#100: The Demolition of Dissent (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 100th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode we discuss consensus, forced consensus, and the manufacture of consensus. We discuss medical misinformation, censorship, and freedom of speech (and freedom to listen). We also discuss how Australia is approaching vaccines and exposure to Covid. We talk a bit about one hundred years of the culture war, and th...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is live stream 1, 2, 3, 4, number 100 if I have that correct.
Is that accurate?
It is 100.
We have entered the triple digits here at Dark Horse.
My goodness, that seems like a lot of live streaming.
We have been sitting in these chairs a lot.
A lot in these chairs.
Yes, absolutely.
But you know, they're good chairs.
They're good chairs.
I think it's an accomplishment and I feel good about it.
The sitting is an accomplishment?
No, no, no.
Not the sitting.
The live streaming.
That amount of content.
And anyway, it's been kind of a wild ride.
It has, and we are ever grateful for the vast majority of feedback that we get about what we are doing here.
Today we are going to talk about medical misinformation and fake news and censorship.
We are going to talk about 100 years of the culture war and the use of the props of science to drive change.
A couple of items from what I'm calling this week in the absurd and appalling and how one newspaper in Australia is framing what you should do after you get vaccinated plus we want to end up today's live stream before we move into the Q&A with a lovely piece of fan mail that we received.
The book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is in stock at Amazon and has been for a few days and looks like it will remain so.
So if you have been waiting to pick that up, please, you can do that now.
If you've gotten it, if you've read it, if you've enjoyed it, please consider giving it some love on Amazon.
We also have this fine publication, Root Quarterly, which we have talked about before, is a beautiful, glossy arts and culture quarterly out of Philadelphia, and they did a long-form interview with us and also have an excerpt from the book in volume three, issue number two.
So if you're looking for For more on us or just what are interested in a beautiful magazine, Root Quarterly has that.
If you are watching on YouTube, consider switching to Odyssey.
That's where the live chat is happening.
You can ask questions for our Q&A at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Consider joining our Patreons.
New products are coming soon at the store, store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Consider joining me at Natural Selections, naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I posted and made publicly available my read of The Boat Accident, the near-death story that we did not relate in the book.
And for paying subscribers, I started putting some links to some things that I've run into recently that caught my eye on COVID and on authoritarianism.
And this week we have three ads that are supporting us and the podcast.
So without further ado, let us launch into those.
All right.
Our first sponsor this week, our three sponsors are Vivo Barefoot, MD Hearing Aid and Four Sigmatic, all sponsors you've heard us talk about before.
And as we have said before, we do not take ads for sponsors that we can't assess either directly or with someone who is close to us.
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Now I gotta add something.
Go for it.
Zach and I were traveling this week and we were at a very fine Mexican restaurant and the waiter came up noticing my Vivo barefoot shoes and said those are great shoes and I said yeah they're really cool and I started to explain how one feels as if they're barefoot inside and he said oh I know and he pointed down to his own Vivo barefoot shoes And he says, how did you learn about them?
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He says, wait a second, you look familiar.
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I said Darkos.
He says, no way.
Right?
So in any case, Marcos identified the shoes out in the field, not knowing who he was talking to.
And anyway.
But knowing the shoes he was talking to.
Knowing the shoes, he said he was on his third pair.
So anyway, he has been wearing them for even longer than we have, and he is a devoted fan, so anyway.
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Hey Marco.
Alright, next ad.
Next ad.
We'll see whether or not my dyslexia is flaring up.
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There's no tour of the new features?
No, nor did you have to wait for midnight for it to happen.
You're right.
Overnight or whenever.
Whenever it is that they hijack your phone and install the new malware or whatever it is that they do.
I think it's far later than midnight.
Most of us would.
Oh, it's well past midnight.
Yeah, it's later than we think.
Yeah.
It is later than we think.
Speaking of which, you were thinking about beginning the hour.
We're going to spend some substantial time this hour on thinking about our landscape, how medical misinformation and fake news and censorship are all kind of swirling in the ether and the ethos, and how to interpret this moment.
I already feel a little back on my heels.
I wouldn't have said I was thinking about how to start the hour.
I would say I was fuming about how to start the hour.
And anyway, that just sets us in motion in the right direction.
I have been watching presumably the same movie that many of you have been watching where history gets ever more absurd.
And, in any case, you know, I've started to focus on this issue of consensus.
And I know our listeners will have heard me say several times, there are two versions of consensus.
There's a version of consensus that's the natural version, where something that may start out perfectly heretical becomes conventional wisdom because the evidence for it is overwhelming, right?
This is a very natural phenomenon.
We've seen it with all kinds of things, jumping genes.
Uh, germ theory of disease, plate tectonics.
These are ideas that have become standard by virtue of the fact that no matter what they sounded like at first, they became unavoidably recognized as true because of all the evidence.
That's the normal version of consensus.
And in fact, I would say it's what we mean when we say the word consensus.
There is some other thing masquerading as consensus that requires intense coercion.
Right?
And the point is it is almost the exact opposite of consensus.
If to say that plate tectonics is the consensus in geology is to say that it's so obvious now to us that everybody besides some fringe believes it to be correct Then the point is you can infer from the degree to which we are all converged on the same Conclusion that it must carry an awful lot of weight.
It doesn't make it true, right?
It could be invalidated by something we would learn in the future But it means that basically a person with the current best Toolkit will arrive at this conclusion by virtue of what happens when you feed the evidence into the analytical software Well, that's exactly it, if I can just interrupt for a moment.
It's that the weight of the evidence, prior evidence and new evidence that arrives, fits with the model that is plate tectonics.
And what you don't have whenever you invoke plate tectonics, and this is a slightly weird example for us to be using because I've never attended a geology conference.
I don't know what actually happens there.
But whenever anyone invokes plate tectonics, there aren't a tiny number of people in the room presumably going, yeah, but what about them?
What about the evidence that it's not what you say it is?
Right.
First of all, I should say I also have never been to a geology conference, so I'm completely confident it rocks.
Good, that did not elicit a glare, I feel.
A glare?
No.
I got away with it.
All right, but the point is... A grimace maybe, but not that one.
The implication is that the evidence, that somebody who is well equipped in this area, given the evidence, will arrive here, unless some Radical new idea that better explains the evidence, you know, as we say either explains more or assumes less while explaining the same amount.
Either one of those things will do to displace plate tectonics or any other hypothesis that becomes a theory by virtue of the evidence.
But the consensus implies that this is the theory.
That's as close as we get to a fact, right?
That this is the theory that accounts best for the evidence that we see and assumes the least, right?
The consensus implies that.
But, presumably, everybody gets that if we said, well, you know, what is the consensus amongst these rocket scientists?
That that rocket is safe enough to get people to the International Space Station in one piece, right?
And if you saw that there were people standing behind each of them with the gun, right, and they all swore that rocket is safe enough, you might say, well, I don't actually know if the rocket is safe enough.
I know I heard every rocket scientist on that stage tell me it was, but I also know that they may not have been free to say otherwise.
And so the very fact that you find intense Coercion surrounding a claimed consensus is in and of itself reason to be worried, to slow down and say, what don't I know?
Would would the conclusion of the scientists on the stage be any different if they were actually liberated to say whatever they thought and there was no negative penalty that would come to them other than the reputational risk of saying something out of step?
Yeah.
And so did you have something you wanted to?
Well, I've forgotten.
This is going to be a little messy because I thought I had the notes, and I can't remember.
There was a podcast that we did this week that was really, really wonderful, and I'm not going to remember any of the particulars, and I'm embarrassed.
Maybe while you're talking, I'll look it up.
It's not out yet, but the host we were talking to is a pilot, and he said that some of the reason That flying is so safe.
It's not just because regulations in the US from the FAA and such are intact and useful, but actually that the culture is one in which you don't just have the – and again, this language isn't quite what he said – you don't just have the right to object when something seems to be going amiss, you have the obligation Obligation to challenge.
To challenge.
So you don't just have the right to challenge your superior, you have the obligation to challenge anyone if you see something that doesn't seem right to you.
And a consensus is a consensus if there is not just, I mean certainly if there's an obligation to challenge But you at least, bare minimum, need the right to challenge and to be left then with a sense of like, okay, is this consensus?
Can we hear from the people who object?
Do we know what fraction of the people in the population actually have challenged this?
Right.
And actually, it's a great example.
Not only is it implicated in how aviation, or at least commercial aviation, has become so incredibly safe, but the exceptions to the rule, the places where commercial aviation has not been tremendously safe, very frequently show the pattern where the obligation to challenge is overridden, right?
And so he had an example of an accident, which I actually can't recall which accident it was, but I immediately came up with two.
You know, I have a long-standing sort of passing interest in aviation, and Bob Trivers, our undergraduate advisor, wrote a famous paper on self-deception in which he used the crash of the Washington, D.C.
flight into the Potomac, I guess, as an example.
And in that case, the co-pilot had understood that they did not have sufficient speed to generate the lift necessary to take off, and being outranked by the captain, the captain overrode him and they plunged into the water.
There's another example in Tenerife where a very famous captain who not only formally outranked everybody, but because he had been featured in commercials for the airline and was, you know, the go-to guy, got impatient with the tower and overrode them and just started his takeoff, not seeing that there was a plane parked halfway down the runway.
Anyway, the point is the obligation to challenge is the safety factor.
Yeah, so let me just plug this again.
Our episode is not out, but this was Dose of Leadership with Richard Rearson, in which he says his leadership interviews with today's most relevant leaders.
He's terrific, and this was a really great conversation.
Yeah, I thought it was a great conversation too, and I was super impressed.
I'd not heard of him before, but I was very impressed with the depth of his thinking and his interview style.
It was really, it's a podcast I'll be paying attention to.
Going forward.
But in any case, so all of this is beginning to gel, and I don't know how likely it is that the public is going to figure out what's going on, or that they're even, you know, they're so incentivized not to figure out what's going on that many who see it may simply keep it to themselves.
But a number of things happened this week that I thought were noteworthy in this regard.
They may seem unrelated at first, but Hazak, could you put up that Zero Hedge article?
So Zach is going to put up a Zero Hedge article reporting on, just out of luck, a friend of ours, Colin Wright, biologist, who had content removed from, I believe, Instagram and Twitter this week.
And the content in question was a paper That asserted that males and females are not equal on average with respect to strength and therefore their capacity in sport.
Now this is A fact.
This is not controversial, or at least it would not have been controversial three years ago, five years ago.
This is a fact, and anybody who said otherwise would have been a person of the French.
Now, you can make other hypotheses.
You and I have both heard really stupid ones, like, you know, the males are keeping the food from the females, and therefore the females are not developing the strength that they would otherwise develop.
That's a valid hypothesis.
It's just wrong, right?
It's demonstrably wrong.
It's patently laughable.
Right.
Well, it's patently laughable and it's easily falsified because you can control for this.
You can simply say, in circumstances where we can demonstrate females have equal access to food, do they still end up on average not as strong?
And you will, of course, find out that they do.
You will also find out that the evidence from other species reflects this pattern in those species in which males displace other males in competition for mates.
It's the millions of years of unending patriarchy with no gaps at all in any culture at any moment.
Man, would I have loved to sit in on the early multicellular life meetings of the patriarchy.
That would have been interesting.
Did they not take notes?
I mean, don't you have access to those back issues effectively?
No?
It's encoded in the genes somewhere, possibly.
But in any case, the absurdity of removing this content is Obviously remarkable.
But what is even more remarkable is the basis on which they claimed that they did it.
Which was under their hate speech policy.
Right?
Now, this is not only absurd.
The very idea that a factual claim at all, even if it was wrong, a factual claim based on a scientific paper that says that males are on average stronger than females could possibly be hate speech.
Right?
This is a discussion of a matter of fact.
Well, I mean, I think if I were to try, I'm not steel manning, I can't do it, but if I'm going to try to understand what got them to that hate speech, it's going to be the trans activists having compelled some number of people, and again, you know, not the vast majority of the tiny number of humanity that's actually trans who wants to be left alone already to live their lives,
But the trans activists who have decided that sex is the same as gender and that how you feel about, you know, what sex you are actually changes what sex you are.
And so, you know, the idea that, and this is actually, I'll save it for the, what I call it, this week and the absurd and the atrocious or something.
One of the examples is exactly in this framing, but it attempts to obliterate, depending on how you count, 500- to 2-billion-year-old differentiation between the two sexes, as if the opinions of some modern humans has any say in this.
Has any say in it.
And what's more, even if you were to take that steel, man, and I think it's about as good as you're gonna get, but even if you were to take it and then you were to go out and ask people purely on the basis of whether they felt male or female to lift as large a weight as they could, right, you would find that those who
arrive at the conclusion that they are male by virtue of how they feel rather than by virtue of what gametes they produce or what chromosomes they have or any of those other factors, you would still find an overwhelming correlation, right?
So it's also a misunderstanding of statistics and mistaking individuals for population-level differences.
Right.
But the thing that really irks me about this There's a way in which those who ostensibly are attempting to defend some vulnerable group very frequently rob the people who need the protection most, right?
So for example, If we just decide that any transgression by a male against a female of any sexual nature, right, everything from a cat call to, you know, a tap on the tush or whatever it is, if we just say that this is all equivalently horrifying, then we are in fact robbing people of the protections against the most serious stuff, which would be something like rape.
Right?
So the point is, either there has to be an ability to deal with the spectrum of indecency, or what you're effectively doing is transferring protection from rape victims and potential rape victims to people who don't like the way they're being looked at.
And the point is, no, no, no.
The protections really do belong concentrated against the most horrifying behavior.
No question about it.
So don't you dare reapportion them, right?
And in this case, what we're doing is we're actually, by boosting something factual into the realm of hate speech, we are actually now robbing the category of hate speech, we are robbing it of the ability to declare something false, right?
The idea that something is abhorrent and false and that that would be a necessary precondition to it being hate speech, We're not turning this into an arbitrary category.
That is an insane degradation of the concept.
To the extent that we all understand that there is something called hate speech, that it may be very difficult to deal with it because of First Amendment protections, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
We've all heard it, right?
So, this is a matter of utmost insanity.
The reason that this circles back around to this other topic is that the degradation of the term hate speech is actually an exact analog for what they have now done to the concept of medical misinformation.
Because just as hate speech now apparently can contain facts that were uncontroversial, you know, a few years ago, The concept of medical misinformation is obviously no bar to discussions of things that are the result of scientific evidence that suggests a conclusion.
They're, in fact, forbidden in the YouTube terms of service, right?
You can't say certain things.
It doesn't matter whether there's a scientific paper that says, hey, this is the conclusion.
You're not allowed to talk about it on YouTube.
So that destruction of these categories, you know, right?
Medical misinformation really ought to mean, hey, this is false, right?
And hate speech ought to mean also, this is wrong and vile, right?
The fact that we are going to destroy these categories in the pursuit of I don't even know what is utterly frightening.
Yeah, I think that we are going to be returning to this topic of consensus next week.
I have some things I've been thinking about with regard to what all conditions render something like consensus in medicine land.
What we're seeing right now is a very particular, and frankly, this should be super obvious to people, that a consensus that has arrived at quickly behind closed doors, we've said this many times before on this podcast, right?
A consensus that has arrived at very quickly in which there are claims being made that could not possibly be known because the nature of the time span is such that you cannot know, for instance, what long-term effects there might be.
Quickly, behind closed doors, in which there is no ability for outsiders to assess the analysis done, in which only the products of the behind closed doors conversations are presented with the sort of props of science.
You know, someone has the relevant degree, someone is wearing the relevant lab coat or has the glassware, right?
This is then taken to the populace who are told to follow the science, right?
This is follow the rapid consensus that we are cloaking in science.
It's different from following science.
Right.
It's not following science, and what they really mean is follow the science or else, right?
And actually we can see the or else factor here, which showed up in a couple of really jarring places this week.
So Zach, do you want to put up the FLCC notice that I sent you?
So what this is, is the FLCCC.
Yep, it's three C's.
This is Frontline COVID Critical Care Alliance.
Alliance, yep.
The FLCCC had their PayPal account suspended or canceled or whatever.
So what we have here is a group of doctors
Who hold a heterodox position now, it's actually one held by thousands of doctors But the problem is they have been unsuccessful the big they that runs YouTube and associated properties has been unsuccessful at silencing the FL triple C and the reason they have been unsuccessful is that these are highly credible doctors with a tremendous amount of on-the-ground experience tremendous number of lives saved and
Because they have innovated new standards of care for COVID, right?
So people want to listen to what the, not everyone, but many of us want to listen to what the FLCCC has to say.
They have relevant clinical experience and they are meeting success in their clinical In their clinical experience, demonstrable success.
And so the point is, oh, well, the attack that drives them into obscurity by using the terms of service of the various platforms has been unsuccessful.
The propaganda campaign that has been used to blur the distinction between them and another group associated with Trump that has a similar sounding name.
All of these things have been ineffective.
And so what are we going to do now?
We're going to allow them to speak, but not be supported by people who want to hear what they have to say, right?
Did you say what the screen showed?
Because it was it was very small and there are some people listening and not watching.
It was especially small for them, the ones who were just listening.
But yeah, so the screen shows a tweet in which the FLCCC reveals that PayPal has suspended their account.
This is not the first time this has happened, right?
For example, WikiLeaks has faced the same... This is the first time it's happened to the FLCCC.
I believe that is correct.
But the basic point is there's some force that wants to create an artificial consensus, and it likes to use the lightest hand possible, right?
If it can drive you into obscurity with the terms of service of the various platforms on which you might choose to talk to people, it will certainly do that.
But if it has to get in the way of your livelihood very directly by interfering with people's ability to use a credit card to support you or to use PayPal or any of these things, it will do it.
And those aren't the ultimate layers.
There are layers even below that.
That we will see.
I mean, we saw various things pulled.
For example, Amazon Web Services that didn't allow certain alternatives to Twitter to exist on their service.
There's lots of places to...
When are we talking?
During the election.
Oh, okay.
So things were... During the last presidential election you're talking about.
People were thrown off of Twitter.
They showed up on another platform, and then that platform suddenly found it couldn't use Amazon Web Services as a host.
And so the point is, there are lots of choke points, right?
We haven't seen them all yet.
Some of them we've seen very occasionally, and some of them we see regularly, like this terms of service nonsense.
Here's another one that I found absolutely jaw-dropping.
Can you put up the paper, the Wayback Machine that I sent you, Zach?
Here we have a paper, unfortunately I'm going to be unable to read it on the screen that tiny, but this is a paper by Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough.
These are both doctors I can read the title from here.
Yeah, go ahead.
A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events and the U.S.
Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, VAERS, in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products.
So this is a peer-reviewed paper that Jessica and Peter had published and Elsevier, the publisher, has now withdrawn this paper.
It hasn't withdrawn it formally.
What it's done is put up a notice in its place.
Zach, could you put up the notice?
Temporary removal.
Yeah, temporary removal, and then, can you read the line?
The publisher regrets that the article has been temporarily removed.
A replacement will appear as soon as possible.
I feel like that's tiny from here.
I can't, I can't.
Yeah, the last thing it says is that when the paper is put back up, it will contain a notice about why it was removed if it is not fully reinstated.
So, this is very exotic.
Here we have two highly qualified- What journal was this?
Oh, it was published in Current Problems in Cardiology.
Current Problems in Cardiology.
Just so people who aren't academics or doctors know, Elsevier is one of, if not the largest academic publisher.
Oh, it's better than that.
Okay, but it's also true what I just said.
It's absolutely true.
It is also, I believe, the oldest academic publisher.
This is by its own account, right?
You know who they claim- What is?
Elsevier.
Elsevier.
What is by its own account.
Elsevier, by its own account, is the oldest academic publishing house in existence, and they proudly proclaim themselves Galileo's publisher.
Now, if one— Wow.
Yes.
If one delves deep enough, you find out that that's a little bit of a dubious claim, that Elsevier is the name of something that did not have a continuous existence.
But nonetheless, for a publisher that wishes to, you know, to wave Galileo at us— Flame the mantle of publishing Galileo.
Wow.
That is a remarkable failure.
I've never seen anything like that removal.
I spend a fair bit of my time looking at academic papers on Elsevier's site and other places and I've never seen anything like that.
And it reveals the whole bankruptcy of this entire, I don't even want to call it a discipline, it's many disciplines participating in the same failure.
What exactly were Rose and McCullough supposed to do with their finding regarding myocarditis other than publish it where other cardiologists could scrutinize it and challenge it?
They did exactly what you're supposed to do.
I've seen the paper.
It's excellent.
This is a very good paper.
Does that make it right?
No.
But what do you want to do to find out if it's right?
You want to put it in front of peers out in public and let that discussion happen.
And now it's gone, and it's not just, you know, if they hadn't gotten it published, it might exist on a preprint server, right?
But presumably, since it was published, it's now simply not available at all, except via Wayback Machine.
Right.
And so all of this is to say that we have a consensus.
About the safety of the vaccines, about the ineffectiveness of early out-of-patent treatments.
But that consensus is built out of intense coercion, right?
We've had people have their livelihoods interrupted.
We have people's reputations threatened.
We have people's peer-reviewed papers removed from the web.
The point is, if you're looking at that consensus and saying, can that many doctors be wrong?
You have to ask yourself the question, well, which doctors am I not hearing from and why?
How many doctors are afraid to say what they know?
How many doctors are being threatened with the loss of their jobs, reputations, careers, everything?
This consensus is not a consensus, right?
And the problem is that a lot of, frankly, High quality thinkers who don't happen to have experience in science aren't spotting this.
And they're simply looking at the number of voices all saying the same thing and saying, it's gotta be right.
It's gotta be right, and that is also built on a foundation of, can we just get this over with already?
This is 20 months in, this is how many months in, and we're still living under this terrible cloud that is SARS-CoV-2, and it doesn't seem to be ending, even though there are countries, for instance in Europe, that have said, you know what?
Excuse me, but fuck it.
We're going to go back to normal.
This thing is going to be endemic.
You and I differ a little bit here, but since we published that thing in my sub-stack at the end of July, I have come to think that at this point it's too late.
We're not going to eradicate it.
It's going to be endemic.
Early treatment is therefore going to be the response that is necessary as people are running into it.
Some countries are doing that, and some countries, like the US, like Canada, like Australia, like New Zealand, are having the opposite response.
Quite the opposite response, except actually there's something I want to talk about near the end, and maybe this is the place, but some places in Australia are actually beginning to say, Maybe we're just going to have to deal with this, and frankly what that means is not clear.
How do we deal with the fear that has been inculcated in just about everyone?
Everyone is making decisions based on fear.
Well, I want to be really careful with the idea that this is going to become endemic, right?
I know lots of incredibly well-informed people who believe that.
But A, I'm not even sure what it means.
I know how it's heard, right?
It's heard as, this is going to become an annual circulating blah blah blah blah blah.
And that does not necessarily fit with what it means.
It is, you know, for example, I've used the example of rabies.
Is rabies endemic?
Yeah.
Is it impacting our lives?
Not substantially.
We've got it so thoroughly under control in the first world that, you know, if we have to accept that level of endemism with SARS-CoV-2, so be it.
But I'm not even convinced that we're dealing with that.
For one thing, because it is ever more probable that we are dealing with the product of a set of human experiments, we don't actually know what this thing does long term.
And we should be managing it with the best tools that we have.
And so I agree with you.
People are reacting.
They are reacting reflexively from the idea that, well, let's just get this over with already.
How are you going to do that?
Well, the best tool is obviously vaccines, and the answer is no, no, no.
We've got a whole spectrum of tools.
What we really need are very smart people, thoroughly empowered to challenge each other with an obligation to challenge, right?
To hash out, all right, what is the best approach, and how do we best apply the resources at our disposal globally so that if this is going to be endemic, it is well managed, and if it is not going to be endemic, we get to driving it to extinction.
But we're not even having that conversation because everybody is skipping so many steps of the logic.
I think this is the place to add in.
Zach, if you would show my screen here for a moment.
This is from an Australian paper, The Courier Mail.
I'm not sure, I think it may be Brisbane, although I'm not actually positive where in Australia it's coming out of.
The headline, this is from six days ago, the headline is, Don't freak out, catching COVID after you are vaccinated improves immunity.
Sub-headline, if you are fully vaccinated against COVID, the next step to improve your immunity may be to actually catch the virus.
Now at first pass, this looks like complete lunacy, and looks like they're just, you know, throwing up their arms and, you know, saying anything they feel like saying at any moment, because that has certainly not been the approach in the past.
There is also built into this the idea that we are hearing, but I have yet to see any data to support the idea of quote-unquote super immunity, wherein the acquired immunity you get from the actual disease is enhanced by also getting the vaccine, and now they're arguing vice versa, like that there is some enhanced immunity from actually having both exposures as opposed to just having had the disease versus just having had the vaccine.
Put that aside for a moment, whether or not that is true or not.
It's hard to imagine what the immunological mechanism might be, but you know, you think not?
Okay.
Oh, I think it is almost certain that this is true at some tiny level.
At some tiny level, okay.
But, you know, that actually doesn't necessarily matter here.
What does matter is if in Australia, a country that has been going, you know, Guns blazing on everyone absolutely must get vaccinated.
And what they're saying is, and you know, again, another thing that this is hinging on is the idea that having been vaccinated, we're now admitting that actually it doesn't really stop transmission very much, but what they're saying is that it will reduce the impact of the disease on you.
Maybe true, maybe not.
But if that is the case, they are saying, look, you're going to run into the disease.
They're basically assuming endemism.
You're going to run into the disease.
Just deal with it.
You'll be fine.
Now, you aren't necessarily going to be fine.
There are people who've died after getting COVID after having been fully vaccinated.
And there are lots and lots of people who get COVID who do just fine, right?
It has an incredibly variable effect on people.
But to me, what this says, if we are to take it at face value, is okay then.
Vaccinated or not, you're going to run into this.
What we need is early treatment.
What we need is to use the wide array of drugs that we have available to us.
to deal with treating people as they show up.
And hey, it looks like vaccinated people and unvaccinated people are both likely to run into this and really there's no reason to be pitting those populations against one another in the political sphere, in the media, unless what you're doing is not, does not have anything to do with public health or about COVID at all.
Unless what you were trying to do is create division among populations.
Create division among populations or sell one product to the exclusion of others.
Yes.
I don't know enough about the recent politics in Australia to know, but if that headline came out in the US, I would be responding with, okay, clearly we've moved from Trump derangement syndrome to COVID derangement syndrome.
There's no ability to have a conversation about this that has nuance that says, Terrible virus, terrible disease.
Let's figure out how best to move forward because actually we have shared fate here, people.
Yeah.
Um, I would add to your, your list of things we should obviously be doing, you know, the elephant in the room increasingly is properly preparing with vitamin D, for example, right?
This is the lowest, lowest hanging fruit on the tree.
And yet we don't recommend it, which suggests that we are not actually all that concerned at the public health level.
We are apparently either completely inept or, um, not that concerned about your actual health and we're doing other things.
I would say, I mean, so obviously adding things to a list that is the simplest makes it less simple, but the three maybe top things on my list of what a country or a world that was actually interested in public health in light of this particular virus and disease would be to encourage supplementation of vitamin D in any population where they are likely to be deficient in it, which is to say that the
Higher latitudes you're at, and the more likely you are to be spending time inside, which also correlates.
That's one.
Recommending that people go outside, that people spend time outside, that people get their exercise outside, that people socialize outside.
Not just for vitamin D reasons, but because this virus isn't transmitting outside still.
And then third, and this does take resources, and it does take money, and it will take time, but improving the filtration systems of indoor air.
Because in, you know, the smaller the space you're in with other people, the more likely are that you are breathing in air that they have exhaled.
This is part of why, this is a big part of why this virus, and like all respiratory viruses, are more likely to spread inside.
So, we need to be focusing on filtration, and airlines are doing it, and yes, those are very small spaces and very easy to control, but we have the technology, and it will take some time, it will take some money, but this is the way to make people more safe going forward.
Every tool at our disposal, it really ought to be.
Alright, so if we can return for a second to the question of where we are.
We've got something that masquerades as consensus, but the point is whatever that thing is, it is coercion dependent.
Coercion dependent consensus, the implication of it is roughly the opposite of an actual consensus.
It's closer to a hostage video in which somebody says some things because there's a gun pointed at them.
It is also, you know, we've heard Chomsky's phrase, the manufacturer of consent, is resonant.
But there's a way in which we are seeing the inverse of many things.
And even though it's an easy extrapolation, we don't get the implication.
And so the Manufacture of Consent is the mirror image of the destruction of dissent, which is what we are seeing.
Those who dissent about Either, you know, sex and gender issues and claim that there's some substantial difference between males and females, right?
Or those who claim things against the public health narrative are punished severely, resulting in a much tinier number of people willing to say these things out loud.
And in fact, lots of people will lie to themselves.
So, you know, the destruction of dissent is key to how this works.
So I'm not sure how much more there is to say.
I did have a thought about, in light of the role That we have seen played by YouTube in particular.
It did occur to me that there is room for us to do YouTube a favor and we've done a little pro bono work generating a slogan for the people who generate the community guidelines.
The slogan is going to be something like YouTube community guidelines, because you can't handle the truth.
Yes, yes.
All right, I think I think that works.
But anyway, yeah, let's, you know, let's put this on pause for now.
But I do want to continue to pay attention to the question about consensus and things that look a lot like consensus, but mean the opposite, because the rubber meets the road right there.
Well, that's good.
We will actually, I do intend for us to return to that next week.
And before we move on to the next thing I want to talk about, did you want to talk at all about why framing this as a free speech issue is an error, or did you want to save that?
No, I think it's actually worth doing.
And it's something that we said with some regularity back in the days when we were fighting false accusations of racism and the like.
But I think the idea is we are seeing the evolution of a new type of cancel culture.
Or the way it actually looks to me and I think to us is It's the exact same tactics of the cancel culture that we encountered with respect to wokeism applied in a totally different context, applied in a scientific context.
And it's very jarring because many of the people who, you know,
Understood completely what was going on in the case of wokeism have switched sides and are now doing the canceling Right, and that is that is a very disturbing Phenomenon because for one thing you would imagine once you've seen the playbook and it's been aimed at you That you would be almost immune to deploying that playbook against anybody else on any topic and you would actually say to yourself something like well If I was in the right, why is this playbook even necessary?
Right?
Being in the right gives you a lot of advantage in the world of scientific arguments.
It should not be necessary to deploy these absolutely draconian tools.
Yeah.
Why cheat if truth is on your side?
Yeah, why do you need to cheat, right?
And of course, you know, the first answer that will be given is because they're, you know, their lives at stake.
And so basically the implication is that this is a noble lie.
On the other hand, how much does it look like a noble lie?
If it was a noble lie, wouldn't you tack on to these draconian bits of nonsense, hey, why don't you get yourself some vitamin D?
If this was a noble lie that was really about an obsession with protecting people's health, there's lots of stuff that we would be doing that we're not.
So maybe this isn't a noble lie, it's just a lie.
But in any case, this is another place where we're looking at the mirror image of something.
The destruction of dissent is a mirror image of the manufacture of consent And in this case, we know it is written into the DNA of the West, as it were, that the free exchange of ideas, which is encoded in the concept of free speech, is very, very important, right?
And the problem is that it is also easily caricatured because it sounds like, oh, you want your speech rights, right?
You really want to be heard?
You're an attention whore, right?
No, free speech is important because it's how we hash out what's true and what's best, what we should do.
And so the point is, there's a whole slew of attacks that aren't really about your ability to speak, they're about whether anybody can choose to hear you.
Right?
Interfering with people's ability to find you.
If there's a large audience that wants to hear what you have to say, and it just so happens that the people who own the platform that dictates whether or not they can find you don't like what you're saying, and the point is, well, you can still speak, but they can't hear you.
Right?
So, anyway, we need at least Speaking into a manufactured void, which is rather like a manufactured consensus.
Speaking into a manufactured void is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they were protecting free speech.
Oh my goodness.
It's like speech-canceling headphones.
You speak all you want and the headphones render it silent.
Yeah.
Yeah, so somehow people need to be aware that it is actually the real right that is important is the right to choose what is worth listening to, which doesn't mean I'm choosing it because I agree with it.
Maybe I want to hear it to find out whether I agree with it.
Right.
You know, maybe that's how I find out that I disagree with it rather than effectively being told, you can't hear this because you disagree.
Right.
And that, you know, that's not new here, right?
Like you drive underground actual hate speech, and it empowers it, because people will do it outside of anyone's sight, and then it will emerge at some point later, you know, far better armed, frankly.
And, yeah, so I think just to just to rephrase what you've just said, there should never be a compunction to speak, just as there should not be a compunction to listen.
So you know, compelled speech, we know, And so as you have just said, there should always be freedom to speak.
Listening also isn't either.
Some people have been confused about this.
They're both anathema to a free society.
And so as you have just said, there should always be freedom to speak.
There should also always be freedom to listen, especially in this era of the virtual public square, because that's the era we live in, the virtual public square, to which you may not know how to show up.
Because we're here for now at noon 30 Pacific time on Saturdays, most Saturdays.
But, how would you find us if you didn't know that?
Right?
So, providing to fact-checkers, fact-checkers, who are, it's just a modern word for censors, who think they're doing you a service, the ability to say, yeah, they can talk all they want, but we're not going to let anyone find them.
is, frankly, a disingenuous response that is exactly antithetical to what the framers of the founders of this country had in mind.
Right, and you know, of course, imagine the Constitution if you actually had to spell all of this out, right?
Right.
You know, okay, what are we going to do if there's ever an era in which there's something called fact checkers who look for misinformation where misinformation doesn't mean it's not a fact.
Right, and there's a capacity for noise cancelling to render speech useless and unhearable.
Yeah, it's an endless arms race, and really the point is, the basic principle is still the same, and it either applies or it doesn't, and we are stuck with a whole bunch of brand new bottlenecks that are being exerted to, I don't know, to shape our behaviour.
Indeed.
Well, this next thing I wanted to raise is related, and you have not seen this yet.
There's an article in Spiked from a couple weeks ago, actually, by our acquaintance, Frank Ferretti, the excellent Frank Ferretti.
And it's actually, I think it's either an excerpt or related to his new book, which we have not read yet because I just ran into this today.
So it's called Hundred Years of the Culture War.
Today's battles over identity and values have deep roots.
And he does his excellent Frank Ferretti analysis here, but I just wanted to read two partial paragraphs here from early in this long essay, which he calls Creating a New Man.
Towards the end of the 19th century, political movements, modernizing capitalists, and asserted intellectuals came to believe that a rapidly changing world required changes to the ways in which young people were socialized.
As they saw it, a new world needed new men.
And to become truly modern, young people had to be distanced from the traditions and values of the past.
Old-fashioned moral norms had to be displaced by scientifically authorized values.
One reason why this process did not acquire an explicit ideological form was it because it was promoted through the apparently neutral language of science.
And maybe that, you know, the entire essay is well worth reading as I imagine the book is as well, but this apparently neutral language of science he is pointing to in, you know, just beginning of the Industrial Revolution as effectively being grabbed and weaponized
Then, in order to make change in people's attitudes and indeed in the way that they were raising their children, by basically pretending that this isn't ideology, because we know what ideology looks like.
It has names, institutions, and science is different.
And the scientific process is the way that we can exclude bias, that we can minimize bias from our understanding of the world.
But exactly what we've been talking about here is when you have manufactured consensus and the people wearing lab coats speaking as if for all science with results that they have generated behind closed doors where you are not allowed to see The analysis, that's not science, but that is, it is potentially a tool of anyone who wants to create consensus and be an ideologue.
Right.
And, you know, what does it say?
So something, let's call it the blue team for the moment, wants to claim the mantle of science, right?
It wants to say, look, the enlightened people are telling you what we need to do because they've carefully considered the puzzle, right?
Right.
The enlightened people.
The enlightened people have now Taken the category of misinformation and smuggled in facts that are just not discussable because they they are claimed to violate the Public health narrative which has been simplified for the little people I guess right but at the same time, right?
You cannot listen to anybody who says, well, there are certain things that might be factual that are going to be declared medical misinformation for your own safety, right?
If that entity does not look at the claim that men and women do not differ in strength and say, wait a minute!
That's just wrong.
You can't call that hate speech.
That's just a fact.
You can't declare a fact hate speech.
If it doesn't counter that, then the point is, why does anybody trust it?
Right.
Right?
If it can't spot the obvious garbage, right?
If it's going to declare the world flat tomorrow, then the point is, oh, actually, I get that it looks like the scientific authority.
I get that it wants you to think it is, but it's not behaving like that.
Guess what else they're claiming?
Yeah, it's behaving like it's been captured by something that isn't all that interested in the truth, or your health and well-being, or facts, or protecting the people who really deserve to be protected, or any of those things.
I think it's chilling and terrifying for people who are otherwise able to see this sort of inconsistency, precisely because of Because science is taught so badly, by and large, at the K-12 level, and innumeracy and – there's no word comparable in science, like unscience.
What would the word be?
I don't know.
So let me use innumeracy as a stand-in for both a lack of comfort and ability to do math and to think scientifically, even though that's really not what innumeracy usually means.
Let me use that as a stand-in here.
Enumeracy is almost celebrated in elite high culture circles.
Illiteracy is, of course, not.
No one, no one would survive a cocktail party among coastal elites by claiming that they're actually kind of functionally illiterate, ha ha ha, but of course it doesn't matter, does it?
Whereas those sorts of claims, I never did, I was never very interested, but to the degree that I'm familiar with what kinds of conversations happen at such places and in academia in general, even in academia and faculty meetings that just have a wide swath of faculty, it is acceptable.
to say such a thing where you simply replace the word illiteracy with innumeracy.
It is understood that most people are not just functionally innumerate, wherein here I'm including the lack of understanding of what the scientific process is, but that it's kind of a badge of honor.
So, put that aside for the moment and say, okay, in that world in which you certainly can't claim to be illiterate, but it's kind of amusing, a little bit funny, and almost even honorable to be a bit innumerate because it means that you weren't that kind of person in school.
It's considered endearing.
It's endearing, yes.
Now we have a moment when authorities are not making claims about racism.
Which everyone, no matter what you were schooled in, if you are smart and have your eyes open, can see that the new claims of racism are nothing like what racism used to look like, and this is clearly batshit crazy.
But now we have the new authorities making claims that sound scientific.
And they've got the degrees, and they've got the garb, and they're not presenting data, and they're not presenting analysis, but the vast majority of people, the talking heads, the elites who are creating the media that everyone is listening to, know that they wouldn't be able to assess the data or the analysis even if it were present.
And so, as a result, they largely haven't noticed that it's missing.
Yeah.
They haven't noticed that it's missing.
And so, when we say to people, look, here's what we are seeing in the actual literature, and here's how we can't compare it to the claims being made in public policy because they never share their data or analysis.
They won't show it to us, and that's not how science works.
That sentence almost doesn't even register.
It doesn't land.
Right.
It doesn't land.
So it's a little bit like there's this assumption that harms that haven't been demonstrated do not exist, rather than you've just intervened in a complex system, there will be harms, you don't know what they are yet, but you should be cautious, right?
So it's the inversion of the precautionary principle.
In the same way, there's this assumption that that which I cannot evaluate is probably done right.
Which is, if you've looked into these things, it's a preposterous assumption.
It's hard to get these things perfectly right, right?
To get them basically right is what people should be shooting for, but the number of times that you go in there looking for it to have been done basically right, and either there's a giant black box that you can't evaluate, or the claim that's in the abstract is not actually justified by the work that was done, Or there was never a hypothesis, and therefore it's data mining.
Or the one you can't see, in which the hypothesis is claimed to have preceded the work, when in fact it is the result of the observations done during the work that was not hypothetical in the first place.
Therefore there wasn't a test of the hypothesis, and what you have here is an observation that is still in want of a test.
Right, which is basically a way of cheating the career system, right?
You claim to have tested a hypothesis that still needs a test, but you misinform everybody who then reads your paper and thinks that the hypothesis came first.
All of these things are standard, very, very common, and the problem is the assumption that they aren't there because you can't evaluate whether they are is just simply illogical.
Yeah.
I think liberals more likely than conservatives, because liberals have been eager to adopt the mantle of science and to become secular and to say, yes, I'm not religious, I'm beyond that.
So what, you know, where, wherein do I find my meaning and how do I, how do I assess reality in the world?
Well, it's through science.
That doesn't mean that all of those people who are claiming the mantle of science actually have a capability to think through what a scientific assessment or what scientific evidence would look like, and most of them would say that.
But we have a situation wherein one ideology has replaced another.
We talk about this in the book, too.
This is part of what Hayek, back in the early 20th century, was objecting to with his coining of the term scientism, where he was saying, basically, the modes of science are being used in places where they don't belong.
And we have actually expanded that term a little bit in the book when we talk about it and said, but also, there's a whole lot of talk as if things are science, where science very much belongs, but science actually isn't what is being done.
Yeah, that second thing probably warrants a different term, but they're both inappropriate and they're both deranging us.
Yes, they're deranging us, and there's so much at stake that one has to be on their guard, right?
There's going to be garbage in here because there's so much at stake, and so the question is, well, where is it and who is it fooling?
Exactly.
All right.
This week, In.
I'm now looking at my... This week an absurd and appalling.
I was hoping to bring... I was hoping to bring you two things.
You, the audience.
And now I have lost... I had forgotten that they were there.
You had you?
No.
Almost.
Okay.
I was in the zone.
You were?
It was hard to tell from the outside, I'm sure, but...
No, no, no, I had it.
So I have to Google this because I somehow have, I don't know, this was so appalling that even Safari blocked it from me.
Took off my tab.
Here we go.
Okay.
Oh yes.
This week an absurd and appalling point number one.
Yeah.
We have Teen Vogue having published an article that included an image that is anatomy of a non-prostate owner.
And I don't have very much more to say about this except no.
Just again, apologies, but just fucking no.
No.
Women are being erased.
This is insanity.
This is that, you know, not again, not just the tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people who are actually trans and just trying to live their lives with some privacy and dignity, but that that other
Somewhat, but largely non-overlapping population, I would argue, of trans activists who would have us disappear reality in favor of their desire to, I don't even know what in some cases I do, and it's not appropriate, and in some cases it's just about power and messing with people's heads.
Yeah, but you would say that as a birthing and chest-feeding person.
I would, and as a non-prostate owner.
I don't even know what a non-prostate is.
I mean, I guess I have one.
See, that's where your mathematical literacy, I think, is leading you astray.
Well, I actually think that I'm also a better grammarian than whoever the idiots at Dean Vogue are, because I think what they mean is non-owner of a prostate.
No.
That is evoking some song from the 80s that I'm having trouble placing.
So that's point one.
Oh, it's Owner of a Lonely Heart.
That was it.
It's not even that close.
Okay, so Owner of a Lonely Prostate.
It's a pretty good song, actually.
It's sure to be the next Teen Vogue thing.
Owner of a Lonely Prostate, how you too can… never mind.
I'm not going to finish that sentence.
I have it in my head though, I'm not going to finish it.
Okay, second item from this week in Absurd and Apology is, oh my god, another thing from Zero Hedge this week.
You may show this, Zachary.
Seattle school cancels Halloween pumpkin parade, says it quotes, marginalizes students of color.
Oh my god.
Well, it does marginalize summer squashes, right?
I can't even do this.
Oh my god.
So don't show my screen again, Zach, because there's all sorts of ads that somehow my ad blocker isn't taking care of.
But I'm going to read from my screen here.
This is from this article by Tyler Durden and Zero Hedge about this This marginalization of summer squashes.
Tyler Durden is a pseudonym.
Yes, I know.
Benjamin Franklin Day, BF Day Elementary School, which serves the neighborhood in the northeastern suburb of Seattle, decided to discontinue the pumpkin parade holiday tradition this year on the advice of the school's racial equity team, according to Seattle-based conservative radio host Jason Rantz.
In an October 8th newsletter to parents obtained by Rance, the school explained the rationale behind the decision to cancel the pumpkin parade, which traditionally involves a procession of children in Halloween costumes.
"Halloween events create a situation where some students must be excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience." The letter read: Costume parties often become an uncomfortable event for many children, and they distract students and staff from learning.
Large events create changes in schedules with loud noise levels and crowds.
Some students experience overstimulation, while others must deal with complex feelings of exclusion.
It's uncomfortable and upsetting for kids.
End quote.
Instead of the Halloween festivities, students at BF Day Elementary may participate in fall events that are considered more inclusive, such as... You ready?
Oh yeah.
What?
Right, so this sounds like the idea was, okay, we have to make Halloween problematic.
artwork while quote "sharing all the cozy feelings of the season." What?
Right, so this sounds like the idea was, okay, we have to make Halloween problematic.
Let's spitball a list of the best critiques we can come up with and that was the damn list.
I don't...
Personally, I don't care about Halloween.
My mother and her dearest friend, who was also a very good friend of mine, used to make me these amazing costumes, and they were amazing and wonderful, but Halloween itself just never did it for me.
I don't care about Halloween.
This isn't personal.
I'm not taking this personally.
The idea that no one should be able to participate because not everyone can participate would be bad enough.
Bad enough, right?
But this is actually taking it one step further.
No one can participate because some people might be made uncomfortable by it.
This is, again, they are building, they are trying to create the illusion that 100% consensus can be created, and unless and until you have 100% consensus on any given issue, you can do nothing.
You are not allowed to do a thing.
So what is a Halloween parade?
A bunch of kids dressed up and marching around?
Like, at one level, who cares?
But at another level, what they are replacing it with is thematic units of study about the fall, reviewing autumnal artwork while sharing all the cozy feelings of the season?
This sounds like the same ol' same ol' garbage school that we have been spoon-fed That are much better for a particular kind of girl style of learning than most boy styles of learning.
Sit still, be nice, raise your hand when you have to pee, and have no ability to embody anything that you're learning ever.
We're making, we're guaranteeing that no one is going to be able to be an adult.
Right.
Guaranteeing it.
This is like the last stage of learned helplessness.
Because what the idea, you know, is it possible that somebody could Put on a Halloween costume that would make you pretty fuckin' uncomfortable.
They're not even going there!
Right.
That's not even the suggestion.
Let's just say, yes, obviously there are Halloween costumes that would make people uncomfortable, right?
How do you draw that line?
Not all that frickin' easy, actually, right?
Yeah.
But the point is... And this was the point that Erica Christakis made at Yale.
I was gonna say, she's the best thing that ever happened to Halloween, but... Yeah.
The point is, we are teaching a lesson, right?
I don't even think it's inadvertent, but if it's inadvertent, that's about the best thing you could say for it.
The lesson we are teaching is that the problem is Anything in which there's any possibility of anyone stepping over any line that might make anyone else uncomfortable, the proper thing is top-down governance, upend the whole thing, and put some utopian nonsense in its place.
And the point is, what are the chances?
I can't even remember what you said about celebrating fall or something.
That's not going to be anything There's going to be cozy feelings of the season, autumnal artwork, thematic units of study about the fall.
Right.
And you know who— Which won't include any study of Halloween, or maybe that's how we should do it.
You know whose rights are being trampled here?
The rights of the people who will be disappointed because there's no Halloween thing.
Right?
And those people do exist in large numbers.
As a matter of fact, I would bet they're the majority of people.
You're going to trample the rights of the majority so that you don't hurt the feelings of some children who probably don't even exist.
Exactly.
Who may be imaginary.
Right.
Which tells us this isn't about the children.
Right.
This is about power.
Just like what is going on more globally does not appear to be about public health.
This is about, it literally somehow, and I couldn't tell you how this is true, but somehow this is about buzzkill as an ideology.
Mm-hmm.
Anything you like that feels familiar.
You're not having fun, are you?
Right.
Anything that's logical, right?
The idea of going on a date with somebody because you're attracted to them and they happen to be of exactly the sex that you would predict you'd be most likely to be attracted to, right?
Whatever it is is gonna be made thoroughly on fun and the whole point is I think there are some people who aren't having fun which you know we could feel bad about that and we could say what can we do about those people who aren't having fun instead we're gonna hand them the keys to civilization and they're gonna kill everybody else's fun in a search for equity.
Pretty much.
Pretty much, right?
Pretty much.
This reminds me, actually, of the penultimate thing that I was hoping to get to today.
Just as the weather cools, we've begun to see on our local next door reminders that sometimes critters will move in on top of or inside your car's chassis as you slept in order to get warm, and that you want to check.
for squirrels and mice.
Literally, this was a next-door thing that I saw today, okay?
And this was accompanied by this image from Newport, here on the Oregon coast, in which- It's a sea lion, isn't it?
It's a sea lion!
That has crawled not under the hood, because probably couldn't get into the car, but on top of this person's car, and they were being reminded that they needed to check for sea lions before driving off with a sea lion on their car.
I have felt crazy since I got my driver's license, but I never start the car without checking the hood for sea lions.
I know, I know.
And you were looking at me at first like I was not making sense, but that in part because, you know, you learn to drive as did I in LA where, you know, the weather doesn't get that cold.
And so it's just a cursory glance for sea lions.
It's not a difficult check.
No, it's not.
Right.
But I mean, we don't yet have the Czech sea lion light.
That could tell you, you know, because you could just go if you if the light wasn't on and you had reason to believe that the system that checks for sea lions was intact, then you could just skip that part and be on the road sooner.
But.
So you are currently having already successfully taught one of our children to drive in the process of teaching the second child to drive, and I think, man, your checklist before actually starting the engine and going must be pretty lengthy.
I have said to you, to all three of you, you and our two boys, You are on lead on the teaching to drive part and I have not been there for the checklist, but I now imagine that this is why you sit in the driveway for 45 minutes before going anywhere.
Yes, my driving school has a philosophy of benign neglect.
No, this is actually true.
The way you learn to drive, the way you learn to drive is through experience.
And so my purpose is to interfere minimally and to allow you to make mistakes that do not result in the dinging up the vehicle, the harming of other people or their property, any of those things.
And as long as I can get that stuff off the table, then the point is actually you do need to make some mistakes in order to figure out how to get the thing done.
But none of those mistakes should involve pulling out of the driveway with a sea lion on your hood.
Right, no, exactly, exactly.
Hence the checklist.
Yes, now the question is, if you were, let's say you skipped that, right, you were in a hurry or something.
As I have been sometimes.
And it turned out, you found out, let's say you're on the highway and you realize, oh, I know why I can't see, there's a sea lion on the hood, what do you do then?
Got it!
Right?
You pull over, you don't pull over on the highway, presumably you're better.
No, I think you stop short so the sea lion won't saw.
That is a terrible idea.
You know what you're doing there?
You're externalizing.
That's your sea lion.
I know, I'm a sea lion externalizer.
That's terrible.
No, you want to get the sea lions safely off the highway, right?
No, that is part of the social contract.
It's not written explicitly.
Between you and sea lions.
No, you and the other people.
I mean, yes, it is an extension of that concept to the wildlife.
Yes.
This is what happens when we spend a week off air.
Yes.
Oh my god.
Okay.
One last thing before we say goodbye.
Not for a week, but for 15 minutes or so before coming back for the Q&A.
Okay.
We received this wonderful email from a woman who said I could share her email and I'm just going to obscure her identity.
This is from a couple weeks back.
Heather, hi.
I've been listening to you and Brett for almost a year now.
My sister turned me on to your show, Dark Horse.
I love you guys.
I belonged to the Daily Wire and saw the show this morning.
I never really reach out to folks like you because I know how busy you folks are and don't have time for just random emails from everyone, but I got emotional over this show.
It was so good.
Honestly, I used to think of myself my entire life as being liberal, but I was so disgusted by what was going on I've moved away and I've understood some conservative views more for the first time in my life.
But what moved me so much was when you and Brett said we need to look each other in the eye and accept our different views on just a lot of things in life and respect each other, that it gives us such power.
And it opens our thoughts and minds to the other person's view.
Heather, I was spilling coffee on my kitchen table because I was missing my mouth.
I couldn't take my eyes away from the show.
I'm going to buy your book and keep you and Brett in my prayers.
I admire you and Brett and appreciate the work you both do.
Thank you for being so flipping awesome.
Wow.
That is great.
That is great.
We try to see everything that comes in.
We do miss some of it and we certainly don't respond to the vast majority of it, but we do appreciate that.
We appreciate knowing how much people are responding to what we're doing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, it's a little bit like you don't get caught speeding every time you speed, but, you know, you get caught enough that it causes you not to do it.
We don't see everything that comes in, but each one of those that we do see stands in for a bunch that we don't see, you know, both positive and negative.
And anyway, it does give us a sense for what impact we're having in the world.
And it's It's really, really gratifying to hear something like that, especially from somebody, you can just tell by the way she's written it, that there are things on which we substantially disagree.
And you know how much that matters?
It doesn't matter.
In fact, it enhances us.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Good.
I think we're there.
I believe so.
I believe so.
So we're going to take a break for as long as it takes to get the Q&A links up on Odyssey and already up on YouTube, and we'll be back with our live Q&A.
Ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Email any logistical questions, not questions for us to answer in the Q&A, to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Consider joining our Patreons, and especially please read the book.
It's now actually available everywhere, and it's in libraries as well throughout at least the U.S., I assume and hope elsewhere as well.
And it's going to be translated into a lot of languages.
Right.
If Lithuanian is your first language, hang tight, it's coming.
Yeah, that's going to be a little while, but yep, that's happening, as are some other terrific translations.
Yep.
Australian.
We're actually going to hold back on that one.
The offer wasn't good enough.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anything else to say?
I don't think so.
I think we've done it.
All right.
Until next time, be good to the ones you love and eat good food and get outside.
