Bret and Heather 37th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Compelled Speech is Never Compelling
In this 37th 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). #Unity2020 Nominations: http://articlesofunity.org/nominate Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon.&n...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream hour 30.
I almost jumped the gun and said it was our 38th.
Our 37th.
I'm here with Dr. Heather Hying.
And a cat in the background.
Oh, crap.
Oh, no, it's one of ours.
I don't think it's too dangerous.
Yeah, that's Fairfax drinking from the sink.
Yes, I think he might be drinking the remnants of my coffee.
Sure.
All right.
So I think we are going to start off today with an announcement about Unity 2020.
Things are moving into high gear, folks.
We are opening our nominations for candidates as of today.
We are going to give you a link that you can go to.
There is no reason you need to go to it right now.
The nomination process will remain open for about 8 days.
And there is no priority given to early nominations.
So you have plenty of time to go there and tell us who you want to nominate.
We are going to accept two nominations per person.
You don't have to give us two, but if you want to nominate two people, maybe even a ticket that you think would be good, you can go to the website and you can tell us who they might be.
You will be able to tell us whether you think that they are on the left or the right, though those are just simply indications of your perspective.
Those are not binding categories.
We will soon, that is to say in the early part of this upcoming week, we will open a platform on which we will be able to have debate over the merits of various nominees that have been advanced.
We will go through the list to make sure that candidates match all of the characteristics that are required and Ultimately, we are working towards a narrowing of the field to all of the viable candidates, and we will hold a vote, likely with ranked choice voting, since we are strong supporters of that mechanism, and have candidates by the beginning of September.
Let's see, anything else that we need to say?
Yes, so the nominations will remain open until the 16th.
The comment and debate period will begin early this week.
Primary voting will be by the end of August and we should have a unity ticket by the first week in September to begin our draft process.
And you're going to post a link, you're going to mention the link at the end of this first hour of our episode.
Yes, I tell you what, why don't we tell them the link now, you don't have to go to it, we will remind you of the URL at the end.
It is, sure you can show the page, it's articlesofunity.org slash nominate.
That's the place you can go, and it will ask you some questions, and then you can give us your nominations.
So we look forward to this process, it's going to be very exciting.
Buckle your seatbelts.
All right.
All right.
So there are a number of things we wanted to talk about today besides that.
One of the things is that you wanted to explain why you predicted that Biden would not make the nomination of the Democrats.
We also have some stuff to talk about with regard to COVID, sunlight, compelled speech, a number of other issues emerging.
But do you want to start with discussing your prediction that the Democrats would drop Biden as their candidate?
Yes, and I can tell you right now, if you are thinking about making such an unlikely prediction, be prepared for a lot of pushback of people who feel very clever for telling you that the thing that is so unlikely to happen is very unlikely to happen, which I already knew.
But in any case, what I wanted to get at is the fact that we are facing an unprecedented situation where I believe both major party candidates are showing significant signs of mental decline.
Looks like the standard kinds of confusion that old people sometimes face.
But I don't believe we have a precedent for a major party candidate suffering decline that appears to compromise them with respect to the very role for which they have been nominated, at least not in such an extreme form.
And so we are seeing lots of hints of, you know, we saw a trial balloon floated in the New York Times about possibly getting rid of the debates.
And we have seen that Joe Biden will not be accepting the nomination in person.
And I would say maybe there are examples I'm unaware of, but I cannot recall the last The last incident in which Joe Biden has shown up on a live interview or in person to deliver a speech where there was not a major gaffe that appeared to be the result of cognitive decline.
Now, the GOP has released a campaign ad that, of course, it will be the least generous interpretation possible, but they've released a campaign ad that compares Joe Biden of 2008 with Joe Biden 2020, and it does appear quite a stark comparison.
So what I'm getting at is this.
I believe there is awareness inside the Democratic Party that Joe Biden cannot be president and probably cannot win the presidency if he is forced to go through something like a debate that would reveal the extent of his mental decline.
And whatever plan they seem to have for keeping him out of the public eye, except in very scripted circumstances, does not appear to be working.
We have one gaffe.
After the other and so there is a question about what makes sense for them to do and of course Joe Biden bowing out of the race which would probably be very much I should say I take no pleasure in pointing out the man's mental decline as much as I'm not a fan of him politically it's very sad to see somebody in the public eye who is just incapable of even looking out for himself.
He deserves a better final act.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say deserves, but I would just say there's no... I think really, you know, no one is suggesting that the man is evil.
I think every honorable human being deserves an honorable final act, and this isn't that.
This isn't that but in any case we have a different problem.
Our problem is not Joe Biden's well-being or his emotional state.
Our problem is how to get the country governed so that we can be safe and move in the right direction and obviously that's not occurring here.
So I would just point out one thing, is that those of us who are focused on the fact that we have what appears to be an incompetent person running on a major party ticket take a lot of flack for not getting in line because people who tell us this are laser focused on getting Trump out of office.
That's the only thing that they can see.
And I would just point out that as with 2016, the only interpretation here is that the fact that we have a candidate who does not appear capable of winning by virtue of his obvious competence to do the job and a desirability to be in the office, that's the fault of the Democratic Party.
Now, you can blame it on Democratic voters who nominated somebody who is incompetent, or you can blame it on the DNC and the skullduggery that obviously unfolds around the primaries.
But one way or the other, In an era where we are told that Donald Trump is an existential threat and that he absolutely must be eliminated from office at all costs, you would expect the Democratic Party to have rallied around somebody who was absolutely unimpeachable and absolutely clearly competent so that there would be no reason whatsoever that any rational person could vote against them.
Instead, they have delivered us a situation in which we have massive cognitive dissonance where people have to put aside the obvious evidence of his decline in order to vote for him.
This is exactly the opposite of what a patriotic party would have done.
And so, as this becomes unavoidable, and we've had people discussing this for months, we've Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty talking about it.
David Packard has talked about it.
Caitlin Johnstone has talked about it.
Many people have been aware of this pattern and have talked about the obvious implications that it has.
So this is not a new problem.
This is something the Democratic Party has been trying to manage.
And the reason for my prediction is that I believe the rate of decline is severe enough That it is almost impossible to imagine him winning and finishing out a four year term, much less being reelected.
And back in December, he floated the idea that maybe he wasn't going to run.
He has not pledged not to run as far as I understand, but he floated the idea to insiders that he would be a one term president.
So already there's awareness that a two term Biden presidency is implausible.
And then I, as I said, I don't think he's very likely to make it four years.
How likely is he to make it two years?
Is the plan for him to be elected and step down immediately?
Might the plan be for him to be nominated and then step down, giving the DNC the ability effectively to choose his replacement?
So all of these things are in play.
So my prediction, while I agree it's pretty unlikely in light of the way things have played out in the primary, is predicated on the fact that I believe there is a behind-the-scenes discussion going on on how to manage this obvious crisis that has emerged.
So that we don't have the situation of Biden and Trump in a debate where Biden's obvious decline becomes unavoidable and people vote for Trump simply because he seems to be the more competent of the two.
So how are they going to manage that if they can't shut down the idea of debates?
I believe something is going to happen in advance of that that will change the narrative dramatically.
Hence my prediction.
Is it really likely to happen?
I can't say.
It'll be pretty fascinating if it does.
But if it doesn't happen, I would say there's also a period of time after the nomination and before the election in which it could happen, which might be the most logical time for a swap to take place.
And then there's the possibility of an election.
It's hard for me to imagine him being elected if he has to All of these things are possible.
What you think is the most likely is an open question.
GAF after GAF will emerge, but let's say he was elected, will he step down in the first year?
All of these things are possible.
What you think is the most likely is an open question.
I've told you, I think actually there's a pretty good chance he doesn't make it to nomination.
Well, this is going to seem like a sharp turn from what you were just talking about, but you prompted me to think with your opener there that people who think they're clever for telling me this is an unlikely prediction are not telling me anything I don't know.
This reminded me in episode 36 Q&A, we got a super chat question asking if we would post one of the covenants that we had used that were the formal agreement between faculty and our students as to what we expected of them and what we would be offering to them.
And as I said I would, I posted on Medium the covenant that we used in our 2015-16 full year program that included 11 weeks in Ecuador in the middle, evolution and ecology across latitudes.
This was the covenant for just the first quarter, fall quarter, with 50 students.
We did a couple of domestic field trips, but it did not include, you know, we had separate documents outlining the expectations, etc., for study abroad.
But what you said about hypotheses being unlikely, making them stronger hypotheses, is actually built into this covenant.
So I thought maybe I would just read a couple of items from this covenant that I did post as I promised to.
So Zach, if you would show... This is on Medium for people to find if they want.
This incidentally is a picture that you, Brett, took of several of our students at Ingapurka, which is a site at the northernmost part of the Incan range in Ecuador.
The Inca were only in Ecuador for about 80 years before the Spaniards arrived, but interestingly at Ingapurka, this is completely an aside, but at Ingapurka The Incans were not just in charge.
They came, they tried to conquer, they failed to conquer, and they ended up in negotiation with the Cagnari.
A royal wedding ensued, and the Cagnari and the Inca were in sort of uneasy peace at the city-state Ningapurka.
And this is some of our students there on the day trip that we took there from Cuenca.
So, there's a lot here, but the rules are these.
I'm going to read the first six, the bottom of which ends with a discussion of hypothesis.
One, failure is to be expected.
It is an inherent part of success.
Understand its meaning, but don't dwell on it more than is useful.
We, your faculty, respect failure as it reveals an honest, risky attempt to try something new.
What is not respectable is failing to fail, or failing to succeed, because you did not make any attempt at all.
2.
You are not in competition with each other.
Everyone can succeed.
Everyone can fail.
Some can succeed while others fail, but no one needs to fail for others to succeed.
Remember, this is not instructions for life.
Often in life, we are in competition with one another.
But students in our classrooms were explicitly not.
There was no grading on the curve.
There was no, we need to have X number of people getting C's or below and Y number of people getting A's.
There was none of that, which is, you know, those sorts of models, those educational models, grading on the curve and such.
are quite dishonorable, because they assume that the bell curve expectation of student ability upon entering the classroom is exactly the same shape upon leaving the classroom.
Maybe it shifted a little bit to the right, but the curve itself hasn't changed.
We would hope to move that into something that didn't look like a bell curve, such that more and more people were at the top end of the spectrum with regard to ability and understanding.
So I would point out that there are, I think you indicated this, there are things for which you do want a competitive model.
Absolutely.
But the idea that schooling is one of them is more or less predicated on the idea that nothing of substance will happen there.
In other words, That, you know, a bell curve makes sense if you are not in a positive sum environment.
In an environment where actually the quality of what emerges in terms of insight is adjusted by how people view each other, a willingness to play an assist, you know, in an intellectual discussion, for example, that has to be incentivized.
Or what the sum total, the emergent capacity of the entire room full of people is reduced if they view each other as competitors rather than as partners.
Exactly.
3.
In our covenant between our students and us in our year-long program in 2015-16, 3.
Treat those around you with respect.
Be candid when something needs to be said or when someone needs to be defended.
Be honorable and honor others.
4.
Apologize for harm you have caused.
Accept earnest apologies from others.
5.
Everyone has the right to take back things that they no longer believe or that did not properly represent their beliefs when they originally spoke.
Speak knowing that you can change or retract what you have said, and listen to others knowing that they have that option too.
At some level, be forgiving, right?
And six, and this is as far as I'll read now, it's online for those who want to read more.
Six, hypothesis is a kind of intellectual property.
When one is able to predict things that are not obvious in advance, it suggests that your model of what is occurring contains some truth.
It is therefore important to track the sources and fates of predictions for scientific insight to grow.
A hypothesis is yours when it predicts something novel.
If it doesn't predict something new, it may not be different from other hypotheses.
Yes, this does fit beautifully.
And so I would just say that, you know, the landscape of hypothesis and prediction is a complex one.
I mentioned on the campfire with Eric that we had just watched the big short with our son Zach and there's a very uncomfortable period in the middle of that movie where you have a number of people who have figured out that the housing market is irrational and destined for collapse and they have bet against it knowing that that's the thing to do in order to profit from the insight and
The condition remains both incoherent and stable far longer than it should have.
So there's this very nervous period where people… The market remains incoherent and stable.
Yes, there's some force playing against them in which the value of the assets is not dropping even though the constituents of these synthetic bonds made of these mortgages… The mortgages have begun to fail.
People have begun defaulting on their loans.
Why is the value of these... Of the commodity not dropping?
And so anyway, this is a very common thing where it's just because you're right about something doesn't mean that it becomes apparent that you're right.
So in this case of this maybe... Nor does it necessarily become, even if it will become apparent as in this case, you know, we're seeing a movie about it in part because the entire world ultimately saw that they were right, but there's almost always an intermediate period when Even though there should be dawning realization, either in the data or in the hearts and minds of people observing the situation, that the prediction was accurate, there is a lag.
And during that lag, people will point at you and say, aha, see, you're wrong.
And there's a famous quote here.
I am a little nervous that I've got the wrong person, and if so, it will be deeply ironic.
But it may be Greenspan who said something like, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
So even though you're right, you may end up getting wiped out by your correct belief because you can't last long enough to get to the The payoff.
So all I would say is I'm working from a model about what's going on inside the Democratic Party.
That model isn't wrong just because this prediction turns out to be wrong, which it likely will.
That model is right if somewhere between now and the two-year mark of a Biden presidency, he steps down or is forced to step aside.
And something else moves into play.
Now, there are ways that that could happen, obviously.
So just to be clear, you're making a few particular predictions, and obviously the one prediction that they will pull him before he becomes the nominee is not borne out if he wins the election and pulls out within two years.
The broader model, which has several, sometimes mutually incompatible predictions associated with it, is that he is not a legitimate contender to the presidency.
Yeah, so what I would say is you've got levels of unlikeliness and obviously the prediction that I delivered here is the most unlikely and so the sort of most aggressive version of the model will turn out to be wrong if that prediction isn't right.
But the general model that there is awareness inside the Democratic Party that Biden's purpose is to put something in office Other than Trump, but that his purpose is not governance and that there is awareness that he does not have the mental capacity left to function as president.
That's the overarching model of which I think that is not a very risky prediction.
I find it very hard to imagine he would go two years.
And if he did, It would be the result of the fact that they figured out some mechanism for piping stuff into his ear so that there was no risk of him going off script.
But, you know, the fact is he can't get through even a pro forma introduction to a scripted talk without straying too far.
So it's kind of hard to imagine that there's any mechanism that will do it.
Yeah.
All right.
Shall we switch?
Yes.
Do you want to talk about...
Sunlight being the best disinfectant.
Other aspects of COVID or compelled speech first?
What do you think?
Wow.
Yeah.
Maybe, geez, maybe let's step into the COVID stuff.
Let's step into the COVID stuff.
Okay.
So, let's do the sunlight disinfectant stuff last within COVID.
So, starting with some COVID risk factors, okay?
So we know, we have been hearing for months now, that race is a correlate of poor outcomes for COVID-19, right?
And I did not pull up these papers, but I believe that we have heard and that there is evidence across many domains, across many geographic domains, That people of color, specifically black people and Latino people, are more likely to contract COVID and are also more likely to have worse outcomes when they do contract it.
And there's obviously a question of why that might be.
So let's take a step back and find some other things that we now understand to be true.
Poor air quality is understood to correlate with increased contraction and worse outcomes of COVID.
So here is a July 28th, 2020 Intercept article, Zachary, that you can pull up, which finds that I cannot find, okay you can take it down.
Quote from the paper, quote from the article that I couldn't find right there when I pulled it up for you guys.
Respiratory illnesses are no stranger to Latino communities who live around California's largest lake, the Salton Sea.
Asthma rates here are some of the highest in California with air quality routinely failing To meet federal and state standards, thanks in part to the state's omnipresent water wars, the water in this desolate form of vacation destination is rapidly drying up, salinating the lake and releasing decades-old contaminants into the air.
So there's a whole lot that we could say about what the Salton Sea is.
You know, it was originally a desert flat that got formed by accident when the Colorado River got dumped, a bunch of water got dumped there, and it became briefly this vacation destination But then something about another water move, a lot of water being moved to San Diego, I think, basically began desalinating, or rather salinating the lake by decreasing the water levels in the lake.
So that you have these towns with names like Oasis and Mecca.
Where really no vacationers any longer visit or live there.
And of course what you have are a lot of Latinos who are often farm workers, sometimes migrant farm workers, often not, who live there because housing is cheap, because it sucks to live there, right?
And so what we have is a finding that Latinos living near the Salton Sea have higher rates of COVID and have worse outcomes when they get COVID.
But what we really have here is a class issue, right?
I predict that anyone who is living in the Salton Sea is going to have these higher rates of asthma and prolonged respiratory problems, and that when a respiratory virus shows up, of course, they're going to be more susceptible to it as well.
Similarly, we have high population density.
being a predictor of bad outcomes in COVID.
So here's, Zach, you want to put this up just briefly, a fairly badly-dud article in Willamette Week out of Portland, the title being, People are more likely to catch COVID east of 82nd Avenue.
That's where Portland's housing is the most overcrowded.
In this case, the headline is better than the article because the article actually really consistently conflates race and class and doesn't grant that actually both of those things are correlated with overcrowding.
So except in high-density urban centers where living in a high-rise is actually sometimes an indicator of wealth, we know that being in overcrowded housing conditions is correlated with class.
And because of historical racism, Maybe modern racism, but certainly due to historical racism, which apparently irritates the cat no end, as it should.
We have people who have been historically oppressed populations who are more likely to be living in high population density.
Housing.
And so again, we have, you know, how is it that we can tease apart race and class?
We have a result that people of color are more likely to be getting COVID and suffering worse when they do.
But is it true that that is true even when you control for class?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And then finally we have factory work.
Factory work, which of course brings with it both high population density when you're in factories and low air quality, and obviously is a correlate for class.
Here's a story from The Guardian on July 11th.
Oops.
LA mask factories shut down as hundreds of workers get sick.
Now this obviously brings in the additional problem of now masks aren't being made because It's mask factories that are being shut down, but the point is that we have a number of these things pointing in the same direction, right?
That class seems to be a predictor of, sorry for those listening and not watching, there's a cat on the screen on the table now, Yeah.
Class is certainly a predictor of bad outcomes for COVID, but is race separately from class?
I'm not sure that that's true.
And I don't know that it's not true, but I'm not sure.
So one more thing, Brett, before you start commenting as you extract the cat without knocking over our water.
We have a CDC report that came out just yesterday.
Zach, if you would show this.
Hospitalization rates and characteristics of children aged less than 18 years hospitalized with laboratory confirmed COVID-19 in 14 states from March 1st to July 25th.
And one of the results of this report, one of the findings they have, The report is that, indeed, specifically Latino and Black children had higher cumulative rates of COVID-associated hospitalizations and, well, that, that they had worse outcomes than white kids.
And this one, this report, I believe, does not attempt to tease out whether or not that was true if you would control for class as well.
I would just point out that there are ways actually that what we, and I've said elsewhere, I won't go into it here, but the term race is a problem because it's not, it is a fiction, but it is not entirely a fiction.
It is a social fiction built around something that we might call population or lineage.
And that those things are real biological phenomena, whereas race is polluted by politics.
But in any case, there are ways… I think that warrants saying again.
I mean, this is just incredibly important.
Population is a real concept, that yes, all populations pretty much will have fuzzy boundaries, both temporally and spatially, but that doesn't make them not real.
Whereas race is like the politicization, the politicization… It's the weaponization of… Yeah, and maybe it was from the beginning and maybe it wasn't.
I'm not, I don't know.
But it is, it appears to be a context-free ideology, free description of populations, but it of course is not.
It is not.
And you can tell that because, you know, a one-drop rule is obviously a political phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon.
Yeah.
But I would, there's one fly in the ointment here, which is what drives people to weaponize it is a kind of racism to which humans are Prone yeah, and so it is your genes trying to get you to advance their interests you know against the values that Most of us would hold that causes things like a one-drop rule to emerge and we can talk about the biological basis for that another time But it's a complex story.
Race is simultaneously a fiction, it is a bastardization of something biological, it is itself not a biological description, but the warping, the distortion is driven by a biological motivation that is not honorable and to which we should be responding and figuring out how to prevent it from having hegemony.
But in any case.
I would just point out there's a way that race can play into this that has everything to do with actual population of origin.
Yes.
And nothing to do with racism.
Mm-hmm.
And I would just say that that has to do with the fact that vitamin D has consistently shown up.
So we'll get... Oh, we're going there.
Okay.
Well, no, I mean, go on.
All I would say is...
The simple interaction.
So the reason that some people have dark skin is because their ancestors come from a place where the sun comes in through the atmosphere more directly.
The closer you are to the equator, the more directly the sun comes through the atmosphere, the less of it is absorbed on the way down.
The sun's rays hit the earth more particularly and so go through less atmosphere to get to the earth and so you get more of it.
You standing in any one place get more of it standing there.
Per hour, or per year, or whatever.
And the point is UV light, as we're about to discuss, is extremely destructive stuff.
And so melanin is built-in sunscreen, right?
Rather than sunscreen that you either wear or slather on, it is sunscreen that's built into the skin.
And of course, people who tan, I've never been very good at it, but people who tan are, you know, ratcheting up In time, their production of this molecule to basically shield their DNA from the damage that comes from UV light.
But in any case, that shield, whatever it is, whether it's a jacket or whether it's melanin in your skin, interrupts the production of vitamin D, which is photosynthetically created in our skin in response to sunlight.
And so, vitamin D, for whatever reason, has shown up as a Primary factor, you are less likely to get sick, and if you do get sick, you are likely to get much less sick if you have proper levels of vitamin D rather than are deficient, and so that can interact in just a physiological way with different populations.
The prediction, of course, of that being that populations will suffer in proportion to the degree of darkness of their skin.
Even individuals might be able, you could see this pattern within individuals, darker people, … might be more affected.
So that has nothing to do with racism.
Right.
It has to do with race, but not with racism.
And then these findings that seem to have very much to do with class.
Class correlates with race 100% due to historical racism, but is it due to modern racism?
That is actually a hypothesis that needs to be demonstrated.
Right.
And no one appears to be testing it.
We are all expected to simply accept it.
Well, and I would just point out that this is, you know, I don't know if we're going to get to what 2 plus 2 might equal, but this is the tragic irony of this desire to unhook all of the structures that we have built and discovered to evaluate what might be true.
The claim that these things are all weaponized and therefore none of them are trustworthy is preposterous.
What you want in this circumstance is something called an ANOVA.
You want an analysis that tells you what fraction of the difference in susceptibility to COVID or the degree of symptoms that you have is due to class.
If you control for class, what fraction of it is due to race?
If you control for those things, what fraction of it is due to the darkness of your skin?
What fraction of it is due to zip code?
So, the point is, all of these things have a contribution that can be discovered.
You can't do it perfectly, but we have the tools.
The bigger the sample, the better the tools work, and we can figure out how much of these things are due to X, Y, Z factor, and ultimately, there will be a factor that has to do with modern racism.
Is it a big factor?
Small factor?
We can predict, but... And should we be trying to reduce modern racism to zero?
Of course.
Of course.
All right.
All right.
So, I can move into the sunlight and UV thing now, unless you had other things you wanted to talk about with regard to COVID first?
No, we can come back to them.
All right.
All right, so a Super Chat question that we got in episode 36 that we did not get to pointed to this article.
Zach, if you want to put this up.
So I thank the person who pointed us to this.
This is a 2020 article from June.
Far UVC light, 222 nanometers, efficiently and safely inactivates airborne human coronaviruses.
So give me my screen back if you will, Zach.
Thank you.
I quote from the abstract that far UVC light in the 207 to 222 nanometer range efficiently kills pathogens potentially without harm, potentially without harm, to exposed human tissues.
So the authors here have tested against two coronaviruses, although not SARS-CoV-2 yet, and found high efficacy against those coronaviruses as well as in previous work against influenza.
So they basically had already, they were already primed and ready to look and see if this far UV light would be deactivating viruses, because they had previously done this work to test whether it would be against influenza.
And so in both of the papers that I found that they are talking about here, they find that it is.
So wait, wait, a question.
The structure of this claim, that this particular wavelength of UV light Destroys the pathogen without damage to tissue.
They're not talking about using this light in or on the tissue, but the question is about using the light as a disinfectant in an environment and that a person in that environment would be unharmed.
So, whereas some wavelengths of light you could potentially cause skin cancers, for example, if you had Enough of it.
In this case, what they're saying, and we've actually talked about this.
I argued in one prior live stream that we could envision light bulbs that would disinfect a room when nobody was present.
The Super Chat question was in response to that, and this is exactly what these guys are saying we should be doing.
But they're also apparently saying you don't have to have light bulbs that know when you're in the room and disinfect when you're not, that you could disinfect a room without hurting the people in it using this particular way.
So in fact, actually what I'm looking at right now, they say the most commonly employed type of UV light for germicidal applications is a low-pressure mercury vapor arc lamp, emitting around 254 nanometers.
More recently, xenon lamp technology has been used which emits broad UV spectrum.
However, while these lamps can be used to disinfect unoccupied spaces, direct exposure to conventional germicidal UV lamps in occupied public spaces is not possible because direct exposure to these germicidal lamp wavelengths can be a health hazard both to the skin and eye.
By contrast, there is no evidence yet that in the range they are finding efficacy against coronaviruses in the 207 to 222 nanometer range That they are damaging to human tissue.
So they may well have found the sweet spot here.
And that's amazing.
So I have a bunch more to say here, but you want to comment?
I want to add one thing.
That lots of stuff where we have a legacy device like our lights could be upgraded for this purpose.
There's another place where I see this opportunity.
We have HVAC systems that recirculate air, and they do it for a good reason, which is that, you know, if you took outside air, for example, then in the winter, you would have to heat it up from a very low temperature rather than taking air, which is cooled in a room, reheating it.
You're heating it a very small amount.
So efficiency-wise, this is important.
There are, however, times when you might adjust your HVAC system so that it was circulating air the way your car system circulates air.
You can, well I mean in a car we're all familiar with you can choose whether or not you're breaking in outside air or recirculating.
Exactly, but my point is there are times, I'm not a huge fan of air conditioning, I happen to think it creates a huge amount of ill health, but if you're not cooling Air or heating it.
You might still want to use the system to circulate outside air in.
And if you had a net flow through, it would decrease the chances of at least contracting COVID.
Would it work generally with flu and other pathogens?
Maybe.
But in this case, wouldn't it be great if you could get your HVAC system to work for you rather than against you?
Right.
Yeah.
Early, I don't remember when, but one of the first live streams that we did, I was talking about the results that in fact you know opening windows is more effective than running your HVAC but it may be that there's a way to fix the HVAC system such that they could be effective in the same way that That opening windows is effective as basically an antiviral agent and lessening the bad symptoms of the disease.
And indeed I think if memory serves, during tuberculosis, tuberculosis outbreaks around World War I maybe, they're basically taking patients who were infected outside increase their survival rates significantly, just getting them outside where there was airflow and where there was sunlight.
Yeah, it'd be interesting to know if vitamin D was an contributor there too.
I would just, as a final piece there, it is certainly already possible, and we could greatly enhance the capacity of HVAC systems, even when you're recirculating air within a building, to physically filter out things like particles, which is costly energetically speaking, but also to use UV light which is costly energetically speaking, but also to use UV light to disinfect this So all of these systems could become wise about infection, and they should be.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I guess one place I wanted to go with regard to this research is it's an opportunity for us once again to talk about the risk of hyper-novelty, right?
And also to talk about the value of the precautionary principle when we modify our ancestral conditions.
So I was asked at a conference last summer, I don't think I told you about this interaction, by this rich young woman who was rather self-satisfied in the way that rich people sometimes are, What value spending time in nature could possibly have?
She had heard me talking about it, and she was affronted by the very thought that spending time in nature would have value.
She said to me, I don't know if this is a direct quote, but something like, why aren't the things we learn on screen a complete replacement?
I made the mistake of generating a list for her on the spot, and I said things like, well, you know, we know that stress hormones are lowered when we're in nature, and that physical movement that's required at least to get to nature and often when you're in nature is well understood to be healthy across a number of anatomical and physiological systems, and the value of facing an environment that is not human-made, and so can throw you curveballs.
That you have no way of either fully predicting or of negotiating with is huge.
That is to say, and this is a point that we make in the book that we're writing and have made many times before, but there's no arguing your way out of a storm front or a river that has risen three feet since the last time you crossed it or the setting sun.
You can't watch light levels descend and make a social negotiation with the descending light levels Unless you're inside, right?
Unless you're inside.
But the physical world is this non-arbitrary arbitrator of, do you actually have a model of your universe that makes some sense?
And so I said all that to her and she was mostly not convinced because she was not prepared to be convinced.
But I actually realized right in the aftermath, and again thinking about this research, That the better answer is this.
The better answer is we don't know all of the benefits of spending time outdoors.
We have some of them, and here's this list, right?
And there are many more that we do know.
But we do know that we have done so for almost all of our existence.
And that as we've been spending less time outdoors, our health has begun to fail us.
And that suggests that there is value there, even if we cannot yet point to what all of the value is or what the benefits are.
I'm grateful that there are people who are discerning what some of those benefits are and that we have discerned some of them and are talking about them, but I'm also certain that there are more.
And it's not incumbent on me, defending the ancestral condition, to come up with the benefits of it, to defend it.
It's incumbent upon the new thing.
to defend why it can't possibly be getting in the way.
So this is Chesterton's fence also, right?
When you come upon a fence and it's in your way, if you want to destroy it, Chesterton would say, you have to tell me what the fence is there for.
And if you cannot tell me what it's there for, I don't want you getting rid of it because you clearly don't know its value.
If you could tell me what it's there for, I could then make an argument for its removal, Maybe we can talk about removing it, but until and unless you can accurately and completely describe what the thing is, do not get rid of it.
In our last Super Chat Q&A, we fielded a question about the appendix, and it's the same thing.
Don't get rid of the appendix until you have a really good sense of what it's there for.
We actually now, after 100 years of people getting rid of their appendices, I don't know if that's how you pluralize the organ or not, I certainly do, whether it's accurate or not.
Right.
Are now coming to an understanding of what it's there for.
So the default assumption should be that it is not actually healthful to do the thing that since we've started doing it has been associated with decreasing health, right?
I guess one more thing on this, unless you want to jump in right here.
Well, I just want to say, you know, the problem is we are too in love with our analytical abilities, which indeed do make us special as creatures.
Sure do.
But there is a sense in which you have an intuition that being outside is healthy.
Virtually everyone has this intuition.
- That's right. - And it is likely to be based on something significant.
I mean, just I would point to one example that if you are, kitty cat, if you are backpacking and you are suddenly exposed to a normal light regime, You are liable to find yourself not so eager to stay up into the wee hours and not so eager to stay in bed after the sun has come up.
But it just simply reinforces a normal relationship to day and night.
And this sets in so quickly that a discovery that yeah, you know, we have all of these You know, I particularly am very interested in tracing down all the little things that you can discover in your life that actually do you harm.
You know, hence the discovery that I'm massively allergic to wheat, which is really hard to detect because it's in everything.
But, you know, the idea that blue lights cause it to be very difficult to go back to sleep and, you know, yellow lights don't, these sorts of things are patterns you can detect in your own life.
And we all have sleep issues because we are constantly flooded by all kinds of arbitrary nonsense.
And the fact that all you have to do, even if you can't specify what it is that you've eliminated, is go into an environment where, you know, there are very few novel influences and you're restored to just a slate of ancestrally representative ones and it fixes your problem.
Most viewers will have heard of the fad, but the legitimate at its base fad for elimination diets, right?
That you take out all the things that you think might be causing you whatever problems that you're having, and you reintroduce them slowly one by one.
Well, backpacking is maybe a kind of environmental elimination diet.
No, it's an illumination diet where you change the wavelengths that you are encountering, It's an environmental elimination diet that actually takes out all of the novel things of modern life, with the exception of what you have brought with you, and you can see if you get healthy.
I mean, the pun is cute, but it actually really diminishes the point.
Sorry about that.
As puns do often diminish the point.
That hurts.
No, but I think this is important.
Really, I was reframing what I heard you say, that this is a kind of environmental elimination diet that has great value.
That's a kind of hybrid answer between the listing that I gave this woman of what the benefits are of of being in nature.
And what I thought later, the more apt answer was, you just don't know.
And because the change has been correlated with a decrease in health, you should assume that it's better.
But that this allows you to actually find out which of the things that you're doing might be unhealthy, or just, oh, I went and spent a week out away from all of the usual Toxins and influences and screens and all of this, and these five things I didn't even know were correlated went away.
Okay, I still don't know what all that I'm doing in my normal life that's associated with, but I can be pretty sure that it was something that wasn't out there when I was backpacking, right?
We have another, this is another benefit of being outdoors, right?
Sunlight is literally disinfectant.
It's literally disinfectant.
And I think our grandmothers knew this at some level, although I don't know if grandmothers particularly said it, but just a side note on that.
We've probably all heard this, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant, but we know when we hear that, that it's usually invoked metaphorically.
And so here we have this perfect convergence of literal and metaphorical truth, which is not always the case.
The sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Sunlight is not going to be literally the best disinfectant in all cases, but in the case of many germs, it is.
And sunlight is the best disinfectant is a metaphorical truth as well.
And so I went down this tiny little historical road that I found interesting, so I thought I'd share with you.
And all of you today.
This was used first, well this was used as metaphor by Louis Brandeis, who was a Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939, in his 1914 essay called What Publicity Can Do, which itself was in his book, again a 1914 book, called Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It.
So the complete quotation, I mean it's still a brief quotation, but from Brandeis is, "...publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases.
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, electric light the most efficient policeman." So, we never hear that second part.
We never hear it, and yet I think that there's something truly deep there around combining the post-industrial landscape and the benefits and the virtues of it that we are all so dependent on, but not presuming that it can fully replace and not wanting for it to fully replace the things that the pre-industrial landscape offers us as well.
Finally, one more note on this.
Brandeis himself didn't actually come up with this.
It's a quote from an 1888 book by James Bryce.
Zach, if you want to put this up here and I'll just read this.
Public opinion is a sort of atmosphere, fresh, keen, and full of sunlight, like that of the American cities.
And the sunlight kills many of those noxious germs which are hatched where politicians congregate.
Maybe that for now.
We'll stop there.
Cool.
Now, I would just point out that in the case of COVID, we find both the metaphorical and literal in play.
Beyond sunlight being the best disinfectant.
No, no, I mean...
Sunlight being the best disinfectant because the the literal use here that there is actually this You know UV light disinfects, especially with respect to kovat for now It's not to say it couldn't evolve a protection and this goes to the second part Which is the complete lack of transparency surrounding what took place in China and allowed this virus to escape China, which it certainly
Did as a result of bad information and whether it possibly escaped from a lab where it had been enhanced for the purpose of research The lack of transparency there is making this a much more dangerous pandemic there are lots of features as we keep saying here and it's getting no traction in the world, but
The possibility that this virus was trained to do what it does in serial passage experiments where it was selected artificially by putting it into either tissues or creatures or both and training it to infect for the purpose of studying it.
The question really is What if that is what happened?
What were the exact conditions of those experiments?
Because from that list of exact conditions we can expect places where it was drawn into one kind of structure and it will evolve back in the other direction over time.
We may even be seeing this.
Initially this virus had a very hard time infecting children.
We are now seeing significant damage to children.
That could be the result of the fact that we are now detecting a pattern that was there all along and we didn't see it, or it could be the fact that it is evolving And it is losing the characteristics that were favored in a laboratory environment and taking on these other characteristics.
So this is not an academic question.
This is a practical medical question.
And we have no transparency.
Right?
We still have... This is what journalism and the courts are for.
And we seem to be lacking.
We seem to be getting a highly politicized push across basically every aspect of the COVID-19 story.
Right.
And the fact is, our governments should come together over this.
The point is, no matter who is at fault and in what way for this having happened, we are all in the same boat with respect to figuring out what this virus is and how we can control it.
Because it could be with us for a very long time, and it turns out that it is Even if it is less lethal than we once thought.
And we've been talking about this for weeks.
It is not as deadly as we feared.
It is, however, apparently much more destructive.
People who recover are not fully recovered.
And so, Zach, could you put up the first of those articles that I sent you?
So here we have an article about damage to the brain.
A large percentage of coronavirus patients, 55%, have neurological problems three months later.
So this article points to some of the original research that is illustrating that there are actually, this is very frightening for it to be
In the brain, and you know, there were hints of this from the beginning, the loss of the sense of taste and smell, for example, but that we are seeing patterns where most people who are getting coronavirus are having neurological symptoms even months later, even after they've completely, as far as we know, cleared the virus, which may mean that they didn't completely clear it, or it may mean that the damage done by the virus in the short period of time that they were sick is having these long lasting implications, and we don't know how long they last.
Yeah.
There's an analogy there between, as we've talked about before, the sort of organizational versus activational effects of hormones.
That the virus might have caused damage in an organizational sort of way back then, in such that even if your body has cleared it, you never go back to normal.
Just like being masculinized with testosterone as a boy and early teenager, you will never go back to not having been masculinized by testosterone.
Whereas an activational effect of a hormone requires that the trigger be on for the for the switch to flip and we don't know and in this case it would be is there still virus present which is causing the lingering brain malfunction in which case we need to clear The problem is a little bit simpler in that case, right?
And it's less dire in terms of the future for people who've been infected, because, well, we just need to clear your body of this thing, and no, we don't know how to do it yet, but once done, it's good and over, as opposed to if it's more like an organizational effect, wow, well, you've got damage, and you're going to have damage, and now we need to figure out how to mitigate that damage, but the damage is done.
Yeah, but the problem is, if it's hiding out in neurological tissue, there may be no way of getting rid of it.
Oh, so I mean, so in another level, so like another analogy with like falciparum malaria, or no, vivax malaria that'll hide out in your liver so that there's no doing anything with it.
You don't feel particularly sick if you're infected with vivax malaria, but you also, there's no way for medicine like chloroquine to go after it.
There's no way for normal medicine.
There are medicines that will chase it out of your liver in that case.
But there are viruses, herpes viruses for example, hide in neurological tissue and they effectively retreat to places that the immune system can't get to them.
So anyway, this is part of why, for example, chicken pox turns into shingles later in life.
So anyway, if it's hiding out in neurological tissue that is insulated from the immune system, that's very bad news.
Much more incentive for us to figure out how not to get this thing rather than the what passed for sophistication early in this thing, which was If you get it and you have a mild case, you're lucky because you might have immunity and you're done, right?
And the answer is well, we don't know if you're done You know, we don't know if you have immunity and we do know that there's a very large chance that you will have had Damage to a major system.
Can you put up the other articles act?
So I'm going to show you another article here.
Again, this is not the primary literature.
This one talks about a number of different systems and types of damage.
Can you scroll down a little bit?
But anyway, this one talks a bit about the brain fog that people experience, but also the heart damage.
And so we are seeing a large percentage of people who have had mild cases where we can actually see the damage to their hearts.
So this is just Yes, it's less deadly than you thought.
Yes, it's more destructive than you thought.
You have to adjust your model accordingly.
And there's still all the stuff that's up in the air about if you get better and you don't have these symptoms, are you really done?
Will it come back later?
Will you contract it again in a year?
We don't know.
So, one last topic before we sign off for the hour and take your Superjet questions in the next hour.
Totally different topic at some level.
We have been talking for weeks now, months I guess, about the ideology that is taking over and making it difficult for people to say things other than what is becoming the dominant accepted truth on the street.
And I've been talking about the Don't Hurt Me walls, and I read from Havel's essay on power of the powerlessness?
I can't remember exactly what it was called.
It had to do with power.
His Green Grocery example.
And I've been reading of late this book called Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Ademich.
She's a journalist, now I think the bureau chief in Beijing for the LA Times.
Who spent a lot of time in South Korea and made several visits to North Korea talking to people.
Most of the people she talked to were people who had escaped from North Korea and were now in South Korea and told her their personal stories.
And one of the things that emerges from this book is just a reminder of the risk of compelled speech and its utility for us in seeing at the point that people are not feeling free to talk, that they are reporting that they feel self-censorship, or that they have to put a Black Lives Matter sign up in their window lest the activists come for them.
We should be taking that as an indicator of worse things to come.
That compelled speech is a kind of canary in a coal mine, and these signs and windows are a form of compelled speech, I'm arguing.
So let me just do a very quick review of what Korea is, and then read a couple of short excerpts from this book.
So, the Korean Peninsula makes good geographic sense.
I should have pulled up a map.
I don't have one.
But it's bounded by the Sea of Japan to the east and the Yellow Sea to the west and a couple of rivers, the Yalu and the Tumen apparently, probably mispronouncing those, at the land boundary with China to the north.
But it's being split along the 38th parallel after World War II was an arbitrary political decision.
I don't know.
arbitrary in terms of where it was.
The end of World War II meant that there were two major forces in the world, and each of them were claiming some primacy over Korea, and that wasn't going to work, and so they were battling for it.
But really, to the degree that there was a natural cultural or linguistic or tribal or anything like that split, it would have been along East and West that basically people to the East were more likely gravitating to Japan and people to the West to China and there could have been a divide that way. it would have been along East and West that basically But the But the split, being put where it was, effectively just cut a not homogeneous, but more homogeneous than many population in two.
And people in the South ended up with something like a democracy, and the people in the North ended up with what is probably the most totalitarian state in the world today.
Not at the time, you know, it took some time to get there.
So, Kim Il-sung, who ruled North Korea from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994.
Then when he died, his son Kim Jong-il became head of state.
When he died, when Kim Il-sung died in 1994, the entire country became convulsed in grief and public displays of grief.
And those two things, grief and public displays of grief, or public displays of something that appeared to be grief, were impossible to distinguish between.
And that is the point of what I'm going to read from today.
So this is again, Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea.
This is journalistic and personal story-driven accounting of life in North Korea.
So pages 98, 99, find them here.
We have.
This is in the wake of the death of Kim Il-sung, the first head of state in North Korea.
As a 21-year-old university student, Jun Sang was naturally skeptical of all authority, including the North Korean government.
He prided himself on his questioning intellect.
But he didn't think of himself as seditious or in any way an enemy of the state.
He believed in communism, or at least believed that whatever its faults, it was a more equitable and humane system than capitalism.
He had imagined he would eventually join the Workers' Party and dedicate his life to the betterment of the fatherland.
That was what was expected of all those who graduated from the top universities.
Now, surrounded by sobbing students, Jeon Song wondered, if everybody else felt such genuine love for Kim Il-sung and he did not, how would he possibly fit in?
He had been contemplating his own reaction or lack thereof with an intellectual detachment, but suddenly he was gripped with fear.
He was alone, completely alone in his indifference.
He always thought he had close friends at the university, but now he realized he didn't know them at all.
And certainly they didn't know him.
If they did, he would be in trouble.
This revelation was quickly followed by another, equally momentous.
His entire future depended on his ability to cry.
Not just his career and his membership in the Workers' Party, his very survival was at stake.
It was a matter of life and death.
Jeon Sang was terrified.
At first he kept his head down so nobody could see his eyes.
Then he figured out that if he kept his eyes open long enough they would burn and tear up.
It was like a staring contest.
Stare.
Cry.
Stare.
Cry.
Eventually it became mechanical.
The body took over where the mind left off and suddenly he was really crying.
He felt himself falling to his knees, rocking back and forth, sobbing just like everyone else.
Nobody would be the wiser.
And one more, unless you want to comment on that one.
Seems to speak for itself.
Yeah, exactly.
A shorter excerpt here from page 101 of this book.
What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief became a patriotic obligation.
Women weren't supposed to wear makeup or do their hair during a 10-day morning period.
Drinking, dancing, and music were banned.
The Inmanban kept track of how often people went to the statue to show their respect.
Everybody was being watched.
They not only scrutinized actions, but facial expressions and tone of voice, gauging them for sincerity.
Mi Ran had to go twice a day for the 10-day morning period, once with the children from the kindergarten and once just with her work unit of teachers.
She began to dread it, not just the grief but the responsibility of making sure the fragile children didn't get trampled or work themselves into hysteria.
There was one five-year-old girl in her class who cried so loudly and was so demonstrative in her grief that Mi Ran worried she would collapse.
But then she noticed the girl was spitting in her hand to dampen her face with saliva.
There were no actual tears.
My mother told me if I don't cry I'm a bad person.
The girl confessed.
Wow.
So, North Korea is unique.
We're not in North Korea.
It is a particularly remarkable and extreme authoritarian, totalitarian, communist state.
But the tactics that are used to get people to fall in line, to get them to comply, To cause them to act out of fear, and some people who act out of fear will at some point begin to believe the things that they say out of fear, just out of self-preservation, are familiar at this point.
I would say that they're familiar to us, increasingly, these tactics.
Yeah.
Not the outcome.
We are seeing the instinct to it, right?
The degree to which we are compelled varies based on where you are, what industry you're in, and all of this.
But we are seeing the instinct to compel people to feel even a particular way about things.
We are seeing a rejection of the idea that you are free to formulate your own opinion about this, that, or the other.
And here's, I mean, I do think there's a deep philosophical question here, which I feel I know the answer to, but I cannot defend it.
The question is, are we justified?
Certainly almost everybody who will be listening to this podcast will agree that there is something marvelous about being free.
Now, I think we have to think carefully about what being free is, because it's very easy to take freedom and treat it frivolously, or basically to squander freedom.
And should we be entitled to?
My guess is we should be, that that's part of freedom.
But at some level, the ability to figure out how, in what, to invest your freedom And the values that will cause you to invest it in something good, rather than to waste it.
Those things, to me, seem simply superior to a system that sustains life.
It may even do some things better than a system in which you are free, because freedom involves freedom to fail, whereas a system that drives freedom out may be able to guarantee that at least that doesn't happen to you.
But in any case, we are facing a question about whether or not, you know, by what standard is the success of a system to be measured?
Are we to be simply horrified by a system that compels you to cry in order to advertise your complete mental alignment with your population, even if that provides some kind of stability?
I think so, but... But I mean also, I guess I would say, The question that you ask is, are we to be simply horrified as opposed to, you know, perhaps the implied alternative was finding something good there, but one alternative implied alternative that I heard was, or can we learn from it?
Can we learn from it even though the outcome is not an outcome that any reasonable person would want?
Can we learn from the tactics that we saw on the ground there and say perhaps these are indicators of authoritarian movement that's afoot?
Well, I agree that they are.
I mean, nobody who listens to us is going to be shocked that we both find the authoritarianness of this movement the most telling and frightening hallmark of it.
But I think I'm asking something deeper, which is that effectively You have a movement that is availing itself of- You're talking about in the U.S.
now?
In the U.S.
A movement that is availing itself of the ability to pressure every institution into saying false things, absurd things, demanding things, and We could draw a line where it violates the law, which it does sometimes.
But there's an awful lot that it does through scaring people below a level where it's illegal to do so.
And so on what basis do we claim actually we have the right to halt this process if the process itself does not inherently violate at least the constraints that we lay out at the level of legal limits.
And I believe fully that we have the right to shut this movement down because it is a threat.
We could make the argument, and we have made the argument.
It is a threat to the stability of our system.
So to the extent that the purpose of our system is to provide for people, if this in the end results in its inability to do that, that's one basis on which you might object to it.
But there's also something objectionable about the very fact that it does not value freedom.
Right?
And, you know, I'm not one of these people, as you well know, I'm not one of these people who thinks That absolute freedom, that the ability to do anything is great.
I think that the constraints that actually liberate you meaningfully are extremely useful.
And actually I think that the ridiculous discussion we've been having about basic arithmetic is exactly this question.
And the point is, you become freer when math does not allow you to choose what the plus symbol means.
If we agree on what the plus symbol means, that is a reduction in some narrow kind of freedom that buys you the ability to make an airplane to go somewhere.
It buys you the ability to have a negotiation with other people and know what it means to enforce an agreement.
These things are liberating.
And so the constraint liberates.
It's like the FDA rules allow you to eat and not fear you're going to be poisoned.
The FAA rules allow you to get on an airplane fly to wherever.
So constraints-- - The FAA is doing a better job than the FDA. - Well, the whole thing's coming apart.
So at some level, I don't know which acronym is gonna be the last acronym standing, but-- I guess they're not acronyms, they're whatever they are.
But the question is, must we be horrified on the basis that they are building a system or threatening to build a system that will rob us all of the ability to live?
Or can we be horrified on the basis that they don't honor freedom and that we know that actually there's just simply something better about any ideology that aspires to liberate people in a meaningful sense is actually simply better than any ideology that discounts freedom as an important value?
Yeah, that's good.
And maybe that's the place to stop.
Alright.
On that note, I will remind you, the nominations for Unity 2020 are now open.
You should go to articlesofunity.org slash nominate.
Nominate up to two people, and then we will quickly get, in this upcoming week, to a debate on who we would like to see elected, which I think is going to be very interesting.
Excellent.
And we will be answering your questions as many as we can get to from this hour and next hour that you deliver via Super Chat, starting in about 15 minutes at a link that will be in the description below this video.
You can find a Discord server as a benefit at both of our Patreons and also get access to a private monthly Q&A that we do on the last Sunday of every month at my Patreon.
And that's it for now, I guess.
Yep.
Monthly discussions at my Patreon.
The last ones were great.
Lots of new faces.
Plenty of folks who've been around in those discussions for a while.
They've been very lively, and I think everybody seems to enjoy them, so consider that.
