#105: State Lies Coming Across (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/EvoLens105:ab84d3cbe2a641c230507d2a3406fdf5d0972168 In this 105th 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. We discuss compliance, and that non-compliance is not inherently a bleak, dark, dreary place; it can be joyous. We read an excerpt from Catch-22. The Multnomah County Sheriff’s office is—in contrast—a bleak and dreary pla...
- Hey folks, welcome back to the Dark Horse Podcast, the podcast we know that the podcast we know that God loves because nothing ever goes wrong.
How was that?
Is the sound fixed?
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Do we know?
We don't know.
How about my sound?
Do either of us sound like Barry White?
That's the question on the table.
I guess we will find out soon enough.
For the vast majority of people who are listening to this who weren't here for our first start, 10, 15, 20 minutes ago, I don't know, was it hours by now?
Apparently the sound was off enough that some reports came in that I sounded just a bit deeper than usual, but Brett actually sounded like Barry White.
Which was, people were wondering if this was maybe intentional, but no, it was not.
Right, it was an opportunity to reinvent myself, had I seen it coming.
But caught off guard as I was, it did not work out that way.
Yeah, did not work out that way.
Here we are, episode number 105.
Episode number 105, that was actually going to be my guess.
Was it?
Yes, I'm not sure why I have to guess.
You would think I have as much information on this topic as anyone, but that was going to be my guess.
It was going to be your guess.
Well, we have as usual a lot of things to talk to you guys about today.
It's not just going to be our live streams, hopefully every Saturday for the foreseeable future, but we're going to get back into some of these hosted episodes with outside guests.
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's something for everyone, but there's definitely something for some people there.
It will be quite jaw dropping in many regards.
Yeah, these episodes are.
We have something for some of you some of the time.
Right, exactly.
It's the opposite of the internet, but even though, ironically, it's on the internet.
Here we are on the internet.
All right, we're going to be talking a bit about Catch-22.
I've read to you before from Catch-22.
I've forgotten.
I didn't take a note of what episode that was in, but we've got a different excerpt today to talk about.
It seems apropos.
A number of people feel like they're in actual Catch-22s right now, so this is not actually about the The situation that Heller named in the title of the book, but something from the book.
I'm not going to tell us.
I'm not going to talk about where all we're going.
We're just going a bunch of places.
We're going to finish up by talking a little bit about places.
If they want to know, they got to stick around.
Place and the moment we're in and Thanksgiving and being grateful and all of that.
All right.
Yeah.
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We have been working with just an amazing artist, who next week actually we'll be able to link to some of his other work.
But Zach, if you would show my screen for the moment.
Oops.
This is the newest art, Welcome to Complex Systems.
For those who are only listening, it's got A crocodilian with a bird plover in its mouth doing sort of the tooth cleaning that crocodilians have in association with birds under some circumstances.
And this is going to be the first in a series of Welcome to Complex Systems.
This is a phrase we use a lot.
And there are just Complex Systems everywhere you look.
The other few things that we have coming out in the next couple weeks aren't.
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We'll have more of those too.
So that is available in hoodie, in t-shirts, I think on a tote bag, and the rendering here is not perfect, but the art is gorgeous.
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Yes.
If demand is high enough, we will endeavor to get this on a radio telescope.
Really?
Yes.
For purchase by individuals?
For viewing at a great distance.
I see.
That's terrific.
Okay.
It's going to be one of those days, I guess.
I think, yeah.
I think it is.
OK, why don't we just go right into the ads?
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Indeed.
And we've been thinking a lot about courage this week and about compliance and about really at some level, this just little excerpt from Catch-22, which you would remember it and I found in our book here, was prompted by our talking about how so many of the was prompted by our talking about how so many of the renditions of
The resistors.
Those who do not comply.
Those who say, no, I'm not going along.
The life that is portrayed of them tends to be one of One of darkness and paucity.
It's one of austerity.
Austerity and the image that comes to mind.
It's sort of like a grayscale liquid of unknown provenance dripping from ducts onto you.
You can't ever quite get warm or dry.
There are very few comforts.
It's a dreary, dark choice, but if you're that kind of person, then you go.
And we wanted to talk about the other way to view this.
Right, and in fact the reality.
So there's of course a great deal of effort invested in spooking people into imagining that if they say what they see, then terrible things will befall them, and that keeps a lot of people in line.
You don't want rats crawling over your toes while you sleep, do you?
No, I don't think so.
But I mean, that's the sort of thing that that's that's the imagery, right?
Like, okay, you step out of line and pretty before you know it, that's the kind of life you're going to be having.
Right.
And indeed, you know, in the current and I should point out that when you say resistors, there is this hashtag resistance thing that I don't want any Oh, I don't even know that.
Well, it's a throwback to the election, in fact, the 2016 election.
But the idea is it's a branded kind of resistance rather than people who are actually resisting the orthodoxy.
In fact, it's become a kind of orthodoxy.
But nonetheless, there is this interesting phenomenon Where if you actually do first principles thinking, you call it like you see it, and you do so publicly, things do happen, right?
And not all of them are good, to be sure.
And we have lost quite a number of friends in recent times over calling it like we see it with respect to issues related to the pandemic.
Guess what else, though?
The other thing, though, what they don't manage to convey is that this causes a kind of upgrade in your social life because the people who, you know, publicly chastise you in such circumstances are actually not high quality.
They may seem like it under normal circumstances, but when the chips are down, they won't be there.
And that's actually a very important thing to know.
We learned this at Evergreen, too.
Right, but let's just be very clear, and I know the viewers who are longtime viewers who are coming here because they find something of value will not have made this error, but I could hear what you just said as suggesting that if you get critiqued, you know that person isn't doing you a solid and isn't worth having a No, no.
A great friend will critique you.
They will do it carefully.
But there's, you know, there's this public distancing thing that is of a very different sort.
And we saw this at Evergreen.
And of course, the first time we learned this lesson when this happened at Evergreen, you know, there were lots of people who we had thought were our friends who turned out not to be up to the challenge.
But, a great many people emerged and the point was the trade was very positive, right?
The upgrade in the quality of people that surrounded us was amazing.
What we would say at the time, in fact, was that there were surprises in both directions.
And we've begun asking some of our new friends, some of the people whom we are coming into contact with, okay?
When you spoke up, when you became public on whatever topic it is, That you are now persona non grata in your former social circles.
What did you find?
We try not to lead the witness, we try not to tell people what it is that we already think we know, and what people say over and over again is a reaffirmation of what we ourselves found, which is that there are surprises in both directions.
Some of the people who we thought would be loyal as friends, even if they didn't agree with the conclusions, were not.
You know, were cowardly, were disloyal, did not act as friends.
And some people with whom we actually didn't know that we had any affinity or affiliation at all stood up and acted courageously and boldly because they too could not bear to observe an injustice or, you know, authoritarianism flying under the banner of anti-racism or science or whatever it is, right?
So I guess what I would say is, you know, you could simply count heads, right?
And frankly, I don't know what the our social circle grew a lot after evergreen.
That's not necessarily what's taken place in modern times.
But the point is, if you do so waiting for quality, then what you find is that actually you discover incredibly interesting, dynamic people who are excellent at careful thought, right?
And so anyway, there is this kind of upgrade phenomenon that is not famous.
People do not know that, you know, that this is part of the equation.
And so... There is a question.
We do hear from people.
And I think this is justified.
Okay, but you guys, us, we're findable.
And indeed, so many people reach out to us that we don't, we aren't able to respond to most people who do.
And so I'm sure, you know, we miss lots of people who are amazing, who reach out to us who we just never follow through with, because we don't have too many.
Yeah, we don't have the time for it.
We don't have that, you know, time is finite.
But for those of you who don't have a way How do people find one another?
What we're trying to say is being courageous is not inherently going to bring you a life in which rats are running over your toes in your sleep, but how is it that people find the community of other people like them who are not seeing the world the way they're being told to see it?
What my impression after Evergreen was, I wish, you know, if there were to be, you know, a minute of supernatural stuff, right, and you could pick what the supernatural thing was.
The ability to know Who actually had the characteristics that would render them strong in adverse circumstances and who seemed like they might be that person but was destined to disappoint?
This is the most important piece of information you could have, right?
You do not want to discover once you're in the foxhole.
That the person who talked a good game actually has no courage and will sell you out, right?
You don't want that.
You want to know ahead of time who really has the depth of character so that what you encounter on the surface Is actually indicative of what's below, and you don't know that until a severe challenge.
And so in essence, there is no substitute for the high pressure test of the system.
So I guess my point is, I believe that anybody who stands up will discover this.
They will find out that many around them who they think are, you know, and who are More than decent under normal circumstances will fail the test under dire circumstances.
Well, so two things.
I hope I remember both of them here.
We have found, you know, when we are anonymous in the world as we're moving about, and increasingly that's not necessarily the case, and frankly I mourn the loss of anonymity because for me as an animal behaviorist, a lot of what I learn about people is by going out into the world and not just observing but interacting with them as just, you know, a human being who doesn't already have stated opinions in the world.
And, you know, we get recognized and approached, and it's lovely.
We've yet to be approached by anyone with whom it wasn't lovely, but I always feel a sort of sense of like, oh, that means that I can't be learning in the way that I would be learning from here, because I don't know to what degree this is a show, right?
But when we have, both you and I do this in somewhat different ways, and largely overlapping, but somewhat non-overlapping, like retail venues, Ask people.
Just show any little indicator of not being totally on board with whatever the dominant paradigm is right now.
In the summer of 2020, here in Portland, it was largely about the responses to the protesters that became rioters every night, and it was about shutting down police, and it was
It was about Black Lives Matter, and increasingly it's about, you know, lockdowns and outdoor masks and vaccine mandates, and it is amazing how many people seem not only willing but eager to take the smallest hint that maybe you were not an automaton, that maybe you haven't swallowed the dominant thing, hook, line, and sinker, and will then just talk.
Will talk a Sometimes a little bit, but sometimes it seems like they go on for hours about what it is they're actually seeing and what they think it means and how bad the public policy and the uniform public response seems to be.
Yeah, actually, I'm sure, I'm sure that this has been understood by those who have analyzed authoritarianism.
But one of the hallmarks has to be when you, you know, coerce a population into compliance, the pressure on individuals is immense.
And the desire for those individuals to find somebody that they can actually be safe in talking about what they don't like about it.
In other words, there's a danger in Confessing, yeah, actually I'm not on board with this.
Even if I'm complying, it's not because I think this is a good idea.
But people cannot, people will not in general be public about this because the hazard of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person is too great.
So if you, you know, put out a little bit of bat signal.
Yes, I do have a cat.
He's crawling in my lap here.
If you put out a little bit of a bat signal, Right?
And I mean, in fact, this is where we are, I would say, on masks.
Right?
The mask thing has clearly become about compliance.
And I will say, for the thousandth time, we were extremely early on the idea of masks.
And the failure of the evidence... It seemed obvious.
It seemed... We were compelled that it seemed obvious.
And that the U.S.
Surgeon General, Nahud, Fauci, and everyone else was like, don't wear masks, that would be foolish.
And then they came out with like, no, actually, that was to preserve the PPE for the healthcare workers.
That seemed obvious to us, and I think we were wrong.
Right.
I think we were wrong.
I think there is a small amount of good.
It's not enough to justify mandates.
It requires, A, certain kinds of masks.
B, it requires that they be worn in very particular ways.
And the point is, it's just not justified.
But it's been a marvelous policy from the point of view of discovering who will... Will they agree to this?
Right, who will go along with mandates that make no sense, and it's been just, you know, really picture-perfect with respect to taking the message, be frightened, and transporting it everywhere.
It rides around with every citizen who has to put on a mask or walk around with it.
We get these reminders constantly, you know, there's a pandemic, these people are a danger to you, right?
And now, the thing is... The unmasked, the unvaccinated, the unns, are dirty and dangerous.
Yeah.
And perhaps evil.
Right.
Now, you and I are compliant, mask-wise.
We don't fail to put them on.
We live in a city, a state, and a coast that is largely masked.
Right.
So, we put them on.
We're not flaunting... Inside retail establishments, except when we're eating.
Well, no, no, no.
Hold on.
We are compliant with the requirement to wear a mask.
The harm, while there, is small enough that we are not going to ignore the rule.
However, there is no rule that says you have to play along with the idea that this makes sense, right?
And so...
When one sits down at the table and takes off their mask in a restaurant as if they're, you know, as if this is like smoke that if you get below it, you can you can breathe again.
You know, one is perfectly free to evidence.
Yes, I'm complying.
But I think this is nonsense.
Well, I think it's actually it's an oh, sorry.
It's I was in a booth in a restaurant in Austin, actually with with a friend, and he said, wow, this is like the one square mile in all of Texas where masks are required, and he actually had not come with one, and I was able, I was like, oh god, you know, I have so many here, take one of mine, and we sat down, and because we're in a booth, he said, oh, it's not about the smoke, it's actually there's the invisible force field that comes across the booth, and as long as everyone else stays outside of our force field, we have no chance of spreading the thing that we don't have.
Right, the thing that you don't have.
Right, and you know, the paradox is there are so many, you know, when you have, you know, the waiter comes over wearing a mask, right, and you're sitting there not masked, and actually my sense is to the extent that this does any good at all, We're more or less morally obligated to put them on at that moment to protect this person, right?
It is only because I don't think that this is a very effective remedy that I don't think that this is a glaring error because it's, you know… Right.
And that's what I was doing until I started to see all of this work suggesting that they're not actually particularly effective.
Yeah.
But anyway, yes.
A little bat signal that suggests I don't think this policy is all that well thought out is liable to put you in contact with others who have those doubts and are likely feeling very isolated about them themselves.
Yeah, and really there's a smugness that some people are willing and eager to convey, and then It's not there's everyone else, but that is one of the ways, that is one of the dichotomies that I am seeing now.
There's the smug, who largely, you know, are actually functionally innumerate, I think.
And get your nose out of my water.
She is not talking to me.
For those of you listening to the podcast, she's talking to the cat.
And, you know, who say things like follow the science, but don't actually, you know, wouldn't recognize a hypothesis if it smacked them in the nose.
And then there's sort of everyone else.
And yes, there are degrees to which the everyone else have conclusions that they're certain of, or not certain of, or have investigated them as much as possible from first principles.
But there is a degree of uncertainty.
The, you know, the smug are inherently certain.
And if you're certain right now that the thing that got handed to you by the CDC or MSNBC or anyone is simply true on account of it got handed to you, then you're not doing your thinking for yourself.
And frankly, your smugness is, should evaporate right away because it's based on nothing good.
Yes.
And so I think we're heading towards the ultimate point here, which is many people are Living under different multiple layers of fear one of those fears is about what happens if you acknowledge your doubts and indeed you are being encouraged to believe that what happens if you acknowledge your doubts is going to be dire and We're not going to tell you that there are not serious consequences there are and we've experienced them.
However, there is another side of To the puzzle, which is how you will feel when your doubts are no longer a secret that you are afraid is going to be discovered.
And that's what the quote from Catch-22 reveals.
Yeah, okay.
Let's do it.
So this is from the middle of the book.
I forgot the chapter.
It's not Milo the Mayor.
It's Nately's Old Man.
Not reading the whole chapter, just about a page here.
So this is...
This is a young, this is a- You want me to set it up?
Yeah, go for it.
You want to set up the whole book?
Oh, sure.
No, no, I thought that's what you were about to do.
No, I was just gonna set up the scene.
Okay, so the scene involves one of these young pilots.
Pilots had a very, very dangerous role in World War II.
A lot of them did not come back, most of them did not come back.
So it was a very terrifying thing.
And this exchange takes place- Hold on, so it's a piece of fiction, but Heller himself, was he a bombardier?
He was in planes, but I don't remember.
I think he was an airman, yeah.
In any case, the exchange takes place, obviously if you're a pilot, unless you're based on an aircraft carrier, you're based on land.
But this is the equivalent of shore leave, where they've gone into Italy, and they're at the whorehouse.
And the old man is the proprietor of the whorehouse, and I believe he's talking to Nately, is that right?
Nately, yep.
And Nate Lee is a young gun, a 20-ish year old guy who is basically pontificating on his understanding of how the world works.
And this extremely old man, the proprietor of a whorehouse who knows a whole lot about how the world actually works, responds and says all kinds of interesting, sometimes hilarious things.
And anyway, this exchange takes place.
Yeah, I mean it goes on for a long time.
I'm just going to read the short little bit here.
The old man says about someone who had risked his life.
You see, imagine a man his age risking what little life he has left for something so absurd as a country.
Nately was instantly up in arms again.
There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country, he declared.
Isn't there?
asked the old man.
What is a country?
A country is a piece of land, surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.
Englishmen are dying for England.
Americans are dying for America.
Germans are dying for Germany.
Russians are dying for Russia.
There are now 50 or 60 countries fighting in this war.
Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.
Anything worth living for, said Nately, is worth dying for.
And anything worth dying for, answered the sacrilegious old man, is certainly worth living for.
You know, you're such a pure and naive young man that I almost feel sorry for you.
How old are you?
25?
26?
19, said Natalie.
I'll be 20 in January.
If you live, the old man shook his head, wearing for a moment the same touchy, meditating frown of the fretful and disapproving old woman.
They are going to kill you if you don't watch out, and I can see now that you are not going to watch out.
Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me?
You might live to be 107 too.
Because it's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knee, neatly retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction.
I guess you've heard that saying before.
Yes, I certainly have, mused the treacherous old man, smiling again.
But I'm afraid that you have it backwards.
It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees.
That is the way the saying goes.
It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees.
That line has given me chills for, I don't know, three decades, three and a half decades since I first read it.
There's something about it, the idea that we have this thing encoded in our minds about, you know, it's better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees, and that in fact we don't even notice this other possibility, right?
It's ruled out by the way that the initial thing is phrased, and the point is, Well, I guess it's another version of Plato's cave in some sense, right?
The idea that there's this other reality that you can't quite see, but if you knew what it was, you would value things very, very differently.
Well, it raises questions of whether or not, where you are at the moment, like, are you on your feet or are you on your knees?
Like that is the sort of Plato's cave, what world is it?
What looking glass have you or have you not gone through?
You know, what is your situation right now?
How free are you?
Yeah, how free are you?
And it's funny, I have never thought of it this way before.
I've long loved Catch-22.
There's so much in it.
It's so brilliantly done where the wordplay is wonderful and the comedy is utterly hilarious.
Plenty dark and all of that, but I've never thought of it as a dystopian novel before, but I'm beginning to wonder, you know, I'm hearing discussions about dystopia and about what we are facing and I think everybody who gets it realizes It's not Orwellian.
It's not Kafka, right?
It's not Huxley.
It's pieces of these things.
It's a hybrid between these things, but the hybridization goes beyond those classics, right?
It definitely extends to Brazil, right?
There's an element about this that is The movie.
That is Brazil.
Yeah, Brazil the movie.
But also Catch-22, right?
And I think the point is how many of these great texts, or whatever they are, does one need to have a piece that covers all of the things that we're encountering
And then, you know, if, you know, I do long for a circumstance in which we have all had enough shared grounding that we can have the conversation, right, that you can say, Kafka trap, and it doesn't, you know, leave a third of the audience wondering what the heck you're talking about.
Well, that of course is some of what, you know, stereotypically conservatives bemoan about the loss of a classic great books curriculum, for instance, right?
That there was a shared cultural set of knowledge that you could know if you were interacting with people from the same rough sort of cultural class, they would know.
And frankly, this was also true about what, like from our childhoods, like must-see TV.
Right?
You know, Thursday night on NBC, everyone watched the same stuff such that if you had the kind of job that had a water cooler the next day, you all had seen, you know, the Huxtables on the Cosby Show the night before, and you all could talk about these, you know, fictional people Who were imagined to be living lives, but you know, they were as if friends.
So, you know, your workplace brought together all these people who live separate lives, but they had this shared thing that was brought into their homes every Thursday.
And, of course, the loss of both classic traditional curricula and of television or other media that actually comes in at a particular moment as opposed to when it is that you have the time, both of which have reason.
The reasons for the changes are not entirely bad, right?
And the changes themselves are, of course, not entirely bad.
But there are trade-offs.
There is very little now that synchronizes us.
Except for this forced consensus that we are told we are all synchronized.
We all know that.
You know, the uns are dirty, right?
We are synchronized by something that is the opposite of education.
It is miseducation or something like it.
I have to say that whenever you say curricula, I think of an academic vampire.
I just can't help it.
Curricula.
Curricula, yeah.
Female, presumably.
No, but that's better.
Oh, I guess Dracula is not female.
Yeah, no.
Maybe he is now.
Perhaps.
Yes, perhaps.
Who's to say?
Dracula.
Only Dracula, yes.
Lived experience being primal.
It's not lived.
It's unlived experiences.
Oh boy.
Too late for Halloween, but we're there right in time for Thanksgiving with the unlived experience.
Yes.
All right, so the point I wanted to make.
I have also made this point about, you know, the shared... God doesn't play dice, but Fairfax does.
He sure does.
He's now about to eat a rubber band.
That could end badly.
What has gotten into all of us this week, really?
So I think the problem is, the conservatives don't have it right, right?
The Great Books curriculum is not the curriculum for modern times.
Neither is the liberal arts grab bag, right?
And the point is... I don't know what you mean by the liberal arts grab bag.
I mean, as I've said a number of times, I think liberal arts, the central concept of liberal arts, which is basically an education that is not about training you, is correct.
It's about learning how to think and helping reveal to you what you can and cannot do.
It is about upgrading the mind.
The problem with it is that upgrading the mind, you know, gets into a question of, okay, what do we regard as an upgrade, right?
And the point is, I would say any education that does not give you basic competence in scientific thinking and math is a failure, right?
If a liberal arts education can include an education that doesn't have that, then it's a failed concept to me.
But anyway, the point is, what we need is some sort of Great book some hybrid between a liberal art style thinking which is too flexible because it doesn't give us a shared set of Concepts that allows us all to interact with the same baseline, right?
And then the great books thing the problem with that one is that it is too grounded at the moment that you declare these books great and the point is the amount of the amount that we know about the universe is changing and so what are the chances that that Group of books that one most ought to prioritize is static.
What it really is is it has to be a dynamic frame that still prioritizes the sharedness and you know your point about must see TV.
I agree and the point is must see TV.
I don't think it was except it wasn't important.
It wasn't good but but much more important.
than good is shared in some sense.
And I've said this about books themselves, that in some sense, The important thing is that people have been run through the same experience so that they have a basis for interacting over it rather than everybody having an a la carte experience, which can be a higher quality experience because it's tailored to you.
But it means that the us part doesn't work as well.
So there is something to having at least, you know, you know, I've made the point that.
Musical.ly, the era of LPs and a small number of radio stations which dispensed music into your car and your house, that wasn't a natural moment, right?
It seems more natural than our current moment, but no, it's just the moment we were born into.
And the point was, though, that, you know, there's nothing natural about having every radio station playing Stairway to Heaven during a particular month because it's the latest craze.
But it did give, you know, it meant that if you met somebody from a different high school, they were also having a piece of the same experience.
It also allows you to place your memories in time later, right?
Stairway to Heaven was big when we were tiny kids, so we weren't around for that moment.
In the 80s, when we were in high school, there was a soundtrack to that era that, frankly, a lot of retail stores are now playing.
We are the target audience for a lot of retail stores, and it pulls you right back.
Right, it builds you right back.
And that is to some degree true now, of course, like there's music coming out right now that will only ever have come out in 2021, because that's just what history and the, you know, the truth of time and reality is.
But there's so much of it, and it's so desynchronized.
That there won't be, there can't be a like, oh, you know, remember, remember the month that all the radio stations were suddenly playing X. And also, you know, the earthquake happened in Y. And that happens to be the month that I broke up my first boyfriend, or Oh, really?
Because that was the month that I first tried sushi, you know, whatever it is, like you can come together over like, okay, there are these universals.
And they're not just an earthquake in why.
They're also things that actually tug at the deepest emotional truths, which is often music, right?
And so we can synchronize with those things, even with people who we didn't know at the time, because they were experiencing the same thing, the same emotional thing, the same musical thing at the time.
And that is one of the desynchronizations and therefore, I think, the decoherences of modernity.
Yes.
With globalization of media and social media surpassing most other kinds.
Well, we are seeing two things at once.
We are seeing the market deliver, because markets feed individuals, because it is individuals usually who do the spending, right?
It is feeding us something that tickles our particular fancy, which is separating us.
It's decohering us.
At the same time, it's dispensing mind-numbing narratives where there is nothing but questions to be asked.
There's no question asked and the narrative is dispensed as if it was obviously true and anybody who departs from this has lost their freaking mind, right?
So it's the worst of both worlds, right?
We don't know each other well and yet we all believe the same bullshit.
Yeah, so you walk around amongst strangers at the moment, as we still have the opportunity to do because we live in a city, and when something crazy happens near you, What should have been able to happen, and what has been true in the past, is you can make eye contact with strangers and be like, just check in, whether or not there are words exchanged.
You're like, you're seeing that?
We both are seeing the crazy thing that's happening.
We know so little about one another now, and we trust each other so little, that it frankly makes the crazy stuff, it facilitates the crazy stuff, because there's no checking in even between strangers.
And, you know, in some, in some cases, even the attempt to make, you know, friendly eye contact is taken as an affront.
And I will say, I want to, I'm going to end today by talking a little bit about Just my experience walking around in the sun this morning, and I realized two-thirds of the way into my walk why it felt so different.
A, it was sunny, blue skies in November in the Pacific Northwest, which is pretty rare, but everyone was smiling.
Everyone I saw smiled at me, and I tend to smile at people when I see them out there.
Long experience, actually, in developing world countries.
My experience is that, especially if my language isn't quite up to it, that this is just sort of an openness, like, hey, I'm going to try here, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to communicate what I need to communicate.
So I tried to not smile first at people, which is hard for me in that sort of situation today, and everyone was smiling.
I wasn't prompting it.
No one was wearing a mask.
We were outside.
No one was wearing a mask.
Everyone was just out there in the sun.
It wasn't warm, but you know, on a sunny, beautiful day by the river.
Happy to be out there.
Yeah.
And how unusual and how sad that that is unusual now.
Unusual.
And there are all of these, you know, you've known me as long as anyone and almost, you know, almost, um, you know, that I have freely interacted with anybody who would interact back since I was a kid, you know, I was a little shy as a kid, but, um, as I was interacting with anybody,
I would interact with just about anybody and, you know, the degree to which cool, interesting conversations sprung up out of nowhere was amazing.
It's something I learned from my grandfather, who behaved the same way.
And that has been lost in large measure because there's this question.
You know, as we've talked about on the podcast before, if I'm interacting with a woman, there's an immediate question as to whether I'm a creep.
Right.
If I'm interacting with somebody of a different race, there's an immediate question about, you know, Am I one of these, you know, largely imagined racists, right?
Am I serving my own interests trying to feel better about my privilege by talking to somebody of a different race?
And my basic feeling is I'm actually pretty good at just ignoring these details.
It's not that I don't see them, but I don't care.
That's true.
And not caring is now a problem because there's a question about do you really care?
Are you lying to yourself, right?
Right, and we used to be able to overcome such hurdles with honesty and with integrity and with an assumption that the person on the other side wasn't trying to be an asshole.
Right.
And there are some people who are trying to be assholes sometimes, and a few who are trying to be assholes all the time, but in general they're not.
I'm reminded, I'm not even sure I've told you this, but I'm reminded of an experience that I had.
We knew each other already, but we were still in high school.
And I was in a photo shoot at the beach, and I was made up, which is not my usual thing at all.
And so it was just like the cameraman, and maybe a lights person, and me, and LA beach in the late 80s, and this homeless person.
There were a lot of homeless people in Santa Monica then, but not nearly as many as now.
And they were all more of a type than the very varied homeless people we see now.
And I hadn't really ever interacted with any.
And this guy comes up, and he's probably twice my age, but not old.
He's probably late 30s.
And he was scraggly.
He certainly didn't seem dangerous.
And I was there with these two guys who were doing the camera and light work anyway.
And he was just watching.
And they were like, do you want him out here?
I'm like, yes, whatever.
And they said we were going to move.
And he said to me, I've never met anyone like you before.
And I said, totally, honestly, not forgetting that I had a face on, right?
I've never met anyone like you before either.
And all three of these guys were like, what?
No, I'm serious.
How did you land here?
And we ended up having a conversation, but really he couldn't fathom.
He had this sort of like, oh, I'm in Hollywood and this is some glamour person.
I'm like, no, I'm just like a kid who happens to look like this, whatever, but I'd like to talk to you.
And at first he thought I was mocking him.
And I wasn't.
Of course I wasn't.
I mean, you know me.
Of course I wasn't.
Some other people might have been.
And we ended up getting to talk, which struck me as, oh, I don't think this guy would have approached me if I'd just been randomly walking down the street, because people randomly walking down the street don't want to have homeless people come up to them.
But because we were sort of pinned down doing this weird, stupid Hollywood thing with a photo shoot, he He was allowed in and I further opened the door and said, well, let's talk.
And that was fine.
And it was good.
And mostly, mostly that's not possible.
Mostly people don't let that be possible.
And it's certainly less possible now.
Yeah, it used to be that within a few… I mean, I still have experiences like this, but it used to be that, you know, a few words made it very clear that you were just a stranger looking to connect in some way.
Yeah.
Right?
And it's amazing how much harder that's become.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really is.
It really is.
So the segue to the next thing was acquiescence to the norm, to the conversation that sounds like what everyone else is having actually to the conversation that sounds like what everyone else is having actually looks It's not interesting.
That's the thing that's not interesting.
You end up living on your knees in a greyscape.
And you had an experience this week at the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
Yeah, you have that correct.
I went to the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, was not expecting anything extraordinary.
And Zach, do you want to put up those pictures?
Any of the outside ones?
There's the inside one.
Here's the outside.
So, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
Multnomah County is the county that Portland is in.
And the Sheriff's Office is essentially completely boarded up.
So this is a live office.
This is their central office.
Well, as I pulled up, my sense was I must be in the wrong place.
This is obviously not an active building.
Right.
Right?
Doesn't look like it.
Doesn't look like an active building.
And, you know, the only thing it suggested otherwise was that the parking lot was full of cars.
So for people who are just listening, you've got a, I don't know, it almost looks like it could be an elementary school or something, like sort of a flat, not very interestingly architected building, but not a piece of glass visible on the outside.
It's all got plywood on the windows.
Well, I think partly it's the plywood on the windows that makes it look like that.
The entrance is actually sort of grand and there's a big atrium on the inside, but it looks like a defunct building, right?
It looks like a building that's been condemned.
And it's going to be torn down.
And so anyway, I parked in the parking lot.
There was a sheriff talking to another sheriff through the window of a car.
And I said, how do you get into the building?
They're like, oh, it's just around the front.
Which seemed odd because there was nothing about this building that looked like anybody could walk through a door in the front.
It looked closed.
So I walked through the door in the front.
Excuse me, that first picture again?
Yeah, you want to go back to that first picture?
It's completely dark in there because the design of the building is they have these Large banks of windows on three of the four walls.
So you've got like clear story windows and then also an entire bank that we're looking at in front of us here that's windows as well?
Yeah.
So the atrium here is 20 feet tall with a huge number of windows on three sides that are supposed to be bathing it in light during the day.
And you walk in and it's completely dark because there's no alternative plan for the light.
And it's just a boarded up building.
Even more shocking, the glass has been broken out and...
It's just been left jagged up in these high former window panes, right?
This is the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
And this is presumably from the unrest, in quotes, that happened more than a year ago in the summer of 2020.
Yeah, I did some looking.
I wanted to make sure there wasn't some event that I didn't know about.
Just now.
Right, I mean, you know, what could it be other than the unrest?
But anyway, all I could find was that April of 2020, was when this building was attacked.
No.
Why would it have been attacked in April 2020?
That doesn't make any sense.
Sorry.
Hold on.
Okay.
So you were there this week, and I think nothing was happening, rioting or protest-wise, in the streets of Portland until after George Floyd's death.
Yeah, I'm sorry, that isn't the right date.
Let me see if I can, while we're talking, come up with the news report.
But in any case, the point was... I'm not going to be able to do it.
The point was...
Somehow this building was damaged by rioters who of course have attacked the police in Portland In the same way that police have been attacked all over the country More vigorously, but more consistently right, you know Uninterrupted months of it in the summer into the fall of 2020, right?
- Right, and the building has been left this way.
In a sense, it's impossible for me to really even imagine that any active workplace could be left in this condition.
Even just the psychological impact of having had people hostile to you, engaged in this kind of violent, destructive behavior, damage your building, and then you're expected to go in there and see the reminder that these people... And work in darkness.
Work in darkness, right?
It's an inhumane condition.
And it's a kind of acquiescence.
Well, it's clear acquiescence.
In fact, what must have happened here is that there was a decision not to fix this.
Yeah.
Right?
I guess I very much want to know that there wasn't something recent that happened.
But if not, we're talking about months, maybe even more than a year, of a workplace People who are working civic jobs should be able to work in a place that feels humane, and this is absurd.
Yeah, it's absurd.
It's inhumane.
And it, you know, we are now seeing a conspicuous lack of law enforcement.
And I have to say, as much as on the one hand, I know that that ends in disaster.
And I feel like, hey, look, the police are obligated to be enforcing the law, because a lot of us are depending on the law being enforced.
Rule of law is the key concept here that prevents terrible people from Ruining our way of life.
Yeah, I also do have some sympathy where the police watched the country turn on them and even though most people didn't believe it The fact is, because people were intimidated and didn't speak up, it effectively, you know, the police were left with this vile stigma being leveled at them.
All cops are bastards, right?
All over Portland there were suggestions that cops were deserving of being killed.
There was an incident we talked about on Dark Horse at the time, where a severed pig's head was lit on fire in front of the courthouse.
And anyway, to find that the damage to a sheriff's building has just simply been left there as if the decision-making entity, presumably the sheriff, didn't decide to leave the building this way, although I'd be curious what the decision-making process was, but that somebody has decided
That the protesters had a good enough point that this should be left, that their statement of destruction should be left as it was and unrepaired is mind-blowing to me.
Yeah, it is.
You, the next thing you want to talk about was this show and excerpt from the video done by the Matz.
Yeah, so many people will have seen this now.
Matt Taibbi put out a piece that he teamed up with, and I apologize to the second Matt in this case, whose name I'm going to, I at one point knew, but I think it's Matt Orfallia.
Do I have it right?
I would have said Orfalea, but either way, we got the spelling here.
Orfalea has a certain ring to it.
Maybe it's Matt Orfalea.
And if it's not Matt Orfalea, Matt, maybe you should consider that pronunciation.
So I had the two people on set whose people's names never get right.
Never said correctly.
But anyway, Zach, do you want to show just a couple of 30 seconds of an excerpt from the video that Matt Taibbi includes?
The video is done by Matt Orfalea.
The teenager drove from his home in Illinois.
Approximately one mile to Wisconsin.
Across state lines.
Driving across state borders.
He's driving across state lines.
Across the state line.
Across state lines.
If you look at the Rittenhouse case, he crossed state lines.
Drives up to events.
Across state lines.
Came across state lines.
Kyle Rittenhouse, who traveled across state lines.
From out of state.
Out of his own state.
Came across state borders.
Whenever you have a situation where a 17-year-old is crossing state I had a lot of reactions when you showed me this last night, and one of them was, crossing straight lines is like horse dewormer.
Yeah, so there's obviously a narrative, however this happened.
Putting entirely aside what you think about either Either Rittenhouse or... Or Ivermectin, right?
But the use of a thing, a phrase, that can instill fear or mockery, in the case of across state lines, people I hear across state lines, it's usually with, you know, abducted children.
That's not good.
Or horse dewormer.
Ugh, these idiots.
Right?
Yeah, I think the point is, it takes a I wish there weren't two Matts in the story, because I would just call him Matt.
Matt Orphalia.
Orphalia?
Matt Orphalia's compilation here.
We're just making it worse.
I'm sorry.
Demonstrates that there was an unnatural, an unnatural, what's the term?
Consensus?
Yeah, that's not a consensus.
It's an unnatural convergence on a particular way of describing these events that leave a very particular impression.
Well, but convergence actually takes some of the onus off.
Almost certainly there were talking points delivered.
Well, of course, I think this is likely.
How they ended up in all of these mouths, I don't know.
It could be a matter of contagion, where there is a style of thought that now has whatever the particular political apparatus, whatever it thinks, gets dispensed and spreads as people repeat each other's Phraseology or it could be that there's something more nefarious and directed, but the basic point is look You had an event.
It was actually a complex event, right?
You had a kid who obviously did something stupid in a country where we have a particular relationship with firearms.
But the point is the portrayal of the story of Rittenhouse having traveled across state lines.
Traveled across state lines leaves the impression that he made a long trip, right?
Which suggests something about what he was up to.
It's actually inconsistent with what actually happened here, whatever you think of it.
And so the point is to have screen after screen barking the same thing.
Well, what was the average person's experience of this?
The average person's experience of this is it didn't matter what screens they encountered, the screen would say this phrase.
But until you knew that every other screen was saying it and it was unnatural, then you wouldn't necessarily think you had a misimpression of the story.
And so your point about Horstewormer, Standing where we were standing suddenly every speaker on earth erupted in horse dewormer at the same moment every screen portrayed horses dewormer paste the story it.
Unfolded in the most nearly sudden.
It was like the week of horse dewormer, right?
And suddenly this was on everybody's mind.
It was, you know, it was about feed stores.
It was that damn FDA picture of the vet stroking the horse's nose or whatever, right?
It was the hospital in Oklahoma.
Oh, the hospital.
Right.
People, car crash victims.
Gunshot victims who during the summer, gunshot victims were standing in parkas outside the hospital, unable to get in because of all of the overdoses.
Right.
And so, the point was that was a very unnatural story, too, that didn't stand up at all to scrutiny.
It also just, again, revealed what the playmakers in the media are among the class that would call themselves the coastal elites and actually really view the so-called flyover states with such disdain.
And we've seen this, professors with students as well, with such disdain That it didn't even occur to them that in the summer in Oklahoma they might not be wearing parkas.
Like, they have that little model of what is going on.
Well, I don't even think that's it.
I think the way this works, it triggers a verificationist circuit, right?
And the point is… But basic fact check.
But this is my point.
If you are in a verificationist mindset, right?
Then your brain doesn't see the parka in August, right?
Because it doesn't fit.
It's looking only for confirmatory evidence.
And so the point is, if you were looking for evidence That all of those people who keep showing up with this inconvenient counter-narrative are actually just dummies, right?
Then the point is, it doesn't really matter that the stuff that glues the story together doesn't add up.
What you're looking for.
Just like with the crossing state lines.
Right, exactly.
Oh, it was a mile away.
A lot of his family lived there and he worked there.
And the gun was there already.
He didn't take a gun and drive across state lines, right?
He drove across town and I mean, the other thing is, you were at the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office this week.
Happens, we live in Multnomah County, but there's two other counties right here, parts of Portland are in it.
Did you drive across county lines this week, Brett?
I'll bet you did.
Since when is this line the one that matters?
Did you cross the street?
Right.
Which boundaries are we going to get concerned about in order to instill fear in people and to continue to drum up a frickin' race war when actually what we should all agree on is that that is not what we want?
Why do some people appear to want the division?
So, this is the point.
You've got A story that doesn't hang together.
But if you're only paying attention to it, you know, out of the corner of your eye, it's sort of like, okay, I get it.
Right wing kid drove a long way with a high powered weapon looking for trouble.
Those people need guns.
Right?
So you just sort of put it together that way.
But what I don't understand, and the thing that drives me crazy, Is at the point you discover that there is a well-resourced campaign to convince you of something, why do you not become immediately skeptical of everything said by those same people?
Right?
At the point you discover that, you know, oh yeah, there was this week where I started to think it was clever to invoke horse dewormer to dismiss a whole bunch of people, the idea that actually that wasn't really my idea, right?
That was CNN's idea and NBC's idea and it was the Washington Post and it was, you know, all of these outlets simultaneously making this clever, you know, and in fact the great example of this is the Dean Scream.
Right, from Howard Dean's renegade presidential campaign.
96 maybe?
I think so.
When Clinton was running the second time?
Yep.
Eric has talked about this as well, but the point was there was one evening Dean came out of nowhere Howard Dean Howard Dean whose slogan or catchphrase Was he was from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, right?
Which was hilarious because the Democratic Party wasn't yet as bad as it is now but the point is it was being taken over by this other thing and the idea that there were still people within the Democratic Party who were Fundamentally about democracy point being bill was not from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party Right.
And so the thing that happened was, uh, he, I think he had lost a primary and he was trying to, he was saying, look, this isn't over.
We're going to go to, and then we're going to go to, and he had a horse voice from campaigning or something.
And he, his voice broke as he was doing something.
And if you'd been standing there, you would have thought, I didn't actually see an event.
But it got recorded.
That's the thing.
I didn't actually see an event.
Right.
Can we create an event where an event didn't even happen?
Right.
Yes we can.
So the point is they broadcast this thing incessantly as if it was like some embarrassing gaffe.
I mean there was literally nothing to it.
Yeah.
And then the late night comedians were like relentless joking about Howard Dean and it was like that's the end of his presidential campaign.
The Dean scream.
The Dean Scream.
So anyway, at the point you discover that you've been Dean Screamed, right?
At the point you discover that that joke that you thought was clever was actually not your idea, that you were doing the bidding of something that wanted everyone to think this was a clever joke during a particular week in August or whenever it was.
You should say, hey, okay, I don't know what's going on here.
It's interesting that there appears to be a campaign to convince me that ivermectin doesn't work and it's only for dummies, right?
And horses.
You're not calling all horses dummies, are you?
No, absolutely not.
I wouldn't want to do that.
But the point is, at the point you discover there's a campaign to convince me of something, then you ought to look.
I mean, it's like if somebody lied to you, right?
If somebody lied to you on a bunch of fronts, right?
If somebody sold you, you know, I don't know, a piece of property, a car, something, and they told you, like, a bunch of things that turned out not to be true, and then you ran into them again, and they started telling you more things, you would be naturally skeptical.
You should be.
That's how skepticism is supposed to work.
That is how skepticism is supposed to work.
It is interesting, though, that people's skepticism is not triggered by the discovery that they themselves have been broadcasting a story that was created for them that does not match the facts that they now know.
And the interesting thing about this trial is that it revealed these facts, even if many people refused to accept it.
They speak as if the verdict is a clear evidence of white supremacy, which of course makes no sense.
No, it doesn't.
This actually does work as a segment.
We just made a lot of different things we want to talk about this week and I think it is actually kind of all All of a theme.
The Atlantic Monthly, one of the longest-running monthly magazines, sort of culture and art magazines, in the U.S.
since the 1800s, I think, has gone full gossip on vaccines.
So let me see.
I have somewhere, if I can pull it up, if my thing will work here.
Here we go.
Zachary, you can show my screen now.
This is just a PDF of the Atlantic article This is the Atlantic Daily, so this is just one of, you know, quickly produced, so this is not an extensively researched, long-time-in-the-works piece by any means.
But the Atlantic Daily, not everyone needs to rush for a booster.
So I'm on the Atlantic's email list, and I get their daily emails, and I saw this on the email and went and just downloaded the PDF.
The United States is reportedly gearing up to authorize COVID-19 boosters for all adults.
Should you snap one up or wait?
Here's what to consider.
Now, the author of this, Carolyn Mims Nice, says, if the booster rollout is a TV show, as my colleague Rachel Gutman once joked, this evening brought a juicy, if not entirely unexpected plot twist.
According to the New York Times, the FDA and CDC are moving to make Pfizer boosters available to all adults, not just those at higher risk.
So should you rush out for your extra dose?
To help you figure out what's right in your situation, I spoke with three reporters who have been covering the vaccine rollout.
Sarah Zhang, Catherine J. Wu, and Rachel Gutman, previously mentioned, to weigh the pros and cons of running out immediately versus sitting tight.
I'm going to share a few of these things, but right there, that should be enough, right?
And I did not go and research any of these four women.
They are apparently journalists who have been covering this story.
That actually tells us nothing about whether or not they know anything, if they have done any assessment of their own, whether or not they are able to... What are you doing?
Trying to find that date.
Okay.
It's very hard for me to talk with other things going on right here.
Okay, so we have these four people who are maybe journalists, claim to be journalists, but we have no idea whether or not they've been right about stuff.
And you know, I could have done that.
But here we have some of the things they say.
This is supposed to be what you, the You know, educated reader of the Atlantic is going to look to decide whether or not to get your booster.
The say-so of four people who have apparently no particular background here.
Why hurry?
This is why hurry versus why wait on your booster.
Why hurry?
The shot will, well, give you a boost.
You're likely already well-protected from severe disease, hospitalization, and death thanks to your first course, Rachel pointed out.
But the early science suggests that extra doses help your body produce additional antibodies, perhaps lowering your risk of infection.
That's a lot of hearsay.
And a lot of, this friend of mine says, therefore, let's do it.
Why hurry?
You're around higher-risk people.
Parents who are trying to protect unvaccinated kids, for example, might consider using a booster as an additional precaution, Sarah told me.
So, two things happening in that one.
Sarah told me.
So, the person writing this article is taking no responsibility, but she's only deferring responsibility to someone else with equal lack of actual ability to assess the evidence.
You're around higher-risk people, parents who are trying to protect unvaccinated kids, for example.
Those two sentences, put next to each other as they are, makes it sound like unvaccinated children are higher-risk people.
Unvaccinated children are not higher-risk people.
Unvaccinated children are very, very low-risk people.
Healthy children don't die from this disease.
Healthy children are at some risk from the vaccines and at very much less risk, almost certainly, from the disease.
Not only low risk from the disease, but there is a discussion that we are not having, which is the The vaccines, which is not the right term for them, but nonetheless, the vaccines, to the extent that they provide short-term protection.
May actually stave off disease long enough that it is a danger.
For children, yes.
Yeah, it is not entirely unlike the situation that caused parents of our parents' generation to put kids of our generation in contact with each other when they had chickenpox, which was that it wasn't a serious threat to our health.
As children, and it could be a serious threat to our health later.
And so there was an argument for it.
It was effectively a crude natural vaccination process.
And the idea that, I mean, I guess the problem is that they've just simply rolled the logic in so that you don't check it.
The idea that children need to be protected from this and therefore parents might do so by, right, is Upside down so anyway yes it's a it's it's just it's like a.
It's conversational argumentation that doesn't subscribe to any of the normal rules.
Exactly.
And because it is produced here as if it's conversation, it is, I think, also being held to a lower standard even by most readers.
So, next one.
Why hurry?
You plan to gather over the holidays.
On average, antibodies peak three weeks post-booster, Rachel explained.
That's amazing.
Three weeks post-booster and then it starts to decline.
So that's something right there that they're even admitting that.
But earlier, the very first one was early science suggests that extra doses help your body produce additional antibodies, perhaps lowering your risk of infection.
So you're just aiming for like the one moment when you think you're going to be at highest risk and you give three weeks post-booster and then like that's your magic moment and after that you're less safe.
None of this is tracking.
None of this is a coherent message.
Why wait?
Why wouldn't you go get your booster right now, even though you're allowed to?
We don't know how to optimize vaccine timing yet.
Boosters haven't been available that long, so the science on timing is preliminary.
You don't say.
Extra doses mean extra chances of side effects.
Getting a booster could increase your risk of rare side effects, Katie explained.
Quote, there's a reason we don't boost unnecessarily, end quote.
But that, she added, is not a reason to not get jabbed if you do need it.
And how do you decide if you do need it, I wonder?
That's left for us to decide.
Finally, keep the bigger picture in mind.
Boosters aren't a silver bullet, Katie reminded me.
And though this won't be solved by you foregoing an extra shot, there are lots of people in the world who haven't even gotten their first dose yet.
That's worth remembering.
What?
It's a total non sequitur.
Whether or not you are going to, for your own health, and because you have or have not seen various things about what these boosters are, what the vaccines that you got in the first place were, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there are people who you think should have had access to the vaccines and don't yet.
Literally nothing.
App zero.
There is zero relationship between those two things.
This is typical, just garbage, pseudo-causal, liberal-seeming argumentation that actually makes no sense.
It's effectively like the clean plate club logic.
That's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it's alluding to, right?
You have to eat your dinner because there are children in fill-in-the-blank China, you know, starving.
I don't know what people say anymore, but no, actually, that's a non sequitur.
Yeah, it's a non sequitur.
I mean, the whole thing is a non sequitur.
But keep the bigger picture in mind, Brett.
Well, but, you know, there's something about the chatty Pseudo-logical argumentation.
Right, and in some sense, basically what this is modeling is, if you're going to make this argument, you know, what will come back at you and what might you say, right?
And it's sort of like… Well, Katie said!
Right.
But, you know, you can imagine just substituting yourself as if you're being clever saying these things, but the question is, you're not really being clever.
Yeah.
Did you hear that the booster's going to be available?
Oh my god, I did hear that, and I heard that if I take one now, that that might mean that someone else can't have it, so maybe I should wait.
It's nonsense.
It's not the way that we should be making these decisions, and unfortunately it is the way that a bunch of people are making decisions, and this is making that more likely.
Yes.
Increasing the odds that that chirpy, gossipy, coffee-clatched level of conversation is the basis for decisions about your health?
No.
No, it's not.
No, it shouldn't be.
Yes, it's going to be.
In fact, it weirdly harkens back to what we were talking about earlier in the podcast, which is there are sort of two visions of How you will be viewed based on your position, right?
Yeah.
And if you're like, yeah, I'm trying to get the timing of my booster down, right?
The point is, well, that assumes that you're going to get one.
It assumes that you should get one.
And the alternative of like, well, wait a minute.
What about the adverse event signal?
And do we know what that means yet?
Right?
That thing, well you're going to be shouted down and mocked and treated as, you know, you're going to be treated as the cause of the pandemic if, you know, you're vaccine skeptical here.
And so the point is you're being offered a choice.
Do you want to go back to being chatty about this kind of stuff or do you want to be the villain?
Right?
Can't we just get back to normal already?
I feel like it's you guys who are keeping us from getting back to normal.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And that is not what the evidence suggests at all.
Not at all.
Not at all.
Okay.
Let's finish up with something and now for something completely different.
All right.
Although I alluded to it earlier.
I was taking a walk this morning before our live stream.
And we've traveled so little in almost two years now, and both of us love to travel, feel that it's important, feel that we would have been able to show our boys so much more of the world by now, because this was exactly the age at which we could have been exploring places with them.
It just hasn't been possible, and it's a huge loss.
One thing is we have been able to see every moment of the change of the place we're in.
We are able to watch not just seasonal changes at the level of months, Um, but, you know, which the order in which the leaves fall from which trees and, um, you know, the way that the rain, uh, if it comes just as they're about to fall, as opposed to after they've fallen changes, the patterns in which they are left on the ground and, you know, all, all sorts of things.
Um, but it prompted me and I already mentioned how, how happy everyone seemed out there today, how willing to share their joy.
Everyone seemed to be out there today and how wonderful that was.
I was thinking of a student I had many years ago, obviously.
I haven't had a student in a few years.
I actually don't remember much about him.
I don't think that he was your student either, but he was looking for a winter quarter project.
He wanted to come into my program in the spring.
We were on a quarter system, so winter quarter would have been January through middle of March, really, you know, the darkest, wettest, drierest time in the Pacific Northwest.
And he didn't see anything in the catalog to entice him, and he was looking for maybe an independent contract, which is like, you know, I do research, but I'm not actually taking a set curriculum.
And I recommended to him, as I did to all students who were not already dedicated to some particular curricular or other plan in the winter, and who were free at some level, I said, you know, go south, travel.
You know, either find a research project to be an assistant on, or go, you know, go woofing, like volunteering on organic farms, which a lot of our students did, because they were sort of those, you know, crunchy, liberal types, and good, honest work, and they got to interact with people from different places and have their hands in the dirt and all this.
Or, you know, often what I would recommend was, because a lot of our students really didn't have very much money, was given how much you want to learn in school, take the quarter off.
Do not pay evergreen tuition, and take the quarter off and travel.
Like, go somewhere and just travel and like actually be with other people who don't remind you of anyone you know, and learn the language well enough to interact with them, and you will be transformed in ways I can't even begin to tell you.
And um...
Often when people resisted that from me, I'd say, oh, no, I just need to finish college.
Can I get college credit for that?
I'm like, I will not sign off on giving you college credit for travel.
Travel is perhaps the best education you can get, but I'm not going to hand over college credits for that, even though I'm supposed to do that as an employee of the state, et cetera.
I won't do it.
They say, oh, I'm scared.
Oh, lots of reasons that people didn't want to go and travel independently or even woof or do one of these other things.
But his, and I wish I remembered his name, I feel like it was Matt actually, but I think that's probably just because we've been talking about Matt.
His explanation for why he didn't want to leave the area around Olympia for the winter was one I hadn't heard before and I really respected it and it was He was from the Midwest, if I remember correctly, and he had moved to Olympia a year or so before starting school so that he could establish residency so that he had a tuition that would put him in less in debt.
He'd been there for a full year and was now beginning his second year and could see already how much things were even different from that first year.
You live in a place for one year and you feel like that's what it's like here.
Right?
And then you live in a place for a second year and you realize, oh, maybe that was an unusual year.
You know, there are going to be commonalities, but it's hard to know what to make after one year.
And he said, I want to stay in one place, like actually really fully one place for the full year and not, you know, go backpacking in this and that and the other, like I did the first year before I was in school, because I want to see at the day-to-day level And this wouldn't have been the language he would have used, but by controlling for place, what is it that changes over time about this environment that I'm in?
Because that's the way to learn about a place, more than by dipping in here and there and by thinking, oh, well, you know, spring is like this.
Well, what about this spring?
What about last night was dry and today is wet?
And how does that affect the animals that I see and how it feels when I walk out the door dressed a certain way?
And I thought,
As much as you already mentioned this, I want to be traveling, I want to be able to go places I haven't seen before, and I want us to be able to take our children places they haven't seen before, but actually really getting to know a place intimately and paying attention to all of the changes, not just the broad seasonal and climate level changes, but the weather changes and the migrations, big and small, is another way into understanding the world that you're in.
Yeah, and in fact a hybrid model where you travel and then you stay put somewhere is actually in many ways the best way to discover something important.
It's very easy to travel lightly through an area and you know you get a glimpse of a lot of stuff.
Right, but coming to know, you know, a foreign city is a really fascinating thing.
And, you know, it's great if you have, you know, even a week in a place can be a lot, especially if you make use of it.
But sometimes if you can move someplace for a couple months, you can really get an understanding of what another An alternative location on Earth is like.
Yeah.
It's an experience I think most people just don't get to have.
You know, it's too tough to arrange it.
Especially, you know, once you do have a job that keeps you in place, although increasingly jobs don't necessarily need to, or a family and, you know, in schools and such, it's harder to do.
And so I do encourage those who are without those kinds of commitments.
I was going to say once it's possible again, although it may be possible for some people now.
It's not clear what all the restrictions are in all of the places.
There are places certainly now that I wouldn't go that I would have thought I would have gone 10 years ago.
But But both being absolutely where you are, and then also choosing to go places that are far from what you think you need in order to be comfortable, and not going to the Disney-fied versions of foreign places, but actually going to the real things, just provides benefits that are unquantifiable.
Yeah, absolutely.
Is there anything else to talk about?
I think we may have gotten there.
All right.
I mean, there is lots of stuff to talk about, but it's Thanksgiving next week.
We'll be back two days after Thanksgiving, but that was sort of a way to talk about being grateful for where we are and looking forward to even more amazing things in the future.
So, we're going to take a 15-minute break.
We'll be back with a live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Email logistical questions that you may have to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Right now at my Patreon, you can ask questions for our live private Q&A.
We've got that Welcome to Complex Systems merchandise up now at our store, which is not on the screen.
I don't see it on the screen.
Store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
There it is.
So for those listening, store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
And we didn't say anything.
About a Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which continues to sell well, and we continue to hear from people who are being affected positively by it, and we really appreciate that, and we love that it is continuing to spread, and we hope that that continues into the distant future, and encourage you to get a copy if you haven't yet.
Alright.
Alright.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
