Bret and Heather 34th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Portland & Covid: What the Hell?
In this 34th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, lik...
Hey folks, welcome to the 34th live stream of the Dark Horse podcast here from Portland, Oregon, the center of all the confusion in the universe, it welcome to the 34th live stream of the Dark Horse podcast here Wow.
I'm right here with Dr. Heather Hying, as always, and we are going to try to navigate the confusion and see if we can't rescue some sense from it.
What do you say?
And at the point that we run out of confusion in Portland, we're going to talk about COVID.
We are not going to run out of confusion.
We may have to call a halt to our discussion of the confusion in Portland in order to get to the confusion surrounding COVID.
Yeah.
But let's just say there's plenty of confusion to go around.
There sure is.
Yeah.
All right.
So Portland, you've heard lots of things about what's going on in Portland and you've heard some Some efforts by us to try to correct the distortion.
But I wanted to start with a couple of concepts.
Alright.
The first one has to do with verificationism, which is something that you and I have thought an awful lot about in a scientific context.
And the reason it's relevant here is that A verificationist approach to sensemaking in science is devastatingly broken because it is very often that you can find evidence for a perspective in spite of the fact that the perspective is false.
Whereas if you seek to find evidence against a perspective and it is false, you will find more of that and you will disconfirm it.
And it is only when you find an explanation for something so robust that you can't find disconfirming evidence that you really know you're on to something.
And for fans of the history of epistemology who are out there, we can attribute the origin of this idea to Karl Popper.
To Karl Popper, exactly.
So a Popperian view is a falsificationist view, and all of those of us who pay attention to the philosophy of science, which is a little bit of a dry discipline, but a very important one, we know that verificationists are a thing to be feared.
And what I see taking place in the news cycle is verificationist myth-making which is resulting in completely divergent and un-reconcilable portrayals of events that are factual, which should be able to be reported and then interpreted by viewers.
Instead, they are being pre-interpreted through a verificationist lens, leaving viewers to have totally discordant understandings of what took place and therefore have no ability to join together and discuss what to do about it.
I've got one perfect example of this.
All right.
I know you're going somewhere important, but one of the things I wanted to show was this sack, if you would put this up, from Harper's Weekly Review from today.
The very first sentence, Violent Client, and this is Harper's Magazine, one of the, you Biggest, best, oldest, most important monthly magazines of news and culture in the United States.
Violent clashes between police brutality protesters and law enforcement officers broke out in several American cities, it says.
And protests continued in Portland, Oregon, where the Trump administration has deployed members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or TAC.
A unit that normally conducts high-risk raids against smugglers along the border.
Two counter-demonstrators equipped with umbrellas, bicycle helmets, and pool noodles.
Wow.
Pool noodles, it says.
That does sound like a bit of an overreaction.
Oh yeah, why on earth should the members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit be sent in as a response to people armed with pool noodles?
Pool noodles.
Yeah, pool noodles don't seem all that dangerous or destructive.
I noticed that absent from that description is anything about nightly arson, about projectiles being launched, explosives, lasers being pointed into the eyes of the officers.
All those things seem to be absent.
Power tools being brought in to take down the barriers erected, and even just when we went down there on Saturday night, things like hockey sticks.
I didn't see any pool noodles, but I did see hockey sticks.
Not a single pool noodle.
No.
Yeah.
Maybe we weren't there late enough for the pool noodles.
Wow, they only break out the pool noodles when the thing really gets going.
Yeah, so it is interesting to be here in Portland, to be able to observe the events directly, and then to read about them in publications that you have subscribed to and understand that there is actually no reality to what is being portrayed.
Now I will say I see some of this on the other side too, right?
We sometimes hear that, you know, Portland is in flames, which is absolutely not the case.
Most of Portland is unaffected.
There is a large area in downtown that has damage evident from the initial riots, but the nightly...
It's not two square blocks, it's much more than that, but it's also not all of Portland.
And this is actually, this is the point when we were down there on Saturday night with our friend Nancy Rom, and she was in town to report from, you know, a city that had been her home for 15 years.
And this was her first thought upon arriving.
Wow.
Where she landed was calm and beautiful, as is the Pacific Northwest in the summer.
And then you go down to this place at the right moment, and it does not look like a peaceful protest.
Well, sometimes it does.
But then again, I think what one has to understand is that the protest, like all protests, is interested in cultivating an understanding.
Now there are honorable protests in which the understanding that is being cultivated is, in some sense, an accurate representation of something.
But it can also be done deceptively.
And in this case, what we have is a reliable pattern in which A peaceful protest becomes a riot at some point in the evening, violence breaks out, attacks on these buildings break out, and what we are seeing is a portrayal of events that takes one bit of license and buys everything with it.
That one piece of license is that the cause and effect have been inverted.
So the portrayal you will see is that the federal government has attacked a peaceful protest and that is resulting in riots.
When in fact what we have is a city refusing to enforce its own laws and we've seen this ourselves downtown.
No police, no normal police presence around these buildings.
We have seen and heard of crimes being committed there.
There are some that are evident right in the park across the street and nobody's doing anything about them.
So the law is manifestly not being enforced and the attacks, the nightly attacks on the buildings necessitate some response.
Now the response could be let these people destroy these federal buildings.
Now of course the federal government has a mandate not to allow that to happen but Given that the local police will not step in, we have to ask, what is it that is supposed to happen?
Right?
And to your point about cause and effect being reversed, the fact is that if you just look at the timeline, the riots precede the sending in of additional federal troops.
There are apparently always federal troops inside the federal buildings because it is their job to defend them always and usually no one knows about them, thinks about them, hears them, sees them, anything.
But the tenor of the protests now is almost entirely about getting the feds out.
And in fact, this might be the moment to show a couple of the videos from last night, or from Saturday night rather.
But the fact is that the riots precede the presence of the new federal officers in Portland.
Therefore, this cannot be responsive to the new federal officers being in Portland.
It just doesn't work at a simple chronological level.
At a simple chronological level.
And you have to ask the question about why it is that federal property is under attack.
That has a meaning.
And in this case, I think it actually has two meanings, which is one, that there is actually antipathy for the United States.
It's visible in much of the graffiti.
And there is a very naive belief that the United States is some kind of unique evil in the world and that it must be undone.
So attacking federal property makes symbolic sense, if that was your perspective.
But also, there is a clear desire to precipitate a response from the Trump administration that can be portrayed as authoritarian overreach in order to justify the violent behavior on the part of these self-described progressives.
And so the whole thing is theater.
So do you want to show some of those?
Yeah, Zach, you want to start just by showing the photograph that I sent you of the, right outside the Federal Building, the site of all of this that is happening.
Someone flying a flag, and there were a few of these, someone flying an American flag upside down, such that it was easy to capture the You know, federal buildings, some of the graffiti on it, and the fence that's been erected around it.
And, you know, this is a clear, frankly, fuck America symbol.
Well... Flying the flag upside down.
I think it's one step more clever than that.
That is an artifact designed for a verificationist viewpoint.
If you hate America, you can find it in the flying of that flag upside down.
If you love America and you think it needs to do better, if you think things are screwed up, you can also find it in that upside down flag.
And so I think it's actually clever.
I feel like I'm a patriot who feels like America can do better for sure, and that has of course always been true and is probably always true for any complex political system, but clearly we could be doing better and could have been doing better, and yet it never would have occurred to me to display or try to communicate any kind of actual patriotism by flying a flag upside down.
Well, let me put it to you this way.
If you burn a flag, it's pretty unambiguous what you mean, right?
If you fly a flag upside down, I truly believe that even just the part of the mind that understands that to be a patriotic symbol gets conflicting messages and you will be allowed to read into it whatever it is.
That you want to read into it, which is part of the problem here is that almost everybody who is making excuses for what's going on in Portland and elsewhere is seeing what they want to see, right?
They've had a verificationist message put in front of them.
They've had ambiguity placed where they can do their own, some assembly required version of events in which, you know, this is peaceful protest.
It's an honorable tradition in America.
It is what the First Amendment is about, right?
Except for the fact that there's a reliable pattern in which the peaceful protest descends into violence each and every night against a federal building.
So, anyway, verificationism is the core here.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Zach, if you want to show maybe just 10 seconds or so of the video that's darker that I sent you in which they're chanting.
Hopefully, we couldn't hear that, but hopefully there was enough being shown there that you could hear the chants, which but hopefully there was enough being shown there that you could hear the chants, which is this sort of atonal nasal, all cops are All cops are bastards, A, C, A, B.
This is not during the part of the evening that things began to unravel.
Actually, this is during what would be widely considered the peaceful protest, and yet that is the chant.
That is the chant.
It is clearly divisive and hateful and dehumanizing.
And has no chance of reaching across borders between demographics.
And then finally, um, the other video, Zach, that I sent you, uh, which is a laser, there's, there's no reason I can talk over the sound on this because I'll just describe for those people who are still not watching.
There's a, a laser show of a, uh, on the federal building.
Maybe show it again, Zach.
Of, uh, of a pig.
This is being projected from the roof of a car at ground level onto the building.
becomes fuck that's what it says this is being projected from the roof of a car at ground level onto the building there's there's several projections onto the building yeah uh and uh there's there's no way to unite to imagine that the people that that are inside that building defending it could come to be your friends or allies when this is the messaging that's out there
Yeah, it is designed to be an unbridgeable gap.
It is designed to make this manifestation of our collective self, the federal government, into the enemy, which is of course preposterous.
And the reason that this is desired and plausible has to do with Trump, lightning rod, who couldn't possibly take an action that would be read as the right one.
If you name an action and you say that's what he should have done and then he does it, it will instantly become Overreach in the minds of those drawing this verificationist portrayal.
Did you want to go on to that?
It's up to you.
I just thought you might be going there.
We'll go there in a second.
Actually maybe we should go there first.
The wall of moms.
So, let me say, I encountered the Wall of Moms for the first time as I was riding my bike through downtown to get home, and I passed by the protests and just wanted to see what it was about.
And the Wall of Moms was there, I think it might have been their second night in existence.
This would have been a week ago today.
Yeah.
And I must say that in looking at the wall of moms, my conclusion was much what we had heard from the couple of people we knew who had seen it in the previous iteration, which was that there were people in the crowd who looked like they might be moms, but that the majority of these people looked like they weren't likely to be moms and they were just donning yellow shirts.
And of course, if you think about this from the perspective of a protest that's trying to make a visual point, Why would this be restricted to moms when the idea is that these are these are people who identify as moms for the purpose of making the response by the federal government look un-American?
Right.
And when we were down there three nights ago, we saw the sort of embankment of moms before they became the wall of moms, before they marched in front of the federal courthouse and did the performative part of what they do, which, you know, I don't think anyone's denying that.
Right.
That it's clearly performative, but what is being called into question, what we're calling into question, and what, you know, Donald Trump called into question a lot of other people, Is it organic?
Are these moms who felt the cry from the heart of these other mothers who've had their children slaughtered by racial violence at the hands of police out there on the streets to decry that?
I suspect that there are some people out there who really did feel that and are out there, but I think it nearly impossible that it explains everyone, and I think it quite possible, and at least a hypothesis we need to be considering, that this isn't organic, that it didn't start that way at all.
And to that point, I would suggest, just like we spent some time looking at the official Black Lives Matter site, there's an official The Wall of Mom site.
So Zach, if you can show this.
It begins with the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, which is at least in keeping, that's on message.
All right.
And it says, you know, it says what we're going to do, but check out the bullet points.
It's not as egregious as the Black Lives Matter website, but it's all the same language that we've been learning from Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi and all of this critical theory and critical race theory stuff.
We listen to black leaders.
We are here to follow their direction behind the scenes.
And at the Justice Center, we go where they tell us.
That's allyship in 2020, which is not, of course, allyship.
It is a form of Subjugation, yeah.
Our goal, it continues, is to push the media to turn the focus where it belongs.
Black leaders.
Oh, really?
Because Walla Walla seems to be taking a lot of the press at the moment.
We will use our white bodies, not our white voices.
Again, with this dehumanization focus on body stuff.
Bev, who was the founder of Olive's Moms, vision was that we moms would take some physical hits in hopes that our black and brown kids, friends, neighbors, and loved ones would be spared some pain.
To summon that mom warrior spirit to protect our kids, all our kids, let the feds and cops hit, gas, shoot us first, not to be the voice of the movement.
This is picking up on not just a trope, but a reality that actual mothers have.
Human mothers, bare mothers, all mothers who have an actual relationship with their children, which is that they will actually put themselves in harm's way to protect their children.
And under certain circumstances, that can be that deep abiding, like deeper than anything else, maternal instinct, if you will.
Instinct probably isn't the right word here, but can be placed onto other targets.
But this feels very much like a ploy.
And in the last livestream, I mentioned Nassim Taleb's coining of the term Pedofrosty, I think it was, in which he said this is what happens when you use children to front an ideology and it plucks at the heartstrings of people because you can't turn your head away or your heart or your emotions away from From a child and a child's, you know, yearning to be heard and to have justice done.
And so I suggested that actually matri-frasty is also a thing, that that is what is going on here.
That it's really hard when people are making the claim that this is a lot of moms in Portland who are seeing the pain of black and brown bodies.
Really?
Not people?
Bodies?
Okay.
Black and brown bodies.
And going out there and putting themselves in harm's way, you know, presumably at risk of, if we are to believe the hyperbole, frankly, at risk of orphaning their own children because they feel this strongly?
I'm kind of not buying it.
I'm just not buying it.
I don't buy it either.
And, you know, there's a general pattern here, which is you've got a movement that is advocating an absolutely radical transformation of the way we interact with each other.
I have the sense it is hiding behind black people, that that's what this is.
That the anarchism at the heart of what is being advocated is really the point.
Tear it down and the great thing will emerge, which is of course nonsense, as we will see here in a second.
But it's hiding behind things that are unassailable.
Mom is unassailable.
And if you want to say, you know what?
I looked at those moms.
They didn't look like moms to me.
Then the question is, well, are you saying they're not old enough to be moms?
Of course they're old enough to be moms, but I'm telling you, I have some sense of what moms look like.
It didn't look like a collection of moms to me.
It looks like a collection when you stand back enough to see a wall of yellow shirts.
And so, you know... It looks very much like someone with a lot of PR background or a PR firm was brought in to say, okay, let's, you know, let's invoke moms.
Let's invoke apple pie.
You know, is that next?
Yeah.
Baseball, moms, apple pie, the whole thing is going to be used to defend us.
Well, I was thinking, you know, baseball, unfortunately, I'm thinking about the baseball bats among the rioters in Evergreen.
You know, like, obviously baseball bats can be used as weaponry, so it's harder to invoke here as some sort of an act, you know, the actual Americans are fighting the Gestapo, they're being called, right?
The federal officers are being called the Gestapo.
Yeah, they are.
And, you know,
The problem is, of course, if you start, as so many of these press reports do, if you start with the dramatic images of the tear gas floating over the pavement with these heavily armed, you know, officers marching at these protesters who you've been told are peaceful and then they get fired upon and it's like, well, OK, yeah, that's a very ugly thing that's happening, except that that's not what's happening.
And it's very troubling, but remember, we've got Local authorities not enforcing the law.
We've got an attack on a federal building which is completely non-random.
They have chosen a federal building because they want a federal response, right?
And if you had any doubt about that, I just saw right before we went live today that there was apparently an attack on the federal building in Eugene, right?
So Eugene is a much smaller town than Portland.
And there are presumably no federal officers there yet.
My guess is there are a few.
A few inside, right?
But no one's been deployed to protect it.
So, you know, what's the attack based on?
Feds out of Eugene?
They're not here yet.
Right.
Feds out of Eugene.
Of course, we'll probably be told that this is in solidarity with the protesters in Portland.
But the fact is, if you're here watching this unfold and you're watching, oh, the cops are not enforcing the law.
Oh, the attack is narrowed to one part of downtown.
Oh, it's narrowed to the federal building, right?
And just one of the federal buildings, too.
I mean, walking back to our car, you pointed out there's another federal building.
It's got some graffiti on it, and it shouldn't, but there's no protesters there.
Right.
And actually, and the city is actually cryptically signing up with the anarchists, which is the most bizarre thing in the world.
But you've got, I showed the notice last time of the indicator that the barrier that is the last line of defense that does not involve federal officers putting themselves in harm's way.
The last line of defense is this substantial metal fence that has been erected to protect the building.
The city is now telling The federal government that it is violating, it is impeding traffic, which is technically true, but not meaningfully true.
Traffic still passes on that street.
Well, and I mean, frankly, having finally been down there, which I hadn't been before, at least from whatever it was, 9 to 11 at night on a Saturday night on a street that normally would have traffic on it.
Traffic is impeded alright, but it's not by offense.
It's actually impeded by the thousands of people in the streets and by some cars that have lined up precisely to block traffic.
I can see an argument for this preventing some asshole from driving through and trying to kill people.
Yep, I think that's what it is, but the point is the idea that... I mean, traffic is very much blocked, right?
Well, it's blocked during the hours of the protest.
During the day, traffic flows.
The city has now put the federal government on alert that it can't have its fence there, and as I mentioned last time, I was told that they also can't move it back so it's out of traffic because then it will violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, right?
But what I found out today is that apparently there is a fine Of something like $500 every 15 minutes.
Somehow, I believe, a couple hundred thousand dollars in fines have apparently been levied against this barrier by the city against the federal government.
I mean, the whole thing is preposterous, right?
What is supposed to happen?
Is the fence supposed to come out and then the people who throw stuff over the fence to light the fires every day are supposed to have direct access?
To the building in order to light the fires in the building, which they have done a number of times.
Like, what exactly is the city thinking?
And, you know, are we trying to secede?
Because I think that they would have… Portland?
Or Oregon?
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean, right?
Right, no, that's a big thing, right?
It's incoherent.
What actually is it that people claim that they want?
Because, you know, the reason I showed the, you know, the two videos that I did, that those struck me as the most salient examples of what was going on down there is it's this, you know, all cops are bastards and fuck feds.
Like that's what this is?
Now the Wall of Mom's site leads with Black Lives Matter, but it's all this jumbled mess that frankly leads to anarchism.
And, you know, my overwhelming sense being down there was sadness.
Yeah.
Just just sadness.
The bleakest protest ever.
It was so bleak.
And you know, that that chant that I displayed for us was actually the most musical of all of them.
It was so awful and sad.
And it also clearly was replacing bars and clubs and parties for people.
Right.
100 percent.
It's the only thing to do.
And so it's it is getting a lot of energy because people are bored out of their minds.
And yeah, it's it and I agree with you that ultimately the only coherent explanation for what is being demanded and attempted and all of those things is anarchism That's the only coherent rationale and you know, it's not coherent as a plan.
It won't work right and in fact Zach could you put up the The Riot Ribs picture.
So unfortunately, I don't have anything beyond this picture here.
This is the former Riot Ribs, which is an illegal vendor of ribs in the park across from the Hatfield Courthouse, which apparently accumulated $300,000 in donations.
People supporting riots via ribs that are free to people No doubt it does.
The trash from this operation has been launched over the fence nightly and lit a fire, so this is an externalizing force.
It's an autonomous rib joint.
It is an autonomous rib joint in an autonomous, an undeclared autonomous zone right across from the courthouse.
But here's the thing.
In the last day or two, Riot Ribs has left.
Just vaporized.
They have vaporized after having collected $300,000.
And they have vaporized as a result of some sort of conflict where before they vaporized they alleged That somebody was attempting to profit by using the idea of Riot Ribs, and it's not well explained what took place, but somehow some internal conflict inside Riot Ribs, whatever it may be, has caused Riot Ribs to say, not only are we
Closing up shop, but anybody who's dispensing ribs there is not a good person and you shouldn't go anywhere near this operation, which raises obvious questions.
And then somebody else... There were, I mean, sorry, but I mean, there were, there are a lot of barbecues down there.
A lot of people cooking, cooking meat for people, it appears, right?
I have no idea how much of that is Riot Ribs and how much of it might be... Oh, I think much of it wasn't, but the idea that, you know, if this movement is anything like what it claims to be about, the idea of other people also trying to feed hungry people being not okay is clearly a rejection of their stated ideals.
Well, the thing is, every time they enact their anarchism, they prove our point about the problem with anarchism, right?
They always tell us that it's going to work out and that it always breaks down into garbage and violence and all of these things.
So an activist, a local activist, has tweeted about the Riot Ribs conflict and she has basically declared who the good people are and who the bad people are and advised the world, don't you dare call the cops on this.
We have to start living our values of settling our own yada, yada, yada.
And the point is, look, I don't know who's good, who's bad, what the $300,000 is, where it's going to end up.
I couldn't tell you whether there are any good people in this story, whether there are good people and bad people.
But the point is, the whole idea That you are going to operate an operation like Riot Ribs under anarchist rules and that this is not a neon sign invitation to bad actors to step in to whatever profit stream you have generated.
Of course this is going to happen.
What do you need in order to address the problem?
You would need a court.
What are they attacking?
They're attacking the court.
They are telling us they don't understand how it is that decency is allowed to flourish.
Right.
No, I mean, and frankly, the idea that if this were what Harper's would have us believe, for instance, and I'm really mourning that Harper's went here as well.
You know, I've unfortunately come to expect this sort of thing from NPR and the New York Times and such, but okay, Harper's great.
What is it that we are actually supposed to believe?
like the They are giving us such incomprehensible nonsense.
Well, they are giving us incomprehensible nonsense.
The other side is getting it closer to right because it's closer to their home narrative, right?
That this has left us out of control, which it is.
But you know what the other side, the right, won't.
Say, hey, look at the entrepreneurial spirit of Riot Ribs, which, you know, one of the things that I thought when I was listening to you saying, well, it's illegal.
Well, I'm sure it's illegal.
Of course, it's illegal.
The whole thing is illegal.
Yeah.
But we're this actually coming up on 60 days of peaceful protests, as opposed to peaceful protests that quickly ceded to nightly riots.
Then I would expect the entrepreneurial spirit of some people out there who actually know how to make food, and there are a lot of people in Portland who know how to make good food, to show up and either donate their time and resources, or at least try to not end up in debt from it, or maybe make a profit, right?
Like, there's nothing wrong with that.
But, you know, the founders of Black Lives Matter would say, oh, there is something wrong with that because we're trained in Marxism and we don't believe in profit.
So Riot Ribs appears to have just shuttered up shop with something like $300,000 in donations, who knows where that went.
Was this just exactly the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit with a bad actor?
That, you know, without the bad actors we celebrate this in the United States.
Except that these protesters would claim that they don't celebrate it because making a profit off of your own hard work and ingenuity is somehow not okay.
Except Right Ribs just appears to have done that.
Like, the entire thing is a mess on top of a mess on top of a mess.
Well, in effect.
They're going to destroy everything.
And then if it is possible to build after that, if they do not destroy things in a way that prevents us from ever returning, they will reinvent all of the things that they claimed were insane to begin with.
And the fact is the cost on the way there will be unimaginable.
Right?
No, I mean, and it's not.
It's not that it wouldn't be wonderful if there were another possible way to run a society, you know, and it's not that 10,000 years ago democracy was understood, right?
These are inventions of humanity and evolving processes, but nothing that I have heard out of any of their mouths or on any of the websites suggest anything but burn it down and if there's Any political ideology at all at the base, it ends up being Marxist, which is a complete redistribution.
Complete redistribution.
Yeah, which we know doesn't work for game theoretic reasons that are pretty simple.
And of course, that requires that you accept that logic is something that one can wield.
And of course, they go after logic.
So, you know, it's...
This is the second concept that I think is central here.
So verificationism is the first, autoimmunity is the second.
This is an attack on everything that makes something functional, that makes a system above a certain size functional.
You cannot humor it, right?
And the problem is, many people, because of the verificationism issue, if you accept that this is autoimmunity... So you want to spell that out a little bit?
I mean, I think, you know, we're biologists, I get what you mean, but maybe you spell it out.
Okay.
Justice depends on the fact that people who refuse to abide by the rules suffer a penalty great enough that they do not come to dominate.
Now, I'm not saying that this works perfectly.
There are levels of our system that actually do reward those who game the system in their own favor.
But at the level of, like, the laws against violence, it is important to your ability to walk down the street safely, to our kids' ability to go to school, it is important that if somebody shows a propensity for violence That they face greater violence.
That something is able to take them away.
And in fact, I wish I had it here, but there was a piece of video circulating a week ago in which a black guy, clearly nuts in some way... Is it Portland or no?
Yeah.
Walked into... Oh, I'm not sure it was Portland.
Actually, I am sure it was Portland.
I'm sorry about that.
He walked into what was represented as a laundromat.
It looked like a very big laundromat.
And he was holding a saw, like a saw for cutting wood.
Not a power tool though, just like a hacksaw or something?
Not a hacksaw, a big traditional wood saw.
And you can see, he walks in, he walks up to the two women who were working there, and literally attacks them with the saw, okay?
And this is caught on the cams.
On the CCTV cams in the shop.
He then walks out and the story goes, the part that is not caught on film, is that apparently protesters tried to interfere with his arrest.
Right?
On the basis that he was black and these were cops and we all know that when cops There can be only one way that justice is served.
Right.
So this is a very frightening... Never arrest black people even when they have done crime.
Right.
I mean, I don't know... This is such an insane rubric.
It's insane.
This is a violent act with a, you know... How did... I mean, how are the women?
How are the employees?
It's a little hard to say.
I mean, but in any case, this apparently happened and what it tells you is, you know what?
You need to have police that have the ability to detain somebody and take them away when they show a propensity for violence.
You just simply do.
And if you take that away, then what you get is you end up with rule by those who are violent.
Right, so the monopoly on violence concept is really important.
Government is a monopoly on violence, which doesn't mean that there has to be violence, but it means you can't everybody decide whether they want to be violent or not this hour or that, right?
You have to have some authority.
You have to have the rules spelled out and So it seems to me like your two concepts for today, verificationism and autoimmunity, are mechanisms by which this cultural Ponzi scheme, which we introduced in the last episode, functions.
That's how it does its business.
Yes, it invalidates all of the mechanisms that would stand in its way.
And so, you know, you need the police to arrest people who attack a federal building.
But you can actually persuade the city and the state not to do it, right?
That's really a shocking development.
But basically, you pressure the city and the state through all kinds of things.
Through, you know, mocking the mayor as if he was a child on a schoolyard, right?
So, you've got that, you've got doxing, you've got all kinds of things that have people making decisions that clearly they shouldn't, but they do, and then there's some last line of defense.
But, you know, you need courts.
What do you do in court?
You use logic applied in the context of law that is publicly understood in order to establish the facts of what took place and whether or not it was a violation.
If you say logic, hey, that's white people stuff, you're cooked, right?
How do you establish if there's bias?
If you say, you know what, this society is biased, well how are you going to establish that without logic, without science, without statistics, without all sorts of things that you've now declared are off limits because you claim that they themselves are tools of oppression?
It's nonsense.
As opposed to the more nuanced but actually true claim.
That those tools, logic and science and statistics, have historically been less available to groups including black people and women and other groups that we are currently recognizing as historically oppressed.
And that reduced access has created situations such that it is perhaps harder to access them now for some people through no fault of their own.
That is true.
Right.
That is a totally different claim, which uses almost all the same words.
Well... Right?
That's kind of the trick, and maybe it's actually the source of the confusion for many of the people involved in these protests and these riots.
So, at bottom, right, if we take the movement seriously, it is having the inverse reaction that I think any logical person would have to the problem of unfairness being non-randomly distributed.
The solution is obviously to democratize all the most useful stuff and make sure it is as widely distributed as possible.
The problem with that is it does not guarantee equal outcomes.
Right?
Equal access does not guarantee equal outcomes.
And I think people, much more than I do, and I think you do, fear that if you were to make access truly equal that there would still be wildly different outcomes.
Which, I think there'd be wildly different preferences, but I don't think there'd be wildly different capacities.
Right, but those wildly different preferences would lead to some different outcomes, especially when we're talking about sex, men versus women.
And I think actually this fear is part of what has led to the completely wrong, confused idea that I've actually seen promoted by people who are credentialed in science, you know, PhD scientists who say things like, if we are equal then the only possible explanation for differences in outcome is discrimination.
Yeah, which is nonsense.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
And equal doesn't mean the same.
Right.
But if you fear what happens if you had absolutely, thoroughly democratized access to everything good and useful, if you fear that, then you go the other way.
And the other way is Harrison Burgeon.
You can get to equality through hobbling.
Hence the attack on everything useful, right?
You can deny everybody access to logic and then there won't be differential outcomes.
Well, of course there will, because there will be ethical differences in how many rules you're willing to violate in order to get ahead.
Then you end up with these dirge-like atonal chants because no one is left with the possibility of beauty or joy or actual justice.
Right.
And you end up with warlords because the basic point is those who are willing to avail themselves of every opportunity, no matter how immoral, come out on top.
So that's the world we are being invited to.
But can you show the tweet I sent you about the lawsuit?
And then we probably need to move to COVID.
Yeah.
So here, You can see Project Democracy is tweeting that they have just sued the administration, that is to say the Trump administration, on behalf of Don't Shoot PDX and the Wall of Moms to make sure that the rights of protesters are protected.
It's time for you to stop attacking patriots.
Now I find that last line chilling because while there may be some patriots in this movement, the movement is overwhelmingly Yep.
anti-american not only implicitly but in many cases explicitly yep you know that upside down flag that's right definitely is not um it is what you will make of it but the people who are flying it are flying it for a reason and it is not about patriotism um so So, anyway, what is it that these lawyers think they are seeing, that they are tweeting about?
They are filing a lawsuit to stop this attack on patriots.
What is it that they would have happen?
I don't know, but one such suit was recently struck down by a judge, finding that actually whatever was happening with regard to federal officers who were, it turns out, identified as federal officers but not with their names, pulling people off the streets into unmarked vehicles, yes they were unmarked, was not itself a violation.
So that suit has been struck down.
We can argue about whether or not that was appropriate, but actually it went to a court of law and the evidence was assessed.
Yep.
And I should say, I don't think this happened in time for our last live stream, but we now know that the description that we provided on this podcast for what was taking place, what explained people being pulled into unmarked rented vehicles in Portland, that now appears to have been the accurate understanding of what took place.
Which is to say nothing of whether or not there's a violation in it.
Right.
But it does appear that people were involved in criminal activity.
They were presumably filmed involved in that activity but their identity was not ascertainable from a distance.
They were then picked up, brought into a cell where their identity was established and then they were released and federal indictments were sought and then issued against them.
So the point is Is this some wild Gestapo overreach?
It certainly isn't that.
This is a normal federal process functioning where the local and state process has clearly not only failed, but is now acting as part of this autoimmunity.
It doesn't even appear to have failed.
It just didn't try.
It's like it failed to fail.
It somehow was boxed into failing socially and politically, which is a frightening thing that that can happen.
It's just terrifying.
Yeah.
Well, should we pivot a little bit?
Yeah, to a more hopeful subject.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
So, well, I mean, actually, there's a common theme here, which is, do true things become untrue when people you don't like say them?
Right?
So, we don't like Trump.
We've made that very clear.
But Trump says the wall of moms is not what it seems.
We already showed you that.
No, we don't need to show that again.
Yeah, I think that's right, right?
Trump has also been, as we know, pushing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 since very early on.
Now we have, in probably episodes 1 through 18, frequently critiqued Trump's response on COVID-19.
He did a very poor job in many, many regards.
But He was pushing hydroxychloroquine early.
There was not tremendous evidence at that point.
Now, and you know, it's still a question and of course this virus is evolving rapidly and so what works now may not work in the future.
But here we have, Zach if you want to show this, An article written a few days ago, on the 23rd of July, by a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, who's an MD-PhD, who is making the point, and he references an article that I can also pull up, probably we won't here,
In which he reviews the scientific and medical literature for hydroxychloroquine and finds it to be highly efficacious when delivered early in the course of the disease, which is what you would expect.
Not late, once you have a pretty high viral load and are well into symptoms.
But specifically, he says that evidence for the cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, and zinc is highly effective.
Will this turn out to be true?
I don't know for sure, of course.
He points to this.
Actually, Zach, you want to put this up?
This is the peer-reviewed article in the American Journal of Epidemiology published in the end of May, actually.
This is fully two months ago.
And it's basically a review article in which he looks at the, you know, scant but growing evidence that this is actually an effective treatment.
So this has been one of the most obviously politicized aspects of COVID, right?
We've been talking since the beginning about masks, and I have a few things to say about masks, but you know since March 24th when we first began this, we've been saying actually ignore what the WHO says, ignore the U.S.
Surgeon General, you should be wearing masks because that is going to be effective and And lo and behold, this virus is not unlike every other respiratory virus out there, but masks are actually effective in preventing transmission.
Because Trump has been pushing hydroxychloroquine, the left media, and therefore fully half the country, have basically decided that there's no chance it could be true.
As if medicine cares about your damn politics.
Yeah, it's absurd, and one wonders how so many people have fallen into this obviously wrong belief system that the fact of Trump saying something makes it wrong.
Right.
First of all, I think it is important that we step back years.
It used to be regularly said and implied that Trump was hit, right?
So you're not talking about decades, you're just talking about a couple of years.
I'm talking about a few years.
At the point that Trump took office, it was very common for people on the left to assert that this was the next version of this historical pattern.
I never hear anybody tell me, oops, we got that wrong, but, right?
They just simply step into this next phase of everything Trump is wrong.
And I must say that it does not do much for my confidence in their opinion.
Because obviously, to the extent that Trump is a cynical actor, which I think he frequently is, to the extent that he's a political actor, which I think he always is, if I have one central criticism of him and one reason that I believe he absolutely must be removed from office, it's that he politicizes everything, you know, including the hydroxychloroquine thing.
But it doesn't make it false, right?
And if you award him the weapon of, if you say it, we will reject it, then you have lost.
You've been gamed.
You've been gamed.
You've been trolled.
You've been gamed.
You lose.
Right.
So a smart player, I mean, you don't even have to be very smart.
You just have to be a tiny bit smart to understand you cannot sign up for that rule, right?
If Trump says it, you don't know if it's right or wrong.
I'd sign up for that.
But if Trump says that it's wrong, is you surrendering?
It may be one of the biggest sources of belonging for a lot of people in the country right now.
I think that is one of the appeals at this point.
The, we're in the club, we're in the tribe that knows that Trump is evil and won't all the problems be gone if only we get rid of that.
And, you know, of course all you have to do is look at the messaging of the protests and know that that isn't actually what will happen, but a lot of people are so, so seeking something to belong to, and the anti-Trump crowd is one that in many social groups is a safe one, and actually it would be quite unsafe.
You'd feel pretty bereft and alone if you said something to the contrary.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, the funny thing about this podcast and the social world that it is a part of is that we attempt to exist in the reality middle ground where there's very little cover, right?
To the extent that one has to say, actually, Trump got this one right.
It's like, oh, you're one of them.
You're a closet Trumper, right?
And to the extent you say no, he politicizes everything.
Oh, you have Trump derangement syndrome.
And so the point is, you know, it's a very quick way to just take almost everybody and eliminate them from the ability to have a conversation.
But it leaves a small number of people who are willing to try to navigate that very much in your milieu.
And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
But there's a question about how safe it is.
Right?
Because the problem is both sides are demonizing the middle for their own purposes.
And, you know, that's all well and good as long as it stays on Twitter, I guess.
But the problem is this is 2020 and a lot of stuff appears to be spilling over into the real world.
It's not fair to me that what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.
Yeah.
No, it clearly, clearly doesn't.
Yeah.
Can you say a few more things on COVID?
Yeah, let's do that.
All right.
So here, Zach, we have a paper.
published called A Country-Level Analysis Measuring the Impact of Government Actions, Country Preparedness, and Socio-Economic Factors on COVID-19 Mortality and Related Health Outcomes.
It's a long title, but basically it's a massive retrospective study trying to assess how country-level policies affected both caseloads of COVID and outcomes once people are infected.
And there's some surprising things here.
And you know, this hasn't this has only been out for a few days.
I have not fully vetted it the way I did a few of the earlier papers back in April and May.
But let me just read the findings here absent the statistics.
Increase in COVID-19 caseloads were associated with countries with higher obesity.
Higher median population age and longer time to border closures from the first reported case.
So higher caseloads in basically fatter countries, older countries, and countries that didn't close their borders fast.
Okay?
That's one thing.
Increased mortality per million was significantly, so this is different than caseload, this is mortality per million and not mortality per million of people infected, but mortality per million of population.
Mortality per capita.
was significantly associated with, again, higher obesity prevalence and per capita gross domestic product.
Interesting.
Fatter and richer countries end up having higher mortality rates.
Okay.
That's apparently true when you correct for the association of those two things.
I believe so, although like I said, I have not fully vetted the...
This is a complicated paper.
Reduced income dispersion reduced mortality.
So that's a strangely written phrase.
What that means is a smaller spread on income.
Basically, lower income inequality means lower death rate.
The bigger the spread, the bigger the wealth inequality, which is to say places like the US and Brazil had higher mortality rates and also reduced income dispersion, again lower spread, reduced income inequality was associated with the lower number of critical cases.
A couple more things.
You want to respond to that?
Well, I'm very curious about the wealth disparity.
Is the increased caseload all on one end of the wealth disparity?
You wouldn't expect it all to be there, but in other words, are people who are comparatively deprived more likely to get sick and does it result in a higher absolute per capita caseload?
If I had to guess, just actually off the top of my head, I suspect that that has to do with you can't get community transmission until it's present.
And so high wealth disparity requires rich people flying in from wherever they picked it up and then they spread it because they're shopping and they infect clerks or they're on the subway or whatever.
That is what I suspect that's about.
Okay, you want to keep going?
Yeah, sure.
Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and widespread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.
However, full lockdowns and reduced country vulnerability to biological threats were significantly associated with increased patient recovery rates.
So, they weren't associated with the number of infected people, but they were associated with better outcomes.
Exactly.
And just one more caveat from this paper.
They say, despite appropriate public health guidance, less than optimal population compliance in Western democracies may be an important contributing factor to variation in outcomes among the various countries.
That science speak for countries like us are much less compliant at actually following medical orders than countries like Taiwan and South Korea.
Yeah, and of course the deep evolutionary irony here, which I think we cannot stress enough, is that in some sense there's an extreme version of game theory playing out here where Any non-compliant pocket is a place where the virus can go experiment.
And so we are in some sense playing with humanity's future with respect to COVID by giving it more opportunities to learn new tricks, to evade detection.
We're playing ball.
We are.
But the point is, at some level, to politicize this is the height of insanity.
Yes.
Right?
This is something in which all of us have an interest in, you know, in the Swedes getting it right.
Because even if everybody else got it right and the Swedes got it wrong, then this thing can hide there in that refuge.
I mean, picking on the Swedes just completely at random.
Not completely at random, because we talked about the Swedes earlier.
Right, but the point is, any community that doesn't play by the rules, any country, is providing a place where this thing can get better at avoiding our surveillance, it can get better at avoiding our treatment.
And so at some level really this is the place, this is the common enemy that is supposed to bring us together because game theoretically that's the only right response and yet it is having the opposite effect because it is for those who are looking for tools in the political landscape it's irresistible.
So if aliens did actually land now.
Yeah.
And Trump said oh my god aliens have landed we must respond.
Then aliens didn't land.
We wouldn't unify.
We would not actually come together.
You're right.
I mean, that stems exactly from what you just said.
This is supposed to be the common enemy.
This is global.
This is big.
This is real.
This is not a political entity.
It is a viral entity.
And it has done the opposite of unify us.
Yeah, it has done the exact opposite.
And it's tragic.
Yeah.
To that point, I have to take a dig at the New York Times here because I cannot believe them.
I just cannot believe this.
Zach, if you want to put this up.
Research boosts evidence of masks' utility, some experts say.
Masks have long been known to help stop infected people from spreading the virus.
Well, like months.
But some research suggests they also protect the uninfected.
And then there's a bullet point here.
Masks may also protect people wearing them, some experts say.
What?
I don't want to even do that.
This, you will remember, I went off on a tirade last night when I saw this.
I cannot believe the level of scientific illiteracy and frankly journalistic fraud in this.
We had the Surgeon General and the WHO telling us that masks did no good at all.
With a respiratory virus.
Then they came around and admitted that that was actually a political move designed to protect the short, the too few masks that we had so that health workers could use them.
Okay?
But they insisted that you only wear a mask to protect others from you, not you from others.
As if masks are unidirectional?
Masks aren't unidirectional.
In fact, there are some masks that are unidirectional.
You've all seen these, the little valves in them?
They actually allow you to breathe your viral particles out into the world and it makes it a little bit more comfortable to live inside of them.
And they've been banned now at many hospitals because it's exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing.
But there is no mask out there.
That I have ever heard of that is unit directional in the other direction, where you are breathing in all of the particles and not able to expel them.
So the idea that we needed unnamed people in lab coats to tell us that masks might actually both protect you from others and others from you, and that this is not even accepted enough that we are being told some experts say it?
Like this makes me so mad.
Of course half the country doesn't want to wear a mask.
Of course this is politicized because no one knows how to think scientifically and they are appealing to authority for the most basic fundamental ideas.
Put something over your mouth and you won't spread droplets which might have virus in them.
Put something over your mouth and you won't inhale droplets which might have virus in them.
There it is. - So I would just point out, I mean, it's obviously implicit in what you're saying here, but we nailed this from the beginning. - This is on our very first, this is episode one. - It's episode one.
And the point was, I don't know what kind of nonsense we are hearing, but obviously we're dealing with a virus, We don't know what it can do.
We know it is transmitted through inhaling droplets.
Wear a mask.
Can't buy a mask?
Make a mask.
It doesn't have to be medical in nature.
Bandana works just fine.
And so the point is, look, all you have to be able to do is think clearly.
And what does think clearly require of you?
Well, one thing it requires is that you put politics aside.
Yes.
Right?
And, you know, this is a very unfortunate, if wonderful, vindication of the fact that, you know, common sense will do it.
Right?
Common sense is enough.
Just basic training.
But, Neil, but, again and again and again, wearing a mask to protect yourself from particles that are in droplets means that when you're outside, away from people, you don't need to wear a mask.
Now, could the virus evolve into something else?
Yeah.
But this has become, I've said it over and over and over again, this is star-bellied snitches and snitches without.
If you're wearing a mask, you must be one of us.
If you're not wearing a mask, you must be one of them, or flip it.
No, you wear a mask when you need to wear a mask, inside, with other people whom you don't live with all the time.
Yep.
The other thing I would point out is that if you go back to our earliest live streams about this, you will find that our model was not nearly as good, that we didn't know enough about how this thing was transmitted.
So we were very concerned about things that turned out to be very low likelihood of transmitting it, like... I've still got copper on most of our external doorknobs.
Right, which is certainly not going to hurt you, but not probably all that necessary.
And the simple concern about surfaces is probably overrated in the case of this particular virus, for whatever reason.
It could change, it could learn that trick, but at the moment that doesn't seem to be the priority.
The priority seems to be These airborne droplets.
It does seem to be an issue of the volume of the space you are in.
So there's some kind of model that we've developed where there's a bucket and if you don't reach the top of the bucket, then even if you're encountering virus, a particle is not going to get you because your immune system can fend it off.
If you exceed the top of the bucket, it gets you.
So you want to, you know, this then creates the, you know, the thing I worried about downtown when we went to the protest was Outdoors, high volume, but if you were downwind of somebody who was sick, then you might fill that bucket up and you might contract it, which I, you know, I still don't feel good about having, I think we needed to see the protest, but there's a risk in it that I think is unacceptable, which is you couldn't control who was upwind of you.
That's right, and there's a lot of shouting.
A lot of shouting, exactly, which we know to be Particularly bad.
But in any case, I think that, you know, the whole thing is an argument for don't overcomplicate this.
If somebody is saying nonsense like masks don't help you avoid this respiratory virus, they're probably full of shit.
Right?
Exactly.
No, that's exactly right.
So just maybe two more things and I won't show the papers.
I'll put them in the...
In the description of the video.
Two more things that we are now seeing that appear to be true, but of course this is an evolving situation in terms of both the data that we have coming in and what is actually true for the virus, so both things can change.
One is that proton pump inhibitors, things like Prilosec, people who are on or take proton pump inhibitors seem to be at increased risk for I think both, if memory serves.
Both getting and having bad outcomes from COVID-19.
And specifically, if you take two or more doses a day, you are at quite a higher risk.
It's still not a huge risk for most people, but quite a higher risk for people using proton pump inhibitors.
Frankly, this strikes me as yet one more example of how novelty is driving us into unhealthy lifestyles and sickness.
You had something to add there?
Well, I just wanted to point out that actually the proton pump inhibitors, if I understand it, what they are doing is they are preventing, they are lowering the pH of the gut environment So they deal with stomach acid.
They deal with stomach acid.
So basically the code here is that proton is a hydrogen that has had its electrons stripped away, leaving only the proton.
So it's H+.
But the basic point is that decreases... So when you've got a lot of H+, you're high acid.
When you've got a lot of OH-, you're high base.
High acid, which is low pH.
So that low pH environment is a hedge against pathogens.
As part of what it is, right?
You eat stuff, it's partially compromised by whatever got onto it, and you have this environment that forces, that kills anything that's not capable of dealing with the extremes, and because it's coming from an environment that isn't extreme, it's very unlikely that extremophiles will be found on your food, and so it's a pretty good way of dealing with most of the pathogens that you would consume, and so anyway, stands to reason that something like a proton pump inhibitor would get in the way of at least some pathogen transmission.
And our diet is such crap that many people are feeling the need to take these proton pump inhibitors in order to have a normal feeling gastrointestinal tract, and then that is putting them at risk because they don't have the on-board pathogen-resistant system.
I'm actually reminded, this is going to seem like it's coming out of left field to everyone but you, actually.
I'm reminded of one of the things I discovered in Madagascar with my frogs.
These poison frogs reproduce in these little bamboo wells that fill with water, and among many other things that I was doing, I was trying to figure out what might be distinct about the water chemistry of the particular wells that the frogs chose to reproduce in, and then the males hung out and guarded the eggs and the tadpoles.
And the wells in which the frogs did best and chose most often were extremely acidic, like enough so that I actually didn't trust my data in one season and came back with a different pH meter and also pH papers the next, but no, it was in like the three to four range.
Like 3 to 3.5 actually, not even up to 4, whereas across the board the pH was more like 5 or 6.
Like it was a little bit acidic, but not much.
Like, oh, these frogs are choosing these particularly acidic wells presumably because the pathogens that I was also discovering were going after them are doing less well in the wells that are acidic.
So it's the same kind of story in, you know, the bamboo wells in Madagascar with poison frogs and our stomach.
So I think that in the case of the proton pump inhibitors, it raises a question about, is there a hidden mode of transmission?
So for example, if we know that mostly this is airborne particles, it's possible that you're breathing in these particles and then they hit your tongue and you swallow them.
Much more likely that that would happen when you're eating, right?
So is it that there's COVID on food that we're eating?
If so, which food, right?
So, or is it, you know, it could even be that when you are eating, Your mask down, right?
And so maybe this increases the chances that your event will involve inhaling a viral particle and, you know, doing so as you're eating and then you swallow it.
And if your proton pumps are inhibited, then it has a much more, it's much more likely to get through your gut.
So anyway, the point is, look, it's all just logic, right?
That's right.
This is the evolutionary logic.
Yeah, this is the evolutionary logic, and you can just simply say, well, what's taking place?
And the fact is, you know, the virus itself is a little black box, and we're learning how the little black box works.
But all you really need to know is that there's some particle that contains instructions that's capable of hijacking your cells.
How is that particle getting into you?
Which cells does it attack?
What measures can you take to prevent it from getting in?
What measures can you take that reduce its effectiveness once it's hijacked some of your cells?
These are much simpler questions.
They're not at the level at all of what goes on inside the black box.
That's right.
Yeah, maybe we stop there.
We come back to some of the other new COVID stuff next time.
All right, very good.
Yeah, so to sign off, we will be taking a 15-minute break and coming back to answer your questions, your Super Chat questions in the next hour.
And if you are interested in access to a private Q&A that we do once a month, we just did ours for July on Sunday, you can join my Patreon and become a Dark Horse member there.
You can access the Discord server that one of those Dark Horse members set up that's private at either of our Patreons.
There's a Clips channel where you can find a lot of good clips from the show.
And anything else you want to say?
Yeah, so we're reaching the end of the month.
I don't know how that happened.
The end of yet another month.
Where did the year go?
I guess time dilation is part of this COVID thing, unfortunately.
But we're reaching the end of the month, which means that we are closing in on the next round of the discussions at my Patreon, which have been so wildly popular.
And Zach pointed me to a comment somebody made somewhere, maybe on Reddit.
Wondering whether or not these things were so popular that you wouldn't be able to get a word in edgewise.
I can say that has not been the experience.
People have found them very rewarding.
It's lovely that there are more people becoming aware of them and choosing to sign up, but the group is very welcoming of new people, and the discussions have been really high quality, and I don't think anybody has had the sense that they were sidelined, so...
Yeah, so those, um, they're higher, higher level, $100 and $250 level, but they will be actually Saturday, this Saturday from 10 to 12 Pacific Time, and Sunday from 10 to 12 Pacific Time.
I think 100 is Saturday, 250 is Sunday, with slightly different Very different foci.
The first one is about, it's called the Coalition of the Reasonable, and it is about people interested in how civilization might be upgraded without attacking federal buildings and destroying logic.
And the other one is focused on evolutionary dynamics.
Yeah, great.
So those will be happening this weekend for people who are interested.
