Bret and Heather 30th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Is it Safe to Go Back to School
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Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I am here with Dr. Heather Hying.
This is our 30th live stream, is that right?
That's right.
Is it fair to say 30th in a row?
I think so.
Yeah.
Why don't we skip one?
Yeah, right in a row.
30th right in a row.
Well, that is a remarkable track record, I would say.
All right.
We are facing a world that is moving at an incredible pace and having skipped a live stream because it was impossible to do from the road.
We now have even more things that have transpired in the in the period between this one and our last live stream.
We wanted to start with a couple of logistics, though.
Couple of logistics.
Yep.
We wanted to mention the Dark Horse Clips channel, which is now live, which will have clips, already has clips from many of the previous episodes.
You can find that at Dark Horse Clips.
There is now a Discord server, which you can get access to as a benefit at either of our Patreons at the $5 and up level, and we have something called Dark Horse Membership at my Patreon at the $5 and up level, which gives you access to a private Q&A one every month.
We're going to have to refigure the level at which people get to ask questions because it's been more successful than we were expecting, and we already have too many questions at that $11 level.
But we do that on the last Sunday of the month, and Brett also does Conversations at higher levels on the first Saturdays and Sundays of every month at his Patreon.
So those are some things going on.
And then I figured… Those conversations have been spectacular of late.
I'm thrilled with what they've been doing.
They were spectacular before, but they were smaller and then people have joined in and they've discovered that there's an ongoing conversation and there's a lot of enthusiasm.
So anyway, consider that.
Fabulous.
And would you like to give any updates to Unity 2020?
Yes, it's going to be slightly vague, but I would like you to deduce from the tone of my voice that things are moving in an excellent direction with Unity 2020.
We are discovering what Unity 2020 is, because of course it is not a political party, right?
So, Unity 2020 is moving rapidly in the right direction.
Of course, what we need is the groundswell.
What we have now is a large team of very capable patriots who are putting every effort into this thing and generating amazing stuff, which you will soon see.
And I think you will be very pleased at what it is.
And then the question is, how many communities that are actually aligned with Unity 2020, that might have been working on a different part of the puzzle, are going to recognize us as fellow travelers and join in?
Because the fact is, if we don't solve This stifling governmental corruption problem that is managed by the duopoly to prevent meaningful change.
If we don't fix that, none of the other things are going to be fixable.
Everything else is downstream of that.
So really, we gotta go, we gotta do it, and the time is now because the problem is so critical it can't possibly wait another election cycle.
All right.
So where should we begin?
Should we begin with a discussion of where we are with respect to COVID?
Yeah.
All right.
COVID.
So the big thing that I'm seeing very frequently is people are talking about, well, cases are skyrocketing again, which we should talk about, but the case fatality rate is actually flat or down, which is interesting.
And I think we should talk about what the meaning is.
In one sense, I don't understand why this surprises anybody.
We botched the lockdown, and having botched the lockdown, the second wave was absolutely predictable, and many of us predicted it.
So let's just say, I think probably all the viewers and listeners will understand this, but when we are saying we in this case, we're talking very much as American citizens.
You have the United States of America.
Not across, for the most part, the rest of America, and certainly not across the rest of the world.
The United States uniquely fucked this one up.
Really bad.
Really bad.
And in some sense, worst of all possible worlds, because what we did was we went maybe 70% of the way to an effective lockdown, which caused everybody to grow thoroughly tired of it and many people to rebel against it without getting much of the benefit at all.
Just enough to destroy large sectors of the economy, to impinge on everyone's mental health, many people's physical health, and to make everyone so exhausted with the thing that it is at least one, for sure, of the factors that led to the protests that then became riots in the streets starting in the beginning of June.
Yeah, and it also, I mean, maybe you could argue that this is actually a positive thing, but it revealed the double standard that exists inside our sense-making apparatus where everybody was demonizing one set of protesters and giving another set of protesters a pass for being out there and not social distancing.
Now, of course, we have to put this in context, those protests occurred outdoors.
Outdoors appears to be relatively safe for the moment.
We have predicted that that will decrease over time, but for the moment, outdoors seems to be a safe environment.
Now, of course, as we've talked about before, we don't know if it's safe during the day because of UV light or safe all the time due to the volume and airflow and therefore never crossing the threshold of viral load that makes people sick.
Well, I think we know.
We actually pretty well know that both of those things are protective.
Do explain part of why it is so much safer as to almost be actually completely safe to be outdoors during the pandemic.
That increased airflow because density of viral load is completely predictive of whether or not you get infected and also of how sick you get once you do get infected.
Both of those things.
And also it's true that sunlight does destroy this particular virus as it does many others.
And so we would expect that there will be some less protective effects of being outdoors at night, but that those effects will certainly not disappear entirely because I don't have a sense of those two factors.
And I'm sure there are more, but of those two factors, basically increased airflow being outside and sunlight being outside, which of those, you know, if I had to put percentages to how important they are, I don't honestly know.
Well, here, I'm going to do my famous English to English translation service.
Wow.
OK.
That's usually my job.
Right.
It's also your famous English to English translation service.
So in this case, what I would argue is that we have a model and we should all be building models based on what we understand.
And our models were really cruddy at the beginning of COVID.
And we were all so worried about washing our hands and touching surfaces, which is important.
But it turns out for this particular virus, it's not nearly where the game is.
The game is all in this other realm or almost all.
The key, though, is for reasons that are yet to be fully articulated, you have to cross some threshold of the number of viral particles that you encounter.
Immune systems with a non-specific response seem to be able to deal with some number of these things, and so a conversation of a minute or two, even with a sick person, is unlikely to cross that threshold.
A five-minute conversation is much more likely to.
A five-minute conversation in an enclosed space that captures all of those particles so they're all unable to diffuse away makes it even worse.
And if you're outside, you've got to think.
You've got a bucket that you're filling with viral particles, and if you cross the top of the bucket, you get sick.
But the bucket is being emptied by the UV light, which is killing viral particles at some rate.
And by the airflow.
Well, the airflow means that the bucket isn't filling very fast because they're diffusing away.
And they're also dying, right?
The UV light is killing them, and so those two things are removing these things.
It's the concentrating environments that make you much more likely to get sick, and it's the environments that dispel or kill these things that make it much less likely for you to catch it.
And people are both so poor at understanding these nuances and being educated so badly by the media and by scientists that for the most part we are falling into, as I've been saying since almost the beginning, these tribes, these, you know, star-bellied snitches and snitches without.
And so, you know, we see now when we go out that there are people wearing masks and, you know, in the state of Oregon where we live it is now mandated to wear masks inside.
And outside, and there's a new twist to this as of yesterday, but outside mostly people are not wearing masks, which is a legitimate move, and yet you can also see in the eyes of people that they are judging you and assuming that if you're not wearing a mask you're one of those people who doesn't ever want to wear masks.
And that's not to say that any of us want to be wearing masks, but understanding the necessity of wearing masks when you're inside with strangers is very different from imagining that mask wearing every time you leave your home is necessary.
So let me say that on Nextdoor, which is, you know, this app that will be familiar to many people, it's this sort of neighborhood connection device.
Just yesterday we had someone in our neighborhood post with regard to a several hundred acre park that's very near us.
I walked in the state park today and I was disappointed that 50% of people were not wearing a face covering.
If people can't or won't wear a face mask, she wrote, they should not use trails.
It is selfish and reckless to not wear a face covering on a trail.
Please walk on neighborhood streets instead.
Now, I responded for the first time ever on Nextdoor, you know, carefully and respectfully, and got many thanks for it.
And the original post has since been pulled down.
But again, this points to the lack of nuance in someone's understanding.
And one of the things I said in response to her was, We should not be imposing rules that are neutral or even unhealthy for people.
Certainly unhealthy for people with, you know, everyone is suffering some mental health effects from this months-long lockdown now.
And some people with physical problems are going to be impaired if they have to wear masks, will not therefore go outside if they have to wear masks to do so, and will be further impaired as a result of that.
And imposing bad rules on people is going to make many good people less likely to follow all rules, which includes not just the bad ones, but the good ones as well.
That is the opposite of what we want.
I totally agree with this and I'm experiencing, I probably experience it a little bit less because my version of a mask sends some sort of signal, but still not wearing it results in people, even when I know that my model is quite good and it's actually based on data in as much as we have that, there is a sense of like, oh you're one of those anti-mask people.
And let me just remind people who have been tuning in more recently that we started these live streams on March 24th.
And our very first one, we talked about masks.
This is before the WHO, this is before the Surgeon General had said, oh, oops, sorry, our bad.
That was actually a political move, not a scientific one.
It turns out masks are useful.
After all, we just have a shortage.
So, you know, we were advocating for this before the mainstream was.
If anybody's pro-mask, it's us.
But I think, you know, I really want to emphasize what you just said.
I've landed in exactly the same place, which is that there is a missing category here, which is, okay, that person's anti-mask, they're not wearing a mask even in close quarters, okay?
I do think that there's some shame that belongs there unless there's a very good reason that they're not wearing it.
Right?
And then there's the pro-mask people who are now broadcasting that they're a pro-mask in circumstances where you should take a break and you should not be wearing your mask because you need a break.
And then there's a third category which is people who are operating a high quality model of the infectious problem here and they are using their mask accordingly.
Right?
And so that category needs not to be shamed by the always pro-mask people even if they're going to be always pro-mask.
And you know I've heard At one point, Joe Rogan, you know, he was in comedy mode and he was joking about people who drive around with their masks.
And it was funny, but I also know I have, especially in the early days of this, driven around with my mask.
Not because I was afraid in the car alone that I was going to get an infection or that it was going to blow in the window, but because before we understood that so much of this is airborne and it's not really about surfaces, there was a question about touching your mask in order to pull it up and take it down.
And so, you know, if you had two stops that were close together, or if your mask is comfortable enough, then the point is, oh, you just leave it up.
It's not that much of an imposition.
So somebody with a sophisticated model should not be shamed by anybody.
Yeah.
And yet here we have, in Oregon, where indoor mask use in any public space is required, as of, I don't know, a week or two ago, and as of, well, I think it might be tomorrow, but the order came down yesterday, wearing masks outdoors is required by law at risk of fine if you cannot socially distance by six feet.
Now, there's a lot in that caveat, of course, if you cannot socially distance by six feet, but you know, to this woman's concern about people going out into nature and hiking several miles without a mask on trails where they may at some point cross paths with someone else, no, you should not have to wear a mask then.
You should not have to be wearing a mask while you're hiking several miles in a hundreds of acres state park.
Right.
Absolutely it should not be the requirement.
You should have one with you.
At this point, you know, at this point, unfortunately, it's become a thing that everyone needs to be carrying with them.
Your key, you know, an ID, probably some method of payment, and almost everyone has their damn phone on them.
But a mask is one of those things you need to have with you if you're going out into public.
But do you have to have it on your face when you're outside for the most part?
No, you should not.
And I worry that this new order from the governor of Oregon suggests a creep towards anytime you leave your home you've got to wear a mask.
Right.
Which is going to then send the, you know, already huge mental health crisis that is looming and relatively small I think yet physical health crisis that is looming that is going to tip that into a giant physical health crisis because lots of people who are still able to run and bike and play tennis and hike Won't do so if they have to wear a mask.
They may not be able to.
It may just be the thing that pivots them from, okay, I'm going to get over myself, my activation potential, I'm going to do it, to I'm just going to stay home and eat chips.
Right?
It's going to be the thing that makes a difference.
And the damn clock is ticking.
Yeah.
Right, it's time.
If you're going to hike, if you're going to bike, this is the moment, right?
We've got a limited number of months to do this and the kicker here is that the vitamin D connection suggests actually you better make vitamin D while the sun shines, right?
Which means if you're being held back by anything now, the cost is later.
What does the cost come in terms of?
COVID risk, right?
Are you going to get it and how bad is it going to be?
So that you want to build up in the bank vitamin D so that when you are faced with winter, you're in much healthier condition from the point of view of resisting an infection.
So we got to get this, we got to get this dialed in and we just don't have it, right?
We're really screwing up the There's just too much rule of thumb, right?
There's too much rule of thumb and there's too much politicizing of it, right?
It's become a political issue and we definitely have President Trump to thank for that to a large degree.
You know, someone who goes into public and refuses to wear a mask even when everyone else around him is doing so, which happened at least a few times in May, if I remember correctly.
It creates a model for his supporters.
It says something like, if you're a real man, you don't wear a mask.
Well, sorry, no.
The virus doesn't care what your political position is, as we've said many times before.
Yes, and then there's the next phase, which is that for a long time, this intentional conflation with flu, right?
This is flu-like.
Maybe it's a little worse than the flu.
Maybe it's worse than the flu for people who are very old.
No, no, no, no, no.
This is a desperate misunderstanding of the virus we face.
And I was going to encourage people... Hey Zach, do you want to put up that subreddit that I gave you?
I happened, I didn't know the subreddit existed, although in retrospect I should have thought that it might.
This is a subreddit of people who have tested POSI.
You want to scroll down a little bit?
Let's see.
Keep going.
Stop up a little bit.
OK, here's one of many, many horror stories, right?
I'm only 21 and I don't think I'm going to make it.
Now, here's what you will find if you search this, and this is beginning to be dealt with in the mainstream press as well.
Not the not the super big papers, but the press is beginning to catch on to the fact that there is a lot of life being lost in people who recover.
Right?
That the point is, you get back from the flu, and actually I would argue that you probably have knocked some of your longevity off, but you recover more or less fully from the flu.
People are dealing months out with the most terrible, mysterious kinds of symptoms because, as they describe it in this forum, Accurately.
This is a virus that attacks vital organs, right?
It attacks your circulatory system.
It creates blood clots.
So the point is, the list of symptoms is huge and the ongoing hazard to you is also very large.
We've known for months there have been stories of respiratory reduced function after recovery from COVID, but the cognitive function being less.
I have not seen the scientific paper that relates this yet, But many journalistic accounts and other anecdotal accounts of people who say they have brain fog, they're unable to find the kind of thoughts and motivation that they are accustomed to having and that they had before they were infected.
Now, Of course, some of that with regard to motivation, many of us, I would say all of us, have been affected by lockdown.
You cannot predict in advance what that will do, but people reporting that post-recovery they don't have the same brain they recognized from before tells us exactly as you said.
As we said back in one of the episodes, 1 through 18, when we were largely focusing on this, That just looking at deaths is a really reductionist way to assess what the damage from this virus is.
Yes, it misses because the point is if you have a decade or two knocked off your life by virtue of the damage done to your internal organs, you want to count that.
The fact that you didn't die in the hospital is not the sum total of the story.
So let's talk a little bit about why people are dying less and why I would say if we didn't explicitly predict it, it was implicitly predicted by many of the things we said.
The fact is you have a brand new virus.
It is spreading like wildfire and doctors are seeing it in large numbers, right?
Those doctors are fielding it best they can based on the next nearest phenomenon that they know.
And a lot of it turns out to have been counterproductive or ineffective.
And they learned, right?
They may not even fully understand what they've learned.
Some hospitals may have learned better than others, but doctors in contact over the internet will have exchanged information and they're getting better at dealing with COVID patients.
And we highlighted early on in late March and early to mid-April, for instance, a few doctors saying, I'm not sure ventilators is the right way to go.
This doesn't look like that kind of disease.
Why have we formulated it that way?
And this to your point that it could well be that in fact care for people with this disease is simply getting more effective.
Care for this will get more effective.
It will continue to get more effective.
Another thing that happens is evolutionarily hosts get less affected by disease.
Now the evolution that accounts for that is primarily on the host side.
The virus may also have an interest in not damaging the host so much that it doesn't walk around and spread it.
But nonetheless, there's also evolution.
So in this case, probably there hasn't been enough death yet to account for this.
But the idea is, what if you had some fraction of the population that was spectacularly likely to contract and die from this virus by virtue of some molecular feature of its cell surface or something like that?
Then a lot of those people would have been caught in the first wave.
That means that those of us who remain are in the category, we're more likely to be in the category of people who aren't quite that vulnerable.
Can I do one of these English-to-English translations here?
Wonderful.
Really, just to exactly restate what you just said, there will be some range of effects for any pathogen.
Let's just make up some numbers here.
Maybe 20% of a population will be affected very badly and die no matter what.
And another 60% there is some range of possible effects, maybe 20% have almost no symptoms at all.
And those numbers are not reflective of what's going on with COVID, I just made up some numbers.
But when the pathogen first starts to hit a population, everyone in that 20% who is infected will die.
everyone in that 20% who is infected will die.
And those people are then no longer in the population.
And so you will see that 20% shrink and shrink and shrink over time such that what the original numbers were will change, and therefore the CFR, the case fatality rate, will change as well and will decrease.
Yeah, so don't be misled by the CFR dropping thing that we were being told a more dire story than we actually have on our hands.
This is actually quite dire, and if you think it's not, I would encourage you to go to that subreddit and look at the story after story of people dealing with terrible symptoms that you just really don't want to have to deal with.
I must say, even though I think we are incredibly conscious and vigilant about this, I even spooked myself reading this stuff.
It was like, wow, do you just not want to be in these people's shoes?
And, you know, I hate to say that because I don't want to add to their burden, like, you know, we're distancing ourselves from them.
But wow, they are a cautionary tale.
And we ought to be thinking very carefully, just as you and I have said.
In some sense, we just have game theory problem after game theory problem.
And one of the game theory problems here is that, you know, okay, the US screws up its COVID response.
Okay, the US is now a Petri dish in which COVID is now learning new tricks and the rest of the world is going to have to deal with the downstream effects of our botching the lockdown.
I mean, the rest of the world does have to, although now Americans can't even go anywhere.
Like, there are only a handful of countries.
I don't remember, maybe it's something between 10 and 15.
Maybe, you know, a dozen countries-ish where Americans are allowed to travel at the moment.
And it's Mexico, and it's basically a smattering of island nations in the Caribbean.
You can go to Ecuador with a 14-day quarantine on the other end.
But pretty much, I think, all of Europe, all of Asia, all of Africa are off limits.
This is new for Americans, right?
We're accustomed to be able to go wherever we want.
It's easy to get visas if you need visas at all, and the rest of the world has looked at what we've done and looked at what is happening now and said, nope, we, the rest of the world, largely did a far better job than you did, and you and your infection are not welcome here.
Right, which is scary because, you know, there are a lot of things that could happen going forward.
One of them is we could be four years out from a vaccine if a vaccine is even conceivable here.
And I do think a vaccine is likely, but, you know, the The best experts in the world of vaccines are not hopeful about one in the next year, right?
That's not to say it's impossible.
I have seen some stuff that's hopeful, but there's also hype and it's very hard to separate those two things.
So how long exactly are we going to go being unable to travel?
You know to the rest of the world, right?
That's another that's an entirely different set of costs that we're gonna start paying and it's gonna have profound economic implications so anyway, and and for those of us for some of us and it's it's a it's a small effect in the global list of effects, but have tremendous mental health effects Oh tremendous mental health effects, but Yeah, I mean look we're talking about A world we did not prepare for, right?
And one in which we cannot travel to other places.
There are things that require travel and...
So, there's a question, which is really, okay, we just got slapped, right?
We learned a lesson, which is that bravado stuff was not going to get you through this by virtue of just, you know, bucking up and letting some people die and, you know, we'd get to the other end and herd immunity and all of that.
We're facing a renewed nightmare, and a renewed nightmare that we now have, in some ways, fewer tools to deal with because we've already blown one lockdown.
And so, Whatever we need to do now is less palatable to us.
So what if we had done?
You proposed this probably 1st of May, okay?
Most of America had already been in some form of lockdown for, gosh, five or six weeks at that point.
And you said then, 1st of May, everyone is already exhausted.
You said, what we need is an actual full lockdown for six weeks, everywhere.
That would clobber this virus.
And then, and then we could actually reopen.
Well, it would clobber it if you then followed up properly.
Yes, and so if during those six weeks you were generating tests and mass-producing tests so that at the end of lockdown you could do active test and trace and actually know who was sick and who wasn't and not have this sort of A smattering of half-assed tests with high failure rates and not enough of them and no tracing.
Simply a full lockdown wouldn't have been sufficient, but we did not have an appropriate lockdown.
And even when you said this, something like May 1st, not here, but privately at our dinner table, My reaction was, people won't do it.
It's already too late.
It's already too late to convince people.
And that was now over two months ago.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
We would have been long since past that if we had done it then.
Yeah.
I mean, this is exactly a mirror for, frankly, for Unity 2020.
Just wait until 2024 when things will be, what, better?
You think it'll be better by then?
It's not going to be better.
Yes, it's already too late, but it's only going to get more too late.
Yes, it's only going to get more too late is a, I like that formulation.
I think we should adopt it because it's clumsiness exactly reflects the clumsiness of our stupid situation.
But yeah, the fact is now we need a real lockdown and there's no way to do it well.
I'm sorry friends.
We gotta I hate to say it, but I don't know that we have another choice because I mean a this sort of Bleeds into the next conversation that we're gonna have but you know, let's do it We've got a question about school and then doing what to do about it upcoming And, you know, there's nuance here.
The very young kids seem unlikely, even if they catch it, to transmit it.
So there's talk of letting kids in grade school go back, but not high school.
Yeah, I've seen some proposals and these things are changing daily such that even what I thought I knew yesterday I can no longer find online, but the conversations in American schools seem to be sort of trending towards there have been very few, if any, cases known to be have been transmitted in elementary school and elementary school children so therefore don't seem to transmit nor get infected.
Middle schoolers more so, high schoolers more yet, and so there have been proposals to do things like totally virtual schooling for high schoolers at least through January 2021, some kind of hybrid system for middle schoolers, you know, two days on every week, and then in-person schooling for elementary school kids.
All of which is horrible.
Not only horrible, but to the extent that we let some schools reopen, we're playing with fire.
Fire that we shouldn't be playing with, right?
We had choices.
They are being eliminated without our asking them to be eliminated or inviting it.
And at some level, Winter is coming.
I mean, it just simply is, right?
So, I mean, you know, I'm speaking as if everybody lives in the Northern Hemisphere, which almost everyone does, but I know that there are some holdouts down there in Australia.
And if you're in New Zealand, well done.
I should say, well done.
That was good planning on your part.
Yeah, well done.
No, no, not the people who chose to live there.
I mean, the political structure that demolished COVID-19 in New Zealand.
Oh, well I believe it was excellent planning for everybody on the islands to be there, and it was good planning of them to use effective governance to... I do think you're giving the Kiwis more credit than they deserve.
Alright, now you're the one who's going to get cancelled by Kiwis.
Yes, because I call them Kiwis.
We have a New Zealand friend, she calls herself a Kiwi.
Alright, so here's the thing.
You're gonna start playing this game with schools, right?
A. Not everybody in those schools, even the grade schools, is a kid, right?
B. Okay, new Petri dish.
We got kids.
Can the virus figure out how to infect the kids?
Right?
Now, again, this just occurs to me off the top of my head, but...
I think a lot of what's going on with this virus would be well explained if it had leaked from a laboratory that was using, let's say, human tissues, right?
Human tissues that had been engineered not to hit their hayflick limits.
That means special human tissues like tumor tissues, right?
That have dysregulation of their epigenetic nature, which means that the virus would be in a chaotic set of cells and it would be learning how to infect different organs because even if you took lung Cancer tissue.
It might be expressing epigenetic phenomena from other tissues like liver.
So, one of the things that might be true is, you know whose tumors you don't tend to see in laboratories as experimental material?
I got this one.
Do you?
Children.
Children!
My goodness.
Yeah.
So, I mean, look, I don't know how far this goes, but let's just say one possibility is... It's consistent.
It doesn't transmit outdoors because laboratories are indoors.
It doesn't transmit to children because the tissues in question tend to be adult tissues.
It tends to be, you know, capable of jumping lots of boundaries because that's what you would train it to do in a serial passage experiment.
This sounds verificationist, and we would want to test all of these, but these are predictions from the idea that this was lab-generated.
They are subsidiary hypotheses.
The nature of the epidemiology and the symptomatology is the result of training a virus in a lab, both intentionally and inadvertently, because of the way lab techniques work.
So, for those of you who are still thinking, maybe it doesn't matter where it came from because we've still got to deal with it.
No, it matters a lot where it came from.
It's going to evolve differently if it jumped from a bat or a pangolin than if it was created especially from tumor tissues that don't have Hayflick limits, which you mentioned that being cells that do not have an endpoint that it could just keep replicating indefinitely.
Those cells will act differently, and therefore viruses that can be transmitted via those cells will act differently than any other naturally occurring virus.
Yeah, and the fact is, even if this came from the wild, even if it came directly from a bat, somehow, by some means, we do not know.
We don't know that it did yet.
And until we know that it did, you cannot shut down these hypotheses that suggest this may be a central player in the epidemiology and the other phenomenology associated with this virus.
So, we need to know.
And if what we prove is that actually through some mechanism we don't get, it came directly from a bat, great.
That would be really positive.
But, it's not looking likely, I gotta tell you.
Yeah.
So, what do we do?
Is that where we're going next?
We have more to say about school.
Yeah, quite a bit actually.
So our friend Keiko Kawabe, who's online on Twitter as Keiko in Boston for those who are looking for a follow, she just does extraordinary research into unexpected things.
Yeah, an awesome follow.
She is amazing.
So it's Keiko in Boston.
So she pointed us to this egregious action that just happened in Michigan.
Where even though Governor Whitmer, I think it is in Michigan, had declared that probation violations would not result in jail time, something like this.
She had declared something basically to give a break to both people and potentially the system during COVID-19, despite that a 15-year-old girl in Michigan who has, among other things, an IEP, an Individualized Education Plan, and a history of mood disorders, and sort of a difficult relationship with her mother who is the only parent in the household, but a loving one, didn't do her homework when school transitioned to online in March.
She didn't do her homework.
Wow.
And she was sent to juvenile detention as a result.
Not doing her homework was a violation of her probation, the judge declared.
So Keiko points out in a thread about this, and there's a story in ProPublica, Publica?
Publica?
ProPublica?
Let's go Publica.
Okay, so ProPublica has a story which we'll link to in the description or the pinned comment on this.
But Keiko points out that the judge wrote in her decision that Grace, the 15-year-old in question, quote, is a threat to community as original charge was assault and theft.
That assault and theft being a skirmish with her mother in which both parties have since apologized.
So she was deemed a threat to the community for not doing her homework.
How is this justice?
Keiko asks, which of course, it's not justice.
More to the point though, this so points to the failure of virtual schooling and a misunderstanding of what school is.
This virtual classroom garbage imagines that school was about sitting in classrooms doing rote tasks and memorization.
That's not education.
That's not education, people.
We have a lot to say about this in general and in the book that we're writing, but I'd love to read two pages from John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, a 2009 book.
Before you do that, I have a technical question.
Is there a statute of limitations on Having done your homework, because I may, it's possible I missed some assignments.
Yeah, yeah, and I think both of our children are in trouble, too.
I mean, I'm the only one.
You're going to have to come to me for your bail, guys.
Okay, so just a couple pages.
This book is extraordinary.
This guy, John Taylor Gatto, won – let's see, I did not go back and think about his biography.
He's since died, but he won, I think, New York State's Teacher of the Year Award at least once.
And he was a teacher for decades in the New York public school system, and he railed against the destruction of children through schooling.
All of those things are true.
And he says here, Let me just say one more thing about the book, though.
I recommend this book very, very highly.
He does, unfortunately, like Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility, misunderstand many good liberals with no background in science, and specifically no background in evolutionary thinking, conflate social Darwinism with an evolutionary understanding of human behavior.
That's a bit irritating in the beginning of the book, if you do read his history of compulsory education.
Other than that, I find little to disagree with here.
He says, Let me tell you a little bit about Fat Stanley, whose path crossed mine when he was 13.
Stanley only came to class one or two days a month, and I knew that sooner or later he would be caught in the truancy net and prosecuted.
I liked Stanley, not least because he never whined when other kids bothered him because he was fat.
He simply punched them so hard in the head nobody ever bothered Stanley a second time.
I hope to spare him the grim experience of becoming a social service case.
As Grace became a social service case.
So I asked him one day what he did on all those absences.
What he said changed my life.
I never saw school the same way after Stanley spoke.
It seems that Stanley had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before the age of 21.
His aim was to follow in their footsteps.
Even at 13, he had been made aware of time's winged chariot hurrying near, that he had only eight years to make the miracle of an independent livelihood.
One of the relatives was a florist, one a builder of unfinished furniture, one a deli owner, one had a little restaurant, one owned a delivery service.
Stanley cut school to work without pay for each of these relatives, bartering labor in exchange for learning the businesses, and a whole lot more, working in the company of men and women who cared for him much more than any professional stranger would have.
It was a better educational package than whatever he missed cutting school, hands down.
As he put it to me, man to man, quote, this way I get a chance to see how the different businesses work.
You tell me what books I have to read and I'll read them, but I don't have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like you, working for somebody else.
When I heard that, I couldn't keep him locked up in good conscience.
Besides, his mother agreed with Stanley.
So I began to cover for him, logging him present when he was marking floral bouquets or building furniture.
None of his other teachers ever asked.
I think they were glad to be rid of him.
To illustrate the powerful energies at work under his fat, deceptively cheerful exterior, Stanley crossed his Ts with a pointed spear formation, not a simple line.
Right then and there, I adopted his T-cross as my own to remind me what I learned from a truant that day.
A big secret of bulk process schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn.
A bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach self-direction at all.
Stanley style is verboten.
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever.
And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
School is the first impression we get of organized society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers.
Like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us.
Work in classrooms isn't important work.
It fails to speak to real needs pressing on the young.
It doesn't answer burning questions which day-to-day experience forces upon young minds.
Problems encountered outside school walls are treated as peripheral, when in truth they are always central.
The net effect of making work abstract, subject-centered, external to individual longings and fears and experiences and questions, is to render students of this enforced irrelevance listless and indifferent.
The causes for sluggishness in the young have been well understood for a long time.
I'm tempted to say forever.
Growth and self-mastery are reserved for those who vigorously self-direct like Stanley.
Planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out on your tormentors.
But this is precisely the agenda school is set up to prevent.
Think of school as a conditioning laboratory, drilling naturally unique, one-of-a-kind individuals to respond as a mass, to accept continual ennui, envy, and limited competence as only natural parts of the human condition.
The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, passive, anxious, friendless, familyless people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap.
People who think the difference between Coke and Pepsi or round hamburgers versus square ones are subjects worthy of argument.
Reminds me of George Carlin saying that the purpose of school was to make you just smart enough to operate the machines.
Yeah, there's a lot.
I can't, I mean, you know how much I resonate with that.
I will say, in my case, the teachers and professors who figured out a way to cover for me and break the rules for me were the ones that were the whole reason I was able to get through school.
I mean, and you know, in the end, My advisor, Dick Alexander, was the ultimate one of these.
One day I had to get a signature of his.
I went out to the ranch that he lived on.
Farm.
It was a working farm, right?
He baled his own hay and all this stuff.
And I biked out there, it was a long way, I biked out there with my form to say that I had had a committee meeting this year, which I hadn't.
Of course you hadn't!
I biked out there and I got off my bike and I walked up to the fence of the paddock and he rode over on his horse.
Because he was an old guy already at that point.
Yeah, he was at least in his 70s.
And I said, I need your signature, Dick.
And he says, oh, well, what's this for?
I said, it says I had a committee meeting this year.
And he said, is this the meeting?
I mean, that was classic.
But anyway.
You know, less people misunderstand the story.
It's not that you weren't constantly engaging with him and with your peers, our colleagues and the other faculty and all of us.
You just, you didn't, you didn't do it by form.
You didn't do it formulaically.
I couldn't.
You didn't do it as you were supposed to.
I didn't do it as I was supposed to.
I didn't even, you know, my dissertation didn't end up on the topic I was supposed to be working on, but it did end up.
No bats at all.
Yeah, the bats don't show up in it.
But, you know, yeah, you're right.
It's not like I didn't do something useful.
It's not like I didn't, it just, the regular rules weren't going to work and he knew that.
He appreciated, you know, although he was very good at the rules in a way that I never could have been.
He also just spotted that some people don't fit them and it's worth bending rules for those people sometimes.
Yeah, I will say, I mean this is probably not the place, but so this was at University of Michigan where we both got our PhDs.
I'd always had a lovely time in school, but I didn't have any biology background until we met Bob Trivers late in college.
Whereas you had been doing biology since you could walk basically, but had always had a completely lousy time in school and basically needed nothing more than to be left alone by it.
And so, you know, we had very different experiences walking into that system.
And I know, I've seen evidence that the University of Michigan, which was really the first public university system in the United States that tried to become a premier, an elite university system, and it did.
But it managed, at least that department, Department of Biology then and the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology managed to find ways to laud both of us with our very different approaches and backgrounds and skill sets and all of this.
We both won, each of us won different of their highest awards that they had to offer for the work that we did there and to their credit that an institution could see both Someone coming in with almost no background who needed to self-teach and teach and learn on the fly, but who loved school, and someone who had tremendous background but no ability to play by the rules.
And you were always mistaken for someone who refused to play by the rules, and to some degree that's true, but to some degree it was also just Guys, I just can't do this, right?
Well, right.
The rules don't make sense.
Yeah.
You know, they do make sense for this kind of regimented training thing.
It's not how you train people to discover new stuff.
And so, you know, that's... I mean, the people who broke the rules on my behalf or bent them, it's not like they weren't frustrated with me, right?
But they also understood... Oh, we're all frustrated.
Yeah, I've begun to detect that pattern.
But, you know, the point is, look, what is the objective of the exercise, right?
Yeah, to Dick's credit, but not just Dick, right?
To many people's credit there.
They were constantly asking themselves, what is the point of this exercise?
How are we having this conversation about schooling for the fall?
Fall 2020 in the United States, and no one appears to be asking, what is the point of this exercise?
Children are not brains in jars.
They are not brains in jars.
We used to hear this from our Idiot colleagues at Evergreen, the faculty colleagues that we had, who basically said, I don't care who they are, what they think when they're outside of school, exactly what John Taylor Gatto was complaining about, right?
These students are effectively brains in jars.
No, they're not.
No one is.
We live in meat space, and it's more than living in meat space.
We are interfacing with the world through our senses and through hearing and smell and audition and through touch, and you can't learn entirely through a screen.
Yeah, well... You can't do it!
We also just completely botched the motivational aspect.
Yes.
So, you know, the reason I ended up the way I did was because school provides no useful model for motivation.
You found self-motivation because you were good at the job in school.
It wasn't what you were about, but the fact that you could get a reward from school for learning things that were totally worth learning made it functional, motivationally.
For me, I wasn't able to get that, so my experience at school was just constantly being slapped by it.
Now, that wrecks some people.
In my case, I was able to find other things that were rewarding enough to get me to do them that were actually educational, but it didn't fit.
You know, school kept asking, well, how are you doing on the assignment?
And the answer was, well, I'm not doing the assignment.
And so the answer is failure, dumb track, all that stuff.
And exactly this, right?
School is carrot and stick model.
But in your case, the stick didn't kill you.
And in my case, the carrot wasn't the reward I was looking for.
The carrot that I got, the actual reward, was, oh, I got whatever the opposite of dumb tracking is, and I got into classes that were amazing.
You know, why do I have this pile of books from 10th grade where I was reading Mao and Lenin and Marx and Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and all of this?
And, you know, people who were dumb-tracked were being forced to learn what a preposition was.
Does it really matter what a preposition is?
I never had to do that.
And the fact is that I got exposed to the great ideas and terrible ideas of the great thinkers throughout history, while people who were just as capable were being forced to memorize rules of grammar, which of course you're going to hate school if that's what you're being exposed to.
So I want to give a plug to the Black Intellectual Roundtable that has just come out on the Dark Horse podcast.
And the reason I want to do that here is there's probably the most painful moment in the whole thing for me, maybe the only painful moment in the whole thing for me, is we were having an argument about reparations and the panel did not agree, which was expected.
They're all publicly in different places on this issue.
And my point was, I don't think reparations is a good idea at all.
I don't think that remedy will work, but I think a remedy is justified.
And I was arguing that the remedy was investment in communities.
And in defense of that argument, I said something about tax bases telling you what kind of school you're going to have.
If you have a wealthy neighborhood with a big tax base, you'll have a good school.
And if you have a poor neighborhood, you'll have a bad one.
And I said, we know how to make a good school.
And I heard myself say it.
And I thought, what the hell did I just say?
I don't believe that.
We know how to make a better school.
We know how to make a worse school, but we don't know how to make a good school.
And Camille Foster, of course, caught me out on this.
And he's like, I don't think we do know how to make a good school.
And it was like, oh man, I can't believe I'm the one defending the nature of our schools.
Yeah.
We know how to be good educators.
And we know, therefore, that it is possible for individuals to be good educators.
But that does not mean that we know how to do it system-wide.
Yeah, I think what I mean is something like, there is no excuse for us not to know how to make a good school.
It's a totally solvable problem if you set out the right objectives and then figure out what works to meet them.
And you know, you and I have worked on an educational project based on our 15 years of experience at Evergreen, and what we concluded is that schools should look like You know exercises and games and experiences that you don't even doesn't feel like school things that teach you by virtue of the fact that you want to do them because they're fun, right?
That's what school should look like the only argument for how you should include campfires School is a campfire extended to a bunch of other realms so So, you know, the only excuse for having people sit in chairs and face forward to hear somebody talk in the bathroom.
Right.
The only excuse for that is that it's economically efficient.
And the fact is, it's Pennywise pound foolish not to put together awesome schools that make your population incredibly smart, because really what it takes is just a developmental environment that reinforces that stuff.
That's what smart is.
No, it's the educational manifestation of Taylorism.
It's how do you turn the Industrial Revolution and the need for factory workers into the production of a population that is willing to do that work.
Yeah.
So I love John Taylor Gatto.
He reminds me that, you know, we've got the let's burn it down camp when it comes to school, and school is great camp, and he's from the let's burn it down but only after we get everybody out of it camp, which I think is about the right answer.
Yeah, that's right.
I guess just one more thing that needs to be said about school.
Is that the prospect of schools remaining closed this fall, especially if that includes elementary school kids who are the most at risk at home if they have bad home lives, means that some children may not have had an adult eye on them outside of their family for closing in on a year and that the number of
Cases of abuse and worse are likely to skyrocket.
To skyrocket.
For lots of reasons.
Because the adults are more stressed, the kids won't have eyes on them.
Yeah.
Yeah, all kinds of reasons.
So that is a huge danger.
One of many in this case.
So I wanted to just lay out the basics of what we ought to be doing to get out of this pickles.
And I actually think that school is the thing that we should be shooting for.
We should be shooting to be in a situation where we can afford to open up school on the far side of this.
And so, I mean, it's very simple.
You need to tell us that we're going to lock down at the maximum possible level for something like six weeks, right?
Now, obviously it can't be 100%.
You have to be able to go to the hospital, but by and large, if we had enough warning, People could stock up whatever financial resources were necessary in order to allow people to stock up could be generated and then it's a question of you know if you have spent time at the beach you hold your breath and you go under the wave right?
Six weeks or something of the maximum conceivable, the maximum plausible lockdown that causes the virus to bounce whatever routes it has and burn itself out for the most part.
It won't be a hundred percent, but it will be close, right?
And then intense testing and tracing on the far end with dealing with flare-ups as spot fires, basically.
And I would say if this can't be done at a national level for some reason and frankly it was the right thing to do months ago and it remains the right thing to do even though it's now harder then it is not inconceivable to me at least that individual states could decide to solve their problem and the difficulty with that is then they have to police their borders, right?
And that may not even be constitutional because the nature of our federation is that citizens can move freely between the states but At some level, if this is an epidemiological crisis, just the same way that crises result in a modification of the way we see your constitutional rights in general, we might have to do something.
And a state that doesn't want to be dragged down by a country that can't figure out how to do a lockdown might decide, you know what?
We're going to solve it in Montana, right?
We're going to solve it in Oregon.
And then, I mean, imagine the following thing.
Folks on the right typically are the ones advocating the laboratory of the states as this great idea.
I'm often skeptical of it because of the bad game theory.
But imagine the good game theory, the race to the top that emerges if a state figures out how to solve this problem and suddenly that state gets to go back to work.
Right?
Imagine the advantage to the state that figures out how to solve this problem, the kids get to go back to school, the workers get to go back to work, the economy fires up in this state, that state, and the other states have to follow suit.
So, you know, at some level, Laboratory of the States is often a catastrophe with respect to things like taxes, where we race to the bottom and nobody can collect the taxes to do the basic stuff, but in this case it could be raced to the top and we should seriously consider it.
All right, this is a very long pause.
Yeah, we've talked about this, and what I said earlier is true.
If it was too late then, it's even more too late now.
And yet it's also true that I have the extraordinarily human reaction of, oh my god, no.
Like, we can't.
But I also know that we won't, and that's mitigating my reaction, which is awful, because the mitigation of the reaction is just an understanding that this is politically non-viable.
Well, so here's the thing, right?
It's still summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and lockdown could mean go outside, right?
Lockdown in the winter, look, I think we got away with something at the tail end of the last cold season.
I guess I'm so if lockdown we're smarter yeah right so you know in I don't know if it's Portland or all of Oregon again just because it's the place where we live and so we know best all the public swimming pools are closed when there is again effectively no or very little evidence that water becomes infected when you swim in it and that you can get COVID-19 from swimming in a pool even with someone who's infected you know unless again it's it's airborne at you
And we should be opening up that stuff even as we, and I guess Newsom, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California has just as of yesterday maybe closed down all bars again and all indoor seating in restaurants.
You know, they did three counties in California, including the one that my mother lives in, were the first to close down in anywhere in the U.S.
And California locked down pretty effectively thereafter, but then they opened up and things went haywire.
But the entire thing was just this half-assed mosaic of, oh, we're going to close down beaches.
Why are you closing down beaches?
What is wrong with you people?
Like, don't close down the beaches, don't close down the pools, don't close down the nature areas, don't close down Columbia River Gorge.
Waterfall.
Waterfalls.
You can't go to waterfalls at Columbia River Gorge still.
This makes no sense.
So we can say that at the same time that we can say, even though I hate it, we may just need more lockdown, but not dumb lockdown.
Lockdown needs a rebranding, I have to tell you.
I felt from the beginning that that term, you know, it has this prison connotation.
And it's got, you know, I don't know what the right version of this is, but the Northern Hemisphere, the sun is shining.
We could do this such that we spend time outside.
We check back in with stuff that matters, with family.
We could commune over the internet.
I mean, what a marvelous tool this is.
If you're going to be locked down, You can still talk to people globe wide.
You know, we have to understand, look, we've got advantages.
Let's draw on them now and let's do what needs to be done so we can drive this thing to extinction.
Because otherwise, we're just going to be stuck with this puzzle for who knows how long.
And believe me, you do not want to get this thing and get better based on what that looks like.
Yeah.
It's too dangerous.
Yeah.
Can we pivot?
Sure.
Right, exactly an hour.
Okay, well this might be one of the last things we do.
Nope, wrong.
Okay, my trackpad is once again not really working.
There we go.
Zach, you want to just show this?
So this was posted as a response to your tweet of today's livestream, Brett.
Okay?
So, you know, a version of this meme we've all seen.
For those listening, not watching, you got the dude whistling at a girl passing while the young woman he's with is looking at him in disgust.
And the dude is Yang Gang, and the woman he's whistling at is a progressive Republican, and the woman he's with but not looking at is Democratic establishment.
I saw this, so you can take it down, Zach.
I saw this and I thought, okay, I've never heard the term progressive Republican before, but I think that's what my dad was.
I think that's actually what my dad was, and I think it was episode 6, I talked a bit about my dad.
It was the 7th anniversary of his death, I think.
And I'm not going to replay a lot of that now, but my dad and I were very close, and we loved each other dearly.
And I never understood his politics growing up.
My parents tended to cancel out each other's votes in presidential elections.
My mother always voted Democrat, my father always voted Republican, my father voted for Reagan twice, and at the end of his life he voted for Obama twice.
And part of that Was that he actually, you know, he wasn't a conservative through and through.
He was really a progressive Republican.
And part of that is that, you know, you and I, Brett, got together so young, when we were 20, and that you and I and my father spent a lot of late evenings with bottles of wine.
Talking.
And he moved.
You know, he shifted some.
He did.
He did not, you know, he dismissed, you know, I don't want to say our perspective as if it was one perspective, but we were coming from roughly the same place.
And he dismissed it at first.
And he definitely was won over to the idea that we were on about something.
And he also convinced us of a fair number of things.
So, I think there was a way in which he had a kind of Right of center perspective that was born of a healthy skepticism of solution making which is a very important because solution making which you only see the upside is just a lethal hazard.
Well, he had grown up on a farm in northeastern Iowa, and he was born in 1938.
His father, my grandfather, was actually elected as, I don't remember what his position was, it was like county commissioner or something.
I don't think that's quite right, but he was a Democrat.
Harold Hein was a Democrat.
If memory serves, the stories that I've heard from my father and also from my Aunt Shirley, that Harold, my grandfather, would come home and complain about the ways that basically the state and the regulations were getting in the way of his ability to do right by the farmers whom he knew.
And I think in large part because of my father growing up in that milieu, seeing a functional farm and a dedicated patriot, his father, who himself was a lifelong Democrat, struggling against the regulations that were imposed by people who didn't know what they were doing.
My father sort of swung over to the, okay, well then we need to reduce regulations side of things.
Yeah.
He also, just in his professional life, Um, was, I mean, had no prejudice, right?
Yeah.
He was a mentor to people in computer science who were coding for the various projects that he worked on.
And it was clear he didn't care if you were a woman or you're black or, didn't matter.
He just, he took all comers and... It's so interesting you say that because in none of this conversation, obviously I knew him so I know that to be true, but it didn't even occur to me that people would be listening to this thinking, oh he's a Republican, well he's probably a racist.
Like, no.
Most people who are conservatives or Republicans aren't.
Well, I agree.
But I mean, I'm stepping it back even... Look, lots of people who I wouldn't call racist have some prejudice.
They prejudge, right, on the basis of something.
And in computer science, especially likely... Which is where my father was.
Yeah.
Especially likely as a matter of sex.
And you know, You're the product of his not having that prejudice.
Right.
Right.
Because the point was he, you know, it's not like he was indifferent to the fact that you were a girl, but he certainly didn't change how he approached you intellectually.
I had math brain, he had math brain, and he taught me everything from statistics to calculus and, you know, made me do my elementary school homework in binary on occasion.
So, yeah, I didn't.
And I think, you know, I think you took on what is traditionally a more male mindset.
And I think it's actually one of the reasons that you do Stuff like this so well is that you're actually capable of seeing things from different perspectives that are often, you know, relegated to one side of that line or the other.
But that was a set of lessons largely instantiated in and by my father.
Yep.
Yeah, it was.
So anyway, I bring him up in part because I think, you know, I'd never thought to call him a progressive Republican, but I would just love to be hearing what he is thinking about this moment.
You know, he wouldn't have voted for Trump, I know that.
Yeah.
What would he be doing right now?
You know, I think he would be excited about, but skeptical of, unity 2020.
Yeah, which is a wise position, you know?
And it would be great if we had him to bounce this stuff off of because he would no doubt have interesting insights about it.
So yeah, yeah, progressive Republican is a good description, you know, and maybe a bit ahead of his time in that regard.
So, is that it?
Did you want to say something about this one last item before we sign off?
Yeah, I mean, it's so timely.
Yeah.
I think it makes sense.
So, hey Zach, do you want to put up Barry Weiss's letter of resignation?
So while Zach is doing that, we have two announcements of big names leaving mainstream media this week.
We have Andrew Sullivan leaving the New York Magazine, I think it's called, although he will explore some of his reasons for that this Friday, which I guess is going to be his last day.
And then Barry Weiss made public her resignation letter from the New York Times today, and this is on her website, and we'll post that link as well.
It's an extraordinary letter.
It's an extraordinary letter.
I want to put it in a little bit of context.
Good.
The thing is, okay, so Barry Weiss is a somewhat controversial person at the New York Times, but she has left the New York Times and what she does in her letter of resignation She describes the internal environment at the Times, right?
The ways in which her license to explore things journalistically that once existed has been backed off by basically a vindictive mob inside the Times that demonizes people publicly on their Slack channels and the like.
A mob which she believes to be a minority?
A minority of the people, yes, because there's, of course, the requisite culture of fear that goes along with this.
So you have a small number of very aggressive people.
You have a large number of people who can't say what they actually think.
It has effectively toppled The Times.
The Times is not a news organization based on what she says.
It is an organization that is broadcasting a particular perspective that, you know, we see in the 1619 Project and elsewhere.
And, you know, the problem is Not only does she give us a window into what's going on at the New York Times, but we can infer from what Matt Taibbi has said about what was going on in other newsrooms.
We can see by Andrew Sullivan and what he is apparently experiencing, which we're about to learn more about.
That there is, in the US at least, almost no, and maybe no, journalistic establishment that is not touched by this.
And that that is a frightening prospect, right?
To have an inability for journalists to Advance certain mainstream perspectives because a fringe has decided that those things are intolerable is It is obviously A prelude to the death of the Republic either we figure out a way to reverse that or there is no Republic You know Benjamin Franklin's a Republic if you can keep it was a warning and we won't be able to keep it if we can't talk about what we actually think and
And journalism is the place where this is supposed to be done at a high level.
So, we're in dire straits, and I highly recommend that you read Barry Wise's letter.
I look forward to seeing what Andrew Sullivan has said about his departure, and I guess stay tuned.
Yeah.
Well, so we will take about a 15-minute break and then come back with Q&A live stream.
We'll start with Super Chat questions from this one.
We're prioritizing by monetary level and then switch about halfway through to Super Chat questions from the live stream that we'll be doing then, the Q&A, and try to take them in the order in which you ask them.
Just one more time, you can find a private Discord server, access to it at both of our Patreons.
There's a Clips channel, Dark Horse Clips.
You can join Dark Horse membership at my Patreon at the $5 level and up.
Can they like and subscribe to the channel?
I think they can.
They can like and subscribe to the channel.
They can comment.
That would be cool.
That would give us some feedback.
That's good stuff.
You always say that.
I don't look there.
I do.
I don't read them all, but I do catch comments and they do inform the way I think about things.
And you know what else?
There's Unity 2020, so that seems like a good idea.
Come find us.
Come find us on Twitter at Articles of Unity.
Check out our website and stay tuned!
If you sign up, you're going to see the amazing stuff that we are going to be releasing this week.