Bret and Heather 38th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Adventures in Sneetch World
In this 38th 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, like this video, follow us ...
Hey folks, Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Cat Extravaganza livestream number 38 with Dr. Heather Hying and myself, Brett Weinstein.
We are continuing to hurdle through 2020 as we expect our U.
We certainly hope so.
Yes, exactly.
It's really better than the alternatives, as they say.
Stagnating in 2020?
Not anyone's choice, I think.
It's not where you want to stay.
You want to get through this as quickly as possible.
Just head down, go for it.
Yeah.
All right.
So I understand we have a correction off the top.
Yes, we do have a correction off the top, but let me actually, before even going right there at the top, say, because we have many new viewers, there have been questions about how it is that people get questions to us.
So if you're watching this live on YouTube, you can do a super chat question, which involves paying to YouTube, and we will take as many of those super chat questions based on how much you gave in the first hour, and in the second hour we will take as many of your questions as we can based on the order in which you put them in.
And then each episode we will take some of the few that we missed the previous time that we thought were particularly worthwhile.
So it's about Super Chat and if you have no idea what I'm talking about but you're live in YouTube right now we have I believe a moderator there who will be able to answer questions if you don't know what that means.
So I should also just say we don't love asking for money but since we were so Colorfully ejected from the Academy, this is a large fraction of how we keep our family afloat.
So we very much appreciate the support that you give us through this mechanism, and so far it has been working pretty well.
We are hopefully going to deliver a mechanism that will improve the functionality even more in the near term, so keep your eye out for that.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so a correction right off the bat.
Last time in episode 37, we talked about a paper published in Nature finding that UVC light in the 207 to 222 nanometer range has proven to be effective against several coronaviruses.
They did not actually check SARS-CoV-2, but they had also found it Effective against influenza.
And so extrapolating, they thought, okay, maybe this is actually going to be effective.
And we then had a discussion, Isla discussion, this is not on you at all, in which, while I didn't explicitly say, I basically implied very strongly that this is one more piece of evidence that being outside is going to be effective against And there is lots of evidence that being outside is actually protective.
But UVC light, and this was actually, I first was alerted to this in a Super Chat question from last time, the UVC light actually doesn't get to the Earth's surface.
That UVC is in the 100 to 280 nanometer range, and between 100 and 200 nanometers or so, it's totally blocked by O2, by just diatomic oxygen.
And between 200 and 280 nanometers, it's blocked by triatomic oxygen, which is also known as ozone.
So the ozone layer also blocks a lot of the UVB light, which is up to 315 nanometers, and UVA is almost entirely unblocked by the atmosphere, and so it's the ground that's in the 315 to 400 nanometer range.
So all of that is a little bit technical and maybe more than anyone wants to know, but the point is that the germicidal UV light in HVAC systems and closets and, you know, in a number of places
Could be very effective, but this is not a place, it seems, that spending time outdoors is actually going to be directly helpful in combating either getting SARS-CoV-2 transmitted to you or having a lower virulence of the disease, COVID-19, should you get it.
So, I just want to unpack this a little bit because the message here is complex.
It's an error correction that, as far as I can tell, has zero implication for what you should do.
Outside is still very safe, especially during the day when UV light does some purifying, though that's apparently not the only reason that outdoors is safe.
Even at night you have the large volume of air which reduces the viral load below the threshold that you're likely to get it.
Outdoors is great.
And as we keep saying, the clock is ticking.
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun is shining.
Spend some time outside now because winter is coming and you are going to be driven indoors much more than you'd like.
So just even at the level of your mental well-being, drink in as much of that beautiful outdoor stuff as possible so that when you're stuck inside in February, you don't feel like you've been trapped for a year.
Yeah.
Speaking of a bit, we had talked early.
You had suggested that you were concerned in April-May about what was going to happen to the homeless communities because they were so packed together and they basically have nowhere to go.
And interestingly, we're not seeing vast outbreaks among the homeless.
Well, what don't the homeless have access to?
It's indoor spaces for the most part.
And even when they do, they often aren't choosing to go there, right?
Populations, even within sort of tent cities, are being exposed to high airflow almost all the time, and so have relatively low density of the viral particles, which are necessary for both getting the disease and having worse outcomes.
Higher density means higher likelihood of contracting and worse outcomes.
Now if I might, I would like to tack a couple things onto this important correction with no implications for your behavior.
So the point of that study then was that we could introduce this UVC into our indoor environments where it would be useful, but it would have to be done technologically.
And it seems to have, as far as we know, it has no adverse health effects, UVC.
All of the beware of UV that we hear about with regard to skin cancers itself requires an asterisk for sure because there is good evidence and I haven't pulled it up so I can't pinpoint exactly the papers, but actually the protective effects of the UVA UVB light seems to outweigh the risks of skin cancers, so that is an aside.
But UVC, even among the people, even among the many dermatologists who will say absolutely never should you be exposed to UV light, you need to slather yourself with sunscreen and wear hats at all times and all this, no one is saying at the moment that there are adverse health effects to exposure to UVC.
But of course, given that we haven't been exposed because we've always lived on this planet, who knows?
Who knows what we aren't noticing?
Right.
Now, there are a couple things I've got to tack on here because during my telomere phase, as you'll recall, there was a discovery that gave me particular joy associated with the fact that dermatologists were talking themselves silly about the following observation.
The expectation was that exposure to UV causes cancer.
Everybody who was dermatologically aware knew that.
But it was becoming clear that people that have very sun damaged skin, farm workers, cowboys, people who work under the hot sun enough that their skin is visibly sun damaged have very low rates of cancer.
Right?
And so it happens that my telomere work gives us exactly the reason for this and it tells you where to draw the line.
So, first of all, sun-damaged skin is damaged, right?
It loses its elasticity.
It doesn't do the jobs that skin does, that healthy young skin does as well.
It doesn't do it as well as healthy young skin.
If you are exposed to the sun continuously and it is damaging tissues such that you are basically turning over your cells at a high rate, but you are not getting so much intensity that it is causing genetic damage, which is mutations which cause tumors, then what you are doing is effectively aging your skin artificially quickly But if you're aging it without mutating it, then the point is that is expending your lifetime capacity for repair.
And your lifetime capacity for repair is what gives you the danger of tumors, because the capacity of one cell to reproduce itself many times after it's had a mutation gives you a big patch of cells that can get a second mutation that will turn it into a tumor.
But people whose skin is artificially old because they've spent a lot of time in the hot sun without getting sunburns, when they get a mutation, it creates a much smaller patch of cells, and so they are actually protected by the damage.
So once your skin is no longer capable of repair, you won't ever have youthful looking skin again, but you are also very unlikely to get cancer in that skin.
If you didn't get sunburns along the way.
That's the key thing.
And so this also explains the other interesting phenomenon, which was long known, which was that sunburns are the thing that leads to cancer, but it's early sunburns that lead to cancer later in your life.
So, the early sunburns, you get a mutation in a cell from UV light.
That cell then starts reproducing in an unregulated way.
It becomes a patch of cells, which is a mole, basically, and then it stops at its telomeric limit.
Well, the bigger the patch of cells is when it reaches that limit, the greater the chance that one of those cells will get a second mutation that frees it from the limit and turns it into a tumor.
Anyway, the bottom line here, at some level, is biology is always a complex system, and the answers aren't necessarily what you expect.
And, you know, turns out sunscreen, which we were told that we, you know, shouldn't dare go outside without it during the summer, it has many negative effects, that going out in the sun has many positive effects, that those effects are not necessarily ones you'd predict, like the vitamin D protective effect against COVID.
Let's actually just talk a little bit more about what we have done and what we did with our kids early on when all of the advice and every time we'd send them to school or camp or something we were told, you know, you have to pack a tube of sunscreen and probably come back empty and all of this and we didn't do this.
I'd like to share just a little bit about how and why, but also say that your point that early sunburn predicts later cancer does raise the issue of, okay, what is the boundary between a burn and a tan?
And, you know, tan is this protective response by the skin, but of course almost everyone has had the experience of, you know, spending a little bit too much time outside thinking you got away with it, thinking it went to tan, and then finding that it was actually a burn underneath.
And so this, like, basically boundaries between categories in every complex system that you can name is fuzzy, right?
And so, you know, you want to avoid getting too near that border between tan and burn as well.
Well, I agree.
The problem is, it's fuzzy in the moment.
In other words, you will have a burn before you have any evidence that you have a burn.
The experience is analog, but the actual, like, did it mutate or did it not, is digital.
Well, it's not even did it mutate, because you may not end up with a mutation.
Did you damage tissue such that it requires replacement, so that you end up with the sloughing of skin that comes with a burn?
The alternative being your skin anticipates damage based on detecting a lot of sunlight and it darkens, if you're light-skinned, it darkens the color of your skin in order to protect the cells that are there.
And so the tan, the sweet spot, is where you got enough sun to trigger this, but you didn't get so much sun that you damaged tissue.
And then genetic damage is one layer beyond that.
And that's the thing that you have to worry about now.
Here's an interesting phenomenon So I used to burn very very easily And I did get some of those sunburns in youth that tend to predispose a person to skin cancer But I've also learned just by observing my own interaction with the world how to manage it without sunscreen and Right?
So that hat on my Twitter profile is part of my strategy when I'm in the field, especially in the tropics, is that hat's great.
It's also great for rain.
Keeps the rain off of your face, which is really very useful.
That's a great conversation starter.
It's a terrible conversation starter.
People assume it's some sort of a prop.
Right.
But anyway, the thing that I learned about myself, which I've now taught my kids, and when they think of it, it works for them too, is that you can get a lot of sun exposure where you're headed towards a burn, and then you can take a short break, like a five minute break in the shade, or if there's no shade, you can turn so a different side of you is facing the sun.
And it seems to reset some sort of counter.
The thing that I think is interesting is it suggests a process that is analogous to what we now know about COVID infection.
So COVID infection, at least as our current model looks, there's like a bucket.
And that bucket, as long as it doesn't reach the top, means that even if you encountered some COVID, you're very unlikely to get sick.
It's only when the bucket overflows because you've had exposure over some period of time and the bucket filled up that you're likely to get it.
which means if you're outside, which is constantly emptying the bucket, you're very low risk.
So viral particles fly away from you.
Right.
And so there's something, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you what it is.
I don't know.
But there's something about the exposure.
The mechanism?
With respect to the sun damage.
There's something about the skin that is able to tolerate a certain amount of sun intensity.
And if you just keep building it up, it's like a bucket that has a hose in it that's bigger, that's putting in more water than the leak in the other side of the bucket.
The bucket eventually overflows.
But if you allow it to drain, and draining in the case of the sun exposure is just a matter of giving it some time in which you're not bombarding it with new Sunlight seems to reset something.
And so the thing that's surprising to me is that it's not like half an hour in the sun, you need a half an hour in the shade.
It's half an hour in the sun, you need two or three minutes in the shade.
Nor can you just count up the number of minutes you want to spend in the sun and say, okay, I'm just going to take that all at once.
You know, say you have skin that can tolerate three hours, that you have calculated can tolerate three hours in the sun at a time.
Well, that's youthful and extraordinarily sun-resilient skin.
But actually, say you did it for three hours, you could probably take a break and at three hours you'd need maybe 15-20 minutes and go back out again.
Yeah.
Now this really does seem to be the experience.
I have less direct empirical experience just because I don't tend to burn, but we've seen it with you and both of our children as well.
Yeah.
The last thing I would say, and first of all, this is just my experience.
It's anecdote at best, so your mileage is almost certainly going to vary and you have to figure out your own pattern.
I sometimes find that when I blow it a little bit and I go too far, and I know this because when I come in finally, you know, my skin is hot and it's like, is that a burn?
You can go a certain amount too far and then it doesn't end up being a burn.
So there's some sort of, you have exceeded tolerances, but not so much that it's gone critical phase, which allows you to actually know where you are in finding that border.
It requires that you pay attention to the feedback your body is giving you.
It requires that you have a sense of what your skin and your breathing and everything else about your physiology normally feels like, so that as it begins to send you warning signals, you are in a position to read them and to receive them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a lot of things work this way, medically speaking.
We're paying attention to the patterns.
Even if you don't know what the underlying mechanism is, you can manage things.
All right, shall we get on to the... I'll let you introduce the topic.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah, let's talk about the Seattle Police Chief resigning.
This is Carmen Best, who announced her resignation in a letter to her staff.
I think it was yesterday, so on August 10th.
To be effective September 2nd.
This happened after the Seattle City Council voted to significantly cut her pay, as reported in the Seattle P.I., the post-intelligencer, also yesterday.
She had been critical of the CHOP, the Jazz CHOP, especially in the wake of killings of two African-American men.
And so, Zach, if you would show... It's very unfortunate that we have yet another murder in this area identified as the CHOP.
Two African-American men dead at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter.
But they're gone.
They're dead now.
And we've had multiple other incidents.
Assaults.
Rape.
Robbery.
And shootings.
And so, you know, this is something that's going to need to change.
We're asking that people remove themselves from this area for the safety of the people.
If they care about people, they're going to have to try to help us to make it safe.
Not opposed to anybody's issue or concern.
They certainly can demonstrate, you know, and peacefully any place, but they can't hostilely take over a neighborhood and cause the crime levels to go up like this.
Two men are dead.
Two men are dead.
And a child, a 14-year-old, is hospitalized and we don't know what is going to happen to that kid.
Enough is enough here.
So, we can't hear that when you guys can, but she finishes with, enough is enough.
And this was back on June 29th.
This is a press conference that she held on June 29th.
And now she's done.
She's just, she's not going to take it anymore.
Well, she has faced some, she has had a significant pay cut.
Yep.
And she has also had her home protested.
And so in some sense what is taking place is you have a police chief who's being hamstrung in her job, who is now being exposed to very personal attacks.
I mean imagine having people protest you doing your job at your home.
That's a very threatening phenomenon, not just socially.
And then these insane demands to defund the police are actually manifesting.
Which are what resulted in her having to accept a pay cut, a significant pay cut, if she was to keep her job.
Right, and so this is now, it's the mirror of the Star of the Beast strategy that the right has employed against governance, where the idea is, well, maybe you don't attack the structures themselves, but you eliminate their ability to function, you strangle them financially.
No, if the point is let's render these institutions so bad that everyone can agree that they are not functional and therefore need to be disappeared entirely, defunding them first is a brilliant first step.
So, you know, how can you guarantee that policing will get worse rather than better?
You give it fewer resources, you give less time for, you know, mental health checks and actual legitimate and real training, And you lower the pay so that people who are considering going into the force are less likely to choose that job.
And you will therefore, as fewer and fewer people want to join the force, have to lower the standards of people you accept into the force.
This is guaranteed.
The defund the police, even if we only accept it as a, even if we accept the, you know, the mild version of what defund the police means, which we've talked before about whether or not that is actually what is being argued for.
But even if we just accept that what people are arguing for is that money has to be pulled out of policing, is there excess in police departments as in every other bureaucratic department in the world?
Certainly, right?
But the idea that we are going to pull money and therefore make it a less attractive job for people, thus guaranteeing that the people who go into it are going to be less likely to be the highly empathic and skilled people who we want as our policemen, is guaranteed to make police brutality worse rather than better.
Yeah, and the simple fact that we are being asked to consider how we would like to see police resourced in isolation is evidence that this is not an honest conversation we are involved in.
It is quite possible that you could get away with half as many police, but you would get away with half as many police by virtue of the fact that you had taken care of the things that the police are now forced to take care of.
By other mechanisms.
And of course, we will be told that, well that's what we're saying, just shift that money into community programs.
You cannot start there.
If you want to render the police less necessary by fixing other parts of society, you have to start with that.
If you pull the police first, even if you shunt stuff into other programs that you think are going to work, first of all, You don't know if it's going to work.
You don't know that the political structure will end up maintaining that money there.
What you're simply going to do is reduce the level of enforcement and therefore you're going to increase the brutality of it because in part the brutality of policing is a mechanism for doing it on the cheap.
Right.
And, you know, it's absolutely true.
It's been noted by many people that police have begun to do, you know, untrained for this work and never what policing was supposed to be about, some of the basically first responders on mental health issues, right?
And this is not what we should want our police to be doing.
And I can basically guarantee you that it's not what the police want to be doing.
Right?
No one wants to be called in to respond to mental health situations when they are not themselves, when that is not the career they have chosen, nor are they trained to do it.
So, do we need systems in place with people who are trained to actually be dealing with the mental health crises that we are seeing revealed on our streets and in the many domestic abuse calls, for instance?
For sure.
But that money, those systems have to be functional before you start to unravel the policing system.
Yeah.
So that's not really what's being debated.
No, it's not.
This is a movement that has discovered that it has power and your willingness to accept that the police should obviously be defunded is a litmus test to see whether you are for us or against us.
Well, this reminds me rather a lot of what happened at, yes, Evergreen.
Right?
I mean, we had this, Carmen Best, as far as I understand it, has been the police chief in Seattle for not too many years, but she's been on the force for almost 30.
And I think she was Seattle's first African American police chief.
And, of course, in a movement, just as she says in that clip, in a movement that is declaring itself to be about Black Lives Matter, why is it that black men are being killed?
And, you know, in a movement that proclaims to be about Black Lives Matter, why is it that Seattle's first African-American police chief is feeling that it is necessary for her to step down?
This is clearly not, you know, being black isn't sufficient to be exalted in this movement.
You have to be Of a particular political bent in order to be exalted in this movement.
And police chief Stacey Brown at Evergreen was, I know more about Stacey Brown than I do about Carmen Best, but Carmen Best appears to just be a good and honorable cop.
And Stacey Brown absolutely 100% was and still is.
She's just no longer a police chief on a college campus.
She was herself an Evergreen alum.
She was explicitly about working on a policy of anti-police brutality and trying to fix relationships between police and their constituents.
And she took no end of abuse from moment one, from her swearing-in ceremony.
Uh, from the people at Evergreen, and sure enough, she was stood down and she ended up having to resign because, because she had the authority to do her job taken away from her by, in the case of Evergreen, the president of Evergreen, and she felt that if she remained in the job, someone was going to get hurt or worse, and that that she would feel responsible for it, even though she had had all of the ability to do her job taken away from her.
This, I am sure, is what police chiefs all over the country are now feeling.
Yes.
And we also have the obvious test of the insight of those who are demanding these changes.
So those who have now driven Chief Best from office have instituted their utopia at small scale.
It very quickly resulted in shootings, including a fatal shooting.
It resulted in extortion from shop owners and basically... And rapes and assaults.
Right.
So the point is this is a test of the claim that the community can police itself better.
No, it can't.
Some of us knew that was coming, but OK, now you've tested it in a major American city and you've seen what happens.
You saw this at Evergreen inside of hours of the president of the college standing the police down.
You had a violent mob.
Students were attacked.
You had them stopping traffic, looking apparently for me.
And then we've got a third case.
We've got Portland, where the mayor, who is also the police commissioner, has hobbled the local police, resulting in nightly violence at first against the Hatfield Courthouse, and now it has moved into neighborhoods.
There's very shocking video of These rioters now telling citizens that they will burn their apartments down.
Apparently the crime is for looking out the window at the riot going by in the street.
So anyway, how many of these would you need before you got the message that all these people who claim to be authorities on how much policing is necessary and how easily and how much better things will be if we Eliminate it.
How much evidence would you need that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about when it comes to the role that policing plays in our country?
Yeah.
They don't.
It's obvious every time they try it.
They can't keep it together for, you know, a week.
That's right.
And just, we might introduce this.
This is from a week ago now.
Zach, if you would put this on screen.
New York Times op-ed from August 3rd, 2020 by Chuck Lovell, who is the chief of the police bureau in Portland.
Newly so, the former police chief stepped down and I think appointed him.
He skipped a number of rungs in the usual hierarchy to obtain this position.
He is himself a black man.
And he says, I mean, this is a, this is a Honestly, a pretty weakly worded op-ed, but even so, it says things like, people, here's this here, people protested peacefully while others engaged in dangerous activities that could have resulted in injury and even death.
So, we have the police chief of the city that we happen to live in that has been at the forefront of the media fight for narrative.
And neither of the polarized sides of the mainstream media narrative have gotten this right.
And, you know, we've talked about this before and so have others.
No, the city was not on fire.
Nor was it limited to two square blocks.
No, the protesters were not the only people on the streets.
Reliably, like clockwork, relatively shortly after the sun went down, and sometimes later, the protesters became rioters.
Some of those are the same people, many of them are not.
It was like a change of scene.
Yes.
Actually, I want to put something up here.
Isaac, could you put up the thing on propaganda?
So what I'm going to show you here is a blog post that came up on the Portland subreddit today.
Can you scroll up a little bit?
So, this is a remarkable piece in which a strategy called, uh, DARVO, is that right?
In the second paragraph there?
Mm-hmm.
Institutional DARVO?
Yeah.
So, what this piece argues... Which stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
Yes.
So, your brain is about to hurt if you try to puzzle through this.
This is, um, somebody associated with this protest slash riot movement who is arguing That the government is now engaged in a kind of propaganda in which they are attacking innocent people, that they are reversing victim and victimizer for the purpose of gaslighting the world into thinking that the protesters are violent.
Now, the problem here is that this is the exact inverse of the story.
I can't say it's the exact inverse in every instance.
Has any cop misbehaved during this?
Probably.
No, we know that's true.
But the point is, they are describing the exact strategy that they are involved in.
They are pretending to be a nonviolent movement, but there's a reliable shift each and every night.
And really, I think it's each and every night for the last 70.
There's been a reliable shift in the direction of violence.
That violence has been directed at federal buildings.
Now it's being directed at the police union and neighborhoods.
And the point is, look, there's not even a set of demands here that we can evaluate, right?
The demand is effectively, oh, get rid of the police, right?
How many, what fraction of the population actually thinks this is a good idea?
Tiny, if even that, but get rid of the police is the excuse.
For a violent attack on the structures of civilization that demand some kind of response.
Now, I'm not excited to see that response in my city.
I don't like seeing police dressed up in riot gear.
You know, roughing people up, throwing them into vans, any of this stuff.
But the alternative apparently is letting them do what they want, which doesn't make any sense.
No, it doesn't.
And you know, one of the things I've seen in the local press is this claim that, oh well, literally, Portland is a protest city.
Like, anything that happens and people just go out on the streets, people show up because Portland is about protest.
And frankly, I'd never heard that before we moved here.
And, you know, now looking back at some of the history, like, yeah, actually, this seems to be kind of the ethos that, you know, if you have any kind of grievance at all, people are going to protest.
Will that be exacerbated under conditions of lockdown?
100%.
Of course they are.
This is where people go instead of clubs and bars because there are no clubs and bars slightly at the moment, but not still really.
But, you know, the idea of that's what we do, we protest, really puts the lie to the legitimacy of any given protest.
People could be sort of Categorically less likely to protest or more likely to protest, and that's a legitimate thing to recognize about a population, I suppose.
But if the local media is saying without any irony whatsoever, well of course there's protests, that's what we do.
Doesn't that then mean that maybe taking people at their word that they are protesting because this new thing happened is less legitimate?
If protest happens for anything and everything, then the any given reason that is trotted out for why protest is happening seems less legitimate, because actually what you've already told us is you protest because you protest.
You don't protest because there's a cause for it.
This is the flip side of the thing that I always say, which is that, yes, I'm a liberal, but I'm a liberal that wants to see change that will make society so good that I get to be a conservative.
And the point is, if your point is, no, I'm always going to be demanding change, then we can't take your demand for change seriously.
You're not a liberal because you want to be a liberal.
You're not a progressive because change is inherently the right thing.
We want to obtain something that is stable and still changing and moving because the environment will change, but that is stable such that we can afford to love the state that we're in.
Well, let's just put it simply.
Change for its own sake is stupid.
Sometimes you are going to do more harm than good with change.
Now, that's not where we are.
We've got a lot of positive change that we can engage in from here, but we should be frightened about the downside of it.
This is the thing liberals tend to miss, is that the unintended consequences of well-intended policies are sometimes I would say the flip, and we've talked about this before, but I would say just the flip side of that is that conservatives are more likely to miss the unintended consequences of their innovations in the marketplace that then cause downstream effects.
Right.
They miss market failure and things like that.
Right.
But nonetheless, anybody whose ethos is, oh, I'm a change person.
Yeah.
Or a protest guy.
And it's like, you're a change person.
We haven't even told you where you are.
You're a change person no matter what.
Right.
Yeah, I'm a restless person.
I always want to be somewhere other than where I am.
OK, well, you're on a ship.
Would you like to stay on the ship, or you want to just step off into the deep blue?
I mean- My guest.
Right.
We are always wrestling with how to phrase this or where to stand so that you can actually see what's going on.
And increasingly, I think we've got some of the right elements on the table.
We've talked about an autoimmune reaction.
A lot of this protest is attacking the very things that make things functional.
We've talked about the verificationism that allows people to arrive at these crazy conclusions.
We've talked about the fact that the Movement itself appears to be involved in a kind of collective psychosis But you've also talked about this The Sneetches analogy.
Yeah, that there's something about what is being said That appears to be devoid of content It's just group identifier stuff and it could be as arbitrary as a star on your belly Right and that we are confused by the fact that there is content like oh, we should definitely defund the police Like, that sounds like an argument.
We should definitely defund the police.
Sounds like an analytical conclusion that arises from an analysis rather than, you know, like, you know, it could just as easily be, oh, you know, I hum at this pitch.
Right?
Yes, you do.
Well, I do now.
But anyway, so I've been wrestling with how to put these things together, how to even think about them correctly.
Yeah.
And I came up with this model, which unfortunately I'm going to hold up on a piece of paper, which is kind of old school.
But anyway, let's see.
Here's my piece of paper.
Here's the model.
That we are, we live here in this gully.
And the point is, the political winds can push this ball one direction or the other, and it tends to revert back to the middle.
You know, the liberals can get a little overly enthusiastic with some of their solution-making, and, you know, things don't quite work out, and then the conservatives say, told you so, it was never going to work, and they drank things back a little bit too far, and we lose some of the gains.
That can go on indefinitely, because what this is, this This depression there is mathematically speaking a stable equilibrium.
Now the points I have labeled A and B here Those are unstable equilibria.
And the point is, if you push this ball far enough, it reaches one of these unstable equilibria.
And the next thing that happens is you end up down here, wherever that is.
And my claim is going to be, this doesn't have to be fascism and communism, but it might as well be.
The point is, a historical process that pushes that ball up to either A or B results in a catastrophic A destabilization, a disintegration of something that was keeping you safe.
And so my point is, you don't always like it where you're in this gully here, but it's tolerable.
And what happens once you go over one of these unstable equilibrium points, is you end up somewhere completely intolerable.
And the real question for us is, A, What does that?
And I'm going to argue that the Sneetches business has a lot to do with it.
That the thing that tends to push you over the edge is something that historically causes you, instead of thinking about things analytically, to default to team.
Okay, so snitches, you know, mask-wearing snitches and snitches without, MAGA hat-wearing snitches and snitches without, it's all the same thing, right?
But the tribes that are defined by the MAGA hat and the masks and the stars on the bellies and all of the rest...
are then slotted by their enemies into particular buckets.
And so, you know, we have pointed out often, that at least used to be, I'm not sure if it still is, but on the official Black Lives Matter page, we see, and you know, in interviews with the founders, we see them saying, actually, this is Marxist.
We were trained in Marxist stuff, and that's what we're trying to do.
And so, you know, to your point, oh, is it, you know, is it communism?
Is it fascism?
Is it Marxism?
Is it fascism?
It doesn't need to be, but those do seem to be the two poles that we are oscillating between, at least in terms of mainstream media right now.
And part of the problem, I think, this is maybe not exactly to your point, but I do think that part of the problem is There are many of us actually on the left, including many people on the right, who are saying, oh my god, that's Marxism that they're proclaiming, because they're actually saying it!
And you should believe them when they say that that's actually what they're doing, because it looks like it, and also they don't deny it, so what the hell?
And by the way, look at these 18 examples from history where Marxism doesn't work, so let's not go there.
On the other side, you've got people saying Trump's ascendancy to office is clearly an indicator that we are about to descend into fascism.
And there are, you know, some people on the right who see that.
There are pretty much everyone in the far left, you know, the people who are actually rioting and some number of the people who are protesting on the streets see it that way.
But there are also many of us on the left who say, don't like the guy, disagree with these policies, don't think he's fit for office, But it doesn't look fascist, right?
So we, on the left, can simultaneously say, don't want that particular executive branch to maintain, but in terms of are we struggling between communism and fascism, it actually doesn't look like this thing over in the Republican Party right now is fascist.
Well, no.
So, I agree with that to an extent.
My real point is that there is tribalism that exists in this well, right?
In the well, there's normal tribalism.
You've got elephants and donkeys under the best of circumstances.
And it's not inherently bad, right?
What you have is a tension between arguments.
Right?
Those who want less meddling and more freedom and therefore are willing to tolerate more failure, more people falling off the bottom of the ladder or something, are in tension with those who want to make sure that bad things don't befall you and so they will actually remove too much of the incentive for you to do good things.
Right?
So those two things are actual arguments.
Right?
And where we are is something that reasonable people can disagree over, and where we should want to be is someplace reasonable people can disagree over.
My point is that those unstable equilibria, the two high points from which you descend into madness, are places where there is no argument.
What we effectively start doing is teaming up for violence.
This is the thing that I'm concerned about is that history has some mechanism.
As far as I know, it doesn't have a name, right?
We might have a description of it when things descend into Marxism.
We might have a description of it when things descend into fascism.
As far as I know, we don't have a description for the general pattern of A functional society that is ebbing and flowing has hit a tipping point, and that tipping point goes to this other type of behavior, and that other type of behavior ends in warfare, genocide, all of these things.
And so that's what I'm hunting for, is I think we are We are now watching, and all of the people that we are in contact with are now grappling with how to describe what they are seeing.
We are debating over stuff that literally, I mean, you know, we've been at, are we really arguing about whether males and females are different at a biological level?
Like, how could a conversation ever get that dumb?
It's inconceivable.
We're now doing this with two plus two equals five, right?
Is it possible the conversation will ever get that dumb?
Yeah, it actually apparently is that dumb.
I will say that my own failure of imagination cannot figure out what gets dumber than that one.
It's hard to get dumber than that.
I'm waiting.
I'll watch.
You have hit bottom.
We have hit bottom on something.
And that is the degree to which what we are arguing over has anything to do with an analysis of any kind.
At the point you are arguing about 2 plus 2 equals 5, you are declaring that you no longer care about what is actual.
Right?
It's pure solipsism.
And so my point is pure solipsism is the adult version of stars on your bellies.
So, to those who would say, but, the other side is fascism.
Anything is better than that.
It doesn't matter as much, maybe, that we say, you know what, I don't even think that's fascism.
What matters more is actual intellectual solipsism is the end, full stop.
That is where you lose all access to the gains from the last 300 years.
Right.
So this is the point about autoimmunity.
Is that the people who are arguing against logic itself, Right?
And those who have signed up with them and are making excuses for them are arguing against what we have in favor of something they claim we could have.
Now my point would be every single test of their intuition about what we could have descends into madness almost instantly.
So we are listening to insane people who have a claim about a world better than this one and we are no longer listening to people who say this world has a hell of a lot going for it And the only right thing to do is to fix the parts that didn't get there.
To complete the project rather than destroy the project.
We are in that argument.
And we are losing ground to the people who want to destroy this world in the hope or in the expectation that something marvelous, as they see it, will arise in its place.
The only We are losing ground because their argument is no longer an argument.
It is a threat.
Expand on that a little bit.
We are losing ground because it all sounded to all of us like we were in conversation, and then it turns out, no, actually what was maybe thinly veiled is now just full-on threat.
Yes, and that the way that this looks... I mean, I'm beginning to get frustrated with our circle, because our circle is seeing so much of this nonsense that it thinks its job is to catalog it.
Have you seen this crazy example?
Have you seen that crazy example?
Look at what this person claimed!
Oh my god, it's gotten even worse!
Right?
And my point is... Well, that will work for some people.
People who haven't yet seen it being presented with a list, a catalog.
I feel a little like invoking Yoda.
And I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but I am kind of a huge Yoda fan.
Go for it!
There is no try.
There's do and don't do, right?
My point is...
Our circle, being fascinated by all of the various examples, is missing the boat because we're about to lose the thing that is feeding us, that will provide our descendants with a place to exist and experience freedom and all of these things.
And the reason we are losing it is because, you know, those who are good at analysis default to it when something comes in a form.
We are purely being gaslit.
The argument 2 plus 2 equals 5 is purely gaslighting.
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who's saying it knows that, but I am saying that its function is to take all of the people who feel like, no wait a minute, let me explain to you why 2 plus 2 does not equal 5, and get them explaining it.
Because they're busy over here not paying attention.
Right?
We are not paying attention to the real thing, which is, holy shit, I think we just crossed that threshold that takes a functional entity and turns it into madness.
And the other thing, if I can just put the last piece in the puzzle as I see it at the moment, I think we need to stop saying that Marxism doesn't work.
I think there's a whole lot we can talk about here, because not work isn't really the problem.
It's that when it works, it is completely unacceptable from the point of view of what actually makes sense to value as a human being.
In other words, being existing as a homo sapiens is not the valuable thing.
The valuable thing has to do with your ability to take the specialness that comes along with being a homo sapiens and apply it to things that seem worthwhile.
So, you know, does North Korea work?
It does.
I don't want to live like that.
In fact, I would gladly... I mean, I think you're going to have to define work then.
Well, it persists.
Well, mass famine and mass deaths and such.
Yeah, but the point is, the entity persists.
And we could say the same thing about China.
The entity, the political entity persists.
And the population.
Some of it.
Even though many individuals are lost along the way in perfectly grotesque circumstances, it does look like it's sticking around.
And China is not just sticking around.
China's actually thriving economically and with respect to its global power.
And so the point is... Right, but China's also moved into more of a capitalist model.
Sure, but my point is, if you're going to make the argument that won't work, then China actually tells you, well, that's not quite right, because whatever it thought it was doing moved into something that made it quickly powerful and ascendant.
I still don't want to live under that system.
And so, at some level, A, communism often does fail.
B, when it succeeds, it never does so without totalitarianism in tow, for reasons that I think we've described here.
That because it is group selection thinking to imagine that people will behave altruistically, the way that a communist system that functions works is by realigning people's incentives by threatening them.
You know, the gulags come along with functional communism, and the point is, this thing... So, but just to put this in the language that we've often used elsewhere.
Communism assumes that external motivation is the thing that is needed to get people to do the right thing.
And then, and the right thing is then...
is decided by, defined by the state and the external motivator is almost entirely stick, no carrot.
And we are not arguing that we should have a carrot based totalitarian argument, but rather figure out a way to allow people To know themselves well enough to motivate themselves internally to produce and create and discover and heal and do all of the other things that humans do when we are at our best, rather than creating a system that requires external motivators, especially in the form of the state or corporations, to impart on people what it is that they should be doing.
Right, or if I could put it a different way, and you know, on the one hand, folks on the right, thinking folks on the right, love to hear an analysis about why communism does tend to come with authoritarianism, right?
They're looking for that argument, and it's important to them, but they over-apply it.
So, what I would argue is that our system functions best As a hybrid and It's not really surprising that it functions best as a hybrid.
This is a natural outgrowth of thinking about complex systems and diminishing returns, right?
Any pure system has massive failures associated with it because if you maximize one thing, you crash all the other values.
That means that a good system will involve getting 85% of some value but not seeking 100% and then you can have 85% of a lot of things, right?
So that principle is important, which is why I think people actually get the question of socialism wrong because their sense is, well, socialism is communism, okay?
And maybe there's an argument that really their flavors are the same thing.
And that therefore anybody who has those inclinations is necessarily inviting gulags, which is not the case because it can certainly be true.
If you take my little trough model here, we can say that actually there are times when you don't have enough socialism to make your system work.
You're coming too close to one of these maximization places.
So you need more socialism.
Does that mean you're a socialist?
No.
You need to pull enough of the risks to guarantee that the people really at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder don't fall off entirely.
Right.
So what we really need is a system that leverages the great part of capitalism, which is markets being applied to problems that markets are good at solving, while hedging out the bad part.
That allow people to discover their internal motivations and act on it and benefit from doing so when it is in the service of the society.
Hell yeah!
We want you to get paid handsomely when you deliver something that improves our lives a lot, right?
We want that to be the incentive, and that's the mythology of capitalism.
And again, there are so many roots there.
It could be discovery, which is typically what STEM people are doing, you know, scientists and such.
And it could be creation, which may be more often in the realm of art and literature, and entertainment.
It could be healing.
It could be so many things.
It could be production.
It could be organizing of those parts in order to create an emergent whole that is greater than the individual parts.
There are many, many ways to actually add value, but you need to discover on your own what your own individual talents and proclivities and passions are.
And learn how to.
And you know, for this we need a system that doesn't destroy children in school, and doesn't drug them, and doesn't feed them screens, it doesn't tell parents that they need to keep all risk from children, all of these things.
Such that by the time people in the bodies of children become people in the bodies of adults, they're actually adults.
As opposed to still acting like unregulated, unable to be regulated, six-year-olds.
Totally.
So I think that this is really, it's like, it's tragic that we're figuring out how to phrase this at the point we are arriving at the possible uninvention of everything, but the idea that the purpose of the protective programs is actually to protect your ability to innovate so that you can deliver value which gets paid back in a market is really I think the right answer.
And you can see how this works.
I mean it's obvious.
The fact is you want to be protected from failures that are not signal, right?
If you're innovating in the market, you want your failures that you could have foreseen to haunt you a bit so that you get better at figuring out where the real value is.
But you don't want arbitrary stuff to take you down.
So you don't want, you know... Except people do want their good luck to raise them up.
I mean, this is the problem, right?
That noise, luck is noise, and people attribute their success that was in fact good luck to their own skill, and they tend to attribute their failures that was in fact bad luck to bad luck.
And if we are going to try to even out the effects of noise, it's going to flatten out both the good and the bad.
Luck.
Right.
We do not want to flatten out the effects of excellent choices and excellent skills and poor choices and poor skills.
But, you know, you can think of it like a tennis court.
A really good tennis court is one in which the luck has been eliminated as much as possible.
That is to say, the surface is perfectly even, so nobody is benefiting from a clump of grass that causes a ball to take a bad hop.
You know, the fact is, some of the bad hops would go against your opponent.
Hey, yay!
Some of the bad hops would go against you.
God damn it, that thing was in the way.
I would have gotten the ball if it hadn't been there.
Sorry, but there's something interesting to be thought about here with regard to players who... Every player in tennis has a preference, right?
Hard court, grass or clay.
Grass has got to be the noisiest of those surfaces, I would think, although it's possible that clay also... The longer you play on clay and the longer you play on grass, the more it changes, whereas hard surface is going to remain entirely the same throughout the game, throughout a competition anyway.
Something I keep saying that people are scratching their heads over is that bad luck, you're never going to hedge it out, but it's got to be randomly distributed, because if it isn't randomly distributed, it's not luck, it's something else, right?
So, you know, it's one thing if there are imperfections on both sides of the court and you both accept that the game is going to...
You know, the game is going to be less good at figuring out who the better player is because it may go one way or the other because of something that was luck.
But it shouldn't go in favor of one player.
The luck shouldn't be, you know, Venus Williams and not Serena.
It should half the time be one and half the time be the other.
And just, I mean, to continue with tennis, this is part of why you switch sides.
It's not just about sun angle and such.
So the point is, a really good game is one that eliminates as much noise as possible and randomizes its distribution so that what you actually get is athletic prowess.
And the thing is, our market should be like this too.
You don't want the fact that you were innovating the next big thing, you know, you were innovating some sort of I don't know, safety mechanism or fusion reactor that would free us from energetic constraints and then you got cancer and you couldn't afford, you know, to fight it so it wiped out your research program, right?
So you want a system that basically leaves the positive incentives in the market, right?
And eliminates the luck aspect.
And what's more, if we can go back to your example about kids and what they face.
You do not want people innovating badness.
I've never ever heard a proper argument that defends advertising to children.
To me, advertising to children is an evil.
I have asked people to give me any valid argument in favor of allowing it to exist.
I've yet to hear one that I found even a little bit compelling.
And the basic point is, look.
In childhood you should be protected from Economic forces that are trying to persuade you of stuff for their good that probably isn't in your interest And this is a corruption.
So, you know, do you want to be able to innovate anything?
No, I don't want you innovating Mechanisms to get inside my kids head and get them to spend money.
They wouldn't spend or demand things I don't that's I want there to be regulations that prevent that right and so the point is if Good regulation is regulation that leaves the market to do things we want done and doesn't allow it where it accomplishes things that we shouldn't want done.
And what's in each of those buckets is what we should be spending our time arguing about.
Right.
Rather than whether it is possible that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is a white people thing.
Yeah.
We are closing in on an hour here, and I think I will save a short discussion of Ibram X. Kendi for next time, because that seems not in keeping.
But I did want to do a brief reading that I think is actually very much in keeping with what we were just talking about, although it may not seem so immediately.
This is a book called The World Beyond Your Head, Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.
It is an excellent book.
It is Matthew Crawford's from 2015 and his first book was called Shop Class as Soulcraft, which I think I've mentioned on our live streams before.
I'm a huge fan of this guy.
I didn't look up his bio again before coming on air, so I may get something wrong here.
If I remember correctly, he got his PhD in economics from the Chicago School, from the University of Chicago, and took a job basically as a policy wonk within the Beltway in DC, and wrote these important white papers.
After a couple of years, realized that he was sort of losing his will to live.
That he felt like two people, maybe at the most 20, are ever going to read any of these things.
I don't think I'm actually having an impact on the world.
You know, clearly a brilliant guy, totally capable of being this kind of analyst.
But he left, and he opened up a, I think mostly vintage, although I may have that wrong, motorcycle repair shop in Virginia.
And hence his first book, Shopcraft as Soulcraft, which is kind of a latter-day zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, both of which I think are extraordinary books.
This, The World Beyond Your Head on Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, I just want to read a couple of expert excerpts from this today.
First from a section he calls the attentional commons.
We have all had the experience of sitting in an airport with an hour to kill and being unable to escape the chattering of CNN.
The audio may be turned off, but if the TV is within view, I, for one, find it impossible not to look at it.
The introduction of novelty into one's field of view commands what the cognitive psychologists call an orienting response, an important evolutionary adaptation in a world of predators.
An animal turns its face and eyes towards the new thing.
A new thing typically appears every second on television.
The images on the screen jump out of the flow of experience and make a demand on us.
In their presence, it is difficult to rehearse a remembered conversation, for example.
Whatever trains of thought might otherwise be pursued by those in the room give way to a highly coordinated experience.
Not the near-simultaneous turning of a troop of macaques to face the python that has appeared, but the involuntary glances of weary travelers towards the content on offer.
Alternatively, people in such places stare at their phones or open a novel, sometimes precisely in order to tune out the piped-in chatter.
A multiverse of private experiences is accessible, after all.
In this battle of attentional technologies, what is lost is the kind of public space that is required for a certain kind of sociability.
Jonathan Franzen wrote, Walking up 3rd Avenue on a Saturday night, I felt bereft.
All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions as if probing a sore tooth.
All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen.
A public space where people are not self-enclosed in the heightened way that happens when our minds are elsewhere than our bodies may feel rich with possibility for spontaneous encounters.
Even if we do not converse with others, our mutual reticence is experienced as reticence, if our attention is not otherwise bound up, but is rather free to alight upon one another and linger, or not, because we ourselves are free to pay out our attention in deliberate measures.
To be the object of someone's reticence is quite different from not being seen by them.
We may have a vivid experience of having encountered another person, even if in silence.
Such encounters are always ambiguous, and their need for interpretation gives rise to a train of imaginings, often erotic.
This is what makes cities exciting." So, uh, remarkable to my mind, especially in the era of COVID when we have so many fewer of these spaces right now, but the fact is that even before COVID, even before the lockdowns, What he was writing about in 2015 is even more true at the end of 2019, early 2020 before COVID, that it is very hard to find a public space anymore.
Even when you think you're in public, you're alone together as opposed to maybe engaging even with strangers, with glances, with the understanding that we are actually sharing our minds and brains and bodies all in one space.
One more brief excerpt from the end of the book, What this boils down to, please don't install speakers in every single corner of a shopping mall, even its outdoor spaces.
Please don't fill up every moment between innings in a lazy college baseball game with thundering excitement.
Please give me a way to turn off the monitor in the backseat of a taxi.
Please let there be one corner of the bar where the flickering delivery system for Bud Light commercials is deemed unnecessary because I am already at the bar.
The attentional comments is an idea that I hope will catch on among those who are in a position to make such sanctuaries happen.
Building managers, commercial real estate developers, and interior designers.
Here is a modest proposal.
Could the MUSAC be made opt-in rather than opt-out?
Once every 20 minutes, somebody in the room would have to deliberately hit a button to restart it and thereby actively affirm, yes, we want some emo in here!
We learned encouraging things, too.
Joy is the feeling of one's powers increasing.
The experience of hitting one's flow as a cook, or feeling one's awareness run out through the contact patches of a motorcycle's tires, seems to reveal something deep about the situated, embodied character of impressive human performance.
This is slightly weird to be doing here because we are explicitly disembodied from those watching and from those who will only be listening.
But, you know, we're here embodied with one another.
And every day that we are smart enough to make it happen during the season, we are going outside, taking walks or bike rides or getting our kayaks into the water and just being there in our bodies, with our brains, with each other and our children.
And it is fundamentally different.
And being out there, you know, when you guys were pulling the boats out of the water a few nights ago and I was just sitting watching first the geese, but then the other people on the dock, we were too far away to see them directly.
It was too dark to make eye contact, but they were there and we were there and we were all there together in a way that doesn't tend to happen.
Yeah, I agree.
And there was an awful lot of what I would say is superficial camaraderie that used to be exchanged.
Just the simple fact that you were involved in the same activity as somebody, you know, you would say something about how nice an evening it was for it or whatever.
And a lot of that has been lost.
And I must say, when it does happen, it feels really, really good.
It's such a relief.
It feels human.
It feels like a reminder of what we are, that we are social beings, that we are not just our brains.
We are not brains in jars, and we are not just our bodies.
So when we go out and actually engage in sport or physical activity, it's not, and now we put our analytical selves on hold or our creative selves.
No.
This is often the place where the best ideas come from, right?
When you are not actively working on an intellectual puzzle or how to word the thing, it is this place where you can be in the moment fully.
Well, and it is a very good demonstration of exactly the thing that is lost in this de-individuated communal view, which is not to say that there's not a lot about what works that needs to be communal, but the point is it's semi-communal.
The thing that's great about communal is The asymmetry of it, that different people with different perspectives find themselves in the same space and, you know, if you erase that by either forcing everybody to be alike or policing what they say so that the differences can't be seen, you just destroy such a large fraction of what's important about the humanness of it.
That's right.
But anyway, I would also say, just on a bright note.
It is totally true that many of these technologies just obliterate some important social interaction that once existed.
But then others are arbitrarily created.
So this podcast is obviously you all choosing to tune in a conversation between us that isn't exactly a conversation between us.
Because we're aware that there's an audience, and this is specifically something we do here so that you can tune it in, but we're also not, you know… It's not a total fabrication.
No, it's a synthesis.
Obviously, we have conversations like this elsewhere and have been for decades, else we wouldn't have been able to show up on camera and start talking.
Right.
So the conversation is real.
There's nothing inauthentic about it.
You all know what you've signed up for.
We know why we're sitting here.
But the point is, it is a choice, and it is a semi-social choice.
Because although we're not interacting with everybody who's paying attention, we get a lot of information back about what people are thinking.
And we get lots of interesting communications that point our attention to things.
So anyway, this is some new form, right?
It is.
And it's, you know, it's hopeful that even as certain things are being destroyed, other things are wrestling their way into existence that in some ways compensate for what's been lost.
Yeah.
May they continue into the future.
Indeed.
All right.
All right.
I have a Unity announcement.
I probably should have done it at the top.
Unity 2020 is humming along.
Interesting things are afoot.
We are going to hold our next campfire tomorrow.
That is to say Wednesday at four o'clock Pacific time.
We are going to have Nate Boyer and John Wood Jr.
together in conversation.
Should be great.
Please tune in.
I will announce it on my Twitter feed, so will the Articles of Unity Twitter account if you want details on where it's going to be.
Our nomination process remains open.
We are getting a tremendous number of nominations that are excellent.
I wasn't able to source an exact count for how many novel nominations we've gotten to date, but we are rapidly approaching the point at which we will put at first some and then all of the qualified nominees on a page on our site where you will be able to debate the merits of various candidates
So anyway, it's exciting times and it's very gratifying to see the number of people who are thoroughly dedicated to saving the Republic from the dire circumstance that we seem to be headed towards and are willing to invest their time and their thought power in figuring out how we might thread this needle.
So thanks to all the volunteers and if you haven't joined us yet, please look into it at articlesofunity.org and at articlesofunity on Twitter.
Wonderful.
So consider joining us at either or both of our Patreons, where at either of them you can access a private Discord server, and at mine you can also become a Dark Horse member and get access to a private Q&A on the last Sunday of every month.
We have a clips channel, Dark Horse Clips Channel, which has, I don't know, four, six, sometimes eight clips from each of these shows that go up.
And they are shorter, so more shareable.
We probably will not be back on Saturday.
Probably our next live stream will be Tuesday.
We of course have one in 15 minutes or so.
We'll be doing Q&A.
But there will be at least one Dark Horse podcast dropping between now and then, hopefully in a few days.
Yep.
And maybe that's it.
We'll be back in 50 minutes to answer your Super Chat questions.
