In this 251st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.
In this week’s episode, we discuss how the Harris campaign spent their billion dollar war chest—including on celebrities who appeared to be endorsing her because they believed in her, but were actually getting paid. Also: $26 million was spent for “text message outreach,” any many people donated $10 or $20. It’s reverse Robin Hood: stealing from the poor, to give to the rich. Related: how can we stay optimistic about unity, when we are seeing such different things? Finally: the New York Times finds a whole bunch of well-credential “experts” in nutrition to assure us that seed oils are excellent for your health. (They’re not.) You have a choice: follow the science, or think scientifically for yourself, and actually be healthy.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Harris campaign disbursements from the FEC: https://github.com/gaiaus/2024-us-presidential-general-election/blob/main/harris%2Fspending%2Ftop_500_recipients.MD
News Nation with Lindy Li: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv3XbWtHyMg
Rescue the Republic: https://jointheresistance.org
Smith professors saw a perfect campaign: https://www.smith.edu/news-events/news/hope-and-action
Reason for Optimism: https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/reason-for-optimism
Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for You? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/well/eat/seed-oil-effects.html
Professor Gardner’s site: https://www.med.stanford.edu/profiles/christopher-gardner
Thumbnail Courtesy: Kent Nishimura / Stringer / Getty Images News via Getty Images.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Holding Screen
00:05:42 Welcome
00:07:25 Sponsors: Policygenius, CrowdHealth, Ralston College
00:22:05 How Harris Campaign Funds Were Spent
00:23:34 Paying for Endorsements
00:26:45 Text Message Outreach & the Matching Mystery
00:29:16 Service Fees
00:30:39 A Lot of Bad Categories
00:31:59 A Gaming of the Mind
00:35:17 Was She Paying for Home Court Advantage?
00:41:54 Faking Every Aspect
00:45:54 This Feels like Robin Hood in Reverse, Downstream of a Terror Campaign
00:48:31 When We Take Experts at Their Word
00:51:31 Too Big to Win
00:53:12 Sacred Trust with Campaign Donors Clip
00:55:07 Wag the Dog Level Phony
00:56:52 Multiple PSYOPs
01:00:18 Smith College Reflects on Election 2024 Results
01:06:14 The “Flawless Campaign” Formula
01:09:49 Heather’s Call for Basic Education in Logical Thinking
01:11:58 Asymmetry of the Blue & Red Perspectives
01:14:19 Blue No Matter Who
01:18:00 Behind the Scenes of Rescue the Republic
01:20:32 The NYT Thinks Seed Oils are Awesome
01:22:48 Bret & Heather Critique the Case for Seed Oils
01:31:42 Olive Oil is Not a “Seed Oil”
01:33:23 The Game of Pharma
01:35:20 Heather’s Culinary Advice
01:39:17 Questionable Experts
01:41:34 Closing
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 ...
