#54: Lane Splitting in the Post-Election Era (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 54th 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. In this episode, we discuss COVID-19, lockdowns, masks, and the implications for a possible vaccine. We ask if there are questions that should not be asked, and what makes a person an ideologue. Should you stay in your lane? What does it mean when a person is consistent in their arguments over time? How do new social media p...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 54. welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 54.
We are more than a week post-election, is that right?
Oh yes.
That's amazing.
We survived this long, so that's something of an accomplishment.
Congratulations.
To you too.
Yes, so I'm wearing a bandana, and one could take that to be a response to the fact that COVID is now very much again on the rise, but it isn't this time.
I'm just wearing it because I'm feeling, you know, in kind of a bandit mode.
A bandit mood.
Yeah, no, it would make no sense for you to be wearing a bandana in our home with the four of us and our friendly quadrupeds in order to avoid COVID, unless one of us have been exposed, in which case probably we should be being more careful than this.
So yeah, bandit, huh?
Yeah.
So you want to talk about that?
Well, I don't know.
I guess it's been kind of a brutal week on social media.
And unfortunately, social media is playing a larger role in our lives as a result of the Reduced activity in the world and increased fears of this new wave of COVID.
I will say, as long as we're on the COVID topic, there is lots of gearing up for what sounds like it might be a renewed... I hate the term lockdown, right?
I think it's actually a bad term.
A renewed quarantine.
Also not a good term because we're talking about keeping people who are healthy from interacting.
But in any case, there is, I think, a tension between the political dynamic that has unfolded around COVID and the fact that there are effectively teams, which there shouldn't be, and the question of what the hell are we going to do about COVID?
Now, it may be that this new vaccine is the silver bullet.
But I have to say, we should have done the quarantine thing right at first.
We should have done it much more intensively for a short time.
And to the extent that we are now talking about that, I hope that people who've become very skeptical about interventions will consider the possibility that for our well-being going forward, collective and individual, that it may be that a brief, intense period of suspending non-essential activity might be the key.
Well, I suspect that you and I actually at this point come down somewhat differently as to what the appropriate response societally would be.
What we're about to see here in Oregon is there's Governor Brown established something that she called a pause for two weeks.
I don't remember what all the specifics involved in that were, but it involved backing off of some of the things that were open.
And, you know, we never, as I assume everywhere, but I'm not actually sure, we never became fully open.
You know, our kids haven't seen the inside of a classroom since March, you know, all of this.
And, you know, there's, of course, no live events, no music, no theater, no sports, swimming pools have been closed, all of this.
But she's in, I don't know, three days from now, there's going to be a two-week Something more than a pause.
I don't think she's using the word lockdown, but in which, once again, there's no in-restaurant dining.
All the gyms are going to be closed.
All the museums are going to be closed.
And so far what I've said, you know, may make sense given that Oregon, like so much of the country right now, is experiencing a surge in In cases, although interestingly, the deaths are not keeping a pace, right?
The CFR seems to be, the case fatality rate seems to be changing the longer it is that humans are interacting with this thing, as we would expect, as we talked about back in March, April, May, when we were talking a lot about COVID.
For multiple reasons, both because we're getting better at dealing with it, and because there may be an evolutionary transition between us as hosts, which will be slow, and in the virus itself, which could be quite rapid.
Right.
So it could be becoming less virulent, which would allow it to stick around with humans for longer, you know, effectively become something that we were more willing to just have a sort of background level noise.
And, you know, and of course there's also the real possibility, and some people say this is herd immunity, but I think this is a misunderstanding of what herd immunity is, is just that, you know, the people who were most susceptible both to getting it and to experiencing quick death from it,
Have largely already been affected and so the people who are getting it now may well have long-term negative effects The full extent of which we have no way to know yet But they are perhaps less likely to be the ones to get it and die quickly because it has already affected those people that part of the population Especially since we see a correlation between susceptibility and severity.
Yeah.
So yes, you would imagine that this thing would pick off people who are vulnerable for whatever reason, first, leaving a less vulnerable population.
On the other hand, the numbers of people who apparently are positive for this at the moment are pretty staggering.
Oh, it's huge.
You know, so Oregon experienced more than a thousand new cases a day, two days running at least this week, which Oregon has always been interesting throughout this pandemic in that while California and Washington were epicenters in many regards, Oregon was actually among the lowest, had among the lowest number of cases in the country.
And also tellingly, despite the amazing number of protests and continuing amazing number of riots that have been happening, depending on how you count, every day or nearly every day since the end of May, Those don't seem to have been attributable to super spreader events or rising or even clusters of cases.
And to this point, the point that we've been making from the very beginning, there is scant evidence that this virus transmits effectively outside, that airflow And boundary layers are key to understanding what it is that you are likely to need to think about in order to stay healthy.
And maybe not 100% never having been in contact with the virus, but very low dosages of this virus may in fact provide a small level of inoculation against getting sicker.
Yes, and I will say I think what we were intuiting and interpreting from what we were reading early on has been borne out almost entirely.
The exception being we were afraid like everybody else that fomites, the surface transmission, was going to be a big deal.
Turned out it's not a big part in this case.
So I early on decorated most of our outdoor doorknobs.
I bought and applied copper tape, just figuring, well, we're going to wash our hands.
But also copper viruses and coronaviruses in particular are known to die faster deaths on copper than on stainless.
And so copper is a good antiviral and antibacterial surface.
But it doesn't seem like that is a necessary step here.
Yeah, but I think the important lesson, as I see it, is that A, a lot was deducible from the high quality information, and there was a lot of low quality information circulating with it.
But if you paid attention, it was possible, you know, what percentage of a highly effective vaccine What percentage in terms of worth is a high quality model of how it transmits and what you can do to not eliminate but reduce the chances in each and every instance?
In other words, if you get into a car that somebody else has been driving for whatever reason, or you get into a car, you know, if you're using an Uber or something like that, All the difference in the world, rolling down the windows and making it effectively a high volume space.
Even if the person has been coughing out COVID, you can clear that volume very quickly.
Yes.
Because it doesn't seem to land and rest on surfaces very well.
Not that it doesn't ever happen.
Or it doesn't get transmitted once it's landed.
Yeah, so there's, you know, and we also specifically said, you know, as folks on the right typically were arguing that these protests were going to cause a massive wave, we specifically said, maybe not, because high volume spaces.
On the other hand, there were things that went in the other direction, like shouting.
A few times that we went down there, you're seeing the number of people who were shouting in each other's faces, like, okay, let's get out of the line of fire of the shouting, right?
Right.
Well, and also, you know, I don't think almost anybody was paying attention to it, but being on the move, right?
What we learned from the rapidly emerging data on the topic was that a healthy person exposed briefly to a cloud of COVID doesn't tend to get sick.
It's only when you're in prolonged exposure, which of course makes cars ultra dangerous, planes very dangerous.
Somewhat dangerous, especially if people have been in them singing or stuff like that.
Well, I will say, our plan was not to talk about COVID today, so I do not have any of this at my fingertips, and I do want us to go to where we had talked about going.
But it does seem to me that there is pretty good evidence at this point that planes have been made much more safe than people have imagined.
In fact, I've had two different people who've been on planes recently.
Tell me that both from the research they did in advance and just their lived experience, right?
Their experience of being in the airports on both ends and the plane in the middle was that everyone was being careful.
If we are to believe that the HVAC on board, or I don't know if it's called HVAC on a plane, but you know that the filtration on board is as good as we are being told it is.
and everyone is wearing a mask at all times, that the planes seem pretty safe, whereas the airports themselves do not.
Now, when I first heard this, I thought, airports are really big volume spaces.
There is an awful lot of space.
High ceilings.
High ceilings, so actually airports don't seem like they would be Particularly dangerous to me, but in both of these cases, anecdotes, it was both women.
They said as soon as we got off the plane, there were people whom we had been, two different situations, who I had been traveling with who ripped off their masks in the airport, either because they needed to smoke or whatever it was, or because they just thought it was insane that they were having to wear a mask.
Such that suddenly in the airport itself, which also presumably is less focused on how perfect their air filtration systems are, are maybe in fact more dangerous than the actual plane rides.
Interesting.
So my sense is that A good model, which isn't that hard to convey once you figure it out, it's hard to figure out what the model is at first, but a good model is worth some large fraction of a vaccine, maybe it's 25%, right?
That the amount you can do to just limit the number of places in which you could even contract it is pretty high if you're vigilant about Depending on how good the vaccine is, it could be worth considerably more than that.
Right, exactly.
And it's a lot less risky, that's for sure.
The things you do in order to prevent this are safe.
Right.
Okay, so again, this was not going to be the stuff we were talking about today, but one of these women I was talking to this week, who we know somewhat, not very well, She came to me and said, I've been meaning to ask you guys.
She just happened to reach me and not you.
As biologists, what do you think of the vaccine?
I'm hearing from anti-vaxxers.
I'm hearing from people who are saying they won't take it under any circumstances.
Is it dangerous?
Would you be worried about a vaccine that was pushed through so fast?
And, you know, we have not talked about this actually.
What I said to her was, I'd far prefer to take a vaccine that had gone through all of the most rigorous testing.
There is no time for that.
I do not think that the way in which this vaccine has the possibility of being less effective than it should is likely to send it into the territory of being dangerous.
I think it is likely to be less efficacious than it is supposed to be, rather than more dangerous than a more reliably tested vaccine.
What do you think about that?
Well, A, this is a perfect segue into exactly what we were going to be talking about.
I would say one thing I know for sure Is that we're damn well not going to be allowed to talk about it the way we need to talk about it in order to do this properly.
We're going to be expected to belittle the public and tell them a fairy story about safety in which their concerns are the result of wild-eyed fever dreams.
Yada, yada, yada, and the adults have tested this thing, and if we say it's safe, it's safe, and all of this is complete nonsense.
Now, the vaccine will have gone through testing.
A, I don't trust the testing, right?
I don't trust the testing because I've seen what happens with drug safety testing, and when somebody, in this case me, tries to raise the alarm about a Glaring flaw in that system the bell doesn't ring so What don't I know about vaccine testing who knows right?
I would also say that there is a second layer of informal testing that we know didn't happen here, which is If a vaccine emerges and it is given to people, then time passes and it is not a good way of figuring out whether something has happened.
But over time, a pattern will emerge that something about the vaccine we didn't know has occurred.
People who've had it are showing this symptom, something like that.
In this case, there just simply hasn't been enough time.
There hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies.
Longitude referring exactly to time in this case that we would normally assume was necessary.
Right, and what's more, in this case, and I wasn't prepared to talk about this, but my understanding is that this vaccine is of a very interesting and I think highly unusual type.
I don't actually know anything about it.
This is the Pfizer vaccine we're talking about?
What I heard was, and in a high-quality conversation, sophisticated people who wouldn't be jawing off about this without having done some work, but what I understood is that it is an mRNA vaccine, right?
Which I believe means... The M stands for messenger.
Right.
That doesn't give a lot of context, but...
Well, you've got DNA, which is made into a template, which is RNA, which is a close relative of DNA.
That mRNA is then sent to basically a molecular machine called a ribosome, which turns it into protein, which is the active form, right?
A, this is interesting because the thing that the coronavirus does is basically hijack the cell above the genome.
It doesn't integrate into the genome.
This is a mistake I made on one of our first live streams and people corrected me.
You thought it was a retrovirus.
Yeah.
That's the mistake you're talking about.
That was the mistake I made.
But it turns out that this coronaviruses are interesting in the sense that they travel above the level of the genome.
They never interact with it.
They hijack the ribosomes and send the messages with it.
They're epigenomic.
Right.
Well, yes.
So in any case, a vaccine that does the same trick seems like it might actually be quite safe.
On the other hand, what we don't know about the situation might be larger than normal because this isn't a variation on a common theme, as I understand it.
So, you know... No, I mean, I guess the danger potentially is what other mRNA does it go after?
Well, there's all of the upstream danger.
In other words...
You can trigger the immune system to do things at the level of antigen.
You can trigger the immune system to be forewarned about particles that actually are hostile before it ever sees them, right?
That would be a typical way.
A typical mechanism for a vaccine.
Right.
You would take either broken up pieces of dead virus or live virus that isn't pathogenic and you would put it in the system.
The system would then do what it does normally, which is recognize that there's something Unfamiliar here, it must be an enemy and it would learn to go after it.
And then at the point that the real pathogen shows up, the system is already primed.
So, that's typical.
This is a very different mechanism.
And so, very, you know… But I haven't heard, all I've heard about the mechanism is it's somehow engaging the mRNA, not what it's doing.
No, no.
It is mRNA.
The vaccine is mRNA.
If I understand this correctly, and boy are we going to get some corrections if I don't, that it is mRNA.
And then what?
Well, so the ribosomes transcribe mRNA when they run into it because they're Primed, you know, that's their purpose and the stuff comes out of the nucleus.
So this mRNA is going to come into the system, trigger ribosomes, and they are going to produce proteins which... That do what?
Well, that's a good question.
Do they prime?
So that's the part that I don't get.
I don't get how...
Plugging new mRNA into your system that then gets ribosomes to print new protein deals with the coronavirus.
Well, it could be.
This protein has to have some particular effect on the coronavirus over here.
That's the black box that I don't have a connection to yet.
We should dig this up to the extent that it is possible to do it, but it could be that it is producing components of antibodies.
Antibodies, for example, are proteins that have basically sticky pads on them, and those sticky pads land on antigens that they match and they can do all kinds of things including gum up pathogens so those pathogens can't access the surface of cells and things.
So I don't know.
mRNA could be causing the ribosomes to produce proteins that are antibodies as opposed to a more common mechanism of vaccine which is Give the body a little bit of antigen itself, the actual virus, either dead or alive little pieces such that the body is prompted to create those antibodies.
Well, but that was going to be my other guess was that maybe it's producing antigens that are resident on viral particles and thereby basically the vaccine in some sense is being produced inside the cells.
You know, so if a ribosome produces an antigen found on a coronavirus and the immune system then sees it and recognizes it as foreign because it's not in the library of self, then that could prime the system.
Definitely we should dig to the extent that it is possible to find out how this works.
Yeah, I had no idea.
I had heard nothing except Pfizer's got this vaccine that they're hoping to get rich on.
All right, so now let's... So I will say that when this acquaintance of ours asked me, I prefaced my, you know, investigating in terms of I'm an evolutionary biologist but not knowledgeable with regard to these particulars, answer to her with, We will have our family vaccinated.
Unless there is something that I do not understand yet about there being an increased risk of danger from this sort of vaccine, then a vaccine that might not be very effective is one that we should be taking.
Well, I fall out quite differently here, and the problem is, to have the adult conversation is potentially to trigger a failure in the game theory realm that people rightly fear.
But the problem is... The difference between individual decisions and public health.
Right.
Here's the thing we're not allowed to say.
My God, wouldn't it be terrible if this was true?
That the sweet spot is for everybody else to take the vaccine and you not.
Therefore, you don't get the risk of the vaccine, which has to be rated as substantial, just based on the unknowns, based on the fact that there will be no one on Earth who has had the vaccine a year ago.
And so we don't know what it does a year out.
Right.
So if everybody took the vaccine and you didn't, you get the benefit of their immunity.
But nowhere close to everybody is going to take it.
Right.
So then the game theory... I mean, effectively, this is one of the things that Trump really failed at so badly early in the coronavirus pandemic, which was polarizing it.
Polarizing the response to it, as opposed to saying, here's what we're going to do, and you know, maybe we'll have to do something else at some other point, right?
But turning us into star-bellied snitches and snitches without with regard to masks, and now vaccines, has made it such that it's not possible to assume that you would be the only person in your community who wasn't vaccinated.
Right.
So.
There's no way.
Right.
But, so there's a game.
The problem is that the game theory is relatively straightforward, right?
The more people who are vaccinated, the less your being vaccinated actually matters to your own immunity, assuming that the thing works, right?
The thing works.
The more people who are vaccinated, the less you need to be vaccinated in order not to get it, because other people around you will not have the pathogen in an active form if they've been vaccinated.
As people register that, And they decide to play the game and avoid the vaccine, then the number of people who've been vaccinated goes down, the risk of getting the disease goes up, and so you get into this very ugly equilibrium, right?
Which is what the anti-vax catastrophe, shall we call it, is about.
Is there is a fear about vaccines and people who are sophisticated about understanding the nature of the game Recognize that those who opt out are, in effect, exposing everybody else to greater danger and saving themselves on the risk.
Of course, it's also true, though, that just as early on the mask discussion was insane, right?
Yes.
Masks provide no safety whatsoever.
This turns out to have been a political decision, right?
And then masks are about you protecting other people.
Right.
What?
Then what?
No!
Yes, that is also true, but of course the masks are going to protect you as well.
So I see a similar sort of analysis possible here with regard to vaccines.
The anti-vaxxers are going to be like, nope, too dangerous.
And if they're sort of savvy anti-vaxxers, they're going to argue, well, I'm going to get my benefit from everyone else being vaccinated.
Well, but there are two ways, of course, that you can be safe from the disease, at least two.
One is not be exposed, and you don't be exposed by being safe and physical distancing and wearing a mask when you're in the presence of others inside and all of this.
And a vaccine is a second way that you can be protected that also comes with risks that we cannot fully know, but that you cannot get any other way.
Right.
So, what I would say is in the case of the masks, the game is exactly the same, but for one thing, which is that the cost of the masks is very, very low for most people.
And you and I disagree on this.
Well, no, it's very, very low at the level of, let's say, safety.
Now, there are people for whom it carries a safety risk, and there are, you know, I mean, look, Reducing the effectiveness of a system that is built to exhale into the world directly.
You are reducing the effectiveness.
You are causing CO2, at the very least, to build up at a higher rate.
So it's not like there's going to be zero effect.
But you're talking entirely about an anatomical and physiological risk.
You're talking, and so over in vaccine space, that is where the risk is, right?
Entirely.
It's entirely about in and of the body.
And the risk from masks for people who are otherwise healthy, from mask wearing, is very low, exactly what you just said.
But we are, as you know, and this is our drumbeat, right?
That humans, like a few other species on the planet, are so much more than just our bodies, and it is all evolutionary.
And the fact of walking around not being able to actually exchange meaning by looking at other people's faces and having initial interactions immediately made painful and suspect because you're walking on a trail in a park and people leap out of the way because they see you're not masked from 12 feet away even though you're outside in nature.
There is simply not enough nuance around the discussion, and I think it's very similar, right?
And in both cases, pro-mask, pro-vaccine, but those aren't sufficient categories, right?
Pro-mask, when it is under those conditions where it is appropriate, and most people don't understand what those conditions are, and outside, I am perfectly comfortable, but I don't like The looks that I get once I'm outside of the range of the HVAC at the supermarket immediately taking my mask off.
And having, as I walk through the parking lot with my groceries in the cart, having occasionally people glare at me.
No, sorry, I'm outside and I'm going to breathe the air.
Okay, so this is in some sense a perfect prototype that you and I did not settle on in advance, but this is exactly the conversation.
Both sides are stupid here, okay?
To the extent that we have a dangerous virus, that we have misunderstood the hazard of it as hazard of death, which is lower than we thought, but that there is a much greater hazard of Brain damage, heart damage, etc.
That there is reason to use a mask where a mask is effective and there is reason to minimize mask use, right?
Not to signal with it when we're for example outdoors where things are quite safe still and again that could change but it hasn't yet as far as we know.
So, in any case, the problem is there is nowhere for most people to stand because the reasonable position is not allowed, right?
And, sorry, asterisk from way back, Governor Brown's order that's about to send us Oregon into two weeks of whatever she's calling it, it's not the full shutdown that we had in March-April because a lot of the retail businesses are still allowed to be open, just at limited capacity.
But among other things that are closed is gardens.
Why the hell are they closing gardens?
Unless they can make an argument for it's the workers.
Except, excuse me, you know, someone behind Plexiglas taking tickets is, you know, the only person who needs to be there at the time.
Why are they closing gardens?
Right.
Especially at a moment when we've got the, you know, where the windshield of the continent and the firehose of the Pacific is on us.
And if you could manage to get outside and enjoy something, you should absolutely do it.
Yeah, for reasons of mental health, if nothing else.
Yes.
And so this is my point about actually, you know, the mask analysis is un-nuanced and the idea that, well, there's, you know, what is it going to hurt you?
No, let's take a more expansive view of harm, actually.
Let's move it beyond the physical and the physical health and into mental health and social health.
And I mean, I think it was Nicholas Christakis early in this who said, maybe it wasn't him, he certainly started to say it, but, you know, no, we shouldn't be social distancing, we should be physical distancing.
And it's really hard to do the one without the other.
But it's even harder when you can't see people's faces.
Right, so the problem is we could outline, we could sketch the, there's got to be a better word than smart, but the smart position in which you pay as little cost as you have to for masks but you get the benefit, right?
You want the sweet spot of how much mask wearing to do and where is it and how can you minimize your wearing of masks and still get 98% of the value of them, right?
We can do that, but the problem is the game theory causes a social enforcement of a lie about the utility.
And the same thing happens in vaccine space.
So there are people who will hear the discussion that we just had.
And somehow heresy, because it acknowledges the hazard of vaccines and acknowledges that in this case, there's a special hazard that just comes from the fact that it hasn't been out very long.
Right.
And so there has to be a way for us to have a proper conversation.
And one thing I would say is, again, in the vaccine case, Both sides are stupid, right?
We have a safety system that can't possibly work because of the perverse incentives surrounding the economics of vaccine production, right?
They're more dangerous than they need to be because there's a perverse incentive surrounding the hazard, right?
That means that we are in a thoroughly compromised position when it comes to the game theory and saying to people, you know what?
They're not totally safe.
We've made them as safe as they can be, right?
Here's how you know that they're as safe as they can be without being perfectly safe and you need to take your share of the risk along with the rest of us so that we can get the collective benefit of us being immune and frankly driving pathogens out of existence or to very low levels that comes from wide compliance with these things.
But unfortunately, Those of us who, you know, I think vaccines are one of the most powerful inventions humanity has ever come up with.
But I cannot just be a booster for vac- that's a terrible term.
Vaccine booster?
No.
I cannot be a cheerleader for vaccines given the economic model and the way it compromises safety.
I have to be in this camp where, you know, I'm constantly getting beaten up because people want me to tell the public these things are safe and you're, you know, you're a conspiracy theorist for believing they might not be.
Well, you and I agree about some of the basically the top Developmental discoveries of Western medicine being vaccines, antibiotics, and then also several surgical techniques, and then a whole lot of the rest of what is going on has been done better in a lot of cases by other traditions, actually.
In part by interfering less with physiology that we don't understand.
Exactly, or by coming at it just from a different perspective and therefore being able to see, like with anamorphic art, something that you could not see from the cut-it-or-pill-it attitude, which is increasingly what the Western medicine approach is.
But, you know, to say that antibiotics are one of the great, great discoveries slash creations of humankind does not suggest that they haven't been wildly over-prescribed, aren't making us all sick, aren't making our cattle sick, and therefore the people that eat those cattle sick, and the people who drink the milk.
All of these things are also true.
So to say that it's one of the great inventions of humankind does not mean that you think it's all good all the time.
So I will also say that I think you've waded into this a little bit more than I have, so you've gotten more pushback than I have.
But, you know, the idea that you are some sort of a vaccine denier or an anti-vaxxer, our family is probably far more vaccinated than just about anyone watching because of where we've traveled, right?
And when our kids were very young, I started pushing for us to take them places, and you, I think, correctly said, nope, not yet, because the drugs that we need to give them to keep them safe to travel in some of these places are not safe for them when they're that young.
Yeah, the longer you wait through development, the less harm.
Given an amount of harm done by a drug or a vaccine, the later it comes in development, the less damaging it is.
Exactly.
And so at the point that we did start traveling to really far-flung places like the Amazon with them, Which would have been when they were, what, like 11 and 9 maybe?
Something like that.
We were able to give them, not with perfect safety, but things like the yellow fever vaccine, which is actually like required by law, but also we would have done.
Had we gone there, because it has been around for a long time.
Yellow fever is one of these mosquito vector diseases that is deadly, that has wiped out whole populations.
And furthermore, in that case, I also feel it is our responsibility not just to keep us safe, but to go into a place where you are traveling into a place where other people don't travel between.
If there's any chance that you could bring a disease in, that's not an acceptable risk to bring to the people who already live there.
However, none of us have ever gotten the cholera vaccine, because the cholera vaccine, while it's also been around for a while, is understood not to have its, I don't remember the numbers, something like 30-40% efficacy.
And it's not particularly dangerous, but all vaccines bring with them some risk.
And the fact is that the cure for cholera largely, especially for, you know, comparatively wealthy people, Norte Americanos, is to have access to clean water, which we would always be able to have access to.
And so we make these decisions one by one, right?
And, you know, I have been wanting a malaria vaccine since we began traveling.
To Latin America decades ago at this point, but that doesn't mean that as soon as one shows up, it's right away the moment to take it.
Because I've also gone through, what, four different kinds of malaria prophylaxis, one of which is completely horrifying, and I hope never to be on something like that again.
So you have to be able to look at the options before you and say, Who do I trust who knows more about this than I do?
And what are they saying?
And also, how is it that I can rely on my own knowledge and make decisions for myself?
That said, public health is a different kind of analysis, which is where you started here.
Right.
And so I think the bottom line, well, there are two bottom lines.
One, when it comes to things like medicine, there's a An analog to the principle that the government that governs best governs least, which does not mean actually least, it means least necessary to do the job.
That the medicine that functions best functions least.
That our tendency to want to interfere in a system always comes with side effects, and to the extent that there are interventions that reduce the intensity of the intervention, they tend to be far better.
Sure, but if you're looking for a vaccine, you're already in arms race, right?
So a vaccine is inherently sort of a combative property that is going to do some war somewhere on some part of hopefully most of the pathogen you're trying to combat, but also presumably your body.
Right.
And, you know, what is the effect of, you know, if one vaccine is great, is there or do we really imagine there's no cost to just vaccinating you to everything that we can possibly create a vaccine for?
Or is there some cumulative cost?
I don't think we know the answer to these questions.
So, anyway, one of the lessons here is about medicine, and a non-interventionist bent, just as you want a light hand in government, a light hand in medicine saves you from all of the things you didn't know about the system you were interfering with.
The other one has to do with the game theory, and frankly, I'm sick and tired of being shouted at by people who don't want me to say the truth because they're afraid it will cause people to tune into the game theory and not participate in something like vaccines.
My point is no.
There's actually no way around the adult discussion here which involves owning up to the fact that the system isn't nearly as safe as it might be and that basically there are two sides to this contract.
If we're going to belittle people and maybe require them to take vaccines, we have an absolute obligation to make these things as safe as possible first, right?
There's no two ways about that.
And to speak with some nuance, and to allow people the possibility of actually understanding what is going on.
Because when you make broadcast claims like, masks do not help, or vaccines are 100% safe, You of course increase the distrust that people have and increase the non-compliance that people have with these rules.
Because some of them are clearly political and lies.
And we really, really hope that this or many multiple vaccines that get produced are not built on lies.
But on what basis are we supposed to trust a political pronouncement about this at this point?
Right, the whole landscape of discussion, discussion that masquerades as analytical has been politicized to the point that we are now unable to talk about even the basics of how we are to interact with each other or how we are to protect ourselves from threats that we all face.
Yeah.
And you know, whatever process it is that allowed that to happen.
Has put us in very serious jeopardy and we have to counteract it.
And this actually, we've already been a number of the places that we were hoping to go.
We wanted to talk about whether or not there are questions that should not be asked and topics that should not be approached.
And I was reminded that when we were in grad school, we had a professor who, you know, actually, and this is somewhat relevant, was of a somewhat Marxist bent, who told us when we were in the field with him at some point that there were questions that should not be asked.
For fear that the answers would be ugly or not good for society.
And we were in grad school in biology and he was a biology professor and I thought, that seems like an extraordinarily anti-scientific approach.
And I'm frankly shocked that a scientist would advise other burgeoning scientists That they need to stay away from certain questions, because the truth might imprison you, is effectively what the message is, right?
The truth will not set you free, in his worldview.
The truth might imprison you, and therefore we need to protect everyone from it.
So, you know, it's hard to know whether or not there is actually some place where that principle that he was espousing is correct.
I'm not certain that there isn't, but what I am certain of is that just as with the case of, you know, free speech and things along these lines, we have an absolute obligation to leave Everything on the table until there is a very compelling reason that something can't be on the table because you will rule out all kinds of important stuff.
The natural process of progress requires us to be able to discuss all sorts of things and throw them out and... Well, and I will say that asking the questions is different from throwing technology at it and trying to develop new things, right?
Oh yeah.
We're in a very different territory when we're, for instance, talking about whether or not cloning humans might be a good idea, as opposed to starting down a path to cloning without having actually really thought through, you know, had all those conversations a lot of times with a lot of different people.
Right.
Asking a question is not the same thing as engaging in work that modifies things.
And the number of places, you know, Should you work on ice nine if you discover a way that you might create such a thing, you know?
This is a Vonnegut reference.
Yeah, a Vonnegut reference to, if I recall correctly, a molecule that causes liquid water to turn solid upon contact.
Yeah, I don't remember which book.
Or should you get involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that enhances the infectiousness and lethality of these things to study the pathology and epidemiology of these diseases?
The entire population of the world should not get to be in on those conversations, but there should be a lot of conversations involving not just the researchers who stand to gain, but including, for instance, bioethicists and such.
Well, I want to back you off that a little bit.
I think I know what you mean, right?
The entire world doesn't get to sit at the table and discuss the reasonableness of this, but we need to have a body that is free from corruption that discusses whether or not the benefit is worth The unknown risk of engaging in these kinds.
Representative democracy in more domains than it currently is.
Right.
So, all right.
And, you know, with regard to topics that should not be approached and questions that should not be asked, You were dragged, and there's a lot of places here that we want to go still, but you were dragged for presumably giving fuel to Trump's fire by talking about the possibility of election fraud, which we talked about a little bit last week too.
And actually last week, you had seen nothing to suggest that anything was going on, and I had this sense of like, I'm just not, I don't know, this doesn't feel right to me.
And I don't really know where you land at this point.
And regardless of what either of us think, it doesn't change what's true.
Yeah.
Well, so I saw a mathematical analysis that I found difficult to falsify that suggested anomalies that were certainly, you know, so I think I did a pretty good job.
I pointed to this analysis and I said, I don't spot the analytical flaw here.
I ran it by Four mathematically sophisticated people and I said, do you see anything here that I don't see?
I should point out because people will assume Eric was one of them.
He wasn't.
Just to preserve his independence.
But anyway, I ran it by people.
Nobody spotted a flaw.
And so I released it carefully.
I said, I don't spot a flaw.
If there is one, I'll be glad to see it.
But until I know that there's a flaw, I think this is worth looking at.
Somebody, who was not the least bit decent about it, did an analysis that I found difficult to understand, but when I finally did understand it, did falsify the evidence that seemed to be contained in the anomalies in the first analysis.
And so I put that out, I appended it to each of the places that I had talked about this analysis that raised the question, and I said, yep, this does appear to account for it on the basis of a rounding error, so it's not evidence.
But the blowback from doing this was spectacular and the number of people who considered it some kind of heresy or sin or something was amazing.
You're not allowed to ask those questions.
Yeah, it's again... Stay in your lane.
It's not even your lane.
It is... Stay away from analysis.
This is not a place for analysis.
And the more I think about it, so... Ah, there are some places that whatever your lane is, you're not allowed to go.
Irrespective of what the truth is, don't you dare raise those questions in public.
And my feeling is, who the hell are you to decide this?
And if you're going to decide such things, you have an absolute obligation, even though I will oppose you for deciding them, you have an absolute obligation to be even-handed about them.
Right?
How much crap did we get dragged through over Russiagate and supposed collusion between the Trump administration and the Russian government, right?
Which came to nothing, right?
This was apparently perfectly reasonable to be discussed on the front page of the New York Times, right?
But if it's the other side, you can't even ask the question, even though There are literally trillions of dollars at stake in an American presidential election, right?
That is a huge amount of incentive for bad behavior.
What's more, in this case, the presidential election on both sides, the candidate was understood by people on the other side to be an existential threat, right?
That's another whole layer of incentive.
And by a small number of us, they both were.
Right, exactly!
So, at some level, you're just dumb not to consider the possibility of collusion in an American presidential election, which doesn't mean that you have evidence for it.
I would further point out, to complicate things, all American presidential elections are now stolen.
Mostly it's legal, but the point is we've all just gotten so used to the idea that these massive corrupting influences have some right to play a role in our process and that that directly affects who we end up electing.
Yes, it happens subtly because it's very often in the primaries that the skullduggery happens and then maybe we get to vote like normal.
members of a democracy in the general election, but come on, there is so much going on in these elections that has nothing to do with the consent of the governed that asking whether or it has extended into a new realm is our obligation, frankly.
Yeah, I would push back a little bit on identifying the things that you just identified as evidence of stolen elections.
We have talked before, I think on air, about the role that social media and indeed the mainstream media have on affecting what people see and what people think and whether or not that is effectively a kind of election tampering.
And might we therefore call such elections that are downstream of that stolen in some regard?
Maybe, but I think we need to be careful using the strongest words when this is what we're talking about.
I accept that.
I accept that.
But I will say, you know, a lot has happened as a result of the attempts to unearth this process.
Even just the recognition.
I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on WikiLeaks, actually.
And reminded that, you know, what spilled out of the DNC in 2016 revealed effectively that the DNC had systematically sabotaged, opposed, used all kinds of mechanisms to oppose Bernie Sanders getting the nomination.
And they succeeded in preventing it from happening.
And, you know, OK.
So I think the point is, When you say influence peddling, people say, well, what do you mean?
Well, there's influence peddling.
It's obvious that people, this is a pay for play system.
The fact that it's not illegal doesn't mean it's not influence peddling.
The fact that the, you know, what the DNC argued in court about the sabotage of Bernie Sanders was not that it didn't happen, but that they had the right to.
It was their party, right?
So if that's the world we're living in, let's just at least be honest about the fact that that's the world we're living in.
Exactly, and I think, I don't know what they actually said, so attributing to them the words that you just said they said isn't quite fair, but they do feel like it's their party, not our party.
Well, not his party.
Not, not, well, put that aside.
Their party, not our party, right?
Like it's, it's not, it's not actually about all of the people who are registered as whatever party it is.
It is, it is about the people in power who are making policy for the rest of us and this actually, you know, this, this, this brings up A question of ideology and what makes a person an ideologue, which I thought I think we want to go to a little bit here.
But let's see.
I think we've basically talked about Well, let's spend a little bit more time first on this really nasty little putdown that happens, which is stay in your lane.
And how, you know, you and I both have been saying for, I think, decades at this point, no, will not.
You've defined the lane.
Even if it's a real lane in the first place, there's a good chance that I have insight into a whole bunch of these other lanes.
And even if I don't, I'm still allowed to go there.
And one of the things that is true as evolutionary biologists is that aside from rocks and quarks and a few other abiotic things, it's kind of all our lane anyway.
So that is one thing that I'm going to claim here.
But it's just regardless of who you are receiving the advice that you need to stay in your lane, it's a cheap shot.
It works as censorship.
It's a tool to silence you.
It works to silo people and thus further make the problem of there's going to have to be more and more policing of staying in the lane.
It establishes the role of authorities to dictate from on high to the plebs who are supposed to just receive it and accept it, whatever it is.
Maybe it's the DNC, maybe it's the RNC, maybe it's the religious authorities, whoever it is.
And I think most interestingly, and what we can add most uniquely here, is that it misses one of the core tensions and brilliances of what it is to be human, which is that we are simultaneously generalists and specialists, right?
And so this is something you've been talking about for many, many years, and to some degree I have as well, and it's one of the central themes of The book that we are writing, which is that humans are the most generalist species on earth.
And yet, individually, many of us are such specialists that we far outstrip any individual in any other species in terms of our ability to do a particular thing.
So how is it that we can be both most generalist and most specialist?
Well, it's that way by being specialist at the individual level and generalist at the population level, which therefore reminds us that we actually need to be with one another.
We all can aspire to be more generalist within ourselves individually, but also to be with other human beings with whom we connect and therefore increase our wealth of understanding and wisdom in the world.
Yes, and not to put too fine a point on it, the fraction of human well-being that is ultimately traceable to somebody not staying in their lane is so large that anybody who wants to impose this rule now, whatever a lane may be that you should stay in it, is obviously foregoing a huge amount of progress that might occur going forward, and so screw them.
Yeah, it's probably not fair, but you know, we could...
We could pretty quickly start naming people throughout history who didn't stay in their lane, and Leonardo da Vinci seems to come right to the top.
Anyone who's ever gone to an art installation, museum installation, that just simply portrays some tiny fraction of what that man did, it's extraordinary.
And the fact is, just to take two things that are often described as sort of polar opposites, at least within academia, Art and science need one another, and they thrive for one another, and they build on one another.
So many of the best scientists have had some kind of artistic passion, or craft passion, or building passion, something that gave them a totally different road in, a totally different lens, angle, whatever it is, in to how it is that they observe the world.
Yeah, I'm imagining actually a wonderful graphic, you know, somehow, my lane, right?
And you can imagine a lane like going fractal in some sort of psychedelic explosion of whatever, of chaos.
Yeah.
And you know, I don't invoke IDW hardly ever.
But not staying in your lane?
Yeah.
That's what it's about, right?
It's pursuing truth and ideas wherever they lead, wherever they lead.
That's what it's supposed to be about.
And so, you know, super interesting whenever it happens.
But especially now, in light of the ever more siloing, contentious, nasty conversations that people seem to be willing to have, Especially online, but I suspect in person too, you know, safely behind their masks.
Yeah.
No, let us remember that we are all human, and that there will be something to disagree with in the opinions and thoughts of every single other human on the planet.
And for almost everyone, you can probably find some things to agree with as well.
So I wanted to add a final thing that I've been thinking this week watching people react to various people leaving their lanes, including me and all of that.
And there's a, I think there's just a basic failure in people's model of how to think carefully.
And you know, a lot of us have understood now that there is no reliable neutral source on a lot of things.
And many people have talked about their methods for dealing with that involving having two sources open and moving between them in order that they can correct for the distortions on both sides.
But there's also a human analog to this.
Right.
I would say we are now watching a social dynamic unfold where many people are understood to be losing their minds.
And the accusation that an individual person has finally lost their mind is now commonplace.
Now, I don't want to claim that this is all nonsense.
I see people out there that I believe are losing their minds.
And in fact, Greg Lukianoff had a thread today on Twitter in which he took a particular account.
I think the person's identity is known, but the account is anonymous, the Popat account.
He took him to task for basically belittling concerns about cancellation and being driven out of a newspaper or university or whatever.
Prompted by the most recent move of Mattie Iglesias from Vox and earlier Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald, yeah.
Right.
And so, anyway, there's a question.
I would just say, look, if I follow somebody, right, if I'm paying attention to their work, And then they suddenly say something that I know to be wrong, right?
I know they've just said something that doesn't make any goddamn sense.
My first thought is not, oh!
They've finally lost their mind.
My first thought is, I wonder if there's something I don't see in that place.
What don't I understand?
As opposed to, how dare you, sir?
Right.
Exactly.
And I don't understand.
When it comes at me, and it's like, oh, you know, yeah, I used to respect Weinstein, but he's lost it now.
I feel like, Jesus, if I built up credibility with you, and then I say something that you find bizarre, just take a minute and think about whether or not I see something you don't.
And it may be that I don't.
But yeah, go ahead.
Well, so you do this.
You, I, a number of people do this, and you reveal in so doing that you're not controllable, right?
And some people are going to show up to tell you that they're disappointed in you, that they used to have respect for you but now they don't, or they, you know, something must have happened.
Are you feeling quite okay, right?
And it's quite possible, and it certainly has happened and it will happen again, that you or I, whoever it is, has erred.
Right, of course.
But it's also quite possible and quite common, you are finding this week, for the person lobbying this critique to have slotted you into a category, right?
Democrat, environmentalist, fascist, you know, whatever the category is.
Which is actually more constraining than clarifying.
Even if it's a category like democrat or environmentalist, one which you might own yourself, or if it's one like fascist, one that is just lobbed at you and people are just hoping some of it will stick.
But regardless, it's a categorization.
And the idea that people are carrying around these categories, like they're not engaging you or me or whatever, and this is far easier on social media than it would be in real life.
As, oh, well, that's this guy, and he's got these eight labels in my head.
Wait, he just said something that tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, doesn't match any of those labels, therefore he's lost it.
Like, no?
Maybe it's literally a category error.
Like, maybe your category is flawed, or maybe...
Fitting a category is itself a sign of an ideologue.
Like, this is what ideologues are.
It's people who, you know, and this is in service of, you know, the easiest examples are religions and political parties, right?
Like, we have a slate of beliefs or a slate of planks.
That create a whole wealth of identity for you.
And if you just accept it, if you just accept everything here, you will find it easier to move through your life because you can find the people with whom you won't have to be in contentious arguments, and you will find a community, maybe you'll find a partner, maybe you'll find friends.
It's all very easy.
And for those of us who, for, you know, there are a number of ways that you can arrive at going, actually, I'm going to It's going to take longer, but I'm going to try to do the first principles thing as much as possible and actually not just accept that because I'm a Democrat, I'm therefore interested in all gun regulation ever, for instance, just to pick an easy one.
It confounds people.
And they respond by saying, how dare you, sir?
You must have really lost it.
Actually, I might be wrong.
I might be wrong.
But what I'm doing is trying to figure out what I believe, given what the evidence is in front of me.
I am not trying to conform to a category.
I am not trying to conform to the thing that you already had in your head about me.
That's not my job, and it shouldn't be what you're trying to do with me.
In some sense, they are using a heuristic.
How to spot an insane person.
Right?
And that's their problem.
If you're using first principles and it causes you to fall out somewhere different than whatever their group is doing, and they're using a heuristic to quickly spot crazy people, That's not on you, right?
And in fact, you know, there are a couple of good examples of this.
I want to be careful here because I haven't followed what Majid is up to so closely, but a lot of people are worried about Majid.
And I think because he appears to have come out in favor of Trump, although he's not an American, but you know, online.
But on the other hand, if you follow him... I don't know.
I mean, Majid, we had a wonderful dinner with him a while ago, but I don't know anything about the modern controversy.
Well, I think it comes down to the fact that there are lots of cocktail parties in which anybody who has so much has flirted with the possibility that either the blue side was so horrible or that the red side wasn't that bad is obviously a nut.
And the problem, you know, in Majid's case, you ask the question, all right, I respect Majid.
I know him, right?
He's saying something.
This is Majid Nawaz.
Yeah, Majid Nawaz.
How could a guy that smart and that tuned in get to this position?
Well, it's actually not that hard.
The guy was recently on hunger strike to get the British Parliament to debate the question of the Uyghurs in China, right?
So, if you're Majid... Dude feels strongly about real stuff, and he thinks it through.
And what kind of real stuff?
The kind of stuff we tell ourselves that we would all do the right thing in the case, right?
We've got, you know, effective concentration camps, we have organ harvesting, really appalling stuff, right?
He's committed enough to dealing with this that he goes on hunger strike, and so if you believe...
As many people do.
In fact, I think there's a very strong argument to be made for it, that Trump is better on China than Democratic administrations have been, that they've been a bit blind to the hazard of China.
Then, okay, you can see how Majid would end up there.
Yeah.
Actually, it hadn't occurred to me that it's internally consistent with his last big public thing.
Yeah.
I don't know whether that's what happened, but I do know that it's not hard to figure out how a reasonable, how without losing his mind, Majid could find himself there, right?
Likewise, James Lindsay.
James Lindsay has taken a ton of flack from people over his support for Trump.
But if you listen to him, his point is, look, I hate this, but I'm concerned about the danger of wokeness toppling institutions that we're dependent on.
So if you believe as he does, it's not hard to see how you would end up there.
All I would say is, look, high quality thinking involves not using some heuristic and deciding people are crazy because they happen to have reached a different conclusion that you regard as crazy.
You have to figure out whether there's some first principles way they might have gotten there and, you know.
Do you know more about Chinese abuse of the Uyghurs and the effect of different administrations in the US on the power of China in this case?
Well, if you don't know more than Majid, then, you know, at least you have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he has arrived at a reasonable conclusion given his priors.
That's right.
And it seems in fact to be consistent, right?
What he is doing, given the argument that you just laid out.
And I know you, I was blissfully mostly not online this week, but I know you to be consistent.
And that doesn't mean that you don't see new evidence and change your mind, but you are consistent in your application.
You know, you're more than I think anyone else I know, just constantly going back through and testing the assumptions that the decision tree is based on, that the assumption that the, you know, that the idea tree is based on.
The little bit of being online this week that I had involved in part running into this crazy pronouncement from the UK government that basically, I'm not going to pull it up here, but all you have to do is read the three-step pronouncement and you basically arrive at Sex is based on chromosomes and hormones.
Like, no, actually, it's gametes, but forget that.
Sex is based on chromosomes and hormones, and oh, by the way, sex is assigned at birth.
It doesn't take very much logic to conclude that the government of the United Kingdom thinks that chromosomes and hormones are assigned at birth.
And this is no harm intended to or meant ever to actual trans people, but this is trans rights activism.
This is the loony, horrifying, dangerous fringe of trans rights activists who are taking over the entire conversation that has now gotten to the UK government and so many other places.
And I tweeted a few things about this.
From various angles, but in part I feel totally okay mocking a government.
I don't tend to want to mock an individual unless they push me repeatedly in a particularly stupid way.
But I saw a little bit of conversation.
Suggesting that I, and actually I think you were named too, in the discussion of this, that we were on this topic, meaning, as I understand it, basically the biology of sex, we're ideologues.
And I thought, well I thought of that princess bride quote.
I don't think you know what that term means, right?
But I also thought, okay, my god, like how do you even get there?
How do you even get from, like, not only am I firmly in my lane, you know, evolution of sex is like what I've been doing for decades now, but the consistency here in my position is what has now gotten me labeled an ideologue.
So I just went through like, okay, what can consistency in an argument indicate?
Let's just walk through it.
Consistency in opinion over time can mean that you originally investigated it from first principles as much as possible, hopefully, and you continue to investigate the question and you continue to feel that your original position was correct.
That's one way that you can end up consistent in an argument, right?
It might be that you did originally investigate it, but then you sort of went like set and forget.
I'm not going to continue to think about that.
I know what I once thought.
I must still think that.
In which case your consistency over time actually holds no information as to what you really think.
That doesn't make you an ideologue inherently, but it does mean that you should feel less and less certain of your stated opinion the longer it's been since you've gone back to it and reconsidered what new evidence there might be.
So that's a second way that you can reveal consistency and what it can mean.
And then a third one, I would say, is that you never thought it through for yourself in the first place, right?
You simply accepted the conclusions of, for instance, oh, a political party or religion or whatever.
And in that case, that provides no evidence at all as to whether or not you believe the thing.
And guess what?
In that case, there's a good chance you're an ideologue.
But that's one of three categories of how it is that you might end up consistent on a point and always defaulting.
Or, you know, when people default to, well, boy, you keep banging this drum.
This is a point that you've made over and over again.
You must be an ideologue.
That's really impoverished thinking.
That's like really bad logic.
It's the same damn thing.
It's somebody applying their heuristic.
You know, if you've got three routes to consistency and your heuristic is in general when people are this consistent, it's because there's an ideology driving them, then it's your heuristic that's at fault, not the person who's being consistent.
Right.
Right?
Which doesn't mean the heuristic doesn't work a lot of the time.
It probably does.
That's why you have it.
But anyway, I think If there's a nugget here to be derived, it's okay.
If you've learned that the way you're going to correct for the bias in media is you're going to have two opposing bits of media facing each other and use each to correct for the other.
There's another way to do it that involves people, right?
If you follow somebody, right, and I would argue that one of the ways to recognize somebody who is not an ideologue, right, is A, that their belief structure does not match anybody's slate, right?
They are dining a la carte because they are arriving at conclusions independently based on first principles which will result in an eclectic mix of conclusions.
The other thing is, How well do they reverse course when they are revealed to be wrong, right?
Right?
If somebody is not good at that, that's a red flag.
If somebody is good at that, that suggests, well actually, you can afford to put your weight on the ice.
So, you know, just as you have the two sources you might go to to correct, You might have a small slate of people that you actually trust enough that when they come to a conclusion that seems batshit crazy from where you're coming from, it doesn't cause you to declare them batshit crazy, but it makes you think, well, what do they see that I don't?
Right.
Right?
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's terrific.
Yeah.
Well, there's many more places we could go, or we could stop here.
Well, I have one thing I want to talk about because I have a sense that it's timely and it, you know, I don't know how long it lasts.
OK.
Next week, then, we'll talk about whether or not women were big game hunters in pre-Columbian Americas.
How big were they?
No.
Terrible joke.
So what I wanted to talk about is this thing, Clubhouse, which you have, I think you are technically on it, but you haven't been there.
Yeah, yeah.
I have it on my phone.
I've been invited, but I've never visited.
Yeah.
So I want to define what it is.
Yeah.
Clubhouse is a new social media platform that has emerged.
I don't know how old it is.
And frankly, I don't know how many people are on it.
It still seems quite small on the inside, which could be an optical illusion or not.
But anyway, it's created a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley.
There are lots of Silicon Valley types on it.
And just the basics of it.
Actually, Zach, did I send you a screenshot of it?
Yeah, okay.
So this is like a room inside of Clubhouse.
This is from this morning.
And it involves... So the key thing to this social media platform is there's effectively no text.
Other than your profile and your name, everything is done by speaking.
And it's not recorded, so it's totally in the moment.
It is totally in the moment.
You know, there's always a danger that somebody will record it, but no, it's not.
But you can't go and sort of scroll through, listen to past conversations.
Right.
So it's ephemeral by nature.
It is conversational.
It's audio Snapchat.
Yeah.
And it mixes people in a way that I'm finding very unusual for the moment.
Um, so there are some ideological lines inside of Clubhouse, but at least until yesterday, you saw all of the public rooms that were available.
They have titles, which may or may not be all that indicative of what's going on in there, and you saw some indication of who was in the room, and you could just drop in and listen.
So the idea is that you can go into any room you want, but you have to be invited to have a voice in that room?
Yes, that's correct.
And so the person who starts it and whoever they designate as moderators can invite you on stage, or if you want to come on stage and you haven't been invited, you can raise your hand and they can bring you up, but you cannot put yourself on stage.
You can't walk in and just start yelling.
Right.
So anyway, I think there are a couple of things that are going on here.
One, so far I don't think the thing has a business model.
It's still in the generating buzz phase, right?
Which is a very interesting phase because it doesn't have the constraints that come along with the economics of the model.
So it's still lively and nobody knows what it is and we're all learning the rules and that sort of thing.
So it's more dynamic than it might otherwise.
B. But, so there's also a lot at stake, and people, I don't know how, people, you can invite two people if you're in, I think.
And then people who were there at the founding presumably invited a lot of people in.
But people don't necessarily know who everybody is, it's not necessarily clear from profile, so there is a lot of mixing going on in this app.
You know, across huge, you know, orders of magnitude in terms of economic status.
Education is widely variable.
There's a very strong black contingent in Clubhouse.
Some of that is, you know, consequential in the sense that there are rooms that are explicitly labeled as black and they often have a very different culture than other parts of Clubhouse.
But anyway, it's...
I think it is going to ultimately collapse into another version of all of the things that we already have, because in some sense it's going to face the same selective pressure where the desire to, you know, in competition with other social media sites, it's going to have to feed people that which will keep them coming back Spending time and that is going to involve I believe unless they are very very careful.
It is going to involve Reinforcing people's existing beliefs in other words.
We haven't yet seen filter bubbles emerge in a powerful way there But as soon as the economics kick in it's gonna be there with a vengeance And I think I think you have not yet said that you saw what you think is the first pivot point in this yesterday and Yes, the first pivot point, well, I don't know because I came in at some moment, I don't even know how long it had been going.
But the first pivot point that I saw, and one that is very clearly a step in this direction, is that the ability to see all of the public rooms disappeared yesterday.
The update of the app caused it so that you would only see rooms, I think, with people that you follow.
So, and it's not, you can't change that setting, you can't then also go scroll through all the public ones, so it's not, it can't really be argued as a, look, this doesn't scale, we have to be able to show people the top 30 or whatever, it's actually now completely blocked you from even seeing a bunch of what's going on.
You don't even know what you're missing.
Right.
And so I advocated yesterday in a room where this was being discussed, hey, we actually need the ability to override whatever's going on, because for some of us, it's not even that, you know, if you follow a wide range of people, then it broadens the scope of things that you see.
We actually need to find the room that is most opposite to the one we would be expected to be in, in order to tune into a conversation we need to know about that we can't find.
Yeah, no, and given that you have to be invited to speak, no one is at risk of having their conversation destroyed.
There's a separate question.
Never having been on this, for me privacy always rises pretty high in the rankings.
If I were going to end up using this, I'd probably want to be able to have a private room where I invited eight people or whatever.
Although in that case, how is it different from a phone call?
Um, but the, you know, the option for privacy is quite different from not being able to see, um, to, to see and choose to go into all of these rooms.
And, you know, I would say that even if there were private rooms, um, I would want the option to see, or that's, that's something that's happening.
I can't see what's behind that door.
Um, but all these other doors that I never would have been shown, given the new filter on it, um, yeah, most of them I don't want to go to, but, um, I want to know they're there.
And I'd like to pop in and see sometimes to listen.
Absolutely.
So I want to point to two things.
One, there is, you know, people talk frequently about black Twitter.
I feel like there's clearly a black clubhouse, but I've never heard the term used, right?
But it's there and you'll find rooms with, you know, sometimes 100 people in which pretty much everybody's black.
These rooms You know, there's an awful lot of black vernacular Spoken and there's a lot of you know, there are rooms in which the n-word is every fifth word, right?
People are referring to other people with this term It's very jarring, but it's also very interesting to be able to hear such a conversation, right?
So that's one thing that's going on.
But what I saw happen yesterday when I participated in yesterday to me was quite Singular.
So there was a room yesterday that somebody started on the question of socialism, communism, and capitalism.
That was the title of the room.
And it was clear that the purpose of the room was to discuss the merits of these things.
And so I went in.
I wanted to hear what this discussion was.
First, I wanted to know if they were going to define these terms because that's a can of worms in and of itself.
But anyway, I went into the room and, you know, they were having a discussion, you know, something you might expect, you know, that you could hear on a college campus, for example.
And I went on stage and I... Of course you did.
I couldn't resist.
And I started pushing a little bit, you know, to see if I could get the conversation to shift.
And people met me where I was, which was cool, right?
Now, this was a very diverse room.
I don't know why, actually, but it had Diverse in what way?
It was diverse in every way, right?
So there was sex, sexual orientation, race, religion.
So, you know, on stage there was a Native American, there was a Muslim, there were many blacks, several whites, male and female, gay and straight.
Go ahead.
I just want to asterisk-object to the idea of sex being a category that is used in diversity because it's binary, and I'm not sure that a binary category qualifies as diverse.
I feel like you have to have a category that has more than two states.
Okay, I accept.
I'm not, you're not the guy who did that.
I'm just, whenever I hear that I think, I'm not sure that's diversity anyway.
In any case, this room went on for four hours, right?
Very popular, big room, right?
And people were very eager to speak.
It had a kind of a hybrid culture, right?
It wasn't the free-for-all that some find, you sometimes find in some of these rooms and it wasn't, there's a So there's a free-for-all culture where people have their, they're not on mute and they just talk over each other like they're sitting at a dinner table, right?
And then there's another culture which is sort of like the Silicon Valley academic culture in which everybody's on mute and one person talks and then they go, you know, they might talk for three minutes and then they hit mute and then the next person jumps in and all of this.
This was sort of a hybrid which was interesting.
It emerges that there are some BLM guys in this room.
The room was started by a black guy who was moderating.
He had power to moderate and he moderated very well.
In other words, he kept the conversation dynamic.
So anyway, what I heard for the first time in a long time was a conversation that moved in the direction of Race and power and politics and economics, but did not derail over all of the things that cause such conversations to fall apart in modern circumstances.
So what I typically see is either a conversation has many perspectives and it derails over accusations of who's defective in what way, Or, it's a bunch of people who have a similar perspective, and it doesn't derail, but it's not all that generative because there's wide agreement over the conclusion, right?
This was not that.
And I think everybody felt about it that it was extremely positive.
And I guess my concern is that whatever is possible there now is going to fall apart As a result of the economics of the situation.
I will say, I tuned in this morning, there was another room on code switching.
Right?
A mixed room, black and white, and a discussion about the unwritten rules in civilization surrounding dialects, code switching, you know, what it's like to be, for example, black and to speak black vernacular and to have white people attempt to do it.
Anyway, another conversation that was very generative and didn't fall apart over the triggers that caused these conversations to be so difficult in modern times.
So, what I'm hoping is that people begin to recognize that we've lost ground recently.
We've lost the ability to discuss things we used to be able to talk about, and that they miss it, and that resurrecting that is highly valuable.
So, yeah, anyway, I think Clubhouse is still in a closed beta.
And so you have to find an invitation either from somebody who's in there or maybe you can email them.
I don't know when that changes, but I would be very interested to see people who are excited about finding those conversations join and reinforce the desire to have them, because without them, I mean, we've seen just Catastrophes across social media and in the world.
Yeah, well actually, so I'd forgotten that I wanted to read just two paragraphs from a letter we received, which I think that's a good segue.
It's a little bit less hopeful than what you were seeing in Clubhouse, but from a different perspective.
So this is dated November 1st, and I'm just, two paragraphs from this from someone who wishes to remain anonymous.
Last night, I went to the Trump Rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which you can read about online.
I originally declined to go because of fears of COVID-19 and because I'm not a particularly fervent Trump supporter.
I'll vote for him, but I'm keenly aware of his many flaws.
Yet in the end, I did go.
And the letter writer talks about the various risks of COVID and how concerned he is and asks, why did a highly risk-averse person like me go?
Two reasons.
That morning I took a walk with a very good friend.
He said that he would consider going to the rally, but if a camera panned the crowd and someone from his workplace saw him, then his career at a quasi-federal agency would be ruined.
This put into clear focus the dangers of the current council culture of which you frequently warn.
I realize that we as a society face a risk of silence through intimidation.
This is not the country that I love, where people can express their beliefs, whether I or anyone else agrees with them or not.
So I went to that rally for my friend and people like him, as a small act of courage and defiance to defend the First Amendment.
And it goes on, but I'll stop there.
He also ends up going for his son, for whom he wants to demonstrate some courage, and that he is willing to stand behind his beliefs, which in this case he says, I don't I'm aware of the many flaws of the man and I'm reluctantly voting for him, but I felt that it was important to go to this because many people can't because of fear of retribution.
And so what you're relating, hearing in that room and clubhouse, a conversation that include, what did you say?
Race and economics and class and politics, maybe?
I feel like that's not quite the four things.
That's certainly true, but yeah.
Seeing people not go off the rails and seeing the conversation itself not get derailed is possibly the most hopeful thing I've heard in a while.
Yes.
The other thing which I think I'm failing to convey is how much it became clear amongst all these people who almost none of them know each other, right?
A kind of camaraderie breaks out because people realize that the room is feeling a sense of, it's feeling emboldened, it's feeling relief, it's breathing after holding its breath.
This is so powerful that I really, I don't know if there's anything that can be done to preserve it or to augment it, but if there can, I think it's important.
Now that said, I will caution people.
It is very easy to waste time in Clubhouse, as it is on all social media.
And it is also difficult to integrate with your life because unlike something that you can just passively read and type, you know, you're at, you know, just as you don't want to be on the phone in a room with people who aren't part of the conversation.
It's disruptive.
So anyway.
Yeah, you were particularly thrown when the two of us were making dinner one night and you were on one of these things because you were on your headphones.
I was actually okay with it.
I was almost done.
But in general, yeah, when we're in the kitchen together, I'd rather you not be in some world, wherever it is.
Some virtual world.
So anyway, use with caution.
But if you can get in there, and you know, it also takes a bunch of hunting to figure out which rooms are generative, but I've now seen good examples.
I've also seen people use it for interesting novel purposes.
So it has not yet figured out what it is, and that makes it more interesting than other such things.
So join us on our Patreons, where there's a Discord server that you can join for conversation as well, not audio, but text.
We have a private Q&A once a month for Dark Horse members at my Patreon, and Brett has more intimate conversations at his Patreon every month.
We have a clips channel now where you can find clips of various things, and we answer your questions in the second half of this show, as the vast majority of people already know.
So put in a Super Chat.
We are going to get a replacement for Super Chat online soon that doesn't involve going through the Google YouTube machine.
Yes, and early indications are that it will be vastly more awesome.
Yes.
Yes.
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Vastly more awesome.
But for now, we're doing Super Chat, so pose your Super Chat question either now or at the beginning of the next hour, and we'll be back in about 15 minutes to answer your questions for about an hour.
