#113: The Wrong Side of History (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 113th 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 Omicron, Covid, and how public policy has failed to change in light of this highly transmissible but far less dangerous variant. We discuss two excellent essays in Tablet, one by a rabbi in San Francisco, the other on scientific and medical “dissidents,” of which we are two. We discuss the pow...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 113, which is going to be prime and Am I correct about that?
Oh, boy, I don't know.
Wow.
Alright, sorry, it is early, and so it's possible that nobody knows whether that's Prime yet.
You really have to look into these things carefully, because there are a lot of ways not to be Prime.
There are a lot of ways in which I'm not prepared today.
Well, it's early in the morning.
This is an experiment, and we had no choice but to run this experiment because our son has commitments elsewhere, and he is the brains behind the tech.
So, in any case, we will... And much else as well.
So much else.
So we are going to forge ahead.
113 is prime.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like it would have to be, but I just didn't know.
Right.
You never know.
Sometimes something that seems like it should be just isn't.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
All right.
Because we are doing this early, for those of you who are here live, even though I don't even know if we told anyone, we appreciate you being here.
The chat is, as usual, going on in Odyssey, although it's got a longer delay than usual because we don't have our usual slate of mods.
Shall we just jump right into...?
I think we should jump.
I mean, there's just so much and, you know, if we don't jump we won't get to it.
Okay.
Okay, you want to jump then?
No, we got announcements, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is going to be interesting today.
Yeah, so we are here on YouTube and the chat is live on Odyssey.
As I said, we will be, as we have begun doing in the last couple of months, posting this video to Spotify shortly thereafter.
We will be talking a little bit about Spotify today on the show, for which we should all be appreciative.
Not the fact that we're talking about it, but the fact that it exists and is standing strong against cancel culture, basically.
We will do a Q&A today.
We're going to try to do everything a little bit quickly here, but as usual you can ask questions for the Q&A at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We encourage you to join our Patreons this Sunday, which would usually be the day after the podcast, but in two days is the private Q&A for this month where you can join us on on my Patreon.
And it's intimate enough, small enough that you can ask that we have the chat going in a way that we can see it for that, so that's very nice.
We have some products, some Dark Horse products at store.darkhorsepodcast.org and at mysubstacknaturalselections.substack.com.
I've been writing about differences in competition between the differences in the sexes with regard to competition for the last couple of weeks, and we've got a couple of Um, of COVID, COVID-related things coming up.
I think I won't say anything more about that now, but, uh, they're, they're good.
And I think actually I may also, we're going to be talking about the, uh, the truckers convoy in, in Canada.
Truckers for Freedom, um, that is happening right now that is due to arrive in Ottawa on Saturday, tomorrow.
January 28th, which is extraordinary, and we won't be able to show even really a substantial fraction of the kinds of things that are happening there, but I think I will post some of some of what we've been seeing in my sub stack as well.
And again, that's naturalselections.substack.com.
And as usual, we have three sponsors today, for which we are extremely grateful.
So without further ado, you are doing number three today.
The third one.
All right, I will prepare.
Be prepared.
Okay.
Our first, excuse me, Today's program is brought to you by Sole, a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
That's S-O-L-E.
Sole is one of two footwear sponsors that we have, and we love them both.
As we have said many times before, we only take sponsors that we actually either have use ourselves and can vouch for ourselves, or in a couple of rare cases, Because the product is not something that we ourselves are in need of.
We have asked a dear friend whom we trust to try them out, and that actually is a fit for the second sponsor today.
Or the third sponsor, someone else whom we love, which we'll get to.
So today we have Sol, a footwear sponsor.
Our two footwear sponsors are very different from one another, but both are focused on creating shoes that help feet get and stay healthy and people become more mobile.
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We don't have any bears.
Much to Brett's chagrin.
Our two boys.
We have boys, young men now.
It's not so different.
It's a little bit the same.
But bears don't wear shoes.
True.
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That's hard to prove.
No, this is one of the ways you can tell we don't have bears.
Um, our children wear shoes, uh, and if we had bears they wouldn't.
Our two boys are wearing these shoes much of the time now.
They take some getting used to, uh, they tell us.
Uh, the structure under the arch is unusual, but once you get used to them they provide great support for feet, and again they look great.
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Second sponsor, MD Hearing Aid.
Did I put these in the wrong order?
Wow, I did.
This was supposed to be our first sponsor this week.
MD Hearing Aid, which was also our last sponsor last week, and I don't know what that predicts about which sponsor it'll be next week, but they do seem to be cropping up a lot these days.
Next week's not Prime though, so.
Yeah, so that changes everything.
Yes, of course it does.
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All right, our third sponsor is also the third ad that we will present today.
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Labs will eat basically anything.
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What do you mean, in a pinch?
Weren't you feeling a little bit pressured to taste the dog food when you tasted it, as you admitted the first time we ran in for Sundae's?
I was feeling pressured.
To taste it.
Having tasted it, I was able to relax and I don't know about this.
No longer feeling it.
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Okay, well, I'll get back to you on whether I'm glad I read that one.
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It's actually quinoa.
And yes, I do know how to pronounce it.
But did you know how it was spelled?
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Only because I've tripped over it about a thousand times.
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Thank you, sponsors.
It's a little silly around here.
Yes, it's early.
It is early.
Okay.
I think you wanted to start by talking about your week.
Yeah, alright.
So, here's the news.
I had COVID.
I'm virtually certain I had COVID because I had symptoms that match COVID so darn well.
I had the sore throat, I had the runny nose, I had a bit of sneezing.
I treated it aggressively.
I used ivermectin, I used hydroxychloroquine prescribed by a doctor, both of them, and the experience... And all the usual over-the-counter stuff that we are now doing, which we have talked about before.
Yes, I continued to... D and C and zinc and quercetin and magnesium and also during that time NAC and black seed oil.
Yeah, so presumably I was pretty well equipped D-wise, ionophore-wise, All those things were in order and the experience of COVID was incredibly mild for me.
And it went on for about five days.
It was odd in the sense that a usual, it basically felt like a light head cold.
And what it was different from a light head cold in my experience in the sense that it didn't really change.
It was like I had the initial thing of like, am I about to get sick?
And then I did get sick.
And then it kind of hovered at that level for five annoying days.
And then it cleared up and actually on the fourth day I got fed up with it.
It wasn't any different than it had been on the previous days and I decided to see if I could ride my bike and actually I detected no difference in my ability to ride climb hills and all of that.
So it was a very mild Somewhat annoying experience.
It's a little bizarre because... You didn't expose yourself to anyone except the people you lived with.
Right.
Who had already had it.
Yeah, and it was annoying to have something that felt like a cold and not do the things.
Now, personally, I've been saying for much longer than there's been COVID that I don't think we treat things like colds with proper seriousness.
That we give each other colds too easily because society sort of doesn't expect you to stay away.
But in any case, it was frustrating not to be able to do things like run to the market to get something when I had what felt like an extremely light cold.
On the other hand, not my choice to make for other people who might contract it, so I did do it.
But anyway, the experience after two years of dodging This virus, and obviously I probably had Omicron, which is clearly a different experience than Delta and other previous variants.
But it is interesting after two years of, I believe, successfully dodging COVID to finally have it catch up to me and have that experience be Uh, be what it was.
This also means that, as you mentioned, all of the family has now had COVID.
We're almost certain of this because the symptoms are such a close match.
I will say, you brought home four.
You happened to be at a drugstore when someone happened to make a delivery of these at-home tests.
And you brought home four, which was the limit of what they would sell you.
Each box contains two tests.
We gave them at various places.
We can talk about this, I guess.
I would never have sought out these tests.
As I wrote about in my sub stack, I happened to be standing in line at the point that they showed up, and all these people came spilling into the store, having been waiting for these things.
The guy in front of me and me in line just happened to be sort of quote-unquote in the right place at the right time, and frankly I bought them thinking, well we'll save them for when we need them to prove, you know, because we can't get into a lot of places here unless you have a negative test or proof of vaccination, and we don't have the latter.
And they're garbage, they're total garbage, and I don't like that they exist, and so basically I am I want nothing to do with this.
I want nothing to do with the testing.
I want nothing to do with being asked to prove that I took a test, that we aren't even being told anymore what the rates of false negatives and false positives are.
We aren't even being told what the source on these things is.
And frankly, the bigger point is this isn't a big deal.
anymore.
This is no longer a disease.
It's a big deal for most people.
And you could say that about a cold and no one's going to gasp and say, you're killing people.
And you could even say that about the flu, although most people wouldn't say it quite so strongly about the flu.
And in the beginning, two years ago, 22 months ago, we were saying about and to people who were saying, it's just a flu.
Like, no, it's not.
And it's, you know, it's not.
It's different, in part because it's been, you know, it's a Franken-virus.
But at this point, with this variant, it is far less in terms of how it manifests.
Yeah, but I still want to make this point, okay?
Eight tests for eight come up negative.
In a family in which the people who were tested were presumed positive in several cases by doctors, okay?
And so my point is, look, you and I are- Who also affirm that the tests are worthless.
Right.
You and I are biologists, right?
We are not lab biologists, but we have certainly done lab work, right?
So we are going to be well above average in our ability to do the test as the protocol- It wasn't a failure to swab.
Right.
It wasn't a failure at any level.
And if we Did the test in such a way that it did not come up positive eight times out of eight because of something in the technique, then it is a flawed test at that level.
And if the test is simply so insensitive that it can't measure these things, how is it possible that we're two years into these things, that we're distributing these tests without information about how seriously to take their results, when the tests appear to be nonsense?
Second thing is, I don't know whether the The lightness of the disease that we faced was entirely a fact of Omicron, whether it was because we have been very diligent now that we understand the role that things like vitamin D deficiency and ionophore deficiency play to supplement these things.
We are extremely careful about this, so we were well prepared, but the point is Or the early treatment.
Or the early treatment, or all of the above.
And the point is, why is the CDC not recommending the supplementation?
Why are we distributing tests that give a completely false impression to the extent that knowledge about whether you are or aren't positive could be useful in terms of controlling the spread of the disease if that's even what we should be attempting to do with Omicron?
Right?
Why is the experience of this so far off of the official recommendation?
Right?
Why?
And this is really the crux of the matter.
And by the way, if you want to know what light looked like.
In every regard, the data stream is polluted.
In every regard.
Every single regard.
There's nothing that you can clean.
There's no place you can stand and be like, okay, I'm limited when I can see.
There's some columns I have to look around, but at least I know from here what I can see about the official counts.
Anything.
You can't trust any of it.
Yeah, the officials are blinding themselves, right?
We can talk all day about, you know, adverse events, but the point is they tell us that we can't trust the data.
They don't tell us what we're supposed to infer the level of adverse events from other than the data in the VAERS system.
They aren't doing autopsies, which would be the way if you were really interested in finding out whether people who had died in some temporal proximity to a vaccination had died from it or just it was a, you know, a spurious temporal correlation, but we're not collecting the data.
So anyway, the data stream is polluted all over the place, but they're tell for me.
Yep.
The tell is what happened at the point that Omicron seems to have caught them and everyone else off guard, right?
At the point that a variant shows up, which as many of us pointed out, has many of the characteristics that you would ascribe to an attenuated virus vaccine.
As a woman I know said to me this week, who does not particularly follow the podcast or anything, isn't Omicron what we all wanted?
Isn't that what the world was hoping for back in the first year of COVID?
I will make my usual caution.
Right?
Attenuated virus vaccines are the best vaccines from the point of view of their interaction with the system.
That is to say, they properly alert the body to the antigens that the body becomes sensitive to, because they are actual infections.
Right?
And so the point is, your body knows how to detect an infection.
It detects the infection from the attenuated virus.
It has the proper reaction.
It makes a durable, lasting immunity.
Right?
That's what you want.
It has a slight danger to it, which is that because you're using an actual living organism, right?
Organism is, I'm using the term loosely, but nonetheless, the point is you're talking about something that has genetic information in it and evolves.
And basically, I would argue it is a living organism.
It just borrows all of the machinery from you.
Let's put that aside.
It's not important to the question.
You're talking about something that can evolve, right?
Now, it's very unlikely to evolve because of one thing, right?
The one thing is that the attenuated virus vaccine that we give you is not contagious, which means it has a very limited window in which to learn new tricks that might be dangerous to you, right?
And so the point is, even if it makes slight progress on that question, if it doesn't jump to the next person, that whatever progress it makes is lost, okay?
Omicron is not like this.
Even though it has many of the characteristics of attenuated virus vaccines, it lacks some of them.
It's not as attenuated as you would want, right?
An attenuated virus vaccine that's really great will have effectively no symptoms.
This one has symptoms.
And it's highly contagious?
It's highly contagious, which means that what evolves from Omicron Yeah, it could be more attenuated than Omicron.
That's one strong possibility, but it's not the only possibility.
And so, yes, the universe having delivered Omicron to us at this moment, we ought to look at it and say, you know what, that is functioning like a vaccine, and we ought to pivot our policy on that basis, right?
We ought not say, oh, Hey, a vaccine, because it has this evolving capacity to it.
This policy pivoting you speak of.
Which is the amazing fact here.
Nothing changed, right?
It was like, you could tell, right?
Were they going to have a meeting and say, you know, well, in light of Omicron, does this booster stuff make any sense?
You know, geez, we don't, you know, if they're being honest with themselves, and what they say to us has anything to do with what they say to themselves, which is clearly not the case.
But if it did, they would say something like, We don't have any idea what the adverse events are from here because we don't trust VAERS and there's no other system to collect them, right?
Maybe we shouldn't be advising boosters because A, what do the boosters have in them?
They have the alpha variant antigen, or the information to produce that antigen, and B, there's an adverse event risk.
They clearly don't know what it is.
There's no reason to give a booster when in fact, you know, again, They have conflated from the beginning, and I believe that this is a way to fool the public, because the public has some understanding of what an antibody is.
They have conflated antibodies with immunity, which is wrong, right?
The best immunity, the primary immunity, the immunity that you want is T-cell based immunity, which doesn't mean that antibodies aren't...
Yeah, you can't do a simple test.
It's harder to quantify, and therefore, you know, the human brain that craves the reductionist, whether or not it knows it, and frankly, the less scientifically literate you are, the more enumerate you are, the more likely you are to crave the simple metric, the simple rubric, and to grab onto it and say, yes, but, you know, antibodies.
Well, also, if you want to fool people, right, then the point is you can say things like, well, but the antibody response to the vaccines is blankety-blank times the response to the infection itself.
And the point is you may even be right, but that's not an indication of its utility.
That's an indication that the thing that you've decided to measure fluctuates wildly with the presence of the antigens.
Yes, your body did mount a response.
Right.
It mounted a response, but it mounted a response on the B-cell side.
And in any case, the whole thing is a game, and the idea is clearly there are lots of things that you and the public can't parse.
And so what you're going to do is listen for authorities who are going to say words like antibody, and you're going to feel like that's... You said that as if we're not in the public.
None of us can parse Because the data stream is so polluted, we simply do not know.
In fact, with regard to the truckers' convoy in Canada, we can see.
When it's a measure of people showing up to a thing, and there's people on the ground filming it, and then you see radio silence from media, you can say, aha, bias, right?
But because The only things you can know for sure with regard to COVID are anecdotal stories of, you know, and they might be three, four, five degrees of separation deep.
We're like, well, no, I heard about this guy who didn't recover when or did recover after and, you know, these sorts of things.
But the aggregate requires data that we receive from Who?
You know, the who?
The CDC?
Maybe the NIH?
None of whom are trustworthy.
They're demonstrably untrustworthy.
And, you know, you're one of the This is not a silver lining, but it's necessary.
Things that is happening is that many people are waking up to the corruption of the three-letter agencies like the CDC and the NIH, and then asking, what does it mean about the ability of, in the case of those organizations, American
scientists to actually do science and the answer is a lot because the vast majority of science takes money and CDC is setting policy for medically oriented science and the NIH is funding a vast majority of the science that at least has any medical manifestations and and we just we see
Even the belief of Fauci, who's now said it multiple times, that to disagree with him is to disagree with science.
I don't remember the exact phrasing.
Attacks on him are attacks on science.
He has a degree in science, and day one of sciencing is, that's not how science works.
No, sir.
You are either far dimmer than you present or, much more likely, far more corrupt than anyone is admitting.
Alright, so the point that I think you and I are now frustrated by and struggling to make in a way that it can be heard.
You and I take science very seriously, right down to the philosophy of science, which yes, is a bit dry, but if you don't get it right, the stuff you stack on top of it actually doesn't work.
It is the foundation on top of which you build all of the things that you do in order to discern what is real in the universe via the scientific method.
Therefore, if your foundation is bad, then the rest of your science is bad.
And if your foundation is uninvestigated, you may get lucky and you may have built your scientific protocols, your methods, whatever your research program is on top of something that actually makes sense, but you got lucky.
It doesn't mean that you were doing it right all along.
You need to start with, you know, I used to hate words like epistemology and pedagogy, but you need to start with the epistemology, you need to start with the assessment of how it is that we make claims of truth.
That's all epistemology means.
The philosophy of trying to understand what it is that, what do you mean you can't?
Because if you go to a paper, the problem is people say, well, look, here's a paper.
You can start that there philosophically.
Who you.
You, if you're doing the work, can do that.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about, the scientists.
Well, but my point is.
Okay, well, then we're talking about two different groups of people.
Okay.
Scientists must start there.
Yes, and they don't.
Okay, but you just said they can't.
Scientists could, but they don't.
And the problem is, we in the public would love the idea that, oh, here's a scientific paper, and it was done with the scientific method, and it tells me that X, you know, is causal of Y.
Okay, so you are actually, I think, then arguing that other scientists can't even walk into some scientist's communication about what they did and necessarily tell if they proceeded from hypothesis, for instance, because it is well understood that many papers don't even pretend.
Back when I was invited to do peer review papers and I did it, my most frequent critique was, Where's the hypothesis?
How is this claiming to be science at all?
They at some point stopped asking me because I was constantly saying, I don't think this is hypothesis-driven science.
Therefore, I don't think it's science.
But increasingly, you have people claiming that they started with a hypothesis when they didn't, and they write it into the paper.
And it's just a Well, no, there are two levels of this lie, okay?
One is they actually observed something in data, and they came up with a hypothesis second, and then they claimed that the hypothesis preceded the collection of data.
That is invalid.
That is not a scientific test.
It is an observation.
It's not a scientific test, right?
But the idea that they test a hypothesis is untrue.
is untrue and therefore it's actually fraudulent.
Yes.
But then there's a second level of fraud.
I was just using the word lie.
Right.
Well, no, but there's a second level of fraud that is also rampant here.
Yeah.
And that is the conclusion preceded any of it.
Right?
And so the point is, it's not even an observation.
So we wouldn't even be, we wouldn't, This paper wouldn't exist had work been done that somehow falsified the Cherish conclusion that they began with.
Right.
The conclusion started, and there are a dozen ways to get to it.
You can run enough experiments that eventually one will give you a spurious result that matches your conclusion, and you'll publish that one.
You could have no correlation whatsoever.
You can run 20 experiments, and one of them comes up statistically significant just because mathematically that's likely to be the case.
Sure.
And you publish that one.
There are lots of ways it can happen, but the basic point is if the- And everything, everything about the culture of modern science pushes a person towards that, even if they are completely honorable, right?
If you do ten experiments and nine of them come out negative, it's very hard to get those published.
Yeah.
Now, I will point out, lots of people... It's hard to get the negative ones published.
Lots of people who on an average day are good at this kind of thinking have screwed it up with COVID, right?
And XKCD is going to be a prime example here.
I'm very disappointed in XKCD and what it was unable to detect in the shenanigans that were going on.
But if you go back far enough in XKCD... The green jellybeans?
Yeah, the green jellybean cartoon.
Describe it.
So basically the idea is...
You've got a bunch of different hypothesis tests.
Somebody is running the test that the various different colors of... What were they?
Were they M&Ms?
They're jellybeans.
Jellybeans, right.
Are related to something.
Did you find it?
I did, but it's long, so it's not going to show on my screen.
So what is the test against?
What is the thing that is proposed?
So you can show my screen, Zach, although you can't see all of it.
Jellybeans cause acne, so I just investigate.
But we're... God, it's so small.
But we're playing Minecraft.
Fine.
We found no link between jellybeans and acne.
P greater than 0.05.
That settles that.
I hear it's only a certain color that causes it.
Scientists, but Minecraft.
We found no link between purple jellybeans and acne.
P greater than 0.05.
We found no link between brown jellybeans and acne, etc, etc.
No link between, you know, pink, blue, teal, salmon, red, and okay, it goes on and on and on.
We found a link between green jellybeans and acne!
P less than 0.05.
Whoa!
And then they go on and then we see, you know, they tested whatever that's going to be.
25 colors.
Yeah.
Right?
News!
Green jelly beans linked to acne.
95% confidence.
Only 5% chance of coincidence.
So the point is... The point is they did 20 tests.
The point is statistically significant means something that people don't understand what it means.
And what it means is it is a tolerable level of risk that something... And our friend Dr. Rolligator is going to once again chastise me over a subtlety buried in here.
But the point is it is a tolerable level of risk that the pattern that you have observed is not the result of anything other than sampling error, right?
And the point is if you set that number to zero, you can't do the science.
You have to accept some tiny risk that randomness will fool you, and the point is if you do a bunch of tests and there's nothing to be found, some of those tests will come up positive because of this sampling error issue.
So, now you're going to take me to task.
Well, I don't think it's sampling error, but I don't think we want to get into the weeds here.
I don't think sampling error is the issue here.
It's sampling error in the sense that you have a non-pattern, and if you grab a bunch of handfuls of data, some of them will be skewed because every handful is random and there's skewed... Meta sampling error.
I believe it's technically sampling error.
But anyway, the point is...
We have a test, a hypothesis test on the table, a de facto hypothesis test about what you and I have been struggling with over the entirety of all of these live streams, over all of our public work, trying to sort out what is and isn't going on with COVID and our response to it.
Yep.
Right?
Our point has been, this appears to be conclusion driven.
Yes.
This appears to have started with its conclusion and then the facts are being bent in order to lead us to that conclusion rather than proceeding from the evidence to see where it takes us, right?
That is Not only unscientific, it is the inverse of scientific.
It is not even open to discovery, right?
Now that is a terrible accusation, right?
If that is true, it says utterly dire things about our system, which we have said, hey, this is utterly dire.
And the point is... Follow the conclusions, follow the anti-science, follow the Pied Piper.
Omicron is the test of this hypothesis.
We did not see Omicron coming, but the point is we have been delivered something that is so radically different from the variants that preceded it in terms of its consequence and risk.
You would expect policy to pivot radically in the aftermath of its emergence, and it didn't pivot.
What happened is you saw, A, exactly the same scare tactics, right?
When Omicron showed up, it was like, scary new variant Omicron, right?
When in fact there were indications from the beginning that the response to it should be the opposite.
Actually, maybe this one has a much lower rate of death, which implies a much lower rate of everything that, you know, puts people at risk of death.
And so, the fact that we are being told that, of course, You know, scientists say that the response to COVID, to Omicron, is that you should go get your booster, right, is evidence that the conclusion started.
The booster was the point, and then the circumstances are being presented in such a way as so as to suggest that same conclusion still follows.
And that is a very unsettling thing, and I don't pretend to know how you're supposed to grapple with that discovery that you've been through two years of insanity and you've been told that the insanity you were being dragged through was because scientists had figured stuff out when in fact it turns out that what they were doing was completely unscientific and conclusion driven from the beginning.
But that does appear to be the case.
Well, I think, as I've been saying for many months now, I'm really trying to figure out what's in the heads of the true believers here.
And I think one of the things that the true believers, And some of the true believers don't believe all of it anymore.
They're seeing cracks in the public narrative, but they still believe some of it.
Most of the people who are now seeking this middle ground and saying, okay, enough already, still believe fervently with a religion-like fervor in, for instance, the vaccines.
And, you know, I see people saying things like, I was so relieved, I cried tears of joy the day I got my first vaccine, COVID vaccine.
And I think, wow, you know, how do you, how would you sort of back away from that edge then?
How would you recover your own sense of rationality and dispassionate analysis if you were that emotional?
If you believed the story to such a degree that at the point that it was announced that there would be vaccines at some point, and then it was still months away, And you were promised and promised and promised.
As soon as you get this, and as soon as enough of your fellow people get it, then you get your life back.
And you believed to such a degree that you were, you know, and you were also scared.
You're going to get your life back both in terms of being able to do all the things, but also you don't have to be scared about dying anymore.
And you get it, and then it turns out, well, it doesn't really reduce transmission, and it's not really that Effective and and it's not even all that safe and all of these things and you you cannot you cannot back away from Really the emotional conclusion that has now been instantiated in your memory as I remember I remember the promise I remember being promised and then having it delivered and it came to me and here I am and I
Who is to blame for this not working out?
It's the dirty unvaccinated.
That's who is to blame here.
That is who we shall blame.
And a lot of the people who are seeking a middle ground now aren't actively blaming the unvaccinated, but they are also in no way, as far as I've seen, actively investigating their own frankly misguided
Having been vastly manipulated by media narratives, emotional response that got them to go all in on being excited and relieved and overjoyed at getting that gem.
Yeah, and so they become in some sense addicted to the relief and the point is they will they will reinvigorate the story even as it comes apart in front of them in order to return to that state of feeling like they had figured it out and other people were wrong and you know and Relief was in sight.
Yeah, and you know, it's it's it's sloppy thinking it in the extreme and it's it's a disaster you know people would have been much better off with frankly simple advice about how to you know deal with their vitamin D deficiency, for example.
Of course, of course they would have.
So this, um, I wanted to get this in while you were talking earlier, but I still do want to show it.
Zach, this is from the Oregon Health Authority.
Tell us how your friends and family helped you through COVID-19.
You have been in bed for two days with a sore throat and fever.
You hoped it was just a regular head cold, but as symptoms persist, you recognize the inevitable and get a test.
It's COVID-19.
Your friends and family are concerned and want to help.
What do you need?
Groceries?
Someone to help with child care?
Someone to run to the pharmacy for you or walk the dog?
So they're soliciting stories.
You've had a sore throat and fever.
You have something in the general scheme of a cold or maybe even a flu, depending on the variant, this sort of thing.
You recognize the inevitable.
They are trying to keep us so scared of one thing!
One thing and only one thing!
And this, you know, this again to your point, and this is why I wanted to interject this many minutes ago, to your point about the narrative will not shift.
Imagine soliciting stories about the cold.
You recognize the inevitable.
You're gonna be not feeling up to walking your dog for a couple of days.
What do you do?
Right.
It's actually, they've loaded you up with a concern, and then the point is, even if what you should be experiencing is, oh, this is an annoyance rather than a life-threatening condition, the point is they're going to now collect on having loaded you up with that fear, right?
And they're going to, instead of letting you calibrate how to feel about how sick you are, They're going to tell you how to feel, and that is you should feel frightened.
Right.
Yes.
You know, that's the other thing that needs to be said here is what we experienced with COVID was super mild.
I do, if people want to know what that looked like, frankly, I did a joint live stream with Chris Martinson, an experiment that we did where we streamed to our two channels.
I was sick.
Before we went on camera, I mentioned this to Chris, and he said, yeah, I hear it in your voice.
So you can go there.
You can hear it, right?
You can see exactly what it looked like and how debilitating it was.
I will say, of all of us, Toby actually defeated the thing in, you know, less than 24 hours of, you know, sniffles and sneezes.
Yeah, we couldn't send him to school, so he went on a bike ride.
Right, I mean, but... But it was exactly the same, the sore throat, you know, all exactly the same symptoms, and none of us got new things from the other as it just progressed through the family.
Right.
So we all had the same thing.
If you didn't have a, you know, nightmare of a public health authority out there, we would be having a very different conversation.
And the conversation would sound like, okay, Omicron is sweeping through the population.
It is folly to think that we can control it, right?
This is so contagious that it's uncontrollable.
We ought to protect those who are vulnerable.
And there is presumably an age stratification in the danger of this thing.
So I may have had something that felt like a mild cold.
An 85-year-old might have something very different.
We should protect people from it, you know, even though...
It's not that people can't die from this.
Right.
But, you know, the fact is the nature of death is such that you, you know, you become fragile and more vulnerable to it.
And at some point you're so vulnerable that nearly anything can push you over.
So turning society upside down doesn't make any sense.
So the right conversation to be having is, in light of Omicron, The policy ought to radically shift in the direction of, we can't control this.
We should protect the vulnerable.
We should go back.
We should rescue our economy to the extent that we can still do it.
We should address our supply chain issues.
And if something evolves from this that has some different pattern, we'll get back to you.
We'll look at that one then.
And we'll say, what does it suggest that we should be doing?
But of course, we're not having that discussion.
And that tells you everything you need to know.
And aside, so there's a lot of things I think we're not going to get to today that I wanted to talk about, but you mentioned supply chain issues.
And bizarrely, and I've told you this, you can't get mint, fresh mint, in Portland for many weeks now.
And I found it once a week and a half ago or so.
I've been to five different markets repeatedly, and I've asked them, and yesterday someone said, supply chain.
I'm like, okay.
You've got rosemary.
You've got thyme.
What's up with the mint?
That's not an answer.
Our shelves aren't empty like we're seeing pictures of in some places.
But there are a number of things that are not being discussed or explained that are happening.
And I would encourage people just to start noticing those incongruities that feel like if this had happened anything more than two years ago, you would have been very surprised and maybe just start keeping track.
I agree with your point.
I happen to think with Mint, it's demand side.
Yeah, it's mojitos.
That's what's going on, is that the level of consumption of mojitos has gone way up because as people become anxious and realize that their government is failing all around them and the supply chain issues with respect to staples, right, are causing people to consume mojitos so as to worry less.
I think when people are that concerned, they don't pause to make cocktails.
They just drink right out of the bottle.
Um, okay, but then they chase them with mint.
That, that's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's not a poor man's mojito, but it's somebody who's pressed for time.
That's... I don't think this is your best work.
All right, I'll take that.
See, that's how we deliver critique in this household.
It's very, very, it's hard to ignore.
No gold star for you.
Yeah, not this time.
No, no, not this time.
All right, I will work on it.
Yeah.
Maybe a mojito spray?
No.
Okay.
Before we talk a little bit about the truckers, the truckers convoy, the truckers for freedom, which is extraordinary.
It's actually one of the things that's giving me hope.
It's one of the few things that's giving me a lot of hope and they're due to arrive in Ottawa.
Tomorrow, I think.
But I wanted to share a couple of articles that were published in Tablet recently.
Tablet, which is increasingly becoming a place where, you know, it's just extraordinary.
I don't know, increasingly.
I am increasingly finding That it is a place where I am finding really, really excellent reporting and storytelling.
And so this first one, Zach, was published actually 10 days ago.
The Four Questions of the Pandemic.
After almost two years of living with COVID-19, we need to ask ourselves about what risks we're willing to take as a community by Dan Ain.
So he's, the first paragraph, like many other pulpit rabbis, I found myself in March 2020 facing a lot of unknowns.
So he's a rabbi in San Francisco who was, you know, did not, did not I did not see his congregation for a while, and the whole essay is excellent, and I recommend it, but I wanted to read just – he asks four questions here, and I want to ask – I want to repeat one of them in his answer.
What responsibility do we have as a religious community to assist people in alleviating irrational or disproportionate anxiety and fears?
During times of war, social upheaval, community anxiety, and concern, should the synagogue not be the place to gather in solace, for a hug, a respite from work life, a place to take in a moment of sweet prayer?
What is the risk of not having that?
Is there more virtue to be found in spending more time poring over graphs of aerosol transmission spread among low-risk populations than in looking at the staggering increase in teen suicides, depression, mental health crises, and learning loss?
That's just super powerful.
And I know, you know, we know some people who are not religious, don't have faith, not believers, who are looking for exactly this, for places of solace, where they can go and be around people and treat others and be treated with respect as human beings.
Even most places of religious worship are requiring your proof of acts at the door.
Increasingly I'm hearing, many are not, but I would ask all of us to consider this question that Rabbi Ayn asks us.
And the other piece that I wanted to share from Tablet... Wait, before you move on from that, I just want to point out another place where you can detect that what we are doing has nothing to do with what's good for our health or what's good for the public health has to do with the absurd way that we have dealt with Natural immunity.
And I believe natural immunity, we will never know whether it has to do with the fact that you and I were shouting about natural immunity for many, many months.
I suspect we contributed to the awareness of it.
But nonetheless, natural immunity has finally dawned on people.
But it is frequently presented in the context of the comparison to the vaccines, etc., etc.
What we don't understand, and, you know, Omicron has changed the picture a little bit because there are a certain number of reinfections, but the fact of some huge fraction of the population for whom the pandemic is no longer a direct threat, irrespective of how much risk they face to begin with, the fact that they got it, got through it, means that those people, you know, to the extent that we have people isolated, right?
Maybe we have old people isolated because they can't afford to get it.
But you know who can non-isolate them?
People in their religious communities, for example, who've had COVID, right?
There are plenty of solutions and the idea that what you're going to do is hand down from the federal government some diktat that results in a religious community effectively, you know, turning into a two-tiered society and not doing anything rational from the point of view of Protecting the elderly because really what you're doing is just deciding who was compliant with a vaccine that does not prevent contraction or transmission of the disease, does not reduce viral load.
It's an incredible waste of an opportunity.
The opportunity cost of not doing the rational thing was incalculable.
So anyway, the idea that the religious community has a purpose, that its purpose Couldn't possibly be more important than in a moment like this, and that we are going to hobble that entity rather than do something rational, rather than come up with an actual test that lets us figure out who does have natural immunity and get on with life.
Yeah, no, and I think many liberals, you know, again of which we are too, take pride in our secularism.
And it has been, I mean, this is something we've talked about for decades, and we write about in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide.
But, you know, religion has a purpose, and those who are religious have historically done far better for themselves and their families than those who have not been.
And so the very smug position of many secular liberals that if you are religious you have demonstrated that you're not educated or you're not smart or you don't believe in science.
is frankly an ideological position that itself is uninvestigated.
It's one of these conclusions that many people on the left have accepted without further thinking through what it actually means.
So, what are some of the values of religion?
It's not just about believing in a god by any means.
I remember hearing that from religious scholars at Evergreen, actually, and it was shocking to me.
People who had devoted their lives, and who were themselves religious, devoted their lives to the study of religious texts and to understanding what they meant, who would say, There are plenty of us who identify exactly as I do who actually will say, it's not about God.
And I'm sure there are others who will disagree with that conclusion, but the idea that the only way that you can discuss religion and its value is to talk about a singular deity is really an uninvestigated ideological position that many on the left hold.
Yeah, it's a crazy position.
I've argued that the claims about the way the universe functions that exist in almost all religions are effectively like the trunk of a tree.
They are a mechanism, right?
Is the trunk of a tree photosynthetic?
No.
What is its purpose?
To get the leaves of the tree above leaves that they compete with to do photosynthesis.
So the point is, it is a means to an end.
But the point of religion is what it does.
And, you know, we have to be careful with this because You know, a position I've tried to lay out.
You have to be careful because xylo and phloem are also in the trunk of the tree and they're delivering nutrients.
No, I mean xylo and phloem are necessary to get the business end of the photosynthetic apparatus connected to the roots and all, but the point is we have to be careful because You can overdraw this message.
And in fact, what we say in our book is we live in an environment so radically different even from the environment that we were born in.
The farther back you go to draw wisdom, yes, there's some timeless stuff.
But much of what exists in these past compendiums of wisdom is out of phase with the place we live.
And so it's not like we can say, look, the point of religion is that it helps you know how to live.
It did, but it helped you know how to live in an environment we don't live in anymore.
So we have a new problem.
But the solution isn't secularism in the sense that finally we're over that religious thing.
The problem is what do we do now that our religions aren't quite up to the task of telling us how to deal with modernity?
Right.
This other piece from Tablet, which was published this week, Zach, if you'll show my screen, called The Dissidence by Clayton Fox, the sort of sub-headline being, a handful of scientists and doctors have spent the past two years defending mainstream public health approaches and scientific rigor against the pandemic response bureaucracy.
You know, truth up front, we are featured at the end of this article, and many of the people whom you have had on Dark Horse are as well, but it really is an excellent sort of
overview of some of the ways that many of us have been actively talking and thinking about the mismatch between what science is and does and how it must progress in order to be science and what it is that the vast majority of people are being told and accepting, it seems, from public health authorities.
And so I just want to read one paragraph here, and then I will encourage and put the link in the show notes, of course, and encourage people to read it.
With regard to the dissidents, you know, the group in which he is including us, He says the term's connotation of rebellion or revolution has nothing to do with what these thinkers represent.
In their Talmudic approach to the pandemic, posing questions of questions and questions of other questioners, they are instead voices that have sought to uphold the past 400 years of scientific tradition and practice rather than overturn it.
Some of their questions have been prescient and vindicated.
Others might appear conspiratorial or extreme.
But the main point is that they have asked and continue to ask questions while a majority of their peers have done away with the scientific method or have been cowed into silence.
And you know, this again, you know, Invoking the Talmud in a defense of science should not be surprising to us.
What should be surprising to us is that the people who are invoking science are actually engaging in religious fervor.
Yeah, and it's very disorienting because people use heuristics to figure out who the scientists are and the point is they see stuff that comforts them, which we've seen all over the place.
I mean, for example, you know, there was this famous interchange between Josh Zeps and Joe Rogan in which Josh Zeps deployed some what he thought was evidence and Joe Fumbled it in the moment turned out Joe was right But nonetheless it became a well-known thing and Josh to his credit Decided to pursue it further later, right?
So he said well look at some level.
Why aren't we just talking to a cardiologist, right?
And so the Australian whatever Authority provided a cardiologist for him to talk to we talked to for a half an hour one cardiologist one cardiologist But the point is he's reacting to the dissidents Right who have said actually none of this makes any sense you're talking about a vaccine that has dangers to the heart severe dangers We can get into what those dangers are but the point is
McCullough is a cardiologist, not only a cardiologist, but an incredibly well-published cardiologist, right?
A well-respected person who has become a dissident because his point is none of this makes any sense.
And so the fact that he is on the fringe is because he was driven there, right?
Because his perspective is so dangerous in light of how much he clearly understands about cardiology.
So you can't just say, well, what do the cardiologists say?
Because they don't agree.
Right.
And I mean, again, we're just going to come back to the same sort of theme today.
It reveals that the policy isn't about what it claims to be.
I don't know.
There's a lot to say there.
But you have more?
No, no.
I think I'm there.
Okay.
Um, so we're sort of, we're all over the place here, and I've lost, I've lost my ability to go through what we were hoping to go through.
Um, so maybe we should just talk a little bit about the Trucker's Convoy.
Uh, unfortunately, because we're doing this when we are, I wasn't able to get any of the videos I wanted to show to Zach, and we won't be able to show them to my computer.
No, no, I have one.
I sent him one.
Okay, why don't we just start with, why don't we set it up, start with that, and then I have a few screenshots, and then I want us to talk about it.
The short version is, and I assume on any social media platform, really if you just search on truckers, it'll start to autofill for you.
For now, autofill is often downgraded when it does things that the powers that be don't want.
But you'll find other truckers for freedom, truckers for, hashtag truckers for freedom 2022, truckers convoy 2022, and basically you've got an incredible number.
I've seen, I've seen a number of estimates.
The most usual one is, you know, 50,000 trucks maybe spread across, you know, a long range across Canada.
I've seen so many different estimates, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna guess here.
Driving slowly, because there's so many of them, and because it's January in Canada, and because they are going through these towns.
So they're heading to Ottawa, the capital.
And they say that they will be there until the insane Canadian policies around things like mandates and blocking people from actually getting services unless they comply with these ridiculous rules are taken down.
are reversed, and as they're going through these towns, and even not in towns, and again, you know, Canada in January, it ain't easy to be outside, but they've got, you know, there's just people lining the roads cheering on the truckers.
We can play it while you're talking.
So, I also have some, okay.
So here you can see people are cheering, lining the roads, they're waving Canadian flags and banners, and what you may or may not be able to see, you'll see it upcoming here.
Every overpass is full of people cheering the truckers on, and you know, in some sense they are So this looks like it's not taken from within the convoy, because there's no big rigs in front of this guy, and he's going pretty fast.
So is he ahead of it, as far as you know?
I don't exactly know.
Okay.
So, I am going to post either today or tomorrow on my sub stack a bunch of these videos, I think.
Yeah.
That actually do, you know, from within or from the side.
From within or overhead.
I've seen.
Yeah.
It's extremely, I mean, it's obviously hard to capture a convoy this big.
You could do it from space, maybe.
Yeah.
Man, that would be great.
Yeah.
So, here.
So here, oops.
I wanna show just a few screenshots here, Zach, from tweets.
Here we have Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, back on March 31st, 2020.
Remember March 31st, 2020?
Things were getting pretty ugly.
This is one of these lines I have not gotten why people keep invoking it because it was patently untrue at the time.
This is one of the things that was just Patently untrue at the time, but two weeks to flatten the curve.
Somehow a lot of people believed that and it never looked like that from where we're sitting, but okay.
This is back around that era.
He says then, While many of us are working from home, there are others who aren't able to do that, like the truck drivers who are working day and night to make sure ourselves are stocked.
So when you can, please hashtag thank a trucker for everything they're doing and help them however you can.
We will see shortly how Trudeau has changed his position.
Here we have from, you know, right now, this is a nun holding a sign that says, God bless you convoy truckers, free forever.
Love this.
Here we have, a little bit small again, an invitation for January 29th, 2022.
That's Sunday.
Nationwide business reopening, no more mandates, in solidarity with the truckers convoy to Ottawa on January 29, 2022, businesses Canada-wide will be opening their doors at full capacity and abandoning all restrictions.
No masks, no vaccine passports, no capacity limit.
And it should not require it to be said, but this is not about being anti-vaccine.
This is about being anti-vaccine mandate.
Anti-vaccine passports.
Needing vaccines to get into services like restaurants and theaters.
Next one, and this is very, very much a match for something you already said, Brett, but remember, they have made the decision to dismiss child abuse, suicides, overdoses, domestic violence, seniors dying alone, destroyed economy, businesses, families, friendships, and risk our health For a product that doesn't work, I'll have to implement a passport.
Hashtag Truckers Convoy 2022.
And here we have, not my Prime Minister, but oops, sorry, Justin Trudeau.
Oh, I managed to take the, I think this is from two days ago now.
I think this is from January 26th.
Last night I learned that I have been exposed to COVID-19.
My rapid test result was negative.
I am following Ottawa health rules and isolating for five days.
I feel fine and will be working from home.
Stay safe everyone and please get vaccinated.
He's so patently hiding.
Right.
He's so patently hiding from what he knows in the middle of his self-imposed quarantine.
He's a world leader who got exposed.
Of course he got exposed.
Of course he got exposed to Omicron while Omicron is circulating.
He is hiding at the height of the Trucker convoy's power and reach and pretending that that's not what he's doing, pretending this is about public health.
If he had been anything like a leader to this point, you would have to wonder.
But I don't think we do.
He's a duplicitous Ken doll, and the fact is this is an obvious ploy, and what's more, I can tell you that if he actually does come down with COVID, I assure you he will have the highest quality early treatments, because of course, you know, why wouldn't he?
I mean, for all we know, he's on prophylaxis now.
Right, and for those of you who may be listening and thinking, what?
You're still claiming that these early treatments work?
Well, yes.
A, we've experienced it.
B, we've had many friends who we have connected with early treatments at the point they have become sick, and not a one of them has had it fail.
So, yes, they work.
But also, As you will find in many places, increasingly you will see it with video, Tess Laurie caught Andrew Hill admitting that the reason that his meta-analysis says Ivermectin's utility is questionable is that he was pressured to say that.
Right?
So, anyway, it's not in doubt.
The efficacy of early treatment.
Just to go back to Trudeau, though, who is a duplicitous Ken doll, which that's great.
That seems to be true, yes.
From his self-imposed quarantine, he managed to tweet from what must have been very hard for him.
Zach, if you will show this to all of the parents out there.
This is from yesterday.
To all the parents out there, if you haven't gotten your kids vaccinated yet, please get that taken care of as soon as you can.
It's the best thing you can do to keep them and those around them safe right now.
Hashtag Kids Vaccines Day.
Kids Vaccines Day?
What the hell is that?
Well, um, hopefully Prime Minister Trudeau has followed that up with, if you have questions about the vaccines, that's okay.
Science Up First, Child Health Can, and Sandbox Canada are hosting a town hall tonight.
That was last night.
Sorry guys, you missed it.
Um, where you can ask your questions there and get the best available evidence from Canadian health care leaders.
Here's the details.
So here we go.
This is National Kids and Vaccines Day.
That was yesterday.
We all missed it.
Now this is only in Canada.
You know, our people didn't think of it.
Wait, wait, wait.
They put Kids and Vaccines Day on Holocaust Remembrance Day?
That was yesterday?
Wow.
Was that January 27th was Holocaust Remembrance Day?
Yes.
So, okay, just for those listening, the COVID-19 vaccines approved in Canada are safe, effective, and save lives.
Let's move the needle, pun intended, and promote vaccine confidence to promote the largest unvaccinated cohort of people in Canada, kids.
Unprotected.
So as has been pointed out over and over and over again, as is actually clear in the crap data that we are receiving, this much is actually completely clear, The age stratification risk for this disease is so incredible.
Usually, you would see a U-curve, right?
Usually, for many diseases, you would see old people and young people at greater risk, and young adults and middle-aged adults at relatively low risk.
Not so for COVID.
Not so for COVID.
The older you are, the more at risk you are from COVID.
What is a greater risk for the young in this case, especially young men and boys, is these vaccines.
And not only is the risk greater, but the loss is greater.
The loss is greater for kids.
To the extent that they scar their hearts with myocarditis, you're talking about living an entire life with a scarred heart rather than living the last few decades of life if you were, you know... Right.
50 or 60.
The idea of a one-size-fits-all mandate for everyone regardless of past exposure, regardless of actual risk due to age, regardless of actual risk due to comorbidities of both the disease and from the vaccines is, again, Anti-science.
This is not policy based in scientific thinking.
It can't be, because static conclusions don't fit with the complexity of a global pandemic.
They don't.
It is anti-scientific.
It is not even unscientific.
It is anti-scientific to be recommending this, especially in light of the fact That to the extent that the vaccines work at all and they prevent kids from getting Omicron, they may be exposing those same kids to future variants which may not be so safe for healthy kids.
Yes.
And the idea that we would expose kids to future risk and then put those kids as they grow up in the bind of having to accept whatever Whatever remedy is being provided by big pharma at that time rather than allow them to acquire immunity Which they can do cheaply now, which you know, I wish that wasn't the mechanism But it's far better than what they're being provided the idea that we are going to basically, you know
Use triumphalist language and tell people you're protecting your child.
Define protecting.
From what?
Right?
Yeah.
From what are you protecting them?
You're vaccinating them with an experimental, yes, experimental remedy that is dangerous to them.
You are doing that to protect them from something that could be as mild as a cold or milder.
Right?
And you're not telling them To supplement their vitamin D, because they live too far north to make it in the winter, and they're almost certainly deficient.
What kind of upside-down world are we living in?
Yeah.
I think I'm going to skip almost everything that I had planned here, because we've already been going for an hour since we finished the ads, and we obviously have some deadlines here, but you had a couple more things I think that you wanted to talk about.
Yeah, there were a few things I wanted to talk about.
I guess we should talk about the issue of Neil Young, who I understand is cancelling his subscription to Tablet Magazine at this moment.
Neil Young delivering an ultimatum to Spotify Um, that they could have his music or they could have Joe Rogan, but not both.
And Spotify did the right thing and they said, sorry Neil, and they removed his music.
The problem is, I think people don't really get the dimensionality of the problem, right?
People spend a lot of time mocking Neil Young for, you know, who's Neil Young was a reaction that a lot of people below a certain age.
I would like to assume, and this is mostly the case for me even, that many of the people who are listening and watching may not actually know about any of this.
If you weren't paying attention to a little piece of social media, then you don't know, and frankly you're probably living a life that is more in touch with a lot of things that you'd rather be in touch with.
But this is important, but I don't think you can assume that this is something that everyone's been thinking about.
Well, I don't know.
It's possible that the slice of the world I was paying attention to was more obsessed with it.
But the fact is, at some level, and I've made this argument and I've been mocked for it.
My point is, actually, at the moment, Spotify is the front line of the battle over free speech.
And yes, you can mock me and you can say it's not free speech because Spotify isn't the government.
On the other hand, the Surgeon General, who very definitely is the federal government, did suggest that these platforms need to be censoring Joe Rogan So that is a First Amendment issue in the, you know, narrowest and most obvious sense of that term.
And you have also made the argument, as have others, that our social media platforms are de facto the public square.
They are de facto the public square.
We have no other access to the Internet but to go through these private on-ramps.
You know, Eric has said it very clearly.
He said, you know, free speech doesn't mean anything if it doesn't apply in this realm.
Anyway, there's a lot of ways to view it.
But the point is, free speech is a principle.
The free exchange of ideas is fundamental to the free West.
And to the extent that we are losing that right, whether or not you can justify it in a court, we are losing something on which our system fundamentally depends.
And what people are not understanding about this battle is that it has nothing to do with Neil Young and the comparison between Neil Young and Joe Rogan.
The point is, this is the last line of defense.
Why are they going after Spotify?
They're going after Spotify because as long as Joe Rogan is on Spotify and he can bring the dissident doctors to the world through Spotify, they can't plug the leak in their story.
Right?
So the point is, we should expect the pressure on Spotify to go up, and we should expect the pressure on Substack to go up.
And the point is, you will remember, some of you will remember, that we coined a term, or a phrase, and the phrase was, zero is a special number.
And what that means is, as long as you have one place where the good journalists who remain on earth can go and publish their stuff, As long as you have one place where Joe Rogan can distribute his podcast and anybody can watch it, they cannot maintain their garbage narrative.
Therefore, you can be certain that they will go after those last remaining venues.
And what they will do is they will ratchet up the economic pressure on those venues until they cave, at which point they will reach the state
Zero where there is no place for those things to be distributed and that will be a very different world So we need to get serious about this question I would say and I have been trying to induce people on Twitter to recognize that every time they trend some hashtag that is designed to make Spotify quake in its boots that it's about to lose some important part of its business because people are fleeing as a result of Joe Rogan talking to doctors on his podcast and
We need to mount a response, right?
We need to have something trend that says, thank you Spotify, and thanks Joe Rogan, or something akin to that, so that people are aware that actually there's a tremendous amount of support for keeping that channel open.
And I don't know how it is that we ensure that we win this battle, but I know that we have no choice but to win this battle, because a world in which there is no Substack and there is no Spotify, in which the dissidents can still speak to us, is a much, much worse world.
It is a world in which we will have a much harder time turning the tide against this garbage.
To this point, actually, I forgot one thing I wanted to say with regard to the truckers' convoy, and I think it actually fits in really well here.
If you would show my screen, Zach.
I just went to two of the biggest newspapers in the U.S.
to see what the coverage.
You know, you go to social media, and again, you plug in truckers, and you immediately get all sorts of stuff.
It suggests all the hashtags.
But observe what happens when I plug in truckers on the New York Times.
We have, from January 19th, facing a shortage of truck drivers, pilot program turns to teenagers.
From January 14th, super lowed lumbers across Pennsylvania, two lanes wide and as big as two wheels.
These carbon spewing vehicles must be stopped.
And then the fourth most recent one is from December 20th of last year, a holiday feast cooked in the cab of a truck.
So, which is to say nothing, right?
And if I, you know, if I do Drucker's Convoy, I get 1966, 1971, 2008.
Wow!
Nothing, okay?
That's amazing.
Let's try WAPO.
1966, 1971, 2008, nothing. - Wow, that's amazing. - Let's try WAPO, let's try Washington Post.
That's not actually how you spell truckers.
Truckers results in um let's see no go away uh from September 2021 perspective the key to the longevity of the drive-by truckers oops that's a rock band And from, again, September... No, this is from May 22nd, 2020.
At a busy East African border, testing truckers created perfect conditions for coronavirus to spread.
And again from May 2020, truckers blast horns near White House to protest low rates during pandemic.
That is, that is amazing.
Yeah.
That is amazing.
And when you plug in, Zach, just one more thing.
Can you keep my screen on this?
Thank you.
When you plug in Truckers Convoy, again, you get nothing, the most recent things from 2016 about Putin.
And I bet if you were to- That's it.
That's the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And I'm sure that I could just keep going.
Right.
Nothing.
Zero is a special number.
Zero is a special number.
If you did the opposite search, if you searched for the public health authorities, like if you were to plug in mother truckers, then you would, I'm sure, get a lot of results.
Yeah, I think the title of this should be Mother Truckers and what kind of Ken doll did you call him?
Duplicitous, was that right?
But he evaded the other, he's not decrepit.
Right, no, he's not a decrepit clown, he's a duplicitous Ken doll.
He's a duplicitous Ken doll, is what that man is.
All right, so actually, did you have more?
No, we're good.
So before we close out this section, Zach, will you put up Chelsea Clinton's tweet here?
Oh boy.
Well actually, hold on a second, let me set this up.
Oh, actually, I think you showed me this.
I have a link.
We got it.
So, don't put it up yet.
The point, I wanted to say, we have a philosophical problem.
People frequently talk about being on the right side of history, and others have complained mercilessly about this term, and I actually will defend the term.
I think the idea of the right side of history is a vital idea, right?
That you You should always be seeking to figure out what... The problem is that we identify the right side of history in retrospect.
And when we say, come to the right side of history, we are making an assertion about the fact that ours will be viewed in retrospect as the right side of history.
And I believe it is a proper exercise that gets abused regularly.
And the problem is, how do you recognize in real time?
And it is in fact difficult sometimes to recognize the right side of history.
But I'm going to pause it.
That there is a method that we can develop that involves a first step that is very clear, which is to identify the wrong side of history, which is easily done because they're always shouting for censorship, right?
Censorship is what the powerful do when their arguments cannot stand up to competition in a marketplace of ideas.
Right.
They call for censorship of the opposition.
And so if you would now show this tweet from Chelsea Clinton.
All right.
I cannot read it from there.
Chelsea Clinton.
She's quote tweeting a Guardian article.
Quote tweeting a Guardian article says, anti-vax grift going strong.
Why is Substack facilitating science denialist's ability to profit from destructive lies and comfortable... Can you read that?
She probably means comfortably profiting themselves.
Comfortably profiting themselves.
So anyway, and she... The headline of the Guardian article that she's linked to is anti-vaxxers making at least 2.5 million dollars a year from publishing on Substack.
Right.
Now, of course, what the hell does she mean anti-vaxxers, right?
Is she calling Robert Malone an anti-vaxxer who is in fact a vaccinologist, right?
I mean, the point is it's a garbage epithet.
Who the hell is Chelsea Clinton to be making this point, right?
Chelsea Clinton She, you know, obviously was born into great power, right?
And she is now wagging her finger at people making money on Substack, some of whom have lost their jobs for standing up for the right thing.
I mean, this is so absurd.
This is power shouting down truth and frustrated that because zero is a special number that they are entitled to reach it and reach it by getting Substack to back away from its commitment to free speech.
So, in any case.
Finding the right side of history may be difficult.
Finding the wrong side of history is surprisingly easy because in general the people on the wrong side are shouting to censor the others.
So.
Yeah.
That's it.
Well, next week we'll be back at our normal time, I believe, and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what we see as the two-tiered society that is being created and about things related to that.
But I think it is probably time to sign off at this point.
Yes.
One last thing before logistics.
I received an email from uh from someone in Canada who is trying uh trying to get uh let me see I don't have time to read the whole email but um she's Canadian and I've reached out to various politicians about the absence of early treatment preventative measures like vitamin D and lack of health care workers
And this person has sent a number of scientific documents to the Federal Standing Committee on Health and has heard back from the clerk of the Federal Standing Committee on Health and has said, well, I can't share any links to the protocols of the studies because they're not in both French and English.
So this is bureaucratias in Canada that could not be pulled in the United States, and I am just going to put that out there that, you know, this person is fluent but not fluent enough to be translating English scientific papers into French, and if
If any of the listeners have that capacity or know of someone and there's no money for it, unfortunately, you can email our Dark Horse Moderator at gmail.com and the moderator will put you in touch with the person who contacted me.
Awesome.
Alright, I have a final thought before we close out.
It's a quick one, but I think it might be important.
The thought is this.
You can't spell masculine without almost spelling mescaline.
That's it.
I feel like I should have shown the video of the musician playing for a wild fox who loves music, given that we should just put some sort of trippy visuals over it.
Yep, maybe next time.
Yeah.
Okay, we will take a break and come back as soon as we can, 15 minutes-ish, with our live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Again, any logistical questions that you have, including if you have a lead on a possible French translator for some scientific documents, to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
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Not that we have a script, but even farther than you might expect.
We go farther from the script that we do not have.
Farther from, yeah, the script that we don't have.
Here's our book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
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