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June 11, 2022 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:32:39
#130: Coerced Consensus (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)

In this 130th 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 state of Portland, Oregon, two years after protests and riots made a mess of the city. Still found on the streets: entreaties to abolish the police, and protect “black trans sex workers,” and to attend a pride brunch that is actually a “drag queen brunch.” And yet when you talk to people, you...

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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number one.
Did I get it?
You did.
It's 130, which is, it's not even worth checking.
Not prime.
This is Bret Weinstein.
Dr. Bret Weinstein, Dr. Heather Hying at your service.
We are here going to sort through many a thing, is what I'm imagining.
Yep, we're coming to you early this week.
Brett and our younger son have a plane to catch.
So here we are.
We're not going to do a Q&A this week.
We are going to start with announcements before launching into a discussion of some of what's going on in Portland, some of what's going on in the LGBTQ community, possibly, given it's Pride Month.
And Brett is going to do a sort of a larger level analysis, as is your want.
As is something that I say, and always wonder what exactly it means when I say it.
I think it means that I want to do it, although you're going to tell me it's spelled differently.
Is that right?
No, it's spelled differently.
It's not the same thing.
And we've had that conversation, too.
So, you know, these last two years are very Groundhog Day in some ways.
Yeah, there's been a lot of that.
There's been a lot of that.
There's been a lot of that, yep.
So, we actually had a lot of fun this week.
Believe it or not, we had a lot of fun this week doing many, many hours, almost 10 hours of interviews for the Spanish-language edition of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, which we don't have a copy of yet, so I can't show it to you, but it's out.
It's published, and there's about to be a lot of media coverage in Spain and in Spanish-language newspapers, wherever those are available on the internet.
You could hold up the French one, and the people who are listening on audio only wouldn't know the difference.
That's true, that's true, that's true.
And I forgot to pull up what it is in Spanish, and even though my Spanish pronunciation isn't perfect, I'd be perfectly happy to say it, but I don't remember offhand.
But anyway, the journalists were fantastic.
We had a translator, because our Spanish is unfortunately not even close to good enough to do these things in Spanish.
The translator who was working with us on behalf of the Spanish publisher was outstanding.
It was just, it was, it was a lens into Spanish culture and Spain is not a place that either of us have been we spent a lot of time in Latin America but never been to Spain and it was it's truly remarkable yes and the interviews were seen pillow in la lingua that's the Spanish idiom for it means no hair on the tongue but it means straightforward direct I
I think, otherwise I've said something lewd, but I believe that's how you say that they were directed to the point.
We will find out in the comments almost immediately.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm not sure.
So I didn't, I don't know if that idiom is correct.
I didn't know it if it is.
And I'm not sure I would describe the interviews that way if it is.
So I'm sort of, I'm three stages deep of not being sure how to proceed.
Can we agree that the interviews were sin monos en la cabeza?
I don't know why you're doing this.
I don't know.
Just gonna come off sounding like complete idiots.
No, I don't think so.
Without monkeys in the head?
Monkey's on the brain, sure.
Brain is different, but okay.
It's close enough.
People are very generous when you try to speak their language in earnest.
That has been my experience.
It's true, but it's rather different when you're actually speaking to a mostly English-speaking audience in half-ass Spanish.
Well, I was hoping they'd be impressed.
Now I think they're likely not to be.
And that's on me?
No, you know, an effort was made.
An effort was made.
All right.
Yeah, so that was great.
And yes, we've been hearing from a lot of people who've been waiting for the Spanish Language Edition in particular, and it's out now.
So you can find that most places that books are sold in Spanish, including Amazon.
Yes.
So, as I said, we're not – did I say we're not doing a Q&A this week?
Yes.
And we are live on YouTube and Odyssey right now, I believe.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
We have a cool new shirt coming to our store, darkhorsepodcast.org, next week, I believe.
But right now you can still go get things like epic tabbies and digital book burning and such.
I am confident enough on this new shirt that I think we can fairly guarantee that they will love it.
All right, all of them?
Pretty much.
You can't miss.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
It's okay.
It's just a little niche to me.
I don't think it'll outrage anyone.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, a small number of people may be indifferent, but I think I feel good about it.
Okay, excellent.
Well, that will bring to you next week and we'll be back at our regular time next week.
One more teaser for next week, as long as we're teasing next week's broadcast.
Next week, I believe I'm going to try to explain why everything is labeled in the inverse.
Why the disinformation is really informative and the information is labeled disinformation.
It's begun to come together and I'm going to lay out a model next week.
So anyway, hopefully people will tune in for that and we'll see what they think.
Yeah, so I'm just writing it down so you remember that it's actually on the docket.
Yes, on the docket.
I didn't know that.
All right.
Dropping things on me as we are live here.
Okay.
We, as always, we encourage you to go to Natural Selections, which is where I write on Substack.
Almost everything is available there for free, although I did post a short thing there this week for paying subscribers only that I called Maybe You Don't Need Enemies, prompted by my observations walking around Parts of Portland noticing, as I have in traveling many parts of the world in the past, how easy it is to reach people if you actually just change your face from totally neutral or worse to a smile.
It is remarkable how many people don't do that, and so immediately start interactions that maybe they'll never have with another person again with a neutral or worse expectation.
And it's rather easy to change that, and people are even more hungry for niceness and human connection than ever right now.
So anyway, that's on Natural Selections now.
You were going to add something?
I was just going to say that yes, the fear that has been used to corral us and direct us is obviously contagious in a way that has been demonstrated to be true of many emotional states.
So yeah, your point about breaking that circuit by broadcasting something else, which is also contagious.
I agree, that's a key.
This is a theme that will come up a little bit later on as we talk today, but also I think we should probably come back to it in longer form later.
The contagion of emotions that is well understood in many circles and that is being weaponized and therefore used to create greater tribal divisions between us than we would otherwise have.
is stark.
And the fact that we can pretty much all see that it happens online, where we're not really engaging with the complete human being, even if we're engaging with someone who we know to be a real human being, the online existence is not their entire human beingness.
And when we're actually engaging with another human being out in the world, even if it's someone we don't know, Very often we go into it assuming it's not going to work.
There's nothing to be done there.
I already know that the boundaries are drawn and that this is unlikely to be a person I can talk to, and by and large that's not true.
Yeah, it's interesting that you remove... let's put it this way.
It almost never happens that people break each other's noses, but the risk that it could happen actually sets bounds in the in-person interaction that cause most of those interactions to be a great deal better if you just simply lean into them.
Yeah, this is interesting.
I mean, this is going to be a place where men and women have very different traditional ways of interacting and of, you know, how things can escalate when they go bad, and therefore what the threats are underneath things.
And, you know, it's very rare that in all-female spaces noses end up broken, but that's not to say that Terrifically bad things don't happen as a result of what can happen in those spaces, but they tend to happen via very different routes.
And I think part of, as I've talked about before, as we've talked about before, part of the confusion of modernity is pretending that men and women aren't different, pretending in some circuit, in some places, imagining that going back to traditional roles would be the solution.
No, that can't happen, and no thank you.
Pretending that the only way out of it, or imagine the only way out of it, is imagining that we're the same and therefore there's nothing to be negotiated.
No, have you met people?
Obviously that's not true.
But knowing that we are different, and we will never be the same, and that traditional roles are full of now outdated stereotypes, and some of them were always outdated.
Or we're never relevant, is what I mean.
It means that we need to forge a way forward while recognizing that, on average, an all-male group will end up negotiating differences and mediating conversation and decision-making differently from how an all-female group will, and therefore,
When, as in modernity, we have male and female groups together moving forward with decision-making and team-building and problem-solving, it is very likely that we need to be explicit and careful about recognizing that just defaulting to either male-typical or female-typical mode is not going to be successful.
So actually, long as we're here, it occurs to me that we have a story that illustrates the problem of the environment that takes the broken nose off the table.
For those of you listening at home, stop me if I've told you this before, but we have a friend named George, I won't give his last name, who is a fellow cyclist who was cycling along one day And because those in vehicles have very little risk from those on bicycles, there's a fair amount of weird stuff that gets directed at us sometimes.
I've been hit by a BB once.
People yell things.
They'll honk trying to scare you to fall off your bicycle or whatever.
George was cycling along.
Yeah, and a woman on a cycle gets a subset of things that men don't get as well, which is, you know, obnoxious and, you know, has an additional level of threat because obviously someone in a vehicle can catch up to someone on a bicycle unless you've got access to trails or thin alleys, and it's useful to have those anyway.
Yes, cat calls from some really uncool cats.
Beyond cat calls sometimes, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, George, not a woman.
Never been, never identified as such.
Actually, we have not checked in with George.
Don't know how it's gone.
But as far as we know, still a guy.
I'd put some money on that.
Yeah, I would too.
Anyway, he was cycling along minding his own business and some dudes in a truck Pulled up behind him, he was not noticing them, and one of them hurled a half-full beer can at him and hit him.
And they shouted something out the window and sped off.
George was enraged, as one might be, and he rode like crazy, and the dudes in the truck got caught at a stoplight several blocks away and did not realize that George was gaining on them.
George pulled up to the stoplight, grabbed the guy who had thrown the beer can, pulled him through the window, and broke his nose and said, Don't fuck with bicyclists!
And I would imagine that that guy has stopped fucking with bicyclists.
Or go in the opposite direction.
No, I'm pretty sure George made his point.
You know, broken nose, that gives you time to think.
Yeah.
So anyway, my thought is that the car interaction, you are there in person, but the advantage that the driver and the passenger have over the cyclist makes it more like Twitter.
But in this particular case, George's excellent cycling and the luck of the stoplight having brought those fellows to a halt.
Turn to the tables.
And there's literally a power differential.
Yes, there is.
I was trying to make a pun.
Power differential.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to diagram that later and figure out what it was.
Well, the vehicle has a differential.
Yes.
The bicycle doesn't.
True.
Yeah.
Quite right.
Quite right.
Anyway, but I think the...
Anyway, the point is the risks in the situation set the rules.
I've made the point in an article I wrote for UnHerd that actually firing ranges and gun shops tend to be very polite places because presumably there are a lot of people possessed of firearms.
So anyway, this is an interesting question.
Polite and, in my very limited experience, friendly.
Yeah, welcoming.
Very welcoming.
All right.
All right, so we were talking, I don't remember how we got on that topic.
Oh, my sub stack this week.
Maybe you don't need enemies.
Maybe you can drop the idea that everyone is likely to be your enemy out there and walk around being more welcoming and have just a better time of it when you're out there in the world.
And then I just wanted to say before we do our sponsors for the week, many of you are supporting us many ways by subscribing to the channel on YouTube, on Odyssey, both the main channel and the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel.
You are liking videos, you are sharing videos, which is the way that word spreads.
So if you are valuing what we do, please do that.
Please share with family and friends, and hopefully that doesn't get you unfamilied and unfriended.
And for those of you who can, we of course appreciate financial contributions.
We were demonetized by YouTube last summer and that has never come back, but we do have revenue that comes in through our Patreons.
We thank all the patrons for supporting us that way.
And I have something to say about the Discord that's available on our Patreon, but I have lost it once again.
There it is.
Our wonderful Discord community where you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, even unwind with virtual happy hours, and they've had a lot of them, and even karaoke.
Young or old, left or right, there's a spot for you around the campfire.
So you can access that through our Patreons, there's also a monthly private Q&A, Brett has conversations through his Patreons once a month, and we also have sponsors.
Three?
Top of the hour?
We will begin those now.
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All right.
We are going to start by sharing a few photos that I took yesterday while walking around North Portland.
Zach, I think you should have them.
You want to put the first one up?
So, I was in a lovely shop that had, among one of the very few unlovely things, hey, this for people just listening, some pins which have on the left, vaxxed, I'm vaccinated, and on the right, pronoun pins.
And to me, this reminded me of the cultural moment we are living in,
Which has people who are confused about what sex is and who are insisting that however you feel like identifying is the sex that you are and therefore it's paramount and maybe the most important thing about you to announce your pronouns in your bios and in introducing yourself to other people and enforcing that on all the people in your world.
Well, it's many of the same people who are certain that although 500 million years of evolution might be wrong, the authorities that just came to you dressed in lab coats couldn't possibly be.
And therefore, the new experimental technologies that everyone is being told they absolutely must take is the only way forward.
Did you want to add something?
Yeah.
I wanted to introduce... I wondered.
And this is completely inconsistent with where you're headed here.
When you see a consensus, and you also see coercion, you see people who depart from the consensus being punished, and you therefore know that some percentage of the consensus is the result of people who fear saying otherwise, and that what might be objections or diversity of opinion shows up as silence,
The question is, why does the mind not register that that consensus isn't one?
Or, I think even more likely, at the point you see intense coercion in the direction of a consensus, one ought to think that consensus is probably wrong.
It wouldn't be necessary.
If the consensus were right, it would be naturally contagious.
This is a point that Neil Oliver was making in your conversation with him that you had as well.
Yes.
But does this fallacy have a name where you fail to register?
You've seen the mechanism that created a consensus and yet your mind still thinks there's wide agreement when in fact it knows enough to know that it knows it.
At best, it knows nothing about how much organic agreement there actually is.
Yeah, I don't know.
If it has a name, and if it does have a name, what the name is.
I'm not too up on all of the fallacies and their various names, but it does seem like it warrants one.
Because it is a psychological error, or maybe it's not a psychological error, it's a failure to recognize a pattern that should be recognizable.
Yeah it is and you know there's one other place I see a similar thing which is if you had you know two shampoos and one of them has a slick advertising campaign with a famous spokesperson or something like that you should probably think negatively about that one.
So anyway I guess the point is why do you know this basket of pins here are People purchasing things, broadcasting something downstream of a phony consensus, which is a funny thing to do.
Of course, we don't know how well the pins sell, but the fact that they're sitting there means that somebody expected they would.
Yeah.
And I saw this just moments really after.
The reason I was in North Portland was to pick up a beautiful piece of art that I'd commissioned many months ago, and just a small piece of glass.
And I had a conversation with the artist who's lived in Portland for, I think, maybe all of her life, but at least since college.
And she's in our age range.
And I guess at some level, you've been doing this your entire life.
But at this point, I just start talking to people as if they're going to be reasonable, rather than being careful about not saying things about which the forced consensus would seem to make us believe that everyone probably disagrees with me and therefore you better not rather than being careful about not saying things about which the forced and And this lovely artist, this lovely woman just opened right up and she said, oh yes, I love Portland and I want to stay, but I don't know if we can.
It's such a mess here.
And to use the language that we've been using for a long time, but I feel Michael Schellenberger really formalized in his book, San Francisco and presumably elsewhere.
San Francisco.
San Francisco, yes.
The book, San Francisco.
I can never say it.
Is we have had our compassion weaponized against us, right?
We are told, oh, if you don't physically allow those people to have terrible, terrible lives on the street in front of you, then you are being uncompassionate to them.
And no, that's actually not compassionate any more than it is compassionate to let a child cut themselves.
Or starve themselves, or believe that they are a different sex than they are and therefore need to start to medically transition.
None of these things are the compassionate thing to do.
So let's... So hold on, back to your point though.
Your point was that you open up to people and you tell them That you're actually not part of the consensus.
And at least in my experience, it's actually rare that anybody actually pushes back on behalf of the consensus.
It's like there's this thin veneer of like, we all agree on that.
And then you say, well, actually, I don't.
People are like, yeah, me neither.
You know?
So, you know, no doubt there are people with whom that wouldn't work.
But I think the question is, how tiny a minority is that?
Yes.
How tiny a minority is it who appears to be driving culture and policy at an increasingly global level for all the rest of us on behalf of not even them?
But even if they think it's for them, and even if it is for some tiny portion of them, sorry, no.
Tyranny of a tiny minority.
Not okay.
And in part it's being allowed to happen because we are being told that it's a majority.
But let's go to the next photo here, Zach.
This is just, so this is again North Portland.
Portland, it's sort of like Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, which is actually four, is it now five books?
Now, he's been dead forever, but it turned into five books, a five book trilogy.
Portland has four quadrants of which there are, has quadrants of which there are five.
That's which I don't, I don't know why.
And North Portland is the fifth outlier, one that's a wedge, because otherwise it's Northwest, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast.
Anyway, those of you who don't live here don't care, but I don't know.
I don't know why that is.
Anyway, North Portland, um, in some ways is a, is an epicenter of the everyone agrees, right?
And if you don't, what the hell are you doing here?
So this is one of many walls that I walked past with a chaos of posters.
It's mostly not tagged live.
It's mostly not graffiti, but posters that have been put up in sort of a gist of, I don't know, there's a better word than chaos.
And some of the sentiments there make some sense and some of them don't.
Some of them are incoherent to me and presumably coherent to someone.
But this is what is passing at Simola for street art.
In North Portland.
And near there, next photograph Zachary, is this storefront with erected above it what looks like a billboard, but I think that this apparent billboard, which reads for those of you just listening, Abolish Police, is actually just a privately owned and erected by this storefront.
So yes, abolished police is still, still being advocated for, even as Portland's homicide rate skyrocketed, property damage, property crimes skyrocketed, homelessness and chaos ensuing has skyrocketed, although that was already quite high.
In the wake of the move in the summer of 2020 to defund the police, and unfortunately to some degree the police were defunded, and of course many good police also left the force, and many who were somewhat near retirement but weren't immediately going to do so left because who wants to work in an environment like this?
Yes, and actually, separately, I have been noticing in the last couple of weeks, police engaged in normal police behavior.
And I'm wondering whether this is in some way organically true, or whether or not the police responded to the population signing on to a phony consensus about abolish, defund, all cops are bastards.
I had the sense that cops had stopped enforcing Anything but the most extreme laws and even then doing so with such a delay that things like our homicide rate skyrocketed So I guess there's a question and I don't know what to think about it because As we said very forcefully at the time, demonizing the police is insane, right?
There's obviously bad policing, but if you think the net effect of police is to increase crime, you have lost the plot, right?
And you know, you can't measure the crime that doesn't happen because the police do come when you call, right?
You just can't measure it.
In any case, yes, it was insane for us to allow the demonization of the police and it is not surprising that the police might choose to allow us to discover something of What happens when they don't enforce the law because how long are you going to put up with being called?
Bastards and being accused of being a net source of crime and being told that you might be killed on site Right and actually having you know, you're you're a murder openly advocated on Walls across the city.
So anyway, I obviously can't defend the police not enforcing the law, but it's not hard to imagine how they might become reluctant.
Yeah.
So anyway, yes, I'm a little surprised to see that that sign on this business.
Now because obviously a lot of people have had time to recognize what happens as you even begin to move in the direction of abolishing or defunding the police and basically it's exactly what you'd expect.
It's, you know, it's warlordism.
But it may become a little more clear once I'm going to zoom in in the next couple of pictures on you can see flyers in the window of this storefront which is not open and I couldn't exactly tell what it was and the lighting was bad so these next pictures aren't too too great.
But next photo, if you will, one of the flyers in the window there reads, again, sorry about the reflection, Honor Trans Immigrant Lives.
Which, okay, honor all lives, you know, not to trigger all those people out there, like, what do you mean you can't talk about all lives until the people who are least privileged and most historically undervalued are protected?
I don't agree with that, but I get that sentiment.
But it is this adding...
Trans, into other discussions, which is something we talked about two summers ago, during the summer of George Floyd, during the summer of over 100 consecutive days of protest, which turned into 100 consecutive nights of violent riots in the city of Portland.
Where trans just gets entered into every discussion and then becomes central.
And you might argue right now, it's Pride Month, it's just that.
No, sorry.
No, that's not what's going on.
So, honor trans immigrant lives.
That's just odd, right?
Like, what a niche group that is.
How many people are we talking about?
How many people are we talking about?
Okay, so next one, next flyer, is protect black trans sex workers.
Also very niche.
Also adding another group to the mix, sex workers, which is, yes, more susceptible to violence in their lives, and also not just work as people involved in advocating for quote-unquote sex work insist.
It is different, and it should not be treated the same way as a secretarial job, for instance.
But I will also point out the amazing irony of the security alert for our video surveillance right next to the Protect Black Trans Sex Workers poster, which is on the storefront, which has across the top a faux billboard that reads, Abolish Police.
So, presumably they've got some private company, or it's not for real, right?
But if this is for real at all, if they really do have—it actually says 24 hours, not 4 hours, I just didn't catch it on the screen here—24-hour video surveillance, if they've got anyone showing up, then we're talking about private security.
Then we're talking about mercenaries, basically.
And this is what we want?
We prefer our protection to be in the hands of only those who can afford it, like used to be for instance the fire department.
And only to happen when you happen to have thought in advance about whether or not you had a risk, as opposed to having, you know, fixing the problems with police forces, which police forces recognize have existed.
You know, there are power problems, there have been racial problems, all of this is true.
But they exist for all of us, they exist to serve all of us, they are funded by all of our tax dollars, and they are supposed to be working on all of our behalf, unlike private security, which to have to have that security alert 24-hour video surveillance posted on the same building that says abolish police strikes me as a particular kind of 21st century confusion that I didn't see coming.
Yes, on the other hand, it seems to me that the poster that has been put in the window here, like the others, is effectively bait.
The answer is, what are your choices with respect to such a poster?
Would you like to spell out what your objection is to protecting black trans sex workers?
Do you believe that black trans sex workers are not vulnerable?
Are they not human?
Are they, right, is it that they're black that makes you indifferent?
Right.
So the point is, one has to have a very steady mind in order to figure out how to correctly raise the objection, and it still isn't safe to do.
Right.
Right?
And so the real point is this is kind of, it's visual sophistry.
The point is, it's an invitation to a discussion in which, at best, you will survive.
Right?
Likely, you will trip over one of several booby traps in the visual presentation and the claim.
And, you know, I never saw anything this...
Extreme in terms of the nichification of the groups about whom we are supposed to care until the last few years.
But before Evergreen Blue, when we were still at Evergreen, and there was the Black Lives Matter nichification of progressive stack demographics that you were supposed to care about stuff.
When I would see things about, oh, you know, it's the black femmes on campus who are most at risk.
Like, are there two of you?
Like, seriously?
And at risk of what?
Like, no, you're not at risk, and there's two of you, and you're just the two people who have identified yourself as this, like, you're just making stuff up.
But also, it felt like, Okay, whatever.
I'm not going to go there because it's going to be too easy to paint me or anyone who raises objections to, therefore, hating black femmes, or black trans sex workers, or trans immigrants.
No, that's different.
And I think you have actually nailed it, that this is visual sophistry.
This is design sophistry.
This is PR.
This is sophistry as PR and marketing.
And even those of us who can see it for what it is, largely, you know, we have to choose our battles.
And we say, Okay, fine, go ahead and fight your fight for black trans sex workers.
And I guess at some level I'm saying, this is, this is beyond absurd.
These, you know, I don't, I don't know exactly how to make the analogy work, but this emperor is long since naked.
And we need to stop pretending that the people who put abolish police and protect black trans sex workers are actually interested in a society that treats all human beings equally, because they don't.
Well, that's the thing about the sophistry, though, and this is why I keep pointing to this particular uniting thread, is that the problem is actually in the burden and threshold of proof.
That by leveling certain arguments as if they are credible arguments, the basic point is, You would have to beat this argument in order to prevent the natural conclusion from arising.
We should be investing in protecting black trans sex workers.
Well, that is not a slam dunk because the question is really one of what is the, you know, How do we protect people who are vulnerable best, right?
How do we distribute the resources for that?
And it is very easy to become obsessed with certain things.
And, you know, for example, if we look at something like mass shootings, which are obviously catastrophic, but Our focus on mass shootings is bizarre in light of our failure to focus on, for example, iatrogenic harm from medical errors, right?
Because what is more likely to kill you?
That's a runaway win for iatrogenic harm.
And yet it's not compelling because you don't see it happen in the same way.
So, you know, the point is you We have to figure out how to say, I'm actually not required to meet that argument, right?
The burden is on you to establish that this is a reasonable standard by which to apportion limited resources, right?
From the point of view of minimizing harm or maximizing good or whatever it is that you're trying to do.
But the burden is on you.
It's not that as long as you can phrase an argument that it's going to take me five minutes to explain what's wrong with it, right?
You win unless I invest the five minutes and you're compelled.
That's not how it works.
And by making a claim that we need to do X, what have you just undone of the other things that society had already agreed we need to do?
And too often we aren't shown the thing that we're now going to lose.
And then when you do raise the thing that you're going to lose, you say, ah, see, again, you're not caring about protecting Black trans sex workers.
So I would say, you know, forget about the trans part of this.
Forget about the Black part of this.
I don't care if you're trans or not, and I don't care what your race is.
One thing that I care more about than protecting sex workers is protecting children.
Children are, there are a lot more of them, and they're inherently innocent.
And I want to protect children from being exposed to sex workers and sex work.
And that incidentally includes things like, and this is a broad, a broad definition of sex work, and there will be some who can legitimately disagree here, but that includes things like burlesque and drag shows and peep shows, okay, which many drag shows turn into.
Children should not be exposed to this.
This is something we had all agreed on until yesterday.
Sex workers' rights to perform burlesque, or whatever it is that they want to call it, or to engage in quote-unquote sex work, and I don't like that term either, cannot infringe, you know, if we can put aside, do they have that right?
Claim that they do, assert that they do for the moment.
That right cannot infringe on the more important and more fundamental right of children to never be exposed to that thing.
And again- Just as we made a point of never talking to our children about suicide until they were Old enough, and we're not going to talk here about what that means, and people will disagree about exactly what that boundary is.
But we protected them avidly from any conversation, any exposure to the concept.
And some people won't be able to because their children unfortunately know it all too close.
But most children do not.
There is no reason to put that into a child's mind.
Similarly, there is no reason to put into a child's mind the idea that people are exchanging sexual favors for money.
To put sexual activity into their minds at all?
To put into their minds that they could become, you know, that the little girl could become like daddy when she grows up?
No, she cannot.
So again, the question is, the argument is a feeble one on the other side.
It is sophistry.
So the point is, feeble as it may be, it's going to take some work to explain exactly what's wrong with it.
And what's wrong with it in the case of burlesque and things related to it and children is that the upside of exposing children to this is essentially zero.
And the potential downside is massive.
So the point is, given that, This does not require an argument from those of us who would like to protect children.
The point is, it's a slam dunk.
Even if the other side was right, what's the value in it?
There's so much in this world.
There's so much that we were unable to expose our children to.
There's just so many opportunities.
There's so much nature.
There's so much art.
There's so much music.
There's so much literature.
There's so many things.
And, you know, gardens and just so many things that children can spend their time marveling at the wonders of the world.
And there's no way that sex shows should be on that list.
But this brings a number of things together because the point is, A, we all agreed on this until five minutes ago for a reason.
One, it's obvious.
So, two, is it incumbent on us to explain why it can't suddenly become okay, right?
Even if you thought it might be okay, you wouldn't assume it was okay in light of the risk, right?
But the coerced consensus around this means that it's actually happening.
We've gone from everybody agreeing that it would be wrong to have a child At a burlesque show to a state in which it is now presumed to be okay.
And if you say, hey, wait, still not okay, then the point is, oh, what kind of bigot are you?
Yeah, you live in the dark ages, man.
Right.
And so, you know, the problem is sophistry is not a well understood concept by most people.
And so saying it is sophistry works with an audience that's been brought up to speed or knows the term already.
What do we do so that we can put the burden of proof back where it naturally goes in argument after argument, right?
Because that's what's happened is by leveling these sophist arguments, they have flipped the burden of proof and it's very effective, right?
It doesn't make their point any better, but it makes it more powerful and that That's the thing that we have to figure out how to repel.
But I don't know what to do because again and again, it's like, I can see the flaw in that argument and I'm going to explain it.
And it's like, cool that I can explain it.
But the really important point is I don't have to, right?
None of us have to.
These are not good arguments, even if explaining why they're bad takes five minutes.
Right, right.
Yes, absolutely.
Let's go to the last slide, Zach.
A picture from yesterday in North Portland.
This is a little unclear.
It's a telephone pole that has, you know, probably years worth of posters attached to it.
The most modern one being Pride Brunch!
You can't see that very clearly, but the four performers all appear to be in drag.
And so I thought, okay, Pride Brunch.
Cool.
I guess, you know, Pride Month is never mean anything.
I mean, mean?
Yeah, that's the term.
That's the term.
Anything in particular to me, but it's, you know, it's been in existence as long as I can remember and okay.
Click through though, you know, go to that, whatever that code is called.
The QR code.
Yeah, the QR code.
And Zach, if you would show my screen briefly.
The Pride Brunch is actually, and it's actually happening, it's happening almost right now.
The door is open in eight minutes.
So if you're in Portland and would rather be here, actually, no, it's sold out.
Sorry, can't go.
But read the fine print, and it really is quite fine, isn't it?
Here, a little bit bigger.
And find that it's an all-star cast for a drag queen brunch.
Well, that's different.
All-star cast for a drag queen brunch.
I thought it was a Pride Brunch.
Nope, it's a drag queen brunch.
I'm sorry, not the same.
Yep.
I want to protect children before I want to protect sex workers.
I want to protect women before I want to protect trans men's rights to be, trans women's, sorry, rights to be in the prisons of the gender that they identify as.
And I want to protect gay people for, to have their, you know, have spaces and actually have some place to honor themselves and what it is that they're unique situation in life goes through, rather than having everything in Pride Munch be... Pride Munch.
Wow.
Pride Month being replaced with drag and trans.
And it seems like it's there everywhere.
And, you know, here of course we have, uh, wear your pride colors and come celebrate what makes the LGBTQIA plus community so dang special.
Yeah, this is a topic much better covered by others.
I'm thinking in particular of Katie Herzog and Mike Solana, two of my, oh, and Douglas Murray, of course, all make related points very, very well.
But there is something you and I are old enough to remember when being gay was Far more of a big deal than it is now.
And one of the things that those who truly did harbor bigotry about homosexuals used to say was that, you know, that this was somehow about recruiting children.
Now, the problem is that that's not what Gays were doing but there is that element here.
And of course we can know the community is got all these other letters associated with it, right and that I'm struggling for terminology that I shouldn't be struggling for but You know garden variety gay folks Are now being challenged by their supposed community, right and
For simply being gay that's because that has successfully been understood as a normal phenomenon The point is there's this other element that is now pushing really fringe dangerous stuff involving children and you know one has to feel tremendous sympathy for for homosexuals who did finally finally win their place in society Um, you know, that was a long, ugly, terrible struggle.
And now it's like, you know, they enjoyed five minutes of being welcomed in polite society before they're now being challenged by their supposedly own community.
It's quite the predicament.
No, and the same argument can be made for the much larger population of people that are women, who had been more fully empowered with legal rights for somewhat longer than homosexuals had in most, maybe all countries.
But are seeing our rights eroded by the same fringe community.
And children is a little bit of a different situation because people have been trying to protect children forever, and other people have been trying to exploit children forever.
But the new thing there is that suddenly it has become the compassionate, the liberal thing to do to encourage children to be exposed to adult human beings.
Sex perversions?
No, not compassionate, not liberal.
That's on you for falling prey to some really insane ideology, and I recommend that you think it through.
Like, just put those words through a filter, and like, yeah, actually, I don't think I want my kid exposed to that.
Yeah.
I don't think I want anyone's kids exposed to that.
Right, and I will just, at the tail end of this, point out I've started to hear this week, maybe we've heard it before, but about the question of reparations for trans people, right?
I had not heard this!
Oh yeah, this is a great one, because of course Look, reasonable people can disagree.
And I think actually, there is a very natural conversation to be had around reparations for American blacks, right?
There is a long history of oppression.
It is handed down through a lineage.
And the question is, how do we right that wrong once and for all?
And you know, Very smart, very carefully considered people with very carefully considered opinions do actually disagree on this front.
And I have heard arguments on both sides that are compelling to me.
Right.
And in fact, I will say my position is an intermediate one, which is I think reparations are justified, but cash reparations are not going to work and they create a bunch of new problems that will make things worse.
So the question is, for example, how do we invest in communities to finally level the playing field?
Right, without creating an excuse for civilization to move on from the genuine harm that is a part of our history.
So anyway, there is plenty of room for rational arguments.
The problem is, it's just like all of these other things, right?
Gays win legitimacy in society and then a bunch of people follow them through the door with arguments that they claim are the same argument just the next phase of it but it's not the same argument.
Women gain the ability to compete against each other without having to compete against men and then a bunch of guys follow them through the door You know, and start beating them in the pool and bicycling and every other way.
Well, and it's not a metaphor if you take it out of sport and take it into actual safe spaces.
Oh, of course.
You know, domestic abuse shelters and such.
And like, oh, who followed me through the door?
That's not a woman.
Right.
No, doesn't belong here.
No.
100%.
But the point is, okay, the reparations argument is on the table.
Well, it's about time it's on the table, right?
Whatever the right resolution of that question is.
But the argument does not apply.
This is again, sophistry, right?
Because trans people are not a lineage.
So the point is the idea that if you are trans, you know, in June of 2022, That you are therefore suffering the weight of oppression that has followed you through history.
No, you probably became trans in 2022, or maybe it was 2021.
But the point is the whole argument doesn't follow.
And yet, again, it's like, yeah, you know, I'm not wrong, because it takes a little explaining to get there.
No, this is critical.
I mean, we've talked about this, not with regard to trans before, but with regard to how sex and race are different.
In fact, we talked about it a little bit last week, that sexism is real and racism is real, but they have some very important distinctions between them.
And one of the ways to understand it is exactly as you just pointed out, sex is not a lineage.
Everyone has an equal number of male and female ancestors.
And there's going to be people who say, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Well, you're thinking at the population level, because you've heard that there are fewer males who have successfully reproduced in the past, which is true.
So at the population level, not all men reproduce, but almost all women do.
But at an On an individual level, you've got a mom and a dad, and so did both of your mom and dad, and so did on back forever.
Everyone had one mother, one father, therefore an equal number of male and female ancestors.
And that means that woman is not a lineage.
You've got an equal number of woman ancestors, whether or not you're woman or man, as you do man ancestors.
Whereas race, which is messy, because again, as we talked about last week, it's reticulate and no races are pure, and I say that, it's a gross word to use here, and I put it in quotes and everything, but we're all interbreeding all the time, and so it's a very messy concept.
And because it bears an external phenotypic marker, it has been used to abuse and keep down whole groups of people.
Obviously, we all know this.
Even the racist among us know this, right?
That, you know, there is a history of actual, you know, slavery and institutionalized racism and things like this.
But trans even more than sex, precisely because you are born a particular sex and therefore, at least through your own developmental history, you may, if you're born in a particular moment under a particular situation, bear the brunt of like, shit, sorry, but I was born female and that wasn't good here and therefore a lot of bad things happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I were male.
Trans, for most people who are calling themselves trans now, is a hat.
It's a thing they're putting on.
And so at the moment that they decide, now I am, and oh, I'm sure I was all along, maybe, in some cases, yes.
For some very rare cases, yes.
But for most of you, to put it on and then say, now, gimme.
Now I'm gonna get what I'm due because of all the past oppression that I wasn't even around for.
Nope, that's not how it works.
Yeah, I was gonna say, what I said could sound callous about most of these folks maybe became trans in 2021 or 2022.
But the point is, actually, that's the problem.
Trans is a real thing.
And many people have been trans, you know, for much of their lives.
But the point is, the contagious part of this, the socially contagious part is a different phenomenon, which is what many of us, including people like Blair White and Buck Angel are trying to say.
There's There's trans activism, which is a contagious movement, and there is trans, which is a much smaller group of people who genuinely wrestle with things.
Still not a lineage.
Yeah.
Right?
Still not a lineage.
Still not a lineage.
That's right.
But nonetheless, those are two different categories.
So there's a big thing that I want to do this week, prompted by some news that Reuters put out, in which they say, gender affirming guidance for prepubescent children is non-invasive and includes professional support, experts say.
And I started thinking about who are these insane experts who say such a thing, and it turns out it's WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and it's a big thing that I want to do this week.
And I spent a lot of time looking into their document, their standards of care for the health of transsexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming people.
I think given that you have a lot of stuff you still want to talk about and that we're under some time pressure this week, I'm going to save this.
I definitely want to come back to it.
I have some dismantling of WPATH's Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, but I don't want to have it be rushed.
I do want to say two more things before we segue into what you're going to do, though.
One of them is, and again I'll return to this when we do return to this with more time, their document is literally called, once again, Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People.
It's hard for me to do this without getting either angry or just laughing.
Three categories.
Standards of care.
We're talking about medical care.
Transsexuals, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people.
Yeah, tomboy medicine.
There are no human transsexuals.
That's not possible.
Okay?
That's not a possible state for humans.
Humans cannot be hermaphrodites.
Sequential hermaphrodites.
Some fish can.
We're not fishing that way.
We're some actinopterygians, okay?
You can look it up if you can spell it and go find what I mean.
We're fish, but we're not reef fish.
Yeah, some reef fish can.
A few other non-reef fish, I think, can, but there are no human transsexuals, so that's an empty category.
There are human transgender people, and when I say that, when Brett says that, what we mean usually is what many of the professionals are meaning when they say transsexual.
And then they're lumping all of this sort of kind of gender dysphoric, but I'm not going to fully transition with all of the tools at my disposal into transgender.
But I'm going to leave that as a category that is worthy of consideration with regard to what kinds of treatment and care we should be delivering to these people.
The third category, for which WPATH has written an incredibly long document, which I will dismantle another time, which they say warrants standards of care, gender non-conforming people.
Gender non-conforming people are people who don't entirely ascribe to the expectations of the sex to which they were born, not assigned for their culture.
Now, in 1980, to pick a date far enough in the past for it to be, I'm certain this is true, and yet not so modern that it had begun to be dismantled already, by 1980 in the United States at least, and I think in all of the WEIRD world, although WEIRD wasn't an acronym yet coined,
It was well understood that women who desired to work full-time in the workforce and maybe weren't that interested in having a family were not less of a woman because of that, and that men who were interested in going to caregiving professions were not less of a man for doing that.
Those people are gender non-conforming, as I was gender non-conforming as a child, and still in many ways Yeah.
I have many characteristics that are more male-typical than female-typical, and that's what gender is.
Gender is the behavioral manifestations, the personality manifestations, the softer manifestations of sex, which is hardware.
And if you are a clownfish, your gender, aka your sex role, 100% follows from your sex.
And when your sex changes, so does your gender, known as sex role in clownfish.
And there's no negotiation.
There's no ambiguity.
In humans, of course there is.
We're so much more softer.
We've got so much more going on.
And so much of the sex role in the first place, the gender, was a negotiated overlay in the first place.
We don't change color when we change sex, unlike reef fish who do that.
We don't change our, I mean, we don't, we don't, we don't change sex.
We don't change color when a woman decides that she wants to be an aviation mechanic.
You don't now have badges.
You know, maybe you put on overalls, right?
Because it's appropriate to the job.
And maybe you put on overalls because you feel more comfortable in it, and because it feels like an expression of who you want to be.
Doesn't make you male, and it doesn't change the underlying reality.
So the idea that gender non-conforming people require care, require medical care, that's a sign that we are going backwards.
Require special medical care.
Right.
The idea that those of us who don't fall in line with the cultural expectations of how we should act because of the sex that we were born to are lumped in with transsexual, which doesn't exist, and transgender, which does exist, people, is itself a sign of intentional confusion and regression back towards a day when women actually weren't able to do as many things as we do now.
So that's the little rant that will be included in a larger analysis of this document.
This document was written by the people who are the experts that Reuters is now using as their fact check when they say gender-affirming guidance for prepubescent children is non-invasive and includes professional support.
Experts say, one more little teaser, one of the things they say in this document is, let me find it, Puberty blockers are fully reversible interventions.
So I'll just leave it there.
No.
Wrong.
Patently false.
Everyone who's given it any thought knows this.
And if you think that you are a healthcare worker and you still think that puberty blockers are fully reversible, you have no business doing the job that you're doing.
You are a danger to your clients.
All right.
They are gender sophists.
We have to remember that, right?
One does, very tempted to explain everything that's wrong.
On the other hand, it's cool to explain it, but it's not a requirement because it's obviously wrong.
Bad news for these gender sophists.
Joan of Arc was not a man.
Not a man.
Nope, not a man.
The other thing, which is just sort of a bigger observation, not about WPath.
I'm off my Off that soapbox for the moment.
But walking around North Portland as I was, taking those few pictures and more, and interacting with people, where even there it was possible to get smiles from people on the street.
Not as easy as in other parts of Portland, but it was possible.
My sense was, I just had this image of, and maybe it's at time, maybe it's Portland, maybe it's the West Coast, maybe it's the United States, maybe it's the whole world, like we're on some giant Giant lake.
It's pretty flat at the edges, and it's really cold out, and it's frozen.
And we're all standing on this lake, and we're just trying to exist and not freeze to death by falling into the water below.
And there's yahoos coming from all the sides.
And they're coming onto parts of the lake that we're on, and they start jumping up and down.
And I feel like I'm hearing the ice cracking from deep in the lake, and it's just radiating up.
That sound, for anyone who's been on a lake in winter, when maybe it wasn't quite completely frozen, and you begin to hear the ice as it cracks, and you think, I gotta get out of here.
I gotta move.
This is no longer safe.
And if it's just you, and you weren't being too much of a yahoo yourself getting to where you are, you can probably get out of there.
But there's other people on whom you have no ability to tell them, stop doing that.
Stop jumping up and down on the ice.
You're going to break it, and then all of us are doomed.
It's really hard to save yourself.
So, I now, since yesterday, walking around North Portland, where it's endlessly raining, but it's not that cold, so I'm not sure where this image of this vast frozen lake came from, but I feel like everyone needs to recognize our shared fate here.
We are all human beings on this finite, beautiful planet, and we are putting so much at risk with this sothistry.
Yes.
I can't help but see the sophists on the lake as throwing sledgehammers and breaking out jackhammers.
I'm just seeing the people, and I'm seeing them jumping up and down fiercely.
For me, we start adding machines and tools.
That's a very male approach, right?
Maybe that's just...
You know, you can have that image, but for me, it's actually just this endless lake with people.
And sure, they have clothes on, but it's really just frozen water and people.
And because edges are less frozen and more shallow, or because there's different depths and there's different places where the currents are stronger.
And you can't tell once it's frozen on top, but where the current is stronger, the ice will be weaker.
And so jump there, but don't know what's underneath, what you are putting at risk by jumping there.
And you have no idea what you're putting at risk.
Yeah.
You have no idea.
And they're not entitled to put other people's stuff at risk, which is your point.
They're putting us all at risk.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So I'm going to start in an odd place here.
I'm just going to make a claim and then you can think about it on your own and understand what it implies.
Let's say that you were standing in a forest.
Let's make it a really diverse one.
You know, the Amazon.
Every creature that you see is the result of a three and a half billion year winning streak of reproduction.
And for almost every creature that you see, that winning streak is about to come to an end.
Right?
That's just statistically true.
Most creatures are dead ends very soon, but by virtue of their having arrived here, we know that they have never lost till this point.
Right?
They've arrived.
That's why evolution is so effective, right?
It's effective because of that massive edit each and every generation that eliminates all but the ones in which the best characteristics and good luck have come together and gotten them one more time through this intense bottleneck, right?
So evolution is a very powerful process for that reason, because of the constant, massive editing.
Economics isn't quite that effective, but it has the same characteristic.
Now, when we say that a creature fits into a niche, what do we mean?
What we mean is that there is some abstraction, some way to exist that is there.
And creatures, by exploring that space, right, those creatures with a little bit more of this, a little bit longer limbs, right, a little bit more acute eyes, whatever it is, Longer snouts, whatever it happens to be, the creatures come to fit that niche in the same way that a liquid comes to fit the shape of whatever container you put it in.
So the point is, evolution, whether it's economic or biotic, explores the shapes of containers.
And it tells us what the shape of the container is by what works, what sticks, what we see there.
And all right, the reason this comes up is I was for the third time in a short number of weeks confronted by the system for COVID testing that one has to engage in to participate in certain activities.
These are tests that you source within a certain number of hours before you get on a plane or attend an event.
Or in cases in Portland, some places you would have to do it to go to a restaurant if you can't prove you're vaccinated.
Most recently to get Toby admission to camp.
Yes, Toby admission to camp.
We have also done it.
I've now done it in three countries.
I've done it in the US a couple times.
I've done it in Britain and we've done it in the Bahamas.
Each time the experience is the same.
It's very It's bureaucratic, but surprisingly efficient.
Strange, talking about COVID testing makes us both cough.
Yeah, it does.
But the point is, one goes in and one fears that somebody is going to jam a swab way up into your sinuses.
But in fact, it doesn't go in so deep.
In fact, they'll hand you the swab and you do it yourself.
And it does raise a question.
I mean, for one thing, you and I have both had COVID.
I have yet to successfully test positive.
We know that we've had COVID because, for example, you and I, one of us gave it to the other, and then you lost your sense of smell.
I had anosmia.
Right, which is really the good test.
But, you know, at least for the antigen tests, it didn't come up positive for us.
So that's interesting.
Lab work is difficult.
These tests are not particularly good.
In fact, one of the things that we don't know is how good these tests even are.
And good at what?
How good are they for one variant to the next, right?
We don't know these questions.
But the point that I want to make is that there is a niche now for a service.
That service ostensibly is about testing for COVID.
And in principle, this is a good idea.
COVID is a dangerous disease, right?
Much more dangerous than the case fatality rate would have you understand.
Trying to control its spread is a good idea.
Knowing who has it is a good element in a program to control its spread.
From one part of the country to the next, from one country to the next, it makes sense.
But what has emerged in this niche is a racket.
A low quality testing service that is very expensive.
The tests in the US cost $300 a pop if you need them on short notice.
And you do need them on short notice because people say you need it within 48 hours of travel and in principle that's a good idea, right?
So that you have a good sense that everybody who arrives has just tested negative and therefore is likely to remain negative.
You know, in principle it's a great idea.
But the point is, what you've got is something that is exploring the dimensions of this niche.
And one of the elements of this niche is that it is going to reward poor testing, Rather than high quality testing.
If you have COVID, you test negative, you go to whatever the event is, and it turns into a super spreader event.
What are the chances that anybody is tracking which lab failed to detect your COVID?
Right?
So the point is, the incentive...
Yeah, on top of the event now having a super spreader event to mitigate the downstream effects of, they're going to go and do due diligence on every single person's COVID test?
No, they're not.
Right, they're not.
What's more- I mean, the data exists, but- Somebody would have- you'd have to set up something like an agency.
In order to figure out which labs were more likely to miss active COVID, right?
You would need a series of super spreader events, and then you would chase them back to potentially organizations that had run the test badly, to protocols that didn't work, right?
But no such oversight appears to exist anywhere.
And so the point is- And without which, I mean, this is where you've gone, without which it's pure theater.
It's worse than pure theater, because what it does is it inhabits the space.
It's expensive theater, though.
It's lucrative theater.
It's lucrative.
Yeah, it's expensive for us.
It fills the space in the environment where a good testing program would go.
So if you had the idea of, well, you know what?
It would be really great if we had good labs that gave good tests, especially, hey, maybe even at a good price.
Right?
Well, the question is, economically speaking, which of these things is going to win that niche?
Right?
Is it the one where you're likely to get a test that says you're COVID positive?
Is it the very sensitive, high quality test that's going to win out?
Probably not.
Because if you're in the position of getting one of these tests, then you know you're rooting for a negative result.
Right?
You want to go to the thing.
You want to get on the airplane.
You want to go to the place that you've got reservations.
You don't want a positive test.
And so the point is, There is competition to deliver you an answer that you want.
That is going to increase the number of super spreader events.
It's going to increase the amount of COVID, the difficulty of controlling it, the number of variants that are going to circulate around the world.
And if you tried to do it right, you would lose in competition with these folks who have that niche filled, right?
And so... Yeah, this is a place where market forces fail us.
Well, let's put it this way.
They don't have to.
Well, they have.
Right.
Because all of the testing centers within a particular geographic area are in direct competition with one another.
And so that testing center which had access to or did due diligence on actually providing more reliable test results, and thus providing fewer false negatives, would lose in competition.
Would lose in competition.
And there's a question about how far up this scales.
In other words, the system that created the niche, how interested is it in controlling COVID versus appearing to be very active in controlling COVID without bothering?
And, you know, it bears mention that at least One part of this system is making so much money from COVID that it has a perverse incentive, right?
Is the moral decency of the people in charge of pharma so good that it overwhelms their fiscal benefit from not controlling COVID and delivering lousy remedies that are expensive and mandated and paid for by government?
Right?
I don't know, maybe they're exceedingly good people, but- All of them.
All of them, right.
Or, you know- All the time.
Even if you imagine that that's true, alright?
So you have multiple companies.
Let's say 9 out of 10 are run by exceedingly moral people who just would never think of doing- And somehow their boards are cool with it.
Their boards are cool, even though it is a violation of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
But all it takes is the one company that isn't run by those people, one company that's just simply run by business people, right?
And that company will win, and then it will take over the industry.
The basic point is, hey look, you get whatever the niche is, right?
You don't expect, when you pour water into a glass, you don't expect it to inhabit half the glass and leave half the glass empty.
It will fill whatever shape you've given it.
And the point is, the niches are what they are.
The businesses will discover the shape of the niche.
Those that are better able to explore and figure out where the opportunities are that aren't so cool but nonetheless are lucrative, those businesses will win out in competition, and so we get these things.
So check this out, though.
I just read, and I don't think I figured out where it is before our show here today, but I just read that as of tomorrow, as of June 12th, The CDC has declared, and I question why the CDC gets to declare anything, anytime, anywhere, never again, but like, I just don't think they have the authority.
They're not that kind of an agency.
But the CDC has declared that as of June 12th, people coming to the U.S. do not need to have a negative COVID test, which is interesting in light of all of this, that the U.S. is saying, yep, or I don't know if the U.S. is saying, the CDC is saying, or I don't know if the U.S. is saying, the CDC is saying, The thing's changed.
This is no longer a necessary part of the protocol.
Right, which could mean a lot of different things.
It could be, you know, so my claim is that the COVID testing regime is a racket, right?
Yes.
The idea is it looks like a COVID testing regime, but really it's a rubber stamping mechanism where you get, you pay 300 bucks for the rubber stamp.
Um, and the chances that they catch, uh, you know, your active infection are, you know, at least lower than they should be.
It reminds me of getting research permits in, uh, tropical countries back when, back when I was actively doing You didn't have to do it as much because you were often working within a field station that took care of a lot of the logistics for you, but I ended up having to get independent permits in three different countries, in Latin America and Madagascar.
And I mean, you were there for some of the wrangling with bureaucrats in Madagascar.
You know, I got asked for things like, I literally got asked for a Land Rover.
I'm like, at that point, I made $13,000 a year.
I'm like, do I look like I have a Land Rover?
Doesn't hurt to ask.
Doesn't hurt to ask, yeah.
And, you know, one day we were told to come back yet again because the guy with the rubber stamp was gone.
The next day, the guy was there, but the key to the office was with someone else.
And then, like, it just went on and on.
But anyway, yeah, the rubber stamping.
This rubber stamping reminds me of incoherent bureaucratic procedures in very poor countries where local dudes are just trying to make a buck.
Yes.
The problem is, in the Banana Republic's so-called, you can see this, right?
And the irony of the power of the guy with the rubber stamp and the fact that the guy with the rubber stamp makes so little money that it would be impossible.
If somebody's going to extract a million dollars of lumber out of a forest they're not supposed to be cutting lumber from, And the person who has the rubber stamp makes $10,000 a year.
It's not hard to change that guy's picture enough that he'll look the other way.
At least when I was working in Madagascar, that number would have been way lower.
Madagascar was so poor.
Yes, the Land Rover was a very big ask, but I believe in that case I came back with a bottle of Johnny Walker, and that was good.
That was sufficient.
But I wanted to point to a Shinier fancier version of a closely related racket because really my point is you can see it with the COVID thing It's new enough and because we are interacting with it and learning what this system looks like.
It's like oh this couldn't possibly work, right?
But there are other versions of it so one of them that surprised me during the the COVID pandemic Was the discovery of how the testing the safety testing of Pharmaceuticals actually works and you know This is the second time I've encountered weirdness in that realm the first time being about telomeres and mouse evolution, which I will just point out The story there.
I don't want to go too deep because it would take a lot of explaining but I discovered as a graduate student that That the mice in the colonies that supply our scientific establishment, including our drug safety testing apparatus, those mice had evolved to the container formed by the market for laboratory mice.
And so the point was, look, if you're going to breed laboratory mice, you want to produce as many mice per unit of effort and shelter and food as you can.
And that economic pressure to produce New mice as cheaply as possible causes breeders to breed young mice and not old mice.
And that simple fact elongated the telomeres of mice and gave them essentially no protection from tumors and an essentially infinite capacity to replace damaged tissue.
A selective force that effectively moved all of the negative effects of all the drugs that were being tested into later stages of life.
Right.
And so the problem when I discovered that, and I discovered it, I predicted it from theory.
Carol Greider then tested it and established that indeed wild mice did not have long telomeres, which was not obvious at the time.
But the point was when I found that, I naively believed that what would happen next is everybody would go and they would realize that their science was all polluted by the mice they had been using and that their drug safety testing was allowing dangerous drugs to make it to market and there was going to be a massive effort to retest drugs, a massive effort to figure out how this had polluted what we understood about wound healing and aging and cancer and everything else and it didn't happen, right?
Now, I think So why the crickets?
One reason, I believe, is that pharma and everything connected to it realized that it had a mechanism for making drugs that weren't especially safe look very safe.
In fact, if you give a poisonous drug to a mouse that's going to die of cancer but has an infinite capacity for repair, if the poison isn't so poisonous that it kills the mouse outright, it may actually make them live longer because it functions as chemotherapy.
Since cancer cells are in the process of always dividing, they are more vulnerable than regular cells.
And so that is a result I've seen several times where a drug paradoxically makes the animals live longer and seems super great, but the point is no, that won't translate to humans.
Nonetheless, the point is the mice adapted to an economic niche, which has very real biological consequences.
The racket I wanted to point to that isn't particularly visible, right?
The COVID testing racket is visible to us.
The one that surprised me, doesn't surprise me in retrospect, but surprised me when I first came to understand that it existed, was that when we say Pfizer tested its drug for safety, that's generally not what we mean.
Pfizer doesn't test the drug.
What Pfizer does is it contracts Those who specialize in the testing of drugs to do these tests.
And the problem is, if you imagine an outfit that's awesome at testing drugs and detecting safety signals that are really important versus one that sucks at it by design, the point is Pfizer has an interest in finding the one that's going to give it the equivalent of the rubber stamp.
And so there's economic competition, even if Pfizer didn't know what it was doing.
Right?
To the extent that it gives business to those that have a protocol that is most likely to miss safety signals, right?
Then that, it means that Pfizer doesn't have its fingerprints on it.
It means that its drug makes it to market because it looks safer than it is.
And this is especially true in the case where you've got immunity from liability, right?
Because there's no way for the system to come back and correct it.
So the evolution of protocols that don't work That's what you're going to get if the shape of the container is such that it rewards those protocols, which we can see, you know, how many other places are there?
I've now described two, right?
The mouse version is a third.
So how many places has the shape of the container caused us to put together something that looks like a scientific protocol that just doesn't do what it's supposed to do?
The two that you described are the COVID testing COVID testing, the running of clinical trials to see how safe and effective drugs are, where the companies that actually do that work are rewarded for pleasing their employers, right?
Or those who have contracted them.
And then the mouse thing, I believe, happened inadvertently.
I'm all but certain that nobody planned that, but having discovered that it existed, the incentive to get rid of that and get mice that could actually tell you when a drug was dangerous, that incentive wasn't there.
Yeah, no, I mean, certainly in the case of the mice, by far the most parsimonious explanation for how those breeding protocols got started was just simple economics.
Simple economics.
Well, in fact, that is reflected by the fact, when I found that, I went looking because that has nothing to do with mice or science.
What it has to do with is any protocol in a small, it has to be a small animal.
It won't work with a large one because a large one will get cancer and won't live to reproduce.
But in a small enough animal, if you breed for economic efficiency, you get this result.
And so we've seen it in mice, rats, Asian hamsters, chickens.
Mongolian gerbils.
Yeah.
Asian hamsters.
Oh, is that Mongolian gerbils?
Is that the same thing?
I'm agnostic.
Okay, okay.
I know there's just, there's a lot of, anyway, doesn't matter.
There are a few of these, what was the, oh you said chickens?
Chickens, yeah.
So, a few rodents and I guess a bird that- Should happen with- Where we see a species basically being designed with some intentionality to be a good lab animal.
Right.
The intention is to be a good lab animal, and the failure is oops, complex systems, unintended consequences, antagonistic pleiotropies, which is specifically what you found with regard to cancer and senescence, with regard to telomere length.
Which is to say, early effects that are good will emasculate effects that are bad for the same gene.
I mean, you know, the basic point is, look, it should have been obvious that your laboratory colony is an environment every bit as much as a forest or your basement, you know, or a grain silo, right?
And so whatever the forces are in that environment is going to shape that critter because you haven't done anything to reduce the tendency of those in the colony that are better adapted to outcompete those that are worse adapted, so you're going to get exactly... Which, you know, which we, in quotes, took advantage of in doing serial passaging research and, you know, gain-of-function research with regard to, you know, the intention was not
To affect the ferrets there, if it was ferrets or whatever it was, but actually specifically to enhance functionality and through monitoring mutations and choosing which ones we liked in, for instance, viruses.
Right.
So we, at this point, as we selected for, well, presumably, if what we seem to be able to infer from the nature of SARS-CoV-2 is the result of serial passaging in tissues and creatures, presumably in Wuhan,
Those who ran those experiments were serially passaging them to create certain changes, but they inevitably selected for other changes they weren't even thinking about, like adaptation to the laboratory environment, adaptation to be able to jump evolutionary gaps because they were running it through different creatures and tissues.
Potentially adaptation for very rapid change.
Yeah.
Rapid variants, for instance.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'm not sure how to sum all this up except to say that Welcome to Complex Systems.
Our environments will cause anything that has the characteristics of an evolving lineage or creature to find the shape of the niche and inhabit it, which means you need to be, you know, if you did want to fix the testing regime, if you did want to fix Pharma's protocols, what you would have to do is
disincentivize rubber stamp protocols, and incentivize the discovery of information that actually caused dangerous drugs not to emerge, cause people with COVID not to get on airplanes, those things.
And it's not inconceivable that you could build those incentives.
But the problem is that Those with control tend to be those who are benefiting from the structure as it stands.
And so, you know, we saw this week, I believe it was CDC recommending boosters for five-year-olds.
And in fact, the absurdity of this has been described in public, but the basic point was the whole apparatus is set up to deliver that answer, which is why it delivered that answer, despite the fact that there's no real medical argument for it and a very strong argument against it.
And increasingly, actually even hitting the mainstream media, we have higher rates of COVID in fully boosted people than in so-called fully vaccinated people, which are not boosted.
Right.
No, but look, the system is going to evolve.
If you give incentives, you know, CAPTURE will create an incentive for those who are supposedly regulated to generate the equivalent of a rubber stamp upstream of them.
You should not be surprised when that rubber stamp rubber stamps things.
Right?
You should expect that.
And what we are dealing with is a captured system in which the shapes of these niches are all paradoxical because the purpose of those niches isn't to enhance the public's health, it's to do something else, right?
Basically, you get regulators whose purpose is to enhance the well-being of the shareholders of the corporations that have captured the regulators, right?
Not surprising, right?
Maddening, but not surprising.
Indeed.
Well, I think that wraps it up for today.
We are going to be back next week at our normal time, and we will have a full Q&A then, so hold your questions until then.
In the meantime, we will have a new episode out with Brett hosting a guest on Tuesday, and for a number of Tuesdays to come.
And this last week, we forgot to say at the top of the hour, the Robert Malone episode.
Yes, the Robert Malone episode.
The new Robert Malone episode.
Again, one he recorded in England.
And I'm not sure what is going to be this Tuesday, but another great conversation that you had in England.
Right.
You can find the Robert Malone one on Spotify.
The Dark Horse channel on Spotify.
Yeah, because on YouTube.
You can't handle the truth.
Yeah, that's it.
That's pretty much where we are.
So, again, we encourage you to, if you liked this conversation, share it.
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