#49: Political Compass, Lies, & the Authoritarian Right (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 49th 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 number 49.
That's right.
Today, we are perfectly square.
We are very square.
We're always a little square.
So in the audio visual check before the podcast, we always do a little check just to make sure the equipment is working.
And somebody in the chat said they could hear me and see me, but wanted to know if it was normal that they could smell me.
And I wanted to just take a moment to respond and say, no, it's very unlikely you could smell me, but probably you're having a stroke.
So you might want to look into that.
Or, if you're luckier, you're having a synesthetic experience, and keep up with it.
Oh, synesthetic, it could be the mushrooms kicking in.
Or just your brain.
Or just your brain, right, exactly.
Okay, well, cool.
So, where should we begin today?
Well, we want to talk about a number of things.
We want to talk about the Political Compass Test.
We want to talk about complex systems and both mesentery and helium, obviously.
Obviously.
And we want to talk a little bit about Solzhenitsyn.
Yes.
And probably other things as well.
Should we start with the Political Compass Test?
Let's start with the Political Compass Test.
Okay.
Do you want to begin by just describing what you understand it to be?
Sure.
Political Compass Test, if you went way back in my Twitter feed a couple years ago, you would find me saying something like, you didn't want to engage the modern era politically without at least running through the Political Compass Test, because it adds a dimensionality to the ability to Understand people's political position that isn't there in the classic right left dimension.
So if you imagine a System of two axes the left right axis is the same as normal political left and political right But there's a second axis the vertical axis that goes from libertarian in the bottom up to authoritarian in the top and the idea is that this gives you four quadrants of It's a small L Libertarian.
This is not a map for the big L Libertarian political party that we have in the United States, for instance.
Yes, and in fact, if you look on my Wikipedia page, you will see that I am quoted as describing myself as a left libertarian, which is sort of a head-scratcher if you think of it as big L libertarian, but it is, of course, little L libertarian, which means very liberty-focused, as opposed to trying to dictate how things ought to be.
One way I've heard it described is the libertarian versus authoritarian axis, is that those near the authoritarian end prefer to use power to accomplish their goals, and those closer to the libertarian end prefer to use reason.
Or perhaps gentler forms of coercion.
So, you know, given that, you might imagine that politicians, people who have decided that they want to be in a position of power, would lean towards the authoritarian end of the axis simply because they have chosen to be in a position in which they hope to exert some control, in many cases to try to do good, but that power is inherently part of the job description.
Well, I want to back us up just slightly because my sense is that it's not that libertarians like me and you, small L libertarians, want to use gentler forms of coercion.
I believe the bias really, if you chase down what we actually believe, is we want to minimize the coercion necessary to accomplish the objective.
Which is why the power versus reason description seems just too much in favor of the libertarian end for me to say it without any qualifying words at all, because it seems like, you know, that must be my bias showing.
But I think it is pretty accurate, frankly.
Well, let me... I think where it goes would be something like this.
For me, at least, I will say the mechanisms I favor most to accomplish an objective like leveling a playing field would be incentives that allow the market to solve problems, right?
Now, I'm not a market fundamentalist.
I don't believe that the market inherently solves all of our problems if we just give it leeway.
I actually think we need to very carefully think about what incentives to place.
But once we place those incentives, market mechanisms allow people essentially to discover whether they are on the right track by whether or not it rewards them.
Again, this is not the system we have.
Lots of people get paid for doing terrible things to society, and that shouldn't be.
But a system of proper incentives would be a very gentle way to get society to function better than it does.
Right.
Yes.
So the people who made the political compass test decades ago at this point have taken a lot of flack for it and have also responded almost entirely, as far as I can tell, with careful, nuanced discussion of what it is that they're doing.
So you can go online and take the test yourself, and it will plot you on this graph of two axes, and then it will also show you who among historical figures, both past and present, you are like and unlike.
And for reasons of a little bit more diving deep into the final chapter of our book, I went back and took it again recently, this week, and was noodling around on their site and found some of these charts that they have in which they have plotted current political figures on.
So I want, before we show this, so this is, we're going to show a graph, the Political Compass Test graph of their estimations of where the The candidates for president in 2020 in the United States show up on the graph, all of them, not just the two major party candidates, but all the Democrats who are running, the Republicans, the Green, and the Libertarian.
So how do they, you know, how do they get these?
Do they get these politicians to take these tests?
No.
And maybe some of them do, but their position is, and I'll just read here from their site, you don't have to show this, Zach.
On their FAQs page, how can you determine where politicians are honestly at without asking them?
And you know, before I even read their answer, I would say, as an animal behaviorist, I used to joke, oh, wouldn't it be easier if we could just interview the bees or the beavers or the parakeets?
Like, no, actually, because they'd lie.
Yeah, it'd be way worse.
Would politicians lie?
Of course they would.
You know, of course they would.
So what they say here is, how can you tell where they're honestly at by asking them?
Especially around election time.
We rely on reports, parliamentary voting records, manifestos, and actions that speak much louder than words.
It takes us a great deal longer than simply having the politician take the test, but it's also a far more accurate assessment.
Okay, so they go on a bit, but given that, let us show, Zach, The Political Compass tests estimation of where in 2020 the U.S.
candidates for president fall on their graph.
Left is left, right is right, top is authoritarian, bottom is libertarian.
Oof.
Right?
Almost everyone who was running for president in the United States this year shows up in the authoritarian right.
Trump?
Of course.
Pence?
Of course.
Biden?
Yeah.
Not really that much farther left than Trump and only a couple squares down in the authoritarian axis.
Harris?
Similar position to Biden as Biden is to Trump.
Almost everyone else.
The big exceptions, and I was so pleased to see this, Gabbard, Tulsi Gabbard, and then we have Hawkins as the Green candidate over in the left Libertarian camp, and Joe Jorgensen, who's the Libertarian candidate for president, far, far right in Libertarian camp, and Sanders and Gravel also in left Libertarian.
So I want to point out a couple of things here.
I have to say I both do and don't buy this graph.
And the reason is that I am afraid that what we are seeing is downstream of the effect of a giant magnetic force.
Yeah.
But that wouldn't mean that this was untrue.
It would just mean that these characters don't necessarily have the agency that they pretend they do or think they do.
Well, I think it means two things, and one of them is consistent with the interpretation presented, and one of them isn't.
Okay.
So, if you imagine a system that will only accept answers that don't upend what it finds sacred, right, then it will essentially filter the world of potential candidates for only those that are consistent, and therefore you will get this amazing bias.
It's not like... Do you want Zach to be showing this?
Yeah.
Zach, would you put it back up?
So, all of these candidates in the upper right-hand quadrant are effectively in the upper right-hand quadrant after we know of them and after they have ascended to a point of seriousness in these races.
And so, in some sense, you are seeing the validation of the duopoly there.
And it is not surprising that the duopoly favors authoritarian measures and is far right-leaning, right?
That's its bias.
So, on the one hand, this is a filter of individuals.
That part would correctly reflect their position here.
But then the other part, which is going to be very hard to disentangle from this, is that their tendency to say things that allow them to move into the next round, to live to fight another day politically, means that they may not tell us what they really think.
You know, is Bernie Sanders really that close to the actual center?
You know, by some measures, yes.
Well, this is why I read part of their answer to the question about how it is that they place the politicians that they do on these graphs where they do, which is that they use actions whenever they can, voting records and such, right?
So not just words, but if it's words, it's words that have something demonstrating skin in the game behind them.
Right.
So the real question I think people should be asking themselves is, if you take this test and you don't come out in that upper right-hand quadrant, and then you imagine, well, were I to enter the political landscape, how far in that direction would I find myself moved?
That's a really important question.
And the fact that you would find yourself moved at all is really the hidden message here, right?
The fact that our system just simply refuses to accept anything Yeah.
of a different type, right?
That it systematically marginalizes things in the lower left-hand quadrant, for example.
- In the lower right.
- Yeah, I would say it does, though there is a, well, no, I guess it does systematically marginalize both differently.
And, you know, according to this, we have no one in the upper left.
Now, you know, you and I would argue, and I think that most people would argue, given the description of what this is trying to describe, that we should be minimizing anyone in the upper half of this at all.
So when I say there's no one here in the upper left, it's not that I wish that there It's that I wish that all of those people in the upper right quadrant were down in the lower half.
And frankly, if they were all in the lower right, we would have a much more fair and just world, even though you and I are both pretty far over left in that lower left quadrant.
Yeah, I would agree.
One of the critiques that has been leveled is that nobody will place themselves in the upper part of this graph, right?
Now, they will accidentally by answering the questions honestly, but there's something stigmatizing about the label authoritarian, whereas libertarian, small l at least, is not stigmatizing.
But I will also say, you know, in some sense, the upper left hand quadrant is in the street, rebelling in a very frightening way.
But wokeness is unrepresented on this graph with respect to modern politicians, though many have paid lip service to it.
And so there's a question about We've got Mao and Stalin and Che Guevara and such in the upper left, historically.
Oh, historically, yes.
Modern times, no.
And, you know, we're seeing a resurgence of this, which is frightening, right, because of where all of those examples point.
But the other thing I wanted to point out, and I wish we had this paper.
A couple years back there was a paper that suggested that authoritarianism was actually a personality type and that many of those that we find on the authoritarian left actually would be just as happy on the authoritarian right if the winds were blowing the other way.
We talked about one piece of research that came out a number of episodes ago that was not from a couple years ago but more recent.
We specifically talked about such a piece of research.
It's possible I'm misremembering when it came out.
But in any case, It is worth considering where you would where you would find yourself in the absence of these other influences.
What motivates you to be there?
You know, in other words, there's a lot of Self-serving economic conservatism in the upper right-hand quadrant, whereas ideological economic conservatives often find themselves in the lower right-hand quadrant.
In other words, it's an actual belief that if we just simply clear the decks of obstacles, people will find their way to success and it fixes problems.
You know, and it's not that there's no truth in that, but it's far from a complete solution as you and I would see it.
This is verificationist, I think, but I find it interesting that the characters that I have the most strong visceral reaction to are very far over right, and the two that strike me particularly even farther right than Trump on here.
Or Bloomberg and Inslee.
And, you know, Bloomberg, I think every American watching at least will recognize who he is.
And at the point that he started running late in the game, before it looked like Biden was the heir apparent, I said to you, I cannot believe there's some chance the Democrats are going to nominate this guy.
He is so not on the left.
But Inslee, who ran briefly, is the governor of Washington State and pretends to be interested in the climate.
That's his issue.
And so it would seem like good, environmentally interested people like us would be in support of him, but he is at best a stuffed shirt and at worst a completely corrupt, frankly caricature of a politician.
He's inept.
Yeah, in some ways he is the same level of emptiness of Joe Biden, but he's accomplished it without the senility, which is, you know, quite something.
Yeah, it's true.
So I guess that's a point in his favor.
It's a point in his favor, you know.
It's hard to do, but okay, so this actually points to another odd anomaly that happened this week in the Wall Street Journal.
Actually, I don't know, you and I have not talked about it, but you may have seen it, where the Wall Street Journal published an editorial, an op-ed, Decrying the lack of honest liberals fighting a back against the woke revolution.
Oh, yeah.
Did you see this?
Yeah, I tweeted about it.
This is Jason Stanley.
Jason Stanley?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It was a... Not, no, sorry, that's totally wrong.
I'll look into it as you talk about it.
Riley, maybe?
Yeah.
In any case, this was an amazing Error, because the Wall Street Journal has been exceptional in publishing a great many... Jason Reilly, yeah.
Jason Reilly.
Publishing a great many honest liberals who have pushed back against wokeism.
It's almost a singular exception in this regard.
They've published you, they've published me, Peter Boghossian, they've discussed Jonathan Haidt, they've published John McWhirter.
They've interviewed Greg Lukianoff, so there's this long list of people, and somehow, either the Wall Street Journal opinion page decided to ignore their own history of publishing these people, or they forgot.
Yeah, so the quote that I pulled from the piece was, there is no shortage of conservatives willing to push back against this pernicious nonsense, but where have the honest liberals gone?
And to some degree, and this is what I said online, we're told in part what you're seeing if you're on the right and you think that no one on the left is speaking to this.
Partially, it's a disingenuous and dishonest assessment coming out of the Wall Street Journal for precisely the reasons that you say.
But in part we are told that our very criticism of this ideology proves that we're on the right.
So there's no winning, there's no being able to continue to claim that you're on the left if you're critiquing the really horrifying ideology that is emerging from the left.
And that makes it even easier for everyone from journalists who are being published in the Wall Street Journal to just rank and file people on the street who have either a lifetime of voting on the right and of being conservatives, Or have moved from the left to right over time.
And anyone who moved after them, I find, they want to point a finger and say, where were you?
How did you not see this until I saw this?
And the fact is that we should all be interested in everyone's eyes being open to whatever is true.
At the moment, some of what is true is some very scary stuff going on.
There's a lot of stuff going on across the political spectrum, but the idea that you aren't welcome unless you arrived at the revelation at the same moment that I did, that's not going to end well.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And it speaks to a, you know, you and I talk about the fact that analysis is very important to get right, but that what moves people is narrative.
But the problem with that is it also means that narrative control is effectively the ability to overwrite analysis.
And so...
What's happening here is that we you know, it's like we are Vampires who do not reflect in the mirror, right?
The narrative is that there are no liberals pushing back that Conservatism is the bulwark that will stop this thing right liberals are completely absent from the fight and it's total nonsense right and you know back in the early days of
IDW, you know, we just watched this unfold in every major publication where all sorts of liberals, you know, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, you and me, Eric, all of these people were just simply portrayed as on the right because it was necessary to the narrative that we'd be on the right, even though... Christina Hoff Sommers.
Christina Hoff Sommers, sure.
And the, you know, The answer is actually things like the political compass test are very useful because you can go and check.
You just deliver, you know, your honest answers and see where you come out.
So it does require that you're honest.
Yes.
Presumably the test is gameable if you're trying to game it.
Sure.
You can spot questions that move you one direction or another.
But if you answer it honestly, you can find out.
Yeah.
But OK.
So.
All right.
Is that as far as you want to go political compass wise?
Sure.
All right.
What should we do next?
As you like.
We can go into complex systems?
Let's do complex systems, and we have two topics in this neighborhood.
You want to start fully biological?
Sure.
All right, let's do it.
Let's do it.
Okay, so there is a structure, I will say, for the moment in... boy, I didn't look it up.
I want to say certainly all tetrapods and I guess probably all chordates called mesentery, which is sort of this as someone who used to teach comparative anatomy labs where we dissected sharks and cats or sharks and salamanders depending on what was available that quarter.
When you do visceral anatomy and you open up the peritoneal cavity of an animal, you find that basically all of the organs of the abdominal cavity are suspended in this sort of vague transparent membrane.
Depending on the animal, you can tell that there's actually functional stuff inside that membrane.
Sometimes it's quite fat, especially if the animal itself, the cat that you're dissecting, is actually quite fat.
And almost always that mesentery has a lot of fat in it as well.
But really, at the point that I was learning my comparative anatomy in order to teach it in the 90s in grad school, and every time I looked into it before I would teach it again, every, I don't know, three years or so, because it wasn't my main gig at all as a professor, it was really, it was sort of this, an aside.
Like, you're going to have to get through it, or you're going to see it, and basically all the stuff in that cavity that you're interested in, the stuff that you're interested in, the small intestine, the large intestine, the stomach, etc., is suspended in this mesentery, but that's kind of it.
That's the story.
And here's a more formal definition of what it is from a paper that just came out.
It's the collection of tissues that supports the development of all abdominal digestive organs and that maintains these in systemic continuity in adulthood.
So that's written in sort of biology-ese, but it's consistent with like, you know, what is it?
Like, you know it when you see it.
And you definitely, like, you did this, you did comparative anatomy with me once or twice maybe.
But we have now, in the last couple of years, evidence that it has a single origin, developmentally.
You mean embryologically?
Embryologically, exactly.
It has a single origin and that it retains a single form, and that has led to calls for it to be labeled an organ.
organ.
And so one of the sets of things that we are now understanding about mesentery is that they are, and again, I'm just going to quote from this coffee at all, 2020 paper, that the functions of mesentery are underpinned by, quote, extensive gene and protein expression.
Over 50 cytokines are produced in the mesentery.
These include ghrelin, adiponoc... I'm not going to be able to pronounce most of these.
Adiponectin, Resistin, Adipofilin, and many others.
Cellular activities are supported by molecular activities, a large number of enzymes are produced by the mesentery, and it is not known if these, in conjunction with surface receptors, subserve specialized or general functions or both.
So, that both has a lot of information in it, most of which most listeners won't have any particular association with, but it points to, oh my god, the mesentery, which we thought was not much, just something you kind of cut through when you're trying to get to the stuff that you're trying to get to, actually is this font of molecular enzymatic cellular functionality that we didn't know as recently as 10 years ago.
So how does this traditional understanding of mesentery, which as long as a hundred years ago, there were a couple of doctors saying, you know, the definition of mesentery is going to prevent us from understanding what it actually is.
So that's very insightful, right?
That once we have these definitions in place, we often cannot go beyond them and see what is actually true of them.
So one more quote if I can find it here from this paper is, all abdominal digestive organs are directly connected to a single mesentery.
This means that the mesentery provides a linkage mechanism between abdominal digestive organs.
In addition, it collectively links all these organs to the body.
A linkage mechanism is an essential component of any functional system.
The elements of a system cannot function in concert unless they are connected.
The mesentery is the anatomical platform on which all abdominal digestive organs are integrated in the systems that collectively generate the human body.
Integration commences or ends at a histological level in the digestive organ itself.
In the mesentery, integration is concentrated in the prominent lymphatic, vascular, and neurological elements.
The mesentery can thus be compared with a biological circuit board by which digestive organs are integrated in the body.
Unless we understand the mesentery, we cannot hope to have a complete understanding of the mechanism by which the human body works.
So that to me is a perfect encapsulation of the failure of reductionism in modern medicine and biology to understand what a system is, It reflects the hubris of humanity in imagining that we can walk in, immediately categorize a few aspects of a system, and try to control it.
We cannot fully control a complex system like this.
And by imagining that we can, we actually walk ourselves into dead ends, intellectual and clinical dead ends, that are going to have really dire health effects.
And one more thing before I stop talking here is this reminds me very much of the thinking on fascia as well.
So fascia for people who are interested in fitness or have ever had to go to PT of late or are athletes that you'll probably be familiar at this point with the term fascia or myofascial or myofascial release techniques.
So fascia is effectively the very thin layer of muscle that lies between the skin and the skeletal muscle.
And skeletal muscle is, when you do dissections, really easy to see.
It has clear origin and insertion points, and you can point to what it must do based on where it is and what it's attached to, whereas fascia is this a set of or maybe single origin of sheaths that are wrapping the body, wrapping all aspects of the body.
And similarly to mesentery, at the point I was learning my dissections in the 90s on vertebrates, we were told just go right through the fascia.
It's not really a thing.
You know, it doesn't really matter.
And of course, it absolutely does.
So the anti-fascia people were just dead wrong.
Is that your point?
It was all a setup.
All right.
So yeah, this is interesting.
And you know, how many times are we going to make this mistake in various different places, right?
A lot.
And we're going to make it every time.
We've got junk DNA.
Yes, we do.
Junk DNA, which is not junk.
If it doesn't code for genes, it must not do anything.
Right.
Oops, that's 90% of the genome.
Right.
We've got so-called vestigial organs like the appendix and like the tonsils.
We've got a whole list of places where we have decided that because we didn't know exactly what something was that it was actually some sort of error of evolution and of course that's essentially never going to be the case.
Let me just say a word about vestigial because I actually evoked vestigiality in a tweet this week.
I talked about the vestigial wings of flightless birds and compared them to the vestigial morals and intellects of modern politicians because it amused me to do so after the vice presidential debate this week.
But, obviously, the wings of penguins, for instance, while vestigial with reference to their ability to allow the bird to fly, are used to allow the penguins to effectively fly through water.
And so, vestigiality, the term vestigial, is kind of like the word weed.
And we've talked about the word weed before on this podcast.
These vestigial and weed are actually human constructs, right?
So yeah, you don't totally like this construction.
When we call something vestigial, it is very often a description of our failure to understand what it is.
And when we call something a weed, it is a reflection of our desire for whether or not it should be in the landscape or not.
Right, so just a reminder for people, I argued that weeds are botanical noise, that the signal is what you're trying to grow in your garden and the weeds are the things that grow up there on a cord.
But in this case, I would argue... I don't like that, because as you know, I tend to garden by competing on behalf of the native plants that I like.
Sure.
Right.
No, I mean, this is this is the right way to think about gardening.
But nonetheless, you're competing on behalf of certain plants that are the signal and the weeds are the ones that you spend most of your time fighting.
But in any case, the The term vestigial has a legitimate use, but I would argue in the case of anything truly vestigial it is also in the process of disappearing, right?
Now it may be a very long period over which it is disappearing, but for example the limbs of snakes, there are some basal snakes that have some remnant limbs that are presumably, I mean they may have adopted a function, maybe they have stuck around, and is it pythons that It's the boids at the base of the snake tree.
They don't retain any of the pectoral girdle or limbs, but they have early in development a tiny pelvic girdle and just the tiny rudiments of femurs.
Right, and we have webbing in our fingers that disappears by apoptosis, so that is presumably vestigial or maybe it's just structural.
In other words, it may be necessary to have that webbing in order to make fingers.
But anyway, there's a distinction between things that are continuing to exist, not disappearing, like the appendix and the tonsils, that have a function, we just haven't found it.
And so it's sort of... Well, we kind of have in both those cases, but just most people don't know them.
Now we have.
But for the long history of medical science, we didn't know what it was, and so we assumed it didn't have one, which never made any evolutionary sense.
So anyway, we've got to distinguish between those things.
All right.
Is there more?
Oh, so let's just cap this off.
The argument here is that this is an organ, and it is an organ in the sense that it functions like one.
It is distinct from... And it's got a single origin.
Distinct from most organs in this... Do all organs have a single origin?
That seems to be the consensus.
And of course, the term organ is itself a human construct, right?
So, you know, does the category organ have a biologically meaningful reality?
I don't know.
But part of the reason that the mesentery is now being reclassified as an organ is because it has been found to have a single developmental embryological origin.
Right.
I'm just wondering whether that's really a category that we already adhere to.
Maybe it is.
I mean, I think, I mean, of course, it depends on how it's fractal, right?
It depends on how far you go in.
So if you're looking, you know, single embryological origin, are you talking about just like the three very primal layers of endoderm, mesoderm, ectoderm, you know, in which case, okay, skin has a single origin, but it's, you know, it's all over the body.
So it's tough to do.
Right.
Well, you know, so it's a very fascinating subject, actually.
Embryology is one of those places that, in my opinion, was kind of a dormant science.
When we were in college, it wasn't, you know, it was very empirical, didn't have a theoretical underpinning that was very deep.
There had been some very powerful early work where people had grafted parts of chicken embryos onto each other to see what had changed.
Yeah, some of the earliest genetic work was done by embryologists, right?
Like Spemann and Mangold and such.
Right.
But it went through this period where we, I don't think we were learning very much because we didn't have the theoretical grounding.
And then the so-called evo-devo developmental evolutionary science, which has a large, it unearthed a large number of what are called epigenetic factors, which in this case means these molecular factors that adjust what genes are being transcribed.
So anyway, that's a large part of the content of the genome that doesn't code for proteins, that was long dismissed as junk.
But anyway, that field really came alive and is now one of the most vibrant fields in biology.
Embryology.
Well, it's evo-devo, I would say, because it now does have a deep theoretical grounding, but one of the interesting things that you don't really anticipate till you see it is that a developing body, a developing vertebrate, the cells, you know, you start out with one cell and then each cell, you know, is a descendant in some line and at some point it starts differentiating and so you're in some line that ultimately leads, you know, to an eye and several other things, but
But in any case, there are multiple processes interacting.
One is the sort of counter where the cell knows how many, you know, steps down the line it is, and so it becomes more and more specific with respect to what it does as it goes down that line.
But it also, by touching other tissue, is induced to produce new kinds of structures, and so it is possible.
So there's clock and there's induction, and those are two different processes.
Right, and so you could get, for example, the same kind of tissue... Or not clock, it's a clicker, it's a counter.
You could get the same kind of tissue produced by two different origins, because basically the real question is to be a kind of tissue you will encode a certain subset of genes, and you can be instructed to do that from two different starting points.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder, actually, boy, I think I'm going to get it wrong, but is it maybe the pancreas, maybe, that has both an anterior and a posterior portion that actually have different embryologic origins?
And so I think as a result, boy, please correct me if I'm wrong and I'll try to figure out if I am, but one of these organs that shows up generally in our viscera, I believe, has At least different origins in time, and I think actually in place with regard to embryology.
And then later comes together to fuse and appears to be a single organ, but actually really is not.
So that would be the perfect answer to my question.
I would expect actually this happens in multiple places, but maybe not.
And maybe there's a reason it doesn't.
In other words, maybe composite organs are More vulnerable to developmental screw-ups or something like that.
Who knows?
And how do you get cellular policing of the borders as they fuse?
There's going to be some challenge there that you wouldn't have in a single origin organ.
Yeah, you're certainly going to get an increase in the potential for mismatches.
Alright, so are we there with respect to mesentery?
Yeah.
Just, you know, once again, the reductionism with which we often approach complex systems.
And I think this is a place where conservatives are much more likely to engage in imagining that they can control, that you can control a system and, you know, control nature, control the body, control, you know, whatever it is.
And it's a mistake.
And it almost always results in wrong understandings and missed opportunities to actually generate better You know, health, well-being, whatever it is, depending on the system you're looking at.
So, if you're keeping track, Pluto is not a planet, mesentery is an organ, the appendix is not vestigial, and junk DNA does a lot of really cool stuff.
Yeah, I wish you hadn't put Pluto on that list.
All right, I'm taking Pluto off the list, even though it was the taking it off the list that put it on this list.
All right, so are we there?
We're there.
All right, so we had another topic in the realm of complex systems, which I want to try to set in motion correctly this time, since I screwed it up badly in the last instance.
I don't think that's true.
We were speaking, and don't go fleeing from your seats as I raise this issue.
We were speaking of a certain set of technical failures that happened in our system while Portland was inundated by smoke from our fires.
And I set this in motion as a discussion of tech, which is stupid.
You don't care about the tech.
I don't care very much about the tech.
I care about it in as much as it allows us to do the podcast and not much beyond that.
The tech allows us to understand how you can dive into a complex system that you will by definition not know very much about and make progress with respect to understanding how it works.
Now, I want to catch people up to where we were because some really interesting things came to light after our last discussion on the podcast about this topic.
So, you will recall we had a problem where five cameras of several different kinds began to screw up in almost the identical way where they would fail to send signal to the computer and there would be a drop.
The problem was that Zach and I spent many hours testing every conceivable reason that our system could be failing.
And we falsified virtually every hypothesis that was available to us.
The only one left over was interference.
But there was no obvious source for the interference.
And so we were puzzling over what could possibly be interfering with the cameras.
Now, we hypothesized that it might be Radiation, liberated by the fires, radiation that might have been lodged in those forests through nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima, the fallout did fall in the Pacific Northwest, got incorporated into the trees, when the trees burned it got liberated, and maybe those radioactive decay events in the smoke around us were interfering with the cameras.
That was the hypothesis on the table, and it was the only thing that seemed to explain it.
Many of you did some calculations on the actual errors, and you told us that you believed that it was a mismatch, that something had adjusted the frame rate of the cameras relative to the computer so they were slightly off because the drops were regular.
Right?
And we falsified that hypothesis because, first of all, nothing in the settings had changed.
Second of all, when the smoke went away, the problem cured itself without us resetting anything.
And we could swap in a totally different computer and the problem still happened.
So there was no place for a mismatch to have gotten in the system and it wouldn't have cured itself if it had been one.
However, there was something important in that observation.
What emerged as a result of this discussion was something we did not anticipate which does actually involve radiation but not in the way that we had proposed it so the observation is that there are
Many devices, as a result of the pressure to miniaturize components, the quartz crystals that used to be regularly used to create a time signal in things like watches and computers, have been replaced by a different kind of component that I'd never heard of called MEMS.
And these components keep time in a different way.
It's not a quartz crystal.
It's actually something like a tuning fork, a nanoscale tuning fork embedded in a little chip. - You realize this sounds completely implausible. - Hey Zach, you wanna put that electron micrograph up?
Okay, so here is an electron micrograph of the inside of a MEMS chip, which is now the timekeeper on many electronics that have had pressure to be shrunk down to a smaller size.
Can you point to the tuning fork?
Is it sort of the ends?
I believe, yeah, I believe it is the ends and you kind of have two railway lines.
But, you know, I'm no expert on this thing.
And in fact, this micrograph comes from the guy whose video alerted me to this, who actually took a chip and basically sanded it down one layer at a time to reveal how it worked.
And so he happened to have an electron microscope and he sanded it down one layer at a time.
And anyway, to make a long story short.
These chips have to be made in such a way that leaves the tuning fork able to vibrate, right?
But in order to build them up, they have to have... You may have encountered in 3D printing, sometimes a part has extra stuff that needs to be printed in order to support some piece, and then that stuff gets cut out.
So it has some of that.
They dissolve away something that would interfere with the functioning of these tuning forks.
To make a long story short, that means that these chips are permeable to very tiny molecules.
And what appears to have happened is helium is small enough to invade these chips, which was discovered when a set of, I believe it was iPhones, that were in proximity to an MRI machine, suddenly all died.
Right?
The MRI machine involves a certain amount of helium.
And so, the long and short of this story... So, I know where this is going, but I have not yet heard in your story how helium gets into our story, our room.
That's it.
Okay.
So, first of all, we don't know the answer.
There are two possible ways.
But helium is very light.
It tends to rise in the atmosphere, so there's not a lot of it down here on Earth.
That which is down here on Earth is all the result of radioactive decay.
That is to say, heavier elements decay into lighter elements, and one of them is very frequently helium.
So, uranium decay creates helium, okay?
Among other things.
Yes, among other things, right.
Helium is one of the things it creates.
Emerging hypothesis here is that radioactive decay of one kind or another, and there are two possible sources in this case, liberated helium, which was trapped in our sealed up house, and that helium invaded these chips causing them to vibrate at a different rate in the same way that helium causes your vocal cords to vibrate at a different rate if you inhale it.
Now, if our house was really so well sealed that it trapped helium, it can't have been.
We had air exchange.
We did.
So, A, it takes very little helium to do this.
You would think it takes a lot.
It takes very little.
So, okay, let's talk a little bit about the two possible sources of the helium.
One is radioactivity in the smoke, and there is radioactivity in the smoke irrespective of whether there have been meltdowns.
Meltdowns could exacerbate it, but it could be that a certain amount of helium was getting into the house, or a certain amount of uranium was getting into the house, decaying, liberating helium, which invaded the chips, which caused them to vibrate very slightly wrong, which is the reason that people calculated that there was a frame rate problem.
That didn't involve us missetting something or resetting it.
It involved the chips vibrating at just the wrong frequency so that they regularly hiccuped, right?
So smoke is one way and the other way is that, and this is plausible here in Portland, There is enough uranium in our rocks that it could have It could be decaying all the time underneath the building and something about our behavior in the circumstance Resulted in it being trapped now.
I think that's unlikely I would lean strongly against that hypothesis because in the winter we don't have this phenomenon It was smoke related and so here's what I think happened this studio is over the garage and The garage was regularly opened and invaded by smoke during the event.
So we open the garage, smoke floods in, close the garage, whatever decay happens, happens.
Helium migrates up through the floor of the studio, messes up the cameras.
Lo and behold, when the smoke goes away, problem clears up.
So the long and short of this and you know Heather and I were both a little bit thrown by people not being some people not being so interested in this discussion because to us this is just a complex system and it gives you know it's a great place to train your brain.
Well, so what I will say is, you're now talking about our conversation about this, whatever it was, two, three episodes ago, right?
Yeah.
I am less driven to be thinking about and interested in hypotheses about complex systems that are entirely abiotic.
That's a fairly gender-typical interest actually, right?
I'm more interested in not so much the people, but the non-human animal stuff.
Those of you with Y chromosomes are more likely to be more interested in the stuff that are more things, even a biologist.
The particulars don't really intrigue me.
I don't spend time at night thinking about them, but I do spend time at night thinking about things like mesentery, so that's my weird interest.
But the conversation that we had, whatever it was, two, three, four episodes ago, struck me as exactly the kind of conversation, regardless of the particular topic, that we would be able to have in long-form discussion with students in our classrooms, because we were exploring ideas, hypotheses, predictions.
And, you know, that's the thing that I hope for us to be able to do more of here as when, if, the world in any way normalizes and we can look forward to actually trying to build something new and good as opposed to constantly feeling like, what's going to happen next?
Well, I agree with this, of course.
I would just add one thing on top of it, which is, you know, there's a question of where you are going to train your mind to do certain things.
And the problem with biology is the There's almost nothing in biology so simple that you can really understand it fully.
And that means that we're all dropped in at some level and we have a very scattershot understanding of some things and black boxes elsewhere and then there are things that are black boxes for everyone.
And that's not a great place to train yourself to do the work that makes you a really good biologist.
So one of the things I discovered in my dissertation work, which was on biological trade-offs, that was what I ended up doing my dissertation on, was that the things that I had gotten involved in that were complex, but not very complex, that I was involved in for reasons that had nothing to do with biology or theory or anything, turned out to be very useful models.
- Things like the evolution of the bicycle, of human flight. - Right.
So aviation, turns out airplanes are simpler than you think And there's certain aspects in which they mirror biological processes.
I mean, not accidentally.
In fact, the Wright brothers were inspired by the flight of birds and the flight of toys that mimic birds and things like this.
But, you know, cameras also, which have now gotten so fricking complicated that you can't necessarily understand them in detail.
But there was something about learning to shoot a, you know, A manual camera that has trade-offs written into them in a way that they become second nature to you.
So, you know, one of the things that I ended up realizing in my dissertation work was that when we say trade-off, we mean one of two different things, and this is very well This is very well mirrored in cameras.
So, for example, a bigger lens collects more light, right?
That's an inescapable relationship, right?
On the other hand, if you have an amount of light coming into the camera that's proper to make a good exposure, you can play games with increasing the shutter speed and increasing the size of the aperture.
In order to, you know, either freeze motion or get greater depth of field, but you're stuck in this trade-off world until you can supplement the light, at which point the trade-off seems to vanish, right?
You can get shorter shutter speeds and a smaller aperture at the same time.
Yep.
So anyway, I just thought it was a good discussion and that what I think we both hope people will get from this is that any system that you can sort out through hypothetical deductive method is a good place to train your mind to think about these things.
Absolutely.
And I'm reminded in your discussion of cameras, you know, what you say about cameras now being so complicated that it's really hard to do it.
But when you have a somewhat simpler, you know, somewhat less electronically based camera, another thing that you would do, especially when you're in the field, for instance, in Panama, is if something stopped working, including, you know, you became the guy that other people, when their stuff stopped working, they would bring it to you.
And you would take it apart and you would put it back together and very often it would work and sometimes it wouldn't, but you would have learned something and you might have saved, you know, the day for them and their research.
Cars are the same way.
You weren't, you know, a particularly, you know, car interested guy, nor was I at all.
Um, but cars also have become so complicated that people can't really learn to work on their own modern cars, but any car from, I don't know, any car from probably the 90s or mid-90s or earlier, almost, you should be able to work on to some degree and learn something real.
about the universe that way.
And so I just want to pitch, as I have before, this book, Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford, who is a PhD in economics from the Chicago School, from University of Chicago, who left his life as a, I don't know, some kind of talking head consultant inside the Beltway, I think, to open up a vintage motorcycle repair shop in Virginia, where he finds that his life has much more meaning.
Because he's actually solving real problems.
Problems come to him that are maybe amorphous, maybe not clear, but clearly there's a problem at the point that the motorcycle doesn't run, for instance, to use just the easiest example.
And if he makes it run, he has solved it.
So there are real problems affecting real people, that's one aspect of it, but maybe more interesting from my perspective is you know that you are training your mind and honing not just your intuition but your insight and your analysis when you work on such a system and make it better as a result.
Yeah, absolutely.
I want to adjust one thing.
You can work on a modern car and you can, you know, play these games with a modern camera.
The problem is that the fraction that is in the black box has gotten so great that you are, you know, you are just a consumer of the information of the black box.
That doesn't mean that there aren't other things.
The same thing has happened to statistics.
The way that I taught statistics, which I did every time I taught animal behavior, was from the ground up.
I didn't let students use the tests that they did not have a real solid understanding of the assumptions that went into them.
If there was a chance at all that they could use a chi-square, which there's a fairly limited number of questions that you can use a chi-square on, But a goodness-of-fit test like that, you can literally do by hand.
All you need is the one chart of critical values to compare your answer to, and then you know whether or not you've got a result that is unlikely to have happened by chance.
And it's just so empowering not to have fed your hard-earned data that you collected after you imagined what the hypothesis was, the predictions were, and the experimental design were, and everything.
To not feed that into the black box that is SAS or SPSS or whatever your statistical program is, and have it spit something out and go like, well, I guess so.
I guess the people who wrote the software know what they're doing.
So it speaks to two different kinds of empowerment, right?
One is how well does your brain work?
How well programmed and primed is it based on your ability to actually run a test that you understand?
But from the point of view of the careerist, the ability to throw stuff into a program and try different tests until something statistically significant pops out and have no, you know, it's... Who cares if you broke the assumptions of the test?
It's not who cares, it's I didn't know, right?
And so the point is, where did the replication crisis came from?
It came from a lot of people using very powerful software that was all black boxed to them in order to get results that were flashy, most of which were wrong.
Almost no biologist I've talked to understands the statistics that they use in their published work.
Right.
And so that has been a disaster and it is the result of a complex, a semi-complex system that the people navigating it don't know anything about.
So I wanted to point out a couple of things about what happened as these cameras.
So my first camera was a manual Canon.
I was lucky enough, my dad gave me an F1, which was this very high quality but ancient At the point that digital cameras took over, it changed things.
So we used to have two parameters that we would play off against each other, right?
You had shutter speed and you had aperture or the lens opening.
At the point that digital cameras became the norm, suddenly you had a third.
But it took me a long time to even realize that I had a third.
The third being sensitivity of the sensor, right?
Because it used to be that you would load your camera with a kind of film.
You'd load it with ISO 100 or 400 or 800 or something.
And then you were just stuck with it, and so you were playing this trade-off game in a world where the sensitivity... Film was ASA, right?
What?
Film was ASA.
Film was ASA, then it became ISO, and then that got transported onto these sensors.
But the whole point is my mind was built around a world of shutter speed and aperture, in which I had, before I'd ever, you know...
Walked out the door, I had set in motion the sensitivity and that was a fixed parameter.
So sometimes I would carry two cameras to have two different speed films because it was just so fixed.
So I mean, I think you're not quite doing yourself a service here.
I mean, I know from us having packed carefully, you know, dozens of rolls of film, packed them in these lead bags so that they could go through airport security if they refused to let us have them hand checked and all of this.
That we would always travel with everything ranging from 64 to 1600 when we were shooting film in the 90s when we were in grad school.
And it's not that you weren't constantly thinking about sensitivity, it's that once you had a roll of 36 loaded, you couldn't do anything about it.
Right, once you were faced with the question of the module that operates in the mind has this thing as a fixed parameter, and it knows very well how sensitive the film in that camera body is, but it's just not an option to play with it, right?
And so the thing is at the point that you can play with that parameter, very often what you want to do is pick your ideal shutter speed, pick your ideal aperture, and then borrow from ISO.
So it's a whole different mindset that takes you a while to get used to.
And now we're getting into this New realm.
So this keeps happening, right?
So digital did this, then mirrorless changes a bunch of things where suddenly, you know, it used to be that you would hit a button in order to see what your depth of field looked like and the lens would stop down and you could see what was going to be in focus.
Where's that gone?
Well, you don't need it, because now the viewfinder has that built in.
You're just seeing it all the time.
Yeah.
Right?
So you've got to now erase that thing to wonder about, because it's going to be automatic to photographers who learn on something like that.
And now we have algorithms that denoise things.
So now you can start borrowing in a way that doesn't have a cost.
So anyway, it's a whole series.
It's becoming more biological, and therefore maybe less useful as a model.
More biological?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
I'd say if anything it's less... Here's what I mean by more biological.
Biology is so complex, right?
The number of ways in which parameters can be made to interact, the way it, you know, the trade-offs are inherent on the inside but they can be obscured by the complexity of the situation.
The more complex an object is, the more like biology it is, and therefore my whole point about, you know, a simple camera is a good way to train your brain to think about trade-offs becomes less and less true.
I would then not say more biological.
Complexity has increased, and the places where the black boxes exist and you have no way to get in as a end user of the product have increased, but that doesn't mean that it's like biology.
No, I don't mean it's like biology.
I mean it is.
analogous to biology in the sense that there's too much black box for you to be sure what you're seeing.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I would like to share to sort of go back to not exactly what we were talking about with the political compass test, but some of what we've talked about a lot and we will return to.
We're hearing so many So many horror stories of what people are experiencing in their workplaces, and in the schools their children are in, and on campuses, on college campuses.
And many episodes ago I had said that we might do an episode devoted to school, and I frankly I'm just so drowning in all of the stories and evidence of things gone so awry across So many domains that I'm not even sure where to start with that.
So this is, you know, this is obviously not that episode.
But I wanted to share a little bit of an essay from Alexander Solzhenitsyn that he wrote in 1974 called Live Not by Lies.
Haptip to Barry Weiss for posting this, I think, on Twitter and leading me down this little rabbit hole into a rabbit warren.
So for those who don't know, I'm not going to read the whole essay, but we'll post it in the video description so that you can find the whole thing.
But again, it's called Live Not by Lies.
Solzhenitsyn fought for the Red Army for Russia in World War II, obviously on the side of the Allies, but a critical comment about Stalin in a private letter got him sent to a Soviet gulag, which is a forced labor camp, for eight years.
He fought for the Allies.
He was one of the millions of Russian soldiers who really substantively helped win the war.
Who was then sent to a gulag for a critical comment that was supposed to be private even about Stalin.
I personally was first made aware of Solzhenitsyn my first quarter in college when I was still a literature major and I was in a class devoted to reading Solzhenitsyn and the works of Solzhenitsyn and Kundera as well.
We read, I don't think we read the whole gulag archipelago, we read selections from it.
And he has always struck me, as you know, so many of the important Russian thinkers have, as pointed and careful and deep and surprising.
So, here a section from this Live Not by Lies It's that year that he was exiled, and he lived in the U.S.
for many years, and then after the Cold War ended, he ended up moving back to Russia, I guess, where he died many years ago.
So, from the middle of this essay.
Is the circle closed?
Is there really no way out?
Is there only one thing left to do to wait without taking any action?
Maybe something will happen by itself.
But it will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol and strengthen and do not sever ourselves from the most perceptible of its aspects.
Lies.
When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting, I am violence!
Run away!
Make way for me!
I will crush you!
But violence quickly grows old.
After only a few years, it loses confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face, it summons falsehood as its ally.
Since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence.
Violence does not lay its paw on every shoulder every day.
It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.
And this submissiveness is the crux of the matter.
The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation is this.
Personal non-participation in lies.
Though lies may conceal everything, though lies may control everything, we should be obstinate about this one small point.
Let them be in control but without any help from any of us.
This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction.
It is the easiest thing for us to do and the most destructive for the lies, because when people renounce lies it cuts short their existence.
Like a virus, they can survive only in a living organism.
Let us admit it.
We have not matured enough to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud or to express aloud what we think.
It is not necessary, it's dangerous.
But let us refuse to say what we do not think.
This is our path, the easiest and the most accessible one, which allows for our inherent, well-rooted cowardice.
And it's much easier, it's shocking even to say this, than the sort of civil disobedience that Gandhi advocated.
Our path is not that of giving conscious support to lies about anything at all.
And once we realize where the perimeters of falsehood are, everyone sees them in his own way.
Our path is to walk away from this gangrenous boundary.
If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and would subside.
That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.
So in our timidity, let us each make a choice.
Whether to remain consciously a servant of falsehood, of course it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family that one raises one's children in the spirit of lies.
Or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one's children and contemporaries.
And one final paragraph near the end of the essay.
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul.
Don't let him be proud of his progressive views.
And don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist or a distinguished figure or a general.
Let him say to himself, I'm a part of the herd and a coward.
It is all the same to me as long as I'm fed and kept warm.
Wow.
There's Solzhenitsyn for you.
So I can't help but feel that there's something We are so far from a moment in time when it is even conceivable that lies wouldn't be the majority of what we encounter, that it just seems almost an impossible gap to cross.
Well, but he's not saying, do not encounter lies.
He says, do not acquiesce to them.
Do not.
Do not intone them yourself.
Do not repeat them.
And indeed, there's a long bulleted list in this of what you should do, which I decided not to read because it's fairly long, but do not repeat them.
And when they come at you, even, and this is harder, do not by your silence appear to acquiesce to them.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, I, of course, agree with this and try to live by it, but but nonetheless, I do.
I think that something having to do with advertising, you know, which has changed so much since that was written, has drenched us so thoroughly in lies.
That we have become a nerd to them in a new way, and I don't know, it's slightly hopeless to imagine that we have to turn the tide against lies in order to make progress.
Well, you know, of course he is speaking to the lies of Ascendant, or now...
Now enmeshed in society ideologies.
And that is why I read it here now, right?
That we have lies coming from every politician.
Every politician, I'm quite sure of it.
But some of them are in the moment useful to them and don't have necessarily any systemic meaning to them.
But when so many people are being asked to, for instance, agree that they are racist, agree that they can't never not be racist, agree that the color of their skin makes them responsible for the sins of their forefathers, agree that their children are racist, agree that they have toxic masculinity, no.
No.
That sex is not binary.
That sex is not binary.
I mean, it goes on and on and on and on.
That talking about the reality of sex being binary makes you a transphobe.
No.
No, it does not.
None of these things are true.
Yes, well, in that context, I think it's important to recognize, I'm still not quite sure how to phrase it, but something very powerful in Brett Stevens in the New York Times having pointed out just how broken the 1619 Project is and has been, and he was very careful about it, as I think he would have to be in order to publish it there.
But the duplicitous way in which the central claim of the 1619 Project was memory hold because it was unsustainable, that recognition is not just You know, a massive lie of a kind that is beginning to move civilization, but it was a massive lie in what was known in our lifetime as the paper of record, right?
To have the paper of record whose clear obligation Is to report to the best of its ability what has happened and what it appears to mean to have it dispensing lies which are clearly ideological and targeted at political power.
I mean, it's obviously not news to anyone that the New York Times is now doing that, but to see such a spectacular example Um, which now the New York Times has been forced to admit because apparently it couldn't sustain the lie, uh, is really stunning.
So maybe there's hope in that.
Maybe we've reached some place where there is a limit to what one can claim in this space.
And even though it has taken many, many months to reveal the bankruptcy of that perspective, it has now, it has now emerged.
That's an important victory.
Yeah, I hope so.
I guess I'm reminded as you're talking about, I hate going to tweets, but a tweet that I saw today that I responded to that says, this guy, don't show it Zach, I'm not even going to read the guy's name.
If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see that I quote tweeted it.
He says, a lot of mediocre white men are obsessed with the 1619 Project because nothing that they will do in their life will ever have the kind of impact that Anne Hanna Jones had and their fragile egos can't handle it.
Well, that's one lie and assertion and ad hominem attack on top of another, right?
And it's clearly about the Bret Stephens piece in the New York Times about the 1619 Project, but the idea that it's men who are white, who are mediocre, who are obsessed with this project, and it's because they themselves are failures, as opposed to it's a lot of us, regardless of the immutable characteristics that we were born with, Who look at this project and say, actually, that's just a bad piece of work.
It is a bad piece of work.
It's bad scholarship.
And it's divisive.
And you're lying.
And we're not going to stand for it.
That's nothing to do with our mediocrity.
No.
Right.
Well, I would say it even goes a step beyond that, because the whole idea of This country can only be understood as a, from the first moment, white supremacist project leaves no option but to dismantle it because there's nothing to fix, right?
And so this lie is so pernicious with respect to the actual nature of this country, which, yes, screwed up from its first instantiation, but Did aspire to something better.
In fact, aspired to exactly the thing that an honest broker would want us now to achieve, which is a truly equal society.
So anyway, it was absolutely necessary to push back on this, because the basic point is, if you accept this narrative framing, then it necessitates a massive project of undoing that is not justified.
So, you know, this is about power and limited resources, stupid, as your advisor's file cabinet reminded us every time we walked into his office.
That's right.
All right.
Are we there?
Yeah.
I believe we are there.
I think we are.
So I had intended to start this hour by reminding people that we answer questions that you write in via Super Chat in the second hour.
I failed to, but I'll say it now.
So many questions you ask now, we will try to get to next hour, and then we will start next hour.
We will also answer questions that come in the Super Chat in the stream for the Q&A, which will start in about 15 minutes.
We have a private monthly Q&A that you can access on my Patreon.
There is a private Discord server that you can access on either of our Patreons.
Brett runs a couple of conversations each month through his as well.
And we encourage you to subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss content.
You've got at least one other podcast, Dark Horse Podcast, coming up this week and we may have a couple more in the works.
We will definitely be back live a week from today, maybe before then, but there will probably be another Dark Horse Podcast before then.
Yes, I believe we will do one and hopefully it will be out shortly thereafter.
