#121 Welcome to the Noble Psy-Op (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 121st 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 the newly published Together trial on the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating Covid, and the media’s response to said publication. We discuss mass formation, as detailed in Mattias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (not “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” as Heather said during the po...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, After Dark.
It is after dark somewhere.
I know you're going to tell me it's not after dark.
In fact, it's many, many hours till dark, but it is much later than we usually do this.
If it were December, it would be after dark now at this time of day.
If it were December, I believe that is the subjective tense.
It might be.
I think it is.
I was never good at the naming of the tenses.
Neither was I, except in this moment I may have shined.
We are Bret Weinstein and Heather Hying, and we are here with episode... you got this.
121, which is not divisible by 7, even though some part of me wants it to be.
7?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
But it's not prime.
Right.
Right.
Why does 7 come up?
Because of 21.
I see.
Yeah.
Also because of the Bible, where it shows up regularly, and I think I can make a strong argument that the length of the week is an adaptation, but another time.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Yep.
You got anything else?
Well, let's see.
Oh, yes, it is... It is five o'clock, one-sixth of a time zone to our east.
Am I right about that?
One-sixth?
Of a time zone to our east.
Yeah, less even by this time, because we got an even later start than we were meaning to.
Our producer was otherwise engaged.
It seems that he was productively engaged, which you would expect from a producer.
Fair point.
And we will come back with more news of that at a later time.
For now, let us embark.
Stop the dithering.
Is that what we're doing?
I thought you were going to tell me that that's not how time zones work, because of course that's not how time zones work.
But yet, at this point in the day, you're willing to go along with it.
It's not how time zones work, but I'm sure someone who is concerned about whether or not it's time for them to have a drink does the math that way.
Right.
Let's put it to this way.
The question of is it five o'clock there already is dicier than it's almost five here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was more dithering, wasn't it?
I think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
We are going to talk about totalitarianism.
Well sure, it's Saturday.
And a little bit about Hannah Arendt and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the things that live on our ceiling according to our dear Tabby Fairfax.
And for those Blistering and not watching, that won't make any sense, but we are going to talk a little bit, apparently, about the Together trial, which was finally published.
One of the arms was finally published this week after it was, in fact, kind of half-announced back Last summer.
And let's see, we've got a few other things to talk about.
Oh, as I wanted to get to last week, but we were too busy explaining what a woman is, there's an op-ed published in BMJ calling for the need for evidence-based medicine.
So in light of things like the Tether trial, I think it's a good moment to go there.
Yeah.
Actually.
So I don't know in what order we're going to do that, but let's do our announcements first.
We learned this week that The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, our book that was published six months ago and is continuing to sell very well in English, is continuing to... the translation rights continue to be sold in other languages, but the Spanish language version is going to be on sale as of June... I think it was first, at least early June.
I actually may be conflating two publication dates now.
Sometime in June, And the presales are available on Amazon.
It's got a cool, totally different cover.
You can show it here if you want to, Zach.
But you don't have to.
So, no, don't, because I need my computer back now.
So, never mind.
Don't show it.
Actually, the more I think of it, the cleverer that cover seems to me.
That was one of the covers that we rejected from our English language version.
Right, but it's... It's cool.
Yeah.
Yes, you should, given that your father is talking about it.
Right.
This will no doubt not satisfy the people just listening as much as the people watching.
Why don't you explain it?
It is like a trident with an arrow as the middle fork of the trident and something USB symbol-ish symbolizing the hyper-novelty of the moment and also suggesting phylogeny and one lineage going forward into the future while others have dead-ended at a square in a circle which raises questions about familiar relations, but it's deep.
Well, I don't get USB from this at all.
I get the phylogenetic tree and the archaic technology combined with something modern, but I did not see the USB association.
USB, yeah.
Yeah, so it's cool.
It's cool and you know the British cover has a different look and I'm just talking here until I can get my computer back so I can know what I'm supposed to say next because we're in that part of the show where I just am supposed to have my notes and it's not working.
It's not working.
There we go.
So the French version is also going to be published around the same time.
We're live on Odyssey, right Zach?
Okay, we are live on Odyssey and YouTube, and the chat is live on Odyssey, and we will, after this first hour of the show, be doing a live Q&A.
We encourage you to ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We always answer one question from our Discord community, which you can get access to by joining either of us at either of our Patreons.
This morning you had one of your Patreon conversations, Fantastic conversation with the Coalition of the Reasonable.
Yeah, well, you would hope.
Well, no, you would expect them to be reasonable, but they are well beyond that.
Ah, yes, that's the lowest, that's the low bar.
That's the bar for entry.
That is the bar for entry, but yes, they routinely exceed that limit.
And you have another conversation tomorrow.
Tomorrow, and I can say very little about how that will go, other than history suggests it will also be excellent.
That's excellent.
That is terrific.
Let's see.
On my Substack this week, on Natural Selections, I published a piece with a similar title to what we talked about on the podcast last week.
I think we titled the podcast, What is a Woman?
And my piece was, I'm a Woman, subtitle, and a biologist.
So I went there.
If you're looking for that kind of thinking in writing, you can go to naturalselections.substack.com.
And boy, there's just so many more announcements, but we're a little bit Discombobulated this week.
I've always wondered about this word.
It implies that we were combobulated earlier.
Right, and I remember I never, I can recall never being... Combobulated.
Or bobulated.
Right, nor does anybody say that they are combobulated when they intend to convey that they've got it all under control, their ducks are in a row.
Yeah, and come, I mean, even just bobulated, like, you know, you haven't even come together around it yet, you're just simply bobulated.
It's your nature.
Oh, it's a Sarah Starr thing, isn't it?
I don't know.
What's that?
That it's a fundamental nature of the thing, right?
As opposed to a temporary state of the thing.
That's the distinction you're drawing, I believe.
Is Sarah Star a person?
No, Sarah and a star.
These Spanish verbs to be, right?
They're differential usage.
Okay, I'm gonna take a moment out.
Did our producer also hear Sarastar?
So technically this is not a failure for you to recognize the Spanish construction and relevance of the whole thing and therefore you can remain as our translator into Spanish for the book.
Which I, of course, am not, because I've never made such claims at all in any way.
But I don't understand, now that I know what you're trying to say, ser versus estar, what the connection to bobulated would be here.
Because you were suggesting that bobulated could just simply be how you are, rather than, at this moment, I'm bobulated.
No, that's not what I was suggesting.
I was suggesting you could have a state of being bobulated, but that is lesser than being combobulated, in which you've come together with your various bobulations.
Oh, it's an emergent bobulated.
A bunch of bobulated.
To be discombobulated may just be a reversal to the state of bobulation.
At what rate are people dropping off the viewership of the podcast as we parse our way through?
USB.
Yeah.
Oh, the whole thing is the USB symbol.
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't, I, wow.
Yeah, I totally didn't get that.
That's great.
Very excellent.
Okay.
It does not, it should, as the USB symbol, connote the repeated flipping of the cord.
Awesome.
Okay.
Let's just, let's do our, let's do our ads.
Let's do that.
Shall we do that?
Yeah.
Okay.
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All right.
You seem to have changed up our background.
Well, you know, I thought I would honor the person who... So did you bring over their names?
That would have been such good planning.
So we received this piece of art in the mail, and it's wonderful.
It's wonderful.
I really appreciate it.
It's marvelous.
Somebody clearly spent a great deal of time.
So we thank you.
Yes, we do.
Okay, where do you want to start?
I don't know, we could start with the Ivermectin Together Trial issue.
And I should say we are not going to exhaustively explore this matter because for one thing quite a number of people have done extensive explorations here and some of them are so excellent that you really owe it to yourself to look at them.
So I would include in that Chris Martinson has done an exploration, Matthew 1T Crawford has done one, Phil Harper has done one, and we will touch on one of the points that he makes in a couple of minutes here.
And Alexandros Marinos has also done an excellent couple of analyses, as well as a thread in which he compiles some of the analyses that other people have done.
And IVM Metta, you can show my screen here if you like, which is a relatively long-standing with regard to COVID site, has an ongoing exhaustive description of what the various studies show, don't show, what their weaknesses are, etc.
And Zach, if you just put my screen back on for a moment here, This, with regard to specifically the TOGETHER study, they just have a number, you know, it's an ongoing list, many of which are points that have been made by, for instance, Alexandros and Matthew and Chris and such.
But just to look at a couple of them, there are many basic inconsistencies and protocol violations.
There's no response with data requests.
They've got two different death counts.
The trial was not blind.
Unequal randomization confounding by time.
And then I skipped the second one here, which is delayed by six months.
And I'm going to let you basically talk about this for the most part, the whole thing.
But I did want to say that here on IBM Meta, they say the paper was delayed over six months with no explanation.
So this is this big study.
The results were revealed back in August of 2021.
And then I think it was the fluoxamine arm, which was published within a couple of weeks.
And then nothing.
And so there are a lot of people who, upon hearing the results, which basically were, uh, ivermectin is useless, you know, don't bother.
Uh, we were, you know, we were right all along.
Not that that's what the authors here said, but that was the sort of the take in the, in the media.
Um, many, everyone who cared about those results immediately said, well, you know, I'm going to need to look at the, at the analysis.
Um, there's not even a way to look at the data because the data still aren't being, um, produced, but the thing wasn't published for six months, and so IBM Meta says one possible reason would be rejection from a series of journals, which would be expected given the issues.
It's a possibility, we have no idea if that's true.
You know, that was not my guess as to why it would have been delayed.
But it is remarkable that suddenly this week everyone is talking about this as if this is news.
And it was news in August, and now we can see how really un-news it is, because the study is so flawed.
It's not even un-news.
It's anti-news.
And, you know, Phil Harper addresses this very directly, and so I want to Do you have something to show?
So you can just show.
Yeah, he's got it.
Well, I actually don't have somebody to show, but I would advise people to sign up for his sub stack.
He has a seven day free trial.
You can look at the whole thing.
But in any case, he talks about-- So you can just-- I've just pulled it up.
You just pulled it up.
Yeah.
So this is-- Yeah.
So yeah, he says the can't add together trial.
I would say the can't even keep it together trial.
So, what IV meta raises as the possibility for why this is so delayed, that it was rejected from multiple places before the New England Journal of Medicine finally accepted it.
The reason that that doesn't quite add up and strikes me as more generous than it needs to be is that were all of the errors here to have been spotted by reviewer after reviewer and journals to have passed on this, that would have forced them to be corrected in a sense.
Some of them are so basic, the errors are just simple arithmetic errors, right?
That if these things were being caught, Then it's hard to imagine how it could have landed in such a high-profile journal in such a crazy state.
I mean, it's really just riddled with errors.
So, that does suggest...
That like so much in this landscape of early treatment, COVID, public health policy and all, that the distortions here are about something.
It's the immense gravitational force of some object we cannot see, right?
Is that object simply pharma profits?
We don't know.
But what we know is that nothing works in this landscape like it's supposed to.
And one of the things that doesn't work is not only was this delayed, it's not really even delayed.
The point is the punchline was given to us and then the basis for that punchline was delayed by more than six months.
So this thing was a weapon in the hands of those who argued that there was no utility to this particular early treatment.
This was a weapon over that entire period without our ability to discover how good a weapon it was or how accurate it was.
And then upon its release, the point is, okay, suddenly there's all this fanfare and the Wall Street Journal is publishing on the fact that this study finally, you know, remember you were told randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of science.
That's what you were told, right?
Well, here is what you are now told is the largest randomized controlled trial that's been done on this topic.
Well, technically, but it wasn't done well.
Well, I mean, this is, this is exactly, this is the kind of explicit and intentional it seems category error that we've been talking about across the board, right?
Like, well, vaccines have been effective in reducing rates of, rates of and deaths from rabies.
Cool.
Therefore, anything that we call a vaccine for a particular disease is something that you need.
Ah, wait.
You know?
Right.
So even if it were true that randomized control trials were the thing that you absolutely need to demonstrate efficacy, which is not true, right?
It's not.
But that doesn't mean that anything that calls itself a randomized control trial is done well or, you know, is done well at all.
And to your point about, you know, the Wall Street Journal.
Every mainstream outlet is very happy about this result.
That ought to be giving us pause.
Why are people so pleased that early treatment with a drug that has a long safety record is not effective against what we are being told is the worst scourge to hit humankind in a hundred years?
That seems surprising.
But then we even have like this, this headline just struck me as particularly remarkable so show my screen if you would.
Again, Zach, this is from Newsweek.
What Joe Rogan has said defending ivermectin as drug is ruled ineffective.
Now, this is a headline author, and headlines are often crazy, and presumably it has nothing to do with the person who wrote this, and you can get rid of that because it's now, of course, of course here it's showing Trump, right, who has nothing to do at all with ivermectin.
In fact, he's pro-vaccine.
Right.
So, what the headline writer reveals though, and no one who saw this at Newsweek before putting this up caught, is that they think this is about, it's like a court of law.
It's like a standard of proof, like you would find in a court of law, ruled Ruled ineffective.
That's not how science works.
Science doesn't work by democracy, by vote.
That's not what should be going on here, and yet that is clearly what we are seeing as this thing finally gets published and suddenly everyone who was so thrilled to be talking about Horst de Wormer last summer is back talking about all the same things they've been talking about before, Without actually paying any attention to the fact that the study itself is flawed, you know, I don't even know how many, at least 20 different ways.
Yeah, and presumably there are many out there who didn't know what to think.
Right?
Who probably did accept randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of science.
You know, nobody having thought through how many things were never exposed to a randomized controlled trial that we know work.
How many things are incapable of being exposed to a randomized controlled trial that we do science in other ways.
But lots of people probably accepted, oh, well, randomized controlled trial is certainly the best.
Kind of science.
And so, oh, this is the largest randomized controlled trial done on this topic?
Well, what did it say about ivermectin?
It says it doesn't work, right?
The problem is a couple things.
One, randomized and controlled, right?
Randomly assigning people to two groups, one of which is a placebo group which controls for effects that are not part of the treatment, right?
This, among the errors here, are errors that suggest that this was neither randomized nor placebo-controlled.
Now, one of the most curious errors in the entire list is that a huge fraction of the people in the placebo group did not complete the trial, right?
They bailed out of the placebo group, right?
Much larger than the number who left the treatment group.
Right?
Which either suggests that they... And given the way that dosaging was happening, it wasn't really blind.
It was pretty easy to tell which group you were in.
Well, that's one possibility.
So, in this particular case, the study was done on people who were sick with COVID.
That's how you got into the trial.
You were sick with COVID.
Thought they were potentially going to get treated with a drug that was reputed to work, right?
And in the place where the trial was done, lots of people were talking about the utility of this drug.
So if you were a person looking to get treated, you could join this trial and maybe be treated for free.
And then you discover you're in the Control group by one way or another and then maybe you leave which would explain a massive difference in the rate at which people if you know lots of people didn't complete but they were evenly distributed between the two you could say maybe there's something about how hard it is for people to get to the place where they get the drug or whoever but it doesn't need it doesn't need discussion or explanation if it's a roughly equal
If it's roughly equal, but wildly unequal, either suggests that those people who were in the placebo group knew they were in the placebo group and weren't inclined to complete a trial where they weren't getting treatment for a disease they had that they considered serious, or it suggests that the effect of the drug was significant enough that they could detect that they weren't getting better, right?
So, even in a blinded thing, if ivermectin worked, you could imagine that it would unblind itself in this way.
So, the point is nothing adds up with respect to a drug that doesn't work and is being exposed to a randomized controlled trial that results in a large fraction of the people in the placebo group mysteriously dropping out asymmetrically, right?
That just doesn't add up.
So, here's the question.
If randomized controlled trial is the gold standard, This was not a randomized controlled trial.
And yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, it's the largest randomized controlled trial that's been done on this topic.
So the point is, nothing in this even superficially passes muster.
And what's more, if you think about what was, you know, one of the few good things about the way the pandemic unfolded, was that at the very beginning of the pandemic, Science was being done out in the open.
Was peer review happening?
Well, review by peers was certainly happening.
It was happening on this podcast and elsewhere as people were looking at science that was emerging that hadn't yet gone through the official process of peer review.
It was amazing.
We talked about it.
It felt like the Wild West.
The preprint servers were just full.
They were just, you know, hundreds more papers weekly and it was extraordinary.
It was the actual studies.
And were the actual studies all good?
No.
But you could look at them and you could say, well, here's what's wrong with this one.
Oh, this one actually looks pretty good because they accounted for the thing that would trip up another methodology.
So actual review by peers happened in this case early on.
The later we have gotten, the more this has been inverted.
And I just want to point out how perfectly the inversion worked here.
The inversion worked so that what we got here was not the ability to scrutinize anything.
In fact, we were denied the ability to scrutinize anything for more than six months.
What we got was a conclusion that matched somebody's desire, right?
And then the point was, well, what are the chances that that's what the study actually says and that it does so on the basis of sound science and sound philosophy of science?
Right?
Many of us thought the chances were low, but there was no ability to do exactly what we're supposed to do, which is go in there and look and say, well, how good was your methodology?
Your methodology could be good.
Maybe you didn't follow it.
How good was your methodology and did you follow it?
And in this case, what we see is, oh, it's garbage.
Long after The six-month period in which people portrayed this trial as definitive and long after the Wall Street Journal and others touted this as, well, the evidence is finally in, right?
Now, what are the chances that all of the people who got suckered a few days ago and saw the Wall Street Journal touting this are going to find Phil Harper or Alexandros Marinos or Chris Martinson or any of these people, right?
The point is, this is a way to sell a conclusion as science-based when the science itself is not robust.
That's exactly right.
I was struck by actually one of the finds that Alexandros made with regard to the dosing.
So the protocol says that the dosing given in the ivermectin arm was 400 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for three days.
But he went digging into the supplement, the protocol supplement, you know, again, not the entire data set, but the protocol supplement, and the detail that he finds there is that actually that's not true, that that's only true up to body weights of 90 kilograms, and then it sort of, it just, it tops out, and there's no justification for that either given or anywhere else in the ivermectin literature, right?
And what that means is that for people who are frankly pretty much, you know, most people above 90 kilograms are probably overweight.
Not all.
Some people are tall.
But in general, the greater chances you have of being overweight, the greater chances you have of having been underdosed in this trial with regard to ivermectin, And there's nothing except hidden in the supplement by someone who was really trying to figure out what happened to indicate that at all.
And so, you know, this is just one example, and there are lots of these examples, but there's just so many ways that the study did not do what it claimed to do.
And then you have places like Newsweek saying, well, basically, the jury came back.
Yeah.
And it's like, that's not what we're doing here.
Oh, wait.
Actually, apparently it is, because The Jury Came Back means Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and HuffPo, and I'm just making places up because I assume everyone has written their ridiculous piece, accepted the conclusion from the authors or from, you know, New England Journal of Medicine's press release, and hasn't taken the time and probably doesn't have the chops of the wherewithal to actually go in and check, or even to look at, you know, any of these analyses that have been done by the people you've mentioned.
I would also point out that this is not just a matter of laypeople not having the chops to go in, right?
It shouldn't be the case, but scientists all too frequently look at the title and maybe the abstract of something and assume that the work is done well.
And it is amazing how frequently one goes into a paper and one sees that actually even the abstract isn't justified by the method section, for example.
Oh, very often.
Yeah, it's really common.
And, you know, methods are tough if you're outside of your particular field.
They're hard to read, but they are necessary if you're actually going to decide that what it is that the authors have claimed is true.
I would also point out that the one thing I will say, you know, by way of steelmanning this trial, which I really don't feel like deserves it because the number of things that are— Everyone else is steelmanning it for us.
Yeah, but even so, just the number of things that are wrong in the same direction does not suggest good faith.
How that happened, I don't know.
It's conspicuous and so, you know, my feeling is Steel Manning only makes sense when the thing on the other side is a different perspective and you want to give it its due, but it doesn't really have a due if it's cheating.
Fair enough.
But, what was I going to say?
I was going to say...
Oh yeah.
It is very, let us admit that, or just acknowledge that a study like this is hugely complex, right?
Yes.
And it's not only complex at the level of, well, what would the study have to do and what things would have to be compared in order to accomplish the goal?
And, you know, lots of things that viewers of this podcast will be well familiar with, like, you know, You can sabotage a trial or you can screw it up by treating too late, right?
Things like that.
Or you could, in the case of ivermectin, you could give it without food so that it wouldn't cross the gut.
As they did.
As they did, right?
But the point is, there's lots of complexity.
Or they recommended that it be taken on an empty stomach.
Right.
What are the chances that you would do a study of this complexity without making some errors?
I'd say they're effectively zero.
Yeah, there will be some errors.
Now, it's been a lot of months since the result came out, so, you know, I think one of the things was like, I don't remember even what the numbers were, but it's like, was it 228 or 288?
I don't even remember where in there, but it's like, well...
You know, typos happen, mistakes happen in the relating of results.
If they happened in the original data, that's a big problem, but also there's been a lot of time for a lot of people on a study this big with this many authors to really go through and check and check and check.
Yeah, and there's also a right way to deal with it.
Either your study is so compromised by the errors that you don't publish it because it's not evidence.
Or, it's compromised in a way that, let's say, you lose some fraction of the individuals who were in the study because they discovered they were in the placebo group, for example.
And so that part of the study is no longer placebo-controlled, but some other group wasn't aware, right?
So then the point is, then you scale back what study you publish so that the study you publish is actually evidence of something, right?
And the point is, okay, they made errors.
Some of the errors may just be the normal fact of a complex study, but the point is there's a right, honorable way to deal with the errors that you make in a study such as that, and that didn't happen here.
It didn't happen at the editor level, it didn't happen at the level of the peer reviewers, it didn't happen at the level of how this evidence emerged into public.
You know, it's one thing to see a preprint where you get to see the conclusion of the study and you get to see how the study was done and you can compare them.
It's another thing to get to see the conclusion and not be able to see how the study was done.
There's no preprint.
And then the point is this is PR, right?
This was effectively a PSYOP as so much in this neighborhood has been.
And so anyway, the final thing I want to say is Science is supposed to work, right?
And I don't mean science, the philosophy of science, scientific method, but science, the practice of science in modernity, is supposed to work on the basis that we want things explored.
We, society, want things explored.
We provide incentives that come to those in a position to do the work in the form of jobs, in the form of promotions, in the form of grants, in the form of prizes, right?
All of these things are given for high quality work that elucidates stuff in a way that is good and those incentives draw people to discover things, right?
But if those incentives are not targeted at, hey, discover what the truth of ivermectin is, but they're targeted at, here's a story that we need to be supported by science-looking stuff, they can do that too.
If you give the prizes and the jobs and the promotions and the grants to people who come up with a story that some very powerful entity wants told, then that's what science will do.
And in this particular case, we do know that You know, the apparatus surrounding Anthony Fauci is the behemoth of grant awarding, right?
That thing is in a position to control a huge fraction of the money which serves the purpose of the incentive in the system.
So what that has to do with how this trial came about, we don't know.
But the fact that you would get a trial that claims to be essentially definitive by claiming the mantle of what they have called the gold standard, which I will argue is actually about something else.
But we've been told randomized control trial is the gold standard, right?
This trial claims to be the largest randomized controlled trial of this particular treatment, and it comes to a conclusion that is, well, treatment doesn't work, right?
That is how you tell a story, and the fact that it wasn't a randomized controlled trial, right, that it pretends to be one but isn't one, is part and parcel of what's going on here.
So my claim is going to be That this idea that randomized controlled trial is the gold standard is actually a trope of sorts.
There is a way in which it can be true.
If a randomized controlled trial is done well, right?
If the philosophy of science underneath it is sound, if the methodology is good, and if the methodology is followed well, then it is going to be the best way to elucidate especially a subtle pattern, right?
However, I don't think that's why it is being shoved at us as the gold standard.
It's being shoved at us because it is the most gameable, right?
Because just as a good methodology is amplified by randomized controlled trial, a bad methodology is too.
Well, it's gameable, but I would say another point in its favor, in scare quotes, is that it can't be done by individuals without large backing.
Oh, right.
So, you know, you can't come in and, you know, and try to understand the study in retrospect the way that, uh, the way that Alexandras and Matthew and Phil and Chris and, you know, and are, and that we have in a lot of other places.
That is as it should be.
We have ourselves done, not in this sphere, but a lot of very low-tech, low-cost science.
In fact, I used to encourage this, not just for myself, but for my students.
You don't want something that's going to require a lot of money, because then you're not nimble.
Then you can't move at the point that your funders say, actually, I don't like what you're doing anymore.
Right?
And that's not to say that there aren't questions that deserve to be asked and that are important for humanity that they be asked and answered.
They require a lot of money, there are.
But there are also a lot, there's too many incentives to push money towards being more expensive than it needs to be.
Did I say money?
That pushes science towards being more expensive than it needs to be.
Because that renders those people doing the science incapable of getting out.
So RCTs, randomized control trials, we can't do those.
Right.
Individuals can't do those.
Right.
Individuals can't do that.
You're right.
That's another, from the point of view of something that wishes to control the narrative, that is a major feature.
Right, that somebody can't easily bootstrap one.
So they're highly gameable, methodologically, and individuals can't do them because they're too expensive.
I think these are both driving forces here.
I guess the last thing I would say is there is a conspicuous oddness to the Together trial, which I haven't heard discussed in this last phase, which is that it oddly, given What it did here with ivermectin concluded that fluvoxamine was highly effective, right?
Now, my point would be... And that result was then published within a couple of weeks, back in August.
Yeah, immediately.
So, here's the question.
That did not, as far as I'm aware, radically change the standard of care so that people who had COVID were getting fluvoxamine.
Why didn't it?
If the idea is, well, we'd give them ivermectin if a randomized controlled trial said it worked, Okay, it did with fluvoxamine.
What happened to that?
Right?
So anyway, I'd be interested to hear what the answer is on that front, but I think the point is All of this looks like, you know, the little people, the riffraff, and by the riffraff I mean us, right, need to be placated or dismissed in some way, and there's going to be enough science-looking stuff to make that happen, and the most annoying thing is that when we try to hold them to any standard whatsoever, it's obvious that they're not adhering to one.
Right, well there are a whole lot of people wearing science-ish hats.
Science-ish hats, yeah, exactly.
Boy, you said a lot of things that prompted me to want to go immediately to all the different places I want to go, and probably won't get to all of it, but let me just, let me jump before going into this The Need for Evidence-Based Medicine piece that was published a week and a half ago or so.
Without the introduction that I will later give it, I had The honor of reading, gosh, is it Matthias or Matthias?
I'm not sure.
Matthias Desmet.
I had the honor of reading Matthias Desmet's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in its English translation, published by Chelsea Green Publishing.
And this week, and it's going to be out, again, maybe June 1st.
I'm not sure.
The Spanish edition of our book and the English edition of Desmet's book are both out in June.
June comes at you fast.
June probably will be coming at us fast, yes.
um excuse me and uh in advance of that you Brett are going to do a podcast with him and um I expect that's going to be a terrific conversation and I gotta say this book is just terrific and you know it pushed me and there's some stuff in here that I don't agree with um but I'm I'm trying to frame it you know he's a I think he has a background in psychology, but he does history and history of science and science, and he just does a lot of really terrific things.
So I want to read a few excerpts, but something you just said now, probably 10 minutes ago, prompted me to want to read this excerpt first.
This is, I don't remember what chapter it's from.
The use of numbers in this crisis, so here he's talking about COVID, pandemic, the last two years.
The use of numbers in this crisis makes us barely realize that what we do respond to are not so much the facts, but the stories constructed around facts.
Those stories are spun by healthcare workers who genuinely do their best to help, by people who don't want to see their families suffer, by politicians who want to make the right decisions, by academics who want to provide information as objectively as possible.
However, they are also constructed by politicians who are under the pressure of public opinion and feel compelled to act decisively.
By leaders who have lost control and see their opportunity to take back the reins.
By experts who have to hide their ignorance.
By academics who see a chance to assert themselves.
By man's inherent propensity for hysteria and drama.
By pharmaceutical companies that smell dollar bills.
By media that thrive on sensational stories.
By ideologies that see, in a technocratic, totalitarian system, the only solution to the seemingly insoluble problems of our time.
So this is brilliant.
And there's so much in his book in which he is basically railing, and that sounds like he's unhinged, which he really, really is not.
Again, this is Desmet in his book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is going to be published in English in a couple of months by Chelsea Green, in which he takes on the reductionist, strictly materialist in his framing.
And this is where I kind of glitch a little bit.
But the very reductionist view of science that then gets handed down to people as if all they have to do is trust the people who say they're doing the science, and then they too are living in a science state of mind, and they too can hope for sort of a utopian infinite life future in which there are no problems, right?
And what he reveals here in part is not just are the numbers not our saviors, But we're not even actually responding to the numbers.
The numbers on their own don't usually compel people.
They compel some of us, right?
Numbers and well-but-not-manipulatively-created graphs and tables will actually compel those of us who are driven to find meaning in numbers, but that's not most people.
And even those of us for whom that is true, the vast majority of us still find meaning in story easier.
And it's easier to remember at an emotional level, at a visceral level.
And so what has happened to us, to all of us, regardless of where we fall in terms of what we believe and what we don't believe, what we think is going on these last two years, is we have been handed a series of stories.
And very often we don't even know that because we think we're saying, oh, but you know, newest study says ivermectin doesn't work, so it doesn't work.
What are you, a horse?
Yeah, that.
Right.
Yeah, I wonder sometimes if people don't need to spend a little bit of time just... You can tell a lot about the story you're being handed by figuring out what the alternatives that could fit in the same moment in history would be, right?
Like, what do people think would have happened if Pharma had discovered that there was a vast new market for novel, patentable, profitable products and it was unnecessary because a drug that had gone out of patent was too effective.
What do they think Pharma would have said and done?
Do they think Pharma would have said, we are so lucky that one of our past successes that can now be produced by anybody because it's out of patent, is capable of controlling this pandemic.
And, you know, it would have been nice from our perspective if this had been a business win, but But it turns out that humanity is luckier than that, and we are grateful.
Does anybody think anyone in business ever sounds like that?
Right?
Right.
That said...
I think this is a good moment to actually to read another.
Wait, I want to take back one thing I said.
I think a few people in business do sound like that, but the idea that an entire industry would have reacted that way I think is preposterous.
Anyway, go ahead.
So, let me actually just kind of introduce the book.
So, Matthias Desmet, as many people listening will know, will recognize his name.
Uh, is, uh, has publicized the idea of mass formation, also known as mass formation psychosis.
Uh, the English, you can show my, uh, my screen here, Zach, for a minute.
The English version of his book, the English translation of his book is being published by Chelsea Green, uh, which is just an Extraordinary publishing company.
It's one that I had already been familiar with, but you go through and you find, you know, books about orchards and farming and COVID-19 and pipelines and, you know, cob houses and all sorts of things.
It's just, it's just so lovely.
And I'm not going to do that now.
Thanks, Chelsea Green.
But okay, I can, I can take my screen back here.
Oh, and I mean, I actually first came to be, I think, fully aware of Chelsea Green at the point that we were reading Derek Jensen's books back, boy, mid-aughts probably, before we knew him, as we are lucky to know him now.
So, you know, he is a radical environmentalist and an extraordinary educator as well.
So, this book, in this book, Matthias Desmet lays out just a remarkable history, and I'm I could have written up an entire description of what it is that he's doing here, but I think we'll just do some excerpts here, and then you'll have a conversation with him in several weeks, and then I will encourage everyone to read the book, and I'll put the link to the pre-order in the show notes as well.
Um, but he, you know, he talks about Hannah Arendt, uh, in the 40s, I think, I've forgotten now, uh, talking about, of course, the origins of totalitarianism, and talking about mass formation, and also a French philosopher named Le Bon in 1895, I believe, talking about this phenomenon.
This is neither new with Desmet, nor new right now, nor is Robert Malone, who has helped publicize Desmet's work, responsible for causing a bunch of people to believe in something that he just pulled out of thin air.
Not that old ideas are inherently good, or new ideas are inherently bad, but this is a concept, this idea of mass formation.
has been bandied about by very smart people who have seen a lot of truth that other people have not seen for well over 100 years at this point.
Yeah, I would just say people should check out Chris Martinson's chat with him.
They have a podcast.
With Desmond?
Yes.
Oh, I did not know that.
That's terrific.
I'll bet it is.
Okay, so Chapter 7, The Leaders of the Masses.
This is two pages.
The chapter's longer than that.
that.
The excerpt I'm going to read is the beginning of chapter seven, which is two pages.
In the previous chapter, I described the, again, this is from Desmet's, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In the previous chapter, I described the phenomenon of mass formation, the psychological basis of totalitarianism, as a form of hypnosis.
However, there is an important difference between mass formation and classical hypnosis.
In classical hypnosis, only the field of consciousness of the hypnotized person is narrowed.
The person who conveys the hypnotizing story, the hypnotist, is awake.
In mass formation, to the contrary, the person who conveys the story is usually in the grip of the story as well.
In fact, this person's field of attention is usually even more narrow than that of the masses.
The reason is clear.
The leader usually fanatically believes in the ideological basis of the narrative, Not in the narrative itself that controls the masses.
So this is, I'm just stepping aside from the quote for a moment, this is a really critical distinction.
He's not saying that the leader who is effectively hypnotizing masses in mass formation believes the narrative, but he believes that the reason he's doing it is so honorable because he believes in an ideology that it's for their, it's for everyone's good, it's for the best, it's what needs to happen in order to attain the goal that he or she fervently believes.
It's a noble psy-op.
It is a noble psy-op.
Back to Desmond's words.
With respect to the leaders, mass formation gives rise to two opposing attitudes.
Either one trusts the leaders blindly and disappears into the mass, or one completely disrupts them, distrusts them, and sees them as people who knowingly carry out an evil plan, i.e.
conspirators.
In a certain sense, both extreme perspectives are based on a similar misunderstanding.
They fallaciously endow the leaders with a virtually absolute knowledge and power.
The first group does so in a positive sense, the second group in a negative sense.
Other misconceptions are that the leaders are primarily driven by money, i.e.
follow the money and quibono, or sadistic pleasure, i.e.
they have a psychopathic or perverted personality.
Such statements are not really confirmed by historical research either.
To give one example, the head of the Nazi party had a reluctant attitude toward illicit profits, and personalities with tendencies towards perversion and psychopathy were systematically excluded from recruitment.
As opposed to the classical criminal who finds an intrinsic pleasure in violating social rules, in this case totalitarian criminality lies more in the uncritical and mindless adherence to a system of totalitarian social rules, even when the system becomes radically inhumane and transcends each and every ethical boundary.
Hence Hannah Arendt's famous expression that totalitarianism was a true demonstration of the banality of evil.
Totalitarianism is not about monstrous people.
It is about normal people who stick to a morbid, dehumanizing way of thinking or logic.
In the initial phase of the totalarization process, such a logic first takes hold of the population.
The masses, or at least a large part of the population, become imbued with certain ideological convictions that to them are no longer distinguishable from reality.
The emerging mass movements of pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism in Russia and Germany in the early 20th century are good examples.
Germans typically became convinced that, as a race, they were superior to others, and that stigmatization and oppression of, amongst others, Poles and Jews could be justified by, quote, the facts.
We see something similar happening during the coronavirus crisis, where a certain segment of the population is becoming convinced that the facts justify the social discrimination of people who refuse to be vaccinated.
The numbers show that they are spreading the virus, don't they?
These dynamics slowly give rise to the emergence of totalitarian parties and totalitarian leaders who gradually institutionalize this logic and impose it on society.
And this typically happens in a fanatical, blind, and merciless way.
Hitler believed that his strength came from his ability for, quote, ice-cold reasoning.
And Stalin believed that the secret of his success lay in his, quote, merciless dialectics.
Races that were unfit for life and dying classes were, under the justification of this logic, expelled from society with surgical precision.
For this reason, what characterizes the leaders of the masses is not greed or sadism, but their morbid ideological drive.
Reality must and will be adjusted to the ideological fiction.
This is critical, I think, in part because one of the questions we often get asked is, does this require conspiracy?
Does what we are seeing around us require conspiracy?
And one of the things that we get accused of, of course, is being conspiracy theorists.
And of course, that word is just weaponized and that phrase is just weaponized and meaningless at this point.
From its origin.
What?
From its origin.
What does that mean?
The phrase conspiracy theory emerges, and this was debated by various people, but it emerges in a document in which I believe it is the CIA argues in favor of using this to effectively stigmatize people who were not satisfied with the Warren Commission's explanation of what happened to John F. Kennedy.
Um, and so the idea that this was a way to get rid of an entire kind of inquiry is, uh, from the outset.
Yeah.
Uh, but, you know, no one intelligent, and I don't mean educated, I mean intelligent, um, of which there is some overlap, um, not total in either direction, uh, should imagine that conspiracies don't exist in the world.
They certainly do.
If your bias is to see conspiracy everywhere, every time anything happens, you are no doubt seeing it too many places.
And if your bias is to say that it never happens anywhere, then your bias is in the opposite direction and is also an error.
But what Desmet lays out here, following again from Arendt and this philosopher, Le Bon, with whom I was not previously familiar, is that it's in order for the leaders of something that becomes mass formation to take place, what you need is ideological certainty and a belief that they're doing the right thing.
They do not need to be greedy.
They do not need to be conspirators.
They do not need to be sadists.
They do not, you know, they actually don't need to be driven by any of the other things, many of which presumably many of them are also driven by, but it's not necessary.
So there's obviously a lot that one could extrapolate from here, too.
And one thing that I think is important is the way in which something that was suffused through all of the functional apparatus of Western civilization, everything, From, you know, from the Democratic Party, to the major newspapers, to the regulatory apparatus, to Twitter, right?
They're all suffused with something in advance of the totalitarian impulse, right?
And so, I and others have talked about William Binney describing the turnkey totalitarian state.
The idea that totalitarianism is built around you, but it's not turned on at first.
And so it's a very much more frightening thing because you don't see it.
It doesn't look like totalitarianism until somebody flicks the switch on it.
But there's a way in which this organically happens too, right?
If the idea is that everybody, you know, everybody through all of the control architecture of Western civilization went through college somewhere, right?
And as they went through college somewhere, they were fed something that was Very simple about right and wrong and which side they were on and who the bad people were And at the point it was handed to them.
It was just sort of an impassing kind of observation that Western civilization is Fundamentally racist for example right right you can accept that and if nobody's saying what you're supposed to do about it Then the point is oh well, I guess I believe that And then the point is, at the point they come knocking and they say, well, you remember how you agreed that Western civilization was racist?
Here's what that requires you to do, right?
Your obligation, so as to not be complicit, is now X, Y, and Z. You have to go after all of the people who don't agree, right?
For example.
It's a version of give them an inch, they take a mile.
Once you've agreed to one of the premises that may or may not be true, If you can be held to that by your own moral standards, then you can actually have your morality twisted up from under you.
Right.
You have to have some sort of an active process so that, A, you're either the kind of skeptical person who, when they hear Western civilization is racist, their question is, what do you mean by that exactly?
Right?
Or you've got to be the kind of person who, when they come knocking and they say, remember how you agreed that Western civilization was racist?
Well, now here's what you're required to do about it.
The answer is, in what way does this follow?
And can we go back to your original assertion?
Because I was always a bit in doubt about what you meant.
Do you mean there has been racism throughout?
That there have been lots of barriers placed in people's way?
I agree.
Do I agree that that's the fundamental nature of what Western civilization is about?
That that's its No, I don't agree.
It's very hard to be either one of those.
It's a lot of energy to be resisting when it seems like nothing's at stake.
Well, and so, I mean, I could read excerpts all day, and I'll only do a couple of more, but one of the things I'm reminded of from what could have been a three-page excerpt, but I won't do it, is, you know, he says, Desmet argues, as we have, as many others have, that there's basically sort of three groups of people.
And I remember you describing this before Evergreen blew up, in fact.
Four groups.
Okay, go for it.
So describe those groups and then I'll fit that into a scheme here.
This is what I put on the board two days before 50 students I'd never met showed up in my classroom accusing me of racism.
There were four groups.
There were a small number of people who will lead, who will instigate a witch hunt.
There's a large number of people who will go along with them.
There's an even larger group of people who will say nothing.
And then there's a tiny group of people who will stand up and say, witches don't exist.
And those are your witches.
Excellent.
Excellent.
So he just hasn't named the leaders as one of the groups here.
That's all.
We've identified three groups that form when a mass arises.
The masses themselves, who truly go along with the story and are hypnotized.
He estimates about 30%.
A group that is not hypnotized, but chooses to not go against the grain.
Usually about 40 to 60%, he estimates.
This again, Desmet.
And a group that is not hypnotized and actively resists the masses, ranging from 10 to 30%.
Okay, that's us, right?
Probably.
The people who are listening, hopefully there are some in that middle group.
I think there's very few in the first group who are listening here, although I would hope so.
He then proceeds, and I won't read the whole thing here, to describe what it is that if you are in that third group, the group that is not hypnotized and is actively resisting, The mass is what you should be doing, and why, what the value is in it.
But the key of it, the central nugget is, the first and foremost guideline for members of this third group is that they should let their voices be heard and in as sincere a way as possible, so as not to let the resonance of the dominant hypnotic voice become absolute.
Do it whatever way you can.
Do it in the grocery store.
Do it on screens.
Do it with your family.
You know, just do not simply be quiet and assume that this will pass.
Because that will be how they win.
That will be how the dominant hypnotic mass voice becomes the only voice that anyone can hear.
And so then that first group grows in size and it's pulling from the second group, but the second group may be growing in size too, maybe pulling even from those who are currently not hypnotized.
In his book, how extensively does he go into a connection with Rene Girard?
I don't think at all.
It's not there?
Interesting.
The document I have isn't searchable, so I don't think so.
So it seems to me that there's like a whole little cluster of people who have studied the same... But apologies, I may be misremembering.
...aspects of the same phenomenon.
Gerard Desmond Arendt, Stanley Milgram, Ash, Solomon Ash, of course.
Yep.
Okay, no, that's not that's not true.
I can search it and Gerard isn't in here.
Not in there.
Ashes.
Interesting.
But anyway, it's...
The number of places where you have some version of, you know, the people are hypnotized by something, what is it?
Is it the lab coat of the experimenter in Stanley Milgram's case that causes people to reflexively go into a subordinate phase in which they'll shock somebody to death because a scientist told them to?
Is it anonymous peers in the case of Ash?
Right.
Is it a need to scapegoat in order to find cohesion in society in Gerard's case?
Sorry, not anonymous.
Stranger peers.
Not anonymous.
Anyway, all of these things are clearly explorations of a related set of phenomena, at the very least.
And how important is it that we figure this out?
Because we're just going to keep living it again and again.
It is so critical.
So I am going to read one more short excerpt from Desmet and then two sentences, but here we go.
Again, all I have is the page numbers.
I don't remember what chapter this is from.
The catalyst for mass formation is a suggestion in the public sphere.
If, under the aforementioned circumstances, a suggestive story is spread through the mass media that indicates an object of anxiety, for example the aristocracy under Stalinism, the Jews under Nazism, the virus, and later the anti-vaxxers during the coronavirus crisis, and at the same time offers a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, there is a real chance that all the free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object, And there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.
This process yields a psychological gain.
Firstly, the anxiety that previously roamed through society as a tenebrous fog is now linked to a specific cause and can be mentally controlled via the strategy put forward in the story.
Secondly, through a common struggle with the enemy, the disintegrating society regains its coherence, energy, and rudimentary meaning.
For this reason, the fight against the object of anxiety then becomes a mission, laden with pathos and group heroism.
For example, the Belgian government's team of 11 million going to war against the coronavirus.
Thirdly, in this fight, all latent brewing frustration and aggression is taken out, especially on the group that refuses to go along with the story and the mass formation.
This brings on enormous release and satisfaction to the masses, which they will not let go of easily.
Wow yeah so much of that is resonant from now a couple of chapters of our recent life right it just it's unmistakable right that you're the experience is certainly one of facing A hypnotized group.
It's like sleepwalkers.
Yeah, and simultaneously, I'm the enemy?
Right.
What happened?
How did that happen?
Many in our audience will have experienced this in at least some ways in these last two years at this point.
Whether or not, you know, wherever they think the virus came from, whatever they think of the vaccines, whatever they think of early treatment, if you're spending any time listening to us, you probably don't simply accept everything that comes out of the CDC's and NIH's mouthpieces' mouths, right?
And so you probably occasionally say something that causes people to go, what now?
And it's like there's a laser focus on the person who dissents.
on the person who descends as a place to focus the anxiety.
Like, I now see it.
I now see that you're the enemy.
And now that I have an enemy, I know what I can do.
All I have to do is get rid of the enemy.
Right.
And it's done.
It's amazing how something has caused The paradoxical and ironic idea of scientific consensus, sudden scientific consensus, to be the good.
Which is not a thing.
Gravitating to the sudden consensus puts you on the side of good.
And who are the enemy?
The enemy are people who are resisting sudden scientific consensus.
And the answer is Sorry, scientific consensus is either over something trivial that's very easily demonstrated and therefore it only takes once, you know, if you drop a hammer and a feather on the moon they fall at the same rate, right?
Or… Or some things over in physics space where it only takes once, like Einstein's observation of the gravitational The gravitational lensing or even the multi-slit experiment, you can see it in a single instance.
Right.
I agree with that.
But in terms of complex phenomena, the thing is the farther you get towards complexity, the more you're dealing with multiple inputs, the more you're dealing with noise, the harder it is to even describe the pattern in question.
So the idea of sudden consensus around something like a new virus and what works to treat it and how it's going to react to the introduction of that treatment and all of that, this is no place for, it's no place where sudden consensus is even conceivable.
Yeah.
So the idea that those who are the enemy are those who are resistant to the sudden consensus, it's like, well, I think you just, you know, painted a target on every single real scientist.
Right.
No, and that's those who are walking around trying to experience having a life are presumably not trying to paint a target on every actual scientist, but that is the effect.
And so just at the end of that section that I just read a couple paragraphs from, he writes, the masses believe in the story, not because it's accurate, but because it creates a new social bond.
And I think this is a piece that is often missing from an analysis that relies entirely on, you know, but why do they believe that?
Like, you know, it's not true.
And especially after two years of the kinds of Behavioral modifications and experiences that we've all had or rather failed to have via lockdowns and remote schooling and Zoom meetings and all of this.
The desire for people to have an actual social bond is even stronger than it was before, which is hard to imagine because we are Above all social creatures.
But the idea that the story, you know, oh I can offer you a social bond, and it happens to come with a story that just don't pay too much attention to the man behind the curtain.
Cool, I'm not going to pay too much attention to the man behind the curtain, because what I really like is now feeling like the in-group, and like we're on the right path again, and I'm moving towards the future, and towards safety, and hey look at all my new friends.
And that's just, it feels great to people.
And that's part of why they tune in to the mainstream media going, rah, rah, look at us.
Aren't we all on the right side of history?
And that works as a sales pitch regardless of whether or not you're actually on the right side of history.
Yes, the desire to be in that group is so powerful that what is the group rallying around is secondary.
And so lots of people who, you know, feel like, I mean, I remember in a prior era, right, the Democrats felt superior for being the Darwinists, right?
They were never very good at it, but they were superior in their own minds.
For being the ones who had embraced this very important insight.
And it is, as you and I both know, a vitally important insight.
But the point is, most of the people who were feeling great about being on Darwin's team Didn't really understand what the insight was or why it was so important.
They just kind of Had the sense that it was you know that the enlightened people were ahead in this regard that Darwin's a little hard to swallow But they were there early.
I've actually got so Zach just put up my screen quickly I've got a piece in HuffPo this post HuffPo this week No, actually, it's from March 15th, but I just saw it this week Herschel Walker skeptical of evolution.
Why are there still apes think about it?
So, you know, this is a former NFL player who's now running for Senate who doesn't get evolution, and he's a conservative, and so the liberals are really excited to point out that he doesn't understand evolution.
But you read this article, and I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to recommend that you do, but I'll post in the show notes.
And you see that the person writing the article doesn't get it either.
Right.
You know, they sort of squirt around it, but it's clear they don't really know why what he said is false.
They just have been assured that it's false.
Right.
And so, you know, this, this struck me, you know, I didn't know you were going to say what you just said, but this struck me exactly.
It's like, well, sure, aren't, don't we feel virtuous for understanding this thing?
Except here too, like, I can explain, I can explain to Herschel Walker or the, or the author of this article, why what he said, why he has, what his misunderstanding is.
And what it actually means that there are both apes and humans still here today.
But neither of the people, and most of the people on both sides of this argument, couldn't do it.
And so it's entirely, it's back to that Newsweek thing.
It's like, it's about, it's about judgment as opposed to reality and science.
Right.
Which leads to one of my least favorite moves in analytical space, right?
Which is when somebody is caught in that bind, right?
Where they know Hershel Walker is not onto something by having discovered that apes still exist, right?
They don't know what's wrong with what he said.
And so the point is, oh, the last thing I want to do is say he's wrong and then have somebody say, oh, really?
Why?
So what they do is they amplify how obvious it is that he's wrong and how obvious it is why he's wrong so that they basically bluff and they say, anybody who doesn't know why that's wrong is a fool.
So then the point is, if you ask the question, you're Stepping into the role of fool, aren't you?
So you wouldn't want to do that.
So you're not going to ask me the question, are you?
And it's created in order not to be asked.
I mean, just as you said, like, okay, I don't want to have to pronounce anything here, because the fact is, I don't understand this.
So I'm going to be really loud and bombastic about making fun of the people who think the other thing.
It's exactly what we're seeing with regard to the Together trial being published.
You know, both individuals and mainstream media pronouncing loudly, you know, what a fool Joe Rogan is, and you know, and we are, and all of this.
None of you actually have bothered to try to understand the science, have you?
Right, no.
They're revealing how little they know about how the thought process even works, what the underlying philosophy of science that makes the engine function is, right?
They don't know, and they're revealing it to us.
They're not revealing it to other people who don't know.
And so anyway, it's maddening, but nonetheless it is effective.
Yeah.
So apologies for the noise, guys.
It's a beautiful spring day and we have the windows open today.
And a truck.
Yes, and that was the postman who looks like a famous celebrity whose name is slipping my mind.
I think it's Owen Wilson.
Does he?
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah, it's not Owen Wilson, but he looks like him.
He was gone before I looked anyway.
No, I think we've had this conversation before.
You'll have to trust me.
I will, yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
A couple more things.
Oh wow, it's after six.
Okay, a couple more things.
It's after six somewhere.
It's after six right here.
Okay, this is a, you can show my screen, this is published actually same moment that Hershel Walker tough post kerfuffle happened.
March 16, 2022 in the British Medical Journal.
BMJ stands for British Medical Journal, yeah.
An op-ed by two researchers called The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine, subheading being Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Corrupted by Corporate Interests, Failed Regulation, and Commercialization of Academia, argue these authors.
And let me just read this paragraph.
Which for some reason I've only highlighted all but the last line.
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open democratic society.
A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses.
This is not antithetical to what Desmond is arguing.
It sounds like it might be, but it's not.
He does not argue that there aren't possible financial interests that are doing bad things in the world.
He's just saying you don't need that in order to see mass formation forming.
Back to the op-ed.
Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market.
The short-term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatization has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended long-term consequences for medicine have been severe.
Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community.
Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
So that came out two weeks before the TOGETHER trial was finally published, the ivermectin arm of the TOGETHER trial was finally published, but it's rather in keeping.
So it actually is an excellent place to make a particular point.
Great.
We tend to think of... Actually, I've been fighting this battle a little bit since back in Game B days.
When we say something like capture, right?
Capture, which is now a common phrase since COVID, is a common phrase in most people's minds.
Capture is a reference to an earlier phrase, regulatory capture.
And regulatory capture was a much narrower phenomenon than what we mean when we say capture, right?
Capture is a very general phenomenon.
It involves the capture of university professors.
It involves the capture of newspapers.
It involves the capture of all the things that sway policy, ultimately.
And the regulators are one.
That's one core thing that you have to capture in order to get ahead through this sort of mechanism.
But anyway, the point is, The proper instantiation for the concept is not the specific one, because if you say, oh, what's going on as the result of regulatory capture, then people only see the regulators, and they say it's not big enough, that couldn't be doing this.
And the point is, no.
Zoom out, right?
This is extended capture, as I think I've called it before.
Unless you instantiate capture as something in which regulators are included, but it is not limited to them, you won't understand its power.
And so likewise, the concept of corruption, right?
Corruption is corruption about bribery and financial incentives.
Certainly includes that, but it can include lots of stuff.
It can include prestige, right?
There are lots of people who will be persuaded by prestige.
As you will remember, I used to argue about what golf junkets were doing, why lobbyists were taking their clients on, clients is the wrong term, but their targets on golf junkets.
And there was one instance in which there was a whole lot of prostitution going on in one of these golf junkets.
And it emerged and it struck me that essentially, look, you want to figure out the two most powerful incentives that you can use to persuade at least men are going to be money and sex.
And so a lobbyist who can figure out how to provide sex to somebody in a way that they get away with it, that their spouse is none the wiser and all of that, has a very powerful tool.
You know, we could figure out what the value, the equivalent value is in money and it's very large, right?
So anyway, the point is corruption isn't about bribery.
Bribery is aversion.
Right.
And in any case, what I would say is you have to instantiate the system that the corruption of the system in terms of the incentives.
What incentives?
Whatever incentives persuade people.
It will include that full set.
Right.
And unless you're looking at that full set, then you will only have a partial picture of why people do what they do.
So, you know, the authors there are arguing About financial incentives and Desmond is saying maybe it's not Limited to financial incentives and you're right.
They're the same story The question is how narrowly are you zoomed in right incentives persuade people ultimately all of that stuff is driven by a System built to put your genes into the future, which none of these people are talking about, right?
Yes bribery is proximate to gene spreading and gene spreading is now crazy because lots of people are engaged in a regulating their own production of offspring.
And so they're interrupting the very process that would unfold, you know, that their extra power would give them extra reproductive opportunities, which they're now not using for reproduction.
Right.
But nonetheless, um, in what way will people be persuaded every way that they can?
Right.
Right.
Oh, that's great.
Okay.
One last thing.
And then we'll, uh, then we'll go onto the Q and A, which we encourage, I encourage you to ask questions for, uh, Were we thinking about having a drink for the Q&A?
Yes.
That was your idea.
You're acting like I just proposed that.
No, I have it all set up.
The question is, do I break it out now, or do we wait for the Q&A?
I think we wait for the Q&A.
Yes.
See?
I had no idea, clearly.
Actually, I'm not that good of an actor.
I can do impressions though.
Yes, you can.
Surprisingly well.
Okay, so I have on this show and elsewhere talked about the comic bookification of American culture, and specifically I've talked about it seeming like millennials who are woke have a particular tendency to imagine the world into purely good and purely evil.
And, you know, they see anyone they disagree with as a supervillain, and they see their heroes as actual superheroes, and it's very un-nuanced.
It's very black and white.
It's very unhelpful.
But while I was reading Desmond's book this week, I was reminded, because he quotes him, of this quotation from Solzhenitsyn.
I've mentioned Solzhenitsyn in the past.
We read some from his essay, Live Not by Lies, when we were also Gosh, that was back in October 2020.
But as I've mentioned here before, I was lucky to end up in a class on Solzhenitsyn and Kundera in my very first quarter of college when I was a literature major.
And I read much of the Gulag, the Gulag Archipelago at that point.
I'd read a bunch of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and such in high school, but I'd never even heard of the Gulag or Solzhenitsyn.
I mean, I'd heard of Gulags, but I'd never heard of this book.
And here is a quote.
from the Gulag that feels to me that it's encompassing of a lot of what we've talked about today, and also relates very much to this idea that I have of the comic bookification of thinking.
If only it were all so simple, he says.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Hmm.
Yeah, that's beautiful.
I've heard Jordan Peterson refer to this very thing, and it's an important insight.
It is the epitome of hubris to imagine that you aren't capable of things that you have not yet done, and I guess the opposite of hubris there would be underestimating yourself, if it's that you imagine yourself not capable of positive things that you have not yet done, simply because you haven't done them.
We can all hope to be our best angels, but no one is pure in either direction.
There are some people who approach monstrosity, and there are some people who approach sainthood, but they are extraordinarily rare.
And mostly that's done in retrospect by mythologizing their stories.
Yeah, that's right.
That's actually right.
Once you start interacting with the actual day-to-day of most people, you find that the monsters also like salad.
And the saints were quick to anger and yelled at dogs in the street or something.
I don't have anyone in particular in mind here, but we all have failings.
Even the monsters are actually human and that doesn't mean that we ought to be, you know, forgiving of their monstrosities.
But it is a huge and tragic error to see in each other super villains and superheroes instead of humans with whom we can sit down and talk for the most part.
You're not claiming you can recognize a villain by the fact that they like salad, right?
I mean, that'd be cool, and I would give up salad if we could arrange a situation like that, but... You make a good salad, though, so I don't think we should do that.
But even still, it would be a small price to pay.
Yeah, I was, oh boy.
No, I think I'm glad I picked salad because there's a lot of things I could have picked that now I'd be just dealing with this forever, dodging and weaving around like, no, it's not like that.
It's not, oh boy.
Yeah.
But no, salad, yes.
Right.
It's just, it's hard, I don't know.
I was gonna say it's hard to hate on salad, but.
It's hard to hate on salad.
There's, you're gonna be remembered for that.
Indeed.
Alright, well we are, I think?
Yep.
Just about done.
This was episode 121 of the Dark Horse Livestream.
We will be back next week, I think, at the normal time.
Zachary.
Is it really a normal time?
In the upcoming months, there are going to be some day changes, but we will keep on coming, in part because we had understood, before I ever read Desmet's words here, that one of the things that's important to do when you see that there is a narrative that is taking over many people's brains and it does not feel right, is to speak.
And so we will keep doing that, and we are grateful that you are here.
Great to hear us, and grateful for the stories that you share with us as well.
Oh yeah.
So, they are extraordinary, and keep them coming.
Apologies that we don't respond to many of them, but we really do appreciate hearing from you what you all are experiencing.
Okay, you're looking at me like I'm crazy.
No, I know better.
Okay, so you can ask questions starting probably an hour ago, but now at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com for a Q&A.
Logistical questions go to darkhorsemutter at gmail.com.
Find us on our Patreons.
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Go check out HunterGatherer's guide, either in the English or soon to be the Spanish or French editions, and be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
