Taylor Sheridan

The conversation opens with a belt buckle. One participant explains that it was awarded for a horse called Maverick Buzz the Tower, which "won reserve at the Futurity," and that such wins bring "a belt buckle and money." The buckles work as a kind of credential: someone who knows horses would recognise one on sight and, depending on the year, would know which horse earned it. The speakers compare this to the way people track fighters.

From there the discussion turns to how deep horse knowledge goes. It is "not as simple as, oh, that's a horse," one speaker says, because there are genetic lines and "certain tendencies that certain horses will actually pass on to their offspring." A stallion named Spook's Got a Whiz is the example. His offspring are described as "incredibly balanced, real feely, very, very quick-footed, big stoppers," but with one serious quirk.

they see dead people, they see ghosts. So like, once every three months, for no reason, this thing's gonna fucking check out.

The speakers compare this to a Corvette that decides to drive itself home. They tolerate the trait because the horses are "worth it." Asked whether a horse really sees ghosts, the answer is open: "I don't know what he sees. Some kind of boogeyman." Two partial explanations come up. Horses are prey animals, and "a lot of them are deaf" because of a gene. Neither point is developed further.

The speakers wonder whether deafness might help a horse ignore a screaming rodeo crowd, and one agrees "100%." A first-hand story then shows the limit of that idea. Before a run, spectators cheering for an Italian rider began "beating on the side of the arena," and the horse "checked the fuck out," reacting as if "a whole herd of elephants" were chasing it. The point is that a deaf horse may ignore noise but still react to vibration and stomping. The other speaker pictures the horse's conflict: it is being told to do something while its instincts say to flee.

The hearing theme leads to a human example. Shane Van Boning (the transcript's spelling) is described as one of the greatest pool players of all time, "if not the greatest." He is deaf and wears hearing aids, which he switches off when he plays and goes into "The zone. Just balls in geometry."

The speakers do not treat deafness as the whole explanation. One adds that "It's not just that": he is also obsessive and practises "10 hours a day." He is said to have won the U.S. Open, called "the hardest tournament to win in all pool," five times, a record shared by only one other player, Earl Strickland.

The rest of the passage is about the gap between casual and professional pool. Watching professionals makes an amateur realise they hit too hard and play the wrong angles, while experts use English, spin and back spin and seem to treat the cue as "part of their body." The concrete example is a ball travelling around a nine-foot table, roughly a 12-foot distance, and landing "in a two-inch spot." Add deafness and the player does not even hear the cheering: "It's just hyper-focused."

The talk about focus moves to neurodivergence. One participant makes a sweeping claim with no evidence offered: "anybody's good at anything is either ADHD or autistic." Another says doctors tried to give them ADHD medication. They were given it as a child, stopped taking it, and their parents decided to "just let him run around."

A second anecdote is about a neighbour's child in California, described as a "wild little kid" who became "flat" after starting medication for hyperactivity. The speaker telling it frames it as personal reaction rather than judgement ("Not my kid, not my place") but says they were confused by it. They speculate that being medicated as a child would have led them to drugs, and add that their own parents would not have done it.

Both speakers reframe the trait as an advantage when it is matched with real interest: "It's a superpower. If you understand it." One participant links this to writing scripts. Once they know what a story is, they say, they can sit in an airport among a thousand people, not hear them, and work "for 12 hours straight." The same focus does not work on subjects they don't care about, such as "the history of Pop-Tarts." The discussion offers this as personal experience, not as clinical guidance on ADHD treatment.

From hyperfocus, the conversation turns to education. The argument is that schools take energetic children and "squeeze it out of them" by making them sit still and listen to "boring shit." One speaker asks, as a question, whether modern public education was founded "by the Rockefeller's as a means to create workers," and the answer is a flat yes: "Compliant workers and soldiers. Conform." No source is cited for this historical claim.

The speakers go on to say that starting school early makes children easier to steer. Their examples are pledging allegiance and what they call "the trans stuff" and "pride stuff," with teachers discussing sexuality with preschool and six-year-old children. The claim then widens past one cause: "It could be your religion. It could be your political ideology." The most extreme example is child suicide bombers, offered to support the claim that recruiters target children rather than men "in their 40s with a family." These are assertions in the conversation; no specific schools, curricula or data are named.

After sponsor reads, the speakers ask where the money behind nonprofits and NGOs comes from. They claim that for "40, 50 years" funding has come from hostile sources, naming Qatar, Russia and China, with the aim to "divide, to just eat away from the inside." They say Russia has been doing this since the 1960s. They point to a 1984 video of Yuri Besmanoff (the transcript's spelling) and call his predictions about American universities, Marxism and the erosion of patriotism "dead on." No specific grants or organisations are identified.

The heuristic proposed is "Just look at who it benefits." One speaker qualifies the foreign-funding explanation by noting that division also benefits "a lot of people in this country," who "can profit off of it."

The criticism of nonprofits is balanced at first. Charity is praised as "one of the most amazing notions about people," when the wealthy give "because they want to." The complaint is that much of the money goes "to overhead and employees." The sharper argument is about incentives, using homelessness in Los Angeles as the example: an NGO that solved its problem would lose its reason to be funded.

But if I form an NGO and that's my cause and I solve the problem, what do I do with my NGO? Now I got no money. Now there's no reason to give me money. So they don't create them to solve problems.

The conclusion drawn is that the incentive is to "Make the problem worse. Make it longer. Make it bigger." The speakers apply this to what they call, "in air quotes," the homeless "industry" in California.

Several California spending figures are cited from memory. California is said to have spent "$24 billion on the homeless problem, and no one can account for it," and an attempted audit was described as vetoed by Newsom. The high-speed rail project is mocked as a "train track to nowhere" with "a mile" built at a sarcastically cited "$100 billion." One speaker suggests it could have simply run beside the I-5.

The third example is a road over the highway to protect mountain lions, said to cost "over a hundred million dollars" and still be unfinished. The comparison is that such crossings already exist "throughout the West," cost little, and are "done in a couple of months" with cement, sod and grass. The speakers conclude that they are "applying logic to a state that doesn't use that." None of these figures are checked during the conversation.

The longest policy discussion is about a proposal described as "under the guise of stop animal cruelty." The transcript first frames it around Portland, then clarifies that "Oregon is voting on this in November" after it gathered enough votes to be on the ballot. As the speakers describe it, it would mean "no hunting, no fishing, no ranching, no agriculture, no animals that get harmed in any way, no killing chickens."

The main objection is practical. The speakers say there are "91 million cattle in the country" and ask what would happen to them. Leaving it to nature, they argue, doesn't work because there is no natural system for that many domestic cattle. A participant who raises cattle says that if feeding them were outlawed, the animals would wander the highways, bulls would break fences, kill people and breed, and the herd could reach "900 million cattle in three decades." That projection is a rhetorical extrapolation, not a calculation.

But it's not supposed to be logical. It's all just a vibe, man.

The speakers then turn to the ballot process. A proposal does not have to be well thought out to qualify, only to "appeal to certain sensibilities." They disagree on its chances: one says "It'll probably pass," the other says "Nah, I don't think it'll pass." Citing a New York Times article, they say one organiser gathered "135,000 signatures." The article is described as identifying him as a vegan, a substitute teacher and a petition organiser who moved to Portland from Southern California. His stated goal, as relayed, is "to have a system where we're not killing or hurting animals anymore."

The speakers pick on the word "system" and ask whether a mountain lion tearing apart sheep is "somehow another less cruel." The segment then turns into mockery of the organiser personally, including remarks about his reasons for moving to Portland. These remarks are jokes and add no argument about the measure.

The speakers tie the Oregon measure back to the indoctrination theme and recall "that Kevin Costner moment on your show" in which a vegan character is challenged about which lives count. The broader point is that growing food also kills: plowing a field or building a road destroys organisms, and anyone driving on those roads is "in that system."

Bees are the next example. The speakers claim bees are brought in "By the billions" to pollinate crops, naming avocados and almonds as "the two big ones," and that large numbers die each year. One speaker then makes a water claim and admits it needs checking: "something like 19 gallons of water" per almond, "we can look it up." The lookup text that follows is garbled in the transcript. It calls almonds a "relatively water intensive crop" and mentions "hundred gallons of water per pound," so the exact figure is unclear from this source.

One speaker adds a historical claim: almonds in the Mediterranean were once poisonous and were among the first domesticated plants. People are said to have noticed which trees squirrels would eat from and uprooted the ones squirrels avoided. The explanation is cut off by a sponsor read.

The discussion then turns to wording. One participant, who says "I'm a writer" and that "words matter to me," objects to calling almond milk "milk" and says they would rather call it "almond juice." The speakers decide it is closer to "almond tea": almonds pulverised and soaked in water, with "a bunch of shit" and sugar added. A friend named Duncan is described as surprised by the sugar content once he checked it.

One speaker reports that a blood test showed high oxalates and that their doctor traced it to frequent almond eating and advised cutting back. A lookup during the conversation gives the qualified health claim and specific figures.

Almonds are a high oxalate food. Eating them can raise oxalate levels that circulate, get filtered by the kidneys, and appear in urine, which may increase kidney stone risk in susceptible people.

The figures read out are about 296 milligrams of oxalate per 100 grams, "roughly four milligrams per nut." The doctor's advice, as reported, was moderate rather than absolute: almonds are "not bad if you just have them every now and then," but shouldn't be eaten regularly. Almond flour in gluten-free products is mentioned as another source people may not notice.

Kale is the second example. One speaker describes daily green smoothies of kale, apples, ginger and garlic until another doctor advised cooking the kale and draining the water to reduce oxalates. That doctor linked such smoothies to kidney stones "With some folks." The speaker recalls being told to eat eggs and bacon instead. These are personal accounts of doctors' advice, not general recommendations.

The wider lesson the speakers draw is distrust. One says years of podcast conversations showed that many people giving food and health advice "don't know what the fuck they're talking about," and notes that "the food pyramid's completely flipped." The other claims the food pyramid was created by "Johnson & Johnson," then corrects to "Or Kellogg's," to get people to eat their products at breakfast and lunch. The claim is not sourced, and the speaker is unsure even which company it was.

Speaking from ranching experience, one participant argues that beef, unlike other food, has no fully industrialised production because there is "no economical way to do it." The closest thing is the feed yard, with Harris Ranch off the I-5 in California given as an example, where cattle are fed "for 90 to 150 days" before slaughter.