplished in this way. And the point is, it's not even to the level of feminism. It's like reactionary. You're using an ancient mode to gain power through sexuality, right? And then you're being promoted to the head of the feminist line, where it's as if you've accomplished great things. And it's like, it's a transfer of credibility from women who have actually accomplished things to somebody who used sexuality to get somewhere. Which is why I say this is exactly like Kamala Harris. Yeah, it is. And so that's now what we are told to celebrate as we pretend that women are advancing their role, as we demand equity in representation in places where it's insane to demand such things. Yes, and the disguising of the one mode, the ancient mode, as if it's super, it's the frontier of progress. It's like, no, there's nothing new there except the spacecraft, which you had nothing to do with. Exactly. Okay, so the only thing I'll say about the other woman who nominally has some background that's relevant here, A. Chabot, she was employed at NASA for six years, salaried, and then two years as a contractor. I don't know exactly what she did. She received some awards, but they're all DEI awards. So I don't know, again, I don't know. This is the problem with affirmative action, right? Like you don't wanna be known as the affirmative action hire because then everyone always wonders, like, what was that? I don't know. And she argued in an Ebony article that I'll include in the show notes, that she's got a couple of successful companies and that she never looked for venture capital because it was easier to get money from the government because it was more straightforward and because they have special programs for African-American and women-owned businesses. And so that, okay, okay, but you're already really, really successful and powerful and like maybe, maybe try the even playing field now that you've successful at the very least, right? And she said to People Magazine, That's actually, I just wanna pause for a second. That's actually really important. I think so. Maybe you needed a leg up in order to get where you were going. But once the advantages have allowed you to get to where you should be able to compete on a level playing field, the question is, well, why wouldn't you? Right? And maybe the answer is because I'd be a fool, the game doesn't work that way. Yeah, the answer is just like, you know, rich people who say the tax code is too fair to me, but I'm certainly gonna take advantage of all of the advantages it gives me while arguing for a change in the tax code. Yeah, on the other hand, on the other hand, if you look at, in particular, Glenn Lowry does a very good job with this point. And it's personal to him, right? His point is I don't need your fucking help, right? I can do this absolutely without you handing me an advantage and by, you know, so. But there's, but the sort of the middle ground that I suggested might be the right one that you then picked up is not Lowry's point. It's a like, okay, maybe there was a reason to use those programs, those government programs to get the leg up to begin with, maybe. I don't want to be in the position of defending. Let's assume so. Yeah, but then the programs themselves should basically govern themselves such that once you have demonstrated a certain amount of success, you no longer have access to those things, which are not supposed to just be for everyone with a particular skin color or a particular chromosome complement. It's precisely to write historic inequalities. And if you yourself have benefited enough that you are now succeeding greatly, those benefits should go to others if those benefits are going to exist at all. Especially if you're then, and this is not her fault because how could she have seen this coming, but especially if you were then going to be held up as an icon of accomplishment. The point is, well, all right, that seems like cheating for a photo op in this case. Yeah, now I was, some of what she says in this Ebony piece, I was impressed by. I thought, I don't know that she's a scientist. I don't know what she did for NASA, but she appears to be a very smart businesswoman who has accomplished things and is actually spreading science literacy to children among other things. So that doesn't, none of those are preconditions for having been on this space Barbie flight, but she does seem like someone with some gravitas. How about that? That's it. It's an embarrassment as we talked about. They are being lauded as the first female, all female crew in space. They're not the term crew. They're not for two reasons though. And they're not for two reasons. One of them being they weren't crew, right? They simply weren't crew. The second being that back in 1963, there was a Russian cosmonaut, Valentina, Valentina Vlodomorovna Terezhkova, who was still alive, who's 88 years old now, who was a Russian politician. And at this point at 88 years old, and Wikipedia is crap as we all know, but I'm gonna read the first paragraph of Wikipedia because most of the stuff on here is in Russian and I don't read Russian. Valentina Vlodomorovna Terezhkova, born 6th March 1937 is a Russian engineer, a member of the state Duma and former Soviet cosmonaut. She was the first woman in space having a phony solo mission on Vostok 6 on the 16th of June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times, spent almost three days in space, is the only woman to have been on a solo space mission and is the last surviving Vostok program cosmonaut. 26 years old at the time of her space flight, she remains the youngest woman to have flown in space under the international definition of 100 kilometers altitude and the youngest woman to fly in Earth orbit. That is an astronaut. That is an astronaut. Cosmonaut, if you will. Yes. She is not mentioned anywhere. This insane, what did you call it? The Barbie space visit? I don't know. I can't remember. Yeah, the space Barbies are being lauded as the first female space crew. When through no skill or vault or anything of their own, they got vaulted up in a penis and came back down in something that didn't look like a penis for a couple of minutes and they did look good. Yeah. I'll bet she looked good too, this Valentina Tereshkova. But how she looked wasn't the point. It was never the point. Apparently, she was grabbed by whatever the agency was in Soviet Union. She did not have a heart set on being an astronaut. She was a parachutist. She was in love with parachuting. And they went looking, they're like, oh, we've heard the US space program might start training women, we're gonna be first. And so they went out and found a bunch of women who looked possibly capable and they grabbed them, including Valentina Vladrovna Tereshkova. And they trained them up for years and years and years and years and made them into engineers and made them into cosmonauts. And she was sent up into space for almost three days, orbiting the Earth 48 times in 1963, all of which required actual skill and tenacity and courage. Unlike what happened this week at Blue Origin. Right. And it also, I will point out, suggests exactly how we should refer to the Blue Origin space Barbies. Okay. Okay, put them back up if you would. I'm gonna have to pen my screen back to find out where it is. It keeps on disappearing. All right, here we go. They, in contrast to this. To Valentina Tereshkova cosmonaut. Yep, these are cosplaymonauts. Sorry. Yep. It's too on the nose not to point it out. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So I can just go on and on and on, but maybe I should stop. Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty amazing event. I mean, just one more thing, just to point out the distinction between the cosplaymonauts, the space Barbies, and actually the first woman to solo space flight for almost three days, 48 times around the Earth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, in 1963. She is being disappeared in a space Barbies. A space Germans face. What, in fact, the What is it supposed to be? (All Laughing) Don't ISIS space you? Yeah. Oh, yeah. of what's going on in the West are often accurate. They said what now? Yeah. Did they claim they went into space? That that was difficult for them? Yeah, it's something else. And I don't wanna dwell here, but I do also think that there is something between what is coming to light about Elon and his fathering of all of these children and what Jeff Bezos is doing here, trying to one up Elon, which I'm afraid that is what's going on. I don't know for sure, but it sure looks like it. These are both, unfortunately, this is what men who have a very low quality understanding of what evolution is about and are trying to compete over what they think it's about, this is kind of what they do. There's a lot of-- Evolution and relationship as well. Yeah, I mean, this is peacocking on Bezos' front and what Elon is doing. I don't think it is peacocking because it's weirdly not public, but it's definitely trying to father lots and lots of children as if, I think he just hasn't understood actually the genes that drive men to try to leave lots of offspring. Most of the genes that Elon is going out of his way to propagate are like respiratory enzymes, digestive stuff that you couldn't possibly care about the spelling. These things really wanna get into the future, but especially if you're Elon Musk and you have as much opportunity as he does, frankly, not only to better humanity by pushing us in new directions, but frankly, Elon actually has some of the technologies in which humanity's future, the balance of humanity's future may be held and to be wasting his time advancing his genes, which I'll bet you aren't special, right? It just-- I don't think he needs to spend much time. I don't think the best argument here is that he could be spending that time doing something. No, he's spending time. He's bothering children with women who are then-- I guess the aftermath of the custody battles. Fighting over money and stuff like this. I mean, frankly, he should find his match and he should figure out how to have a fulfilling relationship. It would be a way better investment on his part, but anyway, I digress. All right, we went on a long time. You-- Yes, we did. Yeah, I wanted to talk about the emergence while we were away of some alarming evidence that whoever they are, they've taken some more hostages. Oh no. Yes. Who were they? It's very troubling. Well, I wanted to talk a bit about Douglas Murray, who is-- He took hostages or he's been-- No, no, apparently he's been taken hostage based on some of the things that he's been saying. And I will say, as I've said before about others, Douglas Murray's a friend of mine, and that's part of why I'm concerned about the strange noises that he has been making. Let's see, why don't we start with the clip on him, on Bill Maher's program of Douglas Murray. I think this was just this last Friday. It's always interesting to see what he's doing. I think it's always interesting to see what happens at the point of victory. What do you do with your victory? And if those people on the American right, who are now in the ascendant, if they decide that they want to use their point of victory to, for instance, lie about the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war, or lie about the nature of Hamas, or lie about the state of Israel, or lie about history. I mean, the reason I did this pushback, because I mean, you just have to. I mean, you just have to, in my view. It's basic social hygiene. It tends to be a historian who then can always do the thing of saying, oh, I actually don't call myself a historian, it's just other people I allowed to call me a historian. I'm not a car mechanic, but if I kept on being introduced as a car mechanic, I would say, oh, you got the wrong guy. So they don't mind it, they don't mind it. They have this slip out. These people that I was trying to call out on Joe's show, they are doing things like Hitler wasn't that much of an anti-Semite. Main problem in the 20th century was Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was the warmonger. Adolf Hitler wanted peace. And I just, look, it's a matter of social hygiene. Don't feed me this shit.(Audience Applauding) And this is all, and you know, there's obviously this crossover between the people who are just trolls. They say this because they think it's really fun to do the Jewish question, to do like a bit of Holocaust denial, a bit of Hitler praise, a bit of Churchill degradation. They think it's kind of funny. What they're watering and what's gonna come up underneath them are gonna be people who believe this rut. And a lot of people you can clearly see on the right at the moment are very happy if you can denigrate the tradition of Winston Churchill and pretend that Adolf Hitler wasn't so bad, because then you can do things like Christian nationalism. You can do really, really tough nationalist stuff. They basically-- You can buy Kanye albums.(Audience Laughing) That's the last stage. That's like the ultimate.(Audience Laughing) After they've absolved Adolf Hitler, they want to absolve Kanye, and then they're gonna get to the point of hand. It's a great book, everybody should read it, thank you. All right, so he says a lot of things in there. Some of them are quite reasonable, but the problem is where he is headed with this line of reasoning, which we can find actually in an article that he wrote that was in the New York Post. So I'm gonna put up that article and... Okay, so Douglas Murray, so-called Israel, Hamas, Ukraine, war experts, few false info on Joe Rogan's podcast, there has to be a standard. Now, presumably he didn't write that title, but here's how this article concludes. But these are his words. These are his words now, he says,"What the standards are in the new media,"especially on podcasts, is still being worked out, "but there must be some."Otherwise, the new media will lead people "into errors and evils far greater"than the old media could ever dream of." Now, I find that completely shocking for a couple of reasons. As I say, Douglas Murray is a friend, he's been on Dark Horse twice, I believe, and I know something about the way he thinks and the values that he holds, and I also know him to be one of the best orators that we have, he speaks with extreme precision. And so to have him say something that violates not only his own values at such a profound level, but values that are actually not just central to, but maybe the central values of the West, which Douglas Murray has been-- Stops to thunder him. Rident champion of, since long before most knew that it was even in jeopardy, raises some alarm. What is going on with Douglas, that suddenly he's ready to make an anti-free speech argument like this? I truly cannot imagine. It's like another hostage video where he is alerting us that something must be wrong. It's like he's sending us a message by saying something that he would not say, it must imply that there's something we can't see. If I try to steel man his position though, standards does not mean enforced by an external agency. Standards can be like morals as opposed to laws. Right, like we need a culture of such and such that we are then expected to, not just allowed to, but expected to point out when someone breaches the sort of cultural standards that we have accepted. Now, I don't think that podcast land, new media landscape, whatever it is, is a thing that can have a culture. But if I try to put myself into his head and understand what he could be arguing for that does make sense, it's more like that rather than, and there shall be a governing body and I shall be on it and I shall be determining what it is that you're allowed to say. Well, of course, he's not arguing for a governing body. What he's arguing for is that we start paying attention to the responsible things over in the alternative media space rather than the wild west of the Joe Rogan podcast. And so if we take, for example, a couple of the responsible platforms in the new media space, let's say the Free Press and Quillette, right? These are institutions that match what Douglas appears to be advocating here. And we simply compare them to the Joe Rogan podcast over the course of something like, oh, I don't know, COVID. When we see how they performed, well, the Free Press and Quillette failed. Is there a polite term for shit the bed? Failed. Failed, okay, that's it, yeah. They failed utterly. And not only did they fail utterly, but they revealed that whatever standards they may have are actually not about prioritizing truth above all else. Because they didn't update and correct their errors once it was clear that they had made errors. Not only clear that they had made errors, but once both Quillette and the Free Press had people in their immediate social circles who suffered from vaccine injuries, and yet they couldn't even figure that out. So. They couldn't bring themselves to say anything. Whatever the answer is, whatever the answer is, they had a journalistic obligation to tell the world that they were being the world, the public was being lied to in ways that was going to cause the public to do grave physiological injury to themselves. They couldn't bring themselves to report that story. So, how did Joe Rogan do? Pretty great. You know, with everything that was said on Joe Rogan's program, right? No, but you know what you could pretty much follow in order to figure out what the story of COVID was, whether we're talking about COVID origins, whether we're talking about vaccine safety and effectiveness, whether we're talking about repurposed drugs, whether we're talking about how to understand the evidence of harm in the aftermath of these things. Joe Rogan figured it out. How? Through exactly the mechanism that Douglas Murray is arguing against right here, okay? Douglas Murray is arguing, you gotta have standards. You can't just put on people who are reporting things that, you know, they're not even experts. Well, the non-experts actually did figure out how to follow the evidence and reach the correct conclusions. And a bunch of us figured out how to dodge the fricking shots. And I don't know a single person who's sorry they did. Not one person, I know person after person who regrets getting the shots. I don't know anybody who listened to Joe Rogan didn't get a shot and regrets it because the horror show represented by the damage. Just to be fair, you wouldn't regret it because you could just go get a shot. No, you would-- But I agree with you. I think the point is-- You would regret it because you didn't get the shot and that caused you to get COVID and you died, right? Or somebody you love died. And the answer is that didn't happen. Do you know why? Because the shot was more dangerous than the disease. We were led to believe that the disease was more dangerous. All of the harms that were well-known about these shots before they were put on the market were buried so that we couldn't see them. So the fact is the ability to discover that was present. The mechanism by which we discovered it is well-known. It is the exact thing that the founders of this great country put first on the list of our enumerated rights for a goddamn reason. It was, they couldn't name a podcast. They couldn't have called out Joe Rogan, but they came as close as they could come to saying, "Sorry, there's no source of high quality information versus low quality information, malinformation, disinformation." You can't know ahead of time. The mechanism by which you come to understand what is true, Douglas, is discussion. It is discussion in which nobody gets to set the rules about what kinds of opinions can be investigated. And yes, that does cause some garbage stuff to be said, but what reveals that it's garbage stuff? Free and open inquiry that reveals that actually it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. That's how you do it. Constantine Kisson. I don't know what's wrong with these people. It's really like somebody has figured out how to threaten them into saying things that they full well know aren't true. They're becoming what they were fighting against. They are becoming what they were fighting against. And I must say in both of those cases, I feel like I don't think I was duped to begin with that they actually held free speech as a high value. So the fact that they are backing away from it and calling for some kind of standard self-imposed or otherwise to prevent certain, you know, the fact is heterodoxy is heterodoxy and it often sounds crazy and most of it is. But the good stuff is the stuff that sounds crazy that then does strangely stand up to scrutiny. That's how you figure out what's coming is you look at the heterodox stuff and you figure out what has predictive power. And you can't get around that. And the people who tried failed. Well, I think there's an error in thinking that imagines when you're in the middle of a fight. There are a lot of people joining from all places, all sides, people you never knew before didn't know exist. And some of those people, like us, may think, wow, this is nuts and the ground is really unstable. And we're gonna definitely try to find some place from which we can tell what's true and what's not, but we know, we know that the ground will continue to move and that there will continue to be changes in the environment, in the social world, whatever it is, that mean that once you've arrived at some place that is true now, doesn't mean that if you stay still, it will always be true. It seems like the argument that Douglas is making here and that you say Constantine is making as well, imagines that in those early chaotic days of everyone going like, well, I'm heterodox, I'm heterodox. And they really seem to be, and like many of us really seem to be, that actually the model in their head, whether conscious or not, probably not, was once we get this figured, we're there. We just gotta cement the thing and then we'll be at the center and we'll be the media that needs to be. And then we will resist all comers. Yeah, but I wanna bring two things in from conversations we've had at other places and other times. Long time viewers will be familiar. One of them is the idea that there is a subgroup within those who fought courageously against the woke revolution. There is a subgroup that feels like woke really was the problem. And actually, if we can just get rid of the woke, then we can go back to doing what we do. And the answer is no, the system was so thoroughly rotten to the core. The reason that the institutions were vulnerable to woke was that they were already effectively deceased. Precisely. Right? So you can't just get rid of the woke. That was the mistake, as you have pointed out so eloquently at UATX. You can't just get rid of the woke and reboot the institutions. You actually need new institutions that are immune to the things that made them vulnerable to woke. And it is exactly the same thing in journalistic space. You can't just take the woke out of the New York Times and go back to being the New York Times under the name Free Press. Actually, you have to learn the lesson of what happened to the New York Times, whether it was Project Mockingbird, or it was some sort of organic arrogance that took it down. You have to fix the basic problem in order to have an institution worth having. And actually have the courage of your convictions and be prepared to be wrong sometimes, and have to step back and say, "That thing we're taking back, we were wrong about it." And not just be cringing in the corner while by flying a banner of courage. Right. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy. And look, to take another friend to task, Barry, you owe us an apology. You do. You got COVID wrong. We had it right. That's now obvious. And so you can't take the Wild West podcasts and shove them out of the way for your new institution. I mean, frankly, just like Colette, Barry demonstrated. Part of what she was about, she was exactly right. But Barry used to say was,"These institutions cannot be repaired. We are going to have to build parallel ones." That's what she used to say. And she was right, and she did it. She was able to build an institution, just like Claire Lehman before her. They built parallel institutions that had potential, but those institutions were not founded around the basic principle of following the truth wherever it may lead. The evidence tells you what is right. Predictive power is the answer. And at the point you've gotten something wrong, like COVID, you can't just find the middle ground and slap both sides and become the new institution. You don't have the recipe for figuring out what's true. And so, I don't know. I'm hoping that all of these people who at one point seem to see the correct direction to be heading and seem to understand how broken the institutions were, will understand that as much as you may not like it, that lots of ideas are gonna be discussed on Joe Rogan and lots of guests who have some perspective that you are certain is wrong and you may be correct in that. The answer is that's how we figure it out. And I will point out, in that clip on Bill Maher, Douglas Murray says something about, these terrible people are questioning the antisemitism of the Nazis. Well, here's the thing. First of all, I wanna point out, you and I were having discussions long before people started freaking out about all of this antisemitism on Twitter. You and I were talking about what I called Nazi Twitter. I was trying to alert people that it was there. And in fact, I think we have a clip of that. Jen, you wanna put on that clip? We talked about it briefly some weeks ago, maybe a month and a half ago. I had gotten, for whatever reason on Twitter, dumped into what I call Nazi Twitter. And I tweeted about it yesterday or the day before, and I got back a reaction that I was not expecting. First thing is people think that I am using that term the way it's been leveled at people like us or Bobby Kennedy, that I'm abusing the term that Nazi is a buzzword and that you can, you can tweet people's amygdala by using it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. When I say Nazi Twitter, I am talking about a part of Twitter where swastikas are not viewed as negative, where Hitler is quoted in an effort to illustrate that he is not who we were told he was. In fact, the idea that is commonly circulated in this part of Twitter is that the television is lying to you, which I'm sure it is, but that the television is lying to you, that Hitler actually was not interested in war. He was interested in peace and that the narrative that has been created around him in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II is a construction of, you guessed it, Jews in Hollywood. Right now. Amazing. Amazing. Okay, so. And that was from a year or two ago? I can't, it was July of 2023 maybe. Something like that. In any case, so I am not somebody who has a soft spot in my heart for this stuff. Of course not. At all. I have no tolerance of it. But first of all, what I have said, boy, I don't know how far back I've been saying this, 2018 at least, I have been saying, if you start bullying people into what they can say, right? If you start exerting standards of the kind that Douglas Murray is talking about here, you are going to create a backlash. You are going to fuel that white nationalist impulse, right? By telling people what they're not allowed to say. Whereas allowing people to say what they will and hashing it out in some sort of a marketplace of ideas actually allows us to reveal why that perspective isn't any good, why it's un-American. And it is the only path forward. The other thing is going to cause the exact problem in question by causing resentment of what you're not allowed to think or say. And it's gonna drive people into that camp, not out of it. Second thing though, is again, Murray says, that people are playing with the idea that Hitler wasn't anti-Semitic. Well, the interesting thing is if you go into the evidence, you actually find that as anti-Semitic as Hitler and the Nazis were, that actually the record reflects that they are facultative about this because there is a higher drive that they have. And I'm not gonna go deeply into this here, but the number of places where simple race rage does not predict Nazi behavior is substantial. And the question is, what are we to do with that? It actually raises interesting questions about what the genocide that the Nazis perpetrated was about. And I would argue that our hope of preventing future genocides requires us to go into that territory and figure out what the underlying algorithm was. So don't tell me I don't get to talk about the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. I don't get to investigate all of the evidence that says they were driven by some sort of irrational rage and all of the evidence that says, no, there was something else going on inside the Third Reich. The answer is we talk about that stuff. That's how we figured it out or figure it out. Should we do that on podcasts? No, that's not the right place to do it. But in the absence of institutions that know how to do it, podcasts is a decent substitute. So, yeah, let's build the institutions, but they can't be institutions that have a higher purpose than truth seeking. That has to be the higher purpose of any institution that's gonna be capable of doing the job. And until we have some parallel institutions that have that as their highest aim, we're gonna do it on podcast, Sorry Douglas. Well, that's an excellent segue to the last thing that we wanna talk about. If you are done talking about podcast, podcast to stand. Podcast to stand, that's what they're calling us now. All right, well, here we are in one of the stands. So we were off for a little bit in large part because we were invited to give the annual Sophia lectures at Ralston College. And Ralston College is a new college. It is in May, it will graduate its third class. We have previously run ads for Ralston and we were given honoraria to give the lectures, the Sophia lectures that we just gave. But what we were saying now is we're not being remunerated for any of this. What we saw at Ralston in Savannah, Georgia blew us both away. They have at the moment one and only one program. It's a master's in the humanities. It is a one-year program. It begins with full immersion in Greece. The half joke that we heard was upon being admitted, you were told to meet at the Parthenon at 3 p.m. on such and such a date. And so your first test is can you get yourself to the Parthenon at 3 p.m. on such and such a date? And the students are just thrown in to the first of four quarters of the academic year. Two something months, two plus months of just immersion and not just modern Greece, but ancient Greece, ancient Greek as well. Modern Greek and ancient Greek in modern Greece. Ancient Greece sounds sticky, but yeah. And then they return and then they go to Savannah for the first time for many of them and have three more quarters in which they continue their study of ancient Greek and just in depth study of the classics. Great books program on Fast Forward. Stephen Blackwood is the founder and the president. We spent a lot of time with him and with some of the faculty and the staff and students who will be graduating in a few short weeks. The founding themes of the college are four. They are truth, free inquiry, beauty, and fellowship. The theme, they also pick an annual theme every year and the annual theme this year was nature, which is part of why they brought into evolutionary biologists to give their four Sophia lectures. And that's just sort of the logistics of the background of what it is. It's the first time that I have been in or heard about an institution of higher learning since Evergreen was functional that made me think, yes, like these students are so open and so wise and so curious and so inquisitive and so knowledgeable. And these faculty similarly just extraordinary and the administration, it is an institution that I was not expecting. Yeah, I was caught off guard too. I was very hopeful and blew me away. This was a true intellectual community and not in the narrow sense, right? The degree to which you had music and fellowship and fun and humor and all of these things interwoven in exactly the way that a real community that has joined forces for the purpose of the college of the self betterment of all of the members, the creation of something truly significant between the members and the plugging into one of the deepest, oldest, most important threads in Western civilization was shocking. We're not talking about the ambition of what they tried to do. We're talking about what was evident on the ground, not just in the classroom, but we were invited to a marvelous one of their Thursday dinners where it's a bit more formal than a regular dinner would be something, imagine sort of dead poets. Supposed to dress up a little bit, yeah. It's sort of that sort of thing. And people are invited to, if they are so moved to present something to the assembled group. It's the students and many of the faculty and always a few guests. And this time we weren't the only guests, we were a few more guests. And so it's a group of, I don't know, 40 people or so. Yeah, 40 people or so. But you can imagine it's exactly the kind of thing that terrifies a normal person to get up in front of such a group and put yourself out there by even what you've chosen to present and then are you gonna present it well? And but just the degree to which the trust in the room was so strong that people absolutely held nothing back. And you know, presented in, you know, everybody there is involved in speaking Greek to one level or another, but the range over which they speak it is tremendous and you and I speak none. So there are recitations in Greek. Recitations from Socrates? Yeah, not even recitations, but like really acting out Socrates, I think it's the apology by Socrates, where he is essentially accounting for his behavior to the court that ultimately condemns him to death. The Constitutional Theater, the Ukrainian folk song. One of the students does amazing imitations of his fellow students and the president. And the president, yeah. And a few of the people who got up to present got a little flustered and recovered and finished and did the job. It was actually even more admirable that they had just nailed it. If you've ever been in the situation where you lose track of where you are in front of a large audience, it is absolutely mortifying. And to watch several people, predictably, I mean, they've got some long thing that, you know, they're also full-time in school. So it's not like they've got a ton of extra time to perfect these things. But watching the trust in the room was profound. The degree to which, to a person, everybody appeared to take all of the subject matter very seriously. It did not rob it of joy. It infused it with joy. It was just a really powerful demonstration of what is possible in an educational institution. Yeah. And the intentionality and the extraordinarily high academic standards in combination with the focus on fellowship is precisely one of the things that we were able to create when we were professors, and which has been hard to convey to others how important it is if you are actually going to have an educational environment which transforms people and facilitates their becoming the most that they can be. And, you know, that sort of thing is not going to scale indefinitely. I'm not sure how far it can scale. And, you know, that will always be a challenge for an institution that, you know, you can't have fellowship among thousands in the same way, right? So it's not that there isn't difficulty to be had there, but the... I mean, I... you have to see it. And if, you know, if you are near Savannah, at the point that there are more public events such as our talks were highly encouraged it, look them up, consider it as a possibility. If you are at a time of life where you have children who do, who are, it is... we also met some alumni. We had dinner around a campfire with some alumni from the first and second years. And not an alumni, but including actually an evergreen alum. And just seeing sort of the worlds come together around, again, inquiry, free inquiry, free inquiry, truth, beauty, and a fellowship. These are the four themes that they center themselves around, the four values that they have, and how extraordinary, really, to have that as a goal and to be achieving it. Yeah, I will say, actually, I'm searching my mind for other examples of institutions that appear to be successful in this moment. And I'm struggling to find a single one that I would add to the list. This is an institution that is doing what it says it's doing and is, you know, it's still small, but it's not tiny. We're talking about, you know, it's hard to gather, you know, 40 or 50 people and not have a single person who, you know, is an exception to the rule that everybody is invested in, in the communal effort. So it really is an educational institution of a kind that is, I thought was completely absent from the landscape. It's a powerful demonstration, and I hope that they do figure out how to expand it from the massive success that they've had with their Greek focus to something that includes sciences more deliberately. That's a question. It's not obvious how you do that, but I'm very hopeful that given how they've slam dunked their first goal that they set for themselves, I'm very interested to see where it goes. Indeed. So thank you, Ralston, Stephen, and everyone there. Congratulations. You've done great. Thanks. Indeed. All right. I think we did it. I think it is done. Yeah. So now do I get to take a nap? Excuse me. So we'll be back on Wednesday at our usual time, 11 30 a.m. Pacific, and join us on Locals. Until we see you next time. Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.