#106: Freeing Ourselves from the Medically Woke (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 106th 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 Covid deaths in 2021, versus 2020, and what the numbers mean about public health policy; we also talk about the new variant. We briefly visit the difference in reporting between the Rittenhouse trial and the assault on people in a Christmas parade in Waukesha. We discuss types of woke, including medical. What is ...
And welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 107?
106.
106!
Alright, we don't even have to discuss Prime.
No.
I already know, it's off the table.
Indeed.
Yep.
106, yeah, alright, that's a lot of live streams.
We've got a lot going on in the world.
In fact, almost nothing that was true last week is still true.
We're in a whole new universe, so that's kind of interesting.
Yeah, it's getting a little much, isn't it, guys?
Are you sick of it?
Yeah, I'm done.
Yeah.
I'm getting pretty done.
Yeah, they say jump, and I say, how high are these people?
They really want us jumping?
That's good.
I like that.
Thank you.
That was good.
That was good.
OK, we're going to talk about a lot of things today.
You know, it's increasingly just It's beyond challenging to know how to choose among the very many topics that are popping up.
What both of us would love to be doing is focusing on scientific hypotheses and would-be truths and assessing whether or not they are truths.
There's a certain amount of that possible in the modern chaotic world, but largely we're stuck in the land of sort of social arbitration, which is harder to find our way out of, and also much less satisfying to spend any time in at all.
Yes, in a world where so much of belief is completely untethered from anything that's like actual evidence, it's very hard to talk about how evidence might modify beliefs and things like that.
I'm sorry, but at the point that you say, okay, well, this is what we're being told is true, and you assess it, and I say, oh, well, Well, actually, there's this other thing.
We couldn't have known that because you wouldn't share it with us, and why wouldn't you share it with us?
That in itself, not sharing data, not sharing evidence in advance of being asked, nay, in some cases forced to come to a conclusion about that evidence, is anti-scientific, as we have said here before.
But then there are traps, whether or not they're premeditated or not, wherein, ah, because you said the thing back then based on what we had told you and that was wrong, you must be wrong.
Well no, I'm actually not thinking of anything in particular here, just the fact that we are never given a complete set of information to work with in this modern environment.
I prefer to think of it as we have been dragged into someone else's psychosis.
It's not an enjoyable psychosis, it's just kind of psychotic.
Yeah, you know, actually I was thinking about this before we get into like the opening housekeeping ads and such.
There's this thing I used to say to you about we had, you know, we were unfortunate enough as really everyone is at some point to find ourselves in the company of people who we came to understand.
You know, I'm thinking of one person in particular came to understand was a sociopath.
And this was actually only over in my world.
This had very little to do with your world at the time, but of course we were sharing worlds mostly.
And I had been trying to make sense of all of the chaos that was happening around me suddenly in this very carefully curated community that was full of trust and warmth and love, really.
And then suddenly it wasn't, and suddenly there were a lot of things that were They're going wrong and I said you know I think I think a rubric is if suddenly everything that you thought was making sense isn't you know you should look around for a point source on that and when it's an individual it might well be.
Someone with, you know, a cluster B personality disorder, you know, someone who's an actual sociopath.
And I think in that case, it was like, oh, all roads trace back to such and such person.
And, you know, that turns out to be the source of all of the misinformation and the disinformation and the social manipulations and such.
And clear that person from the equation, and voila!
Things begin to make sense again.
And you can't do that when the would-be sociopath or psychopath is in fact a society-wide disorder.
So, you know, look around.
See if you can pinpoint a thing that is driving the chaos that doesn't mean that you can just exclude it from your life the way you can to some degree when it's an individual human being.
But I think there is an analogy to be made there.
Make one modification.
Cluster B personality disorder, or a perverse incentive big enough to create the same phenomenon.
That manifests with those same personality traits, but not necessarily because of an actual mental disorder.
Right.
And in fact, what you get is somebody is generating a fiction far enough from reality that people who have signed on to this sort of on-ramp stuff are left with, you know, a giant gap they'd have to jump to get back to reality land.
And so it's sort of like the person creates an artificial hazard and then sells you the solution to it in the form of a narrative that makes neat sense of things.
Right.
Finding it difficult to get your bearings?
I have a narrative right here designed specially for you and the world that I created for you.
Right.
In fact, I have these very excellent bearings.
They're very high quality.
The tolerances are narrow.
They're wonderful bearings.
They're not spherical, but you take what you can get.
They're oblong.
But other than that, beautiful.
Beautiful.
All right.
So we're going to be talking about a number of things today.
But first, we are on both YouTube and Odyssey.
The chat is on Odyssey.
You may ask questions for the second hour of the show, which will be a second live stream at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Tomorrow is the monthly private Q&A at my Patreon, which we encourage you to join.
We have a lot of fun with it.
It's two hours starting at 11am Pacific and the questions have already been asked, but it's a small enough community that we can actually interact with the chat and respond to things that happen in the chat.
And before we get on to the three ads that we have this week, we have new products at the Dark Horse Store, and we are going to show you some of these.
You may show my screen now, Zach, for reasons that are Totally arcane to me.
This is showing up in Spanish, so it's as if I am trying to buy things in Spanish.
That's fine.
I'm okay with that.
What?
Spanish?
But, you know, the products are in English.
It's just the, you know, do you want to... Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Se vende camisas con... Yeah.
All right.
That's not going to work.
That's not the way it could.
Okay, so we have four new designs this week for those of you who might be interested in gifts for yourself or your family and friends.
We have, and in all of these, they're available in shirts and hoodies and maybe tote bags and such, We have Saddle Up the Dire Wolves, We Ride Tonight, with this beautiful drawing.
Again, our artist, who, because he was working so hard on these this week, has asked us to wait a week before introducing his website to the world.
But we will share a little bit more about him next week.
So we have Saddle Up the Dire Wolves, We Ride Tonight.
Bonus points for anyone who nails the reference, We Ride Tonight.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, it's not limited to Gen X. You're much more likely to get it if you're a Gen X, but it's not limited.
It's open to everyone, even, you know, millennials, frankly.
Is it possible that I don't know the reference?
Oh, very, very likely.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
So we also have the YouTube Community Guidelines, because you can't handle the truth.
The description for which, written by Is it going to be my truly if it's yours?
I don't, I've never heard my truly, but after the show I'm going to do a little diagram and see if I can't puzzle it out.
So the description on this one, written by Brett, YouTube's community guidelines have been proven safe and effective, reducing insight transmission by 90% and decreasing severe cases of consciousness by two-thirds.
They are the key to controlling outbreaks of mental independence so we can all return to reflexive consumption.
YouTube community guidelines, because you can't handle the truth.
I was in a mood.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
We've got a lot more, of course, that we've had up.
We haven't taken any down.
And then we have this guy, Epic Tabby.
That is a rendering of our very own Fairfax.
So the renderings shown on the Teespring site aren't very good to avoid, I think, to avoid theft of the art.
But these are beautiful, high quality.
I think this is pen and ink.
So we have Epic Tabby, and then the fourth one that we have that's new now, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, is Book Burning in the Digital Era.
This one does not have any, oh I can't, it's not actually zoomed in quite enough.
This one doesn't have any words on it, but it's a, for those just listening, it's a pyre of books with flames, but the smoke is zeros and ones.
So those are the four new things that we've got out this week.
Book Burning in the Digital Era, the Epic Tabby, the Saddle Up the Dire Wolves We Ride Tonight, and YouTube Community Guidelines because you can't handle the truth.
All right, Zachary, if I may have my screen back.
Thank you.
So those are all available at the Dark Horse store, store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
And we have three ads for you this week.
We are, as always, very grateful to our sponsors.
Very grateful to our sponsors.
We have Vivo Barefoot, Mudwater, and Home Edix this week.
Brett, you lead us off.
In that order.
In that order.
Oh my god.
All right.
Well, I'm going to tell you about Vivo Barefoot.
Most shoes are not made for your feet.
They are made for someone's idea of what feet should look like and do, and be constrained by, and usually that someone doesn't actually know feet or what they can do.
Vivo Barefoot, in contrast, knows feet and isn't driven by fashion.
It will not make your feet feel like hooves.
We love these shoes.
They are beyond comfortable.
The tactile feedback from surfaces that you're walking on is amazing and they cause no pain at all because there is no pressure point forcing your feet into odd positions.
They are fantastic.
Your feet are the product of millions of years of human evolution.
We evolved to walk, move, and run barefoot.
But modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to health crises.
One in which people move less than they might, in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
Vivo barefoot shoes are designed wide to provide natural stability, thin to enable you to feel more, and flexible to help you build your natural strength from the ground up.
Foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them.
We both keep running into people out in the world who comment on our Vivo barefoot shoes that we are wearing.
They are wearing them too.
It's like an odd little club, but growing.
Once people start wearing these shoes, they don't seem to stop.
This has really been our experience.
We really like putting them on and going out and kind of feeling our way through the world.
It's a nifty experience.
All right, so go to Vivobarefoot.com slash Dark Horse to get an exclusive offer of 20% off.
Additionally, all new customers get a 100-day free trial so that you can see if you love them as much as we do.
That's Vivo Barefoot, V-I-V-O-B-A-R-E-F-O-O-T dot com slash darkhorse.
Okay, our second sponsor of the week is Mudwater.
M-U-D-W-T-R.
It's a coffee alternative made with mushrooms, herbs, and spices.
It's got a seventh of caffeine of cup coffee, and you get energy without the anxiety, jitters, or crash of coffee.
Each ingredient was added with intention.
It's got cacao and chai, lion's mane mushrooms, cordyceps, shaga and reishi, all fungus, turmeric, and cinnamon, and more.
I will say this.
I do enjoy my coffee, and I have it most mornings, but I don't need it, and that's intentional.
I've spent time places where coffee was not or might not be available, so it's important to me not to become an addict, basically, to lose functionality if I can't get it.
So I wasn't sure that I needed or wanted this product.
I don't get anxiety jitters or crash without my coffee, I just don't have coffee that day.
But I really love this stuff.
I'm a sucker for chocolate, and there's definitely a hint of the cacao in it, the chocolate.
Same for their Mosella Chai blend, which includes not just the turmeric and cinnamon I mentioned, but also ginger, cardamom, black pepper, nutmeg, and cloves.
It's a spice mix that goes really well with the season, also.
So Mudwater is 100% USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan, and kosher certified.
Furthermore, they donate a percentage of revenue to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
No, this product is not psychedelic.
And work with Pachama, which pays monthly to reforestation efforts to ensure that they have a net positive carbon footprint.
So, visit Mudwater.com slash Dark Horse to support the show and use Dark Horse at checkout for $5 off.
That's M-U-D-W-T-R dot com slash Dark Horse.
Use Dark Horse at checkout for $5 off.
And our final sponsor for the day is Home Medics.
They make an air purifier that actually lives up to expectations.
We have spoken often, and I have also written, about the health benefits of being outside in the fresh air.
Science knows some, but not all, of why being outside is so good for you.
But sometimes you can't be outside, and some indoor spaces aren't amenable to being totally cleared out by opening windows, at least not at all times.
And if, for instance, you've got pets in your home, there's a good chance you've sometimes got smells that you don't want.
Enter Homedex Total Clean Air Purifier.
It uses true HEPA filtration and UVC technology, capturing 99.9% of the bacteria, virus, mold, and fungus that were assessed in third-party testing, as well as pollen and smoke.
In our experience, it reduces all sorts of pet odors, as well as lingering cooking smells that are wonderful at the time, but maybe you don't want to wake up the next morning still smelling yesterday's turkey and potatoes, for instance.
This air purifier cleans large rooms fast and is quite inexpensive compared to similar items on the market.
It's compact, easy to carry, and not ugly either.
It also has both a low setting that is silent and three different light settings, one of which is no lights on even when the machine is running, which is terrific.
There are no unavoidable blue lights associated with this device.
So whether you're dealing with allergies or just looking to keep your house smelling fresh at times of year when you can't throw open all the doors and windows, go to Home Medics slash Dark Horse and use promo code Dark Horse and you'll receive a free replacement filter with the purchase of your air purifier up to a 99 degree value.
Make sure though that you add the replacement filter to your cart or else the promo code won't work.
That's a free replacement filter when you go to H-O-M-E-D-I-C-S dot com slash Dark Horse and then use the promo code Dark Horse.
That's our ads for the week.
All right.
All right.
Did you want to start us off?
Sorry.
Start us off with the topic as discussed.
Or I could start us off, but not with the topic that you discussed.
Ah, right, exactly.
All of which has got to be super fascinating to those listening who have not yet been in on the discussions.
No, I think this is, they get to look a little bit behind the scenes, see what's going on backstage, the rigging, the wiring.
It's just that fascinating.
It's just that fascinating.
Yeah, well said.
All right, sure, I'll start off.
So I wanted to start off with something that emerged last week.
Zach, do you want to put up the, I believe it's a Forbes article that I sent you.
All right, yes.
I can also start us off if you prefer.
Totally different topic, though.
I think we can do this as Zach is working his way towards the article.
Okay.
All right.
So what emerged last week was the claim that we had passed a grim milestone, which is... It does seem like the word of the decade.
The Grim Milestone.
Grim.
I think Grim Milestone is good, actually.
Yeah.
Especially because it kind of... It doesn't count as a word, though.
It evokes a headstone, as well, because milestones and headstones often look alike.
They do.
But, in any case, here you can see the claim that COVID-19 deaths for 2021 surpassed the toll from 2020, and obviously... In the U.S.
it's missing.
In the U.S., yeah.
Yes, this is the US, and this is obviously mid-November, meaning that any deaths that accumulate after this will be an excess in the 2021 number.
Now, I heard this reported everywhere.
What I did not hear reported anywhere was a proper interpretation of this.
Now, I will offer the following caveat.
The data on COVID-19 and everything related is tremendously distorted.
You don't say.
I do say.
Really?
And so it is possible that this number means nothing at all because the way that it was formulated is not robust.
But let's take it at face value.
Just if I may, one of the ways, and we've talked about many of the ways that the data are not, are impossible to interpret, and largely we aren't even, they aren't even made available to us, the data.
But one of the things that is true, that we were hearing about early in the pandemic, and didn't pay much heed to, but have since paid a lot of heed to, is the idea that some deaths are being attributed to COVID when people died with, but not necessarily of COVID.
The with versus of distinction is actually crucial.
Right.
There appears to be, and we can defend this, but there appears to be wide-scale accounting fraud where things that really belong in one category are placed in another category for narrative effect.
So, for example, if you are of a mindset that you want to hand down mandates and have people accept them, then of course you want COVID to look as bad as possible so the mandates feel necessary.
Now, I'm not saying how good or bad COVID is.
It's not good at all.
But I'm not saying that we know the answer to that question.
But I am saying that if your purpose was to get people to accept stuff and you wanted COVID to be really, really frightening, then you would want lots and lots of people in the column that says died of COVID and therefore died with COVID tends to get shoved over into died of COVID.
And we've seen this again and again.
Now you can say, look, this is complex.
It's an emerging situation.
It's very hard to figure out how to do these things, give these people a break.
But the problem is every single instance goes in the same damn direction, right?
You can predict where the accounting errors will be and in what direction they will go based on the public health narrative that is being dispensed to us.
And so with the caveat that all of these data streams are polluted and therefore it is not clear that we have actually had more Before you do that, would it be useful to hear what the context is that those who are reporting on it are saying about it?
Let's take that claim at face value, and let's put it in proper context.
What does that really mean? - Before you do that, would it be useful to hear what the context is that those who are reporting on it are saying about it, or is there not even an attempt at interpretation? - I saw very little interpretation of any kind.
It was the grim milestone.
It's just a sort of a fear headline.
Yeah, it's a formulaic presentation.
We've passed a grim milestone.
Without even any attempt at interpretation, necessarily.
More murders this year than last year, you know, and it's only December 1st, or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it used to be, even in a sort of a lightly journalistic article, you know, two, three, eight paragraphs in, there would be at least an attempt at, you know, why could this be?
Why might this be?
And I haven't seen any of these pieces yet, so I don't know.
Well, let's just say there were a lot of them, but it was a very narrow report that they were passing along.
But anyway, let's take it at face value.
Face value, more people have died in 2021 as of mid-November than had died in all of 2020 from COVID.
In the U.S.?
than had died in all of 2020 from COVID. - In the US. - In the US.
Well, what that suggests to me is that what we are doing has made things far worse.
Not a little worse by the residual of everything that happened after mid-November being on top of what had already happened in 2020.
That would be an even comparison.
But we can't make an even comparison.
We shouldn't make an even comparison because one of the facts that public health authorities have been doing everything to dodge Is that the immunity at least to Delta variant of people who have natural immunity, separate natural immunity from innate immunity.
Innate immunity would be the immunity that we all carry around to pathogens.
It's non-specific.
It's very general, but it keeps lots of us from getting sick most of the time.
Natural immunity, in this case, is immunity when you've contracted COVID, your immune system has successfully fought it off, and you have specific antibodies and T-cells that are adapted to fend off this particular virus with its various antigens.
It's messier, but immunity acquired through infection is more clean.
It takes longer to say, but natural immunity could mean so many different things and has already been used to mean lots of different things.
But immunity acquired through infection would be my preferred way of saying that.
Just to be clear, as we're trying to communicate with clarity, Right.
Oh, I agree.
Natural immunity is an ambiguous term because, you know, natural immunity just by common parlance could mean innate immunity.
It just doesn't have to.
I agree.
Immunity acquired naturally through infection is what we're after, which is an adaptive immunity.
It is the immune system learning the formula for the disease, and it is what vaccines utilize.
They create something else.
Vaccine-induced immunity They create something using that same mechanism.
So what we are talking about here is natural immunity acquired through infection.
Now what has changed between 2020 and 2021 is the number of people who have had that infection and have therefore generated robust natural immunity.
And the immunity indeed... Well, that's not the only thing that's changed between 2020 and 2021.
There's another big elephant in the room.
Well, there's lots of elephants in the room, but let's just say we know Before we get to new variants, let's just say, with respect to prior variants, either original variants or anything up through Delta, immunity acquired through infection appears to be an exceedingly good and long-lasting preventive from getting a second infection.
Right.
So, what has changed, the big deal, is At the end of 2020, something like a third of the population had had COVID.
At this point in 2021, something like half the population has had COVID and therefore has very robust immunity.
So what it means for more people to have died before we get to the end of the year here in 2021 than died in all of 2020 is not only that it will be slightly more deaths, but it's slightly more deaths on a background that is much more immune.
That's before you ever get to the vaccines.
So one thing to infer from this is if that information is correct, whatever we are doing is making things worse, right?
There it is.
That's the punchline, right?
If it is true that more people have died in 2021 of COVID than died in 2020 of COVID, then the public health policy is not working.
Right, and this is true.
Not only the easiest category to say should have made this a lower number, not a higher number, is the number of people who are safe from infection by virtue of having had COVID already, right?
But it is also true that a disease like this, really any disease, will tend to eliminate the most vulnerable first, right?
The people who have the most feeble innate immunity that is not generated by infection will be the most likely to contract the disease and the most likely to succumb to it.
And so not only do we have a population in which many more people have been infected and recovered and are therefore effectively immune to the disease, but we also have unfortunately lost many of the people who are most vulnerable.
So for this number to be going up is an indication of the complete failure of our policy.
Now you can extend that analysis further, but at least that far, this is really what we ought to be talking about.
Well, it's also true, of course, that we don't, you know, we don't know the long term, fill in the blank, right?
Like, you know, for anything with COVID, we don't know the long term anything, because it hasn't been around for that long.
And so, although, and I didn't go back and figure out exactly which episodes we talked about on, but there was one episode where we went into it extensively, and a few others where we talked about.
The comparison in immunity from immunity acquired through infection versus immunity acquired through vaccination.
And what these papers found was, if memory serves, I think they stopped tracking the patient outcomes at, it was either six or eight months post-infection.
And they found no falling off of immunity acquired through infection in that amount of time, whereas the immunity acquired through vaccination was a much shorter-lived duration.
So what we do have is very compelling evidence that the immunity acquired through infection, the so-called natural immunity, is more robust and more long-lived.
so more robust in terms of working against multiple variants, including Delta, and more long lived than the immunity achieved through vaccination.
But we don't know that after 10 months or 12 months or a year and a half, say, for those people who were infected with COVID in the spring of 2020, maybe their immunity acquired through infection is in fact waning because this is that kind of disease.
We should be able to know some of those answers by now, but I've seen nothing even attempting to do that analysis.
I have spoken with some of the excellent doctors who have bucked the narrative about this and talked to them about what they're seeing in their clinical practice.
With regard to recurrent patients coming down with it again after a very long period.
Right.
I believe this is all Pretty new variant that has been announced to all of us in the last two days, but To the prior variants, up through Delta, what we do see so far, according to these doctors, is that that immunity is durable all the way, and the implication is, as far as we know, it's a lifelong immunity.
Right?
We can't know that for sure yet.
We can't know that, but okay.
So anecdotally, we're hearing that the immunity acquired through infection does seem to be durable even beyond what the research has been able to show so far.
Yes.
And again, it's not that any research is showing the opposite.
It's just that it hasn't gone on long enough to show longer-lasting immunity.
Right.
But the point is, that's actually not an unusual situation at all.
Many diseases cause lifelong immunity.
The immune system is an absolutely glorious, complex system, and this is what it does for a living.
And there are diseases for which it doesn't work.
Because they have evolved a mechanism that continually evades.
In other words, they pay the price for something like an extremely high mutation rate, and they get the benefit of becoming invisible over time.
But, you know, I would say that is the exception, not the rule.
That requires selection to have confronted this problem, and it's sort of a 2.0 version of the arms race.
But for many diseases, there's just simply lifelong immunity, and so far as we know, this appears to be one.
Yeah, I think that about does it.
Okay.
You also wanted to talk about the new variant some, or?
Sure.
Is this that spot?
I think so, because none of the other things that we were going to talk about really has to do with COVID.
Yeah, I think we will, of course, return to this maybe next week because we will, of course, know a lot more.
This is really a very new story.
But, you know, I think everybody is rushing to formulate a position over what has been called new and Omicron.
I must say, I don't like these terms.
I'm beginning to feel That whatever is true of the actual biological phenomenon, there is clearly a narrative phenomenon riding on it.
And I wonder if Omicron is not part of a slick presentation that is supposed to get us to feel clever for being in on the new nomenclature which you have to learn.
If it's not a little bit like ordering, you know, a A Vente Americano with room for cream, right?
And the idea is you feel clever for knowing that Vente is code for whatever the hell size that is, which I don't know because I'm not cool.
20.
What?
It's going to be 20, isn't it?
I don't know.
I mean, it sounds like the number 20 to me.
It does sound like the number 20.
It hadn't even occurred to me.
We have never actually gone to Starbucks, but I think that's a Starbucks thing and that sounds like it.
20 what ounces?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
That would be cool.
All right.
I think I'm gonna go get one.
That sounds kind of good.
But in any case, I worry... Some things we just don't know.
Yeah.
I worry about a number of things here, and I think people should start tracking the story, but you've got to track it as two different stories.
One, there is a biological phenomenon.
Presumably, there is a new variant, right?
It came from somewhere, it does something, it has characteristics.
I think people have jumped to the conclusion that because it appears to be highly infectious, that this is a disaster.
Now, it could be a disaster.
But I don't think we know that until we know how virulent it is, right?
In other words, there has been too much talk since the beginning of the pandemic of, oh, viruses tend to evolve to become less damaging to their hosts.
There's truth in this evolutionarily, but all bets are off in the case of a virus that likely came from a laboratory experiment designed to enhance it in certain ways.
But nonetheless, It is possible that a variant that is more infectious but less destructive could actually rescue us from our terrible public health response, right?
Not saying that's what's happening.
I have no idea.
This is far too new, but I do think that you at least want to have a, whoa, slow down.
We want to know more about this variant before we know how to feel about it.
Yeah.
If it were more transmissible but less virulent, doing less damage to the host that it infects, this might actually be the thing that ends this hell that we are all forced to live in at the moment.
And it is also true that there are a number of things that are true of earlier variants that may or may not be true of this later one.
And some, you know, among other things, things like degree of transmissibility and amount of harm that it does, you know, but amount of harm that it does per different demographic groups.
So we know that the versions of COVID that we are more familiar with, Preferentially, go after you, the older you are, the sicker you are, and then there are a few other demographic factors like you're more likely to get sick if you're male, if you have dark skin, and that there are a number, you know, if you're institutionalized, if you don't get outside very much, and then there are, you know, the kinds of sickness include many, but especially things like lung and kidney disease.
And some kinds of cancers seem to really correspond with bad outcomes.
So, you know, does the new variant change any of those truths?
And, you know, I think, as we have talked about privately, one of the ways that it could be different, for reasons that we aren't getting into, like, you know, why might it have changed?
You know, one of the things that would be very dire for all of us is if it started to infect and really cause serious harm to younger people the way that it has not hardly begun to do yet, right?
Right, which is actually a prediction of Gerrit van den Bosch's model.
Yeah.
Which is frightening.
That it would expand the populations into which it's It's moving, although it could also spread and sort of become background and not be doing the kinds of harm that it has yet to begin to be doing to young people.
I mean, there's also the question, and I haven't really not looked at this new variant hardly at all, but I wondered with regard to the Delta and the other variants, What you and I have been wondering for decades now with regard to boundaries between categories and biological systems.
Species is a necessary concept with which evolutionary biologists divide up the world, but that doesn't mean that the organisms in question recognize those boundaries as such.
And, you know, on what basis are new variants being described and carved out and named?
And given that I am certain that you could make an argument, a compelling argument, to name new variants in a lot of places that they haven't been named, at a lot of moments that they haven't been named, that raises the question of what other factors, for instance political factors, are going into the naming of new variants in particular places at particular times.
Yeah, in this case, I think the argument that this is indeed a new variant worthy of naming appears to be almost absurdly strong by virtue of how many different mutations we are talking about.
Now, I will also say... So, but doesn't that raise the question of whether or not... So, we're late to this party, and it's been, you know, it's been... There are, you know, three intermediate forms that we didn't name that have been out there circulating, and it's been accumulating mutations, and now we finally see it in these patients, and oh, now we're going to name it because we see a clear boundary, but at the point that you see a clear boundary, that suggests that there was some time between now and the last time you looked.
Well, that's part of the problem here, is that so far, and again, we're nowhere in terms of time from our awareness of this thing, so it's very early to be discussing anything.
But there is something very weird about this variant, and what it implies about what must have happened evolutionarily.
In fact, It might not even add up at all, right?
So I don't know what that... Do you want to say anything more about that?
Yeah, I do.
You've got a bunch of different mutations, right?
Many of which appear to be alarmingly well targeted from the point of view of escaping potentially both natural immunity and vaccine immunity.
The problem is that doesn't tell a very clean story about where such a thing would have come from because in general a new mutation that created some ability to escape from some kind of widely existing immunity would tend to bring with it a generic random background, right?
The critter that happened to have the mutation that happened to be good at escaping either vaccine immunity or natural immunity Right?
Would be effectively random with respect to the rest of what it contained in its genome.
So the idea that suddenly we're confronted with something that has a bunch of useful mutations suggests some process that isn't described here.
What's more, as I understand it, the spike protein isn't modified.
Right?
In fact, the spike protein looks primitive.
It looks like it stretches back and has experienced no evolution over many months.
So I don't know what to make of any of this.
I will say... It's very confusing.
Well, you know, it may or may not be confusing.
I think the problem is when we were talking about LabLeak...
There was an explanation.
What was the intermediate host?
Where's the intermediate host?
Right?
How did this thing get from horseshoe bats to people and make all of these different changes?
And the answer was, well, you're looking for a population of animals.
You should be looking for a laboratory.
Right?
Yeah.
If you're looking for a laboratory, intermediate host.
Got it.
OK.
Laboratory has complex processes.
It has things it's trying to accomplish.
So anyway, I don't know why this story doesn't make sense.
Maybe next week we'll know why it does make sense.
But so far what I've heard is the invocation of an untreated HIV positive person who would therefore have an unusual immune system and effectively what's being suggested is that this one individual constitutes an incredible gain of function Wait, there's a patient zero that has been proposed?
Oh, we don't know the patient zero.
This has been a model.
Oh, okay.
A hypothetical patient zero that was an HIV positive, but out there in the world, patient in whom this might have originated.
Right, but I gotta tell you, this is one of these things.
Sometimes when molecular biologists, there's this nasty habit they have, because all biologists are, in theory, working in an evolutionary realm, there's sort of this nasty habit of imagining there isn't much to understand about the way evolution works.
Survival of the fittest, that's about it, right?
And so when molecular biologists come up with something, they'll very often Toss out an evolutionary explanation for it that isn't very high quality and doesn't stand up to even a little bit of scrutiny.
And I wonder, you know, we saw this last week with the suggestion that what happened to SARS-CoV-2 in Japan was that the virus thought better of it and collapsed, right?
I mean, there was a lot of, like, adaptive language-y arm-waving stuff, which people imagine is what we do over in evolution space.
It was like, you know, selective forces went boom!
It was insanely mystical thinking, but, you know, again, in the guise of sort of a science-y looking set of people.
And it really just didn't make sense.
Well, let's put it this way.
It could make sense, given another factor that was never discussed, right?
You would need something to push the virus in this direction before it became unstable.
In other words, you know, our audience probably will mostly not know that my expertise is trade-offs.
That's what I did my dissertation on, so maybe at one moment I was the world's leading expert on biological trade-offs.
But the point is, you can sometimes borrow... But at what cost?
That's a good joke.
You can sometimes push a critter, including a virus, into a corner, right?
So for example... He's not talking metaphor.
I mean, he's not talking literally.
I've never seen him push organisms into corners.
I mean, occasionally you've had to corner a mouse, actually.
Like, can we just get this out of the house?
Or even a cat or a dog if you're going to, you know, clean out its ears.
That's true.
But in any case, let's just take an example.
Metaphorical cornering of organisms, go.
So there was a result years ago.
Some people will have seen news reports of it because it was, of course, oh, very tantalizing.
Are we about to cure aging?
But there was a simple alteration that was made to the model organism worm C. elegans that caused them to live much longer, like double its lifespan, right?
And I saw that and I was like, yeah, okay, but what capacity of this creature did you just turn off?
Because if it were true that you could just simply make them live twice as long with a simple genetic alteration, selection would have done it.
The ladyworms look at those worms and say, oh no!
Oh no, I've seen this before!
And in this case, we now know what it was, which was they borrowed from its ability to endure famine, right?
And so the point is, did you just improve them?
As long as they lived in an abundant world!
Right, exactly.
As long as they lived in the lab, it was cool.
So, the question is, is there something – oh, another version of this.
You can see with the way HIV was ultimately managed.
That it's managed with a triple drug cocktail.
Now, the reason that that works is because you can put the virus in a bind, right?
Each of these drugs has an effect.
And basically, if it evolves to compensate for one, it makes itself more vulnerable to the others.
And so it's, you know, it's... You can drive it back and forth between these.
Right.
Keep it keep it on its feet, as it were.
And so something in Japan could have driven the virus to make a bad choice about how much mutation to accept and then it became incoherent, but you need the something.
And the something could, you know, I'm not saying it is, but it could be something like the drug that shall not be named, right?
That could potentially push a virus into making compromises that were not wise in the end and caused it to be defeated by immunity or whatever.
But the basic point is, you need something else for that story to make any sense, otherwise you're just hand-waving, right?
And in this case, this idea of, oh, an immunocompromised person is the reason that this virus has, you know, a bunch of different clever alterations, right?
That sounds like another really hand-wavy argument.
Right?
And so I remain to be convinced that there's any explanation at all that would have done what we've so far been told has happened to this variant.
And in light of that, I would just advise a couple of different kinds of caution.
One, we need to separate our understanding of what is actually true of this variant from our understanding of what we are being told.
Right?
There's some gap between what's true, and there will always be, even if the people doing this are well-intentioned.
But this is always the problem.
I mean, I feel like this is really, to some degree, always been the problem with media, with journalism, you know, presumably tracing as far back as any kind of journalism has existed.
That there is some truth, and given that much that journalism reports on there, that truth may be social at some level, which means that there really are different versions of a story which seem incompatible, but both of which really do reflect what two different observers saw of the thing.
But put all that aside, the journalist who is writing the story is writing a story about the thing.
And the story about the thing is never the same thing as the thing, right?
It's a journalistic version of the map is not the territory.
Right.
And pretending that it is, is dangerous.
And I think, you know, for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention during COVID, it's just become completely clear that this is true all the time.
In fact, no way.
So you're asking all of us here, what I heard you just ask was, you know, we need to keep careful track of the distance, the distance between what is true about this new variant and what we're being told is true.
But how can we possibly do that?
Well, what you want, you're going to have to simplify it.
Even those of us who are trying to get this stuff precisely right have to simplify it even to just discuss it.
The point is you do not want a systematic bias between what is actually true and understood and the simplification that you're offering in order to discuss it, right?
You want it to be a reduction in resolution but not a reduction in accuracy, right?
And this is not what we are getting.
We are getting a landscape in which dots are being arrayed in front of you so that you will put them together just so and feel clever as you announce the answer, right?
That is a very dangerous situation to be in, right?
And it's unforgivable from the point of view of what this is doing to people's ability to calculate what is in their interest and what they should fear and all of that.
We are being manipulated by those who want us to be fearful.
And the problem is they're manipulating us to be fearful of something that is indeed frightening, right?
They're amping up our fear about the wrong things and to a degree that isn't warranted.
But nonetheless, it's not as if the fear is all unwarranted.
Yep.
But in any case, I would say separate out what we actually know about this from the simplified story that we are being handed.
That's one thing.
And then the other thing is simplify the medical question The epidemiological question of this new variant, and the use of this story by the medical authoritarians.
And that's what I'm really concerned about, right?
Am I worried about this new variant?
Yeah.
There are things we could learn about it that would make me much more relaxed, but at the moment, I'm pretty concerned about what I've heard so far.
I am also even more concerned about what the medical authoritarians are going to do with that story, right?
It is going to upend all sorts of things, including quite possibly the awakening that people were going through, that they had been misled, that they were now being forced to things that didn't make sense, right?
Like boosters.
Right.
So the point is, the big danger here is that the new variant upends Processes it up could up end the acquisition of natural immunity across the population It could reset that right where if we had left the thing To run its course, which I do not advocate do not think would have been a good idea But if we had we would be to a certain place Where such a large fraction of the population had had the disease that there weren't all that many vulnerable people Did we do this to ourselves?
That's the question by by attempting to make things better.
Did we make them worse?
Right, that's one possibility.
And what are we about to do as we panic over this new variant?
That's the other question.
And so I think we need to have a go slow approach.
I think we need to, to be honest with you, I think we need to resist letting those who have narratively backed us into this terrible position continue to drive the narrative.
And I'm concerned about New and Omicron as, you know, part of a PR campaign designed to make us feel clever as we say, you know, scientifically jargony things to each other.
So… Well, feel clever beneath a strong veneer of fear.
Right.
It is clear that we all need to be kept afraid in order to be kept manipulable.
And looking at this and saying, okay, better public policy is Clearly necessary.
You've described two reasons to conclude positively that the public policy to date has made things worse rather than better.
But regardless of what this is, take whatever action you can to protect yourself and to make the world a better place, but do not succumb to Oh my god, I don't know what this is.
This could be terrible and therefore I'm afraid because it is the making decisions from fear that does explain actually a substantial, maybe minority, maybe not even, of the extraordinarily bad decisions that we're seeing people make.
Yep.
Now, I this morning decided that I was going to try a different moniker just so that I could escape the... For yourself?
No, I sort of think we ought to generally adopt it.
But anyway... A moniker for yourself?
No, no, a moniker for the new variant.
Oh, okay.
Haven't you heard about the new variant?
It's going to turn planet Earth upside down.
So I'm calling it COVID-22.
You know we're not there yet, right?
Well, but the thing is, we're going to be.
The story will mature into 2022.
Okay.
I mean, I guess to be consistent, though, it has to be COVID-21.
Yeah, it could be.
Because COVID-19 is, you know, supposedly discovered on December 31st of 2019.
And of course, you know, we now have very good evidence that it was probably a few months before that.
But regardless, even if it was what we were told, and what is still the mainstream story for a very long time, literally the first case discovered on the last day of 2019, it's still got the 19 in its name.
I hear you.
I hear you.
But I think COVID-22 is better.
Why?
Various reasons.
One, there's a Catch-22 aspect.
And two, the story is going to unfold in, you know, the fact is COVID-19 is a bit of a weird moniker because most of the awareness of it doesn't dawn until 2020.
And so, in any case, I do think we at the very least need our own- Well, I'm compelled by your first reason, but not by your second.
The Catch-22 connection does make it good, but it's not consistent in terms of naming conventions.
Yeah, I hear ya.
I do hear ya.
But, alright.
It's going to be very interesting to see what this story does.
I do think the number one thing we all have to do is not jump and keep separate analyses for what we are being manipulated into believing.
What we know and simplifications both natural and unnatural that are necessary in order to have the conversation.
I will also say I did have a conversation with Chris Martinson this morning.
It affected my thinking on this.
We were on the same page, but anyway, we had a back and forth.
And so anyway, I would like people.
To register that he's another excellent person to be listening to on this topic if you don't know who I'm talking about check out Peak Prosperity sign up for that channel and I think you'll see the the two channels are quite compatible and you get a lot from it Yeah, absolutely.
I don't really want to follow on with that, but you said earlier, um, don't jump.
And yet, I just, I have to give away what amounts to, like, family state secrets here.
We, the four of us, I think, were recently at a, at a, like a pier, which was very high over the water.
And it was spray painted on the ground, officially, you know, stenciled on the ground, no jumping.
And you made a point of going over and jumping in place on the no jumping sign and pointing out that you were, you know, you were being rebellious.
And I, you know, I think there are a lot of ways to jump and to not jump, as you yourself have demonstrated in the last week or so, and that we might be allowed to jump in some ways and not in others.
Well, that bit of rebellion there was… Maybe your least impressive rebellion to date.
It was my attempt at peer review.
I was not having any of it, and... You were reviewing the peer, in this case.
I was reviewing... It was meta-peer review.
Yeah, it was.
Through the act of jumping.
Yes.
Excellent.
Alright.
Excellent.
Okay.
Oh my god.
Wow, I forgot to turn off my phone today.
Yes, you did.
Was that somebody calling to tell you that my joke was unforgivable and that you should leave me?
No, it's healthcare.gov, apparently.
Wow.
It seriously is, guys.
Healthcare.gov is calling me right now.
They want to have a word.
Now, I expect we need to sign up for our health insurance for next year.
Okay.
I want to talk a little bit about higher ed and universities and such, but first, now for something completely different.
Zach, if you will show my screen.
I've mentioned a lot that I get these weekly reports from Johns Hopkins and from The Atlantic, which I shared one of last week.
God, there's suddenly a lot of cat fur in the air here.
And also from Harper's.
Harper's Magazine, which is, like The Atlantic, one of the oldest-running monthly arts and culture—I don't even know if it thinks of itself as an arts and culture magazine, but a literary magazine—really extraordinary.
But their weekly review this week struck me, because the first two sentences of the first two paragraphs were so very different in tone from one another.
Let me just read the first sentence of the first paragraph and the first sentence of the second paragraph here.
Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old who last year killed two people and wounded a third during protests against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style rifle, which he, then a minor, was prohibited from carrying in public, was acquitted of five charges, including first-degree intentional homicide and the use of a dangerous weapon.
It's not as bad as it might be, but it's definitely got a tone to it.
First sentence of the next paragraph.
Five people, three of whom were members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, died in Waukesha, Wisconsin after an SUV plowed through a Christmas parade whose theme was comfort and joy.
Do we know what the SUV's motive was?
Precisely.
I mean, there's really not a lot more to say.
And you know, there are a lot of places we could have gone here.
We could have shown CNN versus, you know, like, this is kind of already well done.
You know, a lot of people are talking about the difference in tone and messaging between these two events, both of which could have been framed along race lines.
And in fact, the Waukesha driver seems to have perhaps framed things himself along race lines, but we are not shown that version of the story in almost any of the media.
Just seeing in a single piece of journalistic-ish.
I mean, I don't know if the Weekly Review considers itself journalism exactly.
It's a little, you know, it's a little bit pithy.
Sometimes it gets a little tongue-in-cheek.
It puts things in counterpoint that don't necessarily go together, but make you sort of make your head spin a little bit.
But the fact is that those two sentences are both in here, and they suggest really very different conclusions, at least in the minds of the people having written this.
About whether or not, in the first case, there was, you know, a horrifying event that happened that was probably itself racist because, oh wait no, police brutality, actually race isn't mentioned at all, but you know, in service of police brutality somehow, right?
Whereas the second event, which was clearly done intentionally, there's not even really indication that that is a truth, much less that this was actually potentially That it was actually quite violent and awful.
Right, and so this then leaves the person who hasn't got the memo and wants to figure out what's actually going on in the position of having to go to, let's say, Andy Ngo's Twitter feed in order to figure out what the facts of the case might actually be, right?
Andy Ngo, who is known to be A very bad person for distributing immoral facts and unforgivable insights.
I haven't been shown Andy Ngo's Twitter feed in a long time, even though he and I are actually in contact off Twitter, so you would think that that would raise his profile on my Twitter feed, because I know they're watching everything.
Right.
Interesting.
That was a great phrase that you just used about him.
That he is dispensing immoral facts and unforgivable insights.
Yes, he does.
I mean, look, as we've said before, and you know, Andy is a friend, but there are things about the way he reports that trouble me sometimes, but nonetheless, it is uncanny how a story will come across the mainstream feed And it will be obvious, because it's not usual for SUVs to have intent at all, that something is missing from the story.
And then it's worth going to Andy Ngo's Twitter feed to see whether or not perhaps there is another side to the story.
And oh, lo and behold, the SUV in this case, many will not have heard this, but had a driver.
And that driver posted stuff on social media that may be relevant to his state of mind, right?
Yeah, he was not a pure and angelic shepherd of the SUV, but actually a man with intention, and those intentions were not entirely, if at all, good.
He did not seem lovely.
No.
Yes.
So in any case, what a world where, you know, I mean, actually, this goes to what is what is Eric's phrase for this?
Eric has a phrase for this where the journalists become actively anti-interested in certain stories, right?
Yes, that's good.
And the idea is you would have to have a world in which there was anti-interest in figuring out what might have accounted for this SUV's behavior.
In order for people not to discover, I mean, you know, how good a journalist you need to be to realize that when somebody drives into a crowd, it would be worth checking their social media to see if in fact they had discussed anger, biases, tactics, anything like this.
No, but it doesn't go in the direction that we're supposed to be talking about now.
Right.
Because violence in that direction has been too often over-reported in the past, and therefore we shall under-report it now, or something.
So goes the ridiculously bad analysis.
Right, which actually raises another sort of linking point between the topics we've been discussing so far, which is that there has been this mind numbing bias in terms of what could be reported on issues of race, gender, equality, equity, etc.
And it is obviously a religious cult phenomenon.
And I will just point out that we are in the same predicament With the pandemic.
And so we were having a little discussion on Twitter this morning about what the right term is.
The term I've been using is medically woke.
We have all of these medically woke folks who are dispensing the public health narrative as if it was scientifically well founded.
But the fascinating thing to me, the thing I still can't get over, is how many people who on the subject of original flavor woke got it right and figured out that this was a cult and were having none of it, who have become medically woke and are now using those same tactics deployed in the same way, the same cult-like behavior, But not just using the same tactics, but have fallen prey to the same sort of generic, homogenizing analytical tools.
When told, you know, when they're told to jump, they do jump.
Yeah, they jump.
And then they use the same, you know, your point was, and then they use the same tactics as, you know, Woke 1.0 to enforce the things that they've concluded.
But the point is that they haven't concluded anything, just like, you know, Woke 1.0, Woke 2.0.
It's not the people who are enforcing these things who are doing the concluding.
They may be deluded into thinking that they are doing the concluding, but they have actually been handed a set of conclusions.
And in the case of, you know, WOKE 1.0, because it ran so counter to everyone's, frankly, excuse me, but lived experience, you know, that, you know, college campuses are bastions of white supremacy and everything, a lot of people Could say, wait, no, I don't think so.
Not at all.
But because this, you know, if I like your naming here, WOKE 2.0, medically WOKE, so many people really recognize that they have been failed by an educational system.
They don't know how to assess scientific or medical information.
They don't even necessarily know when they have been given simply a conclusion versus the data with which they could do their own analysis if they had those skills.
And so they do accept a conclusion, but somehow have obscured from themselves that they didn't do their own analysis.
They think they've done their own analysis, and then when they go marching out into the world to, you know, tromp on those people who actually have done some of their own analysis and have come to a different conclusion, they think that they are being righteous and saving the world.
No, it's like they have ordered from the back of a comic book a detective kit.
And part of it, you know, it comes with a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes, you know, Deerhunter hat or whatever, right?
And it comes with a book, right?
You're a sleuth and you're going to connect the dots.
But the book is one of those connect the dots books that kids, I guess, want.
It's just literally dots.
It's just numbered dots and you connect them and it makes a picture.
And so they're constantly patting themselves on the back for discovering the villain, which is sometimes us.
And actually what they've done is demonstrated that they can count by ones.
They can connect dots that have been placed in front of them for the purpose of connecting.
And it's very disturbing.
That is good.
So this actually does, I'm going to switch around, I wanted to talk a fair bit about education, but We both had pieces published this week, and I think we're not going to end up talking much about yours, but maybe we'll save to the end just to mention what it is.
But the piece that I published on natural selections on my sub stack this week is about what is wrong with higher ed.
And I talk a lot about the problems with how science is funded and what it has meant to how, you know, how good scientists are, what they do, and also then how the most ambitious scientists are basically whisked away from the teaching and governance part of universities.
Um, but the excerpt that I specifically wanted, there's two excerpts that I wanted to share, and one of them is apropos, uh, what you are talking about, uh, Brett.
I will start by, yep, here we go.
So it's, Higher Ed Needs a Reboot, But Being Anti-Woke Won't Be Sufficient.
Uh, and it's, you know, it's a long piece, and I'll actually be reading this aloud, uh, for everyone for my, uh, Tuesday post this week.
Um, but I'm gonna start right now with a, just a Small excerpt from the very end of the section.
Sorry, I'm making people probably dizzy.
How science is funded.
I was going to read this whole section, but I'm not going to.
And then read the woke revolution.
If we are to be free, we need the scientific process to be free.
Instead, money is driving what questions get asked.
As a result, some research that passes for science is not worthy of the name.
And other research, which would be science had it been allowed to happen, never gets done.
This is perhaps the largest problem of all at modern universities.
The woke revolution.
Into this environment arrived an ideology, which quickly became so widely adopted that it can now justly be called a revolution.
As science and scientists were being bought by market forces, the door was left open for more patently craven forms of anti-intellectualism.
Flying under the beautiful-sounding banner of social justice, embodied by growing legions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, officers and administrators, it is most succinctly called woke.
What social justice aspires to, or claims to aspire to, is the adoption of policies that recognize past and ongoing bias in society, reduces such bias going forward, and helps those who have been negatively affected by it.
In practice, though, it is authoritarian, dogmatic, illiberal, and mean.
As linguist John McWhorter writes in his new book, Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, this ideology directly blocks the ability of people who adhere to it from getting ahead.
Of the movement's three key words, diversity, equity, and inclusion, only one is an accurate representation of what the movement stands for.
The woke do not embrace or pursue diversity.
They are on a mission to reduce human experience and thought to a single note, one that agrees with the conclusions that they have already arrived at.
And the woke are not inclusive.
Indeed, they would exclude all those who disagree with them, to the point of deplatforming and preventing dissenters from speaking.
The movement that claims to advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion is therefore both anti-diversity and exclusionary.
What may be surprising to those not already immersed in this landscape, however, is that the woke revolution really is about equity.
The disconnect is that equity doesn't mean what you probably think it means.
The concept of equity has been around since at least 1981, when it was included in the first principles of the American Society for Public Administration.
The ASPA had this to say about a key distinction.
Equality, they defined as Citizen A being equal to Citizen B. Equity, they defined as adjusting shares so that Citizen A is made equal with Citizen B.
Many people, though, when they hear the word equity, synonymize it with equality.
We 21st century weird people broadly, nearly universally, value equality.
We are all equal under the law, and we ought to fend that fiercely.
Equality refers to having equality of opportunity.
Equity in direct contrast promotes equality of outcome.
This is a dystopian idea that was brilliantly satirized in Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron, wherein those with greater ability are handicapped in order to bring society into full compliance.
And here's just the first paragraph of Harrison Bergeron.
A very short, short story worth everyone reading it.
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.
They weren't only equal before God and the law, they were equal every which way.
Nobody was smarter than anybody else.
Nobody was better looking than anybody else.
Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.
All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
So this is absolutely apropos a discussion of medically woke, right?
I mean we are, this is the same kind of process as you were pointing out, you say on Twitter this morning, but I've heard you point it out elsewhere.
Yeah, it is the same kind of process.
I mean, it's uncanny how much the same kind of process it is.
And, you know, we have been on the wrong end of it twice now in two very different contexts.
And so it's just like, you can see that it's the same.
Okay, but I'm playing the interviewer here now.
Aren't you just looking for trouble, though?
Aren't you just interested in conflict?
No, I would say I believe the actual diagnosis is, um, a bit insensitive to social signals or indifferent to them in some sense.
And so I think the point is if you're sensitive at a normal level, you get don't go there girlfriend away from the dangerous thing, right?
And it doesn't work for everybody on every topic.
But if your point is actually I don't speak that language, I I don't know what don't go there girlfriend means.
Right?
And you just keep pursuing things.
And what you keep finding is the delta.
Yeah, the devil on our shoulder is, you're not the boss of me.
Right.
But the point is, you will keep discovering the delta between the official story and what you can deduce if you do your own work.
And the problem is, if that delta is small, it's not a big deal.
If the delta is big, Then you just keep discovering this chasm, and you're like the idiot who doesn't get the message that pointing that out is bad for you, right?
Yeah.
Still naked, guys.
The Emperor is still naked.
Still naked, right.
It's a different Emperor.
Really?
Are you sure?
Because it kind of looks like the same guy, because I saw him naked before.
He's still there.
Still no clothes.
Still dresses to the right.
Yeah, so anyway, it's a fascinating social process and one that I will say I've had the sense at the beginning of this last week This last week, okay?
Yeah, I mean it was an increasing sense over time that enough people around the world were waking up to what was happening that it was like reason was returning, right?
And I fear that New variant!
You know, is... Hide under your bed.
Right.
This isn't The Great Reset.
This is a, you know, this is, there was some process running in the computer that the owner of the computer was displeased by and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off so they've unplugged it.
And, you know, now everything is new again, as it were.
It's the new reset.
It's the new reset.
Yeah.
NU.
NU, exactly.
Well, I hope you're wrong.
Obviously.
Obviously, I hope you're wrong in this case.
And, you know, we have hoped we were wrong in many cases.
And unfortunately, the things that we have hoped we were wrong about, we haven't, for the most part, with trivial examples, I'm sure, but seen the evidence that that has been the case.
Yes.
And I will just say one last thing.
That Harrison Bergeron thing, it has a particular relevance in our story, actually, relative to our encounter with Woke 1, which was that as Evergreen melted down around us, A student of mine, a current student of mine who had been in the class, current then, had been in the class in which I had put the model for witch hunts and how they work up on the board.
Somebody who was watching this happen in real time, a black woman, took me aside as protests and everything else was going on and she said, you have to read this story.
Harrison Bergeron was like, Less time for reading stories this week than ever before in my life.
And she's like, no, you have to read this story.
Right.
And she ultimately did persuade me even then to read the thing.
It was like, oh, OK.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Too bad we don't have Kurt Vonnegut anymore.
His take would be very interesting.
If only he had written things that we could return to.
But we do, and I have yet to read anything of his that I didn't find deeply valuable, but a link to an online version of the story is in my piece here, so you can find it there.
One more short excerpt from this week's piece in Natural Selections, if you want to show my screen here, Zachary.
Okay, I am scrolling down, so there's sections on what college faculty need to be capable of, and now my screen is freezing, a little story of how I ended up at Evergreen, and then Seeking the Extraordinary, just the last three paragraphs of the piece.
Some extraordinary minds are well-suited to standard metrics, and are discoverable with such metrics.
Are you a compliant and organized enough young person to sit still and turn in neat, copy-edited work by deadline, thus earning yourself the freedom to excel in all the academic places that appealed to you?
I was.
I tested well and earned good grades and was both smart and presentable, and although yes, I was always itching to go outside, I also took pride in putting together careful, well-presented work that expanded my own thinking.
But I have known hundreds, perhaps thousands, but easily hundreds of extraordinary people who were so utterly failed by school that they never got access to the freedom to explore and excel.
English courses where Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are on the reading list are reserved for the good students.
Everyone else has to diagram sentences.
Math classes where the beauty and connections in math are on full display are similarly reserved for the good students.
Everyone else gets fed abstract repetition and memorization of mnemonics.
In both cases, uninspired curricula and pedagogy practically guarantee failure.
We need universities that expand the human mind.
We are all born inquisitive, observant, and curious.
All too often, the modern university is where people learn to conform, make social connections, and game systems.
But universities should and can and must be where we learn to hone our questions, expand our intellectual repertoire, and distinguish between good answers and bad.
In order to solve the problems that we face in the 21st century, we are going to need such universities very, very soon.
Yes, particularly poignant as somebody who was on the other side.
As I talk about earlier in this in this essay a little bit.
Yep.
Yes, I was because I was not good at doing schoolwork as a result of what would be dyslexia if dyslexia was a real thing.
Yeah, I got dumb tracked.
Right.
And I think the vast majority of people who are in a position to think about recreating education are those who were already on the inside.
And there aren't that many of us who are on the inside who also have real insight into what the brains of the people who were told they were stupid And, you know, this is a point that we've made many times in many places, including in the school chapter of our Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, lots of places, but too many attempts to, for instance, fix education, be it so-called lower ed or higher ed,
Take the established tropes, the established forms, and just skim the woke off the top because it's gone bad, right?
It started out bad, it's gone bad.
It's not going to do it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that is not going to fix anything.
You're going to continue to get some people like me who were able to do well enough within the system to then get access to all the goodies, all the educational goodies, all the actually challenging, hard You know, difficult, sometimes mutually incompatible things that then I got to wrestle with in real time because I'd somehow earned it from some combination of personality traits, really.
And the fact is that most...
Some people who are so-called bad in school aren't up to the challenge, but we ran into so few of those people at Evergreen, a non-selective college full of people who had, you know, often gotten their GEDs rather than graduating high school, have been unschooled, homeschooled, they were veterans, you know, all of this crazy diversity, along with a lot of students who were straight from K-12, you know, who had been in school since they were five and had never left and had come straight to college.
And the number of people who, yeah, weren't totally up to speed with some of the cultural norms of academia was pretty high, and who needed a little bit of lenience in terms of some things like, for instance, maybe copy editing, or maybe, oh, you've been so failed by your education that you can't do basic math, and I'm expecting you to do somewhat less basic math, so I'm gonna need to figure out a way without this being, you know, my full-time job to get you
Basic math enough to be able to do the more interesting stuff.
That's supposed to be happening in second grade and fourth grade and sixth grade and eighth grade, not in college.
But the idea that in college, if you haven't already gotten those skills, we can throw you away.
Is is horrifying and it's not what I read should be about no if you survive it and you don't end up taking their word for your capacity it does free you from what happens when the authority goes rogue and and.
Start saying bullshit because you learn to ignore it, right?
Which did not you know, we know for many students that that did not happen.
Lots of them did take the pronouncements from these Educational authorities about their capacity and were damaged by it.
Yes So anyway, it's it's a it's a tragedy, but I must say I do not understand this mindset that imagines that well, we know what happened to the universities they went woke and it's like no and Universities had an acquired immunodeficiency and then you want to cure the pneumonia that killed them.
Yeah.
Right?
It's much like the mistake of many modern doctors treating symptoms rather than the disease.
Right.
You're going to treat the symptom and then you are going to produce If you succeed, you will produce exactly the university that was vulnerable to that disease and then you'll find out what the next version of that disease is.
It's not useful.
That's right.
Which is, you know, you and I spent a year trying to understand how we might build a next generation higher ed institution and, you know, We realized this.
It was never about solving the woke problem.
It's like obvious that the woke problem needs to be solved, but it's square one with respect to what you build in place of the now failed university system.
Necessary, but so far from sufficient as to not even really at some level be worth.
In a weird way, I'm not even sure it's necessary.
Because the point is, in a healthy system, if you built a healthy system, woke wouldn't stand a chance.
If people thought that what they were getting in school was valuable and it was going to empower them to Get a better job to do things that they cared about to be more insightful They would tell the woke to go away and it is only because they were getting very little out of that system that many were Open to the idea that they were entitled to demand things through their university from the world rather than to become capable That actually reminds me of a John Taylor Gatto quote that I happened to see on Twitter today, but we've talked about him before.
I'm a huge fan of his.
He's unfortunately recently dead.
He was an extraordinary educator who wrote, among other books, Weapons of Mass Instruction.
I don't know where this quote is from, and again, I just got it off Twitter, but he said, apparently, "...our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well.
It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life." So this is apropos what you're talking about.
Absolutely.
And one more thing to riff on before we sign off for the week.
One of my patrons reminded me of a section from this book which I adore, and I'm going to read a short version from it.
It's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an Inquiry into Values by Robert Persig.
Originally published, jeez, I forgot when, a while ago.
In the past, for sure.
In the past.
I read it in 2009.
I actually know because I read it while I was on my first study abroad trip that I ran.
I can't remember exactly when it was written.
More than 30 years ago, I'm pretty sure, but I'm not honestly sure exactly when, and I can't find it in this book at the moment.
1974.
Okay.
So, 47 years ago.
1974.
Okay.
So 47 years ago.
Something.
In it, the author has a sort of a character that is a little bit like him, Phaedrus, who was a professor.
and And he is speaking, let me find it, about what a university is.
And here is what he has to say.
The real university, he said, Phaedrus, has no specific location.
It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues.
The real university is a state of mind.
It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.
It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real university.
The real university is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
In addition to this state of mind, reason, there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name, but which is quite another thing.
This is a non-profit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address.
It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money, and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.
But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas.
It is not the real university at all.
It is just a church building, The setting, the location, at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.
And he's not saying that dismissively, but the church of reason he's calling it.
Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, Phaedrus said, and think the control of the church buildings implies control of the church.
They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.
They see the second university, but fail to see the first.
And here we step out of that for just a moment, and the narrator now says, I remember reading this for the first time and remarking about the analytical craftsmanship displayed.
He avoided splitting the university into fields or departments and dealing with the results of that analysis.
He also avoided the traditional split into students, faculty, and administration.
When you split it either of those ways, you get a lot of dull stuff that doesn't really tell you much you can't get out of the official school bulletin.
That is so good.
And actually, I've not read this.
It's certainly on my list of books I may never get to.
It's an important philosophical tome, this book.
It's a book I know that I would love.
I've heard many excerpts from it and it's important.
But I would point out That, A, this is in one way, I like to refer to the academy, because it is exactly this thing, right?
It's not an academy, it's the academy.
And it is also the reason... So that's the stand-in for his first university.
Yeah, the real university.
The real university is the academy.
And so the thing is, you and I fled jobs at an institution, right?
We were forced to.
They were literally rendered unsafe.
But we became professors in exile for exactly this reason.
Exile from the one but not the other.
Right.
From the physical building that owns, or the institution that owns property and pays salaries and things like that.
But the point is it didn't change anything about who we were.
Right.
And that I think is a very important realization and I wish more people had run themselves through the exercise.
Very much so.
Anything else?
Yeah, I think I just want to mention a couple of things that I released this week that I think are worth people's time.
One is an interview with a woman, Betty Pizzamenti, who is Australian.
She lives in Melbourne.
And she has a tremendous sensitivity to Compounds in the world, mostly synthetic compounds that she encounters.
Anyway, my interview with her reveals what is going on in Australia with respect to medical authoritarianism.
And I would highly recommend people watch it and just listen to her.
Listen to this person who is very good-natured, not the least bit bitter.
And describes the absolutely Kafka-esque insanity that she is facing as someone whose position in the pandemic we all have been led to think about in the abstract.
She is among the people who are very vulnerable.
So, in any case, I would advocate that people check out my interview with her on Dark Horse.
There's also at least one clip up on our Clips channel that's worth seeing.
If people want to find it, they could go to my Twitter feed and that would reveal it to them.
The second thing, I was invited by UnHerd to write another essay for them, this time on American gun rights.
And I decided to just more or less reveal my position, and I wrote an essay, which I wondered if it was going to get me in a tremendous amount of trouble.
So far, no.
The reception has been really, really good, but I did not know that that was going to be the case going forward.
But in any case, it contains a number of new arguments about guns.
It addresses the question of what I think the meaning of the mysterious phrase about a well-regulated militia being necessary to the preservation of a free state.
Might have been about in the minds of our our founding fathers.
It addresses the question of what relevance at all private guns might have were tyranny to come to to the United States.
And it also addresses the question about whether or not what is going on in Australia is at least partly due to the different path they have taken with respect to gun rights.
So, in any case, I think it's a good essay.
I think it's worth reading.
Lots of people have responded really well to it.
And if you're looking for something to read, it is their top of the page weekend essay at UnHerd.
That's U-N-H-E-R-D.
Very clever title.
Anyway, look forward to hearing what people think of it.
It's absolutely an excellent essay.
And as you will have come to expect from Brett's thinking, it takes some unexpected turns.
Yes, it does.
Yeah, that's really fabulous.
All right.
That, I think, is the end of the show for today.
We are going to take a 15-minute break, as short as possible in order to get the tech ready for the Q&A, and then be back with our live Q&A.
You can ask us questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you have logistical problems or if you want to send us something, we've got a PO Box.
You can send questions like that, not content questions, to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
We have, again, the private Q&A on my Patreon tomorrow at 11am.
We leave that up for people who can't join us live, but for people who do join us live, it's a very nice conversation.
That we have.
We have, of course, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is out there in the world, still selling well, and we continue to hear from people who want to talk to us about it.
It's wonderful.
We're continuing to have conversations about it on podcasts that are also going out into the world.
And I will just remind people of the new products available at store.darkhorsepodcast.org, which is right there on the screen for those of you watching.
We got Saddle up the direwolves, we ride tonight.
We've got an epic tabby, we've got a digital book burning, and YouTube community guidelines because you can't handle the truth.
All right.
Until next time, be good to the ones you love, and eat good food, and get outside.
