DarkHorse Podcast
The DarkHorse Podcast is hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Bret and Heather both have PhDs in biology, and they seek truth and explore a wide variety of topics with their evolutionary toolkit as society loses its footing. Tune in to infamous spreaders of "Covid Disinformation" Bret and Heather for a podcast—maybe you'll like what you see!
DarkHorse Podcast
Raising the Dead: The 301st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 301st Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss grief and mourning, and what makes us human. How many distinctly human traits will we prune away before we realize that we have gone too far, that there is too little remaining of humanity to be resurrected? From the Industrial Revolution(s) to that of AI, now we’ve got apps that threaten to keep your loved ones “alive” forever, with none of the valuable complexity that ancient grieving traditions offer. Then: bonobos show evidence of language use that is emergent—in which combinations of sounds mean more than the sum of their parts. And: all of the ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm in British Columbia have been slaughtered, per a court order, despite there being no public or individual health justification for doing so.
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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
Heather’s newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.com
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Check out our store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://darkhorsestore.org
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Mentioned in this episode:
Amelia Earhart: https://x.com/dnigabbard/status/1989450238923309500
2wai, the anti-grief app: https://x.com/bretweinstein/status/1989413085753577593
Berthet et al 2025. Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos. Science, 388(6742): 104-108: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adv1170
AP on ostriches, 11-7-25: https://apnews.com/article/oshtrich-cull-bird-flu-canada-cbef6e65b570bbc91a790b4817e02777
WaPo on pet vaccinations: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/15/edith-pritchett-cartoon-anti-vaccine-pet-owners/
(Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. It is number 301. I am not even embarrassed. I am mortified. Oh no, mortified. I guess so early in a weekend? I am mortified. Yeah, I know it's the beginning of the weekend and we got a ways to go, but I am mortified that I looked at 301 and felt strongly that it was going to be prime. I revealed to you that as is my want on my hike yesterday, I started going through the obvious numbers that it might be divisible by and arrived at seven pretty quickly because one does. Yes. And it would appear that 280 being obviously a multiple of seven because 28 is and then 301 is 21 more than 280, which is of course a multiple of seven as well. Seven would appear to be. I haven't actually checked that against a calculator, but it would appear that 301 is not prime. Not prime despite it seeming like it really has no choice. But can we agree that absent the number seven it would be? No, we cannot. We cannot agree to that either. I have not considered, let's see, it's going to be 73 seven by, no, no, no, 43, seven by 43. Yeah. So at least 43 as well. Yeah, but I mean 43 on its own wouldn't do it. You need the seven. I don't think you're helping your cause. I'm not. I'm just I'm grasping at straws with respect to the mortifying misassessment of the primeness of 301. But I mean, if this is the only thing you ought to be mortified about this weekend, I'd say you're in fine shape. I'm doing OK. Yeah. This is the worst. Yeah. I will say there has obviously, I don't know, you have been knee deep in profoundly important work. But big news out just yesterday, I believe. Oh, boy. We're finally getting to the bottom of it. Oh, good. Yep. What is it? Amelia Earhart. We are going to see the files finally released. The files? The files. Like the federal files? Exactly. That were not released? Telsey Gabbard announced that the files are going to be released as a result of the courageous efforts of President Trump. And I imagine that next on the agenda is the-- there's presumably going to be an initiative out of the National Institutes of Health to get to the bottom of spontaneous human combustion. We're going to work our way all the way through-- That was a scourge in the 70s, I remember. Oh, man. Yeah. You couldn't walk a block without seeing a pair of smoldering shoes. Exactly. Yeah. In search of, I think that's where we are, is that this administration has decided to finally get to the bottom of all of the various things repeatedly covered in search of in the 70s, if I recall the show correctly. Yeah, there was at least one other as well. I can't remember what it was called. But in search of, that's a good recall there. Yep. Well done. Amelia Earhart, OK. I had forgotten to notice that the files had not been released. Right. I kind of thought-- She's three generations ago at this point? Four? Something. For a flight there. So not-- Early 20th century, but not-- Not the remote history. But I-- I sort of thought we were there. I thought plane goes down. We don't really know anything. Remains on Pitcairn Island. I mean, what else is there to know? I guess I'm curious. I don't really think this should be the highest priority of the administration. But I'm a little curious. So you said that. Telsey Gabbard. Yes. As the Director of National Intelligence. DNI. Tweeted? Yes. Yesterday. Yes. It's going to go very slowly. That the files of Amelia Earhart's tragic and surprising disappearance are finally being released due to the bravery, did you say? Was the word bravery? I believe-- Jen, do you have the tweet in question? I think these are the main photos, which is direction, leadership. Leadership. Historic initiative is under way to digitize and publicly release these records. OK, so at least this does not-- she's not implying that he is brave to do so, but, OK. Well maybe-- Let's hope that what's going on here is that there's an inbox. And because Amelia Earhart's disappearance happened in the early 20th century, and the Epstein files and that those are next because that would be like important. All right, I don't know what to think of all of this. I will say it did not take long for my observation last week on Joe Rogan's program where he asked me how I thought things were going and I said that I was watching all of our friends who'd been pulled into the administration being drained, obstructed, and forced to back off their ambitions to much smaller things and next thing you know, Tulsi Gabbard is tweeting about Amelia Earhart and I don't know it kind of it kind of breaks my heart that this is where we are. I wish we weren't but I do think. Weirdly the writing is no longer on the wall it's on your phone on X and it comes from all the official accounts but something is trying to tell us that our hopes may have been a bit ambitious themselves. For this administration. Yeah. Yes. That there is not as much freedom within the administration as we once hoped and assumed that there was. Yeah and I'm not sure we will ever know exactly what happened but it does seem like somebody is playing five-dimensional chess and it ain't us. Okay well you went way off script. I did as always. Yes. But we need to pay the rent. Let's do it. Up at the top of the hour. We did a Q&A on Wednesday and no did we? Yes. Yes and is that where we talked? So my notes I just can't remember now if I've updated my notes about that Q&A or the previous one. We talked about maha and mattresses and the twin perils of the industrial and AI revolutions that was last Wednesday. So if you were interested in any of those topics we're definitely not going to talk about those things today but go check it out on locals. All of our Q&A's are up there and you've got patreon conversations going on this weekend. You had one just now got another one tomorrow. Yep. Check us out there and then we have our sponsors right at the top of the hour. As always three whom we really who make products or offer services that we truly vouch for and without further ado Bret is going to find his auntie Ohos. Only a little bit of further ado because and read. All right. Our first sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes mito pure which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone. It's urolithin A. Urolithin A is found primarily in pomegranates and has been the subject of hundreds of scientific and clinical studies scientific and or clinical studies. Many of these studies find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria actually everybody's mitochondria are the powerhouses of their cells. But like you're talking to everybody I'm speaking to specify if you've got cells mitochondria are the powerhouses of your does that job linguistically. Yes I guess it does but it's ambiguous because every so often people write to us and it's clear that they think we're talking to them specifically and anyway I just wanted to be clear it's everybody's mitochondria right I mean their cells and their mitochondria which power them see earlier point where the hell am I oh yes the older we get that to yourself I sure did 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 the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells becomes less efficient the older we get the age related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria but it also impairs the creation of new mitochondria with that new mitochondria smell and this results in an overall decline in cell function might appear from timeline works by triggering mitophagy quoting a research article published in cell reports medicine in 2022 here's the quote targeting mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline we present results from a randomized placebo controlled trial in middle-aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound urolithin a which is might appear a known mitophagy activator at two dosages for four months the data shows significant improvements in muscle strength approximately 12% in with intake of urolithin a we observed clinical clinically meaningful improvements in your lithium-a with your lithium-a on aerobic endurance I got this man English is tough but it's not that with your lithium-a on aerobic endurance and physical performance but do not notice a significant improvement on peak power output see this was an honest paper for that's not in the quote that's me commenting on the quote for then we are honestly reporting on the paper which is so meta and not in the corporate sense furthermore research published by nature medicine in 2016 found that in mice the beneficial effects of urolithin a on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age take two soft gels of might appear a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance might appear enhances yourselves ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria in combination with regular physical activity might appear can help you stay strong and healthy into old age timeline is now offering 20% off your first order of might appear go to timeline.com slash DarkHorse and use the code DarkHorse to get 20% off your first order that's T I M E L I N E dot com slash DarkHorse. All right, our second sponsor this week is care away, which makes high quality non-toxic cookware and bakeware here in the US November is a month in which we give thanks and in which we remember that that for which we are grateful your dark horse we are so grateful to be able to cook real healthy food and high quality and non-toxic cookware listeners dark horse are well familiar with the myriad ways that modern life puts our health at risk this includes the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware which is why we threw out all our tough lawn cookware decades ago. Why? Because tough lawn is toxic. And yet over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with tough lawn and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from nonstick cookware in their blood. When you cook with tough lawn only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins. And when do you ever cook anything in a pan for less than two and a half minutes? 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Visit carawayhome.com slash DH 10 to take advantage of this limited time offer for up to 20% off your next purchase. Again that's carawayhome.com slash DH 10 to get new kitchenware before the holidays. Caraway non toxic cookware made modern. And two egg omelets made awesome. Two egg omelets but yeah particularly there's this little frying pan that we've got of theirs that you have perfected the two egg omelet with the coarse salt and lots of blackened the omelet with not with a may lard reaction or by charring but with pepper. Yep yeah it's good stuff it is good stuff. Our final sponsor this week is fresh pressed olive oil club we love these guys and their olive oils so much. Extro virgin olive oil is delicious and nutrition it is actually good for your heart helps prevent Alzheimer's is high in antioxidants the list of health benefits from olive oil goes on and on and it's a cornerstone of Mediterranean climates but if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Fresh pressed olive oil club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson also known as the olive oil hunter he brings the freshest most flavorful nutrient rich olive oils from harvest to your door. TJ's farm fresh oils are incredible we've received several different varietals now all with noticeably different flavors and have used them in all sorts of culinary contexts in marinades for meat and fish tossed with carrots or asparagus or potatoes before roasting or grilling rubbed directly on the steaks before grilling used fresh in salads or drizzled as a finish on a cold soup or on grilled halloumi cheese we made olive oil cake and several raw sauces that benefit from amazing fresh olive oil a mostly classic Italian pesto a Venezuelan green sauce that is rich in cilantro and a lemony garlicky aioli that benefits mightily from amazing fresh olive oil right now we're sampling their olive oils from Australia last night we had carrots roasted in their outlife varietal the night before we rubbed steaks in Nula Munji I believe is how it's pronounced before searing them delicious both they're both on offer from fresh pressed olive oil club right now earlier this month when we got our newest shipment we sipped them to taste them in their purest form one was spicy green and aromatic with distinct hints of arugula another was bolder and richer they're all unbelievably good olive oil is a succulent delicious food like pretty much all fats is best when it's fresh but most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years growing stale dull flavorless even rancid the solution is to have fresh pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest when the olives when the oils flavor and nutrients are at their peak as an introduction to T.J. Robinson's fresh pressed olive oil club he will send you a full-size thirty nine dollar bottle to one of the world's of one of the world's finest traditional olive oils fresh from the new harvest for just one dollar to help him cover shipping yep it's going to be prepositional today oh goodness yeah and there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever get your free 39 bottle for just one dollar shipping and taste the difference freshness makes go to get fresh DarkHorse dot com that's get fresh DarkHorse dot com for a free bottle of amazing olive oil and pay just one dollar shipping yeah it's kind of addictive stuff the tasting the distinctions figuring out what you can use it in next it's really really good and you know it's like a healthy addiction so it's not really an addiction it's something else i have it a passion perhaps all right um we have a number of places we are headed today let us start with the um i don't know jen do we have access to the uh the video yeah okay uh we're going to show you a video of something that um i caught wind of on x earlier this week and it caused my jaw to fall open it didn't hit the floor but largely because i was standing up and the floor is a long way down so um anyway uh let's so you did not simultaneously fall over else your job might have hit the floor you know i was holding on to a banister at the time and so no i didn't fall over but the potential was you were scrolling on your phone while holding onto a banister increasingly that seems like a good idea i see yeah all right he's getting bigger see oh he's that's wonderful kicking like crazy he's listening put your hand on your tummy and hum to him you'll use those lots of it feels like he's dancing in there mom would you tell charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me once upon a time there was a baby unicorn who didn't know he knew how to fly this baby unicorn was like your mom because she didn't know that she knew how to fly but she knew how to do all kinds of fabulous things hi grandma hey charlie how was school today it was really fun i mean it's crazy shot in basketball i don't really care that much about basketball what about the crush just tell me one thing look who's gonna be a great grandmother oh charlie congratulations she says that he's been kicking a lot though like a little too much tell her to put her hand on her tummy and hum to him you've loved that you would have loved this moment you can call anytime okay mom i just need a quick video this is like an audition or something no mom just three minutes you need my best side i can play the piano actually don't tell me i am i'm absolutely i'm your mother after all so that's an app that's already available yes apparently um for those who were not able to watch it i think a lot is left out if you don't see the video um what describe it's an app that allows you to capture what they represent as a small amount of apparently video of a living person and then when that person dies they can kind of live on on your phone and interact using ai in some way so that it is as if you are talking to the living person in this case the the video depicts a soon-to-be mother getting counsel from her own mother that the kicking of her fetus can be calmed by placing her hand on her abdomen and humming and then the child is born and the child begins to interact with the app and grandma who is now passed tells the child bedtime story who would pet who was gone before the child was human conceived right the child never met this met his grandmother child never met the grandmother the baby grows up weds his wife is pregnant the wife is experiencing the kicking of the fetus and grandma delivers this information that she has passed down now to two generations about how to calm uh the kicking fetus and you know the beautiful circle is you know closed renewed whatever it is that they want to imply now as i said when i saw this my thought was well two thoughts really one of course they would do this somebody's gonna do this multiple somebodies are gonna do this but what i ended up tweeting was i'm not a religious person but this is unholy that what they're playing with here is wildly destructive of the meaning of being a human i just i feel like that's the theme of the era like almost everything we are doing that is being announced as new and uh about the future and progress feels unholy it feels depraved it feels like it completely misunderstands what the value of being a human is we seem to be seeking you know conformity and homogenization and in in everything across all the domains and then here we're going to lose our our ability to grieve our ability to to lay down stories about people who have a right to have their own histories and not to have an algorithm decide what they would say as new things happen in the world yeah i agree with you exactly that um grief among other things what is at stake here most fundamentally is grief and of course the people doing this have no understanding of what grief is i can say that with some confidence because you and i have spent time on this biologically evolutionarily speaking and grief is clearly a very important process we're not the only species that experiences it but the ones that do are on this very short list that you and i call the usual suspects and it let's put it this way grieving is very expensive so the benefit of it has to be much greater than that easily calculated massive expense so it's something very important and to disrupt it by preserving permanently in some crude way a not even photo realistic but a uh a apparently animate facsimile of your dead relative is it is a terrible uncontrolled experiment that is about to be run on humanity it's it's an act of violence against the individual uh who is now dead and is therefore an act of violence against humanity uh the the presumably i'll bet the app doesn't have uh these now dead animated avatars um getting touchy getting irritated with their loved ones when you know when they when they want to engage with them having an off day having a response that they don't like having a different opinion than what the person is looking for i'll bet it's got confirmation bias and conformity and agreeableness all the way down and that means that it can't possibly actually i mean it wouldn't be able to there's no way for it to accurately predict everything that a person now dead would be doing that is not what humans are but it will always have this bias and it will therefore also lead people uh to wish more for the people who are dead than for the people who are alive because the people who are dead aren't going to get in irritating little snits with you they're always going to be what you want yep and you know um to your earlier point about the this really being the the nature of the era violence against the human let's just compare this you know to the already grotesque landscape of pornography which takes sexuality which is and sex itself which is this i would argue sacred realm of connection between individuals and causes something else to be able to trigger the most basic reward that is supposed to go along with it but that reward is supposed to be about something instead porn rewards a person for engaging with a fiction that makes no demands on them and so it it supplants something uh deep and important that has a richness to it with something utterly superficial that is easier and doesn't challenge and um and the point is how many realms are we going to rob ourselves of something that no one on earth really understands right you can't understand these things nobody has the the depth to see it all and yet we're just going to one after the other obliterate them well and just you mentioned the usual suspects the you know the other species the other clades on the planet that are social and long lived and have long childhoods and have overlap of generations living together or living at the same time at least such that there can be learning between generations and this group includes mostly mammals elephants the toothed whales like dolphins and orcas wolves the great apes including us i feel like i'm forgetting someone and then over in in bird world you have corvids crows and and parrots perhaps i'm gonna with regard to grief we have evidence of grief and many maybe all but i don't know for sure but at least many of these groups and and yet in all of these cases we seem to have and maybe this is just because of the numbers because we outnumber wildly outnumber all of the other individuals of all those other species on the planet but we have a much greater diversity of of grief we have a much longer intensity and across sort of more scales of of association and and that seems to be part of what we do as humans that we take these extraordinary things that are that are found in a few other clades on the planet and we expand on them and we exaggerate them in interesting and new and deeply human ways and and so too with regard to to sex like with regard to grief all organisms can experience loss that can be that can be utterly damaging if you don't have any relationship with your parents at all it's it's harder to have that happen but with and with regard to to sex all organisms that are sexually reproducing which is to say at least you know at least all the animals have sex and it feels good whatever that might mean to them but in i don't know about the birds but in the mammals the usual suspects there is seemingly some additional relationship that is happening with regard to sex in many of these cases and humans much more so than even anyone else than say say pan the two the two species of chimps the common chimpanzee and the and the bonobo about which may be more later but so we we we engage in sex in ways that are much of much deeper meaning than other organisms do and so when we strip it back to the thing that is most easy most titillating most obvious we again do violence to our humanity we reduce ourselves to something that is almost pre-human and is that you know is is sexual activity part of being a human sure of course but it is so much more for us at least it should be it can be and pornography reduces it these apps this this app unholy as you say this this app that takes takes the ability for people to actually die and and removes it i mean it doesn't actually but it appears to remove it it it removes the it removes one of the impacts of it which is i think the thing i'm i'm going to settle on is we don't know what the damage of this will be but we do know it's incalculable right that's the problem is that because we don't have um an exact description nor do i expect us ever to have an exact description of the importance of the adaptive process of grieving we can't say what we lose by interfering with it in this way um now it feels oh go ahead it feels um almost explicitly analogous to the response of the pharmaceutical industry to anxiety to depression right we got a pill for that we got a solution for that as opposed to um maybe you're anxious because there's something in your life that needs visiting that needs correcting that you need to figure out how to get your agency back and change something in your life so that the thing that is that has been bothering you for a while and is now encroaching itself on your daily activity you can't seem to get rid of it maybe instead of making the symptom go away you should deal with the underlying cause and so there's no underlying cause to be dealt with with regard to grief it is as we said in our book grief is the downside of love you can't disappear it it is adaptive it is itself healing and it instructs you the person left behind in making an ever more encapsulated model of the person you have lost so that you can help move that into the future that is your job as a human being who loved this person not an apps it is not the job of machines it's not the job of machine nor is anybody in possession of the information of how you would do it with any sort of elegance or nuance no it won't be done well it won't be done well so i i want to actually back up to an argument that i've made in a very different context right people these trans human and this is yet one more bit of transhumanist nonsense but these transhumanists um rail against aging and death yeah and it's understandable why we all you know we're all built to like continue living and so the idea that there's something that will cause your ability to keep doing that to come to an end it's a little bit galling and we all face that but the the fact is there's a built-in biological problem senescence which i've made the argument enough times i probably won't say much about it here other than the fact it's basically the consequence of what economists would call future discounting the fact that your early life matters more to your fitness than your late life causes things that do something good for you early in life and bad for you late in life to accumulate because they tend to be a good deal so that process creates our tendency to grow old and feeble in so doing and then die why has selection not solved this problem longer lives give more reproductive opportunities than shorter ones natural selection does not like senescence it's a negative not a positive from selections point of view why doesn't it solve the problem and my argument is it did solve the problem very elegantly especially in humans where what it has done is created a creature with dual inheritance where we inherit genes and we inherit culture which becomes the substrate that builds our minds and the point is does your child pick up all your culture no and you wouldn't want them to your child picks up the part of what you know hopefully that is excellent and jettison's the part that's superficial unimportant wrong bad right they're in a position each generation to shed the part of you that doesn't make sense and pick up the part that is the most valuable so that is beautiful because it means that the evolution of your family you can get better at a generational scale right lots of stuff that you know my grandfather who was really like the origin point for a lot of the things about myself that i like he got so far and then he passed on what he knew to eric and me we've taken it so far i expect our kids to take it another step that's the way it's supposed to work but all of all of that is dependent on natural maturation process in which the natural order of things is you lose your parents at some point and a process that keeps them alive interrupts whatever developmental consequence naturally follows from even just the knowledge that you will lose them and it interrupts two distinct processes it interrupts the the developmental process by which you learn how to deal with loss and and incorporate loss into your life and then recognize a different kind of loss the next time it comes but it also interferes with your ability to to create models in your head of what people are to you and what people were in the world and and who they are and so it's just i said this actually on our on our local's q&a last time that we had a question about the industrial revolution the ai revolution and i i got thinking about it i was actually writing about it a bit thought well the industrial revolution at least the the one that surrounded the sort of turn of the 20th century from like 1870 through the beginning of the first world war uh had so much change associated with it um and i won't go through all of the things that i understand those changes to to have met right now in some ways it was the chemical revolution it was sort of the birth of pharmaceuticals it was the birth of you know the haber bosch process which allowed us to fix nitrogen and immediately double triple crop yields from having to use you know lagoonist cover crops or guano or something but it also it was like electrification and mass production uh at the same time like electrical grids spreading out across landscapes and mass production meant that pretty soon thereafter we started to have these labor saving devices in both masculine and feminine spheres traditional masculine and feminine spheres but you know within the home it wouldn't be too many decades past that when you when most people would have refrigerators and washing machines and vacuums and electric lights and oh it's it's so great that now we don't have to do so many of the things that we've done before i guess we have more time what will we use the time to do and and oh remember what we are called we are called homo sapiens we are the the wise human the thinker well maybe we will spend time we will spend the time you know creating new things imagining new worlds like figuring out new problems new salt new solutions to old problems and new problems that need solving and here comes the a revolution and it's like yeah we can do that for you too you had a revolution already which unhooked all the need to do most of your physical work cool and now you're going to be you know you're just going to storm right in to the ai revolution and say hey actually we humans are pretty much done with the thinking for ourselves too we're going to also outsource that and to what end like at some point you've outsourced everything that makes you human and there's nothing left yeah i i really like this point i do think that this is um the next stage and that it basically has become uh cognitive outsourcing except it's almost worse than that because what why is the ai knowledgeable about certain things because humans wrote about them so it's almost like it's farming humans it's like yeah you know it's farming us and then spitting it back as if it is smart and you know look i'm i'm impressed with what ai can do but it's still it's basically draining us of something valuable and then selling it back to us in some unholy way and we there's no way that any of us will be able to identify all of the things that we are losing and probably together we can't yet identify all of the things that we are losing but not being able to point to the thing that is being lost does not mean that there aren't things being lost see again chesterton's fence right and in this case it's a new thing so like well you're not tearing anything down it's like well with regard to that app that you showed us that video from what you're tearing down is grief like you you lose grief like how about we not decide to lose things that have been fundamental in the human experience before we stop and carefully and lengthily consider what was that doing there what was the value when somebody dies when somebody we know loses somebody important to them there's a thing i always feel like saying to them i've said it a few times and i've stopped saying it because nobody knows what i'm talking about but the thing i feel like saying to them is grieve well that that process when it goes properly is so important and so cathartic that the idea of robbing yourself of it by preserving a dim shadow of the person you've lost is a preposterous thing to even consider further the whole thing is presented and predicated on the idea that all of your relationships are you know the loving mother who wants nothing but the best for you and those of us who have such a thing are lucky not everybody does and the idea that people with broken relationships don't get to live those relationships down and experience the world after their you know complicated parent vanishes that's also a very dangerous thing well yeah i mean i i guess i don't see that as a risk of this particular thing it's you know it's going to be opt-in but maybe it's just opt-in for now but what happens you know the guilt trip from the manipulative parent that wants to find their own immortality and frankly maintain their own control yeah but once they're gone they're gone right but the point is that works if you're a perfectly rational person if you're somebody who's been raised by somebody with a malevolence to them then a you may be left in a situation where your grief causes you to preserve them you never discover what your relationship actually was you know is this going to cause suicides i think certainly it will cause some of them where some relationship that is troubling never ends and this is confusing because not only does it never end but you don't have a template for what to do with the ancestor who never ceases to be so anyway danger is there also dangerous like let's imagine for a second let's say this becomes normalized and i hate to do this with myself but let's say that our children preserve some aspect of me in one of these things right what happens when COVID 2.0 okay does the app allow them to have a conversation with me in which there's you know they say dad they're telling me that this new technology is safe and effective but i'm not sure what to think do i get to say fuck no stay away from that goddamn thing these people are liars you know what they did the last time because that's what i would say right or does anthony fauci begin to speak through me and say well you know in this case the re it's you know randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of this that and the other you know you certainly shouldn't be taking some drug that only works for this that you know you could imagine that in a world where these people are as comfortable abusing their power over us as they clearly are there is no way that even if they had the power to be neutral with respect to your relationship with your ancestor that they're going to stick to it at some point they're going to decide well you don't really have you know your ancestor was bad they don't have the right to pass on what they actually would have thought in fact we're going to we're going to correct that relationship for you right of course that's coming so anyway my feeling is uh get as far away from this technology as you possibly can this is this is this is i've said before i'm worried that when it comes to ai that the abuse cases will outnumber the use cases this is clearly an abuse case and i'm not saying anybody should be forbidden to create such an app because who of course would dictate what the rules are but i think wise people will just not want to touch this at all well i mean and that raises the question of you know we're living in this brave new world of uh of capacity for for people to create things and you know it used to be that there was a job classification called ethicist and bioethicist and you know they never had any power per se but it was understood that people some people took it on for themselves to be thinking about what the implications of technological and scientific advancements in particular were and um there's really no there's no place for such people anymore we don't we don't listen to them i don't you know i don't know if they existed if they would make any sense it may be like your friend steve patterson says about the philosophers right is that is yeah do i have this right so you say that my favorite line of his is philosophy is where it's at philosophers aren't right and i think you know so many of the um modern real academic disciplines that's yes anthropology awesome most anthropologists oh my god yeah um so yeah it's it's going to be the same thing um so i you know i don't know i don't know if there are any compelling um actually creative and insightful ethicists anymore but regardless the rate of change the rate of technological innovation is too fast for anyone to keep up even if there are good people out there doing it so what who does that leave it leaves unfortunately at one level the only thing it leaves is every single individual needs to take responsibility for their own choices and never imagine that what you're going to say later on was well but they told me to it's not enough it's not enough they're going to tell you to do a lot of things and most of them are going to be good for you yeah and you know as we said during covid lots of people said you know the shots were you know a huge experiment and i would always say well it's only an experiment if you collect the data and the fact is the fact that this is emerging in a market means that they have every interest in not collecting the data and finding out what harm they've done and you know upending their own business model by discovering that it's toxic yeah um which i did maybe i should have done this at the top but this is obvious cognitive emotional poison right you and i can spot this one a mile off and to their credit many on x when they saw this were properly horrified by it so it's not like the public is you know mesmerized by the shiny thing a lot of people can see how troubling this is but i did want to point out it is a radical new step in a subtle evolution of technologies that have some aspect of this some of them we adore so i just wanted to point out that you know at some point it became possible to create a painting of an ancestor and preserve them at some age so they hang over the mantle and they look down on you and it is not entirely unlike being in the room with the person that's not a totally safe innovation right i think it calls to like depending on what your relationship is with that person and how long ago they lived if you interact with them in real life it potentially allows you to think oh what would what would he think of what i'm doing right would he approve of this decision i'm making personally business-wise anything well actually i'm going to come back to that um you'll probably see it coming but uh so we've got the picture over the mantle that has some aspect of preserving a person unnaturally freezing them uh at a moment in time preserving some aspect of your relationship because it does feel like they're in the room with you when you're with that picture right and then you get to photos and initially you know the nice thing about the painting is that it comes with indicators that it's not reality right like i've always worried about the distinction between fiction portrayed in a photo realistic way on a television and a cartoon like i think a child can maintain the idea that when it looks like a cartoon it's of a non-real place and when it looks like a person it's confusing right like i remember when i was a kid um i was watching public tv right sesame street or something and it was in the middle of some public tv fundraising thing and so my show ended the fundraiser people came out and the guy came on the screen and he was like okay kids why don't you go and get your parents and bring them into the room so that we can talk to them about public tv i literally went and i'm like mom you gotta come she's like what i'm like they want to talk to you she's like what are you talking about i remember and it was confusing because the man in the living room who was mayor wants to talk to you mom right he's asking who am i to like say no he's a very he's a public television guy he's nice right so anyway you know did she come i think she did and then she rolled her eyes at me like okay okay no this is we don't do this right so anyway but the cartoon and the oil painting both have little indications that they're not real the oil painting you know you see the brush marks then you get to photography well it's black and white that's not what life looks like okay it's still got that indication that this is from a different realm that you know file this separately and then at some point you get photo realistic pictures and you know you sort of run the risk i think the story is not apocryphal that when the first uh movies were put on a screen that there was a scene of a train coming at the audience and the audience panicked over it because they hadn't gotten used to the idea that the screen is an indicator this isn't real um but the point is you keep marching down this road right from sculpture to painting to uh to photo to video or it's not even video it's film at first right film oh it's got no sound still has an indicator it's not real right and then you get to video and it's like oh you can make as much of this as you want and then you get to fake video and the point is how different is fake video of your relative talking to you through your phone from a zoom call with your relative it's like not different and so the point is the danger grows the fewer indications you have and you know it's one thing for us you know gen x and even gen z types who just skipping over the millennials oh i'm a little a little sore at them but uh all right for us moderns um like we watched the technology go from not realistic to realistic and so we have some way of calibrating that and some level of suspicion based on it but of course at some point you're going to have a generation for whom the phony rendering of your relative is as real as anything else right and they're developmentally just not going to have the proper skepticism right and the urge like you know i can imagine this for those who are overly in love with technology the urge like look you know it's not like let me tell you about your great grandparent it's like i want to introduce you yeah right it's just it's irresistible and so dangerous well irresistible and dangerous is also the theme of the moment isn't it i think you know 23andme and it's ilk we're in that uh we're in that category uh you know we were encouraged many many times uh to to sacrifice some of our dna into the into the abyss uh knowing full well that these people were likely to do nefarious things and we refused over and over and over again never succumbed but um but we we look like crazy people like we sounded like crazy people like the aughts right uh with new babies like don't you want to know you know the whole history if you're like not that way no that's not that doesn't that does not look safe what exactly are you worried about a few things but also it's not my job to enumerate for you all of the possible harms nor my job to have come up with all of them i'm allowed to have a reaction to new technology that says no no not doing that and uh here's why i also think that it's not good for you so um yeah you can't enumerate it in advance and the fact that you can't enumerate it is not an indictment of the hey i've actually noticed that there's a pattern and we keep embracing tech and then discovering what's wrong with it decades later it's no way to live um but here's the thing i said i thought you would see coming really when comparing these novel shufflings of profoundly important relationships that we have and the way that they we deal with death right there are ancient versions of this right of course the belief that your ancestors are in heaven right or in the afterlife somehow allows a maintenance of characteristics that are desirable a connection to them a justification for talking to them but then you also have versions of that that are unsettling to you know us western moderns the retromant ceremony that you went to in madagascar in which when a malagasy person dies somebody in a who's still in a traditional setting several of the 17 tribes practiced the retromant not all of them but the betzimosotica betzimosotica for example they bury the person and often bury isn't exactly the right description it's sort of they put you in a coffin in a place in a burial location and your flesh rots off and you become bones and is it five years it's different in different traditions i think it was seven there but different and with the different tribes after some set number of years the the elders the ancestors uh get um get disinterred they they they are are brought back their remains in front of the people at a regular moment during the year for the betzimosotica it was during it was around the harvest season uh and uh and the elders the current the living elders of the village speak to them and they tell them what has been going on and they they catch them up they catch them up on what has been happening and then the elders who are long dead if they came out of a body box if they if they did not they did not die so long ago that they had not yet been moved into a bone box they now get moved if it's if they're just bones at this point they get moved into a bone box which takes up less space and they get and they get put back and the ancestors are brought out regularly reliably predictably um such that the living can inform the dead of what is happening and thus answer for any sins that have been committed effectively so i would argue a couple things um one our model as we present it in our book you've heard us talk about it is that a behavior like this has a real cost obviously and it's a cost you could reduce you could just simply not bother right the fact that it doesn't get reduced that this gets passed on tells you that there's a benefit that exceeds that substantial cost so that doesn't tell you what the benefit is but we can surmise certain things imagine that you have tension with somebody else in your tribe that is kept under control because you both have obligation to your aunt right and your aunt dies and the point is oh now the safety's off the gun yep but it isn't off the gun because your aunt's going to be back in seven years and you're gonna have to explain what you've been up to so your aunt kind of sticks around but she's not looking over your damn shoulder right it's different actually than an afterlife tradition where your your ancestors are above looking down on you right it functions differently now is that an adaptive difference or just an arbitrary difference who knows but the key point is each of these systems right whether it's bone boxes and retinol ceremonies or a formalized afterlife where your ancestors go and have some contact with you but they don't interfere directly in your life the thing that those all have in common is that they passed the test of time yes they weren't toxic were there toxic versions maybe they're gone right the non-toxic versions the ones that actually have benefits for you remain and this new thing it has not passed the test of time nor will it i mean you know that's speculative but it's not a risky prediction this is so disruptive and you know when has a market ever produced a you know a an important mythological structure that facilitates the well-being of a population over the course of hundreds or thousands of years right not a thing well and so the value of the traditions the ancient traditions that you have mentioned is in part that there is a kind of accountability that the living know that the dead would have opinions were they still around and are allowed in the spirit of the tradition to have opinions about what the what the living are doing with this app you can just obscure whatever it is that you're doing from the person you know that you know that this isn't god-like and so there is actually not even a safety on the thing like you you can just use it to to get the cleanest most mundane most banal but supposedly happy version of this dead person without any of the it's not it's it's not the cost without any of the discomfort that comes from actually having checks and balances in a relationship that actually comes from someone saying you know i love you deeply but that thing that you did i saw you interact with that guy and i think you were too harsh with him or you know whatever it is right the a loving relationship has to has to include the potential for critique and the you know the traditions the religious traditions have that you know it requires the living to infer that the person who's looking down them can see everything and is going to have an opinion just like they did in life but the app doesn't even pretend to that so there is no there is no critique unless you the living go explicitly seeking it and usually when you go explicitly seeking it you're already open for it you're already primed for it and very often the critique that we need the most from the people who have been most dear to us are the ones that we don't see coming yeah this is a great point and also think about what it does to you know if you if you are if you fear the the critique of your mother and so you present things in a way so as to minimize the likelihood of her critiquing you well then you preserve that tendency through death because you're talking it as if on a zoom call to your mother and so the point is you're you're lying to yourself persists through this thing because it superficially maintains your telephone relationship and what you know how much better is it to have you know the idea that your mother has ascended to the the afterlife and is looking down on you and now there's no fooling her right which might make you wiser yes that critique is something you can't dodge yes right so yeah just i mean you could you could go weak naming risks of this bizarre intervention into our humanity but wow is it profound and really i mean unhealthy is one thing unholy is another but you you you're looking for terms strong enough to indicate just how insane it is to march head long into this new tech thinking it's a good thing right it's not a person on earth you should look at this and not think wait a minute what makes me think that's going to be a positive change yeah i agree um okay i sort of felt like we should uh we should leave it there but we still we we we should go in a little longer all right um you want to talk about bonobos or ostriches um let's talk about bonobos bonobos all right um there is a paper out that is not it this is going to be it can you cannot see my computer um uh this actually came out um several months ago but it's a 2025 paper published in science science uh excuse me for messing with my screen here um called extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos well that is quite a mouthful and that doesn't sound very exciting necessarily but i'm just going to read the first two paragraphs to give us to give us a little background here a quintessential i am going to try to make it bigger and see if my screen doesn't freak out there we go a quintessential feature of human language is the capacity to combine elements for example morphemes can be combined into words bio and logie is biology or words into sentences biology is interesting this is possible because of compositionality whereby meaningful units are combined into larger structures whose meaning is determined by the meanings of the parts and the way they are combined it's all fairly obvious but just to define the term compositionality compositionality can take two forms in its trivial or intersective version each element of the combination contributes to the meaning of the whole independently of the other element and the combination is interpreted by the conjunction of its parts for example blonde dancer refers to a person who is both blonde and a dancer if this person is also a doctor we can infer that they are a blonde doctor as well so that's a trivial compositionality um however compositional syntax can also be non-trivial the units constituting a combination do not contribute independent meaning but instead they combine so that one part of the combination modifies the other for example the meaning of the expression bad dancer does not refer to a bad person who is also a dancer indeed if this person is also a doctor we cannot infer that they are a bad doctor here bad does not have a meaning independent from dancer rather it complements it so there's our sort of background or linguistic background in terms of understanding what it might mean when we see the title of this paper extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos first of all bonobos are pan paniscus they are one of two extant species in the genus pan pan truclet i use the common chimp being the other bonobos are sometimes called pygmy chimps not really anymore but together the chimps are sister to humans so chimps both species bonobos and common chimps are our closest living relatives so we might expect that there was more language present or at least capacity present in these guys than elsewhere among the usual suspects we were talking about before on the other hand one of one of the many anatomical and physiological changes that happened as humans evolved away from our most recent common ancestor with pan which is something like six million years ago is we went you know we went bipedal which changed a lot of things about our our pelvis and our feet and our achilles tendons and all of this but also our snouts shortened uh and our larynx changed shape and as those things happened we gained the capacity for much greater precision and fine differences in the utterances that we make so this seems to be one of the precursors that were necessary to at least having intense vocal communication like humans do here i just i can't help but think that we went from a pretty severe disadvantage to looking even more ridiculous through all of those changes you know a pretty severe disadvantage feeding typically like in terms of beauty like yeah the apes are not like we do not live in the most beautiful clade we are no it's not it's not the most beautiful clade and in that clade i would not have chosen chimps for more than one reason but all the great apes are pretty damn ugly yeah i agree i mean you know a gorilla can look you know majestic in its own way and then you're right the lesser apes i think the gibbons you know they do all right they're beautiful yeah um but um but yeah chimps you know it's an acquired taste i guess humans too i think yes yes yes mostly mostly for other humans um okay so we what that but that background is is we're looking at bonobos and um and the claim is that there's extensive compositionality and rather than walking you through all of what they have done and i'm compelled that it was it was good work uh is they've identified um hundreds of different calls and they've classified them into seven different seven different call types the bonobos make that are that are equivalent to morphemes like you know individual sound units that have words like i don't remember it's like yep and pant and and hoot and such and they also find the bonobos combining these uh regularly and what the research discovers i believe compellingly is that when combined in particular ways you get meaning that cannot be inherently inferred from the the base units uh and yet has a clear relationship to the base unit so that you have again to use their language non-trivial compositionality in bonobo vocalizations where they are using utterances in distinct combinations and creating more meaning that is emergent than is present in the original utterances that was what i was going to ask you is it fair to characterize this as there is emergent meaning more than the sum of the constituent pieces that's the word that i kept on looking for in here and i actually failed to search on that but my read of it um yeah it's not in the paper it's not yeah the word seems like the obvious interpretation i agree so i don't know um you know i'm not familiar with these guys work otherwise i don't have i read this paper i don't know if in linguistics there's a reason that that word is avoided you know there may just be some historical reason that they're not using that word but it sounds exactly to me like the two different kinds of compositionality of um you know additive language bits and uh emergent language but it's is it multiplicative it's not even it's more than that it's emergent yeah uh and and that's exactly the word that i was thinking of in reading this and um i think i'm compelled just as i think uh two shows ago maybe we were talking about the manta rays you know not among the usual suspects you know we find some evidence of the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror in manta rays um but what you know what is what is the evidence here we have um you know and surprising in manta rays in bonobos we're not so surprised to find uh extraordinary capacity but given the laryngeal restrictions on what kinds of utterances they can make it is perhaps a little surprising that some of the complexity is coming in linguistic form that said these authors say at the end of their paper uh that there are also gestural things that often accompany uh vocalizations and obviously you know the different the different sensory modalities have different strengths and weaknesses sound works in the dark uh gestures don't and they also don't work in clutter or if you're far away if there's a tree between you and the guy you're gesturing to it's not going to matter right um but at least at short distances vocalizations in combination with gestures may have even additional even more emergence or at least more multiplicative effects and once you're in a species that can uh combine utterances the need for the face palm gesture is all the greater very very much so um question for you yes the i think you know to you and me it will be the obvious question it'll take some explaining as to why for for those who aren't uh well versed in phylogeny yeah but the obvious question given that we excel in compositional meaning making um like no other creature yes and bonobos are on the branch on the branch to which we are sister they are our closest they and the common chimps together are the closest living relatives of humans it would be interesting if common chimps did not have this capacity yes indeed did they look oh they you know not only did they not look uh i mean and of course they wouldn't like you don't expect this is a big involved study they should mention right but um so i i just meant to qualify i shouldn't have said not only did not did they not look because you wouldn't expect them to have done all of this in two different species but they say the strange thing at the at the end of the paper which i didn't highlight but here it is um the extent to the extent to which our findings can inform the evolutionary roots of linguistic compositionality is yet to be determined one interpretation of the data could be that non-trivial compositionality can be traced as far back as the last common ancestor of bonobos and humans seven million to thirty million years ago it is also now that's not where they say it they they say in here um i'm not finding it um um they suggest in here that bonobos are our closest living relatives oh here right before right before what i just read our results indicate that non-trivial compositionality is not limited to humans and that bonobos our closest living relative also engage in non-trivial compositionality now that sentence that's at least sloppy if not wrong that that is a very strange sentence and you know i i feel like this will be of almost no interest to just about anyone but i do i do think it's important um so once again the sentence is them saying that bonobos are our closest living relatives and that's at one level just you know sloppy because it's both both extant chimps in the genus pan which are our closest living relatives it's pan paniscus bonobos and pan drug litis common chimps but it also harkens back to the strange unscientific hypothesis that was popular in anthropology back in the 90s when i was getting an anthropology degree uh i was my undergraduate degree before going on to into biology which i think is what maybe you wanted to well i want to do a couple things one what Heather and i are both reacting to is that because bonobos and common chimps diverged after our lineage diverged from theirs they are each inherently equally close to us there is no more closely related to bonobos or more closely related to common chips the point is we are equally related to everything on that branch which includes these two things which i believe diverged is it two million i i do not remember that number but just imagine so we you know everyone served neanderthals yeah uh we did not you know apparently there's some neanderthal genes left in some populations of humans but um we don't imagine that neanderthals are still walking among us but they could be and if that were the case right here if that were the case there'd be two extant uh species uh in the genus homo homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens just as there are in fact two extant species in the genus pan pan paniska some pan troglodytes and homo and pan have a most recent common ancestor there's nothing else extant on earth that is more closely related to any of those things than they are to each other so if you wanted to rephrase what they've said in a non sloppy way assuming that their error is not analytical it's uh linguistic what you would say is um finding this compositionality in pam our most our closest living relatives is blah blah blah blah blah you would not single out bonobos yeah and you'd also then say um next up we want to look at chimps right i want to look at common which they allude to sort of in the sentence you read um they they say one possibility is that this implies that at the divergence point between our ancestors and the ancestors of modern chimps of both kinds that this characteristic existed which is exactly why i said is it in common chimps because if it's not yeah then that suggests there's what they say is there's absence of evidence in other species right so this is so they haven't left right they haven't looked no one has and so my prediction would be well i actually don't know if absence of evidence means they haven't looked no one has found evidence in other species that's that's because of the syllogism absence of evidence is not evidence of absence it seems like by using that phrase they are implying nobody's looked it is also possible the absence of evidence in other species has been hampered by the lack of appropriate methods oh that does suggest they looked or somebody looked um so my prediction would be that it would be that the same compositionality would be found in common chimps absent that it suggests something else one of two things and i think one of them vastly more probable than the other one it could have been lost right it was if it was in the shared most recent common ancestor between homo and pan then it would have been lost in common chimps and retained in bonobos that would be interesting why would you lose such a thing yeah possible but just weird yeah the other possibility is that it had been evolved that it evolved in bonobos and our ancestors separately which would suggest that this was a parallelism rather than a convergence that basically there was some precursor that caused this shared evolutionary trajectory to unfold on both branches separately which is always cool when that happens um but anyway i will say i'm surprised at how readable that paper is often they are not and i love it when somebody writes so that it's sort of accessible from regular english yeah it actually is i mean even even down to this i'm again i'm not going to walk us through the the methods and such in fact most of the methods are in a whole separate supplemental uh file which is 39 pages long which i do have um but and it's been it's mostly readable too but here in the results we estimated similarities between single call types and call combinations of wild bonobos using a multiple correspondence analysis i've never heard of that mca performed on the um foc if that's just like their individual calls the mca the multiple correspondence analysis is similar to a principal components analysis which i have heard of which you've heard of too which you know maybe no one in our audience has but oh principal components okay got it um but it's conducted on categorical data categorical data oh well you just gave me in a few words i like i i do need to know something but you're using mostly in they're saying here results it's really the methods but they've combined the methods because they do all the methods in a different place um usually when you describe stuff in a paper like this you just say the thing and if someone doesn't know what you're doing you just let them flounder right in not very many words here they told us what this is and how it's like the thing you're more likely to know except that it uses categorical data which you know again we're like often the weeds here but this struck me is so clear and so indicative that these authors actually want their readers to know what they did right which is an excellent sign about the research i agree and i more or less feel you know obviously they're going to be rarefied places where you can't write in a way that's accessible yeah but that explains like two percent of the inaccessibility and i more or less feel that if you submit a paper that is inaccessible except to the tiny number of people who are expert in your immediate thing you should just send you home to rewrite it yes right write it in english yeah you know you'll have to use some terms of art but as few as possible right as few as possible and as precisely as possible and you know you'd be amazed at how much better science would work if you forced people to explain what they were actually doing so that other people could look at it and call bullshit yes now um i did just want to um show a little bit from the supplemental um paper can you see my screen still much i'm never sure uh so this i'm just i'm just sort of scrolling through um they've got you know the vocalizations like peep and a peep yelp which is a combination and a whistle and they've got you know the incidences and what happened and what they think it means and so there's a lot of inference here and you know bonobos are awfully interesting i i have still i've never seen uh i've never seen any great apes in the wild yeah or lesser apes i've never seen any apes in the wild very much love to um but bonobos you know sort of got famous in i guess probably the 70s for supposedly being you know these crazy sex happy hippie feminist apes which it turns out it's not exactly what's going on there but they do these like food for sex trades and such and um they're just they're they're they're more hippie than there were like uh cousins right the common ships um and so you know you have things about you know the caller was building a nest there was food present there was an encounter at the time of the call uh and it goes on i just was skimming through these and i don't know what this means but i think it's the next page another individual was doing a butt drumming at the time of the call a butt drumming i don't know what a butt drumming is but given its bonobos it's probably vaguely sexual or maybe very sexual right um when the high hoot low hoot was admitted uh in one case another individual was doing a butt drumming at the end of the call i suspect the high hoot low hoot is has anyone seen my phone you think so just a guess yeah um all right that's good that's all i got on bonobos yeah well that's cool stuff really interesting um yeah wild to find that precursor in our closest living living relatives yeah and by that i mean pan not bonobos yeah indeed um okay maybe we should just mention um we talked uh actually it turns out on september 10th uh in DarkHorse 294 which was the day that charlie kirk was assassinated um before we knew that that had happened um we talked about the ostriches in british columbia uh and that uh that what is it the canadian food inspection agency uh was had been told by a court in canada they needed to kill all these ostriches in this ostrich farm because back in january there had been uh some animals that were sick uh had died and it was thought to be bird flu and now all the surviving ostriches um were at risk of being called because why hadn't they survived isn't that what the immune system is for hadn't didn't they probably have heard immunity now not i mean just even individual immunity right flock immunity what's that flock community um and uh and so this argument was going back and forth uh in the canadian courts for a bit and as we talked about on september 10th a lot of mainstream media was getting in on it the wapo and the wall street journal and politico all had articles in july and august they were mostly bringing in the angle of uh you know that that the maha people those crazy maha people think that avian flu is under risk and you know bobby kennedy wrote a letter suggesting that you know you really shouldn't kill these ostriches and isn't he a crazy guy um so you know that was the bent of the mainstream media of course um but you know the the very bad news and frankly i'm a bit surprised uh is that the ostriches have been killed uh they uh the canadian food inspection agency uh orchestrated the call um and here we have uh the ap um writing about it uh there's no one else in the mainstream media that i can find the guardian did one piece but none you know wapo wall street journal uh politico all of whom had articles on this back when they could use it as a way to try to mock bobby kennedy have said nothing about this canadian federal agency says call over all ostriches shot dead at british columbia farm uh and this was on um november 7th so a week ago uh and just the opening the opening paragraph of this thing a canadian federal agency said friday it has shot dead all ostriches at a british columbia farm fulfilling a 10-month old call order over a bird flu outbreak 10 months old yep these birds have not had a sick or dying or dead bird among them for 10 months yep there's over 300 of there were over 300 of them doing just fine the owners of this farm knew these ostriches they knew they were healthy and they're dead now well dead brutally killed you know in a disgusting in a disgusting way this was not done in any arguably humane way after being tortured denied food all kinds of insane madness and you know i think actually the tell is in the fact that the story when it first broke was covered by many outlets yes and now covered by just a couple yeah because what happened is the public didn't buy the story that we were supposed to buy which was that this was being done to protect us from bird flu right right so when that story didn't fly and people were like what the hell are you doing then this became a loser story yep and it is rather than back down which is what they should have done they decided not to set a precedent and they had to kill the animals but they didn't want to champion it because they knew that the public would just become even more irate about it and so you know when i heard this yep my overwhelming thought was first they came for the ostriches yeah right and that's the thing is this is some weird strange african bird you know how many people are gonna pay attention some number of people are gonna roll their eyes like who even knows ostriches right but you are gonna pay attention when it's your cat and your dog right and believe me these authoritarian monsters oh and those where they're headed i mean i remember us talking during covet like they there were a few of those uh little why do i want to say trial balloons is that the right place here a few little of these trial balloons floated during covet um i can't remember what outlets but some mainstream outlets were like it's you know it's bad for humanity and bad for the planet to have cats and dogs and so you should get used to the idea of not having them anymore and i you know i don't remember exactly where where those things were published and exactly what they said but you know people were outraged immediately like oh no that wasn't us never mind never mind um they they are that is what they're setting us up for that's that is what they're setting us up for and you can tell the mentality it's like the fact that dogs and cats aren't perfectly regulated that this is some source of joy idiosyncratic you know that we post our videos of our animals behaving in funny ways on the internet that this is just maddening to the authoritarian mind and you know a who who authorized you to experience any joy at all right and you know b we technically we we are going to take the right to take that from you on the basis that there is some theoretical argument for a health interaction right these are monsters they are not emotionally healthy people they are drunk with their goddamn authoritarian power and this is the warning first they came for the ostriches and the point is if you don't want this to go any further that lesson has to do more than just back them off of talking about it in public they decided to kill these ostriches after they knew goddamn well that there was no health benefit to be had if they didn't know that to begin with all of the arguments that many of us made about natural immunity were completely compelling yeah so why the hell did they have to kill these animals right why did that have to happen it had to happen because they wanted they wanted not to set a precedent in which reality allowed them to back off their plans yep it's a display of power yep it's a display of power when i went looking um and a few of the outlets to make sure that they to to to double check um that what i was finding was true that they hadn't written about this i was on the wapo site washington post and i did find this today um the anti-vaccine movement spreads to pet owners it's a cartoon uh so i will describe it for those who can't see it the the illustrator is edith prichitt alternative treatments for anti-vax pet owners homeopathy crystallite therapy mats and tinfoil hats so that's really cute isn't it that's very funny yeah um she can fuck right off yeah so you know in the comments are what you would expect i'm not gonna i'm not going to go through them but um the washington post readership who appreciates uh a comic uh that thinks it's insane that uh some people have begun to question giving their animals almost all of their shots every single year of their life when there's literally no vaccine other than the flu vaccine which is insane um that anyone is suggesting like that for humans so what could possibly explain the periodicity on pet vaccinations put aside for the moment whether or not you think any of them are good for your animals but the regularity with which those things get given which really just gets pet owners into the vet once a year and that's you know that's several hundred bucks right there because you have to do the exam and you have to do this and if your animal's healthy just like if you're healthy you shouldn't need to be going into the doctor or the vet depending on what species you are with regularity you just shouldn't need it so uh yep tinfoil hats is clearly what is happening behind the scenes of any human being it was questioning vaccines for their pets yes that's what i find on wapoe instead of any treatment of the ostrich farm executions it's complete madness and you know anybody who had pets 30 years ago knows that they're facing you know as we've talked about multiple times here you know out animals becoming allergic to meat yes really you gotta you know you gotta go find unique meat because the animal got allergic uh wonder what that might have to do with the adjuvants and those well you know i mean domestic cats in the wild get allergies all the time yeah oh that doesn't happen yeah doesn't happen uh and you know and uh anecdotally but i mean this these data should be collectible but anecdotally from a lot of animals that we have had and that we know of people uh that and we know people who have had animals throughout these last many decades our animals don't live as long as they used to yeah they just don't they don't um and i'll tell you you know vets and pharma have become partners in this racket the idea that you need to bring your animal in to protect your animal from all of those circulating diseases um is uh generating of a tremendous amount of revenue and there is cryptically a immunity from liability here because the the ability to recover on a animal that was killed by a defective vaccine is limited to the value of the animal which is what it costs to buy one which is nothing it's not worth fighting in court so you know yeah the incentive for these monstrous people to get formulations that are tolerably safe is effectively not there that's right i will say and i've said this before someplace maybe here um that the uh annual vaccinations for your pet's schedule hadn't actually occurred to me even when we were into covid uh and uh and i can't remember exactly when this was but i think that the vaccines were out and we had already been like wait no we're not we're not doing that um we were still living in portland at the time and our cat tesla um who at that point would have been uh like 12 or 13 um he was over 10 for sure and he's he's he's still with us he's still alive um but he had a he had a lot of health problems for a while uh until we figured out basically we gave him an elimination diet and cleared a bunch of the stuff that he has developed allergies to from his diet and he's doing much better but we hadn't figured that out yet and i found because i was sick of the allopathic vets i found what someone who called himself a holistic vet in portland oregon and this was in the days when you couldn't go into places remember those days yes it lasted a lot longer in portland than anywhere else and it wasn't because the vet wanted it that way it was because this was required because people are stupid um but so i had to do this meeting i had to like hand the cat out through like and like they took the cat in i had to stay in my car um but at the end of it uh the vet came out and talked to me and uh and did not insist that i keep my mask on and you know i put a mask on in the car and you know he didn't have his mask on and he was kind of leaning in the window talking to me about um yeah you know maybe an elimination diet maybe you know it's it's this you know i certainly don't recommend any drugs because that's not the kind of vet i am and i said well um like you seem great you're able to talk to me scientifically and clearly um and maybe i should bring him back at some point because he's gonna you know maybe we should switch to you he's gonna be up for his uh annual vaccinations along with our other guys and the guy says to me you sure you want to do that like what what do you mean what are you talking about of course like vaccinations for the animals he said well think about whether or not the vaccinations that you think do you any good um if they're doing you so much good would you be getting them once a year right that's a well certainly not no i've yeah certainly not and you know we have we have not um we are you know dogs are required to get um rabies vaccinations uh with with greater um the longer periodicity um but nothing else for any of our animals and their health has improved yeah i mean effectively it is vaccine superstition that has been seeded by the people who stand to uh to gain by selling us these things it's no better than that yeah and it's very dangerous because these things are bioactive yes exactly um so this is a debacle and a tragedy and they shouldn't have done it and uh we should remember that they did and what we think it means about what might be coming yep 100 yeah all right maybe that's it i think we've arrived all right uh we will be back in a few short days we'll be back on wednesday again you look at me like that's my 302 also not prime also not prime yes 302 302 yes uh you you are right sir um let's see we uh we'll be back in a few days you've got a patreon call tomorrow uh check out check out our locals or where we also have the watch party going on whenever we do these live streams and until we see you next time wait a minute nope first i wanted to give a shout out again to our sponsors timeline caraway and fresh pest olive oil uh all i think when as we go into gift giving season all would make um you're right good gifts and until you see us next time how about that boom yeah nailed it gordian knot sliced open yeah it's a hatchet you can just sort what was it yeah sort exactly that was the wrong yeah wrong motion you wouldn't do that yeah you wouldn't you just afraid the knot exactly useful well you just anchor it yeah you wouldn't do that yeah right not right not yeah be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone
