#127 The World in the Eye of the Storm (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/evolens127:f36c1f80cb409fd2708cfa2f7f58a08c4073b653 View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 127th 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 observations from recent travels—how the world looks as it emerges from 2+ years of restrictions and lockdowns, and what it feels like to have conversati...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, Thursday live stream edition back from here and there and everywhere.
It is episode 127, which I'm just going to guess is prime.
It is.
All right.
I knew that it was prime because we checked just before going on.
But nonetheless, it remains prime, whether I cheated or not.
It's true.
It's true.
So it's been a while since we've been here.
We're going to be here today.
No Q&A today.
And we're going to come back to you in less than two days, actually.
Saturday at our normal time.
And joined then, perhaps as well, by our smallest panther, Tesla.
And we'll be coming back to you on Saturdays for a bit, after a lot of strange scheduling.
Announcements, I guess.
Yes.
What do we got?
Well, our private Q&A also, our private Q&A, which you can access at my Patreon, is this Sunday, so we're doing this right now on Thursday.
We're going to have another live stream along with a public Q&A on Saturday, and then on Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific, there'll be a private Q&A, so if you're interested in that, you can join us there at my Patreon.
Find the link there.
Boy, there's just a lot of other things to say, but maybe we'll... Maybe they'll happen in line.
Maybe they'll happen in line.
I will say, don't hesitate to spread the word.
Check and see whether you're still subscribed.
We see a lot of funny business on this channel.
And, you know, frankly, I think it suggests that Goliath may have wised up and decided to do some...
Some subtler things.
So anyway, it's worth checking whether you're still subscribed and, you know, doing all the things you might to help us out algorithm-wise.
Yeah.
We appreciate all of it.
We appreciate your support by showing up and listening.
The wonderful fan mail that we receive, both through email and through letters and just being stopped in the street, honestly.
It's pretty remarkable.
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But also, much of the way that we are supporting this work right here is through our sponsors, whom we are very grateful to, and for, and out, and with.
With!
We are grateful with them for all of the wonderful bounty that is this Earth that we share.
Well, I think that was pretty good for on the spot.
Absolutely, absolutely.
You didn't say amen, though.
Tesla is nonplussed.
I was just going to say, I've never seen him plussed, never seen you plussed, never seen anyone plussed, honestly.
It may be that it's a flammable-inflammable situation, where they both just mean the same thing, it sounds better with the prefix, but I don't know what plussed is.
Yeah, I don't either.
I've been minussed a few times.
Sure, absolutely.
That's your want.
Not what you want, it's your want.
I almost got minussed over a...
The pre-takeoff tweet, which I did not realize was going to be at all controversial.
Well, I think pre-takeoff tweets are just setting yourself up for those who would imagine that they now have many, many hours, depending on, in this case, it was a transatlantic flight, which they didn't know, presumably, to really get in there.
It was a transcendental flight.
Was it?
You didn't mention that to me.
How were you transformed?
Well, I came back the other direction, so, you know, it's a reversible reaction.
Chemically speaking, I am what I was before, but I wasn't in the intro.
In so many ways, not what that means.
Okay, but do they know that?
I think so.
So, yeah, we are very discriminating in the sponsors that we accept.
It is the fifth anniversary plus a few days of us being accused of that exact thing.
We are discriminating and we are discerning about which sponsors we accept.
And actually, speaking of the fifth anniversary of Evergreen, maybe we should talk some about that today.
There are two things before we get into our three ads for the hour.
You did a five-year anniversary conversation with Benjamin Boyce, who was also on the ground during the events there.
We came to know him a week or two afterwards.
We'd never met him before Evergreen blew up.
I became aware of him during what must have been his first or maybe just first or second broadcast from the library which he did in portrait because everybody else from Evergreen who filmed the damn thing did it in portrait so it became like… So he did it in landscape you mean?
No, he did it portrait just to be in keeping with everybody else's terrible video technique.
So how did that discriminate him from the others?
It didn't.
That was him fitting in, and then him saying things that were true is what separated them.
I see.
I see.
Yeah, well, I first came to know Benjamin, and I thought at the time you had indicated to me that this was news to you as well, that he was one of the 17 people, 17 students at the time, who signed the letter saying, you know, what the fuck is going on here?
Excuse me.
But, you know, like, hello, Evergreen administration and faculty and students and all y'alls.
This is insane, and this is not what we stand for.
And that letter went out, and I figured out we didn't know any of them.
None of those were our students.
And I figured out who most of them were through channels that were then available to us as Evergreen faculty, and wrote a letter to all of them.
And asked anyone who knew the couple who I couldn't find to spread it, and Benjamin was one of the ones I had found, and he wrote back, and so a friendship was born.
He was really extraordinary from the beginning.
I had completely forgotten that he was a signatory to that letter, but I at least became aware of him from his library.
Broadcast, which is pretty cool.
It's worth going back and looking at to see what it looked like for a recent grad, I guess, to be... or was he just on the verge of graduating?
Yeah, no, he was not graduated yet.
He was... It might have been the week before or something.
No, I mean, graduation happened three or four weeks afterwards, right?
That whole thing happened in like week seven of a ten-week quarter or week eight.
No, it was eight or nine.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
It was right at the end of the quarter.
I know that because Bob Woodson offered to come out and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us.
Which would have been e-mail week, but that was several weeks later.
Yeah, and it wasn't clear that there would have been anything to...
So I've actually just written about some of this, which is the other thing that I just wanted to mention as the anniversary.
God, there's quite a furrow of dust and birds in the air or something.
So my natural selections post for this week is about the five-year anniversary, and one of the things I mention I didn't mention him by name because I didn't have time before I wrote it to say who it was, but I say in there a civil rights activist who had marched with King had reached out to you and said, I would like for myself and to bring a few other of my civil rights activist buddies to come and march on the Evergreen campus with you and Heather.
And we were considering it and then violence emerged anew basically when I think it was when the Patriot Prayer Group came, and they did not bring any violence to campus, but there was violence around them that was made to look like it was them.
So, we had to say there's no way to march on campus at this point.
All right.
Maybe we should move on to paying the rent and then we can either return to Evergreen or we can move on to other topics.
Okay.
All right.
I guess I'm number one.
Yes, you are.
This might be the first time that's happened.
Nope.
All right.
This is not the first time I've been the first one in the queue, but it's been a while, right?
I don't know.
Probably, yes.
Okay.
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I'm going to interrupt for a second.
Yep.
While you were gone this last week, the boys and I had a flank steak from Moink, and it was spectacular.
It was spectacular.
It was spectacular.
I'll just add that in here.
All right.
Yeah, that's all.
I hear there was a flank steak had while I was gone that was spectacular.
Was it spectacular, Zach?
To me, this is hearsay, but I believe it.
It was, actually.
See?
All right.
There's testimonials going on all over the place.
This is what happens when you leave.
Yeah, well.
We have spectacular testimonials.
We sit around giving testimonials.
Okay, all right.
Could you film that next time?
Because I'm not quite sure what that would mean.
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My father's father, who was the main farmer and the farm owner in northeast Iowa where my father grew up along with his siblings and his parents didn't grow up there.
My father's father encouraged all of his children to leave the farm because he saw What, as it turns out, was largely true, at least in that part of Iowa, which was an increasing sort of corporatization of farmlands.
And at this point, it's all, you know, giant, I think, largely pig farms at this point.
And they were raising cows and pigs and chickens and vegetables and, you know, all sorts of things.
My father became a computer engineer, and I think it was absolutely the right move.
He was much more of a natural as a computer engineer than as a farmer, but he used to call himself a little country programmer.
First he went to Notre Dame, and then to Pittsburgh, and then LA, which is where I knew him most.
Yeah, he became a code farmer.
A code farmer!
All right, our second sponsor of... and he, I'm sure, so he's gone now, but I am certain that he would love the food from Moink, because he was always a fan of excellent, excellent meat, well raised, carefully raised, and Moink is that.
Okay, our second sponsor is Brightmove.
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Brightmove is a bit of an odd sponsor for us, since we don't have any reason to use the product ourselves.
We are proud to be sponsored by Brightmove, however, since it was founded in 2004 by the current CEO, David Webb.
Brett's experience with David was that during Unity 2020, he showed up to volunteer, took on a great deal of responsibility and initiative in planning and crafting the technical aspects of the Ranked Choice Voting Platform, and all of that was fantastic and he was terrific to work with.
So Brightmove's co-founder is mission-aligned with Dark Horse, but what makes Brightmove the ATS vendor for you?
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Well, he's sitting here.
Oh, okay.
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Not so much of an applicant tracking system, but maybe of shoes.
I see.
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I didn't want to confuse him.
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So I was at this conference, which we will come back to, and I was sitting in the audience trying to glean something from this panel before my panel, and somebody says, Dr. Weinstein, it's very good to meet you, but I thought you'd be wearing vivos.
What were you wearing?
I had conference... Your conference shoes.
Yeah, I did have conference shoes on at the time.
And I'll bet your feet weren't nearly as comfortable as they would have been.
No, they weren't.
But I was unlikely to get cancelled over conference shoes.
That's what they're for.
Not being canceled?
Right, I think so.
Yes, it suggests a certain willingness to participate in polite society, that sort of thing.
Well, but I mean, so you have a hypothesis about neckties.
Yes, I do.
And I feel like conference shoes may similarly be sort of a handicapping.
No doubt about it.
You can't really run away that fast wearing conference shoes, and much less in the idiot shoes that women are supposed to be wearing, which some of us just won't.
But, you know, the shoes that you cannot actually make a run for it in, Not totally savvy shoes.
Yeah, there is something to the idea.
I mean, just the whole idea of a, you know, a slick sole and a kind of a confining.
Yeah, it's not the best design for a shoe.
So it's interesting how dominant it is amongst the power players.
Yes.
Yeah, I've always kind of imagined that that was a matter of constraining you down to something so similar to everybody else's shoes that we can figure out how much you spent on them, you know, that kind of thing.
How long it's been since you've refreshed them, right?
And that is a way of telling who, you know, what the hierarchy is, economically speaking.
Really?
That's what I think, yeah.
How high a gloss you can get your shoes to.
Right.
I mean, if you have really high quality shoes and they're very beautiful, especially if they change the fashion slightly so that you also have, you know, the right shaped toe and all of that, it says, you know, you're able to, you've got a shoe budget.
That's what it says.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've got a shoe budget, but I can outrun you.
Right.
Yes.
We have a shoe budget, but I'm still going to be alive after this thing chases us down.
Yes, that's true.
That is true.
Right, so anyway, I don't know where to start.
We have three Errs to correct.
We better do that.
Oh, I know what one of them is.
You want to start with yours?
The one that you made is from farther ago, and then I made two in the last episode, one in the main episode, one in the Q&A.
Go for it.
I think chronologically I've got to face the music on this one.
We're going to call this correction a turn for the better.
Are we?
Yes, we are, whether you like it or not.
Even the cat grimaced.
Tesla grimaced.
Probably grimacing at me.
But here's the thing.
I put up a picture.
I am not embarrassed by this picture at all.
Oh, we should have shown the picture again.
We should have shown the picture.
I thought it was a turn picture that I had taken in the Bahamas.
In the Exumas.
In the Exumas.
And several astute bird watchers, biologists alerted us that it was in fact a laughing go and not a turn.
Are you actually certain that it was no laughing girls who contacted us?
It was no laughing matter.
Was it all people, or was it in fact some members of the clade in question?
Given that everybody's spelling was better than mine, I think it was people and, you know, people of a certain breeding.
I think, you know, you've met parrots.
I think they can spell just fine.
Yeah, Lena, I, you know, their pronunciation is often surprisingly good.
I don't know about the spelling, though.
Yes.
Okay, so that's your correction.
I own this one.
I just got it wrong.
Yeah, no, and the other two are sort of not in the same vein, but of the same sort of... It doesn't matter.
These are not going to be errors that we are going to end up politically cancelled over.
Oh, you'd be surprised.
You know what you do?
Am I inviting it now?
You deliver these corrections right before takeoff, and then you'll find out hours later Whether you can cancel, especially if you were ironic.
That's the thing that does it in my experience.
Okay, so we were talking about seed oils in the last Q&A, and I said that I thought grapeseed and rapeseed oil were the same thing, and they're not.
Rapeseed is what is turned into what's called canola oil, and grapeseed is, in fact, as you had posited, from grapes.
Seeds of grapes.
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
So that's the second correction.
And then the third is that I can't actually remember.
I didn't go back and look, but for some reason I was invoking the fact that when in the field, when I used to spend many months at a time living in a tent on an island off of Madagascar, showering in a waterfall, etc., watching the sex lives of poison frogs unfold in front of me, as some people did in the 90s, mostly me, That I would take all the reading material that I could get my hands on.
Oh, I know, we were talking about then The Economist, that my wonderful field assistant's parents would send us these care packages that occasionally included a block of cheese, and often included all these back issues to The Economist.
But One of the books that I had taken, I said, was Crime and Punishment, and I was so impoverished for the written language that I even read all of the troop movements, which would have been tough in Crime and Punishment.
There being, in fact, no troop movements in Crime and Punishment.
Actually, in high school, I had been lucky enough to have just an extraordinary great books curriculum and English curriculum in high school and had read A lot of Dostoevsky.
But I'd never read any Tolstoy, and so I had taken War and Peace, never having read, in fact, any Tolstoy, to Madagascar.
And I did, in fact, read all of the troop movements in War and Peace.
Not in Crime and Punishment, which would have been a far less impressive thing to have done.
Would you care to revisit those troop movements now?
It's been a while.
It's been a while, and I think now I'm just looking past you at all of the books on this wall and knowing that we have many other walls in this house that are lined with books.
I think I've got plenty at this point that I would perhaps skip the troop movements.
Yeah, perhaps.
Yeah, I can see it.
I can see it.
Those are our errors.
Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky.
Different kinds of seed oils and laughing gulls, not terms.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So we've been to some places.
Yeah, we have been some places.
Very interesting to return to any sort of traveling post-COVID as it warms up here, as COVID is not quite banished by seasonality the way some of us expected it might be, which is ominous.
Yeah.
Nonetheless, we've been some places.
You and I have been to, well, one of the Bahamas.
We went to... So, I have been to four and you have been to three, and together, between us, we've been on five different trips in the last month plus.
We've already talked about the Bahamas some, which was an extraordinary gift of a trip.
And then I was in Austin for an event associated with the University of Austin, which I think I mentioned in a previous thing.
But since we have seen you last, we have been to Santa Barbara.
Zach and I have been to D.C., and then you have been to England, including London and Bath.
Let's just say a little bit about each of these and really, as you say, how odd it is to once again be going places and to feel like, is this like 2019?
Is this like 2023?
Will this last?
One of the things that you said to me when we were in Santa Barbara, so we were in Santa Barbara.
We were invited to go by Bishop Robert Barron who has a podcast and a YouTube channel.
He and his people, he is a Catholic bishop in, gosh I hope I get this right, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles I believe, who's based in Santa Barbara and who has been Basically, trying to get the word out and to interact with people, not just who are already in the fold, with a YouTube channel from the very early days of YouTube.
And off-camera, we had some really wonderful conversations with him and some of the people whom he works with.
But he had us on his show, Word on Fire.
Word on Fire?
Word's on Fire.
Word on Fire.
And it was remarkable.
I can say that if you got the description of his position in the church incorrect, I'm pretty sure he will forgive you.
I can't tell you how I know that, but it just, it's a sense that I have about him.
Yeah, he's an extraordinary man.
He really is.
And we, my internet has stopped working.
That's a really good moment for that to happen.
We also spent an extra day down there.
You know, we could have flown down and just had dinner and spent the night and gone to his studio and then, you know, we had lunch.
We had lunch with him as well and then flew right back, but we actually spent an extra day.
So, we got to see a little bit of Santa Barbara, which I went to UCSB briefly, you know, for a couple of years right at the beginning of my college experience, but UCSB is 12 miles or so outside of Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara is itself A very fancy little enclave in Southern California, but far enough outside of L.A.
to really have reminded us almost not at all of L.A.
Yeah.
It's like what L.A.
wants to be.
Yeah, it's really, I mean, you know, there's the vegetation on the hills, which is reminiscent, but I really find almost nothing about it similar to the feeling of L.A.
But one of the things you said was it felt like a lot of the people were missing.
Yeah, and so now I've had a couple of trips and I'm You know, it's hard to separate because two things have happened.
One, the population has been through something.
We've all been through something together.
And then you and I have been through something that most people don't have an inkling of, weren't, you know, on the wrong end of, and all of that.
And so, you know, one has to separate how is it is the feeling that is so different here about what's here?
Is it about me?
What exactly is that?
But there is a I would say for me, it has been It has been delightful, eerie, and poignant all at the same time.
To travel again.
To see places you haven't been before.
Yes.
And I can't say, but I feel like this is some sort of, you know...
an intermission right between acts of something which makes it all the more poignant because you know to the extent that we have just discovered how disconnected we can become from each other how you know borders that never mattered before like the Canadian border to an American citizen suddenly become impenetrable right And if you're Canadian and are unvaccinated, you are still denied many of your rights.
Right.
And so I feel a couple of things.
One, I feel that we are traveling in a transformed world.
Right?
And that, you know, people, I almost felt people are traumatized.
They're very relieved.
You know, every so often you meet somebody who's been tortured, right?
And they're out.
And you think, you know, you hear the stories of what they went through and you think, I just don't even know how a person processes that.
But it is evident that a person can process it and they can live again and they can have joy and they can laugh and all of those things, but they are never the same, right?
You've seen what can be done to you.
And this isn't that, obviously.
We were not tortured, but we were, I think, psychologically, you know, I wish we had, you know, 40 words for Gaslit the way Inuits apparently do not really for snow, but the apocryphal accounting has it that they do.
We need 50 words for gaslit because this isn't all the identical thing, but to the extent that we are being told that we must accept nonsense again and again on a dozen different topics and then punished if we start asking questions, that is a kind of It is a traumatizing phenomenon and I believe one can feel it as you travel someplace.
Yes.
There's a tentativeness about people living.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
And it's actually one of the things that was so remarkable about Bishop Barron and all of the people whom he is working with on his team.
We were invited there as evolutionary biologists to a group of people who have explicit faith, for whom faith is absolutely central in their lives.
And it went in knowing that on this point, we do not see the world through the same lens, but on so many other points, we do.
And that the one point on which could be construed as utterly fundamental actually does not preclude us from conversing and agreeing and coming to have great respect and admiration for one another on so many other points, as in fact, I think we did reveal in the conversation.
Certainly in the conversations that we had off camera, but I hope in the conversation we had on camera as well.
Yeah, I think it's really a Lot has been lost recently, but this is one of the things that has been I think achieved largely in the last five years There is a way and I you know, I I hope that we have significantly contributed to this I think that may be the case and that's part of why you know, we've been invited to talk to people such as Bishop Barron, but There is a recognition
amongst especially people on the religious side, that it doesn't have to be that those on the scientific side are the enemy.
And in fact, You know, there's a great deal of reason to think that that's not the case at all, right?
And it just involves, you know, let's put it this way.
When we talk about metaphorical truth, we are saying something that could be read hostily.
If you were in, you know, if you were of a mindset to view that as an accusation, you certainly could.
On the other hand, if you have, you know, a broad, I mean, and I think almost all
thinking religious people have to have a somewhat broad mindset because they're living under circumstances that don't look anything like the circumstances described in their texts and so you know that's there's a profound question in that did God intend you to live by rules that made a lot of sense in you know an ancient world in which nobody spoke the language you speak or is there some amount of flexibility as you know is the church a living entity because it has to be in order to adjust and
You know the religious doctrine for the modern world and so what that means is not that we come to agreement, but it's like You know, sometimes people ask us You know, they never say it in these terms, but it's sort of like I Oh, you're an evolutionary biologist, well then how did life begin?
And it's like, well, I gotta tell ya, really don't know.
There are some things that make more sense and some things that make less sense, but that's one of those things that we might just never find out because there's not a whole lot of evidence.
The evidence is very indirect.
It has persisted for three and a half billion years.
So, anyway, the point is all of us have stuff at the very edge of the thing that we care deeply about that we may, you know, effectively have to be agnostic about.
And that allows religious people and scientifically focused people to, you know, talk about most issues without ever touching on it.
Absolutely.
And I think, you know, another thing that became more clear for me, associated with both talking with Bishop Barron and the other people whom we were talking with there, and just then walking around talking with you in the aftermath of that, considering what we had heard and what we had intuited from what we heard, is that, okay,
Be you in a secular landscape, as we are, or in a religious landscape, as they are, you are likely to have, in every other regard, all of the same diversity of opinions and demographics.
And so, for instance, what happened five years ago this week, when Evergreen publicly blew up in a fury of misplaced outrage and absurd chaos.
was about the so-called left having lost its grip on reality, in part, right?
And, you know, there are those of us, and we are certainly not alone, who, you know, since before then have been saying actually the best way to go forward into a future that is as post-racial as possible is not to keep pointing out how bad everyone is to one another based on race, right?
Like, that's not going to be helpful.
And there are those, of course, who say that they're on the left, who say that by saying that, you are demonstrating that you're not on the left yourself, and that you are yourself on the right.
Similarly, there will be those on the right who will say, look, if you're not, you know, if you are arguing for anything that sounds like giving in to these people, then you're not really on the right, and maybe you're one of them.
And I'm like, that's much more of a caricature of position, because I don't hear that as much, because we don't claim to be on the right, because we're not.
But I get the sense that within the religious community, there are people that are hard right and hard left, and woke Catholics exist, and very conservative Catholics exist.
And there are tensions pulling people in both directions there, just as there are for those of us who don't exist within the religious context, but are sort of in the wider world.
The fight against woke ideology in favor of an actual liberal understanding of the world is not constrained to being one of either an explicit religious or an explicitly non-religious context.
And that is part of the lesson of talking to people who would appear to have some fundamental difference with you, is where you find all the other commonalities and all the other ways that you can actually cross lines and find ways to talk to them.
Now, that description suggests something to me that I have not considered before.
I'm sort of surprised because thematically it's very much like many thoughts that I've expressed.
But I'm feeling at this moment, if you take our description of much of the orthodoxy that accompanied the COVID pandemic, which we have described as medically woke.
Yep.
And you invoked that actually with Bishop Perrin, I believe.
Yeah.
And I must say, I invoked at the conference too, and people resonate with this.
For those of us who felt this, the analogy was awfully close.
The conference that you were at in Bath, which you haven't introduced yet.
Haven't explained yet.
But in any case, the question is, In one way, woke is a kind of contagion, enigmatically woke is a kind of contagion, right?
It is a set of ideas that spread horizontally for reasons that are not about the reality of what's being described.
Okay?
You know, contagious mimetic cluster of ideas and assumptions.
But I guess the question is, all right, if you have two Earth-transforming contagions like this that come in quick succession.
It raises the possibility that these things are downstream of a change in the rules, a loss of immunity actually, that would allow such things to catch on where they would have been tamped down by normal homeostatic processes in your culture beforehand.
And I guess you could phrase that as a change in the rules or a release on the idea that rules are a good idea.
And, you know, the release on the idea that rules themselves are a good idea is sort of how a lot of the woke left is framing their preferences.
You know, no more police, no restrictions on people, you're just going to let them do what they're going to do.
But it's not libertarian, it's the opposite.
That's the confusing thing about it.
It is the suspension of those rules and it is the imposition of these rules generated by some undemocratic, anti-democratic, anti-analytical mechanism that defines the thing, right?
It's like suddenly you don't have free speech.
Censorship is good, right?
And what will be censored is now The result of some murky process inside some corporation that happens completely arbitrarily and not only... Say our truth or suffer the consequences.
Yes, or, you know, certain people can say certain things, but other people can't say those same things.
I mean, it's just some sort of impossibly baroque set of new rules that, you know, their defining characteristic is that they're never spelled out so that you could even follow them if you wanted to.
Right?
Or often there are mutually exclusive sets of rules, which you have to be one of the chosen ones in order to use these ones.
But, you know, if you're the riffraff, then you're restricted to these.
Yeah.
And those who would make jokes about recognizing hypocrisy are of course Nazis or something.
Right.
But it is, you know, I guess the question is, It was supposed to be the case that if you were going to have a major change in the way we governed ourselves, you would have to talk about it.
You would have to convince a certain number of people that it was a good idea so that the change that was necessary was made and then good or bad, the new thing would happen.
And now it is all bypassed that process, right?
And it's like, you know, I'm constantly struck by the fact That I go into, you know, the DMV and I'm, I'm asked my sex and there are only two choices.
And that works pretty well for me, but I thought I was told pretty well, well enough.
I mean, let's put it this way.
I, you know, my answer hasn't changed in all of the years I've had a driver's license.
I have noticed.
Right.
And, uh, my point would be that either That is a spectacular failure of the DMV to keep up on the latest science.
Or there's some bureaucracy that's just stodgy enough not to have been afflicted with this thing.
I mean, I don't know what it means, but you know, even... Go on.
I want to hear this.
I don't know.
I don't know what there is to say.
I guess my feeling is we're just caught in a world where, you know, Somehow the DMV is not constantly beset by protesters, as you might expect based on their transgression.
Yeah, whereas almost any survey that you fill out from a school, or I would think most sort of conferences, although probably not the conference you were just at, And certainly not the little conference that I was at for the University of Austin, but many, many such places will now offer you, you know, not the full panoply of 8,000 possible choices, but, you know, at least, you know, a few and then another.
And, you know, maybe a space to fill in your explanation for what kind of other you are.
You need male, female, and don't go there, girlfriend.
Right?
But I mean, as Douglas Murray has said, and this is one of his, what is it, one of his framings, one of his many framings that I really appreciate, so much of those things are actually, it's not don't go there girlfriend, it's look at me!
So many of the neologisms, maybe that's not even the right word here because they don't actually describe a real thing, but the ways that we are told, and now they're doing with the pride flag apparently, there's not nearly enough colors in the world.
To describe all the ways to be, and so they're just adding lines and lines and chevrons and this, that, and the other to the pride flag.
And it's about, look at me.
This is the way that people imagine they're finding meaning in the world.
And maybe just to go back, I'm thinking about our time just walking around and biking around a little bit in Santa Barbara and seeing people.
Like you said, it didn't seem like there were as many people as we would have expected, But, we were walking in like a dining district, where we stopped for cocktails one place, then we stopped for dinner another place, and people just looked like they were having a good time.
They just, they looked, in that place, no one was masked, there were families out, there were couples out, there were older people out, there were all sorts of people of all the demographic descriptions out, and they just looked to be enjoying themselves.
Yes, but I don't, well you and I may have perceived it differently.
I did not feel that they were enjoying themselves without The thing that they had been through effectively haunting it, like, like waiting for the next shooter, you know, in the meantime, we're happy to be out here in the sun.
Yeah.
But at any moment, you know, I think we have all lost confidence that we will be, you know, free people choosing what we're going to do because we actually know better now.
Yes, in which case I would hope that that doesn't.
That awareness, as that awareness fades, it becomes more and more possible that it will happen again and soon, right?
That the greater awareness we have, like, wait, many of us just signed off on having a bunch of our rights taken away, and then in trying to get them back, we're told that maybe they weren't ours to begin with, or something?
Like, what was that?
How did that happen?
Right, how did that happen, and You know, one of the things that haunts me is we have to now live with each other.
Let's say that the thing recedes and it doesn't return in the fall.
You're talking now not about the human infrastructure, but the virus.
Well, I'm talking about the radical decrease in our freedoms that we experienced, which we were told, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve and then it just kept extending and new things were added and all of that.
So I don't want to limit this to, you know, COVID, right?
But to the extent that next fall arrives and we do not see a sudden emergency radical constraining of our freedoms.
So you're talking about like this northern temperate fall, September shows up.
Should that happen, then we will, for a time at least, Have to go back to some sort of normal pattern of interacting, which is on the one hand, great, except we have now seen what happens when the thing comes.
And people have had very different reactions and they've played very different roles, right?
So we have to go back to being a functional society when, you know, some of us have, for example, been demonized as the cause of the pandemic, right?
Pandemic of the unvaccinated, right?
Knowing that your society can do that to you at the drop of a hat, and very wrongly, right?
How exactly do we, you know, is there a mechanism?
Is there a truth and reconciliation mechanism?
I mean, forget the powers that be.
Is there a truth and reconciliation mechanism that even allows us as peers to navigate something that we will trust as a relationship with people who have, you know, taken up arms against us as if we were exposing the world to pathogens, right?
I don't know.
But in any case, I mean, I hate this, but I think our listeners will hear me struggling to describe some visceral experience of traveling and then interacting with people that just, as pleasant as it is, it's not normal.
And some of that is undoubtedly my perception, but some of that is likely not.
Some of that is the fact that people have been through something profound and they are grappling with how to understand it.
And one of the things that it was very aggressive about doing Was disrupting our ability to make sense of things and disrupting our ability to Find our way to a consensus about what took place by discussing it with each other, right?
What took place is going to be something that will be told to us and we will either accept it or reject it and the people Who reject it are the bad people, right?
That's that's the pattern and So anyway, I don't know where we are, but I definitely I It is hard to walk around, even in a perfectly delightful place.
I found Bath surprisingly delightful.
I was not, maybe it's just my ignorance and some hole in my education, but I did not realize what Bath was before I got there.
And upon arriving, you know, I discovered a beautiful place with ancient roots and very pleasant to walk around and quite clean and, you know, just a really interesting part of... You thought a place named Bath would not be clean?
Well, to be honest with you, I did not know that Bath was a... I mean, not all baths are clean, but I did not know that that was a literal reference to something.
And so I thought it was just some UK township.
It's not.
It's a tourist center.
It's a... I do want to talk about DC a bit, but I can save that.
I can go out of order chronologically if you want to talk about the conference first.
We can do it either way.
I mean, mostly at the moment I'm just remarking on the experience of being elsewhere and being haunted by the appearance of normalcy or semi-normalcy and the feeling of not normal.
So what do you think?
DC or?
It's up to you.
All right, let's talk about DC.
We'll do it chronologically.
Okay.
So, the morning after we got back from Santa Barbara, Zach and I flew to DC.
And I did not prepare a full sort of explanation of what all we were doing there, but Zach, I hope that you will correct me if my very brief summary here is wrong, okay?
So last year, Zach led his high school rocketry team to winning the national rocketry competition, TARC, which stands for the American Rocketry Competition, I think?
Challenge.
Challenge.
What's that?
It might be challenge, might be competition.
Okay.
And the founder of the high school racketry team that Zach was led to winning last year had graduated the year before.
He was a mentor on the team last year and he had really and then largely passed the baton to Zach.
created all sorts of remarkable active programs with regard to the rocket.
So they've got Active Descent and they've got Active Ascent.
Is that right, Zach, or am I saying that wrong?
Yeah, I mean, I know that Active Ascent is a thing, but I thought there might be a special language for it.
And so there's a tremendous amount of both coding and circuit board building and also hardware design and In this case, at the very last minute, there was a parachute design, just a tremendous amount of work that put in that allowed for a tremendous amount of precision.
And we went out to the Plains, Virginia?
Is that what it was called?
The Great Meadow?
Have you described what the precision is for the competition tests?
The competition tests, it changes every year.
And there are specs around how large the rocket can be.
It can't be over, it was like 650 grams.
I make that up?
Okay.
And this year it had to hold two eggs and they had to land safely.
And then for the finals, there were two launches, the first of which had to be, so correct me if I'm wrong, Zach, I'm doing this from memory, I think to 610 feet.
810.
Yeah, of course.
810 feet and have a flight time between 41 and 43 seconds.
40 and 43 seconds.
40 and 43 seconds.
810 feet and have a flight time between 41 and 43 seconds.
40 and 43 seconds.
And then the second flight had to go to 850 feet and be between 42 and 45 seconds.
860, 42 and 45 seconds.
Okay.
And for each foot that you're off of the apogee of the flight, you get a point.
And for every second that you're outside of the window, you get five points and a score of zero is perfect.
And so you want the lowest score possible.
And their flight Can I interject a couple things here?
Of course, of course.
OK, so the key thing is that in order to reach that height, you could basically, if you imagined a perfectly static world, right, you could figure out what weight and drag coupled with the particular motor.
These motors are highly standardized, though not perfect, would get you that height and approximately that descent time based on how big a parachute.
And with, you know, as you say, with no wind under certain pressure.
Right.
It's not a good system.
Like if you've designed the rocket and are flying in exactly the same conditions under the same altitude, all this, yeah.
So you can imagine, the same rocket will deliver different results based on all sorts of things.
But a rocket that can measure where it is, right, can actually, as it is going to exceed its flight ceiling, can add drag by kicking out some brakes, right?
And as it's descending, you have... Zack, your current rocket has motors that Oh, you're using exclusively the parachute reefing.
So, last year they had propellers that could add drag to slow the descent, and this year they used a system in which the parachute could be pulled back in to speed the descent or let back out in order to slow the descent.
So you can imagine a rocket that knows how high it is, right, and can deploy these things is capable of getting much closer to hitting those numbers perfectly than a rocket in which it's just simply based on the basic parameters of the rocket and the motor and, you know, cross your fingers.
Yep, absolutely.
So having both active ascent and active descent systems on board.
And another one of the rules is that you cannot interact with anything about the rocket from the ground.
So you can't be inputting any information.
Once it's launched, it's launched and it's going to do what it's going to do.
So, as last year's winner, they went first, and they hit 858 feet in 45 seconds, which would have been a nearly perfect flight.
It would have been a two-point flight, which is extraordinary.
But the first flight was supposed to be for the 810.
So, and that was due to one little piece of code not being put into comment rather than not being commented, and so it ran rather than the 8.10 script running.
So let me make that slightly clearer.
If you're programming and you have a parameter that you might swap out, so the program remains the same but the parameter swaps out, you can comment out, you can turn into a comment which the thing that reads the program ignores the value that you're not using anymore, and you can put in your new value, and in this case a punctuation error left the old value active so the rocket performed.
Yeah.
Exactly as the rocket thought it should perform.
But it was the wrong flight.
So, completely heartbreaking.
They obviously didn't win.
They didn't come close.
And I've asked Zach to take me out, maybe you out this weekend.
I want to see the two flights.
And, you know, the rocket did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it did so with elegance and precision.
And Zach talked to some of the other people who were there afterwards who were just geeking out over the engineering and the rocketry.
And it's just a joy to see people actually really caring deeply about physical systems and engineering and problem solving and going, Oh, I had an idea like that, but I wasn't sure how to bring it to realization.
And having this go back and forth between people in real time, it's just like, this is what discovery and engineering and science also is supposed to be about.
And it's amazing and, you know, a heartbreaking result at one level, but really, really amazing another.
As a result, Zach and I were there.
Okay, so we were there and, um, There are a couple things worth commenting about the trip other than the TARC competition, which is probably redundant TARC competition.
It's like having steak with those shoes, right?
Yes.
Sucre du jour of the day.
Yeah.
One is we were out, I don't know, an hour sort of east of D.C.
and we went to get some breakfast in Warrington, Virginia.
We don't, neither of us, Zach had never been in the D.C.
area at all.
I have been a few times once as a kid and a couple times more recently.
And And I just looked up, like, breakfast near me, and it was, you know, ways away from where we were, but the closest that looked reasonable.
And so we drove on Saturday morning into the town of Warrington, and we couldn't make the left that Google Mouse was telling me I should make at the rental car because it was blocked.
There was a police blockage, and we had to drive through.
One side of the street was Black Lives Matter protests, and the other side of the street was an All Lives Matter protest.
And it was fascinating to drive through, and then I realized after we had parked in this quaint little town in the middle of what seemed to me like nowhere, oh, we're going to actually have to walk back through this protest, and that'll be interesting.
And I wrote about this also in this evergreen piece that I wrote for Natural Selections this week.
We ended up on the side of the street, just because of where the restaurant was, with the All Lives Matter protesters.
And talked to a couple of them.
And while we were talking to a couple of them, one of the other All Lives Matter protesters started just kind of throwing a fit and yelling and he was standing in the street and he was yelling at the Black Lives Matter protesters.
And Zach and I were saying to the two people we're talking to who are very calm.
And we're making, frankly, in many ways, a lot of sense.
He said, that's not helping.
It's not helping anyone here, but it's certainly not helping you send the message that you're actually interested in everyone moving forward into the future with some freedom and justice.
But of course, all movements have their unhinged people.
And in this case, the unhinged person happened to be on the side of All Lives Matter.
And it's unfortunate whenever it shows up anywhere, but that was the case there.
We talked to these people, and they seemed honorable, and they were faithful.
In fact, one of them was quoting scripture at me, which I didn't find compelling as an argument for why all lives should matter, but any more than I find appeals to authority when it's from the CDC compelling on their own.
But it was fascinating to also observe that if you just took like nice mugshots, like if you tried to do like profile portraits of the people, the Black Lives Matter protesters looked more like People that I see in the coffee shops around here, who I imagine I might have more in common with, who probably think about eating locally, and eating organic, and probably want to spend a lot of time outside, and all of this.
And yet, the things that they were chanting were the usual Black Lives Matter chants that I know to either be not what they claim, or to actually be inconsistent with other things that they chant, given what's been on their website, and much of which they've taken down.
But, you know, all of this is happening in sort of an exurb of DC, you know, an hour out of DC, like very far outside, but in a context that I didn't, I never foresaw, I never imagined that we would run into Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter protesters in Warrington, Virginia.
And then we went back, the whole team went back, and, you know, I and one of the other parents, the other parent who was an actual chaperone and the The team, like the person from the school who's like the mentor sort of, went back to like a, what was it called?
Carouselzak?
The sweet shop?
Which was its own cultural extravaganza.
And I thought, oh, this just reminds me of nothing I've ever seen before.
This is like, this is the place where everyone in the town comes for Saturday night and gets desserts that I don't recognize even as food.
And none of the other sort of Portland kids are like, I don't, it's, it's a deep fried Twinkie, is it?
Okay, I'm not sure I want to eat that.
So the whole thing was a little bit like traveling to a different country in some regards, and then to have sort of people from a different country, but still with the Black Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter people facing off against one another and yelling at one another.
Okay, so there was that.
And then the next day, I'd gotten us an Airbnb for the night in DC, and we went first to Arlington.
Which was super easy to be in.
Arlington had all the little cafes and the good cappuccinos and all the stuff that I think I like, and it was just easy to walk.
They had great bagels, right, Zach?
And then in D.C., we had – let's see, I sent you three pictures, right, Zach?
Yeah, you want to show first SCOTUS?
So, we walked by the Supreme Court.
And this was a Monday morning, so I guess this is the next morning.
It was a gray morning.
There was clearly a lot of signs of there having been protests over the weekend.
But while we were there, there was this one lone protester who had a backpack on from which she was blaring some sort of very angry music.
And I can't read it from here, but her sign says something like, you know, she's pro-choice.
All right.
But then the other signs, which again, I can't read.
I wonder if you could put it on our little screen here, Zach.
No, you can't.
Well, maybe you can.
So, I don't remember what's on the signs, but the one that's most... Yep?
My body, my choice.
Okay.
Yeah, so just tell us what one of them says here.
Okay.
Trans rights start at conception.
And gay rights start at conception.
And then I think the one lying on the ground says something like, um, atheists for life.
And all three of those signs are just not what we're expecting.
And they speak to some protests that I've yet seen, yet to see any evidence of elsewhere.
And the idea, you know, trans rights begin at conception.
This causes so many errors to be thrown right away that it's really hard to even know what to think.
And, you know, maybe the point was whoever designed that sign and was carrying it was trying to throw errors in the minds of the pro-choice protesters, or they were just themselves very confused, or I don't even know what.
But this, you know, this is the Supreme Court of the United States.
That's a perfect indicator of the level of confusion of the moment, almost no matter what explains it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I guess actually the night before then, the next picture, Zach, is of the rainbow over the White House, which we saw, if you can show it, yeah.
We had gone to the National Portrait Gallery, which was fascinating.
There's a Watergate exhibit at the moment, which is quite worth seeing.
And we walked through the presidential portraits, and we're learning some things.
I had been there back right when the Obama portraits had gotten there, and they're now on the move, so they weren't there.
So, Barack Obama wasn't there, and there is, I imagine, a sort of temporary one for Trump there, but the bios, they have one or two paragraph bios for all of the presidents, and the farther back you go, the...
The clearly less politicized, excuse me, they are, but they all seem pretty straightforward.
They all seem to pretty much describe the facts, until you get to Trump.
And I wish I'd taken a picture or, you know, I could tell you exactly what it said, but, you know, as we've said here before, I'm not a fan of Trump.
I didn't vote for him.
I didn't vote for the other guy in the last election either, but I haven't voted for him.
And the description of him in the National Portrait Gallery was so politicized and so not reflective of actually a description of what it is that he did as president.
And any fair analysis of the things that he accomplished includes some things that all Americans should be able to get behind.
No such things are mentioned.
And what is mentioned is January 6th.
Do you remember, Zach, if the word insurrection is used?
I don't remember, and I don't want to misquote.
I don't remember exactly the word.
Yeah, so that struck me as a tragic disappointment in one of our most important national museums, to have it be politicized in this way, when this is supposed to be about portraits of presidents.
Yeah, in fact, it's decidedly unwelcoming of some large fraction of the electorate.
Of the electorate!
This has become the nature of our system, which is, at least on the one side, there is a sort of sense that people who disagree are They're not entitled to the full rights of citizens.
They're not entitled to have their president objectively memorialized.
You know, it's preposterous.
How could this possibly end well?
Yeah, no, it's not okay.
It's not okay.
So from there we walked and we walked to dinner and then we got sort of stuck in a thunderstorm and we got told we needed to leave from in front of the White House and it seemed like something interesting might happen.
And so Zach and I hung out there for a while and nothing interesting happened, but we did see this rainbow.
And then we stayed there long enough to miss the sunset onto the Lincoln Memorial, but we got there a few minutes after the sunset, and that's just an extraordinary monument.
And we also went to – what is it called?
What's that crazy museum called, Zach?
Sorry, I hate to do this right here.
It's the Udvar-Hazy Center, basically the overflow museum for the Air and Space Museum, which was closed right now.
But it's got a Concorde, it's got the Enola Gay, it's got a Blackbird, it's got some of the very early planes.
Oh, it's got the Discovery, the space shuttle, the whole Discovery.
And it was hard to find political signage in the Udvar-Hazy Center, which was outside of DC.
And that was an extraordinary museum.
Highly recommended as well.
Conservatives are still welcome in the Aviation Museum?
Apparently.
That must be some kind of oversight.
Maybe due to the recognition that they too use physics?
I'm not willing to concede any such thing.
So just a couple more things about our experience in DC.
The last morning that we were there, we went, well, we went past SCOTUS.
I really wanted to see the Library of Congress, and it turns out they weren't open that day.
So we got to the door of the Library of Congress, and they weren't open.
But we did go to the Museum of African-American History, which I had gone to in more depth a few years back and found it really extraordinary.
And then we also went to a museum that none of us had been to before, and now Zach and I have been.
We went to the Holocaust Museum.
And so the last picture, Zach, for you to show is something that many people who are aware of the museum and of the history know, but these are just some of the Millions, I think, of shoes of the people who were killed during the Holocaust.
Just piles and piles and piles.
And there's something about the numbers that the human mind can't grasp.
And seeing actual shoes that were worn by actual people who ceased to exist due to evil acts of genocide really takes the breath away.
Yes, I have not been to that museum, but I very much hope to go.
Hope to go makes me sound like I doubt I will get to DC again, but anyway, I'm looking forward to going.
Yeah.
So Zach and I got back from there late, late, late, and the very next day you flew to England.
To England.
Yeah.
So why don't I I'll just say that England felt very different.
I've been to England quite a number of times.
It has not been so exciting.
Having seen it many times this time, it was quite poignant, I think, as a result of having been disconnected from the world and just simply seeing a culture that is surprisingly different.
I mean, you know, I think one forgets how different it is, was remarkable.
But okay, I went to Bath and this conference.
It was a conference of primarily COVID dissidents of one form or another.
It was organized by Tess Laurie and her group, whose name I always forget.
But in any case, I was doing some presenting at this conference and I was doing some hosting of panels.
The conference was quite eclectic in terms of who was there.
I did get to meet quite a number of people who, strangely, you and I have been in battle alongside many of these people but have only met some of them in person and it was almost indescribably What's the word?
It was comforting just to meet them in person, right?
Garrett Vandenbosch was there.
Ryan Cole, who actually doesn't live so far from us.
He's in Idaho.
He's a pathologist.
He's a pathologist.
I will return to him shortly.
I found what he had to say remarkable.
I got to meet Phil Harper, who we had not met before.
So in any case, oh, and I had not met Tess Laurie.
We certainly interacted over Zoom.
But anyway, to be in the company of all of these people who have been fighting in parallel against the same amorphous, well-resourced, diabolical enemy, and I hate to describe it in those terms, but the way it behaves, Leaves no doubt on the part of those who have been targeted by it that there is a something.
I don't know how it works.
I don't know how many organizations are collaborating, but you know, we do know that GAVI exists, the Trusted News Initiative exists.
We know that the CDC has dictated a certain amount, the WHO.
So anyway, there are these organizations and they clearly share a perspective and they clearly target people who step out of line.
So in any case, Something indescribable about meeting these people.
Oh, Neil Oliver was there also.
I must say that was quite cathartic to meet him in person and, you know, look him in the eye and to just, you know, the joy of discovering that such a person exists.
For those of you who don't know Neil Oliver, you probably do know him.
You've probably seen a soliloquy or two distributed on Twitter.
But he's really a lovely person.
But in any case, I just wanted to give a few of the insights from the conference.
I think the one that struck me most Was hearing from people who have been vaccine injured being able to talk to them privately so there were presentations but you know also being able to talk to these people privately and just get a sense not only for what they've been through medically but maybe even more importantly what they have been through in the aftermath of having their injuries.
Like socially?
Yes, and I think, you know, there are a lot of things about this last year that have been utterly jaw-dropping.
But I think the one that sticks with me most, the thing that I am going to have the hardest time Forgetting is the gaslighting of people who did what they were asked to do and were injured in the process.
Now let's say... And then were treated as despicable.
Liars or non-existent, right?
How dare you have been injured?
How dare you talk about it?
How dare you bring this to anyone's attention?
Don't you see that you're part of the problem?
Right.
And the insanity is so deep that in general, one of the things that these people most frequently hear is that they are anti-vaxxers, right?
These are people who took the vaccine and were injured by it and then are accused of being anti-vaxxers.
They are effectively denied care.
They are told that it's in their minds.
They're doctors who do know how to treat them.
Paul Merrick in particular.
He delivers a very compelling, I mean, you know, tears in his eyes.
He says, I'm faced with these people.
I know how to treat them, but I'm not allowed to, right?
His hands have been tied to hear that story.
I guess the point is what kind of civilization?
I mean, even let's say that the vaccines were exceedingly safe, right?
And the occasional person got severely injured, right?
As far as I'm concerned, that person is a hero, right?
They got the short straw in a thing that they did for everybody.
Everybody did their part.
These people came up with the short straw.
They are entitled to an extraordinary level of care.
They're entitled to better care than most people have because their injury comes from doing something.
They participated in something that was ostensibly to foster our collective well-being.
It feels a little bit, maybe this is a bad analogy, but as you're talking it reminds me of how Vietnam vets were treated when they came back.
It's exactly the thought, right?
You sign up because your government says your country needs you.
Something terrible happens to you, you need care, you come back, you can't, your mind doesn't accept that you are now at peace and you can't live a normal life.
How is it that these people are not receiving extraordinary care?
And why do we not compare how these people are treated?
Sorry, all war vets, but the Vietnam war vets were treated particularly brutally by society.
Particularly bad, because society had no patience for that war by the end.
Right.
But nonetheless, it seems to me that at the point on the front end of their recruiting effort, where they're saying, hey, your country needs you, sign up, it's really important, right?
The first question ought to be, well, how are you going to treat me if it doesn't go well?
What happens if What happens if I do what you say and I end up severely harmed by it?
Are you still going to be there?
And if the answer to that question is no, then the answer is sorry, that's not the deal.
If my country needs me, then my country should take care of me if it doesn't go well, right?
Right.
And so these people responded to the call.
These people, now you're talking about the people who were the vaccine injured.
The vaccine injured responded to the call.
And frankly, if you, We are going to be blamed, despite the fact that you and I are vaccine enthusiasts, that a book written before COVID happened lists vaccines as one of the three great medical discoveries, right?
That's who we are, and we're demonized as anti-vaxxers, right?
How many anti-vaxxers do you create when you injure people with a vaccine and then pretend they're not hurt?
Right?
How many people is that going to rightly drive away, analytically drive away?
I'd be crazy to take that vaccine.
If they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?
Right.
And if they're treating me like this over what is happening now, who else has experienced what that I don't know about?
Yes.
It's very, very safe.
Really?
Totally safe?
Yes, totally safe.
And if it turns out that it hurts me, does that mean that you will then take care of me?
No.
We're going to treat you like garbage, right?
It's like, I can't believe that we can't just simply see how the dots connect, right?
So, I guess I am beyond fed up, right?
The gaslighting of people who spoke up was terrible.
The gaslighting of people who did what they were asked and were harmed by it, and some of them severely harmed, right?
That is unconscionable.
It's unconscionable.
And I guess I would ask others, right?
Those who just wish this topic would go away.
Are you okay with that?
Right?
Yeah.
Maybe you took the vaccine.
Maybe it went well.
Are you okay with people who made the same choice that you did and will never live a normal life again being treated like this by the governments that asked them to do it, that asked you to do it?
You're really okay with that?
I can't imagine how you could be.
So, there's that.
I will also say, I think Ryan Cole, the pathologist, has a special role to play.
And I'm troubled that there seems to be only one of him.
Right.
Only one pathologist who is speaking publicly about what he's seeing.
Right.
Now, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I have a new caveat.
When you were talking to me, as you know, you just came home yesterday, as you know.
Yes.
But when you were sort of giving me a quick overview of what you had seen and experienced and everything there, my question to you was, where are all the other pathologists?
Right.
And I don't think we know the answer to that question.
It is especially troubling.
You know, it could be that you wouldn't The pathologists aren't seeing anything or aren't seeing anything yet, but that can't be right, right?
I don't know to what degree you're free to talk about what you understand from Dr. Cole.
If you are, you might share some of it.
For those of you who haven't thought about what a pathologist is, So, a pathologist is a doctor who sees specimens but not patients, right?
This is somebody whose specialty is looking.
I hope, Ryan, if I have this slightly wrong that you'll gently reach out and I will correct it.
But basically, the point is this is, you know, how a radiologist is a doctor you never see.
The doctor looks at the scans or the MRIs or whatever it is that you've got and says, aha, that shadow there is a something or other.
Well, the pathologist is somebody who's looking.
It's like blood cultures and tissue cultures.
Tissue cultures, biopsies, all sorts of stuff.
So, they see this.
And what this means for a pathologist, you know, Brian Cole has many years of experience behind the microscope, right?
He's there for the beginning of COVID.
He's there for the vaccine program and what he's seeing.
And he's there decades before.
Right.
Like, I don't know how old he is, but at least like many, many years before.
Many years before.
Yeah.
In that time, you will see transitions in how many of this type of cancer you see, and that type of cancer, and this type of dysfunction, that type of dysfunction.
And so the point is, this is a doctor who sees way more patients than most.
So if a doctor, you know... Because he doesn't see whole people, he sees samples.
Right, exactly.
And so, you know, he has a much larger data set than most people do, and he's in a position to see change in a way that if you were a doctor in an office seeing patients, You might see that change, but you wouldn't necessarily know whether it was noise, right?
Sample size is lower, it's just harder to know.
It's just harder to know, right?
So, he's seeing all these things, including lots of cancers, very sudden cancers, right?
Cancers that were dormant and then suddenly are in stage four, this kind of thing.
thing um you know and he is profoundly altered by looking at the change in what patients are facing and his own profession and their ignoring of these patterns which i don't know what we do about it because with one pathologist it's very hard for this point to be successfully made
but um it's very, his report is very stark and And it is consistent with the other doctors, right?
There's a lot of doctors at this conference, including, you know, Malone.
So did you specify the timing?
Maybe I was thinking about something else you were saying, but did you specify, are you free to specify the timing of when he starts seeing an explosion of cancers?
I don't think I know, although he has spoken about it publicly.
There's actually an interview clip that people will probably have seen on Twitter where he's seated, I believe he's seated with books behind him, and he is discussing these cancers that he is suddenly seeing emerge.
The question is, is this attributable to COVID or vaccines or both?
I believe, well, I'm going to leave that to Ryan.
I'm going to interview him.
Great.
Fabulous.
I think it's a must do.
He is certainly seeing a lot of pathology that he believes is vaccine in nature and he would be in a position to know because the difference between 2020 and 2021 is the vaccines.
Yep, that's right.
Alright, so that was an important upshot.
I will say, for those of you who are inclined to demonize this as some kind of an anti-vax conference, I think ultimately all of the video from the conference is going to emerge.
So you will be interested on the panel, I believe it was the first panel, and it was moderated by Majid Nawaz.
Um, there was an interesting back and forth between, um, it started out between Del Bigtree and Garrett Vandenbosch.
And what happened was Del Bigtree actually queried the audience on the panel about whether they felt that vaccines had an important role to play in public health and, um, Robert Malone, Garrett Vandenbosch, and myself, Robert Malone and Garrett Vandenbosch, both being vaccinologists and me being an evolutionary biologist, all said yes.
And we had a back and forth with Dell about it.
So this was not an anti-vax conference.
What this was is a conference in which people who are vaccine hesitant and from before COVID were in dialogue with people who are very pro-vaccine and very troubled by what's happened During COVID.
Anyway, I think that that's really interesting.
I will also say it was one of the things people in the audience responded to.
I must have had 25 or 30 people come up to me and say they were really glad to see that exchange, right?
They really thought that this needed to be aired because it's too easy for Camps to become entrenched and the dialogue needs to happen So that was really important people are eager to see respectful disagreement they and it's not you know, it's not bloodthirst it's a
I've had no exposure to it, and I know that there are reasons that you might land on either side of this, and I really want to hear what smart people have to say in response.
I want to build up my model and build up my arsenal, if you will, and maybe using that kind of language isn't helpful here.
This is how you learn how to compose arguments and how to engage with people when you do run into people who don't agree with you, is by hearing how other people do it.
And you can do it from scratch, you know, you can figure it out from scratch, but it is Every time you or I or we have been involved in something like that where there's actual disagreement and it doesn't just result in yelling, people are appreciative.
They're appreciative and they are also appreciative of the sense that, I don't know how to phrase it exactly, but watching people respectfully disagree over substance, analytical substance, is reassuring because so many people have had the experience of, you know, expressing, let's say, skepticism of the COVID vaccines and then having all hell break loose in their life, right?
That just simply seeing that actually at the end of the day they're not crazy, and this is an analytical question, is super important, right?
That's a reaction shot, where Zach leaves the camera on you while I'm talking so that we can see how you feel about me.
Which is cool, because I think you feel pretty good about me.
Yeah, I do.
Okay, that's good.
So, okay, I wanted to add a couple things.
The Garrett Vandenbosch feature of this was important, and I feel certain based on the way people commonly... Yes, we have a helicopter problem.
I don't know if you can... I think that's actually an airplane, but... Yeah, that actually is, but we do have a helicopter problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't love the fact that we have a helicopter problem.
We never used to.
It'll go away, you know.
Breeding season, they'll fly off somewhere else.
All right, so Gerrit van den Bosch predicted on this program, I will point out, I mean, it wasn't the first place he had done it, but he predicted that we would have a pandemic of variants.
He also predicted that the severity of those variants would go up, and he predicted that it would move in the direction of younger people.
Now, I believe he was right on two of these three counts.
The variance certainly proliferated, and the level of contagiousness went up.
The level of severity seems to have gone down.
Okay, so you just split up his second one into two parts, so three out of four, perhaps.
So your virulence has gone up, but severity's gone down.
And then the third one, as you described it, which is actually the fourth one in The New Variants, is that you think that you are seeing, and I also think that I'm seeing, although I've seen no data on it per se, is that this is affecting young people more and more.
Yeah.
The virulence is actually the severity.
So, it's the contagiousness that's gone up.
The virulence has gone down, at least so far, which doesn't mean that it will continue to.
But in any case, the point I want to make is, Geert took a lot of crap for his view that the vaccine program was going to cause a proliferation of variants and that it was going to make the thing more contagious and more damaging.
And my point would be, You don't get out of it, right?
Now that he's turned out to be right, when somebody has a prediction that turns out to be right, you don't get to make a special pleading.
Now it's possible that he could have gotten there by accident, but unless you predicted better than he did, right, then the question is what model did you use to predict that and what does it say is coming next?
And the problem is that the model that he used to predict that has some very dire things to say about what's coming.
Right?
More variants, vulnerability amongst the vaccinated primarily, and severe disease.
So, nobody, including Garrett, knows whether that is going to happen, but I would say when somebody who has done as good a job of predicting the course of the pandemic as Garrett says that, we don't have a choice but to listen, right?
This is somebody who has demonstrated that he's got a model that works better than the field.
I would say I am at least paying very close attention to what he has to say.
It's quite frightening and hopefully he's incorrect about it, but nonetheless, I don't know, buckle your seatbelts I guess.
Oh boy, yeah.
Yeah.
So I'll just say it's 6.05.
There's a lot of other things that aren't exactly in this territory that we were thinking about doing, but we're going to be back in less than 48 hours.
So I think we should save some of what we were talking about, but you may not be done yet with what you're on.
We can leave it there for the moment.
I may return to a couple of topics from the conference later on, but I do feel like we've more or less set the stage.
Most of what I was hoping to accomplish was to give people a sense of what the feeling was being there.
Anyway, I hope you all find comfort.
There was a lot of comfort for people who attended as spectators or as participants just simply in being in the company of that many people who were at least holding on to sanity.
Yeah, well and I guess we probably should have said at the top of the hour too, and I hope this isn't a secret but it's about not to be, is that you recorded several, in fact five, Dark Horse episodes while you were there with people who were there, some of whom you've mentioned here.
Each one darker than the last.
Okay.
Which are going to be released weekly on Tuesdays, I think, for the next, well, five weeks.
So those, I'm looking forward to hearing them, and I think you were very enthusiastic about the conversations as you were having them.
Yes, I will also say I recorded an unheard episode with Freddie Sayers while I was in London on my final day.
That I think is out today, or if it's not out today, it'll be out tomorrow.
So you might check that out.
That was pretty good.
He, you know, he pulled no punches.
But anyway, I thought the interview was what was good.
And I think people will enjoy that too.
Wonderful.
So I forgot to bring it up, but on Saturday, at noon Pacific time on Saturday, we'll be back and we'll do an episode then and we'll do a Q&A, which we haven't done in a while.
And we'll also bring up the French version of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which just got delivered to us yesterday.
Très bon.
Très bon, indeed.
And the Spanish version's about to come out.
We have not received those yet, but for those, we have been hearing from people who are eager for the book in both French and Spanish, and there are other Lithuanians coming out.
I don't think anyone's eager for the book in both French and Spanish.
I mean... I am.
Really?
I mean, I could read them simultaneously.
Honestly, probably going to read either of them because neither my French nor my Spanish is that good, but I'm sure it would improve if I tried to read both my Spanish and my French would improve if I tried to read our book in Spanish and French.
Anyway.
Oh, there's probably a lot more to say here, but I think we are going to sign off and say thank you for for being here.
Again, subscribe to this, that, and the other channel.
This being, you know, YouTube and Odyssey and the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel.