Dr. Michael Bryant is a professor of History and Legal Studies at Bryant University. Dr. Jonny Hudson has a Ph.D. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Bret talks with the two of them about Jonny’s recent dissertation which applies an evolutionary lens to the Holocaust.
Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean nude spa for women in the Seattle area, was told by the state of Washington, now upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, that they must let men in, so long as those men think they’re women. Judge VanDyke’s dissent correctly summarizes the issue as one of “swinging dicks.”
Heather Heying explains:
"These are such clowns. These judges are such clowns. And one of them’s a woman who apparently gives no fucks about the women and girls as young as 13, who might go to this amazing spa and be exposed to a very confused and mentally unstable man who’s got his balls and dick out.
More likely, frankly, most of us who once went to this amazing business are not going to go anymore. They’re going to have put out of business a Korean family who happened to be conservative Christians because of what? ...
"From your perspective, how good are your AirPods for you?
The answer is: that depends if you’re a mouse that was bred in one of these idiotic protocols.
If you are a mouse, where do you get AirPods? You probably want AirPods, maybe more than one set.
If you’re not a mouse, then this is an indicator that it’s actually dangerous.
The fact that the mice live longer is not good news.
It’s bad news because a toxin that you will not tolerate well will function like chemotherapy, or in this case like radiation therapy does on a cancer patient."
Clipped from Episode 316, Bret and Heather discuss a new paper that finds infection tends to lead to greater frailty in older people. This reverses the causality of Terrain Theory of Disease (frailty of the body leads to greater susceptibility of infection), and also provides support for a prediction made by Bret and his co-author Debbie Ciszek in the unpublished, longer version of their reserve capacity paper from 2002.
Mentioned in this segment:
Ragusa et al 2026: https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/gerona/glag043/8497853
Weinstein & Ciszek 2002: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11909679/
Failure of Imagination
When zero sum thinking is a mindset
If you haven’t listened to Avraham Burg and Tucker’s conversation, I highly recommend it. As someone who is fascinated with the Israeli mindset, I found the conversation to have a wealth of information. Burg is a former Speaker of the Knesset and interim president of Israel. He grew up inside the system and spent decades at the center of Israeli political life. And in this interview, he genuinely transformed how I think about those in the Israeli political scene.
Here are the quotes that stood out to me the most:
1)
> “We Israelis live in a reality where a constitution can be seen as a threat.”
Unfortunately, I am starting to think more Americans feel this way too. A lot of Americans, especially when it comes to vaccines or figures like Charlie Kirk, seem to adopt what I would call “Sam Harrisonian” thinking—where we must trust the institutions because institutions need to be trusted. Therefore, it’s okay to ask questions… but only after the endless ...
