#41: When They Come for You (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 41st 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, foll...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream, the 41st if I am not mistaken.
Is that correct?
You are not mistaken.
I am not mistaken.
Well, that's good.
That's an excellent way to start.
So let me say a friend of ours, approached me recently and gently said words to the effect of, even if we manage to save the Republic, if it comes at the cost of your sanity, it wasn't worth it.
And I must say, on the one hand, I understand this meaning and I appreciate what is being said to me that somehow the current event situation and our political predicament is driving me a bit crazy.
On the other hand, I would say my sanity would be a very small price to pay to save the Republic.
And in any case, I would like to split the difference and recognize that saving the Republic is very important, but that it is probably incumbent on me to figure out how not to go insane in the process.
I think that's fair.
One of the things that we've been doing in service of that is spending some time on the water.
We've been kayaking, we've just begun to try stand-up paddleboarding, and we were hoping to spend today not talking about current events, talking about some other things having to do, you know, related to what is going on in the world, of course, but not directly.
Unfortunately, some things emerged that we feel that we must begin with.
We do hope in one of the upcoming episodes to devote most or all of an episode to talking about schools.
We've been hearing from a lot of people with either children in schools or who are teachers or staff at schools.
We're not going to do any of that today, but we are going to spend some time talking about what's happening on the streets, what's happening in Oregon, and then also get a little bit to some ways that people might be dealing with depression and other mental health issues that are probably coming up for just about everyone at this point.
Then we're going to finish with a follow-on to a question that we got asked in the last episode about movies that we enjoy, just to give People, maybe some things to go to that have nothing to do with the current moment that will allow for some smart but other entertainment.
Well, I think this is a great plan for this episode.
For future episodes, in order to depart further from current events.
Actually, I think this is really more of a partnership with our audience.
That if they could do something to halt the progress of current events, then we would be able to focus on other matters.
Please do.
And failing that, I think if they just didn't tweet about it and they could get everybody else not to.
If we don't know that current events are happening, we won't be talking about them.
Yeah, I actually don't get my news primarily from the tweets, but it's going to take more than just not tweeting.
Yeah, it is.
That was a joke.
Not a great one, but nonetheless.
In any case, yes, we will be attempting to intersperse as much other kinds of content as we can in upcoming episodes.
So anyway, look forward to that.
All right, now with that run up to the current events.
Yeah, so many people will have seen already, but we are going to show a couple of these videos in which people who are calling themselves Black Lives Matter protesters are approaching and being antagonistic towards restaurant goers.
So Zach, if you want to show the first video from Matt Walsh.
Put the mask on now, huh?
Motherfucker.
And we have another one to show.
But before we move on, for those who are listening only and not watching, you see one particular young woman yelling at two restaurant goers.
And what has happened, I think, before the recording started is that the mob has shown up and demanded of all of these people, most of whom are eating outside, They raise a fist in solidarity and we see other people, everyone else that we can see who's seated at this restaurant has raised a fist in solidarity.
I would again refer to those as don't hurt me fists.
Some of them will feel like they're in solidarity but this is the green grocer, this is the don't hurt me salute, Václav Havel's green grocer.
Uh, and you also see some of the protesters, mobsters, in the foreground at the end of the video, uh, not raising a fist but giving a finger to, uh, the two, the couple, the, the young straight white couple, uh, those last two descriptives of which shouldn't matter at all, uh, who are refusing to do what the mob has demanded of them.
So let's show this, first this tweet, Barry Weiss.
We found this one through Barry Weiss, Zach.
And then if we could show the video that's embedded in there.
It's violent! It's violent! It's violent!
It's violent!
It's violent! It's violent!
It's violent!
No peace!
No peace! - So very much the same kind of scene, in this case it looks like it's just a woman, maybe she's sitting with someone, we don't see them being...
Assaulted by a group of people, including in particular a young man, a young white man, who just gets right up in her face.
Very aggressive.
Very, you know, very... In any other situation I would say that was clearly a sexed interaction in which a dude is aggressively going after a woman who is sitting there and not having any of it.
She too is not raising a fist.
So, Barry Weiss, after posting that video, which she got from another source, says, also makes me wonder, what makes particular people brave enough to stand up to a mob?
Is it a rare personality?
Is it strong conviction that overrides the fear?
And she asks if we might have any insight.
And before we start talking about that, I think this is a good time to bring up again, as I think we did in the last episode, that famous Martin Niemöller I need to look up his name to make sure I'm pronouncing it correctly.
a quotation from about and after World War II, in which he says, First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
I tried to modify that exquisite and unfortunately doesn't go out of fashion poem from him last time, and I didn't really nail it.
And someone on YouTube who goes by BobbyBFat did what I think is a better job.
So here's his contribution.
First they came for the socialists and I helped them because I am not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I helped them, because I am not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I helped them, because I am not a Jew.
Then they came for me, because they no longer needed my help.
I think that nails it, in a way.
Yeah, let's put it this way.
You could do an exercise on how to rethink and modify this thing, and just simply going through that exercise is valuable from the point of view of understanding what the deep meaning is here.
Because really, in some sense, you know, is it a poem?
Is it a lesson in game theory?
Is it a description of a historical process?
You know, it's all of these things.
As you know, those other things that you mentioned, a description of game theory, a description of historical process, certainly those things aren't required in great poetry, but many of the great poems do exactly that.
This is what the power of poetry is.
This is what the power of music is, at least music with lyrics, that they do They sneak in without pretending not to, important and universal truths, without inherently pointing to anyone in particular.
And so they can allow lessons to come into people's brains, to percolate there, without those people ever having to face perhaps their own hypocrisy, their own cowardice, their own failure to act in the past, such that they might change the behavior going forward.
So I think they do one other thing, which I think is familiar to you and me from a teaching environment.
They being good poems.
Good poems.
And I must say, you know, you mentioned music with lyrics, and I really think poetry is music devoid of melody.
That really the idea is that the form is identical to a really powerful song.
And the idea is that some lyrics are so powerful that you don't actually need melody to float them.
And, you know, great music, great lyrical music has both characteristics.
It doesn't require, you could read the lyrics and they would be meaningful, but they're augmented by the melody.
But anyway... So at another time we should have more of this conversation.
It would be terrific if we had it with your brother as well, because you and I have almost Almost inverse responses to what the deepest part of music are, I think, in my case, because of my sort of origin story with music, where I played so much classical music from a young age that it was what I was immersed in, and I didn't even hear music with lyrics until I was an early teenager, such that the lyrical part of music seems like a totally separate thing to me.
Yeah, it is a conversation worth having, and you know, I do find what happened to you both beautiful and tragic, because you did pick up some really powerful thing that I wish I had, which is the ability to play an instrument, but it cost you in terms of access to all that is so amazing in lyrical music, and of course you're arriving there late.
Anyway, what I wanted to say here about the poetry is that the thing about poetry is, A, if you write poetry, you find that you discover things about the subject matter that you're writing about that you didn't know because you are forced to think in the neighborhood.
It basically forces you to search what we evolutionists might call the adjacent possible.
Because linguistically, if the right word doesn't have the right number of syllables in it, or it doesn't rhyme, then you're forced to think about synonyms, and then you're forced to go one step out, and then you're forced—you know, actually Twitter has this aspect to it also.
It forces you to think carefully enough to phrase something well, you know, in 280 characters or whatever it is.
Constraint is almost always a useful way to find your creative or analytical outlet.
Which is why I said in the Greg Ellis podcast that I wasn't a fan of free verse.
But of course, it really depends on the free verse.
You can buy your constraint somewhere other than meter and rhyme and then it works just as well.
But a totally free verse that expects nothing of the author is also not very informative.
But in any case, the thing about the...
The poem, as you called it, that you read at first, you know, first that came for the socialists, the important thing is that it does not state its meaning.
You infer its meaning by being led through a series of things, right?
You don't even know what the thing is about until the end.
The thing is about... At this point, we do.
And so, I mean, this is part of the reason for the value of Right.
And so, you know, in this case, at the end, it's very frightening because to the extent that they came from me, you know what they come from me is, right?
- Right, and so, you know, in this case, at the end, it's very frightening, because to the extent that they came from me, you know what they come from me is, right?
That's death.
And the fact that there is no one to stand between you and it is frightening.
And the fact that you don't understand that you lost your opportunity to be defended at the point that you failed to defend, it's such an obvious point at one level and then we see the game theory fail again and again and again for, you know, exactly the reasons that Barry is asking us if we have insight into.
But I wanted to go back to something about the video.
Yes.
You said that they were asked to raise a fist in solidarity.
I am inferring that from comments and such.
I don't think I heard that in the videos.
I think it is exactly the inference you are supposed to take, and the thing is, it is simultaneously true and a lie.
Right?
Solidarity with what, exactly?
Well, it is true that that is presumably what they were asked to do, but is that actually—are those words actually reflective of what the gesture would mean?
Is that the way in which it's a lie?
It's a lie in exactly the same way that asking people to kneel, right?
We've seen many in the early parts of the protests and riots, we saw officials being asked to kneel with the protesters.
Kneeling is, you know, did you kneel?
You know, is this kneeling as in the Game of Thrones, you are showing fealty to something?
Is this kneeling in solidarity?
It's totally ambiguous.
And so the point is, It is a physical Motten Bailey, where the gesture has both characteristics.
Now, if I raise a hand... That's what we get, a physical Motten Bailey.
It's a physical Motten Bailey.
If I raise a fist, right, like this, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter...
Have I announced that I believe that black lives are undervalued and that we have to do something about it?
Or have I just embraced black power, which is of course traditionally what that fist is.
Now, I'm not even against the idea that a fist raised for black power is inherently an offensive thing.
I get it.
But the idea that you're going to accost people And I guess I would say it's even easier than that.
I don't care what it is that a mob shows up at a restaurant asking me to do.
movement, right?
With no discussion.
This is...
And I guess I would say it's even easier than that.
I don't care what it is that a mob shows up at a restaurant asking me to do.
I don't, you know, if it's demanding that I show support for a movement that I myself found it.
Right.
Why is it that anyone should feel responsible to or forced to do that thing, no matter how firmly they are convinced that they are actually in favor of that thing?
And so, I mean, these really are two separate questions, right?
This thing that they're asking you to do is not what it seems, and it's obscuring a whole lot of other things, and actually you can tell that by the fact of how they're behaving right here, right now.
But also, even if you're sure that the thing that you were being asked to show support for is something that you support, you should always be free to show or not show support for that thing on your own terms, under your own conditions, on your own time.
And so we have these few restaurant goers resisting, even while everyone around them is sort of looking a little bit shamed and doing this thing.
How will the people who resisted versus the guy sitting next to them who didn't resist feel?
How did they feel that night?
How did they feel afterwards?
The people who resisted were probably shaken, still scared, worried.
Could they be doxxed?
Could they be found?
But they knew that they had resisted the thing that demanded of them something that was not okay.
And the guy who avoided the mob for now, What does he do?
Does he sleep?
Does he sleep well?
I don't think so.
There's he, and there's those off camera.
And this is, we have to go here.
Yes, yes.
I agree with your formulation.
I think it's exactly right.
If a group of well-intentioned people confronted us at a cafe surrounded by people, maybe they came to us and they said, you know, so do you support Unity 2020?
And we'd say, of course.
And then they start, you know, forcing other people to embrace it in the cafe.
Suddenly, I'm not even on board with the support part.
The point is, I don't support it if it's forced in any way.
And all right, so let's get to the... I think it's really in part the issue that Barry is asking us to comment on, which is What happened, the people on camera, those who put up their fist and those who resisted, that's one category.
And we, because of our evolutionary processing, focus on that, because they are the people in the narrative.
But this narrative is really not even about them, right?
The person who sees that video, which is, who knows, hundreds of thousands of times as many people as were actually present, maybe millions depending upon how far those videos go, that's the target.
And I will point out, this is the exact analog of the Evergreen situation, right?
The protesters flooded in, cameras out, right?
The idea is whatever you do is about to be broadcast.
Who do you want to be, right?
Now, let's compare these two on the screen.
You've got The people who raised their fist did what they were told, irrespective of what they actually felt, right?
They paid one price.
Maybe they weren't comfortable being told to raise their fist and they felt weak for doing so.
On the other hand, there's no focus on them, right?
They are unlikely to show up anywhere.
On the other hand, the person… They may walk away.
Sorry, I know you're going somewhere, but they may walk away.
Actually, some of them may walk away feeling better about the movement because they have now shown support and it will be harder for them to walk away.
And some of them, and unfortunately I think it will be a minority, We'll walk away feeling worse about the movement, now questioning it in a way that they perhaps had not done before and wonder if it can do that to people with whom they had no beef.
What else might it do?
And they might actually begin to question the movement.
I suspect, though, that that will be a minority of those who, without thinking about it and without ever imagining that they would resist, didn't resist and did raise a fist in support.
Well, I will say again, Evergreen teaches us everything we need to know.
There was a faculty colleague of ours, somebody who I at one point would have called a friend, who was cornered during the protests at Evergreen and was frightened by it and wrote about it and then flipped sides because she was offered power in exchange for embracing the thing, which is, of course, the underlying dynamic here.
But oh, yeah.
All right.
If we go back to these cafes, right?
If you don't raise a fist in that circumstance, then you are very likely, you have reason to expect that video of you not raising a fist is going to be broadcast.
So whether or not you are doxxed is in some sense not it, because the The price to be paid for raising a fist is probably a price between you and who you were sitting with because they're, you know, that's the person you have to look in the eye after the thing.
The person who didn't raise a fist, whatever their reason for not doing so may have been, and it may have been as good as the one you spell out, Maybe the point is, hey, you're not going to tell me when I raise a fist and when I don't.
I will decide that.
This is in no way a statement about your movement.
This is a statement about you not being able to tell me what I do.
Right.
It's a statement about us being equals, right?
It's a statement about...
Maybe I'm an ally, but I'm an ally by virtue of the real meaning of that term, which is a pure relationship, not a subordinate relationship.
And so in this case, solidarity, which sounds like a pure relationship, is actually subordination.
But in any case, think about the asymmetry of the game theory.
You're one of the anonymous people who raised their hands.
It doesn't get very far.
Maybe nobody even spots that you were present.
Right?
You're the person who doesn't raise your hand.
Suddenly you raise a fist.
You're suddenly famous for this.
Right?
In some sense.
Right?
You are now on the minds of all of the people who think it's cool to go to cafes and force people to raise a fist.
Right?
You're on their feed as one of the resistors.
And you're also broadcast everywhere else.
And so This is the answer to your question, Barry, is that the game theory plays out in the mind in that moment with the, what do I do to reduce the cost of this thing?
Maybe I don't want to empower this movement.
I don't want to become its iconic resistor.
I don't want this to dominate my life going forward.
The point is, the bargain is you do whatever minimizes the chance that the camera lands on you.
But you're answering the inverse question that she asked.
She's asking what makes particular people brave enough to stand up to a mob.
So you are explaining, and this also warrants explanation, it warrants both the question being asked and it being answered, what explains the vast majority of people, and I've seen numbers in the range of like 98-99% of people, Who will raise the fist?
That is the answer you are providing right now, but really what we need is to provide people not just sort of a litany of, you might have these characteristics in which case you might be more likely to resist such demands should a mob come for you, but also what is it that you can be thinking of in the moment that will allow you to have the courage in the moment to resist?
All right, but this is where this gets so complicated.
I agree with you that the question I answered is the inverse of the question she asked, but it also, I think, contains the indicator of the answer to the question she did ask.
Unfortunately, this is personal.
It'd be much better if I wasn't the guy in those evergreen videos.
The thing that people need to understand, and I keep saying it, and I think people don't quite get what I'm saying, Why did I do what I did confronted with students armed with cameras portraying me as a racist who wanted me to simply embrace their movement publicly so that they would go away and harass someone else?
There was never a choice.
It never occurred to me.
Literally did not occur to me that that was an option on the table.
Still doesn't.
I still, I know formally it's an option on the table, but I do not register it as one because something about my development produced a program in which that's just not an option on the table, right?
It's like a keyboard without an accent on it, right?
There may be some keystroke you could use to get there, but it's not on the keyboard.
But help everyone else out here.
Like, how do other people without that very particular and, you know, perhaps unique in the world trait that doesn't even register going along as an option even for a moment, how do the rest of us not only dismiss that as an option in the moment, but really just relegate it to the netherworld?
So I'm not ruling it out.
What I'm saying is The thing that you're looking for is the answer, whatever it was that developmentally produced, and it's not just me, it's lots of people, but it's rare.
Well, I've never heard anyone else describe exactly what you're saying, because there are many of us who will stand up to these things, but the way that you describe this is so absolute.
And that kind of absolute, like actually you don't have to worry in the moment about what choice you will make, because actually there is no choice.
Is a kind of framing that might be useful for some people who might otherwise find themselves unsure how it is that they need to act in the moment.
So there is development and then there are hacks that substitute for development.
And I think the question that people are really asking, and I do get asked this a fair amount, I think the thing that people, they don't know When I was teaching I always used to say to students, please answer the question I should have asked you rather than the one I did ask you.
Because very often students will answer the question you did ask when the right question is right next door and you'll discover it a week later.
And so I'm going to answer the question that people should ask, which is how do I bootstrap the developmental structure to get there?
Because I know my logical mind knows that that's who I want to be.
How do I override the amygdala in the moment and do the right thing?
Right.
And I would argue that this is actually, A, this is something I don't know how they do it in the military.
But the military manages to take people and reschedule their system of incentives so that they are capable of effectively being ordered to engage in heroism or something like this.
Now, I'm not arguing that that's the right structure here, but my point is... Wait a minute.
Unfortunately, there's also a certain degree of depersonalization and such that is not what we would want to be seen as advocating for.
It's why it's not the right answer in this case.
But what it is, is a proof of concept that there is an answer to this question that can be systematized.
Now, I'm not arguing for a systemic answer.
And in fact, the poem that you read about first they came from the socialists... For the socialists?
Yeah.
First they came for the socialists.
It is a hack.
To the extent that you have that thing resident in your mind, some part of you actually knows that thing.
So the question is, does that thing arise in your mind at the point that they, you know, come for you?
So, I mean, that is one of the things that poetry is for, right?
That because it's in verse, it's easier to call up, it's easier to have remembered in the first place, and it is more likely to come up into your mind at the point that a mob shows up.
Right.
And the other thing is an analog.
I've argued in a couple places, I think I did an early video on wisdom and I argued something that then after I released my video it turns out a lot of people have made an argument similar to this in various different places.
But the argument is that wisdom is either very tightly related with or synonymous with delayed gratification.
That the idea is we are all as children We're unable to regulate our desire to have that thing and that there are many things that in order to have the thing you really want, you have to be able to forego some superficial substitute for it in the short term.
I think the marshmallow test somehow got revealed as not being what it was claiming to be, but it still looms large for me as an example of this.
God, it's so noisy out there today.
So, yes, whether or not the marshmallow test is or is not valid, like the Stanford Prison Experiment may or may not be valid, it resonates because we all know that there's something to this.
And we all watch children unable to regulate their desire for that thing and for going something much better.
And so the adults we respect are almost always people who have figured out How to put off some instant gratification for a delayed gratification.
And the farther you can delay that gratification, the more powerful this process is.
And frankly, the thing that's really hard to grasp is that our society has caused us to become very deeply focused on self as individual.
And this is understandable, but As important as self is, self is also part of something, right?
How important is yourself if the things that you do to keep yourself, you know, we're watching people of means fleeing major cities even as they are politically paralyzed from doing anything interesting, right?
They're saving themselves and they are not taking any risk on behalf of the larger entity on which we all depend.
That is going to result Sooner or later in that entity failing.
And we are actually, you know, when you're watching Americans confronting other Americans in cafes and portraying them as racist or otherwise defective for not being willing to comply with an order, you're watching the failure of the US.
And so the point is registering the value of that which is lost if you act in the moment in the way that you are being incentivized to act is the key.
Can you do... No, no.
I gotta push back against it.
It's far too analytical.
There's no way that it works at that level, in part because what you're saying is people are thinking too much about themselves and not enough about something bigger, and I would argue it's actually exactly the opposite.
That people that this, you know, what is it that some people have that allows them to stand up to a mob?
Well, having this character trait of being ash negative, which is something that your brothers talked about and we have talked about before, right?
Like of not conforming to expectations of the people around you when they are patently lying, right?
So that's what the ash experiment from the 50s revealed, and later repeats.
There have been hundreds, I think, of replications of that, and that was originally just male undergraduates, and it's been done now across a number of people.
One of the things we find, for instance, is that women are more likely to fall prey to the conformity of Of peer pressure, basically.
Even when these peers who are new to them, and they will probably never see again, and they are patently telling a falsehood about what it is they see before them, women are more likely than men to conform.
And that doesn't mean that all women conform and no men conform.
Nor does it mean that you can't change yourself, but sort of recognizing conformity to peer pressure, to social pressure, as something that you're engaging in in the moment when the mob is there.
And saying, you know what?
No.
Who am I?
Who am I when I go back and try to sleep tonight and report out to my spouse, or my God, or my children, or my friends?
Whatever it is.
Will I be proud to look them in the eye and say this is what I did?
Or will I look at the ground the way the guy sitting next to the resistors is with his fist in the air knowing that he does not want to look at the camera?
But I don't understand.
I understand everything you just said and of course I resonate with it.
What I don't understand is where the disagreement is because I feel like we're talking about the same thing.
I think in the moment it's so easy, it's too easy to be in that room.
Maybe the framing is, as you have said many times elsewhere, the room is not the room.
The room is in fact the internet where this thing is going to get played out.
But in the moment, in the room, our understandable millions of years of human and pre-human evolution cause us to look around and try to fit to some degree, especially if some are threatening violence against us.
How do you just get out of this situation right now?
You are asking for people to imagine maybe a bigger us, a bigger group that will be better served by resistance, but that requires staying in the groupthink and sort of Moving through the emotion into a purely analytical, purely abstract space that also doesn't refer back to who you are at your core identity.
And I think that those two sort of extremes of who you are as an individual and who you are proud to be and who you want to aspire to be and how successful are you being at becoming that best of all possible you's.
And how is it that society can be best for all people?
That those are the two things that we would try to maximize.
And that intermediate social group is the one that is most likely to get you to behave badly.
And I think that in the moment, referring back to yourself and your individual self and whether or not you're going to be able to live with yourself is going to be much more likely to succeed than imagining the greater abstraction.
Okay, now I know why we're disagreeing.
Let's imagine three states.
There's self, which is local in space and time to me.
There's future self, which is local to me, but not in time.
That is to say, how am I going to feel an hour after this interaction?
How am I going to feel a year after this interaction?
And then there's self, but bigger.
That is to say, I'm part of something that I'm actually dependent on and Ultimately, if that thing fails, the cost to me is absolute, right?
I think all of these things are the same.
They result in the same alteration of the thought process in the moment.
And I would just point out, and let's take the evergreen situation because it was simple and because we know the context of it, right?
I didn't have a choice.
I wouldn't have had a choice if I had been alone.
But I was also there in front of my students, right?
For me to have a choice in that moment would have left me completely hypocritical with respect to everything I had represented to them as true.
That doubly made it no choice.
So, you had already publicly defined yourself as who you were on the inside, and therefore to cave to the mob would have been a public act of hypocrisy, which won't be true for most people.
And so maybe one of the things you're arguing is, in advance of any such mob coming for you, begin to make public in small ways who you know yourself to be, so that you have to answer to the self that you've already established yourself to be.
I believe this is exactly correct.
And the reason people don't do it in general is that they will begin to lose friends.
And this goes to something... We are hearing from many of them.
This goes to something you and I have said on multiple occasions, which is that one thing that was crystal clear about the Evergreen situation was that it revealed everybody's character.
Now the fact is, the people that I might have thought were our friends who turned on us, I would rather not have had them as acquaintances in the run-up to the thing, because what they were was unreliable.
And what you need is friends who are reliable.
It's better to know.
It's better to know as early as possible.
And so, to the extent that you see... It's still sad, but it's better to know.
Um, the only thing I find sad about it is their failure of character.
Right?
The fact that that weakness is so widespread is sad.
I don't find it personally sad.
I mourn the narrative that I thought was true.
I agree, and I'm stunned by some of the things we saw, but I would say the other side of that is not, well, you're going to lose friends, it's you're going to discover who you can trust, who you could find yourself in a foxhole with and be glad that they were the ones there.
Well, faculty almost universally disappointed us.
They didn't all turn on us, right?
Many of the people that we were friends with were silent, which is frustrating.
Or privately supportive.
Or privately supportive, but they did not attack us.
There were attacks from a number of different people.
But the number of people, especially on the student side, who shined, right, was more than compensation for all of the people who were weak.
I think I think you're right that the way the hack that is useful is to explore this ahead of time such that the structure that is there at the point that you are confronted with that camera knows why you did what you did.
So two other things I think we should say is one.
I don't see any reason to imagine that the people who didn't raise their fist had the slightest bit of racism to them.
But even if they did, the point is this is not how we interact with each other.
Right?
It is one thing to disagree with people.
It is another thing to weaponize stigma in order to control them.
That is completely unacceptable.
It is obviously a threat that's being leveled in public.
And we all have an absolute obligation To resist its being wielded, right?
No good will come of this.
And it certainly will not be good for black lives or any other group of Americans.
That's right.
You said you had two things.
Was that both?
No.
I'm trying to remember what the second thing was.
It'll come to me in a second.
All right.
Well, in the meantime, let's talk about Ted Wheeler, shall we?
Oh, sure.
Oh, good.
Zach, would you show the tweet from Ted Wheeler that I sent to you?
He says, the Oregon CARES Fund is now accepting applications.
Black families and business owners experiencing housing insecurity, emergency needs, or a loss in revenue due to COVID-19 pandemic are eligible for cash grants.
This is the mayor of Portland announcing the Oregon CARES Fund.
Zach, did I send you the link?
Can you show the Oregon CARES Fund URL that he is linking to?
And as it says here on the screen, for those of you just listening, the Oregon CARES Fund is a targeted investment in the black community from the CARES Act Coronavirus Relief Fund.
It is for Black people, Black-owned businesses, and Black community-based organizations.
So this is how some of the federal relief from COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns are being used in the state of Oregon.
Zach, if you would click on FACTS, the Frequently Asked Questions, and scroll down to how did the Oregon CARES Fund come to exist?
It's a ways down there it is.
In addition to federal funds directed to many U.S.
citizens and businesses, in July, the Oregon Legislature voted to allocate $200 million from the federally funded CARES Act Coronavirus Relief Fund toward specific communities and sectors of the economy.
So, the legislature dedicated $62 million of that $200 million towards quote, specific communities and sectors of the economy.
What were the other ones?
$50 million to cultural institutions.
$35 million to emergency relief checks for those waiting on unemployment benefits to be paid, $30 million to pay workers who need to quarantine, and $25.6 million in grants to small businesses.
None of those other quote-unquote specific communities and sectors of the economy are demographically marked.
They are potentially specific sectors of the economy or groups that can be identified by, for instance, workers who need to quarantine, but none of the others are demographically, or in this particular case, racially described.
And elsewhere on these on these sites, you will find the claim.
And I'm just going to start pointing out when things that are stated as facts are in fact claims and not necessarily facts, especially when they come with no references whatsoever.
And of course, often the references are lies anyway, but the claims without even citations.
are made on these websites, the Oregon Cares Fund website, I believe, and on some of the links that they have to the organizations that are helping them administer these funds, that there are two pandemics that are facing us There's COVID-19 and there's systemic racism, and that Black people are suffering worse because of both of them.
And of course, to the degree that systemic racism is an ongoing problem, Black people are of course, yes, one of the groups of people who are facing that worse.
But the idea that Black people
are experiencing the effects of COVID-19 at a rate that is really in any way greater than all the rest of people, but to the tune of $62 million to Black people, Black-owned businesses, Black people who are experiencing housing insecurity, loss in revenue due to COVID-19, when no other demographic gets anything to that effect.
is amazing.
This is a direct manifestation of Kendi's anti-racism.
We've talked in the last couple of episodes about Ibram X. Kendi and his racism versus anti-racism formulation, which is a rhetorical trick.
He is trapping all of us with this.
He has either trapped or successfully gotten Jack Dorsey to put up a Don't hurt me, $10 million towards his initiative at Boston University.
What's this going to create?
What is this kind of quote-unquote anti-racism going to create?
Resentment and actual racism.
Yes.
I mean, it is a kind of racism, but it's going to also create the kind of actual racism that this whole movement is pretending to be fighting against.
It is, as I've argued, the ultimate objective is reparations in every interaction, at every scale, every day of every week, every context.
That's what this is.
The amazing thing about it is that, think about how our system is supposed to be governed, right?
Our system is supposed to be governed by a process in which that which serves the interest of the public becomes policy.
How does that happen?
Primarily through the election of representatives who understand our interests and manifest them in a policy context.
The motivation for this distortion of the distribution of federal funds, these are federal funds, the motivation for it is the result of the protests and riots stemming from the George Floyd death.
I won't even say killing because frankly I think That that is something we don't yet know that it was.
We can we can establish that in a court, but at some level this is the result of Violence in the streets that are demanding, that are insisting on a particular narrative and they are demanding changes and the policy apparatus is manifesting those changes without taking the temperature of the public.
This is Ted Wheeler putting up a fist in solidarity.
Right.
This is Ted Wheeler putting up a fist in solidarity.
And what does fist in solidarity means?
It means exactly what we saw in that cafe.
Yes.
It means that somebody is solving their local problem as Jack Dorsey did.
As Ted Wheeler is.
Yeah.
As Governor Brown is.
So, it is the hijack of governance.
It is the hijack of the manifestation of the apparatus that is supposed to be serving us all.
Frankly, it's not clear to me that this is in any way legal.
Right.
That you can even distribute funds to people based on race in this way.
Also...
Also, I would point out that this is absolutely 100% going to force the reinvention of the one-drop rule.
Right?
Lots of people will claim to be black.
Because what does black-owned mean, right?
Does it mean... I mean, there's no workable definition that isn't going to involve effectively some claim.
Let the games begin.
Yeah, let the games begin.
So let's just briefly go back over the other four categories that this $200 million that the – boy, I don't have it on screen anymore – $200 million that the Oregon legislature, I guess, decided to put towards specific communities and sectors of the economy.
Cultural institutions, which presumably means things like museums and zoos and theater organizations, you know, live art and such.
Emergency relief checks for those waiting on unemployment benefits to be paid, which for those not in Oregon, Oregon famously has done a terrible job of getting unemployment money to people in a timely fashion, so this is a fix for a failure that's within the state of Oregon itself.
I presume that there are some other states that are doing really badly but you know we have friends on the Vancouver side of the border that's Vancouver, Washington, and friends in Portland, Oregon, both of whom have been trying to get benefits, and on the Washington side, it's been easy, and on the Oregon side it's not.
30 million, it doesn't matter the amounts.
Cultural institutions, basically emergency relief checks for people who are eligible for unemployment but the state system is failing them so far.
Paying workers who need to quarantine, obviously.
And grants to small businesses.
Okay, all of those, I can totally get behind all of those groups.
And then let's see what this Oregon CARES Fund does only for black families and business owners who are experiencing housing insecurity, emergency needs, or loss in revenue due to COVID-19 pandemic.
Okay, let's instead of making this a racially biased set of grants, put more money to grants to small businesses, and put the rest of that money, that $62 million, towards helping with housing insecurity and towards helping with housing insecurity and emergency needs for all Oregonians who need it and who apply and And yes, that will mean that some less money goes to black Oregonians, but it is distributed across the board.
Maybe I'm done.
This makes me so, so angry.
God, why am I still surprised?
Right.
This is coming from the same administration that has coddled these rioters, which is now apparently resulting, predictably enough, in businesses fleeing from downtown.
I mean, what else are they going to do?
Businesses who are on the cusp of failing anyway because of lockdowns.
We were just beginning to open up here in Portland, which we know better than the rest of the state.
Just beginning to open up.
The protests begin.
The riots begin the very next second.
And restaurants are closing.
Retail shops are closing.
Of course they are.
They are.
And I should point out, it displeases me to even have to say this, but evidence emerged in the last week of protesters hurling feces?
Yeah.
Um, this is incredible, right?
It seems to me like, at least at the rule of thumb, the people who are hurling bodily fluids and feces are wrong, right?
I'd like somebody to provide a credible example of where that's not the case.
I would say it's quadruply the case in the midst of a pandemic.
Right.
So at some level, we've got anarchists who existed in Portland before the George Floyd protests were regularly engaging in protests in the street, have taken up with the BLM protests and riots, and are now engaging in this vile behavior.
And yet, that That manifestation is resulting in large numbers of funds being redirected.
It's just, it's appalling.
Yeah.
Okay, let's pivot.
Can we?
Please.
Alright.
I want to talk a little bit about some, some of this is new research and some of it is not, but the entire country and I suspect the world is suffering a mental health crisis at this point from a combination of lockdowns that have gone on forever it seems and look like there's no end in sight in combination now with the protests and the riots that for many people is something they only see on screens, have no direct access to.
Um, in combination with, in the United States, the presidential election, and, you know, if you're in California, maybe your house is going to burn down.
I mean, my God, just one thing after another.
We, for those who are well familiar with our kind of thinking, our evolutionary thinking, it will probably come as little surprise to you that we are suspicious of treatments for human conditions that look like quick fixes and tend to come in the form of pills.
Not to say that some pharmaceuticals aren't a very effective treatment for some conditions some of the time, but we feel, and we are not certainly alone in this, that the use of pharmaceuticals to treat especially things having to do with mental health and mood disorders and anxiety and depression and such, has been way overplayed.
So, to that, there's an article from 2008, Turner et al., 2008, called Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy.
Zach, you could show, did I send that to you?
Turner et al., 2008.
I think I did.
And in it, this is a review of research registered with the FDA on 12 antidepressant agents.
Are you finding it, Zach?
Is that it?
Yeah.
So this is a review, this is Turner et al., 2008.
It's a review of research that was registered with the FDA, so not research done by the FDA or inherently funded by the FDA, but it was just registered with the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.
On 12 so-called antidepressant agents, which just means 12 molecules that are understood to sometimes work against depression, you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac being probably one of them,
Across over 12,000 patients, across many, many different research studies, it's a review article, they found, this group of researchers, that 31% of the research is not published, even though it was registered with the FDA, and furthermore, that the research that wasn't published is significantly more likely to show a negative result, meaning that the drug in question was not effective in treating depression than the published research.
So, this is misleading and could easily lead to overprescription of and reliance on pharmaceutical solutions for depression.
Let's just... So, Zach, if you want to scroll to the results, I'm going to try to see if I can see it on my screen here.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
Here we go.
So they say, when we look, according to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive, which means if you look just at the scientific which means if you look just at the scientific literature, 94% of trials on these 12 antidepressant agents appeared to be effective in treating and Depression.
But when you look at all of the studies that were registered with the FDA, including the ones that weren't published, actually you find that only 51% of them are positive.
So I bring this up just to suggest, once again, that maybe drugs aren't your best, you know, pharmaceuticals are not your best friend for treating depression.
And saying, well, we found, you know, there's evidence in the scientific literature that things are effective.
Well, that does not reveal the likely bias in publication.
In fact, the conclusions here are careful.
They say, we can't tell from this if the bias results from a failure to submit manuscripts, from decisions by journal editors and reviewers not to publish, or both.
So they're not saying anything about where the bias may be coming from, but just that there is a clear bias that the published literature makes it look like these drugs to treat depression are far more effective than they are.
If drugs are not the best thing to be dealing with what is likely to be a creeping mental health tragedy across many populations at this point, what might be?
So we've got two... You want to say something first?
Oh my gosh!
So many things that need to be said in response to this.
Okay, okay.
One, that's 2008.
That is long before the so-called replication crisis.
That's right.
Okay?
Two, 50% of the papers, if you take the aggregate of the positive and negative results, were not positive.
Okay?
That's after a perverse incentive, because there's a perverse incentive to do work that will come out with a positive and therefore publishable result.
So we can't test that.
There's already selection on these drugs and on this research.
Right.
We have a gargantuan apparatus with tremendous financial resources that has an interest in having results published that justify releasing these drugs into the market.
It has captured the agency that is supposed to regulate their safety.
Even after this, 50% of this- Well, so just, like, the FDA is not implicated here.
The only thing the FDA is doing here is that the researchers doing this review paper went and just looked at the papers that were registered with the FDA.
Right, I got that.
But what I'm saying is… I'm sure they're implicated more broadly, but… Every step of this process is biased in the same direction.
Yes.
Right?
Yes.
Every step of the process is biased in the same direction.
And there's still enough evidence to find that only 50% of the results are positive, right?
Yeah.
Now, at the same time, this is, you know, so… It's very ambiguous that these drugs are a good thing if only half the studies say that they work at all.
Yeah.
Right?
That leaves out two really important factors.
One is, does the fact that a drug has a positive effect in the short term mean that it's a good drug?
It's like the only thing you track with COVID-19 is deaths.
Right.
It's the same thing.
Exactly.
What about all of the other lingering effects that may actually cause a decrease in quality of life or early death that we aren't tracking?
What about all of the side effects of the drugs?
What about all of the other systems that they affect?
What about all the other drugs you have to be on to deal with the side effects of the drugs?
Right.
So there is massive downside, much of which will not be measured.
Much of which is actually unknowable because if it manifests after decades, it won't have been captured in these initial studies that said these drugs were a good thing.
You can't say it was because of that drug!
Right.
And then there's the overarching Elephant in the room here, which is, we know dick about the brain, okay?
We really don't know how it works.
We know a fair amount about what it does phenomenologically, but in terms of our interventions, our interventions are all crude as hell because A, brains are tremendously different between people.
And B, because we don't have control at the level of these systems.
So, the fact that you're gonna dump some chemical into somebody's system, and it's gonna have some alteration that, under the best of circumstances, makes them feel better in the context of this drug, may well make them feel worse when you remove the drug later, The null hypothesis should absolutely be that if you dump a bunch of neurotransmitter into someone's system that it's going to have long-term effects.
Right, it's going to have long-term effects.
in their life, right?
All- The null hypothesis should absolutely be that if you dump a bunch of neurotransmitter into someone's system, that it's going to have long-term effects.
Right.
It's going to have long-term effects.
And so in any case, the idea that we take this as a sophisticated approach, that what we're looking for is the best molecule to dump on the person's system rather than looking for a deeper cause, that we do this to children, right?
Who then end up in this damned if you do, damned if you don't situation later on where their development has happened in the context of this drug that then becomes necessary because developmentally, it was a feature of their environment.
This is so insane as an approach.
And, um, and it's Anyway, I know we're headed to interventions that aren't pharmaceutical in nature and that's a really important thing, but it's so much more important than we give it credit for.
We could do two times a week live streams just talking about pharmaceuticals and why you should not go there first when you have a problem and should be seeking other forms of relief for whatever symptoms you're experiencing.
I think we could go one live stream a week just blowing off steam ranting.
I think we already did that.
Okay, alright, well, good point.
Alright, so we were going to talk about alternatives to What's that, Zach?
One hour.
All right.
Well, I think it's obvious that now we need to talk about zebrafish.
Of course.
I couldn't find a way to talk about lizards, which is usually my preference, but it's going to be zebrafish.
Our long-time listeners know that zebrafish are the next topic of discussion as a result of the way we've built this all up.
Yeah.
I hope that some people took bets and made a little money on that, that you're guessing that zebrafish were coming up next.
Seriously though, zebrafish are a model organism, and I think just that statement needs a little bit of explaining before we will explain why.
I will explain why I'm talking about zebrafish here in a moment.
Can I just say that when you say they are model organisms, you do not mean like he's a model prisoner.
You mean something entirely different.
I do, in fact.
Zach, if you want to show my screen just for a moment, this is actually a really lovely paper that I just ran across today.
I've only skimmed it, but for those latent or nascent biologists, Who wants to know more about model organisms?
This actually does sort of an interesting job of describing.
Most of this is in service of human health and medicine.
How many organisms are there out there that we could learn about that would be relevant?
Something that we could learn about them would be relevant to something that we could learn about humans.
Obviously, hundreds of thousands.
I pulled that order of magnitude out of a hat, but certainly many, many, many more than we could possibly learn everything about them.
What has happened in biology is that a few organisms have been chosen as ones that some people are just going to learn a tremendous amount about from the From the genomics, to the behavior, to the anatomy and physiology, to the cellular and molecular biology, the development, you know, across the board.
I'm sure I'm forgetting whole swaths of biology here.
But so you have C. elegans, you have Arabidopsis, you have Drosophila melanogaster, you have, well... Musculus.
Musculus.
And many more than that.
All of which have proven themselves to be, you know, we know enough about that now, depending on what question you might be asking, you can tweak some aspects of what they are and have effectively controlled for a number of things that you would have a hard time doing if you just went out into nature and picked an organism at random.
There's a lot of logic behind this.
One of the pieces of logic has to do with the trade-off between knowing something in, you know, you can imagine that there are creatures in which some system would be best studied.
And then there's the advantage that comes from knowing some creature very well at multiple levels.
But one of the downsides of knowing some creature very well at multiple levels is that to the extent that that creature is not representative, you may be misled in terms of understanding how to extrapolate to the thing we most typically care about, which is humans.
And you may become more likely to decide that outliers are not relevant, because they don't fit a pattern that you've already begun to see.
And frankly, once you start throwing out outliers, you start being a verificationist.
You start enforcing the idea that your future results will conform to the model that you already had, as opposed to you actually testing a hypothesis.
So this is yet another problem with model organisms.
That said, They have their place, and zebrafish is one.
Okay, so zebrafish is another one on the list of model organisms that I just gave, and I've got this paper that finds, actually, Zach, you could show, I think I gave you the link for Olivari et al.
2020, the title of which is, Zebrafish Show Long-Term Behavioral Impairments Resulting from Developmental Vitamin D Deficiency.
Well, to be published actually in October of this year.
It's online now already.
This is not a preprint, this is just an early online publication of a peer-reviewed primary literature in the journal Physiology and Behavior.
And the paper, sorry, I'm trying to go back and forth and see what it has to say.
The highlights of this paper are that when juvenile zebrafish are given diets that are either replete with or deficient in vitamin D, Those zebrafish that were, as youngsters, given insufficient vitamin D in their diets had more anxiety-like behavior as adults.
Furthermore, they swam less, and their startle response was increased.
So again, those are the highlights for the paper, and there's a lot more in there.
Juvenile zebrafish that were deficient in vitamin D as adults had more anxiety, had less lower activity in the form of swimming, because they're fish and that's what they do, and tended to startle more than those who had sufficient amounts of vitamin D.
And so, you know, we went through like, well, what does it mean for it to be a model organism?
But you also need to know a little bit about the natural history, actually, of zebrafish to know why this should matter.
Because if zebrafish are cave dwellers, right, that never get exposure to the sun and therefore don't synthesize vitamin D the way we do, Then maybe the idea of taking it out of their diet is ridiculous, because you would never find a zebrafish without vitamin D in the wild, because they are not synthesizing it from the sun anyway.
Well, it turns out zebrafish are teleosts, which is ray-finned fish, which are vertebrates, and like us, share an evolution of the brain and the central nervous system, and have a majority of shared neurotransmitters.
And molecular mechanisms of physiology.
So that's true.
We know that just from where they fit on the phylogenetic tree.
But they're also basically living in shallow streams, shallow clear streams.
Uh, where presumably there is access to a lot of sun.
So, what I take from this, and this is just one of two things that I want to talk about briefly here as, you know, are you beginning to suffer from anxiety and depression-like symptoms?
Rather than running to your doctor for SSRIs or similar, um, antidepressant agents, consider going out in the sun and not slathering yourself with sunscreen from head to toe before you do so.
This is, yes, a result from zebrafish.
And yes, it's a result, and this I think may help explain further some of what's going on with a whole generation of young people whose parents slathered them with sunscreen before they were ever allowed to go outside.
But children and adults alike benefit from having their skin exposed to the sun.
And this is just another result that suggests that actually it may help with mood as well.
Yeah.
If I read, I only skimmed the paper, but if I read it correctly, also increased vitamin D results in greater job satisfaction among zebrafish.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
Especially zebrafish who find themselves working in cubicles.
Oh, man.
If during their 10 minute breaks that they're allowed to take each day, they go out into the sun and leave their cubicles, they are much happier.
I can imagine they would, maybe if it went to the corners of a cubicle are just not well suited to the… No, they do not have the deep body form of, say, reef fish, so they don't turn very well.
They don't have great agility.
They're kind of built for speed.
Yeah, built for speed.
You're the first person to ever say that about zebrafish.
Okay, on a later episode of the Evolutionary Lens, we will talk about the deep body form in reef fish.
Probably we won't, but we could.
Ah, we should.
Okay, we should.
Okay, finally with regard to depression and what things besides popping pills you might do to help yourself out of the funk that is totally justifiable based on what is going on in the world, there's a 2016 paper that, actually there's two papers here, one 2016 and one 2019,
that find that moderate to intense exercise does a tremendously good job of impacting depression.
So, let's see, I'll just show, Zach, I think, did I send you the Belchen et al 2016 paper called Sweating Away Depression?
The Impact of Intensive Exercise on Depression.
So, what this paper finds... Oh, again, here we have highlights on the screen.
Like I said, moderate-intensity and high-intensity exercise was found to improve depression.
Very low-intensity exercise, like walking, while it's good for a whole lot of other things, didn't seem to be particularly beneficial.
And specifically, the participants... This is a small study.
This is 30 men who showed signs of moderate depression.
The participants showed a slight decrease in panic and fear and increased seeking behavior.
So that's, this is again, not zebrafish, but men who are showing increased seeking behavior and decreased panic and fear after spending some regular time in moderate or intense exercise for, and I think it was, I think it was like an hour a day, three days a week, like not, not a tremendous amount even.
But not just, you know, taking a walk, which has benefits for sure, but moderate to intense exercise with some regularity, yes.
There's some part of me which just, you know, is thinking about the process.
This is the downside of enlightenment.
That we needed hundreds of years of careful study for scientists to finally discover that going out in the sun and exerting yourself makes you feel better.
That's right.
There is another way to discover these things which might involve just Going outside and exerting yourself and discovering that you feel better, and my guess is some people may have gone there.
I think it's been tried by some of us, right?
Occasionally.
And then let me just point out that there are many follow-up papers and, you know, not even follow-up.
I mean, just like you say, this is at one level so obvious.
But there's a McIntyre et al 2019 article called Physical Activity and Depression Symptoms in Women with Chronic Illness and the Mediating Role of Health-Related Quality of Life, which finds very similar results for not men with moderate depression, but women with chronic illness, that the effects of moderate intensity exercise are remarkably high in treating quality of life symptoms
And indeed in some cases the symptoms of the diseases themselves.
So I was thinking about this in the wake of our kayak last night.
So three of us, Brett and I and our younger son Toby went out last night and just on the Willamette just for you know what three miles each direction we put in one place and we Kayak to dinner.
Yeah, we paddled downstream, but it was against such an amazing headwind.
It was really, really, really hard.
We get out, we go to dinner, we got back to the boats actually just as the sun was setting, and so paddled back the 50 minutes or so upstream.
But all of that wind that would have been a tailwind taking us home had died, so it was hard both ways.
And, you know, it was dark by the time we got back.
There was about a, I was calling it like a six-day moon or so, that was beginning to set as we were pulling into the dock on the far end.
And my tweet of this livestream included a very unusual cloud prism color bow that we saw only briefly, a couple minutes, and it was gone just as we were arriving towards sunset.
No, so it was as we had arrived at the dock where we were then walking to get dinner.
So it was an hour before sunset or so, hour and a half before sunset.
But all it takes is doing it to see the change in your own mood.
And of course, yes, your body as well.
Don't underestimate the effects of this and don't waste the summer and the good weather for those of you who have it now while it's here.
All right.
I cannot resist going full evolutionary theorist on this question.
Why would you resist?
What we have discovered is that going out in the sun and exerting yourself makes you feel better.
And I'm thinking what else might?
So here's the hypothesis.
Oh, wow.
It's going to be risky?
What about love?
Do you think that might make people feel better?
Yeah, love, actual connection, touch.
Yeah.
Finding bags of money, would that help?
Maybe.
I think that's a shorter term problem.
It's shorter term, but you know, anything helps.
Okay, we're well over our hour, but we were asked in the Q&A last time about movies that we enjoyed, and you gave a couple of answers, but I promised that we'd come back to it, and I thought we might actually just move this up to the main live stream, just so that we've Set a couple of movies and I, you know, basically, I always have a hard time with this question.
And I went to a spreadsheet that we've made that we've shared with our kids as we're trying to figure out what to watch.
And some of them are kid appropriate and some of them aren't.
By the way, we show our kids inappropriate stuff.
I'm not sure why we do that, but we are currently showing them Game of Thrones, which has lots of inappropriate stuff.
I think when they were four and six, we introduced them to the life of Brian.
So there's that.
Yes.
Yeah.
So just a few of the movies from that list that we've been sort of adding to over the years that popped out for me were movies that we have appreciated and Only one of these have we gone back to and watched recently.
Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The English Patient, Lost in Translation, and The Truman Show.
A very eclectic list.
And before you might want to add to it, I will also say, and again, none of these movies have I gone back to and watched recently, although probably I should, that I had an exquisite film education in high school.
which focused in part on Italian and French new wave cinema.
And like I said, I haven't gone back to any of these recently.
You should mention Jim.
Yeah.
So Brett and I actually met at Crossroads at the school in Santa Monica where I had been from seventh grade.
And Brett came in 11th grade having been invited to leave his former school, which we'll tell that story another time perhaps.
And it's a private high school for the arts and sciences, built around an alley in Santa Monica, California.
And Jim Hosney, he's retired now, but was an utterly extraordinary teacher there.
And I had him as a teacher for five, I think, of my six years that I was there.
And some of the films specifically in the sort of Italian and French new wave cinema genre that he showed us and had us analyze as 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th graders that I enjoyed at the time were Fellini's Satyricon from 1969,
Truffaut's Jewels and Jim from 1962, Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie from 1972, Antonioni's Blow Up from 1966, and Bertolucci, I think Bertolucci only wrote the screenplay for this, didn't direct it, but Bertolucci's 1900, which came out in 1976.
So that's again a fairly diverse list of films, all of which I recommend.
Do you have anything to add?
Yeah, you hit several of the ones I had highlighted from our list.
Chinatown is marvelous from the point of view of understanding how things actually function.
Great.
Many people believe the greatest screenplay ever written.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is great for embracing the messiness of being human in light of the technological desire to interfere with it.
Lost in Translation, I would say similar topic.
That's one that we did actually recently watch again.
It struck us both as remarkable.
Yeah, it's a great, great film.
I would add Rushmore.
Especially if you have someone in your life who's smart but doesn't fit very well with school.
It's kind of an important film for that reason.
What else was I thinking?
Maybe that's good enough for now.
But anyway, those are great films.
And we'd be interested in hearing... Oh, I would say we watched 12 Monkeys right before COVID showed up on our radar.
And that is an interesting film to look at now.
It was just pure happenstance.
Literally, I think we had not heard of COVID.
Yeah, and we watched 12 Monkeys, but it's quite something.
Brazil, I also find, has aged quite well as a film.
Maybe that's it!
Maybe that's it.
So we will, as has become our habit, take a 15 minute break or so and come back afterwards to answer your questions from this hour's Super Chat as many as possible and then your questions from the Super Chat next hour.
One announcement, I should say.
There's been a slight change in schedule at Unity 2020.
Our voting system is apparently ready, but it is not sufficiently well tested that we are ready to release it.
So we are going to get there as quickly as possible, but we did not want anything to potentially upend a good, honest accounting.
So, anyway, stay tuned and we will give you information as soon as voting is possible.
Excellent, and as usual, you can become a Dark Horse member at my Patreon.
This Sunday we will have our monthly private Q&A at 11am Pacific for those people who have joined at the $5 level or above.
And there is a Discord server that is available as a benefit at both of our Patreons.
Yep.
And we are coming towards the end of August, believe it or not.
So that means that the next two Patreon discussions on my Patreon are going to be happening soon.
