#108: Books that Stand up to Lockdown (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 108th 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. This week, we talk about 12 important books, and the media, and the democrats, and public health messaging, and more. Buy signed copies of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century direct from this lovely bookstore: https://darvillsbookstore.indielite.org Check out our store! Epic tabby, digital book bur...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream 108, take four.
This is the 8 o'clock class edition, and we are experiencing... Literally, it's too early for all of us.
It's too early for all of us, right.
This is not a civilized hour here on the West Coast.
I mean, I guess it's even worse if you're in Hawaii.
Unless you're up since last night.
But nonetheless, we are going to try this.
And as I was explaining before, the massive technical hiccup that accompanied apparently a deepening of our voices, I don't know what all, but we have power fluctuations today because it is in the Pacific Northwest.
It's December.
And what happens when those two things come together here is that The trees wobble, and they get drenched, and they fall on power lines, and everything goes kaput.
And we've seen our power fluctuate multiple times this morning, and I think it has messed with every system that is dependent on constant power.
Indeed.
Well, we're going to do what we can do here.
We're going to do a little fast and furious here this morning.
We have places to be that aren't here.
Which is why we're coming to you early.
Without further ado, we're going to talk about some books.
We're going to talk a little bit about Omicron, just various things today.
We will then, as usual, take a break and then come back for a concentrated Q&A, maybe 45 minutes.
First, let's do logistics, shall we?
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century continues to sell well.
We appreciate your We continue to hear really great things about it.
We continue to be on other people's podcasts talking about it.
The most recent one being Forward with Andrew Yang.
This is a great conversation.
I really enjoyed this.
Me too.
So hopefully I will remember to put the link to that in our show notes as well, but we encourage you to go find that.
It starts out a little meandering and slow, but I think we really get into some important issues.
But, you know, Andrew is so darn likable and diverse and interesting and, you know, it's crazy.
I see a guy like that and I think, I mean, wouldn't it be cool if he ran for office?
Yeah, wouldn't it?
Wouldn't it?
I mean, wouldn't that be great if we just elected people?
I don't know why that doesn't happen.
Maybe we'll talk to him about it.
Yeah, that would be awesome.
Okay, as we announced last week, there is a bookstore on Orcas Island, Darvill's Bookshop, which can be found right here.
Actually, show my screen just briefly, Zachary.
Darvill's Bookstore dot Indie Light, I think it is, dot org.
You can go there and order a signed copy of our book if you are so interested, if I may, Zachary.
And that link will also be in the show notes.
Presumably you could also go pick one up in person.
Oh absolutely, yeah not until I think Sunday afternoon is the soonest there will be any in person though.
If you're watching on YouTube we are also of course streaming to Odyssey where the live chat is happening.
You can ask questions for the Q&A that will happen immediately after here at darkhorseemissions.com.
We have Patreons which we have told you about Often, and right now the question asking period is open on my Patreon for the private Q&A that we will be doing a week early this month, so rather than on Boxing Day on December 26th, we'll be doing it on December 19th, and indeed we may be taking a couple of weeks break from Dark Horse.
We will not be streaming on Christmas or on New Year's Day, but we may add an episode in there one or two places.
And we being addicts, apparently.
Unlikely addicts of the form.
Yeah, I don't think that's what's driving it, no.
No.
We appreciate how many people we hear from who really are finding value in what we're doing, and that in turn helps us know that we are doing things of value in the world.
We are honored to be your reality check, and we apologize for the reality.
Yes, about which we are doing everything we can.
We have a variety of products that have been up for a couple of weeks at the store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Dire Wolves, Saddle Up the Dire Wolves We Ride Tonight, Epic Tabi, Digital Book Burning, a variety of other things.
And our wonderful artist, David Eldred, you may put up my screen here for a moment, Zachary, has a website now where he has some of his His work and you can contact him if you are interested, you know, you will find some some familiar artwork here right on this site Including he also did the did the artwork for our book website.
So he's just he's terrific and and Just a joy to work with and we encourage you to go look him up Yeah, he's got such an incredible, what's the visual equivalent of voice, you know?
Yeah, very much so.
His style does not seem up to the challenge of describing it, but it's so beautiful.
Yeah, it really is.
And on Natural Selections this week, my sub stack, I co-wrote this time with our friend and longtime collaborator and former student Drew Schneidler.
A piece on gifting traditions in spiders, in octopus, in Iran, in the Kong, in the modern world.
I feel like I have to do that, even though it feels ridiculous.
Yeah, you faked that very well.
So that was really actually a joy to write, so I encourage everyone to go there.
And we have three ads this week.
All right.
Without further ado, three ads for you this week.
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Moink sent us a turkey for Thanksgiving, so since we came to you last, we have actually had their turkey as well, and seriously guys, so, so good.
Yeah, it was completely off the hook, I must say.
I'm a huge fan of turkey.
Yeah, yeah.
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Well, we're going to switch gears a little bit.
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Now, most shoes are not made for your feet, but here's the thing nobody ever says.
They're not made for anybody's feet, right?
They're just made to get you from here to there, and it's not what you want.
It really messes with your ability to locomote.
They are made for someone else's idea of what feet should look like and do.
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And finally, this episode is sponsored by Four Sigmatic, a wellness company known for its delicious mushroom coffee as well as protein powders that contain mushrooms.
Weird?
Yep.
Delicious?
Also yes.
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Now, you said cacao nibs, which is indeed how we say that, but you said banana bread, and we say bonanza bread, so what gives?
What gives?
No one would know.
Oh, you want me to add protein powder to my bonanza bread?
Well, I've never had bonanza bread, therefore I don't need that product.
That's what people would think.
I guess.
I guess.
Well, all right.
Maybe you made the right call, but still.
Still.
Maybe if an apology isn't...
If it turns out that I believe an apology is in order to you, the family, the bonanza bread enthusiasts everywhere, I will come back and provide one.
The bonanza bread industry.
There's not one of those.
Oh.
Yeah.
Sort of a shame.
Nor will I apologize to the apparently nascent, if it exists at all, bonanza bread industry.
Big bonanza.
Little bonanza yet.
All right.
All right.
OK, let's see.
It is, wow, it's already 830.
Here on the West Coast.
Last week in our Q&A, we were asked this question.
Quote, I teach college English in prison.
A student asked for a list of 12 books he ought to read over winter break that I thought were important.
What would your respective answers be?
And this is the sort of assignment that I do actually enjoy.
It's tough, of course, because what renders something important?
And so I ended up scanning our bookshelves and really only held myself to one standard, which was I have to have read it.
I know there are books on our bookshelves that I know to be important and that I've read parts of or not at all, and none of those are on this.
On this list, many people familiar with Dark Horse will recognize many of these.
I think I've talked about almost all of them at some point, and I've also on my Patreon I have some book lists.
I've got a list from November 20th on my Patreon of 25 books that I themed History and Resistance.
And at the year marker of Dark Horse in March of 2021, I went back through and talked a little bit about all the books I had read from, which was another 24, 25.
But really, what ended up, how things ended up on this book is if it felt a little bit apropos to right now.
And There are too many amazing books that don't show up here, but I have them here.
I have this pile of 12 books and I will show you, but first I'm actually going to read a little bit from a book that I thought I was going to put on the list, but I decided not to because I didn't think that it quite I didn't quite live up to the promise, but there's something early on that I wanted to share.
So this is a good book.
It's Elaine Scarry's Thinking in an Emergency.
And I reread much of it this week.
And I find the kinds of emergencies that she is talking about thinking in much more localized than I was hoping for.
Things like, well, her first example, her first main example of four is, for instance, CPR and how CPR has spread throughout the world and how individuals end up knowing how to do it, which is important, but not exactly apropos for right now.
However, she says, let's see if I find this.
Just two things early on.
All along, the people of the United States have had the legal procedures to prevent this from happening.
Exterminating another population, that is.
Why didn't we use them?
We still have those legal procedures.
Why don't we use them now?
The existence of nuclear weapons endangers all the populations of the world.
They are truly what in earlier centuries was meant by the legal principle, quad omnis tangit, that which touches all.
That sentence has a second half, and I'm sure I'm butchering the Latin here.
Quad omnis tangit, ab omnibus deciditur.
That which touches all requires everyone's agreement.
So this is an important legal principle that I had not seen in the Latin before anyway.
And one more point from Elaine Scarry's book.
She's talking about Artaud's writing on Thucydides and says that, I think this is Artaud understanding what Thucydides was saying, is that the goal of the emergency spectacle is to bring about a genuine enslavement of the attention.
And I don't know that we can say that that is universally the goal, but that it certainly serves those who would turn an emergency spectacle into something for their own ends.
That once you can grab a person's, a population's attention with a spectacle that may or may not be an emergency, the likes of which you're being told it is, then you can do a whole lot with that individual or that population that you could not previously do.
And so in service of that, the first of the 12 books, and you just jump in whatever you want.
Sure.
You don't even know the books.
No, I don't.
I'm curious.
The first, I have them upside down for some reason.
Okay, here we go.
The first of the 12 books, stuck in my scarf.
Speaking of attention is The World Beyond Your Head on Becoming an Individual in the Age of Distraction.
This is Matthew Crawford, a terrific author who I've mentioned many times here before, and in this book he talks about getting our attention back from those forces that would have it.
As perhaps the most salient and actionable thing that we can do to bring back a sense of coherence.
Yeah, he's a lovely human being too, and there's something about the deliberate consciousness that is, I think, very consistent with the way you and I see things.
If you're living in a novel era, basically your conscious mind is the mechanism you need to navigate with.
Anyway, a lot of us don't, and a lot of us, you know, our conscious minds are occupied with mundane stuff, which also happens to be novel but isn't worthy of them.
Exactly.
The second book on my list of 12 important books is Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars.
Now this is, he's unfortunately dead now a few years, and this is one of his early books, oh actually it's not that early, from 1995, maybe my favorite among his.
I've read almost all of his work.
He was a I want to say a neuroscientist and also effectively sort of a clinical psychologist, although I'm not sure exactly, I don't remember exactly how he described himself.
But in this book he takes on, basically he describes seven of his patients as effectively case histories and what has gone wrong in their brains such that they are seeing the world in a totally unusual way.
And in some cases what that opens up for them and what doors it closes down.
And so just taken in through this extraordinarily, you know, brilliant and compassionate man's eyes to see, to try to see the world in a way that almost none of us have ever seen it in seven different ways really can provide a sense of the other that so many people are actually failing to try to do at the moment.
Sax is the doctor who is depicted in the movie, I think it's also a book, Awakenings, played by Robin Williams so brilliantly in that film, where Sax literally awakened a bunch of patients who had locked-in syndrome, and he used L-DOPA to break them out, unfortunately only temporarily, but
Anyway, it's the same sort of approach where, you know, a doctor does good doctoring, where they experiment until they get to something that works for patients, and anyway, I agree, Anthropologist on Mars is a brilliant book, as is, I thought, Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Okay, third, and these are not ranked, they're sort of ordered-ish, but this is not a ranked list.
Weapons- oh, I took the cover off that, you can't- Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.
This is- this man, also recently dead, He was a first-class, world-class educator who spent, I don't know, 30, 40 years something teaching in the New York City Public Schools, won awards for being such an extraordinary teacher, was not simply a good teacher on the page.
Students adored him.
And he was recognized as an excellent teacher, and then at some point he decided that it was necessary for him to stand up against what he saw as the denigration of education and therefore of students that is so widespread at this point in what he correctly calls compulsory schooling, which is the model that we live under.
So also, I have learned from everything I've read of Gatto's, but this weapons of mass instruction is particularly Particularly impactful.
Four, and again, all of these I think have something to teach us in the current moment.
Four, Mother Nature, Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species.
Now that's a different subtitle than was originally published.
This is Sarah Blaffer Herdy.
This is basically a book that I used to use as a way to seminar on with my students, as a way to introduce students to evolutionary biology with regard to humans.
You know, we would start with Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and then we would work through this book and over several weeks.
And, um, A, she's, she's brilliant.
And, uh, B, she's a great writer and a great storyteller.
And it also does the, at that point, this was written in the nineties and I was, you know, teaching the, um, started teaching with this in like 2003 or four.
Um, it was somewhat unusual in being, um, you know, being told often from the perspective of what is, you know, what are the females in the situation?
You know, getting from this, what's the angle, as opposed to, you know, the relatively male-biased ways that such stories, such scientific stories have been written in the past.
Enough so that I actually early on in teaching animal behavior had a couple of students ask me why evolutionary biology was so biased towards females, which is a totally laughable proposition, but it made me sort of appreciate the book even more and also appreciate my own biases.
I didn't pick it because of all of that, but I thought, oh, then she has successfully She has successfully done in this book, you know, what so many people have successfully done before, but from the other perspective, and it just it reveals that you can tell true scientific stories and the stories that you choose to tell are going to reflect your biases, but that shouldn't affect what the stories actually are.
Yeah, and it's really, there's no reason for the bias, right?
The bias is completely a historical artifact.
I should also just point out that Sarah Blaffer Herdy comes from the same evolutionary tradition that we do.
She is a fellow student of Bob Trivers.
And so, anyway, if you like our style of reasoning, you're very likely to like hers.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, she was an undergrad at Harvard when he was a graduate student there.
So she was his student.
Early on, like when he was writing the very important papers he was writing, and then we were his students later on when he was a professor at UC Santa Cruz.
Okay, number five, Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, a true story of perfume and obsession.
What?
Why would that be important?
This is another book that I used to teach with a lot, and so did you.
You can see it very well book darted, as most of these are.
This book is, again, brilliantly written, but it also reveals the ways that modern science fail us.
Uh, and it tells the story of Luca Turin, uh, who is an extraordinary scientist who has, uh, it seems like, uh, figured out how smell works.
And that seems like something that probably we should have figured out a long time ago, but no, there's a lot that we don't yet know in science, and he seems to have figured it out.
And he has not only not been recognized for it, but been actively, you know, shut out of many of the conversations where he should have been present, in part, because he and this is, this is too simple, too simplistic, but in part, because he's too much of a generalist.
Because he does physics, and he does biology, and he does chemistry, he does all of it.
And he can talk across all of these boundaries.
And frankly, those who are specially trained, Well, I would add something to that.
find that kind of capacity, frankly, very intimidating and they try to shut it down. - Well, I would add something to that.
The problem I think is a generalist takes a toolkit and walks into a puzzle and says, well, what makes sense here in light of what the evidence is?
And that is very different than the process of picking up the school of thought that owns the field, And so the school of thought that owns the olfactory perception field is shapism, which is the very logical idea that we smell things based on the fact that a molecule that has a particular shape finds a receptor with the inverse shape, they bind, it sends a message to the brain, it all makes perfect sense, right?
Except that it doesn't make sense at all, because the system is capable of smelling an infinite diversity of things instantaneously.
And ordinarily, with every other system in fact, you have to choose between these things.
You can recognize an infinite diversity of things, the way our immune systems do, but it takes time to develop the immunity.
Or you can smell things instantaneously, or perceive things instantaneously, but it's a limited library.
So how do you get the two Happening simultaneously here.
This is such an important point.
You know, you can have it all, but it'll take time.
Or you can have a subset right now.
You can't have both.
You can't have both.
And so anyway, a generalist walks in and says something about the story doesn't add up.
Whereas if you, you know, were schooled by the experts, what they've done is shown you all of the wonderful evidence in the direction of shapism.
And they haven't shown you the evidence that tells them that they don't know the whole story.
And so anyway, he is effectively persona non grata in the mainstream.
On the other hand, he's got a model that's a hell of a lot more predictive than the model that they've got.
Although the caricature of it, you've got an oscilloscope in your nose, does sound laughable.
It sounds laughable.
On the other hand, you know, prediction is the coin of the realm.
So anyway, it's a wonderful book.
It does show exactly how fields get stuck by a school of thought.
Owning them.
It also will cause you to give a damn about perfume and smells in a way that you never have before.
In fact, when I've taught from this book, I know you've had the same experience.
Students become so interested in smelling things and then trying to characterize them that they will go into, you know, Burly dudes will go into perfume stores and start smelling stuff to see if they can figure it out.
Anyway, it is a great book.
Yeah, it is.
And Chandler Burr, who's written it, is an extraordinary writer as well.
I will say, I wish, actually, I don't remember exactly when this book was written.
I think it had not been yet.
2002.
I had the lovely experience of spending a week in Egypt with my parents back in the mid-90s, so before this book was written, and we spent a little bit of time in Some of those perfume stores that that in fact Luca Turin has spent time and you know sourcing some of the really amazing fragrances and I wish I could time I wish I could have those experiences again right with this with the knowledge in this book in my head.
Oh, we should also say that Luca Turin is an extremely... I don't even... I've forgotten the name of the person who specializes in scent production, and he's written several world-famous guides to perfumes, and... We've actually read from a few... from that once.
Yeah, they're marvelous, and they're especially good when he dislikes a fragrance, when he pans a fragrance and he explains, you know...
It's a powdery affair.
Yeah, he and his partner, whose name I've forgotten at the moment, but have written a couple of perfume guys that are exquisite.
And again, you don't have to care about the perfumes themselves or know them at all or have any familiarity with the history of perfumery, which neither of us do, but they're hilarious.
Okay, number six on this list of 12 important books is, again I've taken off the jacket, Jerry Muller's The Tyranny of Metrics.
This is a short book, really, and this is relatively recent, 2018.
I read this first as we were working on Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and it fit as so many You know, we have talked about concepts being obvious in retrospect, many evolutionary concepts being obvious in retrospect, which, in fact, we considered as an alternate title for The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
So much of what is true or is logically robust in evolutionary biology, once you hear it, it's actually hard to put yourself back in the position of not knowing it.
It feels so obvious.
Things just fit into place.
You know, the epicycles vanish.
Including Darwinism itself.
Including Darwinism itself, exactly.
And so, you know, but there is more to know, right?
And so I think with regard to Darwinism, you'll have, for instance, a lot of people in biology who aren't evolutionary biologists say, well, yeah, of course, evolution.
Right, a whole field that can be summed up in a paragraph.
Right.
Well, not just that they may be wondering what it is that we're doing over here, but that they haven't actually tracked the logical implications of what it is into their own work.
Anyway, I feel like this entire book is, again, short but brilliantly researched, and he's got the tyranny of metrics applied across Colleges, schools, medicine, policing, the military, business and finance, philanthropy and foreign aid.
And it is so important for an understanding of one of the big problems that we point out a lot.
is the reductionism that replaces a holistic scientific thinking and which many people who either wear the mantle of science or think that they are speaking on behalf of science mistake metrics for understanding.
And that is really the thesis of the book, but with a tremendous amount of evidence.
And once you get it, it'll make you 19% smarter.
Okay, six more.
Six more books.
It's finite though, you see.
I could keep going, but I'm not.
I've only got a pile of six more here.
Okay, number seven.
Probably saw this one coming.
Bad Pharma.
How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre.
We've talked about this before a little bit and it's just really important and frankly the title says most of it except that this is not a short book and it's extraordinarily well researched and there's a lot here to learn from with regard to what standard operating practice as of 2012, which is when the first edition of this book came out, was in the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors and also research both academic and industry.
Yeah, I would recommend actually people check out a TED Talk by the author called What Doctors Don't Know About the Drugs They Prescribe.
It is quite good.
He's an excellent speaker as well.
I do wonder where he is in the pandemic.
I find it shocking that somebody who knows as much about pharma's corruption of our medicine is missing how much corruption is shaping our response to this.
And anyway, I hope he arrives soon.
Number 8 on the list, Anatomy of an Epidemic, Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker.
Again, extraordinary, terrifying, brilliantly researched, Just one, here's just one thing from it.
I'm not actually sure if this is going to show because I've only got the hard copy here.
Here we have, I've got it book darted twice, that's funny.
Long-term recovery rates for schizophrenic patients.
Two-year follow-up through 15-year follow-up.
The y-axis is zero to 50 percent.
And for those of you who, let's see if I can, oh wait, there's my camera, for those of you just listening, and now I'm just going from memory because I can't see the thing anymore, basically those who are off antipsychotics have a much higher rate of recovery from schizophrenia than those who are on antipsychotics.
That the people who are on antipsychotics have a recovery rate in the 5-10% range from schizophrenia, and those who are off antipsychotics have a recovery rate in the 40-45% range.
So that, in a nutshell, is the kind of result and analysis that he's doing in this book.
It's terrifying.
This stands to reason, right?
Your brain and the mind phenomenon that it creates are a tool, a means to an end.
And to the extent that they are malfunctioning, that's bad for the creature.
And so they are built to self-correct.
Lots of things about us are built to self-correct.
And if your instinct is to medicate something, Right that that's your response and the point is what you do is you remove the ability for the system to detect what's wrong and to repair and so And something you didn't mention here, and we've talked about it before I think on the podcast Is that in other parts of the world?
People who have a schizophrenic break often recover right they have one They don't it's not that they're schizophrenic is that they had an episode and it goes away And so there's a question anytime you see a pattern like that the question is well.
What are we doing?
That's messing that up Yeah, right what we obviously that's something that we should be seeking might it might even if you knew why that was distinct, you might even be able to eliminate the problem altogether.
And in fact, we propose something in our book.
It's not going to it now, but But anyway, it's clearly, at least largely, a novelty problem, and that means the solution, at least for people who haven't yet come down with it, is likely recognizing what the novel influence is and corralling it.
Yeah, the way you said that made me think, you know, all this language policing that is happening, especially in the woke world around, you know, what it is that you call people and, you know, you can't say a fat person, you have to say a person of fatness.
I don't think that's the one.
No, actually, like a person of size, like, believe me, there are stupid ways that you're supposed to say it and you're not supposed to... Oh, I know there are stupid ways.
You're not supposed to adjectivize, right?
And you know, like, you know, black person, fat person, gay person, right?
Like this is actually, I'm not sure we're ever told not to do this with the LGBTQ thing, which is, you know, always interesting, the inconsistencies in the In the policing and the, you know, the framework that we're supposed to be adopting.
But there is, as with so many of these things, at base, something real to talk about and something real to consider that, you know, if in the rest of the world, without our modern pharmaceutical interventions around at least mental illness like schizophrenia, people aren't schizophrenic for life.
They tend to have a schizophrenic episode.
Uh, then presumably people aren't understood as schizophrenics, you know, 10 years after that one episode that they had.
And so, um, training ourselves to understand these things that we are currently doing or experiencing or are happening to us and therefore feel like the entirety of our experience as temporary things that are in a way, you know, passing through us or we're passing through the time period where they are us, uh, can be a way to escape from what seems like the permanence of You know whatever hell you may think you're experiencing at the moment.
Yeah, right like I'm you know, I'm a depressed person you're experiencing a depressive episode right now and You know, let's get you out of that.
But but you know, this this too shall pass.
I Yeah, unless you rush to medicate it so the system does not have a calibration to get you out.
Yeah, thank you, because that's actually where I was going.
I think the tyranny of metrics and then the perverse incentives of the companies that make money from keeping people medicated for life Creates a world in which it is all too easy to see ourselves as patients as consumers as Schizophrenics or depressives or you know, whatever it is that your diagnosis is and you know, you're you're not your diagnosis You're many many more things than that.
Yeah, and you shouldn't identify as a consumer for sure.
There's something You know, obviously there are good doctors out there but there is something about Maybe it is even the reward structure for a doctor, where when they are able to give you something, they're able to identify the condition and give you something that gives you relief or causes the problem to go away, you're right, they've done their job.
Whereas, you know, let's compare, you know, okay, they give you a drug that solves some problem you've got, right?
That seems, that's a very aggressive intervention.
Whereas, advising you that you're probably vitamin D deficient during the winter and should probably supplement, you'll never know the things that you've been saved from, right?
Because you just simply won't come down with them.
And so it doesn't strike you, oh my god, that doctor's great, he saved me, you know, three colds this winter, right?
You don't feel that.
It's not the same thing.
And so, you know, if you think about medicine, As some kind of analog for our online environment, where you're induced to do things by a dopamine reward.
Doctors are also apes that are driven by dopamine rewards, and the rewards are not well structured to result in the best medical treatment, which is, I'm sure, one contributor to the reason that there's so much bad medicine.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, that's brilliant.
Yes.
Okay, two books of a slightly different sort, both of which we've talked about on here.
Again, I've taken off the book jacket, but Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher, which we spent a whole, almost an entire episode on a while back.
The subtitle is A Manual for Christian Dissidents, and this is written just in 2020.
It came out I think last summer, which is when we talked about it, and it really describes Again, somewhat terrifyingly and in in terrific detail with stories from from people who have lived through totalitarian regimes and who actually do this.
This is one of the few places where I at least have seen the description of what it feels like as it comes on.
So, you know, this this is a very important book and it's of course named for the Yeah, it is.
It's an essay of the same name, which is also terrific and highly recommended and findable online.
So Live Not By Lies, Solzhenitsyn essay originally from, I guess, mid-20th century, and then Rod Dreher's book in 2020 of the same name.
Yeah, it is.
It's obviously a moment that we should be reading the five or six, maybe it's 10 or 12 good things on this topic, because obviously most people are missing what's taking place right in front of them, and we're having stupid arguments about whether it's even happening.
Right.
And I didn't put on the book, I haven't reread actually 1984 and Brave New World and Catch 22, all of which we've talked about here, but I haven't reread them recently enough to put them here, or actually the Gulag, the Gulag but I haven't reread them recently enough to put them here, or actually the Gulag, the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, which I think that's a great question.
I think does this, you know, brilliantly as well.
But, you know, there's a lot not on this list.
Right.
All right.
However, this is one that is.
Eric Hoffer, the true believer.
Thoughts on the nature of mass movements.
So, just in light of conversations about mass formation and such, Eric Hoffer, this is from mid-20th century, 1951, does a Does a fantastic job of describing what it looks like from the outside and to some degree on the inside.
So here are just two very brief quotes from Hoffer, again written over half a century ago.
Whence come the fanatics, he asks.
Mostly from the ranks of the non-creative men of words.
The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot.
I'll read just two more sentences here.
The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present.
His passion is to reform and not to destroy.
So he finds, and I think he's right, that so much, and again, he's talking about fanatics in the mid-20th century, are people who are literate, people of letters, people in the so-called intellectual class, the lettered class, people in the so-called intellectual class, the lettered class, perhaps the elite you might call them,
But who don't actually have much original to offer, and so they become more easily attracted to and perhaps indebted to fanaticism.
Well it's actually a corollary of what you and I talk about with respect to the importance of education including interaction with physical systems that you can't fool, that are not socially mediated.
And so we do find all sorts of people who are very learned in some way, some book way, but it is not tested against reality.
These people can become extremely Mm-hmm.
extremely enamored of ideas that are terrible because they don't spot why they're terrible.
And I will say, I think the inverse is true, that in general, if you meet somebody, you know, there are people who work with their hands badly, but they don't tend to stick with it.
People who have a tradition of working with their hands tend to be very down to earth, because the thing is, if you're not down to earth and you're doing some physical thing, then you're constantly frustrated because it doesn't work.
And so you have to sort of accept, you know, its authority.
You have to accept the authority of the physical world over whatever you're trying to do, and that... I wonder if it doesn't just make you a better, less dangerous human being.
That's fascinating.
I've never thought to frame it in those terms that you just did.
You have to respect the authority of the thing that you are working with, the physical system that is giving you feedback.
And that helps you learn not to follow false authority, actually.
Because you recognize, you come to understand what real authority is in the form of gravity or You know, forces from a saw or the, you know, chemical leavening agents in a cake, you know, and there's just no negotiating with them.
Yeah, actually I had an interesting one yesterday.
First in my lifetime physical experience that taught me what I was misunderstanding.
We have this power washer and Toby had used it to power wash something for us.
He's 15.
And he had put the hose on it, the pressure side hose, right?
And I went to take it off to put the thing away, and I could not dislodge the thing.
I got to the point of using wrenches.
I still couldn't dislodge it.
Right, nobody could.
And so, I mean, I didn't think he was especially likely to have put it on that, I mean, you know, if he put it on too tight, right, and nobody could get it off by hand, surely a wrench would do it, but no, this thing was on there like nothing I've ever, and it turned out when I finally dislodged it, that the thing was still pressurized.
That the hose was still pressurized and full of water, so it was pushing the threads against each other in such a way that they were basically Probably they had galled together, right?
Yeah, that's the term.
I actually don't recognize that term.
Galled is what you said?
Yeah, I reserve the right to discover five minutes after the podcast is over that I've forgotten the right term.
But I believe galling, when you take two, let's say you have a nut and a bolt of the same metal.
Right?
And you screw them together very tightly.
If you screw them together... And they're appropriate for each other.
They've got the right threads.
Correct threads.
But if you screw them together really tightly, what happens is the two objects are put so close together that some of the molecules sort of forget which, whether they're nut or bolt.
And so basically they weld, right?
And so it's very hard to break them free.
And there are various things you can do.
You can put a thin film of something in there, grease or whatever.
But anyway, the pressure in this system made what went on by hand impossible to remove by wrench.
Oh, he and I did get our comeuppance because we're standing rather too close to the point you finally got it free.
Yeah, it was really something.
Luckily it was already pouring out, so we were already somewhat damp.
I learned we all survived.
Yes, we sure did.
Okay, number 11 on this book, and there are some other things we want to talk about today, but this is of course taking a while, is something probably no one's going to be expecting, is Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.
This is just such a terrific book.
To explore what is possible and what is, you know, what people who have something they want to accomplish in the world and are driven to do it, no matter what some other people think the value is, can do.
And it's just, it's of course brilliantly written.
Again, Tom Wolfe recently died as well, I think.
Did he?
Oh God, maybe he didn't.
Yeah, maybe he didn't.
Okay, I'll figure that out.
Tom, please take care of yourself if you're still alive.
Well, I don't know.
I'm trying to wish him well, but I'm not absolutely certain.
I might have missed, you know, the news that he's gone, but I don't know that he's gone.
Zach, if you have the ability to figure out that, that would be fabulous.
Okay.
And actually, if you can get him on the phone, just put him through.
I don't have much more to say about this, but when my eyes fell onto this on my shelf, I thought, this belongs on a list of important books that are relevant for the moment to give people hope, actually, about what we can be, what extraordinary things people can do.
He is no longer alive.
He is no longer alive.
All right.
We didn't do that, did we, Zach?
Okay.
And then finally, the 12th book on this list of important books is Sebastian Younger's Tribe on Homecoming and Belonging, a book that I've read from before.
Utterly brilliant and short.
I was going to say utterly short, which is not that short, doesn't really go with utterly, but I have a very short excerpt to read from this.
Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits.
Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse.
Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples.
People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.
The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right.
The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a non-working underclass has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group.
But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky.
In today's terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account.
Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society, and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system.
The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs, and more broadly over liberal and conservative thought, will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself?
How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place?
I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Yehuda has seen up close the effect of such anti-social divisions on traumatized vets.
Quote, If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different.
You underscore your shared humanity, she told me.
I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences.
Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another and not on the things that unite us?
Hell yeah.
That's square on and I would just say the other thing is don't let people emphasize your differences because that's what's happening.
There's a reason that we are we are divided at the razor's edge and we now have routine photo finish elections and that is not about some organic phenomenon that is about Our division being necessary to whatever it is that is governing us continuing to do what it does without having to pay too much attention to what we need or want.
Exactly right.
And to the degree that Younger has accurately described some of the fundamental positions of liberals versus conservatives, and I think he has, so much of what the Democrats and the Republicans currently represent has very little to do with those things.
And, you know, we as having been lifelong Democrats are more attuned to the changes in the Democratic Party.
Certainly, it has strayed very, very, very far from its traditional, its historic values.
Well, I would say, I mean, you know, it's interesting because we spend so much time now interacting with honorable conservatives that I have to go back and look at what I used to think about Republicans and say, did I have it right?
And have things changed?
Did I have it wrong?
And it's a mixture.
But, but I have thought But also with regard to the Democratic Party itself.
Right.
So it used to be a division between, more or less, management and labor, right?
And the Democrats represented labor.
And with Clinton, they became direct competitors with the Republicans And they competed over management and they abandoned labor.
And so the point is, in my opinion, the Republican Party was more corrupt because it was more closely aligned with capital.
Not that the unions weren't corrupt, because they were.
But nonetheless, because it was the C-suite The corruption was direct.
And then the Democrats took over the model, and they basically set up their own racket.
And now I think in some ways, maybe in many ways, they have exceeded the Republicans in their corruption.
And so, you know, I do have to sort of go back decades and think, actually, you know, Democrats have not been very good at representing labor in a very, very long time.
Labor is at least a natural entity that does encompass most of us.
Yes.
And it's been a long time since I've seen the Democratic Party give any thought to those people.
Yes.
Actually, this is a good segue, if we might, into this.
Oh, hold on.
No, I'm looking for the piece.
Published in The Hill this week.
You can show me, show my screen here, Zach.
Hat tip to Tim Pool, who tweeted this.
The headline is, Biden is delivering the fastest economic recovery in history.
Why hasn't anyone noticed?
And it proceeds with a whole bunch here.
You can give me my screen back here.
A whole bunch of claims that seem suspect, although I didn't go through and try to track them down, and certainly Certainly the idea that we are living through the best time in economic history in the United States would seem to be false on its face in a lot of regards, but just take for a moment, assume for a moment the headline is accurate, that we accept the premise of the piece and the numbers therein.
Like I said, I don't and I don't.
I don't accept the premise and I don't accept the numbers, but okay.
We are led to this remarkable statement in the inside of this article, quote, Democrats' biggest problem, a conservative media machine pumping out economic disinformation on a 24-7 production schedule.
So, if the Democrats really believe, now this is not the Democrats saying this, but this is, you know, the Hill reporting on what they see as the Democrats' biggest problem, If they really believe that their biggest problem is the conservative media machine that's entirely outside of them, this is victim culture at the political level.
This is like, oh, woe is me.
Everyone does this stuff to me.
If only you guys would leave me alone, then I could do the amazing, honorable stuff that I've always been trying to do.
If the DNC truly believes that their biggest problem is external to them, then it will fail.
It is doomed.
I was going to say we are doomed, but no, it is doomed.
Because that's hogwash.
Yeah.
Boy, I love the idea that the DNC might be doomed.
That would be marvelous.
Well, I mean, it's also, oh man.
The Democrats' current mode of propaganda and censorship and frankly, taking on the mantle of enlightenment values in this caricature-y way, like, I am science, right?
And then making pronouncements that are unscientific and unverifiable and unfalsifiable, too.
I think that's that thing that I just said.
The censorship and the, you know, abandonment and the transformation of Enlightenment values to serve their own petty ends or non-petty ends.
Like, that's their biggest problem.
Or there's a bunch of other things beyond the external media.
I mean, and also, how much of the media is being fed by what the DNC wants?
Right, I mean, no, it's preposterous, right?
You know, the conservative media machine is arguably Fox, right?
But then there is a much bigger machine that leans in the other direction, so what the hell, right?
Fox, you know, a few newspapers, I guess, but let's see.
MSNBC, I wanted to say the CDC, that's CNN, you know, basically all the other networks.
Right.
NPR, New York Times, WaPo, you know, almost everything has, as we know, this bias.
Let's put it this way.
This bias in the other direction then is being claimed as the Democrats' biggest problem.
In order for that to be an explanation, it would have to be the larger force.
And given that the conservative media machine is the smaller force, that's not a very good explanation.
Yeah, it's really not but I mean I think we should come to expect not very good explanations from the Democrats at this point.
Yeah, so, you know, I guess given that this feels very much to me like the sort of victim culture that is, that has been very much the rage on college campuses of, you know, don't put anything in front of me that I might be alarmed by, that might have my feelings hurt.
Anything that goes wrong is about me having been victimized as opposed, you know, I never should, you know, take any control of my own life.
I would say to individuals who actually buy this, including the DNC perhaps, take some responsibility for your damn self.
Get a grip.
Like, wake the fuck up and do some things that are actually good for the people and the country and stop lying to us.
Like, that's a start.
Maybe one of your biggest problems is that you're lying to us too much.
And are, you know, are the Republicans also lying to us?
I'm sure.
Of course.
Like, that's what politicians do.
But it seems to have become one of the planks in the platform.
I don't know.
I don't think the point is, Even to expect them to lie to us less, or do something good, is to misunderstand what they do.
The business model, they're not supposed to have a business model, but they do have a business model, and it has to do with their real constituents, which are not the people, right?
So I don't even know, I don't know what the point of, you know, it's like going to criminals and saying, less crime!
You want us not to go after you?
Do less crime!
And it's like, nope, criminals.
Well, I guess there are still some number of people, and I have no idea what fraction of voters in this country, might believe that the Democrats' biggest problem is the Republican media machine.
And I will say that, again, as I mentioned last week, I walk around, I end up having short conversations with strangers, and I overhear conversations, some of whom are among people who I then interact with and some of whom aren't.
Yeah, and this is in deep blue Portland.
This is in a city that routinely votes very, very, very, very blue.
And I overheard another conversation, a little bit like the one I reported last week, this one between two elderly women, actually white-haired women at a coffee shop, who said, Bob was hospitalized after getting his booster.
And the next thing I heard was, I'm not sure if I should cancel my appointment.
I just don't think they're telling us the truth.
This is in deep blue Portland among older women who are more likely than any other demographic by age or sex to to listen to the authorities and to say okay you said I should I should I will you know even even in that group we are seeing people experience with their own, you know, in their own families and friend groups, actually what I know is not a match for what I'm being told.
And also I've had four conversations in this last week in which people without my prompting said, what we need is leadership.
And I'm hearing this with regard to, again, in deep blue Portland, at the city level, at the state level, at the federal level, all of which in Oregon are currently blue leaders, right?
And so there are a whole lot of people who are, I think, you know, to agree with you.
We're saying, you know, why, why, frankly, are we continuing to talk to the same people who continue to do the same thing?
We need something different.
Well, in fact, they are handing the allegiance of the people to the Republicans.
Yes, they are.
They're handing it to them because, in some sense, the Democratic Party has started doing all kinds of things for reasons that serve constituents that we barely know.
Yes.
And all the Republicans have to do in order to actually be preferred is block terrible Democratic ideas.
And this It doesn't have to be this way.
The fact is, there's a mystery.
Just as there is a mystery why it is no colleges and universities that are resisting wokeness when obviously a huge number of people want one.
Why there, you know, why there aren't social media platforms that are wildly popular that, you know, don't censor all of these things.
In the same sense, a party that actually served the interests of the people would be wildly popular, right?
For obvious reasons.
And yet, the point is we're forced to choose between corporatist parties.
And that tells you what the game is.
It does.
And yes, it does. - It's just over an hour. - Right, well. - No, including admin. - Yep. - No, like including that factored in the over an hour content. - So Zach says we're an hour.
I saw us start at 8.30 when we were through with the ad, so we've got another 10 minutes or so.
There is at least one more thing that I want to talk about here.
I don't know where you might want to go.
We will move from that.
Ah, no, I've lost it.
Here we go.
Last week, you talked a little bit about Omicron, the new variant that we are all supposed to be quite terrified of.
We've been involved in some conversations about what it is, what it means, what it actually... Actually, we've talked about it for the last two weeks, I guess.
And it's hard to find real data, right?
It's hard to find actual information.
And the Oregon Health Authority, which I get messages from, as I have mentioned several times on this show, came to the freaking rescue this week with everything you ever wanted to know about the Omicron variant.
So I'm going to put this up.
I'm going to have you, not quite yet Zach, but I'm going to have you put it up on my screen just briefly and then take it down while I read to you guys what I learned from the Oregon Health Authority this week about Omicron.
Uh, so here it is.
Omicron, what we know about this new variant.
All right.
Um, number, so as I just, I don't want you guys getting ahead of me.
Um, it's five, it's five points.
Color-coded.
I don't know what the colors mean though.
So maybe it's not color-coded.
Five points.
Omicron, what we know about this new variant.
I was so eager to hear what the Oregon Health Authority Oh, totally.
I mean, what do the data say?
What do the data say?
1.
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, mutate or change constantly.
2. All over the world, scientists are studying the Omicron variant.
Three.
We know how to protect ourselves and others against infection.
Get vaccinated if you're eligible a booster.
Wear a mask in indoor public settings or outdoor crowded settings.
Keep physical distance and wash hands frequently.
Four.
Oregon Health Authority is monitoring Omicron closely.
And five.
And you can put my screen up now if you like, Zach.
As we learn more, we will share information on how you can best protect yourself and keep your loved ones and your community safe.
I mean, among other things, the Oregon Health Authority has revealed that they in fact know nothing about Omicron, and have nothing to share, and really shouldn't have put this into their missive because they have just further reduced the confidence that they know anything and have anything to offer.
This may be, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a low bar at this point, like for worst.
I'm not sure I haven't reversed a sign there, but like, could this be the worst messaging we've seen so far?
At least it's not, it's not misinformation.
It's just no information.
It's a-informational.
It's completely empty.
Well, it reminds me of...
I was just trying to find it, but the Terror Threat Level Color Coding System, which was a very useful system, you'll recall, for avoiding... So it's like after 9-11?
Yeah, after 9-11, the government, actually in conjunction with the Red Cross, put together a very informative resource about how you should respond to the different terror threat levels.
Is this going to be at the level of like Duck and Cover?
Well, it was, as I recall it, you know, you had green through red, and green was, there's no threat of terrorism, which I guess would be equivalent to the extinction of humanity, which would be the end of the threat of terrorism.
I mean, you've seen, like, squirrels going after each other.
I feel like squirrel terrorism is a possibility.
Just world terror is a thing.
I don't know about... Oh, okay.
Okay, you don't think it's organized.
Right.
No, no.
Okay.
But in any case... So green is an unattainable goal.
Green is an unattainable goal.
So you sort of start at yellow and yellow is like, well, terrorism is possible today.
And, uh, you know, yellow had, it had some, some pretty useful stuff in it.
You know, you should probably have a plan and you might want some supplies because Things like that, right?
And so, okay, that's good.
Have a plan.
And supplies.
Oh, and I think you were supposed to listen to authorities if they provided information on what you should do, right?
Yep.
And then every level on top of that basically just revisited the things they had already told you you need to do, but with, like, greater urgency.
Like, definitely listen to authorities and things like that.
Make sure those supplies are still good.
Yeah, check your supply, exactly.
It was just empty.
There was nothing there.
It was just completely emotional manipulation by color coding, right?
No, it's not a green day.
It speaks a little bit to this, you know, the tyranny of metrics thing.
Except in that case, Like the color coding, there's like an implied numeric, there's an implied ranking, right?
So there is this, you know, implication of quantitative thinking that has gone into it, and they're just not bothering us with the numbers, don't worry about that.
But, you know, all you have to do is like plug in to, we've used numbers, and you get people to go along with it.
Yeah, no, well, but I think the point really is, you're not, You know what it is?
It's public policy where they forgot to replace the, what is it, lorem ipsum?
You know, somebody put together, all right, you know what we really need?
We need a, you know, like five points, what we know about Omicron, right?
What we know, all over the world, scientists are studying the Omicron, which is literally the only, like, that's actually the most, two of them actually mention Omicron at all.
The other one being Oregon Health Authority is monitoring Omicron.
But you can imagine, right?
If you knew that there was a, you know, five points you need to have about Omicron, and you just wanted to, like, rough some stuff in, and then you were going to come back later, and then you got distracted, and then somebody published it.
Well, no one got sent out!
Right, exactly.
It would be that.
And, you know, that was the terror threat level, in which case we actually I believe discovered, I mean, the whole reason that it's not like terrorism has gone anywhere.
When was the last time you saw a color code for where we are at threat level, right?
They got rid of it because, you know, everybody sort of understood it was a political manipulation tool designed to just sort of, you know, you know, amp your amygdala or whatever.
Right.
And so, OK, how many times are we going to fall for this crap?
Right.
The pretense that there is information in there about Omicron?
Yep.
I mean, even if it was five questions, here are five things to watch out for, things we'd like to know about Omicron, right?
You know, how virulent is it?
That's a very important question, because this could be a great thing, right?
If it's very mild, symptom-wise, and produces lifelong immunity, it could save us from this vaccine madness and the insanity of our public health response, as we said several weeks ago.
Does Omicron, like Delta before it, seem to evade the vaccines?
Hmm interesting question right so you could you could say here are some things to watch out for but you can't say here Here are the things you need to know and then not say anything Yeah, yeah, yeah, no exactly that and man there was something there was something related to that but I Maybe that's it.
We knew we had to be pretty brief today and then we had some technical problems, so maybe we're going to do a short show this week.
We're going to take as brief a break as possible and come back with Q&A.
We're going to start with a Discord question and then answer your questions when we come back.
Anything else to say before we sign off?
Well, I think I want to add a couple things to the sign-off, just based on where we seem to be in history.
Yes.
So Julian Assange lost his battle against extradition.
That's not to say that it's the last round.
There's an appeal that he has available to him, I believe.
But nonetheless, this has gone on far too long.
He's clearly a political prisoner, and I don't expect the Biden administration to even consider pardoning him, no matter how right a thing it would be.
To do, or to stop pursuing him even.
But I would say, free Assange, bring Snowden home, and stand up.
These mandates are immoral.
The orders are immoral, and we know what to do.
Standing up is what we are obligated to do.
And so, for the moment, those three things.
Be good to the ones you love and eat good food and get outside.
