The Washington State of Science: The 309th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 309th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss science and scientism, experts and expertise. Washington state Governor Bob Ferguson objects to the reduction in the Childhood Vaccine Schedule, and promises to bring “science” back to the state. In fact, the new recommendations are putting the U.S. more in line with what European countries recommend, and are quite conservative. Also, while Ferguson was the WA Attorney General, he imposed and enforced Covid vaccine mandates; many people lost their jobs and their livelihoods. Also in Washington: Brandi Kruse outs Democratic majority leader Jamie Pedersen as being unclear about the nature of male and female (or unwilling to say what he knows). On Broadway, Dylan Mulvaney, a male, will be playing Anne Boleyn, one of the most famous and influential women in history. Finally: words in honor and memory of Scott Adams.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Governor Ferguson: https://x.com/govbobferguson/status/2011482561206231340
 
HHS Immunization Assessment: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/assessment-of-the-us-childhood-and-adolescent-immunization-schedule-compared-to-other-countries.pdf
 
New vaccine guideline summary: https://www.hhs.gov/childhood-immunization-schedule/index.html
 
Hanson v Ferguson: https://www.silentmajorityfoundation.org/medicalfreedom
 
Kruse takes on Pedersen: https://x.com/BrandiKruse/status/2010068851858518456
 
Mulvaney to play Anne Boleyn: https://www.iheartradiobroadway.com/content/2026-01-16-six-welcomes-new-queens-on-february-16/
 
Scott Adams: https://x.com/dawnsmission/status/2011123367794118822

Chapters

• 0:00 Scientificism, Expertise & Broadway
• 3:02 Sponsor: SaunaSpace
• 6:41 Sponsor: Masa Chips
• 9:14 Sponsor: Xlear
• 13:41 Washington State Childhood Vaccine Schedule
• 35:53 Bob Ferguson, Attorney General & COVID Vaccine Mandates
• 56:44 Washington State Senate Majority Leader and Biological Reality
• 1:08:36 Dylan Mulvaney on Broadway
• 1:23:13 Remembering Scott Adams
• 1:35:33 Closing

Transcript

1:00:00

(Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. It is number 309. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying. Here with a special mid-January Saturday edition. A Saturday edition. It's kind of a throwback to when we used to do live streams on Saturday. And a throw forward because it won't be our last Saturday live stream.(Whistles) Yes. In the future is where we will do the next Saturday live stream. This one. That being the nature of next. The nature of next. The nature. Oh, that's a good title for something. The nature of next. No idea what it would be, but something. 309 isn't even tough. No. No, it's pretty obvious. But we're coming up on a couple of interesting primes. One of our supporters at Locals pointed out to us some interesting primes coming up. So we'll get there. All right. Remind me, there's some interesting stuff that's come up about primes. And I'm sort of eager to talk about it in light of the fact that you and I have been focused there for some time. But anyway, yeah, 309, not prime. Not prime. Speaking of Locals though, join us at the watch party that's happening on Locals right now. And tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific for two hours, we'll have our monthly Sunday Q&A for local supporters only. The question asking period is open now. Closes after this live stream. Join us there. Anything else to say at the top of the hour today, we're going to talk about science. Science. Scientificism. And experts and expertise and the failure of both. And what I think is soon going to be the next big hit on Broadway. I shut up to think. Yes, that one I made a point of not telling you about. So I'm going to make you guess. Oh, God. Yeah. Not yet. All right. No, I'm not getting it. It's going to take me a little while to get into a cynical enough mode to be even in the ballpark. We're going to talk about the state of science right here in Washington state for a bit first. So if that's not going to increase your cynicism, I don't know what is. The Washington state of science. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in this case, the state of Washington state of science, not the nation's capital, Washington state of science, but but but related because here we have our our executive, Governor Bob Ferguson, arguing with the orders coming down from the nation's executive with regard to some changes to, for instance, the the childhood vaccine schedule. Amazing. OK, well, Bob Ferguson is up. And my guess is when it comes to disappointing, he doesn't fail to disappoint. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But there we are. All right. Let's let's pay the rent first and start the episode with three as usual, three ads right at the top for sponsors who make products. In this case, all three are products that we truly stand by and for. These are excellent products, all of them. The first is Sauna Space, which makes amazing saunas and therapeutic lights. Several years ago, I started looking into saunas, both traditional infrared, having found that they were delightful in many places that you could you could access them and thought that maybe we could bring one into our own home. I found a morass of information. You will remember this. We both went looking and then red light therapy became popular and the glut of products and claims became even more confusing. Is the product effective? How long does it take to heat up? What frequencies does it actually produce? Does it emit harmful electromagnetic radiation? The only product that I found that clearly lived up to its scientific and health claims was Sauna Space. This is long before they were a sponsor of ours. Sauna Space combines visible red light and near infrared to provide deep radiant heat for whole body results at home. This is no harsh LED panel nor a giant wooden box. Sauna Space's fire light spectrum is a proprietary sun-like spectrum that was developed over a decade of research and development. The incandescent bulbs are flicker free, glare free, and long lasting, staying consistent for over five years. Sauna Space has two flagship products, the glow and the fire light sauna. I've been using the first, the glow, for years. It's a single large light that can be used at the side of the desk or bedside. The glow can alleviate screen fatigue and the ill effects of blue light and helps with skin, mood, energy, and sleep concerns. The glow also works as spot relief for sore backs, tight shoulders, or cramps. And if you've got cats, they'll love it. The fire, I can attest to this. The fire light sauna, which we just got a few weeks ago and Bret and Toby built, is a full body sauna that promotes sweat and provides provides red light and near infrared therapy all in a single experience. It is beautiful and powerful. You get medical spa level results right in your home. The fire light sauna gives you deep detox, pain relief, pain relief, and better sleep. Your skin gets rejuvenated. You get an energy boost, enhanced cognition, stress relief, and an immune boost. It helps with healing and recovery. The fire light sauna offers fast sessions with no preheat necessary. You flip the switch and start sweating in minutes. Sessions last 15 to 25 minutes, half the time of other saunas. And the fire light sauna is a beautiful canvas sauna that is lightweight and plug and play and fits into a spare room or corner. You can start small with the glow, which is a single full spectrum red and infrared light or go all in with the fire light sauna. All sauna space products are built with integrity and handmade in Missouri with organic or with organic cotton, bamboo, sustainable unfinished basswood, and medical grade stainless steel. No toxic loser plastics, no off-gassing, and the grounding mat and optional silver lining upgrade blocks environmental EMFs like wifi to enhance healing. And you get a hundred day home trial and outstanding customer service. Take your wellness to the next level with sauna space. DarkHorse listeners can get an exclusive 10% off site wide when you shop at sauna.space.darkhorse. That's S-A-U-N-A.space.darkhorse. Discount will be automatically applied at checkout. I will just say the quality of the materials and the degree to which they are well thought out is really impressive. Yeah, it looks good. It is well built and things like no glues in the interface between the metal rods. I mean, the metal joining pieces and the wooden rods that support the thing, there's, you know, having no glue in there makes sense because what would off gas if there was. So anyway, really, really nicely made products. The term you used last time, I think was the fit and finish. Fit and finish. Extraordinary. It really is. Yeah. Okay. Our second sponsor is not eaten by dung beetles anywhere, but I'm trying to, there we go. Our second sponsor today is Masa chips. These are so good. Masa makes ridiculously delicious chips with only three simple, real whole ingredients. Organic, nixtamalized corn, sea salt, and 100% grass fed beef tallow. Masa chips are made the way that all of our food used to be made. They're fried in 100% beef tallow, no seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference. America's health is declining fast. Chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded. What changed? Lots of things change, but one thing that changed is that all chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow. But in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper seed oils, which includes soybean, canola, sunflower, and corn. Seed oils are often labeled vegetable oils as if that makes them healthy. Well, in fact, seed oils are linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation. And today, seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories, not 20% of the average American's daily fat calories, their entire calories, 20%. Big food companies also use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins. Masa chips though, none of it. Absolutely no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives ever. Beef tallow is nutrient rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible. Masa chips are crunchy and delicious and after you eat them, you feel satisfied, satiated, and energetic. Masa also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture. Choosing real food heals us in our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy. Try masa chips with salsa or goat cheese or a spicy pepper jam. Smother them in beans and cheese or just eat them straight out of the bag. They're all delicious. At the moment, my favorites are their white chips made from heirloom organic white corn, which gives a particularly light and flaky texture. I also love their blue chips, which have a deeper nuttier flavor and a serious crunch. They've also got hatch chili, kobanero, these guys, lime original, and wait for a churro with cinnamon. Ready to give Masa a try? Go to masachips.com slash DarkHorse and use code darkhorse for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.com slash DarkHorse and code darkhorse for 25% off your first order. And if you don't feel like ordering online starting in October, Masa will be available nationwide at Sprout supermarkets. Stop by and pick up a bag before they're gone. I've been in kind of a lime phase. You've been in a lime phase? I was in a lime phase for a little bit. And when, so I was away, um, uh, with my mom, uh, in California for this last week. That's why we're doing on Saturday, Wednesday. And when I got back, one of the first things I did was opened up a bag of lime masachips. There it is. They're really good. Yeah. Now our final sponsor, Heather is clear clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. And it's a product that we have been using for quite a while. It's made by a company with which we are well familiar. It's clear that X L E A R pronounced clear. Now I will say we back all of the companies that, uh, sponsor our podcast. I do not necessarily stand by this spelling. I find it, I find it confusing. Um, throughout history improvements, excellent product, questionable spelling. The product is so good. You look past the spelling, that's the way it works. But obviously the reason for it is, and you'll get here in the ad read here is that the active ingredient is xylitol, which doesn't sound like it starts with an X, but it does. And so clear also starts with an X and doesn't sound like it does. Yes. But in the interest of full consistency, I also don't support the spelling of xylitol. So would you like it to start with a C? Uh, wow. That is cool. You're causing a dyslexia flare up. Hopefully I'll be able to read this ad without it interfering too much. Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health, clean up the air and water and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through the mouth or nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash your hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person. But it's rare that you get sick through our hands. Rather we get sick through our mouth and nose. Thus it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter clear. See, I'm teaching myself. Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five carbon sugar alcohol. Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone of sugars like RNA and DNA. Respectively, while most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like glucose, the emphasis is all wrong. While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons like glucose and fructose, xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues. In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast, it's easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses. That episode was in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Clear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an X X L E A R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy grocery store or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health. I will also say these people have been fantastically supportive of the health freedom movement. And I was shocked once I became aware of this product and how readily available it is. Yeah, actually, while I was in California with my mom this last week, I went into a CVS to get her and it was not only readily available, but the imitations are already out. So, you know, buy Clear X L E A R and recognize that it is effective enough and already popular enough that the mainstream drug stores are putting out imposters. All right. Well, hopefully the imposters are spelled even worse. All right. All right. I think it's time for us to talk about science and its competitors. Yes. Science, scientism, all the science. Yes. Why don't we start with, so in response to recent changes to the childhood vaccine schedule put out by HHS as then publicized by the CDC and is ultimately, of course, coming from the executive branch of the United States, several governors, including our very own right here in the state of Washington, Bob Ferguson, freaked out. And let us show this video. This is actually a video in a tweet that Governor Ferguson of the state of Washington himself put out explaining what he was going to do in response. The Centers for Disease Control has seen an exodus of scientific experts and alarming shifts in policy that place Washingtonians health at risk. I immediately took action and teamed up with other governors to form the West Coast Health Alliance. The Alliance ensures Washingtonians will continue to receive responsible recommendations from health experts who rely on, you guessed it, science. But we are not stopping there. I'm proud to partner with insurance Commissioner Kuderer and a bipartisan group of legislators, Senator Cleveland, Representative Bernosky and Senator Harris to shift vaccine recommendations away from science denying federal committees and place it with our own Washington State Department of Health, which will be guided by, you guessed it again, science. Unfortunately, our governor doesn't seem to know what the word means. Let me just begin. There's a lot to say here, including how he behaved during COVID. He's only been the governor of the state of Washington since January 2025. But he was the attorney general of the state of Washington since 2012, and therefore the attorney general during all of COVID. And he has quite a direct record. But before we get there, let's see what he's responding to. So here, if you can see my screen, go ahead and show it here. Here's what the official document put out by the federal government on January 2nd, 2026, the assessment of the US childhood and adolescent immunization schedule compared to other countries. This was as part of the announcement that the CDC's childhood vaccination schedule would be changed. And I'm just going to end it by Tracy Beth Hogg and Martin Koldorf, both names that people familiar with DarkHorse will also be familiar with. And I'm just going to read the first four paragraphs of the executive summary. On December 5th, 2025, President Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, that's Kennedy, of course, and the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, to review best practices from peer developed nations regarding childhood vaccination recommendations and the scientific evidence underlying those practices. The president instructed them to update the US core childhood vaccine schedule if they determine that superior practices exist abroad. This assessment is a scientific, evidence-based, data-driven response to the president's directive. It argues that a change in the US childhood vaccine schedule is necessary. It compares the US with peer nations, examines vaccine update and trust, addresses clinical and epidemiological considerations and knowledge gaps, analyzes vaccine mandates, and outlines recommendations and next steps for immediate and long-term action. The US is a global outlier among peer nations in the number of target diseases included in its childhood vaccination schedule and in the total number of recommended vaccine doses. The acting CDC director should immediately consider, and this has now happened, this is what happens in this next paragraph here is what Governor Ferguson in Washington is responding to, the acting CDC director should immediately consider updating the childhood immunization schedule to keep vaccines for 10 diseases, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria, hemophilus, influenza type B, Hib, pneumococcal disease, and human papillomavirus, HPV, for which peer developed nations share international consensus, as well as varicella, chickenpox, the consensus vaccines in the category of vaccines recommended for all children. These consensus vaccines will represent the core childhood vaccine schedule. This report does not substantively address the consensus vaccines. All other vaccines currently on the US schedule, the non-consensus vaccines, should be recommended for high-risk groups and populations and or through shared clinical decision making by taking individual patient characteristics into account. Figure one, no vaccine should be moved to the not recommended category. So this is tiny. Let me see if I can make it bigger for us. Oops, well, that didn't work here. Why don't you give me my screen back here while I figure out how to make my computer comply. So while I'm doing that, Bret, if you have anything to add, go for it. I will just say note that. Note how many vaccines, how many diseases are still being vaccinated against on the recommended childhood vaccine schedule by the CDC? And I'm about to pull up the list. They have, again, not even taken away from availability. They've just moved to, you are allowed to decide for yourself. And of course, we are always allowed to decide for ourselves. That is part of what the health freedom movement is fighting for. But let me find the list of things that are not included here, which for some reason isn't showing up. All right. Let me just say first, I got it. Tracy Beth Hogue and Martin Koldorf are in no way extreme. Yeah. These people are institutional in orientation and cautious in a direction that frankly, I think is a bit troubling in the sense that the presumption that there is value in these vaccines and in light of the way in which they're tested, that the consensus of Western nations should somehow be guiding us, I think is actually incorrect. But nonetheless, the point is our governor is responding to people who are cautious in his direction and he is treating them as if they are zealots or cranks and nothing could be further from the truth. So first of all, I don't get the sense from our governor that he has a deep feeling about anything. Well, this is a, this is a posture. This is absolutely true. And the idea that by comparing what we're doing to our peer nations with whom when you compare our children's health, we clearly come out badly and trying to come into greater alignment with nations that are peers with regard to also basically being weird, also being Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, all with issues associated with those words, that that is somehow going against science. So he's saying that Denmark is an anti-scientific country, that most of Western Europe are actively going against science. And how is it then that those countries who are apparently ignorant of Bob Ferguson's special science have children who are healthier than ours? So here we have, following these recommendations, as we just read from Hogan Koldorf, the Childhood Immunization Scheduled by Recommendation Group, including the ones that I just read, which immunizations still recommended for all children, which is, as you say, quite conservative, quite a lot. There are many people who would say, this list is already is far too long, far too long. But okay, these, all of these, you know, DTAP or, and Tdap, Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Aeschyla or Pertussis, and Musals, Mumps, and Rubella, and Varicella, and several others are still on the recommended schedule for children. Recommended now only for certain high-risk groups of populations include RSV, and Hep B, and Dengue, and meningococcal, and Hep A. And immunizations based on shared clinical decision making. That is not inherently recommended for anyone, but any parent who, frankly, has come to a bad decision and decided that their child needs such a thing, can continue to get rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, and still, I'm not sure why this, why Hep A, Hep B, M, and Jococoa, and Sherman come on both lists. So I'm going to put that aside. I'm not sure what the details are there, but they've got basically flu and COVID vaccines on the, you and your doctor and your God can make this decision for yourself, for your child, but the CDC is no longer offering a recommendation one way or the other. And the idea that this, this warrants a statement from a governor who clearly doesn't know what science is, that he's going to stand by science and make sure that all Washingtonians are healthy due to a, you know, healthy dose of scientism is frankly alarming. Like he's the one we should be alarmed by, not anything coming out of HHS in this month. So what he is doing is he is- Governor Ferguson. Governor Ferguson is he is picking up on a decades long propaganda campaign that misled a lot of people, including you and me, into imagining that these things had a net health benefit that was not demonstrated and imagining that they had been safety tested such that the likelihood of them doing harm was vanishingly small, which it isn't. So that propaganda campaign was a big investment by pharma and the idea that with the Trump administration moving against the vaccine recklessness that has overtaken our medical establishment, that the right thing to do is to do the opposite of whatever Trump is doing is, as you point out, the exact inverse of science. And I will also just say, I think I hinted at it before, but there is a growing consensus amongst the policy oriented people in the health freedom movement that we don't want to take your vaccines, you should be free to choose. I don't agree with this. We have things like a CDC in order to protect us from bad decisions in a medical realm. Either we should allow a free for all and we should warn patients, hey, you can have anything you want, but a lot of it, probably almost all of it isn't any good for you at all. Right? That's not my position. And it's not that we don't have policies that prevent people from taking some of what they want. Well, that's my point. Drug laws exist. Well, pharmacies exist and you have to have a script from a doc to get the stuff in the pharmacy. So the point is we've decided to regulate things at the point you find out that Bobby Kennedy and Toby Rogers are right, that these things were never tested with the process that would be necessary to demonstrate their safety. The answer is there's only one rational thing to do, which is full pause. Why is choice bad? Because some people are gullible. And if you have a gullible parent, you don't deserve to have a vaccine injury because your doctor was persuasive or your parent didn't know what questions to ask or they were nervous about being a first time parent or whatever it is. But I think that's what he's doing here. I think that's what Governor Ferguson is doing here is creating alarm and fear in response to a very, very conservative slow. Okay, we're going to take a few things off the childhood vaccine schedule, given that we've noticed that no one else is doing the crazy stuff we're doing and our childhood vaccine schedule exploded over the last 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 years. So if he responds with this kind of hysterical, anti-scientific, pro-scientistic rhetoric to a very conservative set of recommendations, what he is trying to do is get parents basically up in arms, presumably not actually, but parents up in arms to decry the craziness that is happening and to get them to even more unquestioningly simply vaccinate their children with any drug that a doctor or a pharmaceutical company presents them with. Well, if I can briefly detour into a thought about the political landscape that sets this in motion. I've become, I mean, you and I are lifelong liberals traumatized by the state of nominal liberals, the state of the Democratic Party. And the state period. Indeed. And I should just say people need to understand that the state of Washington is really two states. I meant the nation state, like the whole, the state. Traumatized by states. State power turns out to be tremendously dangerous. It's not that there's not governance that needs to be done, but inevitably it seems to fall into the hands of people who don't do that governance and do something else with that power. But state of Washington is two states. You could say the same thing about the state of Oregon. There's the Western part of the state, the wet part of the state in which Seattle and Tacoma exist. And then there's the Eastern part of the state. And they're politically not alike. And so what is happening in the state. Eastern Washington's politics is much more like that of Idaho. Right. And what happens is the demographics of the state mean that Seattle effectively dictates not only the city policy, but the state policy because it is large enough to sway state level elections. So in effect, what you have is a kind of Democratic party tyranny being inflicted on those of us in the state who know better because Seattle is, you know, a large population center. And I can't, I can't complain about that at the level of democracy. That's how democracy works. But we are divided and the idea that they're going to treat this federal move as tyranny and they're going to impose some sort of state level tyranny in order to compensate for the fact that the federal tyranny is actually being relaxed by this administration is everything's turned on its head. And the point I wanted to make about liberalism is this. As we have become alarmed about the propaganda and the political direction of the blue team, which has in effect embraced the inverse of all of the values that you and I grew up with. One of the things that has become apparent is that blue team voters, people who really resonate with the Democratic party seem to have a diminished ability to recognize that some belief that they held turned out not to be right. In other words, they have a kind of unfalsifiable mindset where they come to believe that something is this. And then that's special to blue team. I think it's, I don't, I guess I don't know that we have evidence that it's special to blue team. I see ample evidence of what you're talking about on the blue team, but I don't know that we have seen recently major errors. I mean, there's been plenty of chaos, obviously, at the federal level in the last year and in the last nine years and like all the time. But it feels to me that there are lots of my team, no matter what they do, players on both sides. Oh, there are lots of partisans who aren't doing an analysis. They may be presenting something as an analysis that isn't one. And frankly, the idea of both sides is complicating here because I think there really is a blue team and there isn't really a red team. The red team is at the moment a battle between several different factions, right? It's a battle between the old GOP, MAGA, MAHA, right? There's tension there, but I do find much more self-reflection on that side about what we got wrong, what we didn't get wrong. Well, and it's also, I mean, this is an old point that has been made by many people, but because the media and higher ed, like the media and education, have been effectively owned and run by Team Blue for so long. Team Red, people on Team Red are simply more familiar with hearing opposing arguments and become more comfortable knowing that there are people who think differently in the world from them and that not the entire world doesn't look like them. Whereas if you are on the blue team and you live in a blue city, in a blue state, and you watch corporate media and you read corporate media and you go to public schools, there's a very good chance that you just never run into anyone who doesn't think like you do, or at least who doesn't say it aloud. And so you come to find it easy to demonize those people, to imagine that they are the boogeyman in the corner, which is, it's a bizarre and frankly really sad irony that it's exactly those people who then claim things like in this house, everything's about inclusiveness and diversity. It's like, you know, you're the people who actually only know the world that you have created instead of actually recognizing the, you know, the beautiful diversity of experiences and thoughts that humans have across the planet. No, I think this is quite right, that effectively the blue team is better able to create an impenetrable echo chamber where people inside the echo chamber will actually do the bidding of the echo chamber and they will fend off anything that might, you know, this is why we get the attacks that we get, right? You know, the one I'm constantly complaining about is, you know, if you can't see that Bret and Heather are, you know, scientific know-nothings and hacks, I can't help you. That kind of accusation isn't going to work for anybody who spent time listening to us. It's obviously just not accurate, but if you're trying to decide whether to listen to us, it's enough to make you think as you begin to hear something that we say that sounds reasonable to you, the point is, oh, am I being tricked? So you second guess yourself and you won't listen. And so that thing where you've got like, you know, well, I pay attention to many different news sources. Well, they're not really many different news sources. You're paying attention to one news source that has many different mastheads. And so you get the sense that you're broad-minded and you're consulting different perspectives. And anytime something shows up, the challenge is that, you know, there'll be a ready-made op-ed that will tell you why it's preposterous or, you know, why that person is insane. So anyway, it becomes whatever the mechanism is that does it. At the moment, the blue team voters cannot discover that they have been wrong. They have an unfalsifiable mindset that causes them to do exactly what Governor Ferguson is doing here, which is if they're doing it, then we must do the inverse. Yes. Right. If they want to close the border, then we should open it completely. Right. That kind of mindset. And yeah, instead of analytics, it's contrarianism. And the thing that was so maddening during COVID that is now maddening in the same way on the larger question of vaccines is nothing should be less partisan than this. Every single American should be able to agree we want the vaccine schedule that increases the quality and length of life for the maximum number of people. We may differ over what we expect that to look like. Some of us might expect it to have very few vaccines on it. Some of us might expect it to have even more than the schedule from a year ago, but we shouldn't disagree over whether that would be a good thing. And at some level, we effectively do. Somebody has already decided the more vaccines, the better. And we're going to push in that direction. And anybody who's pushing in the other direction is obviously doing so because they are callous about the health of people or because they're stupid or something like that. And it's like we need a moment at which we are able to shake people with an unfalsifiable mindset by the lapels and say, you know, wake up, you actually need to participate in an analytical process. That's right. And it will lead you somewhere very different than you are. Yes, that is exactly right. So you may not remember, in fact, we weren't in Washington during most of COVID. We were in Oregon. And so Bob Ferguson was not our attorney general for four years between 2018 and 2022. And it turns out that one of the things that he did during COVID as attorney general, which he had been since 2012 and only became not the attorney general, but instead the governor of the state of Washington in 2025, was imposing and forcing COVID vaccine mandates on his employees. And so here you can actually, you can show my screen here. This is from an organization called the Silent Majority Foundation. And they do a lot of work in support of the Second Amendment, in support of free speech, in support of medical freedom, among other things. Here's the medical freedom page, including some of the cases that they have brought, one of which is Hanson versus Ferguson. And I'm just going to read their blurb about this still open, I believe, case on December 3rd, 2024, Silent Majority Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 former employees of the Washington State Office of the Attorney General, challenging the Attorney General Office's adoption and implementation of policy 1.58, which was titled simply vaccination. Our plaintiffs were required by AGO policy 1.58 to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of their employment, while the policy provided the option to request accommodations or modifications for employees with disabilities, health conditions or religious beliefs. None received accommodation. Attorney General Bob Ferguson took an oath to support the United States Constitution and the Washington State Constitution, both of which he has violated. And the Silent Majority Foundation stands with our courageous plaintiffs who are taking a stand against Bob Ferguson. Now, I looked through a certain amount of these documents, and if I can see my screen again here, including the declarations from several of the plaintiffs, several of the 10 plaintiffs. I didn't read all of any of them, nor did I read all of them, but I read some of many of them. And you have, for instance, Stacy B and Natalia C, who were entirely teleworkers, never went into an office at all, but were denied vaccine and at least one of their cases, I think both, they were longstanding Christians with obvious reason to make a stand for religious exemptions. They didn't get their exemptions. They literally never saw face to face any of their coworkers. They refused to get vaccinated and they were fired. This was under Attorney General Bob Ferguson, now the governor of the state of Washington, the very man who claims that we shall bring science back to the state of Washingtonians so that they can be healthy again. Firing people who work entirely remotely for not getting a shot that is not only not effective, but actually dangerous is not exactly a scientific approach, is it? Even if those COVID vaccinations were actually effective against a disease that was actually more dangerous than it turns out to have been, even if both of those things had been true, which they are not. Forcing people who work entirely remotely and have never yet and are never expected to come into an office to get a vaccine that they have a legitimate reason to request an exemption from is utterly insane. This man doesn't stand for science. He stands for authoritarianism. He stands for bullying. He stands for trust in experts for deferring your own thought and analytics and agency and autonomy over to other people so that what? So that he can get on with whatever else he's doing. It has nothing to do with science. I see no evidence that anything he has done has to do with science. And in general, I wouldn't go after an attorney for not understanding science, but he did this to himself. He's standing up and claiming that he's going to be bringing science back to the state of Washington and he's completely full of crap. Yes. Not only is his perspective completely unscientific, but that particular piece of tyranny is obviously a violation of Nuremberg, even in the most narrow interpretation, because what Nuremberg says is that when you have an experimental remedy, you have an absolute right, A, to be fully informed, which we were not, and B, to decide whether or not to consent to it. The government cannot force you to do this. And we hanged seven doctors over these violations. So, you know, this is obviously a tyrant who is pretending to be. Doesn't look like a tyrant, though. How could he possibly be a tyrant when he looks so soft and doe? He does. And of course, he's not his own tyrant. He is, of course, a political animal like the guy. Like his predecessor. Yes. An empty shirt spewing the propaganda as if he feels this way passionately, where the point is, no, his team has decided to do this. Why? Presumably we could chase it down to large donations from people who stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars if we decide to back off this insane commitment to vaccinations that were never tested for safety. Well, and it's properly tested. It's far easier to have a political platform based on contrarianism than on analysis. You know, if your entire position is going to be, we reject what the other side says, then you're going to impose vaccine mandates in 2021 and you're going to reject a reduction in the recommended childhood vaccines that the CDC is making in 2026. That's what you're going to do if you're not responding with careful conscious thought, but instead with, oh, they said that, then we say this. It's the opposite of like human conscious, thoughtful analysis. It's robotic. It's automatic. And it's dangerous. And, you know, we've seen it before. We've seen the cynicism in this before. I'm trying to remember Eric Topol participated in delaying the vaccine campaign so that it would not be deployed under Trump and then advocated for, you know, inflicting it on people because of a false claim that it was somehow essential to ending the pandemic. It's just, it's simply reactionary. And the fact is, you know, at the moment we are having trouble convincing President Trump of the extent of the danger of the mRNA shots. Right. So when he changes his position, will they then flip theirs? Because the one thing they know is that if Trump believes that they don't, like, this has to be a process. No, but you just said we like the Maha movement is having trouble convincing him. Yeah. So at the moment, the blue team and Trump are on the same side. So I think you won't like that. That flip, that's a rare case of alignment in part. I mean, you know, the timing of COVID and the release of the mRNA vaccines was as we remember, and most people here will remember, very strange indeed that you had in October, November of 2020, Kamala Harris, who was then running as VP, arguing that if these vaccines got accepted under Trump, that she would certainly not take them. And then as soon as the Biden Harris ticket took the White House, then suddenly their Democrat shots, which makes no sense. Like the shots are not political, you know, the thing is the thing. But they did flip their position then, based on who could claim ownership of them. But they haven't, they somehow they haven't managed to flip it back. And, you know, of course it's been predicted for a long time that once we, whatever, like collectively Maha, mRNA skeptical, we managed to convince enough people of the truth that that technology is both not safe and not effective. At some point, you may find team blue erasing history, revisioning history and being like, yeah, but that was a Trump thing. Yeah. But I, you know, the longer the longer the time is that elapses between now and then, I think the less likely they'll be able to pull that off. Like who knows how this will be written. You know, we're still, it still feels like a very active fight to those of us who are trying to, you know, reduce the childhood vaccine schedule for the safety of American children and make sure that new vaccines aren't using the mRNA platform. But for many people who went along during COVID, they already think this is, they want it to be remote history that they never have to think about again because they don't want to look at themselves in the mirror. And there, there is no reckoning. It felt like there had to be a reckoning and there surely would be a reckoning and there seems to be no reckoning by and large. And you have freaking Governor Ferguson standing up and pretending to be pro science when he's, when he's a, a scientist, no scientific guy. Yeah, not in the slightest. It feels to me like there's a trick that has been played and I think it actually goes back to your point about the difference. If you've been a conservative, then you've been forced to confront all sorts of liberal arguments, good, bad, and otherwise. Yeah. And so the point is you're sort of forced to have a broader mindset because you just don't have an industrial strength mechanism for... You're going to have to contend with your own blind spots sometimes. Yeah. You're at least going to have them pointed out to you. Well, I just wonder if the trick is not a version of repulsion. If you're a blue team true believer and it begins to dawn on you that something that you're being told doesn't actually add up, then you immediately fast forward to what happens if you confess your doubts and you think, "Oh, all of these people who like me will instantly stop because that's what they do." And then the question is,"Well, will anybody like me?" Yes. Who? Those awful people. You don't want to be liked by them. That's what that basket of deplorables... They don't have nice cocktail parties. Right. They have evil cocktail parties. They have cocktail parties you'd be embarrassed to go to. They cook outside. They do sometimes. But that idea that you've got a cartoon of who's on the other side. Yeah. And so you can't even fathom, even if I did believe that, what next? But I mean, this reminds me very much of what we went through in 2017 with Evergreen, where you're called a racist and then I'm called a racist. And there's a whole bunch of people who've never met us before. It's like, "Oh God, they got called racist. They must be racist." And you and I doesn't take long to look inside like, "Yep, still not. Definitely not. Huh. Okay. I know it's not true. Huh. Well, this is interesting what I'm seeing." I got called this thing that was patently not true. And in some cases, there were people actively lying. And in some cases, there are just people shaping it up and following along and they're all wrong. And it didn't destroy me. Still standing. What a lot of interesting people are on this side of the looking glass. And so that's what we started saying. Through the looking glass you go, when you actually hold your own and say,"Well, I am still the same person I was. And some of what I think I know may change. I hope that continues to be true throughout my life. But at this moment, this thing where I went through the looking glass, nothing changed about me." It was my understanding of how the rest of you are making decisions and who you decide your friends are. And if that's how you decide who your friends are, and you're going to pick based on who's in power right now, I don't want you as my friends. If you're only choosing teams based on power, you are dangerous and shallow, both. And unfortunately, that's a lot of who we are all contending with, the dangerous and the shallow. But I guess to those who are still in the shadows, who are questioning the dominant paradigm, who are looking at Ferguson, talking about science as if he knows anything, going, "God, I don't think that guy knows anything." And gosh, it does seem like getting our childhood vaccine schedule more aligned with, say, that of Western Europe might make sense because their kids appear to be healthier. What is he on about? I guess I and I think we are here to tell you that when you do stand up, yeah, you take a lot of crap, for sure. But when you go through that looking glass, there is a relief and a release of tension around all the things that you were not saying. And you start to find the people who are actually honest brokers about their own values and commitments to the world, as opposed to people who are simply making sure that everyone sounds the same. Because that appearance of homogeneity is just that. It is an appearance. And there's plenty of people who believe the way Ferguson is telling us we all need to believe, but there are many more than it appears who don't. And going through the looking glass and realizing that it doesn't kill you, it actually frees you and makes you stronger, and a more joyous and purposeful person is incredibly fantastic, and I recommend it. Two things. First, I want to just correct that story a little bit. The way you've told it, we didn't know who the others were. And the fact is, you and I have been good about making common cause with religious people and conservative people. You represented that when we got called racist, we discovered that the other people weren't crazy. No, I certainly didn't mean to say that at all. It was that people became, these are the people who became friends and community, whereas we had not been in the midst of them before. Well, it certainly kicked into high gear at that point, but lots of people weren't willing to interact with conservatives or religious folks or whatever. And that wasn't us. Of course not. So anyway, I just wanted to fix that. And now my other point had to do with... Looks like propaganda, maybe. No, it didn't. That was an earlier point. I'm trying to remember, it had to do with Ferguson and his particular brand of scientism, but I've lost it for the moment. Well, he does like to sound important and science sounds important. And so it's not that surprising that he would use science as a weapon with which to sound important, but it's a real shame and it's bad. It's very bad for actual science. And for what those of us who are trying to make sense of the world scientifically are trying to do, because there are a lot of otherwise smart people who are seeing this kind of garbage, mostly people on the right and who are concluding, "Okay, that's it. No science for me. Thank you." And in that way, who wins? No one wins. We all lose when people turn away from science because it's being wielded by people who don't know what it is. So I remember what my point was, which is that somebody should pose to him immediately after he goes on this tirade, ostensibly defending science, when in fact he is defending scientism. This science you speak of, does it recommend the COVID shots for healthy people? Now he's going to say- Well, he obviously does. I mean, that's why I bring up his history as attorney general. Right. But he could have changed his mind, but he hasn't. Why? Because the official recommendations still are in favor of these shots and have not made eye contact with the absolute horror show that they actually are. And the fact that since they don't block transmission, there was never any justification for forcing these things on anybody. And certainly there was never any argument for healthy people. And in light of what they actually do to your physiology, there's a strong argument against them for everybody. But point is, in 2026, you are a champion of science. You are trying to put those vaccines on a Washington schedule that are being taken off the schedule by the CDC because of your commitment to science. Hey, Bob, tell me about the COVID shots. You want those for people as well? Or are you willing to admit that that was a mistake? And the answer is you will admit no such mistake. And failing to admit that almost anybody, since nobody's taking these COVID shots, since everybody's figured out how dangerous they are, most people are not admitting to themselves that that's why they're not taking the shots. But the shots have extremely low penetrance at the moment, even though COVID is still circulating. So in light of that, your average person walking around not getting COVID shots is aware there's a problem with them. Will Bob Ferguson admit it? He will not. What does that tell you about his proclamations about science? It tells you that they're garbage. They're just something. They're a posture, a political posture. They tell you nothing about what he would do, you know, for his own children. If they were being offered these shots, they don't tell you a thing. So anyway, one of the small, bright points about politics in the state of Washington is that our stuffed shirts are not compelling, right? You can look right through. They're not charismatic. They're paper thin, right? And so in light of that, we are, you know, on the one hand, that says bad things about the population of the state that we will elect these empty shirts. On the other hand, it is nice that they're not like super geniuses and rhetorical. Or even just Kevin Newsom, who I've never been compelled by, did strike a figure. Oh, yeah. Like he was charismatic in a sort of a way for a while. I mean, I think even most Californians now are like, what the hell is up with this guy? But he's harder to immediately dismiss because he has rhetorical skills and charisma. Yeah. He is skilled and he is smart and he is therefore much more dangerous than these herbivorous know-nothings that we elect up here in the damper parts of the West Coast. I mean, seriously, the degree to which Ferguson doesn't look. So you think maybe if we just take him out to a state house, things will improve? They might. He might have a deficiency. It's not beyond the realm of possibility. But just the degree to which my reaction seeing this guy, and I haven't spent a lot of time hearing him or looking at him, but it's like, okay, I knew Inslee. I even met Inslee once. Yeah. And my thought was, that is nothing but a stuffed shirt. There's not like a human being in there. This is a person, there's a scriptwriter. He might as well be a robot. Right. We found another one. Yeah. Like, that's not that easy to do to find somebody who has no convictions whatsoever and can read the script without stumbling, but mean nothing. Probably doesn't even know what he just read. He just knows that that's his job to deliver it as if he thinks it's true. And it's interesting that we found another. It is. Meanwhile, also in the state of Washington, also among elected officials, we have the majority leader in the state Senate, a guy named Jamie Peterson, who was responding to, well, let's, you have this video to pull up. Let's check this guy out. This is out of Seattle being asked about men and women. Men and women. Yes. Men and women. As if those were two different things. Well, yes, precisely. Senator Peterson, you said at the beginning that one of the key priorities for Senate Democrats would be to make sure science is respected. Can you acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women that would give boys a physical advantage over girls in athletics? No, I don't think I could say that definitively. First of all, I'm not that I don't have the scientific expertise to be able to weigh in on that. Based on what I know, a lot of many of the kids who participate in athletics, who are transgender, are taking puberty blockers, are taking hormones that probably change the scientific balance about competitiveness. So I don't have the tools or the training to be able to weigh in and offer a scientific conclusion about that. But I think that there is some reason to be skeptical of that claim. Thank you. Would you be willing to make that a requirement? We need to move on. Sorry, we need to move on. Bill? I'm just going to repeat what he said because I transcribed it. This is Jimmy Peterson, state senator out of Seattle, majority leader, Democrat, state of Washington. Quote, "Many of the kids who participate in athletics who are transgender are taking puberty blockers, are taking hormones that probably change the scientific balance about competitiveness. So I don't have the tools or the training to be able to weigh in and offer a scientific conclusion about that." That's an amazing evasion. At some level, I just wanted to present that and it is what it is. What era are we living in? You could argue that what Ferguson is responding to in the previous story that we were talking about is vaguely nuanced. How did we get to a childhood vaccine schedule that was so full if not because there was evidence to support it? We know this isn't true, but how did we get there if there wasn't evidence to support it? So diminishing it could be seen as a move in the wrong direction. None of that is true, but there's at least a few little logical steps that you need to keep in your head at a time to understand why. Putting our childhood vaccine schedule in greater alignment with that of healthier, weird nations of Western Europe is a good move for the health of our children. I never would have predicted when we met in 1985 or when we were in grad school in 1995 or when we were teaching at Evergreen in 2005 or 2015 that we could have arrived here. That the same people who were talking about needing to rely more on science then defer to the expertise of off-camera experts to decide whether or not males and females are in fact different. And possibly, again, many of the kids who participate in athletics who are transgender, he says, are taking purity blockers or taking hormones that probably change the scientific balance about competitiveness. It doesn't change the underlying truth. If you take testosterone as a woman, you can get stronger. If you take estrogens and progesterone as a man, you will likely get somewhat weaker. But the developmental and endocrinological environment in which you come of age at puberty and through puberty defines what your skeleton looks like, how your muscles are arranged, what kinds of muscles you have, and you cannot undo that with insane, dangerous, disruptive, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. You can mess with yourself for sure. You can make yourself less of what you could have been, be that a man or a woman. You can make yourself less of a man and you can make yourself less of a woman, but that doesn't mean that you have equalized and made yourself the other thing. It's not possible. We can't do that. We are mammals. There is no sex change in mammals. End of story. Cannot happen. No. So you said that the the governor and the vaccine story is more nuanced. Well, I don't think it's nuanced, but I do think it's something. It takes a little bit of... It takes a lot, actually, for one reason, which is, and I've been struggling for a way to say this, such that it lands and carries the proper connotations. But the thing that caused you and me not to understand the hazard that our children were exposed to as we went to the wellness visits and got the vaccines for them was that what turns out to be true is impossible in the world that we thought we lived in. If the systems that we understood these vaccines to have been created in and accepted by were at all functional, they wouldn't be on the schedule. It would be impossible to put them on the schedule without testing them against an inert placebo, without at least some valid scientific attempt to figure out what their net impact on health was. Some attempt to figure out what the combinatorics, if one of them is good and another one is good, what happens when you give them both? What happens when you give them both on the same day? So I feel dumb because the evidence was apparently available if we had gone digging, but the problem is you can't approach life that way. What are the chances that this car is past any safety test at all? Well, I would say if you're buying a car in an American car dealership, the chances are 100% that it has been through a battery of safety tests. If I found out that wasn't true, that'd be one thing. But the point is, did I go and check that the tests were done? Did I visit the facility to make sure it actually exists? You can't live that way. So if you buy a vacuum, you look for the little thing that says UL, Underwriters Laboratory, something effective and knowledgeable has vetted this product. It's not going to catch fire in your hands. And if it does, you have a lawsuit. Right. And you know, the equivalent of the UL listing for a vaccine is, you know, the friendly and knowledgeable pediatrician who you've talked a certain amount of biology with and tells you, yes, this is time for this vaccine. It has these benefits. The harms are extremely rare and blah, blah, blah. Point is, okay. So pharma hired our pediatricians out from under us to pretend that tests were done that warrant. And so the point is, okay, they snuck one bias. And so the truth is impossible in the world you think you live in. You don't live in that world. That's how it is possible. But the truth is impossible in the world you think you live in. And so that's the reason that this governor too many will sound like he's actually courageously defending science is because they think they live in a world they don't live in. And in that world, the Trump administration has gone insane. They've appointed a kook who is a well-known anti-vaxxer who doesn't understand how it is that people are kept healthy. And in that world, you know, it's great that the states are trying to stem the tide of this madness. Whereas, and I think this is sort of where you were going, whereas when Washington State Senate Majority Leader Jamie Peterson has this mushy mouth response to whether or not boys should be allowed to compete against girls in girls sports, it's much easier to just see on the face of the comet that he's being cowardly and not trusting what is in front of his and everyone's eyes. Yeah, that's exactly what he is doing. He is trying to deliver a response that explains why he doesn't accept the obvious, will not catch anybody's attention. There's not enough content in it to evaluate it. So the whole point is I would like to give you, I would like to kick up enough dust that this question goes away. I would like not to pay the price of angering the trans activists. I would like not to say anything concrete enough that, you know, it will make the news as they explore why I didn't know what I was talking about. So his real point, I think I see in that person, that his real point is to take factors which have some impact and to throw them together while proclaiming that he has not enough expertise to know anything about men and women and that it's supposed to go away. And what you just did is not supposed to happen. Yeah. And that's, and I apologize, I don't know how to pronounce your last name, but that's Brandi Kruse who's asking the question and whose clip that is and kudos to her for effectively not letting it go away. Yep. Right. For being there and asking the question and then taking it and posting it and here we are because we should not be letting people hide behind their cowardice. Yes. This is an elected official responding in a public forum. You know, he's allowed to have a private life and have whatever insane beliefs he may have, but this is an elected official responding to a public question in a public forum and his response is beyond inept. I mean, that's being very, very kind. Yes. And if we were wise as an electorate, we would take any instance of such a thing and we would say, okay, that person can't be in office. Right. If you can't answer this question, if you're not willing to pay the price of answering a simple question with a straightforward answer, then obviously you can't do our bidding. We don't know who's bidding you will do. Yeah. But you know, so Brandi Kruse, good on you for forcing this into the open. And the point is for the same reason that you should read the books they wish to burn, we should highlight every time somebody puts out a puff of squid ink and disappears, make sure the camera sees where they emerged later and highlight their cowardice because obviously we can't be governed this way. It's true. So that segues somewhat less naturally into the last thing I want to talk about, unless you wanted to speak more explicitly about science and scientism first, before we go to Broadway. Can I just ask, am I going to be expected to break into song when we get to Broadway? No, good. No. I mean, you're good at it, but I'm not going to ask that from you on air. Yeah. It's, it's tough. Especially, I think this is a musical that I didn't even know existed. So I don't think you're going to know the songs. No. And it's hard to make those things up on the spot. Though people in musicals appear to be doing exactly. They appear to be doing exactly. Yeah. So remember Dylan Mulvaney. Oh, do I? Yeah. So I did not actually prompt this with a picture of him. But listen, let me just say he's, he's the, the talented twink who, and there are people who are like, he has no talent at all. And he has no singing voice. He's actually a really, really talented guy, a slight bodied young gay man, a twink who mocks women for a living and has been very, very successful at it. Before he began his whatever it is, Days of Girlhood thing on TikTok, which skyrocketed him to fame and got him an invite to the Biden White House and you know, all of the things and, and what was it? Budweiser? Oh man. So they tanked single handedly tanked Budweiser. Oh, I think he was in a bubble bath drinking. So, so I'm, he's a he and he's presenting as a she. And so everything you see about him will always use the she her pronouns, but no, everyone knows because he was trying to be a performer. He's a talented twink, like I said. And before he decided, I know how I'm going to do this, I'm going to pretend to be a girl. He, there's a lot of video out there of him trying, you know, trying his hand at like, he's got one being like a safari guide. And like, there's, I looked into him a lot when he started emerging. And he's a one man village people. Yeah. And so like, and you know, he has, he has real skills. He's going to be playing a big new role on Broadway. Yeah. And I want you to guess who. And so I'm telling, I'll just tell you, this is in a musical that I didn't know existed. It's an historical figure, an historical figure. And you know, you don't have to spend really any time at this at all, but I thought it might be a mute. Not yet. So I sent our amazing producer, Jen, is looking at me because I sent her some pictures, not of him, but of the historical figures, some paintings from back in the day for her to show once I start describing the historicalness of this person, because I needed a reminder and I will give our audience a reminder. But so she has just come to understand who Dylan Mulvaney will be playing on Broadway. Is it Joan of Arc? Joan of Arc. No, no. Is it that offensive? It's all, it's in some ways, in some ways it's, it's worse. Only because like Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc, we know in part because she was really a girl, I think, right? Like a young woman, a young, a girl. And it was super, even more unusual that she was a girl being so courageous, but that unusual, like the fact of her being a girl or a woman, other than it being unusual for her to have taken on such a public role, wasn't part of, wasn't part of her fame necessarily. Like it didn't, it didn't inherently impact what she did in the world. Oh my God. Yeah, I do not know. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's, it's getting, Joan of Arc was a good guess. It was a good guess. So on, there's a, there's a five, there's a musical called Six on Broadway. It's won a ton of awards. And it's been on Broadway since 2021. And currently, Gina Gianna Yannelli, apologies if I'm mispronouncing her name, is going to step down from this role on February 15th. And on February 16th, Dylan Mulvaney will be taking on the role currently being played by Gianna Yannelli as Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn, Anne Boleyn. So you can go ahead and show the first, the first shot. Now this is a painting of Anne Boleyn. These are, we have a couple of paintings here, all of them in the public domain. So Anne Boleyn was born in the early 1500s. She died in 1536 when her head was cut off at the order of her then husband, Henry VIII. Born, the name of the musical is Six, which is a reference to Henry VIII's Six Wives. She was, Anne Boleyn was born to a high class family in 1522. She joined the court of Henry V, Henry VIII's wife, Catherine of Aragon. That was his first wife as a maid of honor. Here we have a painting of the court of Henry VIII in which Catherine of Aragon is still the queen. But he's there, Henry VIII in the left, left middle, sort of being lecherous with Anne Boleyn. She resisted his advances though. She resisted his advances unlike other women in his court. And so because he had become insistent that he really needed to marry her, he sought a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. And the church, the Catholic church, said no, divorce, no. And you have a child with her. And so we can't annul and like, no. And so the Catholic church would not allow the annulment. And this was the beginning of the schism between the Catholic church and what would later become the Church of England. Oh, I did not know that. Exactly. So Anne Boleyn was actually in some ways the key figure, the first figure in what would become the English Reformation and the beginning of the Church of England, although the Church of England wasn't officially formed, I think, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who actually is Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII's only child, Queen Elizabeth I, and obviously very important historical figure. So Henry VIII goes around the church, basically says no to the Pope. He creates the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Canterbury says, okay, you get to have this divorce. And then they get married. And so show this, this is them and they're in the good times. They're hunting together. This is Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn hunting together. Back when he still thought that she might produce for him the male heir that he wanted. But she had baby Elizabeth, whom he apparently was affectionate towards, but then she had three miscarriages. And he was beginning to get rather upset with her. And so trumped up, we believe, a number of charges of high treason, which included adultery, that she was having incest with her brother, George, and that she was plotting to kill her husband, the King. And, you know, later historians found all of these charges completely unconvincing, but a jury that included not only her former betrothed before she joined the court and married the King and also her uncle found her guilty unanimously and she was beheaded. And so here she is in the tower before the beheading, feeling rather sorry for herself, as you can imagine. So Dylan Mulvaney, a talented twink in 2026 is going to be playing Anne Boleyn, one of the most important and influential women from English history whose femaleness was utterly and completely endogenous to her role in history. She couldn't have been any of the things that she was if she'd just been a dude. There's no, there's, I am now, what that words, I think I'm out. All right. So imagine for a second that you and I lived some different life than we've led and found ourselves at this production. Yeah. It looks like an interesting musical. I mean, you know, you and I could find ourselves there because it would be interesting to see what such an abomination would be like. Yes. But imagine you were there in earnest. Yes. Struggling to see Dylan Mulvaney as a compelling woman in this role. And, you know, he's more compelling than some. Oh, yeah. No, in fact, I mean, you can, while Bret's talking, you can show my screen if you want. This is one of the press releases about this. And this is Dylan Mulvaney on the right here. But nonetheless, I would argue that any reasonable person who is aware that that's Dylan Mulvaney is going to be struggling to maintain the suspension of disbelief that is required in order to enjoy and absorb the particular show. Yep. And so it is. It is a gamble, I would argue, on behalf of whatever company is putting this production on that is presumably motivated to make money that you will bring in a lot of people who want to see the spectacle and presumably want to virtue signal to their friend group. Well, I saw the Dylan Mulvaney production of what was it called? Six. Oh, six. And it was marvelous. Right. Oh, he really, oh, I'm sorry. She really does a great job. Right. She really does a compelling job. You wouldn't even realize that blah, blah, blah. So the point is that might actually be a winning strategy. Unlike Budweiser, which tanked its brand over this person. This might actually work because, A, you've got a lot of sanctimonious liberals who do love to posture in front of their friends. And it's not a show. He's not the lead. There are six leads. There were six wives. And apparently the conceit of the show is somehow it goes back and forth and now the six wives are regaining their agency and showing that they were more than just wives of Henry the 8th or something. I don't know. Obviously, I haven't seen it. And it looks like, as far as I can tell, all the other people playing the former wives of Henry the 8th are actually women. I don't know. For now. But here's a, let me just read a couple of paragraphs here. From Tudor queens to pop icons, the six wives of Henry the 8th take the microphone to remix 500 years of historical heartbreak into a euphoric celebration of 21st century girl power. This new original musical is the global sensation that everyone is losing their head over. Cute. Six is the winner of 23 awards, including the 2022 Tony award for best original score and the outer critic circle award for best musical. The New York Times says six totally rules. It was a critic's pick. And the Washington Post held six as exactly the kind of energizing, inspirational illumination this town aches for. So that's all kudos for some time in the past five years, this show, when it didn't have a dude playing one of Henry the 8th's wives. I am curious what the critics will say at these insane, captured ideological papers and other media at the point that you actually have a talented twink playing anvil in. Yes. And actually, there's the question of what they will say. And I think an equally interesting question is what they will imagine they are allowed to say. Yeah. Because that's been the game all along is you're not allowed to notice, you're not allowed to comment, you're not allowed to have a natural reaction to transness. That's weird. That's funny. That's curious. That's hard to fathom. None of those things, you know, it has to be. That's transactional and in service of his career. Right. Exactly. Yes. I wonder if he's a bad guy, right? You're allowed to wonder that. Well, not once he's transitioned, you're not. Right. So anyway, it'll be interesting. I actually would, I would want to go out of our way and read the reviews of this thing and try to figure out whether, you know, what reaction they actually had, how well it got translated into review. Because in general, I would imagine that reviewers, you probably go into that gig, because you kind of like having a reaction and it being something you can articulate well enough. And that people think highly of your reviews because you said it was good. They went and they thought it was good. That's right. And so what was a certain class of performers whom you are no longer allowed to accurately review. Maybe there is. Maybe there is. And maybe you're not good at lying because maybe reviewing in general involves dishing on what you saw and that any critique you have, you deliver and feel cool doing so. In this case, maybe you're forced into a skill that you aren't so practiced in. Yeah. Yep. Okay. That's all I have about that. Yes. Well, I hope they don't take my suggestion of Joan of Arc because. Well, it depends on how well he'll do playing Anne Boleyn. Well, not how well he'll do, but how well he'll be said to have done. Yes. And if it succeeds, who knows what roles we might find him in next. Lassie, for example. As the dog? Yeah. Okay. All right. I mean, I don't know. He's gotten this far. He's attractive. Yeah. But so was Lassie. Absolutely. And, you know, being a girl is one level of jump and being an entirely different species is another. It might be within his skill set. Yeah. He's aspirational. Why not try? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. Before we stopped, and we'll be back on Wednesday and we'll also be back tomorrow with our Q and A on locals. Did you want to say something about the passing of Scott Adams this week? Yeah, I guess I do. And I will say I have complex feelings here. Scott and I were in a bit of contact at the end of his life. He said some very nice things about me, in particular, something he had said publicly. He reiterated and he thought I was very good at explaining things. But anyway, we had a nice interaction. He knew already that he was facing death very shortly. Said he was on a hospice already. And I didn't ... It was sort of too late for us to have a conversation that I would like to have had. Publicly. Yeah. Well, publicly or not, I would have just simply at a human level, I wanted to understand the meaning of his arc with respect to COVID and specifically the COVID shots. Because we were on different sides. Scott was a pro vaccine. He was not wildly pro vaccine, but he was by his own accounting trying to read the tea leaves and figure out whether or not it made more sense to get it or not get it. And ultimately pro vaccine enough that given who he was in the world, he got it even though he didn't have to. Right. And then he changed his tune to his credit. He acknowledged and he went out of his way to acknowledge that he had gotten it totally wrong. Maybe we should just watch the clip. I have it. You want to put up the clip of Scott Adams? Completely. Having said as clearly as possible that the anti-vax people seem to be the winners. I want you to hear that clearly. The anti-vax people appear to be the winners. The anti-vaxxers clearly are the winners at this point. And I think it will probably stay that way. And I don't want to put any shade on that whatsoever. They came out the best. They have the winning position. The unvaccinated have a current advantage because they feel better. The thing they're not worrying about is what I have to worry about, which is I wonder if that vaccination five years from now because really the anti-vaxxers, I think we're really just distrustful of big companies and big government. That's never wrong. It's never wrong to distrust government. It's never wrong to distrust big companies. Right. So if you just took the position, let's just distrust everything the government did. Well, you won. You won. You won completely. I did not end up in the right place. Agree? You would all agree with that, right? I did not end up in the right place. The right place would be natural immunity, no vaccination. You should take victory and I should take defeat. We can agree on that, right? That my position is now the weakest and your position has gone from the weakest to the strongest and that we can just say, that's true. The people who didn't give acts are absolutely in the winning position. You win. You win. You are the winners. You are the winners. All right. Let me say that part with no ambiguity. You won. You won. All of my fancy analytics got me to a bad place. All of your heuristics don't trust these guys. It's obvious. Totally worked. All right. Now a couple of things about that. One, it's obviously not a continuous clip. So when that happened, when Scott said that on his show, it rubbed a lot of us who had been against and skeptical of and concerned about the COVID vaccines the wrong way because... Well, I mean, it allows him that he did analysis and grants the win to people whom he claims did no analysis at all. Right. Which is exactly not what happened. Now, I'm not saying... There were contrarians and they were faithful. And so there were people on both sides who just did the thing because that's what the team did or just did the thing because I will always do the opposite of whatever X does. But there are also people doing analysis on both sides. Yep. Now, I do appreciate that he went... I mean, he went too far out of his way, in my opinion, here to accept defeat and to award victory to those who disagreed with him. That's not really the point. The point is... And Scott was very careful about the lesson of this, that, and the other. If you read what he's written, if you listen to the way he spoke, his particular brand of genius involved analyzing things dispassionately and proceeding from them with a sophisticated waiting and all of that. Anyway, he did things that, in my opinion, actually likely changed history, his embrace of Trump back before many people in the public eye were doing that was, I think, pivotal. But in any case, it's striking that he says that those of us who resisted these shots don't have to worry about what he now has to worry about. And that, of course, rings in many of our ears. It's less than five years since that clip. Yep. And he's gone. And not only has he gone, but he's gone of something that has skyrocketed in the aftermath of the vaccine campaign, which is these rapidly developing cancers. Aggressive cancers. Yeah. So anyway, I think this is tragic. And I think the reason that I'm going down this road is in light of who Scott was, I believe he would want us to do the analysis. And the analysis is not definitive. It's quite possible that he had some cancer that was unrelated to the shots. But it is also quite plausible that his, what he describes as the analytics and the rejection of the reflexive resistance to the shots that he saw in his opponents cost him his life. He was somebody who said very clearly that he had almost no regrets in life. If we had gotten to the conversation, I would have asked him if this one was different. But anyway, I think what I would hope is that A, we could see the kind of guy that Scott was there. He was trying in his own way to acknowledge his opponents. He was saying good game to those of us who had vehemently disagreed with him at the time, but his particular understanding of what had happened is incorrect and unfair to those of us who were actually doing our own analysis and came out on the other side and tried to convince Scott of that analysis. And yes, we did turn out to be right. As you say, the reflexive people do exist, right? There were lots of contrarians and I've said multiple times, there are lots of people whose track record is essentially perfect with respect to COVID, but it doesn't imply anything about what they know beyond simple distrust. And so because the system was so reliably wrong on every count, it was the inverse. They told you the inverse of what you should do if you did the opposite. So Adams is right that if you only were using heuristics, you landed on this point, but that does not mean that all of us, I don't even know most of us, but it certainly doesn't mean that all of us were only using heuristics. There are obviously many of us who were not correct. And what we do next time, this is now a challenging problem because once you've seen the institutional structure tell you the exact inverse of what you're supposed to do, it is now harder to think independently about each thing, right? But that's a haunting clip to me now because I do personally, I do suspect that the shots probably cost him his life, that decision, that particular analysis for a guy who was very analytical, that particular analysis may have been fatal. And I do think that there's a general thread. COVID briefly woke people up because in general, you have a political perspective, you vote based on it. It's very hard to tell what in your life is different. If we parachuted you into your life two years after an election without your knowledge of who had won and we said, okay, now look at your life, tell me who won, you wouldn't know. But in the case of the COVID shots, your political belief, those damn anti-vaxxers are killing grandma. Well, if you had that belief, it had a material impact on your physiology. It's not certain that it did, but in many cases it did. So lots of people either experienced something or saw something in people, other people who had taken them. And it was that moment at which you realize, oh, wait a second, those impassioned beliefs that I'm getting from my newspaper actually put my life in jeopardy, right? So that's an important thing to recognize. And unfortunately, the outpouring of love for Scott before his death and after was, I think... Except for the New York Times. Right, which slandered him. But that outpouring was about something. People saw that Scott cared about them in a strange way, but he cared about people. He talked about basically essentially giving himself over to people, trying to be useful. He talked about this in his final note. And I think it is important that we at least have in our minds the question open. Did we watch somebody do the analysis on a literal whiteboard in front of us, come to a conclusion, and then pay the ultimate price over it? I'm not saying that did happen, but I'm saying it's probable enough that that example ought to remain in our minds next time we find ourselves arguing over some medical technology that shouldn't be political, but obviously is. Very good. Yeah. It's a big loss. Yeah, it really is a big loss. And I was heartened to see the reaction that people had. Scott paid a big price for saying things out loud. We didn't always agree with him. I took him to task over what he had said in a previous episode, but it was nice to see how many people he had been meaningful to, and he'll be missed and he won't be forgotten. Yes, he will. Okay. Well, I think that that brings us to the end for today. We will be doing a Q and A on Locals tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific for a couple hours. Join us on Locals. You can join us on Locals right now and ask a question that we'll try to get to tomorrow. We'll be back next Wednesday with our next evolutionary lens. Check out our sponsors this week. They were Sauna Space, Masa Chips, and Clear. That's Clear with an XLEAR. Awesome products all. And a recognition again that we're supported by you and we appreciate you. We thank you for being here and for appreciating what we're doing and for sharing when you feel like it what we're doing with others. And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.