View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/EvoLens117:202d5513321da9a11b551964ffe7e3da27ec4e3a View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 117th 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 discuss Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), vaccine mandates, and how very non-inclusive many arts (and other organizations) are being while they claim to be e...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
I think it's number 117.
That's right, that's right.
And I feel emotionally like 117 is entitled to be prime, but I think you told me it's not prime.
Yeah.
And not prime because more things are divisible into it than one and itself.
Such is the nature of primity.
That's the primary reason it's not prime.
Yeah, today this has been your lesson in why emotions don't rule math.
Yes.
Actually, no.
I think actually, now that I see it, my lived experience tells me that it is prime.
And that means more now than it did a few years ago.
Indeed.
But your lived experience is apparently full of crap.
All right.
Well, I'll take that under advisement.
Indeed.
Yes.
You're lucky you're not a straight white male telling me that, or you'd be in trouble for some reason.
I guess.
I don't know, I'm pretty low on the progressive stack though, aren't I?
Yeah, you got basically- Having only the doubled up X-chromosomes going for me.
Yep.
That's it.
Yep.
That is it.
Large immobile gametes, and that's about the one point in your favor.
And no one checks!
I'm speechless.
Okay.
Hi, everyone.
This is Indeed Livestream 117 coming to you from March 2022, which means this is not the actual anniversary, but we've been at it for almost two years.
We started in March of 2020.
And what a pair of years that's been.
Oh boy, yeah.
So we will maybe say more about that when we actually come up on the actual anniversary, but for fuck's sake.
Sorry, that's where we're going today.
Now we're going to talk a little bit about what you this week dubbed vaccine apartheid.
And inclusivity in all things except, of course, COVID.
We are going to talk a bit about how we are being entrained to behave in ways that are not in our best interests, even when those ways that we are being entrained seem neutral, but being entrained is itself a negative.
You are going to talk some about the concept of gene therapy and what it means, and about something that we thought we were going to last week and didn't circle back to.
I don't like that phrase, circle back.
Circle back.
Yeah, it's very business-y.
It's very business-y.
Well, we did not get back to the question of whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was in fact enhanced through serial passaging in a lab would affect virulence and therefore its passage through humans over time.
And then we're going to, I'm going to share an excerpt that I've not shared with you yet, that was shared with us by a listener this week, shared with us by a listener this week, from Orwell's 1937 The Road, The Road?
Path?
Sorry, hold on, Wigan Pier.
You will, you guys who know, yes, it's The Road, The Road to Wigan Pier.
Really extraordinary observations.
Of course, Orwell was an extraordinary social observer of so many things.
But the parallels to modernity are remarkable.
This is George Orwell, not Larry Orwell.
Yeah, or Lucas or Bartholomew or any of the Orwells.
Larry was a bit of a hack.
Mostly rude.
George's coattails.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I don't remember.
It happened, but it wasn't a big deal.
Okay.
Okay, but before we do all of that, logistics.
We are on YouTube and Odyssey for now.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
If you're watching live, you can go there and participate in that.
You can ask questions for the second hour on darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We, a couple of episodes ago, which was actually I think closer to three weeks ago, Wow, I am messing up my formatting here.
Put out a call for web developers, and as I mentioned last week, the response has been Overwhelming and fantastic, and we are grateful to all of you.
And as of this morning, everyone who wrote in to the Dark Horse Moderator Gmail address should have received a response.
So if you didn't get that, check your spam or wherever you check to find such things.
You had a Patreon conversation this morning.
Wow.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, we had a great conversation about the Amazing squid ink caper of 2022 wherein Anthony Fauci and all of his cronies seem to have suddenly disappeared as war in Ukraine changed the subject for us.
Seems to be working out better for them than the rest of us, doesn't it?
Yes, well, we will talk a little bit about that, but it's quite the thing.
Yeah, but anyway, you do two of these two-hour small Patreon conversations every month over Zoom, I guess, and have been actually since 2017.
I was thinking it was 2017, and they have been extremely popular, and there are a bunch of people who have been there If not from the very beginning, nearly so.
We've gotten to know.
You've gotten to know many of them very well, and we've gotten to know a few of them.
I've met many of them in person.
In any case, we have two conversations.
One is focused on the state of the world, what it means, what we might do about it, and the other is focused more on evolutionary issues, more abstract.
But anyway, they're both really good conversations, and people really seem to get a lot out of them.
So we encourage you to join Brett there on his Patreon, and my Patreon of course has the monthly private Q&A, which is two hours as well, but us answering questions that patrons have previously written in, more like what our weekly public Q&As are.
We have, as always, at store.darkhorsepodcast.org various Dark Horse merchandise, including Saddle Up the Dire Wolves we ride tonight, Epic Tabby's digital book burnings, the whole lot, and of course at I'm Writing Weekly at Natural Selections, it's naturalselections.substack.com.
Occasionally I have help from my trusty Epic Tabby, but more often he shows up right here on camera as he is right now.
Perhaps, having heard the call of the Epic Tabby just a few seconds ago.
I think he's just lonely.
That may be it.
This is a very cuddly, very, very smart Epic Tabby.
All right.
We have three ads for you this week, as has become our want, and we will say before launching into them once more that we are, as ever, very grateful to our sponsors for helping us do the show, helping us live our lives, and just being amazing.
We are As you've said many times, we are very choosy about the sponsors that we actually accept.
And so if you hear us reading an ad for one of these, A, you'll know that we're doing that because it begins with a little audio and ends with a little audio.
And if you're watching, you'll see the green perimeter on the screen.
But know, too, that we are actually vouching for the products that we advertise for.
You're number three.
Number three.
Yeah.
I mean, you're number one in my heart, but you're number three today.
Wow.
Nice recovery.
Appreciate that.
All right.
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You can tell because the shoes aren't really all that attractive, But man, oh man, are these shoes a revelation.
Now I will say that I got stopped by two different people this week who were asking me about my shoes.
And then also I heard from two other people who either have just received or are about to receive their first pair of Vivo Barefoots because of our recommendation.
And in the case of the two people who stopped me and said, you know, do you like those?
I saw an ad for those.
And it wasn't, they didn't know Dark Horse.
And in both cases, I said, you know, I love them, even though they're obviously not that attractive.
And in both cases, these are two women, they said, Oh, actually, I think they look nice.
So maybe I'm underselling them somehow, even though I literally almost every time I leave the house in shoes, and I It's a mental independence test, how they look to you.
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Oh, you think I'm mentally dependent?
No, but I think you're fearing that other people lacking mental independence will look at these shoes and think, eh.
But once you put them on...
No, I don't think that's it.
I don't think that's it.
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In fact, one of the women who stopped me said she works retail and she spends all day on her feet.
I can go well over eight hours without feeling pain in these.
I could go on and on, but this is an ad.
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I don't think there is such a thing as a health crisis.
I think it's an unhealth crisis.
Health is inherently not a crisis.
Okay.
It feels like it was named by the same people who named the gene eyeless because it produces eyes and if you break it, it doesn't.
Yeah, I see that.
You see it?
Yeah, I see that.
I think the people who named the gene Eyeless have a little bit less power in the world, but still.
Fair enough.
I'm just going to start saying it.
Wingless, Eyeless, yeah.
An unhealth crisis.
That's the opposite.
Public unhealth policy.
It's the opposite, but yes.
Wow, you hit the nail on the head there.
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That's part of what I was expected to say and right now I'm thinking St.
Patrick's Day.
Oh hell yeah, when is that?
Sometime in March, 17th.
Never a big holiday in our house.
No, not at all.
That's why I'm like, what holidays are in Mars?
So people will have birthdays, of course.
Roughly a twelfth of you.
But a gift for any time of year.
Maybe just because I was thinking of you.
I was thinking of you and your nausea.
I was thinking of you and it made me think of nausea.
We're not doing a good job.
No.
But you know, for St.
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I always have to not say the name of the nightclub when I read that.
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Actually, ill health issues.
There it is.
Yeah.
Yep.
There are no health issues.
This is going to be a long day.
I apologize.
Not entirely in advance.
Yep, mostly, um, really not your fault.
Wow.
Yeah, unfortunately.
Because that, maybe we could do something about.
Well, no, I mean, like, you know, if this was one of us, like, if we were experiencing all of this, be like, you know, man, it's me.
I gotta, like, I gotta make some changes, and then it all gets better.
Or you.
And, uh, you know, maybe we'd have a chance.
If I was the cause of all of this, I would move out on all of your behalf.
All right, so, um, it's been a couple of weeks.
Yeah, it's been a couple weeks since Trudeau implemented the Emergencies Act in Canada, and then since it was lifted.
And of course, he's doing a typically political job.
You know, he's a politician, but he's doing a typical job of pretending that that was the plan all along, and it was never going to be long term.
Of course, anyone who was paying close attention can see, A, that the Emergencies Act never should have been implemented in the first place, that the coverage that was largely, ah boy, I can't even think of the word, that was facilitated at least but promoted by Trudeau of the truckers and their participants in the truckers' convoy was just lies up and down.
And I wrote about that and had a lot of other people write about that.
on natural selections.
And we talked about it for a couple of weeks as well.
And really, Trudeau, no doubt could see that the tide was turning on him, that, you know, I saw something, social media somewhere, Like, hey man, Trudeau, you seem to be the most hated guy in the universe at this point.
Quite a feat.
It was a bad moment for him, and he's disappeared now, you know, as everything else has disappeared.
Well, I did see this one very odd video this week of him.
I didn't think to cue it up for this.
You didn't see Trudeau?
I don't know.
I don't know yet.
It's an amazing video in which If I'm understanding what he said correctly, effectively he starts out discussing how there has been a disturbing trend towards authoritarianism in many places, and then he blames misinformation, basically says we need to crack down more on free speech in order to deal with the authoritarianism.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the guy, you know, chutzpah.
Yeah, he does.
He does have chutzpah.
And he seems to not, you know, political death doesn't seem to be a possibility for him.
You know, if anyone should be out of office after this, after what he has done in Canada for the last two years, and specifically over the last, what'll be at this point, six weeks, it's him.
And he seems to be just chugging along.
Well, I think he, if I understand correctly, he is a member of the World Economic Forum's Permanently Undead Young Global Leaders, or something like that.
This is how we've pronounced the World Economic Forum now.
The World Economic Forum, yes.
Permanently Undead Leaders.
The Permanently Undead Leaders that they, yes, and, right.
Yeah, well.
They're penetrated cabinets, as it were.
That's quite an image.
Okay, so what the Freedom Convoy was originally about, most narrowly, was about the vaccine mandates that were preventing Canadian truckers from crossing into Canada.
The US, or maybe it was the opposite direction, because both the US and Canada had these in place.
And then, you know, of course, it was about more things than that.
You know, so many of the bad, dangerous, extraordinarily damaging policies that have been in place in Canada, and of course, throughout many of the countries, including the US where we live, over the last two years.
But the, you know, but the primary thing at base was the vaccine mandates.
And And then we start to see, you know, the CDC is sort of flustered because that's their job now.
That's what they do.
And they start to hem and haw about masks.
And we start to see mask mandates fall, except they're not actually falling now.
They're falling in the future, but at a promised moment, right?
You know, the West Coast of the U.S., where, again, we live, you know, all got together.
California, Oregon, and Washington decided to lift mask mandates for most places As of March 12th.
Oh, wait, wait.
As you allude to, it was initially late March, like somewhere.
It was the, it was, yeah, 28th, something like that.
And then as the collapse of the narrative outstripped, I mean, obviously, there was no reason to delay the lifting of the mask mandates as soon as It became clear that they weren't useful They should have come down effective immediately because of course there's harm done every day that especially children are wearing these things, but of course even in Capitulating they need to reassert their power over us.
Well by setting these dates and then moving them they are Hinting that they you know that there is some scientific reason which of course This doesn't make any more sense than walking to the table in a mask and sitting down and taking it off, right?
That's been nonsense And the whole point, and you know, the mandates, people, you know, whenever I say the mandates don't make sense, people say, well, it depends what kind of masks are we talking about?
But the point is, if the mandates aren't specific, they don't make sense.
Even if there are masks that do something, they keep announcing to us effectively that this is about symbolism, and we're not getting the message.
So this is all true, but I really actually wanted to talk not about the masks.
I think that the mask conversation is, yes, still incredibly stupid and all of what you just said is true, but I believe it's a feint.
I believe it's a distraction.
Let us compel the vast majority of you who have increasingly full access to, you know what, they're not actually privileges, they're your rights as citizens of the countries wherever you are, that we're going to pretend that the one remaining artifact of this two years of insanity is the mask mandates.
And therefore, as we either lift them or promise that they are about to be lifted, you are now back to full-fledged humans, basically.
And what this has done is cause essentially, you know, those of us who don't have access to many of the things that we had access to just two years ago, because we have rejected these particular vaccines as either necessary or effective or safe in preventing COVID, We do not have access to a lot of things.
And I actually think that, you know, Trudeau is an interesting place to focus here because he, of course, is extraordinarily woke.
He's like, you know, the wokest guy to routinely show up in blackface that anyone can currently think of.
Hopefully that anyone will ever be able to currently think of.
But he uses woke as a weapon, of course, as many people do.
And he's simultaneously Doing exactly the opposite of what, if you actually listen to the words of Woke, like the honorable fundamentals at the basis of social justice, you know, what are those words that we hear?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion, right?
And I was reminded of this in particular, and you know, the phrase that I came up with is this blind hypocrisy of the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd, the Woke crowd, if you will, When a long-awaited new Performing Arts Center was announced that it's going to be opening shortly in the Portland area.
And I'm not actually, I was going to show the site and go through it, but interestingly, they've been changing the languaging on the site a lot in the last few days.
So, because I don't feel like, you know, saying, okay, right now this is what it says, and it's going to say something different.
In a week or a couple of days.
I will say that our local free news weekly, Willamette Week, proclaims that this new Arts Center is going to be, quote, a welcoming space for all art lovers.
A welcoming space for all art lovers.
Doesn't that sound amazing?
I got excited about it.
I thought, finally, this is one of the few pieces of good news.
It looks like it's in a great place.
It looks like it's actually going to have a wide variety of kinds of live entertainment, but a welcoming space for all art lovers?
Nope, that is a lie.
That is a complete lie, because you go to the website and you click on COVID-19 attendance policy, And find the same vaccine apartheid now being practiced in, you know, in some cities across all restaurants.
Places like Seattle and LA and New York, as I understand it.
It's not the case in Portland.
There are individual establishments that are enforcing vaccine mandates at the door, and there are many that don't.
And indeed, like I said, with regard to this place, they have flipped back and forth between saying vaccine mandates, absolutely, that's it, or vaccine, proof of vaccine, or a official formal negative COVID test, home tests won't do, you have to, it has to match, you know, your ID, this, that, and the other.
And of course, these things are expensive.
Right?
In fact, you heard a story this week about someone who ended up, someone who doesn't have this money to spend, but in order to give her son the birthday present that she had already bought for him.
I don't know if it was a birthday present, but yeah, the woman who cuts my hair wanted to take her young son to a monster truck rally, which she wasn't really looking forward to, but he sure was, and then found out, having already purchased the ticket,
That there was a vaccine mandate and she actually suffered a vaccine injury herself So did not want to vaccinate her son, which of course him being a young healthy boy was the right decision Yeah, but in order to rescue her tickets, there was not even a mechanism for an easy refund She had to get him a test and of course and it cost a lot of money I think it was 300 bucks So a huge amount of money.
Yeah.
And, you know, just the idea that they're going to institute these policies without considering what this is going to do to people who can't meet their demand, because of course, at some level, the message is, well, if you can't meet our demand for proof of vaccination, then you don't really deserve our consideration.
That is the underlying message.
That is the underlying message, and this place and other theaters, which we have had tickets to, which I have had to cancel, have also been flip-flopping between... It's been vaccine mandates since the vaccines have been widely available to people, or since the population has been widely vaccinated, but they've been flipping between vaccine or you're out, and vaccine or a test if it matches, you know, if it's PCR, if it's within 72 hours, yada, yada, yada.
And, you know, either way, it's untenable, and it's hardly about welcoming all art lovers, is it?
And it's hardly about inclusivity, is it?
Especially when you take into consideration that these are, again, experimental treatments that are not necessary for most people, are not safe for some people, and have efficacy that is dwindling by the moment, and even the CDC admits that now!
And just to go one step farther, the fact is the dwindling efficacy and after a very rapid point following vaccination, the fact that these things are not in any way preventing contraction or transmission of the disease, means that there is no logic for requiring people who show up to have proof of them.
Because it doesn't stop these things from being spreader events.
It can't.
The idea that it is about protecting other people, that part of the story has completely fallen apart.
And if you want to focus on whether or not you yourself are worse or better protected as a result of having taken this experimental treatment, that is a conversation that perhaps individuals should be having with one another.
But at the public health level, the only thing that, you know, the way that the messaging has been put Pushed out and pushed and pushed and pushed has been about this being the thing that you need to do for other people.
It tugs on the heartstrings, especially the female heartstrings, right?
It gets to, and this is what we hear also from mothers telling their children, this is what you do in order to be a good person, in order to care not just about yourself, in order not to be selfish, in order to be a member of the community who cares about the people who cannot do these things.
And that logic has completely fallen apart, and yet the messaging persists.
And this is actually, well, okay, go on, but I have a perfect segue there to do what I wanted to do next.
All right, well, I would just say that the messaging continuing on as if the evidence had not shifted on these vaccines It is hard to avoid the interpretation that something is holding on to these mandates because of their utility in manipulating us and in turning us against each other rather than their epidemiological reasonableness.
Absolutely.
And that is the thing that we have to worry about because we are watching Across so many domains, rights that are enshrined in our founding documents for a reason, suddenly under fire like we've never seen it before.
And, you know, this is happening at a moment when mysterious forces who swear that they are scientifically motivated are functioning in a way that cannot be defended on scientific grounds, and just so happens to have this other characteristic, which is It amps up people's fear, it turns every person into a product placement for fear, right?
That's what the masks have been, right?
We're all broadcasting this be afraid message at each other, even outdoors, which never made a whit of sense.
And so the point is, I think that the whole system is like a more sophisticated version of what happened after 9-11.
With the security theater at airports and the terror alert system, which if you ever looked into it, didn't make any sense on scrutiny, right?
It was really just a mechanism for like amping people's amygdalas Right, when it was politically desirable to do so, and the fact that it suddenly evaporated without a change in the environment suggested that that's what this had been all along.
Yeah, I mean, and you've talked about that before on air here.
I do think that this, what I'm trying to say is something different.
That we have talked about fear, and we have talked about the use of fear, and what looks to be explicit, formal, and intentional use of fear now.
And, you know, we have posited that this was, in fact, part of the plan all along.
In fact, there is some evidence from authorities in various countries that they intended to use fear, that they understand that fear is a good way to To change population-level human behavior and individual-level human behavior.
But what I'm focusing on right now, with regard to the vaccine mandates, is that this has all but disappeared from almost everyone's thoughts.
That unless you yourself are affected by this, Even if you oppose vaccine mandates, even if you really think that this has the potential to bring in authoritarian horribleness, you largely are breathing a sigh of relief now.
Like, okay, I already don't have to, or I'm about to not have to be wearing these insane masks anymore.
Things are finally going to go back to normal.
And in some parts of the country, of course, things have been more or less normal for more or less the entire last two years.
And when I say country, it's my United States bias.
But in some parts of the country, things have been anything but.
And frankly, this is a more worrying moment in some ways, because The de facto, privately instantiated rather than government instantiated vaccine mandates are becoming normalized because they're becoming invisible.
And we're not even arguing about it anymore.
With the truckers convoy, everyone was thinking about it and they were pointing out just how awful and divisive and nasty and anti-democratic and authoritarian they were.
And now we're not even talking about it.
So I do want to please segue to the thing that I was trying to get to many, many minutes ago.
Okay, go for it.
Well, I just want to say that it really is a tension between a unifying force and a divisive force.
And that what you are pointing at is that even with the lifting of these mandates, there is this divisive instinct.
And I will leave it there and we can segue.
But But it is that tension.
And the truckers, which were portrayed as divisive, were of course unifying.
That's the point.
Everything is labeled backwards, right?
The inclusive of all art lovers thing is apartheid, right?
The truckers who were supposed to be divisive were actually inclusive.
And that's the thing is you have to get used to a world in which things are labeled upside down because that's the world we're now living in.
And that actually applies at sort of the individual level of, you know, we are not the first to have said this and we've noted it before here, but individual liberals, and we still call ourselves liberals, but individual liberals, and we still call ourselves liberals, but individual liberals as sort of a class are much more likely to be smug and divisive and interested in mandates that are exclusionary.
And certain that they know you because they know one thing about which you believe.
And individual conservatives are much more likely to be kind and generous and open to all ways of life and actually be interested in seeing what kinds of connections can be made.
And, you know, that's the opposite of what we were told and what we thought we knew growing up in the 70s and 80s.
And there are certainly people out there who will say, yeah, that's that's always how it's been.
And it was only from within the liberal bubble that you couldn't see it.
And I'm sure that there is some of that.
But I also think the degree of smugness and arrogance and hypocrisy is in particularly fine relief right now with regard to we've now endured years and the schools are failing and the media hegemony is is Spreading, yes, mis, dis, and mal-information in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And these are the people who are spreading the non-inclusive, yes, vaccine, apartheid policies.
They are the ones doing that.
It is such a clear case of hypocrisy, it's extraordinary.
So, I wanted to just say something about how we're being trained.
And to wear masks, yes, for sure.
And to ignore the unvaxxed and quietly just, you know, let them do whatever it is that they do, right?
The dirty, the, you know, the non-compliant, the we-probably-shouldn't-be-talking-to-or-about-them-anyway people.
The eight-year-old who wants to go see Monster Trucks.
The eight-year-old who wants to go see Monster Trucks, yes.
But also, and at one level, maybe less important, but at another level, I think, maybe more important and more fundamentally, even in how we move.
And so I just have a particular example that I experienced this week, but I'm sure that many such examples exist.
And if people think about what kinds of places they've gone in the last two years, that they may be able to find examples from their own lives.
So, Portland has a world-class Japanese garden.
It's truly wonderful, and it was one of the places that I was spending some time early in the pandemic, although pretty early on.
I'd maybe gone once or twice before the pandemic, and when I started going, they already had mask mandates, and indeed at the point they were requiring masks outdoors, I basically stopped going because I just I could not take it.
You know, there are some indoor spaces there, but mostly it's a garden, so it's mostly outdoors.
But one of the things that they did, and this reminded me of like early in the pandemic the New York subway system cut the number of trains down, and of course what that did was collect all the people who were on the subway system into smaller, into fewer compartments, which of course would have spread any pathogen more quickly because people were concentrated.
Yeah, and they cut them down, if I recall correctly, they cut them down to the local trains.
Right, and there was some good research that we covered early in the podcast on, indeed, the local trains.
The more tightly packed, of course, and the more local the trains, that is to say, the more stops, the more times people knew people were getting on, The higher the rates of transmission were.
And the longer it took to get somewhere.
This is actually where our model of effective volume of spaces began, was a discussion of that surprising at first result, that this remedy that had been deployed across the subway system had actually made things worse, and you could see it in the pattern of spread in New York.
Anyway, it was very interesting, and it really is how we started You know, doing this was trying to understand what was being revealed in the patterns that people had found.
I'll try to go back and find that New York Subway research.
I think it might have come out of MIT, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, that sounds right.
If I can find it quickly after the show, I'll put it in the show notes.
The policy, which was explicitly put in place to protect against COVID, was having explicitly the opposite effect.
It was making things worse, COVID-wise.
And obviously for people on the ground, not just because they were more likely to end up with COVID as a result of these policies, but it was just harder for them to do their work.
And those people who were still having to go to work, which is to say largely not the middle class, you know, information workers who got to Zoom at home, but the people who actually had to go places and serve people and do physical work, were, you know, it was taking them longer to get to work.
It was harder for them to do so.
And they were having to, they were being exposed to more COVID than they would have been if the, if the trains were all running.
The policies, the changes at the Portland Japanese Garden felt very similar to me, which is to say, you know, at a tiny scale and, you know, there's nothing necessary about going to a Japanese garden.
So, you know, it's obviously not the same at a lot of levels, but they closed down a bunch of the trails, a bunch of the smaller trails.
And there's one little loop in the garden that's very narrow and very steep and doesn't have handrails throughout the way.
And of course, a Japanese garden attracts people of all ages and abilities.
And so there is one little part of the garden that's always a one-way path.
Because for some people, you know, for some kinds of people meeting head-on on this path, it might be very, very difficult to know what to do or to be able to get by.
But the rest of the garden had, you know, it's a garden.
It's not an amusement park, right?
The rest of the garden had always been open to explore as you like, and the policies were not just about masking, but they were about some number of the smaller trails being shut down, which again would have concentrated visitors into a smaller place.
But we're outside, so maybe that doesn't matter so much.
But they also made everything one way.
So there was literally only one way that you could walk through the garden.
There were arrows on the ground, there were signs.
I had little enough experience with this garden before COVID that it struck me as very strange for a garden.
But I came to know this garden in this phase of its existence, and so I walked the route that they prescribed that I must walk if I were going to be enjoying the garden.
And I did so some number of times back in 2020.
Maybe even into early 2021.
And then, as I said, I kind of stopped going because the idea of wearing masks outside at a garden was too much for me.
I went back this week for the first time in a long time.
And there's still masks inside if you want to go to the cafe or the gift store.
They have a couple of lovely exhibits at the moment.
But for the most part, again, it's a garden, so it's outside, and they don't expect you to wear your mask outside, although a lot of people were.
But more to the point, for this story, still some of the smaller trails were closed, which was disappointing, but there's no one-way anything except for that one loop that I mentioned.
And when I saw that, I thought, oh, wonderful.
I can actually meander.
And meandering, like serendipity, are two of the things that the human brain just needs to be able to explore and to be able to create and to be able to come to understand new things.
You need to be able to meander.
You need to be able to experience serendipity.
It was one of the key words that I used in my study abroad programs, as you know, Brett.
And so seeing that I was going to be allowed to meander, Was like being told in a third grade classroom, you know, not only don't you have assigned seating, but you're expected not to sit in the same place every time.
Because even just having a different perspective on the class, on the teacher, is going to allow you to take in different things.
That is similar, and it's kind of like, well, I won't go there.
I was excited to meander, and I actively did so, and I found myself, except when I was being actively conscious, at every turn that I had an option defaulting to the one that I had been forced into before.
Forced into before.
I had been entrained.
Because almost my entire experience of this garden had been walking the one route that they told me I could walk.
I got to see the same stuff for the most part.
I could at any point stop and turn around, you know, like you like you should when you're, you know, on a trail or backpack and whatever, you know, stop and see what it looks like in the other direction because you don't actually know.
But I found myself having to actively force myself to take the opposite route.
Even though I walked into this place excited by the possibility of meandering, by the opportunity to meander, and still my brain, my feet, everything about my body wanted to just take the familiar route.
This is how we're being entrained.
This is a tiny example.
You know, does it matter that much?
Not much.
But any moment that you don't take the opportunity to explore, to meander, to have serendipity where you could just set and forget, is an opportunity lost, you were going to say.
Yeah, there are a number of things here.
One, I think you haven't given regimented meandering and planned serendipity enough of a chance.
No, but really the point is,
I was having a similar thought having nothing to do with the garden but looking I've forgotten where I was but just looking down a street and realizing that I don't feel the same way about it that I once did because there is now this sort of cryptic authoritarianism that means that the way that you appear to be free to use this place you are sort of free you can go into a restaurant you can order what you want but the point is you're not really free there's something that has become
Obsessed with understanding, you know, the limits of what you will contemplate and controlling them.
And so there is a kind of, you know, an amusement park feels like a very spontaneous place, right?
You let out a scream because something is very thrilling, but the point is that thrill was exactly planned by an engineer who caused your G-forces to And not to say that an amusement park isn't fun.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's been a long time since I've been in one, but I used to love them as a kid.
But it's highly prescribed that pretending otherwise is a fiction.
Right, and if that's where your joy comes from, if there is some authoritarian force deciding to create opportunities for joy because of course humans need them and so there's a plan for you to get enough joy to keep you from revolting, that ain't life.
Actually, that's perfect.
We'll wrap back up with Orwell at the end on that point.
Yeah, so, you know, it's a very odd moment, because if you look for the thing that is entraining us, as you say, you find it everywhere.
If you don't look, you could kind of convince yourself that things are actually sort of getting back to normal, when in fact The rights that we've lost across these last two years are profound and the rate at which they've been lost across many different nations.
It's not like one nation has lost its mind this time.
It's like there's been a loss of our self-awareness across the entire West and it's invisible.
But the other thing I wanted to point out Is there something about, okay, a Japanese garden in Portland, Oregon came up with a system in which you walk one way through its outdoor trails while masked.
Now, And thus, incidentally, walking one way – this is a point I was going to make, sorry, I know you were going somewhere – but the idea of one-way paths is, again, counterproductive to the point of the rule, because that guarantees that you will be in the airflow of those exhaling in front of you.
Right.
Whereas if you can just walk any which way, A, it's outdoors, so probably being even directly behind someone outdoors doesn't make that much of a difference, but it's worse than passing someone or from, you know, going orthogonal to them or 30 degrees or whatever.
Directly being in line behind someone puts you at the greater risk of inhaling something they just exhaled, of course.
Right, and so this is exactly what I wanted to get at.
You and I make a point in the book which goes deeply into our experience as professors, and the point is almost nobody who hasn't
Interacted with the real world in some way that the real world can cure them of their follies Has a deep kind of intelligence you need to have Interacted with a system that will Make it clear that you are fooling yourself in order that you get better at not fooling yourself, right?
all of these systems Well, you know, basically what we had is a bunch of people who went to school in an environment in which they got A's for effort, deploying effort at controlling this pandemic, right?
Now, the point really is... I put in the time.
Yeah, I put in the time and I came up with a plan.
Oh, what was your plan?
My plan was to have people walk one direction through the garden while wearing their masks, right?
I spent all of yesterday at this.
And I came up with something.
I think it's really good.
What's good about it?
Well, I don't know, but it's really changing people's behavior in a way that has something to do with the pandemic, right?
We do like changing people's behavior, don't we?
So the point is, it's like people are actually convinced that the fact that they've put in a lot of effort is tantamount to them having done something useful.
Now, we watched our public health authorities.
If we give our public health authorities the benefit of the doubt and we say, actually, They were trying to control the pandemic.
Well, then what they proved is it's really hard.
This was such a contagious disease that human efforts were swept aside by this incredibly powerful pathogen that, you know, yes, we very likely cooked up in a laboratory, you know, from a natural ancestor, but yes, turbocharged the thing.
And then the point is human control wasn't going to happen, right?
I did believe that two years ago.
What?
That they were really trying.
Well, you know, I don't think they were really trying because I don't think they could have failed as badly as they did, but the point is... But did you... I know, but I said I did believe that two years ago.
I started out with that assumption.
I'm not saying that I believe that that was... I believe now that was two years ago.
Are you saying you didn't believe that two years ago?
I was a little bit agnostic, but I was certainly... it was my assumption.
Yeah.
And then it broke very quickly, and the farther they went... And it seemed like Trump was just doing a terrible job, and...
Yes, Trump was reading stuff on the internet and spouting off about it, which is not a good control mechanism, but frankly, it's as good as anything they did.
But anyway, the point is, look, so, you know, in a world where you were not led to believe that effort is what the universe is monitoring, right, there would be two questions.
Okay, we've got a dangerous pandemic.
What is the likelihood that by doing something we will make it better?
It's not obvious, right?
In fact, I think the real comparison that we need to look at is what if... I'm not suggesting you do nothing.
You don't pretend that people are getting... You don't acknowledge that people are getting sick, right?
You don't pretend that there's no pandemic.
But if we had simply allowed doctors to do what doctors do, right?
And let scientists study the thing and see what they could figure out.
And not tried to rush in with a top-down plan that turned out to make things much worse in my estimation, right?
We probably would have done better, but the idea that we're going to control this in a useful way, all right?
We're going to, whatever organization you run, whether it's a school or a garden or whatever, you're going to need to put in some effort, right?
That's how we're going to control this thing.
Yeah, and then everybody comes up with their thing, and basically I think they feel rewarded Based on the fact that they know they've done something, and it has changed something that they can see.
Well, and it's consistent with the idea of work being inherently valuable, right?
I quoted a little bit from Graeber's Bullshit Jobs a few weeks ago, and he goes into the history in that book.
And again, it's been a little while now since I read it.
It's still sitting here.
I don't remember all of it, but that's not a universal from history.
We didn't always assume that just doing stuff that someone else is paying you for is of value, and we seem to have taken that on.
And I do wonder how that interfaces with, for instance, the ascendancy of the Protestant work ethic, which You know, I wasn't raised by Protestants, but that was certainly, you know, that was part of our home culture for sure.
You know, I was going to get a job early, and I, you know, and you, you know, in practice, and you know, just working hard at things was how it was that you were going to both perfect your own self and your skills, and also therefore make enough of yourself that you had reason to expect that you would get ahead.
Right?
All of these made sense, but then the kinds of things that I was doing, and that my family was doing, were – and I could be wrong about this – but it all felt like it was inherently of value, right?
And so much of what people are being paid to do now – and this is Graeber's point with regard to bullshit jobs, which again he distinguishes from shit jobs, which tend to be jobs that need to be done in the world, but pay terribly.
No, no.
Shit jobs are jobs that need to be done but tend to pay terribly, and bullshit jobs, about which the book is written, are jobs that largely don't need to be done.
Even many of the people doing them know they need to be done, but they tend to bring white-collar wages with them.
And the rise of the bullshit job is not just an absurdity, but maybe a contributor to the Fermi Paradox, frankly.
We've got a whole lot of people, like presumably the people making policy at things like schools and gardens and such, who are like, oh boy, we've got to put some effort in.
We've got to do some work.
I'm going to need that gold star stamped on my forehead.
Okay, we've got a plan.
Well, is it a good plan?
Well, but it's a plan.
We've worked hard on it and we're going to have to work hard to implement it.
We're going to have to work hard.
Maybe we'll come up with plan 2.0 at some point, but we certainly have to implement plan 1.0 first.
So let's go.
And it feels like effort.
And effort feels like it must be good.
And it must not be good.
There is nothing inherently good about having spent time at something.
No, and in fact it's bad.
So, two things.
One, if you compare, let's take the Japanese Garden as a microcosm.
If the Japanese Garden had not put in a lot of effort on a plan, It would have meant people would have walked chaotically through the garden where nobody would have gotten COVID because they were outside.
So the point is, you can compare these two things.
Now, the one marginal difference is there are indoor spaces, and those indoor spaces, it may have mattered.
You know, certainly a ventilation plan would greatly reduce the chances of somebody contracting it at the Japanese garden in an indoor space.
And you know, the three indoor spaces that I can think of, granted they're small, but they didn't have the arrows.
You could walk chaotically in the indoor spaces.
Right, so what they came up with was a plan that probably did no good, changed a lot of people's behavior.
And I, who reject entraining so actively, who think about this and have been thinking about this for decades, found myself entrained.
Which means, I think, because I am so aware of the hazards of this, and it is one of the things that I think about a lot, I think it means that almost everyone will have been entrained by things that they have not yet seen or detected.
And that we should all try to become conscious of the ways in which that has happened, and break it.
And this is, you know, harking back to Wendell Berry's manifesto, The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front, that I read last week, and that I also posted on my sub stack this week.
You know, do something every day that surprises them.
That does not compute.
Be the kind of person that does not compute with some regularity so that you aren't entrainable.
Entrainable, which is why that scene that I've mentioned in the Truman Show where Truman has caught on enough that he becomes unpredictable and he's driving around the roundabout and nobody can predict which exit he's going to take, right?
It's that.
But, okay, I wanted to return to this question about, you know, spending time is not inherently good, effort is not inherently good.
I once surprised myself by pointing this out, I think, at the very beginning of one of the programs I taught at Evergreen.
And I was shocked at my students' reaction, because what I said is that work is not good.
And they were like, And I was shocked that this was surprising to them, because to me it seems pretty obvious that if you have two individuals who both produce something of equal quality and one of them has spent a quarter as much time at it, that that's actually the more adept person and that we should all be striving for a given level of product.
We should be striving to invest as little time.
And it doesn't mean that you don't want to invest more time, but it means if you're going to invest more time, you want to get more out of it.
And so, you know, the investment is a necessary evil.
The point is we like people who work hard because they tend to produce things, but we should not like people who waste their effort.
Okay.
So you're going to be misunderstood two ways, I think.
Only two. - No.
Well, I can see how I would misunderstand you two ways if I did not know you well and had not taught with you in several situations.
I'll probably forget one of them while I speak to the first.
The first is that, let's see, you call it productive goofing off?
Is that what you call it?
You do a lot of stuff.
You spend a lot of your time that to anyone outside of you looks like you're not doing anything.
Yep.
And...
Zach is laughing.
You're like, it's just true.
I am not here slandering my husband.
This is just true.
And it's really, I mean, you've taken it to quite a level.
And you are actually doing work.
You are actually doing intellectual work.
And so, you know, to fit into your equation, you kind of, you can't cheat.
You got to count that as time spent.
Oh, right.
But it doesn't look like what people expect you to look like when you're spending time on a project, on an intellectual project.
So that's one thing.
That you actually do spend a tremendous amount of time, but often the stereotype is in the shower.
People have their ideas in the shower, and that's true too, but biking.
Fiddling with stuff.
Yeah, here, you can have that back.
Thank you.
Occasionally I will take the things that you're fiddling with away because I can't take it anymore.
Good lord.
And your younger son has picked this up, hasn't he?
Yes, he sure has.
It's driving me crazy, so there's at least some justice in that.
We were watching, the three of us, Zach was out doing tech production on a play last night, and Brett and Toby, 15, and I were sitting watching a show, and like three times during the show, I carefully He reached over and grabbed the remote out of Toby's hand, not because I want it – I actually don't even know where the buttons are on it, and it's not backlit – but because he was messing with it, and the batteries were coming out.
I'm like, oh my god, you too, just stop.
Anyway, you are productive doing this, okay?
And you spend time in a way that doesn't look like productive, but it is.
So that's one thing.
You're right, productive goofing.
Is that they, whoever they are, have an idea of what productive looks like, and it's mostly the kind of thing that you see in, again, a third grade classroom.
With little boys and girls, and girls are much better at this than boys are, sitting very quietly and neatly in their rows with whatever it is they're expected to have in front of them.
And they raise their hand nicely and politely when they're called out, when they have an idea or they need to use the bathroom.
And it does a great job of creating cogs, and it does not do a great job of creating Innovative thinkers and creators and explorers and adventurers and innovators and all these things.
That's one.
The second way that you will be misunderstood, I knew I was going to forget it, is we did in a couple of the programs that we taught, and I think I actually started it first in one that I taught, and I don't think it was as effective when I did it alone as when we did it together then, called Learn a Skill, okay?
And Learn a Skill, we did this in freshman, first-year programs, and maybe an all-year program, I mean an all-level program, but mostly it was the idea, you know, formally it was, remember Evergreen was a full-time program, so we had these students for, you know, either a full quarter or two quarters or three quarters, but their full-time, their full-time college experience was supposed to be us, and we'd spend You know, 15 to 20 hours a week in class with them, or, you know, all week if we were on a field trip.
But then they were expected to spend, you know, the equivalent of a full-time job, 40 hours, at the work, at the academic work of our program, whatever it was.
And so, learn a skill was formalized.
Like, you know, I had it all written out.
Like, you will pick a thing which has some physical ramification in the world, like carpentry, or playing the guitar, or baking yeast breads.
I don't know.
And we had a list of possibilities, and we said, if none of these appeal to you, pitch us your own idea.
But we're not going to let you just do anything, because it has to have physical manifestations in the world, and it has to be of sufficient complexity that you can't simply master it in two hours.
Right?
The key thing is it has to be evident when you fail.
Right.
So physical manifestation in the world could mean doodling, but the problem is it can't be subjective whether or not you've succeeded at it.
Yes.
And I set up a minimum expectation of hours per week, and it wasn't a huge number.
It was like I could go back and look, but I feel like it was four or something.
So, it was like over the course of a quarter, just like 40 hours.
And then there were check-ins.
There was a check-in midway through the quarter, a public check-in.
Everyone had to get up and spend like one minute saying what it was, how well they were doing, and how well they were making progress on their own goals.
And then at the end, they got like three minutes because we had 50 students and we had other presentations, like more academic stuff as well.
And the point was not, did you learn how to make a table?
Or did you learn your G chords?
It was, what did you learn about your own internal motivation?
And did you in fact spend the four hours a week?
And we asked for, we asked for, we mostly got, I think, remarkably complete honesty from students, even the ones who just didn't spend the time.
Because again, the point was, and I think how I formalized it in what I was, what I said to them about it was, failure is possible and fine.
Failing to fail is what we are trying to avoid at all costs.
If you fail to fail, it's because you just didn't put in the time.
And so this is where, this is how you're going to be misunderstood by saying, it's not about putting in the time.
There are some things where you really do need to put in the time.
Oh, well, no, I was very careful.
I am not saying don't work.
I am saying we esteem people who work because work is important, but it's a necessary evil.
Given that you are trying to accomplish something, the question is how, you know, the X is a something.
It may take you a half a lifetime to do it, right?
But the point is, it should take you a half a lifetime because that's how long it took to get there, not because you wasted three quarters of that time that you could have spent on some other project.
So, it was like, do enough work to get the damn thing done.
But, don't waste your time at it.
Which actually comes with another important lesson that I found students had a hard time with.
Which was, there are a lot of things, this goes back to the question of, is there something useful to do?
I would say, for me, the kind of work that I professionally do, my theoretical work, Almost every important success I have had in making a breakthrough involved figuring out what the puzzle is and then putting it aside and not trying to force the answer because I didn't have all of the important pieces of information to finish the thing until later.
And so the point is, if your point is, look, I'm going to work on this puzzle for two years, You may not be able to get to an answer in five years, in ten years.
It may be that you're waiting for something to show up to complete the puzzle and at the point that you stop making progress, the point is, I'm not quitting the project, I'm putting it on a back burner and I will know when to pull it off that back burner and revive it because now I suddenly know the thing I didn't know.
Well, and you were allowing for mental meandering, you were allowing for serendipity, you were allowing for, you know, the larger time scale equivalent of dream space to enter into your thinking.
And so, you know, in academia, the model that we are taught and that we are told in most fields, not the arts, And not the experimental sciences either, but many, many fields.
You have an idea, you accumulate everything that anyone has ever written about that idea, you become familiar with what everyone has already said about it, and from there you cobble together the pieces, the evidence either for or against yours, or you just review what they've done and you create something that's a little bit new.
Over in science space, I call this brick-in-the-wall science.
And, you know, it's valuable that some people are doing brick-in-the-wall science, but you will always have the same foundation of the house that you started with with brick-in-the-wall science, and it's possible that the foundation of the house you started with is not the foundation that you want or that is true.
So, you know, there's a problem with enforcing brick-in-the-wall science and, you know, complete literature-based review, the truth shall never be outside of the literature-based science, to the exclusion of all other approaches, because you can't have revolutionary ideas, you can't have paradigm shifts with that.
Yes, in fact, so this is an incredibly important point.
You have to have people.
I mean, there's a way in which brick-and-the-wall science is a bridge too far, I think, for anybody.
But it may be- But it's what most people do.
Oh, it is certainly what most people do.
And the point is, it's actually Antithetical to breakthrough science.
If you have everybody do it, then there are no breakthroughs.
And the point is, the bricks in the wall are less and less meaningful if they are not stacked on some breakthrough that's actually taking you somewhere.
Because diminishing returns means smaller and smaller bricks.
You're not really building anything of value.
And so, it's a catastrophe The whole idea of, well, surely if you're going to make progress on this set of puzzles, you will want to know everything everyone has done on the way there.
And the answer is by the time you learn everything everyone has done on the way there, A, you will have spent a huge amount of time and made no progress.
And B, even worse, you will be entrained.
Right?
You will be entrained in the thought process that got them stuck in the first place.
And this all is very counterintuitive.
Do you want to know everything that is known before you try to add anything?
The answer is you probably don't.
You'll ask better questions.
Now, you'll ask some bad ones.
Right?
You'll ask some questions that other people have figured their way past.
But you'll ask some good ones that nobody's asked yet.
And that's where the breakthroughs live.
So, it's all very counterintuitive, but... Indeed.
Well, we could clearly go on about this for a very, very long time.
I'm sure it is a topic we will return to.
Perhaps since we've already been at it for a while and we have several more topics we want to get to, you had a couple things you wanted to talk about with regard to mRNA vaccines to start.
Yeah.
So I wanted to start, and I should have shown you this since we can't hear the sound as a video is Or are we going to watch a video that I can't see?
Yeah.
Well, I probably won't contribute much to the ensuing discussion.
No, no, you can contribute just fine.
I'll tell you what it says.
Okay.
The video is one of the high-ups, maybe the CEO of Bayer Corporation, the pharmaceutical maker.
Bayer or Bayer?
B-A-Y-E-R.
Not B-E-H-R.
Talking to some group of people, we can't see who they are, about the massive transition that the vaccine campaign has made in how open people are to having gene therapy.
And his basic point is two years ago, if you had told people that they really need some gene therapy, they would have looked at you funny.
But now, after the mRNA vaccines, it's amazing, 90% of people have some willingness to contemplate getting a gene therapy, right?
And so anyway... So, you want to show this?
Yeah, Zach, will you show the video?
We're really taking that leap, us as a company buyer, in cell and gene therapy, which to me is one of these examples.
We're really -- we're going to make a difference, hopefully, moving forward.
Ultimately, the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy.
I always like to say if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?
We would have probably had a 95 percent refusal rate.
I think this pandemic has also opened many people's eyes to innovation in a way that was maybe not possible before.
We're really taking that leap.
Okay, so what I wanted to do was address the question.
There's obviously been a whole lot of ink spilled over whether or not these are vaccines or not vaccines, whether this is gene therapy or not gene therapy.
Now I have pretty much avoided those discussions because my sense is they are Strictly a semantic question.
You deliver me the definition, and I'll tell you whether that's a vaccine.
You deliver me the definition, and I'll tell you whether it's gene therapy.
And the problem is, if we say these vaccines are gene therapy, that will cause people to think that they are a lot more dangerous.
And if we tell people they're not gene therapy, it will cause people to think they're a lot safer.
But in fact, whether they are or are not does not adjust their level of safety at all.
Right?
And this is an important point, right?
And this is a point that gets muddled by postmodernists rather intentionally, I think.
The idea that language itself changes underlying meaning.
Language can change the meaning of things, but applying different language to existing things does not mean that that existing thing is A or B, depending on whether or not it's got label A or B on it.
Right.
And it's a classic estate tax.
Yeah, people are in favor of an estate tax because you're taxing the rich.
Death tax.
Sounds like you're kicking somebody when they're down.
It's the same tax.
So anyway, what I wanted to do was just give people an orientation so they know what the question is.
And you can answer for yourself then whether or not this is gene therapy.
But the point again is it's been used as a political football rather than it being a Right.
I don't even know.
Let's put it this way.
I think the fact that one can argue it either way is the answer to the question.
This is something very new.
It's so new that it does not clearly fall within or outside the definition of gene therapy, and I want to just give people enough information to understand what is being described.
So traditionally, gene therapy, which I think initially goes back, the idea is sort of seeded in the 80s.
It's a cool idea, but I would say it's an idea that is overly based in the drawing in your textbook, which is always misleading, right?
So if you think about it, there are many disorders or diseases that are the result of a gene being broken in some way, right?
Your genes are spelled in some way.
They produce proteins.
Mind you, I will go back and tell you that the word gene isn't very useful.
Genetic is a very useful term.
I don't use the term gene very much, but I'll use it here just for shorthand.
There are lots of cases in which a gene has taken on a mutation that has disrupted the production of its product and made it harmful.
And if the product, let's say there's an enzyme that you need to produce in your liver to detoxify something, and you have a bad spelling of the gene, that will interrupt your ability to produce the enzyme and to detoxify the thing.
And if you encounter it, that's bad.
Now in general, these things don't matter.
Every time because you have two copies of every gene.
And so, you know, in many cases, even if you have a bad spelling, if you have a good spelling, you'll be alright.
But, when somebody comes into their doctor and they have some kind of a malady, it's a fair percentage of the time that it is the result of the fact that they have maybe gotten two bad copies of a gene, or it could be a sex-linked thing where they only have one copy to begin with and it's disrupted.
But nonetheless, there are lots of cases in which a badly spelled gene disrupts your ability to do something that is part of normal functioning and it has left you dysfunctional.
So of course, Given all of the tools that nature has built for editing genes and things like this, an obvious answer is, well, why don't we just give you a good copy of the gene?
And the basic answer to that question, and what I thought when we were first hearing these ideas, you know, in... I guess we would have first heard them in high school, but college would have been where they came up, was, well, here's the reason that that's not a great plan.
It's that You don't have a genome.
It's not like a central thing that lives somewhere in you that we can edit.
You're 30 trillion cells.
And, you know, yeah, maybe if it's a liver gene that we're talking about, you don't need all 30 trillion cells modified.
You probably don't need all 100 billion cells in your liver, or however many it might be, several hundred billion cells in your liver.
But still, you've got to edit Yeah, that's well said.
before you've done enough work to actually solve the problem.
Even if the cells that you edit work over time, it's still a long way before you've done anything therapeutic.
The genome is highly centralized within the cell, but highly decentralized within the body.
Yeah, that's well said.
Okay.
So the point is, what gene therapy basically means is, or at least initially basically meant, was you go in, you edit a gene so that the bad product is replaced by a good product and you're you're no longer sick or you're less sick.
The problem is, easier said than done, right?
We do have a lot of tools for editing genes.
You can do it in a cell pretty easily.
You might be able to deliver it with a syringe to a particular tissue.
How much uptake you're going to get, how much actual useful editing you're going to get, and how much will, you know, maybe you edit a bunch of things well, but in the process you also disrupt a bunch of things that worked because the editing isn't perfect.
Right?
See?
So anyway, the point is, really cool idea, really difficult to do.
Okay?
Implementation is going to be tough.
Yeah, implementation is tough.
Now, Zach, do you want to put up the FDA's... the FDA has a little explainer site.
What is gene therapy?
And you can begin to see what the problem is.
Do we know if... is this the modern version of it, and has it changed in these last two years?
This is the current one.
I don't know if it's changed, but it's good enough.
If it's changed, it has not changed in a way to... Actually, it says content current as of July 2018.
Okay, so they haven't changed it then, at least if that's accurate.
Okay, so can you scroll down?
Okay, stop.
So there are a variety of types of gene therapy products, including plasmid DNA, that is circular DNA molecules that can be genetically engineered to carry therapeutic genes into human cells.
So plasmids are outside of genomes.
They are little units that carry particular instructions.
So sometimes antibiotic resistance in bacteria is carried on a plasmid.
Those plasmids can be exchanged between critters.
So that's the introduction of it.
They're talking here about introducing a plasmid that contains a useful gene And not integrating it into the genome, presumably.
Viral vectors.
Now, viral vectors are capable, in many cases, of introducing genes into a genome.
They can actually edit things in.
That's one of the things that many viruses do.
Now, it turns out coronaviruses do not.
But nonetheless, viral vectors is a way you could edit a genome.
Bacterial vectors.
Bacteria can be modified to prevent them from causing infectious disease, and then they can be used as vectors to carry therapeutic genes into human tissues.
Now that suggests that they are not editing genes at all with their bacterial vectors.
Anyway, well the point is, this is interesting, I wonder if that's an intentional use of that word or if it's just vagaries.
I think the point is, as with the word gene, right?
We used to define the word gene and we said, oh, a gene is that which exists between a start codon and a stop codon, right?
And that it encodes a protein.
We now know that that's not true, right?
There's something like an average of five different edits that you can make of what exists between a start codon and a stop codon.
And so each gene may have multiple productive interpretations, right?
You know, I gotta say, I've never seen the site before, and this list of five, so for those just listening, there's actually five bullet points and you just read the first three.
The fourth one is human gene editing technology.
The goals of gene editing are to disrupt harmful genes or to repair mutated genes.
And it feels to me like this should not be an unordered five bullet point list, but that plasma DNA maybe, I know less about what that might do, but viral vectors and bacterial vectors both could be used to effect human gene editing technology.
It's like having a list of hypotheses.
You're like, no, those aren't alternatives to one another.
their heads and they get scared about when they hear gene therapy.
Like that's the thing they worry about most.
And it's not like, this is not, these aren't all, it's like having a list of hypotheses.
You're like, no, those aren't alternatives to one another.
These five things don't strike me as alternatives to one another, even though that's how it's being proposed here.
Well, I think the point is you start out with an idea, People have bad genes that cause disease.
We'll edit those genes and make them good.
Then you realize, that's difficult.
But there are a lot of things we can do in that neighborhood that might work.
Maybe we don't have to edit the genome.
Maybe we'll put it on a plasmid and we'll introduce the plasmids and maybe we'll have to do it periodically, but you'll still be better.
My point is, if you take a strict interpretation, gene therapy is the editing of your genome to make you healthier or immune or something like this, then these mRNA vaccines are not gene therapy.
If you take a broader sensu latu understanding and you say that basically the point is what gene therapy aims to do is to introduce a piece of information into a body such that the body is capable of doing something that it couldn't do before that information was introduced, then in fact this fits perfectly on that list.
And it does it at the genetic level, as opposed to like, you know, vaccines are immune therapy.
You never hear it called that, but that's what they are.
And if gene therapy is any of these bullet points on the FDA, then yeah.
Well, let's put it this way.
The problem is that A vaccine that introduces an antigen is not gene therapy.
Any vaccine that is effective is immune therapy.
It's affecting your immune system.
It's entraining, in fact, your immune system effectively.
But I can make an argument that an attenuated virus vaccine, which is in fact I would argue the gold standard of vaccines, is gene therapy by this definition.
And I'm Not troubled by that, I'm just saying that if the question is, did you introduce something in a genetic form where the product is then causing you to have some capability you didn't have before, right?
Then you could make an argument for that one.
And so this is why it doesn't really matter, right?
It doesn't really matter.
Is introducing a virus with genes that then causes the virus to do something that then creates immunity for you, right?
Is that vastly different or is the plasmid example vastly different than a lipid nanoparticle covered mRNA that gets into your cytoplasm and causes your ribosomes to make a protein as if your nucleus had told it to?
No, it's not different at all.
This is gene therapy at that level.
But again, who cares at the level of the messaging?
Right.
The point is, really, what ought to alarm you is that we are doing something for which this is a question on which you could argue both sides.
And what's really troubling here, as we talked about last week, Is that okay.
You're going to introduce something that you know, you're going to introduce a literal genetic message.
Yes.
It's RNA, not DNA, but it's still, it's a genetic message.
You're going to introduce it into the cytoplasms of cells so that they will produce proteins that then trigger something useful, but absent a specific targeting mechanism.
Absence something that tells cells, you are the cells that should pick up this message and you are cells that should ignore this message.
What happens is you have to dump enough of the message in that enough cells pick it up to create enough effect to be worth doing.
But that means a lot of cells that are not doing the body any favor by transcribing this message are going to pick it up.
And that's the question.
The myocarditis that we talked about last week might be the hypothesis that I put on the table last week was that the heart is picking up these messages, faithfully transcribing them the way the designers of the vaccines hoped.
They didn't think it was going to be heart cells, but they didn't Provide the lipid nanoparticles of the mechanism for bypassing the heart either right so the heart picks it up Transcribes the message the immune system looks at the heart transcribing foreign messages and thinks that it's virally infected and attacks and kills some of the cells in the heart which you can't afford to lose because it's your heart and it's Not capable of replacing them with similar cells Right?
So that's the level of the hazard.
Is it gene therapy?
The fact that it is arguably gene therapy means that that's the level at which we should be having this conversation.
This is not an antigen that was dumped into your system in order to wake up your immune system to a pathogen.
This is something much more serious and novel than that.
And that's the conversation that needs to be had.
Right.
All right.
You also wanted to talk about serial passaging making a virus, in particular cytoscopy 2, more dangerous to humans.
Or do you?
Should I skip it till next week?
It's up to you.
Depends how long we've been going.
Oh we've been going a while and I still I definitely want to get to Orwell because it fits with some of what we were talking about earlier.
Maybe I'll save it for next week.
All right.
Then let me just Put in my notes, we're going to get to that next week.
This fits with some of where we were starting with regard to entrainment and such.
God, excuse me.
The Road to Wigan Pier is an Orwell book written in 1937 that I have not read.
I read a fair bit of it this morning, but I won't claim to have read it.
And so in general, I won't read excerpts from books that I haven't at least well familiarized myself with.
But an excerpt from the end of Chapter 5 was sent to me by a listener in England this week, and he says, the listener in England says, the book is not the easiest read or listen so far unless you have a particular interest in the desperate life of miners in northern England in the 1930s.
But this passage near the end of Chapter 5 stood out.
So before I read this excerpt, and again I have not shared it with you yet, I want to just share a little more background on the book itself, as I understand it.
Again, I haven't read it, but I've read a little bit of critique and some reviews.
The first part is Orwell effectively acting as a documentarian, traveling through England, exploring the lives and conditions of working-class people.
in England in the 1930s between the two world wars.
Of course, he doesn't know that that's the moment he's in, but he knows he's post-war, post-World War I. And the second part of the book, which caused quite a furor apparently, is effectively Orwell's social analysis.
Specifically, his analysis of whether socialism is an appropriate answer to the problems of the people whose lives he's documented in the first half of the book.
And in short, again, I have not read most of this analysis.
I read a little bit of it.
His answer is he thinks it is.
He thinks that socialism is an answer, does have a chance of being an effective solution, but not the way the socialists are doing it.
He has a lot of critique for both the particular way that socialists are doing things in the 1930s and more broadly for the ideology, but he does think it has a chance of doing good.
And of course, him having this deep, careful, and nuanced argument manages to piss off ideologues on both sides.
So, you know, much madness ensues after he publishes this book.
Here we go then, without further ado, from Chapter 5 of Orwell's 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier.
Hold on just a second.
Before I read that, was that thundering we just heard our younger son leaving on his electric unicycle?
Yes, it was.
Okay.
Oh, God.
Great moment to start to have a cough.
From The Road to Wigan Pier.
Trade since the war has had to adjust... This is Orwell.
Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity.
One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra smart pairs.
For the price of one square meal, you can get two pounds of cheap sweets.
You can't get much meat for three pence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips.
Alright.
I'm gonna guess what Orwell wrote next.
Actually, I can't really guess what Orwell wrote next.
He was too good a writer, and frankly, even with a crappy writer, that would be a difficult job.
But what I'm going to do here is It's not entirely clear what I should do here.
I'm wondering whether I should switch topics to one of the other things I wanted to discuss.
Maybe that's what I should do.
All right, so I will pick up the question.
Oh wait, Heather may be returning.
You all right Heather?
Yeah.
Okay, I was about to switch topics because it was hard to figure out how to complete that.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
We've both had a cough for a little while here, but I think it's dusty today.
Water is your friend.
I know, water is my friend.
Water is also streaming out of my eyes now because I'm coughing.
Okay, I'm going to start that over.
It's unfortunately a long quote and reading aloud is not easy on the voice, but Here we go.
Orwell's 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier from Chapter 5.
Trade since the wars had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity.
One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs.
For the price of one square meal, you can get two pounds of cheap sweets.
You can't get much meat for three pence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips.
Milk costs three pence a pint, and even mild beer costs four pence, but aspirins are seven a penny, and you can wring 40 cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet.
And above all, there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.
Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope – something to live for, as they call it – by having a penny on a sweepstake.
Organized gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry.
Consider for instance a phenomenon like the football pools, with a turnover of about 6 million pounds a year, almost all of it from the pockets of working-class people.
I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland.
Hitler, Locarno, fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance—this was an attempt to quell the football pools—flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury.
And then there was the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies.
You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore.
20 million people are underfed, but literally everyone in England has access to a radio.
What we have lost in food, we have gained in electricity.
Whole sections of the working class, who have been plundered of all they really need, are being compensated in part by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.
Do you consider all this desirable?
I don't.
But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances.
They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect.
Merely, they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard.
The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair, or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to feudal massacres and a regime of savage repression.
Of course, the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers.
It is quite likely that fish and chips, art silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-priced chocolate, five two-ounce bars for six pence, the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the football pools have between them averted revolution.
Therefore, we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute maneuver by the governing class, a sort of bread and circuses business, to hold the unemployed down.
What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence.
The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process, the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.
So, three things before you start riffing.
This sentence in particular.
Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated in part by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.
That feels like today.
And that feels like not just COVID times, right?
But that feels like something we have been seeing and talking about since we've known each other.
Since, you know, since high school.
Since the 80s.
I was, I just, I delved a little bit into the fish and chips part of this story, and apparently fish and chips were incredibly cheap, incredibly cheap, and there were an abundance of fish and chips stores in the 1930s, and it started to become more and more expensive.
So that doesn't sound quite right to our modern ears, in the 70s apparently it started to get more expensive.
But it was very much a cheap thing that was available to everyone.
And then I also, I looked, I was thinking about a conversation we had at the end of 2021 about the price of lumber.
We were told by a contractor that dimensional lumber, like two by fours, was about to, what did he say, double?
He didn't maybe have a prediction, triple, like that it had been going up and down during the pandemic, but that it was about to really, really climb.
And so I went and looked it up, looked up the prices, and of course for some reason I don't have it queued up because I wasn't prepared.
And this is This is, you can show my screen Zach, this is the Nasdaq's reporting on lumber prices for five years, since I guess it would have been early 2018.
And you see it start to spike during the pandemic, and it spiked higher in 2021, basically before all of the mandates were lifted.
And then of course, we got them back.
And you know, here we go, that's a match for what we were hearing from this contractor.
Just a couple months ago.
And, you know, do people need lumber?
Yeah, people need lumber.
But can people get apps on their iPhone for dirt cheap?
They can get those, and they don't need those the way they need lumber.
Yeah, and in fact, it's interesting that, you know, phones are almost the perfect example of what's obviously not essential for life since, frankly, we didn't have them until very recently.
But, you know, there are a lot of folks who don't have homes who have phones, right?
Right.
So anyway, it's pretty interesting.
A number of things struck me about that.
One, Very interesting that he makes the point about This having happened through an unconscious process.
Mm-hmm.
So no doubt.
There's an awful lot of collusion in our world There's also an unconscious process that Does all kinds of heavy lifting for those who would collude, you know perverse incentives that cause people to innovate mechanisms That they don't even realize what they're participating in I was also reminded that
Obviously, Heller is much later than Orwell, but the character Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22 is such a marvelous exploration because Milo starts out as kind of an all-American Go to it kind of a soul who starts making life better for the pilots.
He's in charge of the commissary, I think.
I think that's right.
He starts making life better by trading and he gets all sorts of yummy things from other parts of Europe and brings them in and starts making money, you know, because so he's sort of like this, you know, shiny You know, emblem of capitalism.
But over time, as he moves farther and farther down this road, he becomes diabolical.
He's in fact- And he's specifically a luxury peddler.
Well, and that's the thing, so there's a marvelous exchange where, I hope I don't get this wrong, but he has made a bad deal, and he's ended up with a huge warehouse full of Egyptian cotton that he can't do anything with, and he tries feeding it to people, and they won't eat it.
Anyway, I can't remember exactly what happens.
I think somehow he's also traded away the silk in the parachutes.
So at some point, somebody jumps out of a plane with a parachute, but there's no parachute in it because Milo has traded it away.
Oh, and I think he puts coupons in there or something, like you can trade the person you don't have for... There are ownership stakes in the syndicate, right?
That's right.
And I don't know if you remember the exchange that ensues after this.
I forget which pilot it is who has died.
But somebody, I think it's Yossarian, the sort of antihero of the book, is shouting at Milo for having killed this guy by substituting coupons or ownership stakes for his parachute.
And Milo's defense is, well, he died rich.
And Yossarian says, it's not going to do him any good.
He's dead.
And Milo says, well, then it'll go to his girlfriend.
And he didn't have a girlfriend.
Then it'll go to his parents.
They don't need it.
They're rich.
Then they'll understand.
Oh.
It's the most chilling line in the whole book, I think.
Oh, wow.
The idea that the rich would understand why this parachute was traded away and their son lost his life to it.
And yeah, it's mind-blowing.
But really always interesting to hear Orwell, who basically feels like he thinks way ahead of his time.
And which is part of why the present is so confusing, because we are seeing a lot of stuff that I thought Orwell overdrew.
But actually, it's just every bit as crazy as he describes it.
No, what I wasn't aware of...
I don't, you know, I'm not a historian by any means, and I hadn't really thought a lot about the life that Orwell lived.
I had thought about his work.
And, you know, this is something we should be allowed to do.
We don't need to become aware of the creator behind works in order to appreciate the works themselves and to analyze them and and find value in them.
But one of the things that in my just tiny bit of research I was doing on this book, The Road to Wigan Pier this morning, that really struck me was that he actually went and traveled and lived among people whose lives he was then telling.
And immediately I thought, in a slightly different world, I would like to be able to be on a road trip now, much as I very much wanted to be in Ottawa during the truckers' convoy.
But actually seeing people where they are, seeing how they're living, and you know, in direct contrast to the lies we are being told about this being the greatest economic recovery ever, right?
You know, actually seeing people as they are living their lives.
And he did that, and so all of his social analysis was not armchair theorizing, it was not abstractions, it was not – and this is in fact part of what he argues in the second half of this book, as I understand it.
A little bit that I read is that the abstractions of the largely middle-class socialists who are insisting that you adopt their solutions that will never work are just that.
They are abstractions, and they're based on imagining of human character and, frankly, human evolution, although that wouldn't have been Orwell's framing, I don't think.
That simply misses the mark, you know, that isn't true.
That, you know, humans will not come to abide by the rules of the white-collar middle-class socialists as they are demanding that people live by.
Yeah, that is really the problem with it is there's an underlying game theory problem, right?
It's basically a free rider problem and socialism as constructed effectively punishes contributors and rewards freeloaders and so it's unstable.
Which doesn't mean, you know, those who recognize some version of that Often overdraw the lesson of the problem with it They don't understand that actually your body is socialist and a family can be socialist And there are places in society where we want this, you know the fire department and the fact that it doesn't you know Look up your tax return before it puts the fire out in your house or it takes you to the hospital, right?
These are all places where there's some element of it.
That's quite right, but I What I've tried to later in life, the model I've deployed is it's not a question of do we want socialism or don't we want socialism?
It's a question of in this case, do we want more of it or less of it?
Right?
It's an ingredient.
It's not a plan.
Yeah.
And anyway, I'd be curious to know what Orwell's point was about yes, socialism, but no, not the way socialists think about it.
I wonder what he was on about.
Yeah, well I'll add it to my stack of books to read and maybe get back to all of you when I learn more.
Cool.
I think I'll also save this one last thing maybe for next week because we've been at it a while and we have a Q&A to get to yet.
Yes, we do.
All right, so we will take a break just as, you know, as short as we can manage for tech reasons.
You can be asking questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We will get to as many of them as we can.
We never get to all of them.
We don't make that promise, but we will pick and choose among the ones that we've got and see what we can do.
If you have logistical questions, not questions for us to address on the show, you can email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Again, consider joining our Patreons, looking up my substack, naturalselections.substack.com, where you can join for free and get almost everything to your inbox.
And Brett mentioned our book on this show, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and we continue to be really pleased with the attention it is continuing to get, and we encourage you, if you haven't, to Pick up a copy either of your very own or at a library and take a look.
And in the meantime, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
