#112: The Scramble to Protect the Elites (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens112:5 View on Spotify (With video): https://anchor.fm/bret-weinstein/episodes/112-The-Scramble-to-Protect-the-Elites-Bret-Weinstein--Heather-Heying-DarkHorse-Livestream-e1d9ko6 ***** In this 112th 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 the crumbling public health narrative...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number one.
That's right.
Which is not a prime number, I mean, for many reasons, but primarily because it's even.
Is there a primarily and not being a prime?
It's an interesting question.
I mean, my guess is mathematically no.
Yeah, I wouldn't think so.
All reasons that you're not prime are equal in the eyes of the Lord.
Yeah, but you know, let's give me a break.
As an ape, I'm using heuristics.
It's a good one, you know?
I mean, it only fails in that one case, and you can just kind of remember that.
Yeah, that's true.
So we're coming to you early this week.
For those of you watching live, you are already well aware of that.
And it's late afternoon on a Friday, so I don't know.
I don't know what that means about the tenor here.
It's been a long two years.
It has been a long two years.
It's been kind of a long day.
It's been a long week.
It's already been a long month, even though it's only half over.
It's been a long two years.
It's been a long two years, but this does mark the midpoint of the pandemic.
No, don't.
No.
No.
Well, it's looking like it might be the end of the infectious part of the pandemic and then the beginning of the really annoying part.
Uh-oh.
That is apparently not what you wanted to hear.
I thought it was sort of an uplifting message.
Oh, did you?
There's light at the end of the tunnel, it's just you need a telescope to see it.
Okay, so do you want to say anything about where we're going before we get into logistics?
Or do you just want to jump into logistics?
Well, you know, I mean, yeah, let's just say we're going to talk a little bit about the very rapidly developing story of where we find ourselves in the We're gonna discuss that.
We see mandates collapsing.
We see marches occurring.
We see all sorts of interesting stuff.
And that, I think, tells us something about where we are.
So we're going to discuss that.
We're going to discuss why I will not be at the march.
And I think that's an important thread to have discussed.
So those things are on the table.
I know you have a couple of other things you were planning to do.
Indeed, including a couple of film recommendations for films.
Not brand new films, but films that we and with our boys watched this week that we recommend.
And also, we're going to finish, I think, with a little bit about Thich Nhat Hanh, who died today, and whom we have spoken about on the podcast in the past at one point.
But first, but first.
Uh, we are here on YouTube and Odyssey and, um, excuse me, and we, we...
This and the Q&A will also be on Spotify.
We are still trying to figure out our video game, obviously, but this is where we are for now.
You can ask your questions for the Q&A at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can join either or both of our Patreons.
Right now, the question asking period for the private monthly Q&A that happens at my Patreon is open.
It's a 48-hour window every month, and it is always open Over the middle of the month livestream, and that's right now.
So you can consider joining us there.
Those private Q&As are a lot of fun for us.
They are small enough that we can see the chat and we can actually interact with people, which of course we don't do on these.
You have something to add?
Well, I wanted to, no doubt, there are many people duck-duck going right now to see what it means that we are still working on our video game.
We're not working on a video game, we are working on our video game.
We're trying to get dialed in as to where we will be coming to you from.
There's no video game happening, certainly not a virtual reality Dark Horse universe, nothing like that.
It's all pretty much as you remember it.
One of the things that happens when you have a really long two years is that punctuation just goes out the window.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, for people substantially younger than us, they never believed in it.
Which?
Just look at their texts.
Didn't believe in which?
Punctuation.
Ah.
At all.
I thought you meant either the pandemic or the video game.
Well, I'm not sure.
I think they sort of hold all beliefs kind of lightly, which is probably wise in an era with so much bullshit.
But yeah, punctuation was never, never on their list of priorities.
Yeah.
Who gives a fuck about the Oxford comma and all that?
Oh, they definitely don't.
As a whole generation, the Oxford comma is... I'm a fan, frankly.
I like it.
I won't die for it.
I don't care that much, but I like it.
It's not a hill you'd die on.
No, definitely not.
Nope, nope, nope.
But I like it.
There are times when it is actually clarifying, and therefore, I believe, must be used.
Okay.
You can find direwolves and epic tabbies and digital book burning and such at store.darkhorsepodcast.org on shirts and bags and I don't know, what else?
Nothing much else.
Shirts and bags and blankets, I guess.
You can join me.
Almost all of the content is free.
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I wrote about sex differences in competition, the first of two parts this week, the second Part is happening next week, and there's going to be some more COVID content coming up soon.
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All right.
Why don't you start us off?
All right.
I want to explain why it is that I'm not going to be in DC for the march on the 23rd, which is Sunday.
This was a difficult decision and one I'm not entirely happy about.
I would very much like to be there.
There are a good number of people who have become our friends over the last year who are going to be present and I feel like it would be a natural place to be, and I would love to speak to that audience.
We actually have no idea how many people are likely to go.
We know that there are quite a number of signups, that if this event looks like other events where people have signed up in advance, it could be a million people.
On the other hand, somebody could be messing with the march, and they could be registering large numbers of phony names in order that we would think more people are coming than actually are.
But I suspect it's going to be a large and successful event.
However, I was pretty concerned that such a large fraction of the movement—the dissident doctors, for example, who have told us so much during the pandemic that we needed to understand about things like vaccines, things like alternative treatments, things like the progression of COVID and how you address it—such a large fraction of those dissidents are going to be present that I'm concerned
That somebody who had been embarrassed by these people might seek to do something at the event which would cast it in a false light or worse.
And I thought it was necessary that somebody stay outside, somebody who had seen the planning of the event, so that if somebody were to, for example, attempt to make it look like a January 6th insurrection or something like this, That there would be somebody able to say, actually I was there for the planning, here's what was said, here's what the intent was, I don't know where that thing came from, but that wasn't what these people were attempting to do.
And so I have decided to stay home and play that role, as much as I would like to be present on the ground.
Now I very much hope to hear That nothing has happened, and in fact maybe I'm not the only person who has decided to play the role of staying outside so that we can speak to what has actually taken place in the planning.
But my hope is that if somebody did plan something to embarrass the march, or worse, that they will be dissuaded from doing so by knowing that there are people who will be able to speak very clearly to what the planning of the march looked like.
In the aftermath, so anyway, hopefully it goes off without a hitch and we get to see a Well, I guess at the moment we're watching mandates being withdrawn around the world and
This march is decidedly an anti-mandate march, bringing together people who are vaccinated, unvaccinated, pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, bringing together people from both left and right, because there's a great deal of agreement that this public health nightmare has been Radically mismanaged that the mandates are not justified as we have said here many times They're not justified by this pathogen.
They're not justified by these remedies and they're not justified by the quality of these public health authorities Which is to say, just to repeat, and we've repeated this many times, there are some conditions under which it is possible that a mandate would be something to consider, but not this pathogen, not these vaccines, not with this government.
Yeah, and I will add to that that it is hard to imagine a government sufficiently free of corruption that it could be trusted with this, but what we're saying is that in principle one could imagine a scenario in which you had such a government and you faced such a pathogen and you had remedies that justified.
And that conclusion, I think, is one of the things that – maybe I shouldn't speak for you, but I think both of us, I know myself – have woken up more to in the last couple of years.
The recognition that much of the conservative pushback to regulation is precisely about the suspicion that it's actually impossible to find a government instantiation that is trustworthy enough to take it forward.
Yes.
Now, I was thinking as I was biking home from dropping Toby at school yesterday about the comparison, just a thought experiment that, you know, obviously one can't know, but I was thinking about the comparison between... I have bad news for you.
That was today.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
You should start over.
But just, you know, just I'm gonna just mess with your timeline, but I'm telling you the truth.
That was today.
Okay.
Well, yeah, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Okay, sorry, gotta start over.
But anyway, I was thinking about the comparison between the response to the pandemic that we saw Which was almost unbelievably top-down, right?
We had remote bureaucrats interfering with the relationship between your doctor and your pharmacist, right?
Your doctor was not allowed to prescribe certain things even though under normal circumstances the doctor can prescribe whatever they want, right?
So that's an amazing level of top-down coordination that basically You know, rendered doctors and pharmacists as automatons in some system that had decided on one path.
Let me say anecdotally that I had a conversation with a doctor whom I trust this week.
No, I trust this doctor all the time, but I had the conversation this week and I was reporting my experience with COVID a couple weeks ago and reported that I had gotten a prescription for
uh hcq and uh and this doctor whom i trust said how did that prescription go through i can't get it through i cannot get the prescription put through and i'm i think i'm not going to explain it here because i think it's probably not safe to do so and that further tells you what kind of a landscape we're living in but the idea that a doctor should be asking a patient uh that you know how how is it that some other doctor was able to prescribe something completely legitimately
When this has always been the purview of doctors, this is one of the things you go to school for, is to gain some autonomy, to have this stamp of approval on your forehead that says, you now know enough.
That we are going to vouch for the fact that you are going to make decisions, and sometimes those decisions will harm people, and overall they will do people good, and you are able to make those decisions for yourself.
And this incredibly top-down and just remarkably across-the-board authoritarian response Chuck the power away from all of the people who have earned it, and that includes also, of course, the individuals who don't have medical degrees, who wanted to be able to, say, continue to take supplements that they had been taking before, the kinds of supplements like NAC that were yanked from shelves.
Right.
And, you know, what I concluded is that I believe if doctors had been left to their own devices, right, if there had been no overarching public health mandates of any kind at any level, and doctors had done what doctors are trained to do, which is to treat patients that have diseases that they can't be certain of the nature of, And to discover what works, right?
Doctors try things.
They try things based on the fact that this set of symptoms implies that this system is doing that thing and these, you know, drugs tend to be helpful in those cases.
Doctors would do that.
They would discover, I mean, as we discovered, you know, ventilators seemed like the thing, right?
They weren't, right?
Doctors figured that out.
But the point is, you would expect a crude initial response to get rapidly better on the basis that doctors are intelligent people who can talk to each other, pool information, and get smarter collectively, rather than have some thing in Washington with unknown allegiances dictating a response and handing it down and then browbeating And penalizing doctors for departing from it, which is what we saw.
And I think, to my way of thinking, it is essentially certain that we would have lost fewer people and we would have had a lot less carnage if doctors had been left to do the thing that they are in general left to do, which is access the pharmacopoeia, among other things, and figure out what works.
And presumably be free to put out their recommendations, which has been noted for many, many months, many, many times now.
It is remarkable that there are almost no sets of recommendations for either prophylaxis or treatment for this disease.
That's insane.
That is insane.
There is a set of, um, stamped with the approval of the government and the pharmaceutical company's vaccines, so-called, and there are a couple of newly generated, again by the pharmaceutical company's drugs, and nothing else is officially approved.
And that's...
There's never been a pathogen in the history of the Earth for which nothing else that isn't brand new has worked.
And even though it is quite clear at this point that this pathogen was helped in its evolution with humans, that doesn't make it such a new thing that it can only be treated with things that have been created by humans.
Yeah, there's no possibility that you wouldn't find useful things to do.
Doctors around the world have come up with different protocols.
We've got a bunch of them that work, and the point is you also have a public health apparatus swearing that they don't work, swearing that the doctors who have put these out are cranks, and that's just abnormal and frankly transparent, right?
There is some other priority here.
Right that involves disrupting normal medicine and you know, basically setting a precedent for Basically allowing your government to stand in for your doctor.
Yeah, which is appalling.
So anyway Good luck to the dissidents who are speaking at this March this weekend.
I really hope it is a smashing success That a huge number of people show up, that everyone is well behaved, that anything that is planned to embarrass or disrupt the march is called off, and that the worst we face are a lot of really terrible people shouting anti-vax, which is what they're already doing, right?
Which is a crazy thing.
We're talking about people, many of whom have been vaccinated, right?
We're talking about vaccine-injured people, right?
It's appalling, but I think by now pretty much everybody whose brain is still functional has learned to reject that stigma.
Those who have been injured by a thing do become somewhat opposed to the thing under many circumstances.
They might, but the point is to say anti-vax is to imply that this is somehow an ideological position rather than Yes, the evidence tells people who have been injured by something that it is perhaps not so safe.
Well, and that's part of what it is, actually, and that's part of what I think is driving both you and me so crazy at the moment, which is that on the other side, the people who are yelling anti-vax, just like the people who were yelling racist four and five and six years ago, are in fact ideologues.
And they may have dressed up like scientists, and like humanists, and like thinkers, and like intellectuals, but that doesn't make it so.
What they are is ideologues, and they've got a conclusion, and they're going to stick to it no matter what else happens.
And because they are ideologues, and they know that that is the basis by which they make decisions, they assume that everyone else that they encounter is as well.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, I know you claim you're a scientist, but so am I, right?
Ha ha ha.
I also have a conclusion, and we just have come to different conclusions, so we're going to argue about it.
It's like, you know what?
We're not all ideologues.
And what is happening right now, the narrative is crumbling, right?
And you begin to see some of, frankly, the ideologues backpedaling.
And some of the backpedaling is going to convince some of the people.
And some of the people who would have been very happy to see us and the others like us, who have been vocal and out there from the beginning, disappeared into the abyss, and in fact tried to help that happen.
Some of them are going to be the ones who are positioned to win in the New World Order.
Well, that's the next thing I want to talk about is the scramble that is about to unfold, which I think, frankly, most of the people who have been paying attention to the better, more predictive, dissident narrative about public health and COVID are having the sense of, okay, well, Omicron swept in and it took the pandemic out of the public health tyrant's hands, right?
It effectively handed us something that couldn't be controlled and wasn't killing very many people, and that has brought us to a place that feels like it could be the end of the pandemic.
Now, I will say, some people who are well positioned to think about these things Have warned about what might emerge next.
I don't yet know what to think about that, but let's just say, assuming that we do not have a next variant that kicks this into some other phase that we haven't yet thought about, right?
This does look like, well, probably the end of something, because so many people are getting this vaccinated and not vaccinated, that at some level, to the extent that natural immunity is A decisive factor, right?
We're going to reach herd immunity quickly because it's racing through the population.
So, with that said, the point is, all right, mandates are coming down because people can see that mandates don't really make any sense, right?
What are you mandating?
You're mandating a vaccine that doesn't prevent people from contracting the disease, doesn't prevent them from transmitting it, doesn't reduce viral load.
On what basis are you doing that?
And they will say, well, because it reduces hospitalizations.
Well, even if that's true for young, healthy people, That is no reason to mandate, right?
Are you protecting me from me by locking me in my house and firing me from my job?
That doesn't seem like it's very likely to actually be coherent, right?
I also, I'm kind of not feeling protected here.
Right.
Maybe, right.
So the point is the absurdity of the mandates and really what has happened is that Omicron has revealed what we have been saying all along, which is that something else is driving this, right?
They swear it's being driven by a desire to protect civilization.
And the point is at the point that makes no sense, they still want to do it.
They still want to do it.
And I know you're going somewhere, but I think this is a good place to just show this idea.
I saw this on Twitter today, Zach, if you would show it.
Nobody said you wouldn't get COVID if you're vaccinated, we keep on being told.
Like, just, you know, constant gaslighting by these people.
And so this woman has put together just a few places where of course they said that you wouldn't get COVID if you're vaccinated.
Here we have from Joe Biden on July 21st of last year on CNN.
You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
From Walensky, the director of the CDC on March 29th on MSNBC of last year.
Vaccinated people do not carry the virus.
Don't get sick.
Fauci, the NIAID director, on May 17th of last year, MSNBC.
When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe, they will not be infected.
And Fauci again, of the vaccines, on May 17th again last year.
They're really, really good against variants.
All of these things are untrue.
Some of these things were lies, right?
I'm not going to claim that Biden was lying.
I'll bet he just didn't know.
But my God, you know, and we keep, they keep on changing what it is they're claiming that they already said to us.
And if we can't even keep track of that, then of course they're going to continue to win.
And of course, they're going to erect the new people who they can claim, okay, yeah, well, we got this wrong and we'll have a couple of fall guys.
We'll make sure a couple of people have their heads sort of metaphorically cut off and prop up some new people in the positions that already existed with the systems that already existed with all the same incentives that already existed.
You got to slow down through that because people are not going to understand what's about to happen.
Go for it.
Here's the problem.
Public health elites, and whatever it is that they represent, they have screwed up at an unprecedented level.
They've effectively crashed many of the functional systems of planet Earth.
They've caused untold misery, and frankly, untold disease.
I would suggest people take a look at John Campbell's video from this week talking about how many people actually died of COVID.
It's quite eye-opening.
But he also talks about what people did die of, things like, you know, delays in cancer diagnoses and things like this.
So the point is, this is an unprecedented catastrophe, and the natural outgrowth of an unprecedented catastrophe is a kind of collective soul-searching in which we figure out who screwed up, how it happened, what system should have been in place so it doesn't happen again, and we move forward in that way.
But Were that to happen, these incredibly powerful, in many cases now incredibly wealthy elites who earned so much through this colossal error, those people have everything to lose if we actually figure out what happened and install the systems that would prevent it from ever happening again.
So they're now in search of anything that can save them from facing the people who were right.
Right?
Now what that means is that there's a race that is going to be kicking off here, and we're already seeing the first signs of it.
And the race is for people who weren't right all along, who are now going to challenge the public health authority.
Right?
They're going to point out just how disastrous this is.
That's so brave.
It's very brave.
They're going to say, these public health officials failed us.
But, and then they're going to attack those of us who had this stuff right.
And the idea is that the elites have an incentive now to embrace this new middle ground that is neither fish nor fowl, right?
It is not on board with the public health narrative, it challenges it in very strong terms, but it also challenges the dissidents who will be accused of all sorts of defects.
And the point is, The elites have an interest in finding that voice.
The struggle to phrase it just so is now on, and so people will be falling all over themselves.
Some of them will know what they're doing.
They're jockeying for position in the new world order.
Some of them will not know what they're doing.
They will just detect that suddenly they're seeing articles on a particular theme in all sorts of places, and they will think, I could write that article, and they will write it.
And so you'll have this whole new group of people in the middle, and their purpose Their purpose is to prevent meaningful change, right?
No, no, no.
That is their utility.
That's not why they exist.
They are taking advantage of an empty niche, and they will be adopted by the mainstream and the elite in order to serve the purpose of the elite.
Right.
Well, let's just say the purpose of the niche is that, is to protect the elite from a reckoning in light of what they have done to planet Earth.
Yeah, this is reckoning insurance.
It's reckoning insurance.
But here's the other thing, there's another dimension to this, which is that there are a huge number of people in the audience who aren't going to write that article.
They're not going to write any article, but they're in a bad position, right?
Because to the extent that for a year, you've been browbeating people for being on the wrong side of history, and then it turns out they were on the right side of history.
Closer to two.
Well, let's just say there are people who go back two years, but we've been hearing these voices, And the point is, if you're somebody who's been on the wrong side of this and you were sure you were on the right side of this and you've been chastising people publicly, you've been shunning your friends and all, then the point is now you're in a very awkward position that actually mirrors the position of the elites who want to stay in power.
Right.
And so the point is, you've got a bunch of people who will hunt for the best phrasing of this narrative so that they can be pulled up into the positions of power that will decide what will be done and what will be done is symbolic shit and nothing more.
Right?
You've got an audience in search of an excuse, which is to say, yes, the public health authorities did fail us, but those other people weren't right, right?
And, you know, you've got the elites, and their point is, look, anything so long as it doesn't take us out of our positions of power, right?
That confluence of those three is going to result in a scramble that you're not going to see coming, and it's going to result in the promise of reform, and there will be no reform.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I would suggest you go watch the excellent film, The Big Short.
Not one of the films I'm going to recommend later, but yes, The Big Short is a third film.
It's a beautiful and heartbreaking film and pay very close attention to the end, right?
This is coming and we could get in the road.
We could prevent this, but we have to be very careful because the temptation to embrace these people who have been outside of the fray and are now going to rush in and they're going to shout at the right people.
and they're going to shout at the wrong people, and they're going to seem like they're somehow more moderate, and it's nonsense.
It's strategic, right?
The people that you should be talking to are people who took a risk and said what needed to be said, even when it was almost impossible to do so.
And generated predictions based on an actual understanding of the situation by deriving meaning from what we could see from first principles as much as possible.
I think, frankly, much of what I'm wrestling with at the moment is, as I told you, there's a sadness that verges into rage.
And I've just got this deep disappointment with a lot of people who I thought were honorable and brave and insightful and full of wisdom.
And this has gone on long enough, and they have been, so many people have been unwilling or incapable, and it is often hard to determine which it is, To actually investigate the evidence in front of them and generate a claim or an opinion that runs in any way counter until, like, until yesterday, right?
Like, until the last couple of weeks, the last month, you know?
About a year ago is when we saw the Lab Leak crumble in exactly this way.
This is just about a year out from the Lab Leak narrative crumbling this way, and suddenly there were a lot of people going, yeah, but I was saying so, I was saying so.
And now that's just like this dull roar, and some Fauci and Barak and all and Dasik are still denying it, but you can say that now without risking getting kicked off YouTube, for instance.
But still you can't, you know, we're still demonetized, we're still at risk for talking about all the rest of the things we're talking about, and the people whom
I thought it was honorable and brave and insightful and full of wisdom who have said nothing that counters the mainstream narrative until like yesterday or not even yet, and who are going to somehow contort themselves into positions that make them appear to have been carefully thinking it through all along, when what has been revealed is actually
The white-coated scientism thing has confused most people who actually don't understand what science is.
Most people who actually have never thought of themselves as scientists, or done science, or engaged with people really truthfully, honestly with the people who are doing science, really have no idea.
And so they really feel like they have no ability to assess the claims.
And so we have a whole lot of people who have been claiming to assess the claims, who are actually doing no such thing.
And so now the narrative is crumbling, and they're going to jump up on top of that smoldering pile and say, aha, yes, here I am, here I am.
Like, what even are you standing on?
Like, they're still going to be unable to assess the claims that they're either now saying yes are true or no they aren't, because they've revealed throughout this that, again, they're either unwilling or incapable of doing so.
Well, we're going to have to do a better job of sorting, because there are going to be various different categories of people.
Need a hat.
Well, I would say that there are certain heuristics, right?
It is now going to become profitable to find that middle ground position.
Of course.
So you don't know anybody who adopts it now why they're adopting it, right?
You do not have evidence that they have, you know, if you get slightly ahead of the narrative now, but it ends up being a huge win, then the point is, okay, well, what is that, right?
I think that was you promoting yourself.
I don't think that was you actually, you know, figuring it out.
So the question is, what is the look?
On the other hand, the scales will fall from people's eyes more and more rapidly.
Right, right.
And so it's a very different realm, but I found, I adopted a policy for people who came to me, this happened somewhat regularly, that people came to me after the evergreen thing and apologized, right?
And, And they said, you know what?
I got to tell you, I did not know what was going on.
I called it backwards and I'm so embarrassed.
And I would say, you know what?
You don't owe me an apology and here's why.
When you figured it out, you did the right thing, right?
Anybody who does the right thing upon discovering what it actually is, we're square.
And I think we need to adopt this policy generally.
But the right thing includes not pretending that you always felt this way or that you were really on the side and you're like, I'm going to dig up something that I said or wrote or tweeted, you know, once six months ago in a sea of things.
Like, no, that's not the right thing.
That's cheating.
And you know it.
You know it.
Right.
So, you've got A, being honest about the fact that you've changed your position is fundamental, right?
Doing the right thing, and the right thing does not mean just wagging your finger at the people who screwed this up so badly.
It means not wagging your finger at the people who got it right, right?
That's also part of the right thing.
That is 100% fundamental.
And, you know, then the question is, and this is the tough part, I think we need to figure out How to feel about the various different categories of people, right?
So, I don't want to get too far in the weeds here.
But obviously, feeling is a proxy for stuff, right?
We feel because it's a quick way of actually deploying a, you know, game-theoretic approach that has been refined by selection.
And it's not very properly applied to many modern circumstances.
So, for example, If you imagine yourself a thousand years ago In some circumstance where some person delivers you a terrible insult if you're a man, let's say and some person delivers you a no we're clear on that, but If somebody delivers you a terrible insult suggesting that you are, you know a weak person it might be important that you throw a punch at
Because if you don't, it might imply that the person was actually accurate and it might result in you facing a lot of bad stuff going forward.
On the other hand, in modern times, if you're in a bar, 500 miles from home and some person that you've never seen and will never see again says something insulting, the game theory is very different, but you still have the same emotional reaction.
So, I mean, this is fascinating.
I didn't expect us to go here.
The piece I'm working on for the second part of this competition, as it differs between the sexes, for my subsect for next week is based on an invited commentary that That I just wrote that I just was just published a week and a half ago or so in the in the journal in the scientific journal the archives of sexual behavior and it's specifically it's called something like covert versus overt on the different competitive styles of women and men.
is, in part, precisely this, that male-stale competition, so dominance hierarchies, exist in, I think, certainly all species that can be said to have friendships, and I think pretty much all species that are social.
But the way that humans are so unique, one of the many ways that we are unique, is that we have hierarchies in both sexes.
And actually, I've only been able to find chacma baboons that also have male hierarchies and female hierarchies.
Most species of primates and elephants and stuff have a dominance hierarchy in one sex, but not in the other.
But then in modernity, we bring it together, and we act like, oh, we can just work together and play together and everything, men and women together, as if the different hierarchical styles, the different rules by which we create and maintain social interactions with one another aren't different, and as if they will just slide together easily without ever negotiating.
And of course, that's not going to be the case.
Men, for reasons that I won't get into here, but do get into in this piece that'll be published on Tuesday, are much more likely to say, hey man, you want to take it outside?
Like, what was that?
And like, it's on right now, here, now, we're doing this.
And it has hard borders in space and time.
It's direct, it's for an audience, it's there.
Right?
And female stale competition is much more likely to be covert, to happen away from an audience, to happen in fact, when a person is alone, but engaging in a competition that over in ecology speak, you might call like scramble competition, for instance.
And that doesn't look like what we think of as competition.
And so we have all this research claiming that, well, women aren't really that Women say they're not competitive, so they're not competitive.
Well, bullshit, right?
Like, this is not true at all.
It just looks different.
And what we see in so much of especially 21st century version weird modernity is basically female-style dominance hierarchy tactics being adopted by everyone.
And everyone pretending that, well, if it's not overt male-style dominance interactions, well, then it's not competitive at all.
And you're probably imagining it.
And that's the basis of a lot of the gaslighting, right?
Like, oh, you're imagining it.
No, I'm not!
That's for real, and we all know it.
And frankly, if it looked like, you know, if it looked like teenage girls, then we'd see it.
But because it's so-called adults doing things that really you should have grown out of it if you were a dude, you never should have been doing it in the first place, then we don't see it.
All right.
So let's look at some of the modern proxy emotion landscape and figure out what we are supposed to be feeling at this moment and compare it to how we are actually feeling in this moment.
Yeah.
So let's take something like the desire for vengeance.
The desire for vengeance, I'm going to argue, is rather like panic.
I'm going to argue that panic is almost never a good idea under modern circumstances, right?
You are almost always better off being level-headed, which doesn't mean that panic is never adaptive.
It was adaptive.
That's why it exists.
But the point is, modern circumstances are much more likely to require you to puzzle through something than they are going to benefit from you flailing about.
You know, right?
Flailing is usually not the right response.
No, and it can get you drowned.
It can do all kinds of things.
And so the basic point is, hey, if you could actually turn off panic, yeah, there's probably occasional circumstances in which that would be bad, but it's sort of like a seatbelt.
You're just kind of better off with it off, you know?
Yeah.
I'm going to argue vengeance is a bit like this.
Vengeance, before we had things like governance and hearings, was an essential mechanism.
And what it is, actually, is a version of, and I'm using this term technically, spite.
Spite, as you well know, is defined as accepting a cost in order to deliver a cost.
I'm going to accept harm to me in order to deliver harm to you.
Why would anyone ever do that?
Well, it's necessary, because if you betray me, and I don't deliver you a cost, then betraying me becomes cheap.
So if I want to be betrayed less, I deliver a cost so that it isn't cheap, and that causes the system to work better.
But if you have other... You have a long-term win in the aggregate, or else we wouldn't have spite existing at all.
Right, right.
So spite, you know, and just for those of you who are scratching your head as to what the hell we're talking about, so policing is actually integral.
It is a spite mechanism, right?
We, as a society, pay a price to hire police to make sure that if you commit a crime that is bad for society, you pay a cost, right?
So police and prisons... Police's population level spite.
Yeah.
Okay.
I see what you mean there.
I think it's going to be taken out of context and you're going to be accused of it being one of those ACAB guys or something, which of course you're not.
No, no.
I'm saying, you know, the point is it's the cheapest way to accomplish something important.
The last thing you want is everybody having to take, you know, vengeance into their own hands in order to ensure
that civilization works then there's a whole lot more carnage that way rather than why don't we all agree to offload our vengeance instinct to a force that we can then regulate with rules that say what it is and isn't allowed to do and you know it's just better right you know it's the monopoly on violence is the better less violent way of dealing with it than having everybody have to you know engage in their own violence okay so the point is there is a sense of like
I have watched these people crash a planet I have become very fond of, right?
Yeah.
And I have watched utter indifference to the suffering of human beings, a willingness to keep useful medicines away from people who desperately need them, right?
Even though that resulted in people's deaths, and that means there are families grieving who didn't need to, right?
Keeping useful medicines away is particularly galling, right?
The destruction of children.
The destruction of children, the indifference, the feigned inability to understand the developmental impact of, you know, shielding the face with a mask that is not especially effective to protect them from a disease that isn't especially dangerous to them.
I know you're on a roll here, but can I just show?
Sure.
Oh gosh, I had it queued up and now it's gone.
Okay, so this, Zach, this was in next door yesterday or today for somewhere our region of Portland.
School parents, today, the Oregon Health Authority held a public comment hearing on making mask mandates permanent.
There were over 335 people on the call and 125 plus people spoke and it lasted for over six hours.
Not one person spoke for the rule.
OHA heard the plea.
Now it's time for your school boards to hear it.
Start emailing your schools to demand they make masking a choice for parents and stop dehumanizing our children.
To which one of the responses was, oh wow, that's tiny.
Keith, wearing a mask dehumanizes a child about as much as them wearing socks or eating a burrito.
I get his point with respect to the socks, but a burrito?
It's not even fucking funny, man.
I'm sorry.
No, I'm sorry, but it's not funny.
These people are doing so much damage to children.
We spent a lot of time talking about childhood in our book, in A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and we've done it a lot on this show.
But how you could be an adult on this planet and actually really believe That covering a child's face for most of their waking hours in school, which is, given how bad school is now, mostly about social interactions and not about learning anyway, that that could not be having an effect, that that could not be dehumanizing children?
How?
Either this guy is a troll and does not believe this, which I hope, but given the back and forth that then ensues, I don't think so.
People actually believe this.
I know.
People actually believe that children having been masked in some places for a year and a half, an academic year and a half, is fine.
It's fine.
Right.
No, it's incredibly not fine.
The question is, okay, it's happened.
A huge amount of damage has been done to a generation of children.
It won't be undone.
There may be things that we can do to reduce the damage, but it won't be undone.
It's a permanent fact of the way this was approached.
And on a future podcast, I'd like to talk about what actually happened and why, right?
I think we can infer a great deal about what the pandemic actually was.
You know, of course, it was a pandemic.
There is a pathogen, but it was something else too.
There is a pathogen.
That doesn't mean there was a pandemic.
Well, I don't know.
I'm not saying there wasn't a pandemic, but there is a pathogen.
Therefore, there was a pandemic.
It's not a logical necessity.
What I have said is that we had a wave of tyranny riding on COVID.
That it used COVID to do other things.
And the other things are something that we need to become rapidly aware of.
Because the fact is, this is the kind of excuse that can spring out of nowhere.
It can spring out of a lab in some place that you don't know anything about.
And, you know, suddenly you're dealing with a global phenomenon, whether you like it or not.
Far less likely to spring out of a cave that you know nothing about.
Right, right.
For reasons, you know, they pulled that one over on us and they claimed, and many people believed, that actually this sort of thing was ready to happen any day of the week.
Oh, it just happens.
You know, as I argued in my UnHerd piece earlier in the year, actually that's not right.
It's much harder for something to leap out of a cave than you think.
And this bullshit that people like Daszak like to say about, you know, oh the You know, the expansion of the human population is putting humans in contact with wildlife more and more, right?
Like, that sounds really logical.
It's just bullshit, right?
It's bullshit for simple, easy-to-understand ecological reasons.
And no, this wasn't threatening to happen any day of the week.
They created the exact... They brought forth the Golem, right?
And then required us to bend to their will in order to address it.
Anyway.
No, and also, he's not an idiot, and he has training as a zoologist, so he knows damn well it's not true.
Right.
You know, whatever the explanation.
I mean, let's say we just need to get to the bottom of it.
But I want to go back to the question about vengeance, okay?
Because you're a better person than I am in this regard.
You can tell that I am having a hard time.
But not better person.
That's not what's going on.
And the language I was using with you earlier is you are better able to find, this is a weird language for us, but you're better able to find your Christian self.
You're better able to find your forgiveness at the moment.
Okay, but let's take the Christian self way of describing it.
I would argue that the Christian thing, the thing you're referring to, is actually a kind of enlightenment that has to do with You know it's not inherently Christian, but the place that it is inscribed for you know the European derived West is you know in those particular narratives, but but the point is
You go from little tiny bands of closely related people who are aligned by genes, and you start benefiting from collaborating with people who are less and less related to you.
And it's actually so much better that you need new stories to explain why you're doing it and why you're ignoring relatedness, right?
And so you're sort of moving in this direction.
And, you know, it's compensating for two things.
You're keeping less and less close track of whether or not you're closely related.
Right.
And the point is it's so hugely profitable.
Did you raise his barn last week or was that someone else's barn?
Right.
It becomes indirect and the point is I'm going to participate in this thing that raises barns when they need to be raised, right?
And I'm not going to hold back.
So, anyway, if we can just Put a final piece on your claim of betterness.
I do believe that in this particular regard only, I'm actually benefiting from a kind of enlightenment that has to do with just staring at that game theory over and over again, and then it actually changes how you feel once you realize, you know, once you realize panic is no good, you can learn not to do it, right?
This is that same thing.
And so, anyway, what I will argue Is that vengeance, the urge to see those people suffer, A, you will immediately have less of a taste for it when you realize where you heard it last, right?
But urge to see people suffer is different from not feeling forgiving, and is different from something that I have explicitly called for, I think, here before, which is a reckoning in which all of those people Like, look at yourself and be honest.
And frankly, at the point that you proclaim to all of the rest of us that you were always this side or the other, it will be clear if you have actually been honest with yourself or not.
And all too often, there has been no reckoning.
Right, but here's the question.
I agree with you.
The ideal thing is for people to go be honest with themselves because then what comes out of it is not a defensive reaction in which they forget what they believe.
It's an upgrade in which they say, ah, where did I go wrong?
I don't want to do that again.
So, what was I really sure of, and how did I end up sure of it, and then where was my first indication that I had it wrong?
Where's the first signpost I missed?
Because if they don't do that, and we do come out of this now, the narrative collapses, and this Northern Hemisphere summer actually feels like the summer of 2019.
What happens in three years when the next whatever it is happens?
These people will not have learned, and it will be worse and faster.
Not only these people will not have learned, the people that we actually know and interact with, but the elites who did this cynically, those people will still be in a position to do it.
They will have learned.
Well, and you know, look, let's take a parallel example.
The financial collapse of 2008 was about a housing bubble.
But the point is there's a game, which I have called the bubble game, which just requires you to declare some place for a bubble so that you can get people in bubble frenzy.
You can profit on the way up and leave them with the thing when it blows up.
And the point is dealing with the housing bubble by focusing on housing is a mistake.
You need to focus on the culture of profiting through bubbles, right?
Yes.
That's the thing to focus on.
And so in this case, We had a particular pandemic.
And what we need is for a general recognition that this was a massive exercise in rent-seeking, that we have just all been dragged along, kicking and screaming, in a massive exercise of rent-seeking that actually shifted.
It transferred a huge amount of well-being.
Recognizing what that was and not leaving those people in a position to do it again is fundamental.
But here's what we need to figure out.
How should you feel about, you know, the Prime Movers?
Right?
Like, I'm not in a forgiving mood, and I don't think that the ultimate Prime Movers were actually engaged in a noble activity that turned out to be in error.
Right?
There are too many indications that that's not what happened.
That said, personally I don't feel any need for, you know, for vengeance.
What I feel a need for is a complete airing of what happened and that such people, for example Fauci, needs to never ever again be in a position of power over anything important, right?
And how do we get there?
Yeah, what are the chances that there's going to be a complete airing?
Low, incredibly low.
That's not going to happen?
Well, but you know... That should happen, but that's not going to happen.
People need to understand what the scramble that's coming is about.
And the point is, the scramble, whether or not we have anything like a complete airing, is going to depend on whether or not the people in the middle who are going to scold both sides are allowed to get away with that move.
That cynical move is going to make it impossible to get to the bottom of what happened, right?
It is going to ensure that we have an outcome, like the end of the big short reveals from the housing crisis.
So, All I'm arguing is that we need to kind of up our game and we need to recognize... Who we?
All of us?
Us in particular?
Those of us who are feeling like, okay, the narrative is finally collapsing and people are beginning to wake up in large numbers to things that we've been trying to tell them for a very long time.
So up our game how?
To what end?
- And what? - A, whatever the mechanism is, we need people to understand that it is in their own interest to figure out what happened and figure out what role they played in it and get to the right side of it as quick as possible, right?
The rationalizing is what's going to do us in the next time.
If we rationalize this time, it's going to cause it to happen again.
So we want people, and you know, the problem is that that actually involves But that does require reckoning, right?
That does require looking at yourself and saying, yeah, actually, three months ago I was in a different place.
Yeah, but in order to get people to do that...
They need to know that there's a hug on the other side of it.
That if you do that frightening exercise, that you can come back, right?
And so that's the point about the desire.
There are bad people, right?
And the reason that we punish bad people is so that others will not do what they did, right?
Or that they won't do it again.
Right?
But ultimately what we need is, you know, truth and reconciliation is a process invented to take this situation and say, look, if we play the game out, right?
If we go after you and try to punish you for what you did, then you will resist and you will probably win and we'll never even find out what it was.
And we need to know what it was in order to prevent it from happening.
So we will trade you Something like amnesty for honesty, right?
That's a good trade believe it or not and We need to figure out what that looks like here Right in order that we can get to the bottom of this because the bottom of this is pretty pretty ugly Right.
We need to know what happened Well, I think you're talking about two different levels.
And I think the level at which I am most sort of tormented at the moment is not at the level of the people who are actually driving policy in any way, but the people who were helping facilitate the public messaging through media and social media presence.
And those people are capable of being very squidgy about what it is that they're claiming now and then and before and in the future and the sort of weaseling out of things.
And it's the seeing into the very near future, seeing the weaseling and the request for hugs.
I was like, I'm not fucking hugging you.
Stop being a weasel.
You need to stop being a weasel first.
Well, right, but the point is, it's like one of these things, like quitting smoking.
People don't quit smoking because it's very hard, right?
But they don't make eye contact with the fact that the hardness of it is not an argument against quitting, it's an argument for quitting now because it gets worse, right?
So, the game theory has to work out such that people face something that they would not otherwise be willing to face in order that they get to the other side.
And the point is, look, And you know, look, this is also written into religious doctrine, right?
There's a reason that confession functions the way it does.
And the point is you don't want to create a situation where somebody is just damned because that's a very dangerous person.
You want to create a situation where somebody has a route back and that makes them behave better in the future.
And this is that.
And anyway, I mean, you know, Let's put it this way.
Most people did not do the worst.
There were some terrible, terrible people who did absolutely jaw-droppingly awful things.
Then there were a lot of useful idiots who got taken advantage of.
So useful.
Right.
So much utility out there.
They became very useful and they became very dangerous.
But the point is, what crime is that?
Right?
It's a serious crime if you don't learn that you were used as a tool against other people who didn't deserve to have you wielded against them.
Yeah.
Right?
And so the point is, you want the useful idiots to become immune to useful idiocy in the future.
Right?
And that does involve being ready to recognize that they didn't mean to do it.
Right?
Yep.
Doesn't mean they shouldn't have known better.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm stuck in part because I'm stuck, but also in part because I see precisely, you know, we're not going to talk about any names, but I'm thinking about a couple of people in particular who I can already see repositioning themselves so as to appear to be doing what you're talking about, but are making their plays in various ways so that they will socially advance from this.
And that is already driving me crazy.
And it is illegitimate.
And calling it out, you know, I could start to call it out by name, but that's not I don't think that that would help.
And it is it is Same old, same old.
You know, it is, it just, and yet the stakes this time have been so high.
So many people have had their lives destroyed.
So many children have been permanently damaged.
More people died than needed to die.
More economies died than needed to die.
And there are a lot of people who are going to make social gains because that is the game they were playing the whole time.
Yep.
That is what they care about.
And that gets me.
Look, anybody who plays this strategically at this point is a problematic person, okay?
We've been through hell, and I mean we as a species have been through hell over this, right?
And for you to play it strategically at this point, especially if you're going to go after people who were more right than you were, it's unacceptable.
I'm not defending that at all, right?
The scramble is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the vast sea of people Yeah, so there's at least three different categories that we're talking about here.
where they were and what they've just learned.
Yeah.
So there's at least three different categories that we're talking about here.
And the people who have no particular ability to make social strides from coming to grips with where they've been and what this means about the future, by all means.
Yeah.
You know, yes.
Yes, forgiveness and, and, and let us, you know, let us join hands and move into the future together and never do this again.
Yeah, so I will just say there's a particular person who I'm not going to mention here.
Somebody well known who did approach me years after the evergreen meltdown and did say, hey, look, I do owe you an apology and explained what he had thought.
And this is somebody that I am now extra fond of, even though I would say he did well, but not brilliantly in the public health crisis here.
Right.
He made some bad calls.
But the point is, I know what he was honest.
I know what he will do upon discovery that he fucked up.
And the point is that is such a useful and important piece of information because it's not a window into, you know, what takes place.
It's a window into values.
And what we're really trying to deal with here is the fact that people's values were utilized to turn them into useful idiots, etc.
And that what you need to know is that, look, if somebody knows, if the The facts of a situation are clear enough that somebody will do the right thing rather than figuring out which way the wind blows and then figuring out what to do about the facts, which is there's far too much of that.
Yeah, that's right.
A couple things that are sort of of what we're talking about.
I just like the follow-up to this tweet so much that I want to share this.
If I can don't show it yet, Zach.
It looks like I don't.
Oh, here we go.
Can you turn off efflux?
Oh, it's evening.
Boy, where did I put efflux?
There it is.
Nope.
There we go, yeah.
Okay.
Yep, that's fine.
Okay.
Just heard Intel has dropped Oregon employee vaccine mandate.
They are the largest private employer in Oregon.
Now I went looking and I can't actually find confirmation of this, but I did find a lot of stuff from Intel even in December and even in January saying, yep, if you don't meet our deadline by January, by April you're on leave without pay, yada yada yada, and it seems like Intel is backing off this like so many Both private companies and governments, but this response is so good.
They followed the science so hard.
Glad to see these reversals, not so pleased to see it without some heads rolling.
People's livelihoods were destroyed and all they can say now is, oops, we were just following orders.
So, A, that is consistent with how I've sort of been feeling, but they follow the science so hard.
It's such a hilarious way of framing it.
Yeah, no, it's a really good phrasing of it.
So, I don't know.
I mean, I don't feel like we're done, and I don't feel like we're in a position to even sum up what it was we've said.
But I do think that we need… We need some tools for this, and the tools have to involve openness for what anybody involved at any level has to say, but, you know, a recognition that there's a lot of places that people will go that are not born of, you know, a desire to do the right thing.
They're born of a desire to find a safe place to stand, even if you've made the world much more unsafe for other people who actually were trying to tell you something that you needed to know.
And that's the thing that's really so troubling.
People who try to tell you things you need to know were demonized.
And if you participated or if you were too credulous and you accepted that these people were bad grifters, whatever it is that was said about them, you need to do some soul searching, period.
And you do it and we're square as far as I'm concerned.
You don't do it and that's on you.
That's a defect of your person and it's not a small one.
I guess, but it's also true though, isn't it, that there's got to be a statute of limitations.
Well, there's a de facto statute of limitations, but the problem is...
You know, when Evergreen happened, we said one of the most important lessons was that you don't really know about the qualities of the people you're interacting with until you have a crisis that reveals what they will actually do, right?
And so we have that same situation here.
It's so much the same.
And I know how long it took for me to get to a place of going like, okay, well, I'm glad I know.
Wow, a lot of people disappointed me, but I'm glad I know.
I'm having a hard time being glad I know.
Yeah, but here's the thing.
You know how we sometimes get letters from people that we never met at Evergreen who say, oh, I was on the wrong side and I felt bad about it.
I'm actually going to go to the effort of reaching out to you and telling you that I actually figured it out, right?
So, there is the possibility For people who broke the wrong way to do the soul searching later, right?
But the point about the statute of limitations is that what will happen in short order is that now it's very visceral, right?
We remember what people tweeted and what they said and, you know, what they published and all of that.
And that will become murky.
And it will go back to feeling like, oh, yeah, you know, it's going to be this sort of loose heuristic on, you know, who makes sense when in fact, at the moment, it's very clear that a lot of people failed the test.
They weren't actually engaged in the activity of trying to derive meaning from first principles in the first place, even though they appeared to be those people, because they fell anti-woke, for instance, because they fell anti-hashtag Black Lives Matter.
Of course, Black Lives actually matter, but not that movement, not here, not now.
They fell the right way because they saw something in that that really didn't feel right, but it doesn't feel right.
It was based on some other kind of – god, this sounds ridiculous – but like way of knowing, and it wasn't based on analysis, and it wasn't based on scientific thinking, and it wasn't based on numeracy.
And I guess part of what this is revealing over and over and over again is how functionally innumerate and scientifically illiterate and Not just anti-analytical, but just like virtually a-analytical.
So many people are that they just couldn't even manage to do it.
They couldn't even get close to it.
Because some dude who's practically just like holding a glassware wearing a lab coat goes, trust the science.
Follow the science.
Yeah, I mean.
It's so disheartening.
It's disheartening.
It's disheartening.
Here, you have something.
Oh yeah, so many things.
Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, right, from a long time ago, who has not done a brilliant job throughout this, quote tweets, the new silent majority, the fully vaxxed.
Of an Atlantic article, which, let's see, I didn't pull it up for the silent.
This is an Atlantic article published a few days ago.
The silent, vaccinated, impatient majority.
As patients with the pandemic wanes, leaders in widely vaccinated democracies are deploying a new political strategy.
And it proceeds to explain how those who are vaccinated are just fed up with those of us who aren't, and it's our fault.
They're continuing the pandemic of the unvaccinated, even now.
I mean, this is, what, is it the 21st or 22nd?
Even now.
It's like four or five days ago.
Even now.
Even now.
When the efficacy of these things is so clearly through the floor, Right.
And you're going to get on your high horse about being impatient with those of us who resisted your crap treatment?
Well, it's, it's, you know, dog whistle is an overused term, but it's a dog whistle for people who were gullible enough to fall for that line in the first place.
And the point is, you know, I at least have some sympathy for people who didn't know what to do, didn't know who to listen to.
You know, I said, well, these people who have all of the things that are supposed to indicate that they are scientifically credible are telling me that they've looked at the evidence, they've looked at the safety, they've looked at the efficacy, and that I should get this thing, right?
Yeah, but are you sympathetic to people who are still now, this week, saying, well, I did everything right and I'm just really fed up with the people who didn't because it's their fault?
Look, I'm sympathetic with anybody who didn't have the tools to make sense of it.
That's different.
I am not sympathetic with people who did have the tools and decided not to use them.
Well, but I guess, and this again, it's really hard to discriminate between can't and won't.
But part of what I am wrestling with at the moment is the reveal that so many people among the so-called intelligentsia, the shattering classes of the coasts, Either cannot or will not engage in what, for us, as people who think scientifically every day of our lives, is second nature.
Doing analysis and just basic hypothesis generation and an attempt to look into the actual data insofar as it's been available.
There's been almost none of that.
Is it a can't or a won't?
I don't know.
Well, but I mean this went down Through the careful use of incentives.
Yeah, right and the whole point the whole reason that the That the experience was from our side what it was had to do with the fact that what was really being said to people is Look at them There but for the grace of God go you.
Now the way that you stay out of that position is you don't explore in this way.
So to the extent that somebody put very frightening stuff in the path of those who might otherwise have been open to an analysis, you know, I don't respect not thinking because somebody is trying to scare you away from thinking, but I understand it.
Right.
Right?
Right.
And depending upon who you are, you know, a lot of people were isolated.
They did not know who was making sense.
It's not simple.
I've taken The Atlantic to task a lot over the last year or two, in part because I'm super disappointed in it because it was one of my first literary loves, and I was treated well by it early on.
And this, Zachary, if you would show this, this is the article I just showed, The Silent Vaccinated Impatient Majority.
Well, I'm old enough to remember when The Atlantic was publishing articles like this, 2010, did Pfizer bribe its way out of criminal charges in Nigeria?
WikiLeaks cables shed new light into one of Big Pharma's darkest hours.
And I'm just going to read- What was the date on that?
2010.
Just read the first paragraph here.
On day 12 of WikiLeaks' release of US State Department cables, the daily drip, drip, drip of diplomatic secrets implicated the pharmaceutical industry.
The company was Pfizer.
The country was Nigeria.
And the context was the long-simmering, still-bitter aftermath of the drug giant's quick and dirty 1996 trials of an experimental antibiotic for children during a devastating meningitis outbreak.
A truly chilling, cautionary tale of industry-funded clinical trials in the developing world, this event is recalled in the West mainly as inspiration for John Le Carré's evil pharma thriller, The Constant Gardener.
So, The Constant Gardener is one of the two films that we watched this week.
Zach, if I may have my screen back, thank you.
Which is extraordinary and also won all sorts of awards for its artistic and narrative skill.
It's a 2005 film based on the 2001 John Le Carre novel of the same name.
And interestingly, so that Atlantic article suggests that it is understood, and there is a lot of stuff that suggests that Le Carre really was loosely basing this on on what happened with Pfizer in Nigeria, but at the end of the film there is a quote from Le Carré that reads, Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world.
But I can tell you this.
As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.
I recommend this movie.
I recommend this movie highly.
And I also recommend the movie we watched last night, which we had seen before, but we watched with our boys for the first time, which is Dallas Buyers Club.
A 2013 movie, so-called biographical drama, based on the real life story of Ron Woodruff.
Story takes place in the mid to late 1980s during the AIDS crisis.
And at the end of the movie, the quote there, interesting.
In both of these movies, there are quotes at the end that you don't typically see the likes of at the end of movies.
At the end of this movie, we have, AIDS is not over.
Access to treatment could save many more lives.
And, you know, Dallas Buyers Club doesn't have anything to do with Africa, but there's a common theme here in terms of what kind of medical capers have actually happened in Africa, and who is actually being harmed, and what the people who are doing the harm sound like when they talk about what they're doing there, and it's almost always exactly the opposite of what they're actually doing.
I think this is a piece of the puzzle here that we are never going to have an easy time conveying, which is that there is a process in normal business.
There is a positive feedback, right, where I've used the example of, you know, if you're going to design the interior of a car, You're going to make decisions that are going to result in certain people dying, right?
Because if you were to design a car in which you made every decision such that, you know, it had no downsides, the car would be impossibly expensive and impossibly gas guzzling.
And so, you know, there are trade-offs.
But the point is, once you are in the world of trade-offs, where the point is your decisions result in somebody's death here and there, and you start getting comfortable with that as part of the process, there's no end to it.
And so, pharmaceutical companies run trials.
These trials involve people dying from medications, because you need to know how safe the thing is.
And obviously, a medication could be wonderfully valuable and have a certain amount of harm in the form of people dying who have particular predispositions or whatever.
Right.
So the point is, there's a there's a utilitarian metric by which you get an allowance for for doing terrible things to people.
And the point is, once you get comfortable with that, as these films obviously reveal, you know, one in the case of an African trial and the other in the case of the absurd use of AZT earlier in the in the AIDS.
And the refusal of FDA to allow any other kinds of treatment.
Right, a familiar pattern.
But the point is once pharma or any other industry gets used to the carnage that results from business as usual, the point is then it becomes a question of scale.
Yeah.
Right?
And that's what we saw here is a brand new scale of something that actually isn't remarkable for pharma.
It happens all the time.
It just this time it involved all of us.
Yeah, this went full global.
Typically they have restricted themselves to a continent.
Right, but my point is all of the things that people are having a hard time believing actually could possibly have happened.
I mean, what protected the pharma effort here was that it was impossible to believe that people would do this to other humans.
What kind of lie was it?
Was it noble?
What it was, was business as usual at a scale that has never been seen before, at an absolutely unprecedented scale, right?
And that is actually a story that we need to wrap our minds around, right?
That this is happening all the time with other diseases and other drugs and, you know, often far enough out of your view that it seems very, very remote, right?
But anyway, the scale caught us off guard and hopefully it's woken us up.
I hope so.
I will say that I came home, I was out working at a coffee shop and then walking and trying to be Christian, trying to be forgiving, and I was not managing it.
I was pretty worked up.
And I came home and I discovered that Thich Nhat Hanh had died.
And he was 95.
He was a Buddhist monk whom many found solace and meaning in.
And I spoke about him a bit in, it turns out, episode 62, almost exactly a year ago, actually, January 9th, 2022, in an episode that we called Tyranny Comes at You Fast.
And as I said then, my experience, I actually spent two weeks with a man when I was a 17-year-old.
The high school that you and I met at, Brett, had these senior, I don't even know how it was framed, but they gave you sort of two weeks to do something creative or to take time to do something by which you would become a better human being.
I believe you My friend Kim and I went to Death Valley and did black and white photography.
Yeah, fabulous.
I can't remember anyone else's.
I knew that.
I thought it was Death Valley.
I wasn't sure.
And I, my amazing creative writing teacher, who I don't think was then, but is now a Buddhist himself, I think a Buddhist monk, It got me into this Buddhist artist retreat up in Ojai, where I was the only kid, you know, I was a 17 year old, I was a young woman, and there were all these beat poets and then some other artists as well, some 2D and 3D artists, and Thich Nhat Hanh.
Who, for two weeks, led us in three sitting and one walking meditation a day.
And then we were, you know, making the place run.
We were, you know, breaking bread together and all of this.
And then doing our art, whatever it was.
And, you know, my art at that time, I began to do some ceramics, but it was words.
It was writing and it was sleeping in tents and such.
And I got to hang out with beat poets and Thich Nhat Hanh.
Remarkable.
And I haven't, I didn't think of myself as a Buddhist then, and I haven't since, and I haven't really meditated, but I have seen the value in sort of finding a place, finding a calmness, and his words certainly are Illuminating with regard to the damage that fear and anger do.
And so I went back to the same book that I read from back in episode 62, Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm.
Again, this man is dead today, the age of 95, and I just wanted to read a couple of brief sections from this.
Appreciating where we are.
Thich Nhat Hanh.
Imagine two astronauts go to the moon, and while they're there, there's an accident and their ship can't take them back to Earth.
They have only enough oxygen for two days.
There is no hope of someone coming from Earth in time to rescue them.
They have only two days to live.
If you were to ask them at the moment, what is your deepest wish?
They would answer, to be back home walking on our beautiful planet Earth.
That would be enough for them.
They wouldn't want anything else.
They wouldn't think of being the head of a large corporation, a famous celebrity, or the President of the United States.
They wouldn't want anything but to be back there, walking on Earth, enjoying every step, listening to the sounds of nature, or holding the hand of their beloved while contemplating the moon at night.
We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from dying on the moon.
We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious, beautiful planet.
Zen Master Linji said, quote, The miracle is not to walk on water or fire.
The miracle is to walk on the Earth.
I cherish that teaching.
I enjoy just walking, even in busy places like airports and railway stations.
Walking like that, with each step caressing our Mother Earth, we can inspire other people to do the same.
We can enjoy every minute of our lives.
And one more brief.
That's uh...
Beautifully described, in fact.
Yeah.
And I would argue, actually, you can get a different version of that by looking at mundane creatures.
Absolutely every one of which is a miracle.
Oh yeah.
Right?
You just don't realize how amazing a housefly is, right?
But even a housefly, if you stop to take the time to look at it, there's a lifetime's worth of fascination in it.
Yeah.
I'd rather it not land in my drink, but okay.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
I mean, it's immoral on the part of the philosopher that does that, but... No, I think they're deeply into amoral territory.
Okay.
The Conditions of Happiness from, again, the book Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh.
The conditions of happiness.
There are so many conditions of happiness available in the present moment.
You can take a piece of paper and a pencil and write them all down.
In the beginning, you may think your list won't be very long, but you'll be surprised to find that even both sides of the paper aren't enough for writing down all the conditions of happiness that are already available.
When we look at our own body and the environment, we can identify many conditions of happiness that are already available, hundreds, thousands of them.
For example, your eyes are a condition of happiness.
When you have eyes still in good condition, you need only to open them to see a paradise of shapes and colors.
When we've lost our eyesight, we recognize that to have good vision is a wonder.
So your good eyesight is already a condition of happiness.
Thanks to your eyes being in good condition, this whole paradise is available to you.
If you touch this condition with awareness, happiness naturally arises.
There are innumerable other wonders just like that in your life.
For example, there is your heart.
Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
With mindfulness, you recognize the presence of your heart.
Breathing in, I know my heart is there and I'm very happy.
To have a heart that functions normally is a great happiness.
When you've worked a long shift, you may have a chance to take a rest, but your heart never stops working.
It's beating for you 24 hours a day.
Your heart is healthy and working for you.
That's a wonderful thing.
There are those among us who don't have such a heart, who are always afraid of having a heart attack or some other emergency.
There's nothing in the world they want more than to have a normal heart just like the one you have.
So you breathe and recognize the presence of your heart, and you are touching another condition of happiness.
Breathing in, I'm aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile to my heart with a lot of gratitude.
You're touching another condition of happiness.
You can touch hundreds of conditions of happiness right there in your own body and mind, as well as around you.
It helped me.
It helped me get out of my anger and despondency.
Yeah, I don't want to sum it up, but there is some aspect of this that has to do with outwitting your evolutionary program through good calibration.
Yeah.
Right?
We are designed not to pay attention to house flies.
We are designed not to be noticing every step.
We are designed to be doing all kinds of things.
And we are designed for an environment we don't live in.
So that design is almost completely arbitrary with respect to what you should actually be paying attention to.
And you know, mindfulness doesn't cut it.
The problem with mindfulness is that it's too general, right?
But what he's arguing there...
Is you know that from another vantage point something that you have which you are taking that you are taking for granted almost every moment of every day of your life would be a reason for great joy were you just simply in a slightly different spot and therefore you know you can tune into that anytime you like.
And, I mean, you've talked about this with regard to what it felt like waiting for the boat to come back after the accident in Galapagos, right?
When no one would talk to you and it wasn't clear if I had survived.
And you had the sense of maybe this is the moment before which and after which everything is different.
And just, you know, for me having lived through the experience, and then of course the years and years of aftermath, rehabilitation and everything.
But for both of us, the like, everything could have changed right then, brings you back into sharp relief of appreciation and gratitude for so many of the things that you had perhaps forgotten to be recognizing or grateful for.
Yeah, in fact, it's weird.
I hate to introduce it because in some sense it almost suggests the opposite lesson, which I don't want to do because I know it's the right lesson.
So for those who aren't aware of the story, Heather had been gravely injured in a terrible boat accident in Galapagos, and word had made it back that there were injuries, that not everyone was okay.
But nobody would tell me anything.
And the more I asked questions, the more it became clear that something had happened to Heather, that there wasn't information.
And so, you know, I ran to the dock and waited for the boat with the injured to arrive.
And the more I learned, The more it seemed likely that you were probably gone.
And, you know, there is this... I don't think there will be another period in my life like it.
There was a period of, you know, 40 minutes where it's like, I don't know this to be a fact.
I can't find any evidence that it isn't true.
I'm hovering in that place, you know, between two completely opposite realities that will You know, immediately kick loose as the boat arrives.
And, you know, and it was worse when the boat did arrive because you were injured enough that you were lying down in the boat so you weren't even visible.
So as, you know, I pull out my binoculars and I'm trying to understand what has happened.
You can see all of our students, but not me.
Seems to confirm the worst.
And then our student Val gets off the boat in absolute tears over what she's been through.
And so I think I see in her eyes confirmation of the worst, right?
In any case, the profound relief upon you being carried off the boat and speaking to me was, it was like this moon thing where it's like, okay, right?
Doesn't matter what else is true, right?
Because the point is what isn't true, the horrifying possibility that has just vanished is such a relief that it was like, I don't think I saw as clearly as I needed to how badly hurt you were, because the point was you were alive and you were clearly going to make it.
Well, and I wonder actually, I feel like that's exactly sort of where I was going is that I didn't know that I was going to survive at that point.
It felt very much like it was possible that I had punctured a rum with a rum, along with one of what I knew to be multiple broken ribs among all the other Injuries, and so there was like this series of step functions where I was like, oh my god, now I need to somehow compel.
I need to put the information out into the universe that I am not certain.
I'm alive now.
I did not die back there.
I'm alive right now.
But it's not clear that that will be the case.
And somehow there's this vigilance.
And I think maybe that is actually kind of mirrored in what I'm feeling right now around the public health response and the pandemic, if you will, and all this.
I'm just feeling this like anxiousness, this vigilance, like Oh my god, must communicate the thing that needs to be communicated so that the worst doesn't happen, because as awful as these two years has been, it becomes even worse if things get instantiated as a result, if the new regime is the people who have crowned themselves with exactly the same systems that got us into this situation in the first place.
Yeah, if the scramble in the middle ground allows the thing that did us this way to continue to be in power, then the point is we are inviting the next one.
And I agree, we are weirdly hovering in this middle spot now where the narrative cannot hold.
It's coming apart, right?
And you and I are feeling a great deal of relief over that because that narrative has been pointed at us for two years.
And yet not relief.
I think I actually do feel, I hadn't occurred to me, but I actually do feel that same sort of visceral anxiety without the excruciating physical pain associated with really just the hours between landing on that dock and being assured by the good doctor, Stephania, that no, I was going to survive.
But there was time in there, like, I don't know, and no one else is aware.
Like, no one else can hear the truth of what I know is going on, and that was entirely about my body, but this feels like the body politic.
Watch this.
Everyone must have eyes on this and not let it happen again.
Well, it's interesting.
I didn't see this connection coming at all.
I absolutely think this is where we are and I have had multiple conversations with people who have taken, you know, some prominent people who have taken a tremendous amount of shit over revealing again and again and being, you know, courageous in the face of what came back at them.
People are feeling relief and I hate to be the one who says, actually, I mean, you know, I was kidding at the beginning of the podcast.
But I do think this is the halfway point because the point is it wasn't about the pathogen to begin with the pathogen was real Something rode that pathogen and that something's fate now hangs in the balance and it is now going to react like a a Threatened ferocious creature and people need to understand that that's coming.
Otherwise It will stay in power Yeah, I think that's right.
Wow, okay.
We are going to sign off and take a 15-minute break or so.
For those who aren't sticking around for the Q&A or who are listening on audio-only podcasts where the Q&A doesn't show up, we'll be back in a week.
Next week, I forgot to say it again at the start of the hour, next week we'll be coming to you early on Friday Pacific Time.
Something like 8.30 or 9 is that what we agreed on, Zach?
Yeah, something early Pacific time.
But if you're with us right now, or you're on video, Boy, I lost it.
Ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com and that's for questions you want us to answer.
If you have logistical questions like, hey, I heard they have a PO Box.
We've been getting some just lovely communications and packages as well from people.
Our darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com can point you to that address.
Right now the question asking period is open on my Patreon for a private monthly Q&A.
As always, consider reading this.
We're proud of it, and we think it does a lot of the heavy lifting of the kinds of thinking that we're talking about here.
Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
And be good to the good ones.
Try that again.
Yeah.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
