In this 138th 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 what fatwas and cancel culture have in common. Why are we allowing zealots to decide what we can say and do by fiat? The circuitry of religion has an ancient history (even when it goes off the rails, as in the attack on Salman Rushdie); it is being hijacked by a secular cult. This new cult is tar...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 138.
We are your dark horses in a residence.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
We have suffered a technological malfunction but have recovered splendidly, I will say.
Oh, so splendid.
Splendidly.
I was going to warn people that although I feel great, I have a lingering cough from whatever it is that got me, which tested three times negative for COVID, so I don't think it was COVID.
But anyway, a lingering cough.
Please bear with us if I end up coughing in the middle of a concept, and dial up your level of inference.
You may be able to finish my thought for me in your head.
I know that sounds crazy, but it can happen.
And with that, let us orient the audience to where we are headed.
We are going to talk today about authoritarians, and fiats, and science and scientific misconduct, and organizations that say that they exist to provide accurate data and not to propose policy, and yet manage to sneak in the ideology du jour into what they write and produce.
And it causes a person, a thinking person, I think, to wonder what actually is possible, like how
How ideology-free, how opinion-free, how feelings-free, if you will, can factual representation of currently understood-to-be-true things be in 2022, when social media in large part, although there are many other factors as well, is working hard to make it very difficult to know what is true and what's not?
Are we still live, Zach?
We're good.
Okay.
All right.
So, you... Go ahead.
Okay.
I don't know what's going on.
I just have to check in.
Zach, we got a lot of glitchy stuff here on our screen.
Don't worry about stuff on your screen.
That means nothing at all.
Okay.
So probably to the relief of some people listening right now, we're not going to be back next Saturday.
We are not going to be here.
There will be another podcast that Brett is doing with a guest that will be up at the same time, so that will keep you thinking, hopefully.
And we will be doing a live Q&A after today's stream, if the technology allows.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We are live on both Odyssey and YouTube as far as I know.
The chat is live on Odyssey at the moment.
We have some cool stuff for sale at darkhorsestore.org where you can find various products like Epic Tabbies and Dire Wolves and Jabs.
At Pfizer, yes, and YouTube and other things.
I always encourage you to find our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and to find Natural Selections, which is my sub stack, where I have weekly-ish postings on various topics that are widely dispersed in topic, but like what we talk about here on Dark Horse.
Basically, if it evolved, it's fair game, and that includes just about everything.
And we even talk about some things that don't evolve.
We occasionally talk about rocks, but not very often.
Quasars.
Yeah, I don't think we've ever talked about quasars.
I have.
On Dark Horse?
Soda Vocha, you know.
Yeah, I don't think you have.
I think you're just trying to come up with things that don't evolve, which of course, yes, that's true of quasars, but I don't think we've ever talked about them here.
All right, folks, if you remember where it is that I mentioned quasars.
Soda voce or not.
Soda voce or otherwise, please feel free to introduce that information into our sphere in the comments or wherever.
Yes.
Okay, so we are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channel, liking, sharing both our full episodes on YouTube and Odyssey, and of course the clips at Dark Horse Podcast Clips.
And we encourage anyone who can afford to, to support us not just by sharing our work, but also by contributing to our Patreons.
Where within a few minutes of us finishing here today, I will set up the question asking period on my Patreon for our private monthly Q&A, which is a lot of fun.
It's smaller than these chats with our live streams, and so we actually get to interact with the chat.
Brett just had a conversation on his Patreon this morning, which I assume, as always, went really well.
I believe it did.
We are dialing in a model for the ad mixture between acting and planning.
Acting and planning.
All right.
And at both of our Patreons, you can get access to our Discord community, where there's a lively community of people who do not have any intention of canceling you for having opinions that are different from theirs.
And they do things like book clubs and virtual karaoke, and are actually planning a real-life meetup.
They've done a couple, but a real-life meetup in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the I have an error correction.
Several sentences ago, I said, between acting and planning.
That's not what I meant.
It falsely represents the coalition of the reasonable group.
Okay.
Acting and preparing, that is to say, for future action.
Okay.
All right.
I feel better now.
Do you?
A little.
So, at the Discord community, you... I'm just going to stop.
Okay.
Do you have any more corrections?
We'll see.
We do encourage you to join that community and to join us on our Patreons.
This is going to be a tough day, clearly.
I am going to start with our sponsors for the week, for which we are very, very, very grateful.
This is the wrong set of papers.
I have no one to blame for that but myself.
Okay, now I have the correct set of papers.
We have three sponsors as usual, and we do not run ads for products that we don't actually vouch for.
So we really do feel extraordinarily positive about Thesis, Ned, and MD Hearing Aid, our three sponsors for this week.
Our first sponsor this week is new to us this summer, and it is Thesis.
Thesis makes no tropics.
Nope.
Nootropics.
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Okay, our second sponsor this week is Ned, a CBD company that stands out in a highly saturated CBD market.
Ned was started by two friends who discovered that their hyper-modern lives were leaving them feeling, quote, empty, bewildered, and disconnected.
Something about this way of life, they say on their website, just wasn't working.
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Their de-stress blend in particular really impressed us.
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Cinnamom.
That's not actually how you say that, but I'm going to go with it.
It could catch on.
It could catch on?
What did you say?
It could catch on.
CPG is known as the mother of all cannabinoids, and because of how effective it is at combating anxiety and stress by inhabiting the reuptake of GABA, the neurotransmitters responsible for stress regulation.
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So perhaps our technical difficulties are in the rearview mirror.
That would be great.
That would be great.
And we are ready to discuss some of the topics of the day.
It has been a strange week in the world.
Wow.
And also in our world.
And so we have a number of things we might want to say something about.
And if this makes sense, I was thinking that you might lead us off.
By talking a little bit about what has happened to Salman Rushdie.
Yes, what has happened to Salman Rushdie is I think shocking to every thinking person and at another level it's something which has a history leading up to it of 33 years.
Salman Rushdie was attacked this week prior my understanding is to giving a talk in New York and he was gravely injured.
I believe he is expected to survive but might lose an eye and has serious damage which will impact him from here on through his life.
This is presumably the result of a fatwa issued 33 years ago by Ayatollah Khomeini based on the fact that he had apparently delivered an offense to Allah
In the satanic versus a book of fiction that he he penned and he has lived under that threat courageously for all of those decades and I learned in looking into that fatwa that apparently there is a monetary reward for Offered.
It was increased in 2012 several million dollars.
Yeah.
That has been offered for a person who eliminates him.
It was never lifted and several of the translators of his work into other languages were attacked.
And I believe a couple of them were killed.
So, you know, even translating the work is deemed worthy of, is deemed a mortal offense.
Yes, and although the Iranian government has distanced itself from the Fatwa, the monetary reward was raised by a semi-official entity connected.
So this is really a fundamental question about how the world is to be run, what is within the purview of a nation-state, and what is not.
It is also well worth noting, as many people have, That there is some comparison to be made between this violent act and cancel culture.
And of course, one comparison that could be made is that cancel culture, in which you are simply stigmatized and ostracized and maybe driven from your chosen profession, is certainly preferable to being attacked by a knife-wielding madman.
But there is a way in which this is a difference in degree, but not in kind.
These are both instances in which people are preferring a system in which what may be said and what may not be said is dictated by some authority and that those limits should guide discourse and be severely punished when they are violated.
And there is an alternative, of course, which is the alternative upon which the West is based, in which individuals are free to think and to say essentially anything.
Now, of course, there are limits worth talking about, but in the realm of ideas, in the realm of narratives, should you be free to express anything and be challenged if what you have said is Vile or dangerous but not be silenced.
And of course this is in one way counterintuitive because Everyone who believes that certain things are right in whatever way things can be right and other things are wrong would, of course, prefer a world of the rightness flourishing and the wrongness being absent.
But the problem is, as the American founders correctly realized, the truth is counterintuitive.
That even though most ideas that are expressed are probably at best valueless and very frequently wrong and sometimes downright dangerous, The most dangerous thing is an environment in which you cannot express ideas that are not sanctioned, because that is a world in which there can be no progress.
That is a world frozen in some state.
It's the frozenness, really, which I think is what many people who think that free speech should go by the wayside are not recognizing.
It is also the height of hubris.
It is an arrogance that comes of imagining that now, finally, after however long it is that you want to keep track of in the past, finally we have arrived at a moment of perfect understanding.
And whereas we can all look back on previous moments and say, oh, weren't they confused?
Weren't they small-minded?
Weren't they ignorant?
Didn't they not know the things that we know now?
It imagines that we are now omnipotent and omniscient, and that we have full possession of not just the knowledge, but also the power, and therefore that we want the full possession of the power to make sure that everyone who doesn't yet see things as clearly as we do can be forced to be relegated to basically be our underlings.
So I wanted to try to put this in context of a model that long-time listeners of Dark Horse will have interacted with many times in many different contexts.
In the comparison between fatwa culture and cancel culture, you could view them as distinct and one preferable over the other.
Or you could view them as the same thing in a different form.
But the purpose is to make sure that what is accepted is accepted by fiat rather than by some process in which we all participate.
And here's the thing that I think needs to be explored.
One of these is obviously religious, right?
It is by religious authority that the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was issued.
And the other of these is nominally secular.
Yes.
That is the wrong way to think about it, though.
It is true at a factual level, but it is untrue at a deeper level.
And what I would argue is that we come, all of us, irrespective of what lineages we emerge from, we all come from a world of religious authority.
Every lineage has that feature up until some point at the least, and some of them continue to have it.
Those religious authorities are the result of an evolutionary process.
And what I've argued many times and I'm going to argue here again is that you cannot found a religion in the same way that you cannot write a myth.
You can write a narrative.
And then selection can act upon narratives, throwing out almost all of them relatively quickly after they are written, preserving a few that have some kind of value, and then honing them and turning them into durable myths.
Yes.
And the same thing can be said of a religion.
You cannot found a religion.
You can found something that functions on those modalities, which I would say is correctly understood to be a cult.
And then a very tiny fraction of those cults turns out to have some sort of durability, lasting power, and capacity to, in some way or other, enhance the lives of believers and adherents.
Yeah, and cult always has a negative valence to it, a negative connotation.
But if we try to put that aside for the moment, what you're arguing is that a story with staying power can become myth, a cult with staying power can become religion.
But at its origin, neither a story nor a cult has the capacity to, at once, at its inception, call itself either myth or religion.
Right.
I apologize.
So what I'm getting at, I agree with the point about the negative valence.
I think we need to stop having a negative valence for cults and stories.
And we need to think about them in terms of the chances that that one is a durable one are very, very low.
So our skepticism of both things, right?
A story can be entertaining, but what are the chances that a story is valuable?
Well, if we know nothing about the content of the story, it's very low.
And the same thing for a cult.
What is the chance that that set of beliefs and traditions is more beneficial than it is harmful to adherence?
Chances are very, very low.
But, you know, all the religions of the world that have succeeded in protecting a population and facilitating its flourishing have started there.
And all the myths have started as just stories as well.
So, Yeah, I do.
I think we need different words, though, because cult does also mean something, you know, different and specific.
And there are plenty of stories that don't have the capacity to turn into myth.
So it's, I would say this is an imprecise mapping.
Well, I don't think so, but I think it does require extra precision to get there because somebody who imbues a cult with the capacity to advise that person as if it were a religion that has withstood the test of time
The negative connotation of the term cult comes from the fact that you wouldn't say that a book that contained a description of a potential, a candidate religion was itself dangerous.
It is the adherence to it.
That is to say, people who ascribe it Uh, with that kind of potential, uh, that kind of value in the present before it has stood the test of time and before it has been refined by selection in any way are making an error.
They are, um, treating something with the capacity to advise that it doesn't, it is not yet known to have.
That's fair.
I don't think that addresses the question of how, I mean, I just, I wasn't, I'm not prepared for this conversation.
I'm not remembering the various technical definitions that have been proposed for what makes a thing a cult as opposed to some other small organization.
And I think that there are characteristics of cults that are not inherently found in religion.
Well, so what I, the part that's important for the argument, That I'm making is that the value of these things has never been in their factual accuracy, right?
And this has tripped up secularists who look at the factual inaccuracy of many of these belief systems and imagine it to invalidate the whole project rather than saying actually factual accuracy was never the point.
what the point is prescriptive.
How should you behave?
And because these traditions, the ones that have withstood the test of time, I'm not arguing that any individual one is good or bad.
There may be some that are pure bad.
Probably all of them have components of both.
But the point is, as I've argued many times, a literally false, metaphorically true idea is one that if you behave as if it was true, you do better than you would if you behaved according to the fact that it is false. you do better than you would if you behaved according And so in this framework, you have the ability to hand down ideas, ideas that may be factually in conflict with the evidence, hand,
have people behave as if it is not in conflict with the evidence, and for some reason do better.
Now, what I'm arguing is that cancel culture is doing exactly this.
Cancel culture, wokeness, is strangely indifferent to the fact that what it claims is factually true is so deeply in conflict with what is well understood already.
And observable by simple means.
Simple means, right.
And so, I think again, this is tripping.
We who are highly skeptical of the woke revolution are in some ways tripped up the way scientific secularists are tripped up by religious claims that are obviously not right, like the earth is 6,000 years old, right?
Secularists are often Well, obviously it's not 6,000 years old, therefore it is invalid.
Oh, so by tripped up you mean we find the obvious falsehood and we say, that's all you need.
That's all you need to know.
Yeah, we're done.
We're done here.
Clearly, this makes no sense.
These people aren't serious.
They're not paying attention to reality.
Therefore, can we just stop already?
Right.
It has been often discussed that that is actually not the right way to dissuade people who believe a thing with rationality and logic in the face of a firmly held belief.
But I think you're coming at it from a slightly different perspective.
You're saying that this is ineffective in understanding what it is because we're stopping too soon in our analysis of it.
Right.
We are like people who want to drag a geologist to a creationist and say, Show them the strata!
Right, show them the strata, show them just how long-lived the thing is, and then they'll understand that that thing they believe in is wrong.
And the point is, factual accuracy about the nature of the dirt was never the point, right?
Where the universe came from was never the point.
Where people came from was never the point.
The point was always, how should you behave?
Now, the dangerous thing here, and the thing I want to distinguish, right?
Obviously, if I have to pick between fatwas and stabbings and being maligned on Wikipedia, obviously I prefer the latter, right?
The one, the ancient version, is at least about something.
Now again, I'm not defending anything about it.
It is absolutely vile that somebody stabbed Solomon Rushdie.
You're trying to explain it the same way you have tried to explain the Nazis.
Well, yes, but I'm also saying there is something, the fact that cancel culture has some analogy In the sense that it wants to fiat belief, that it wants to fiat beliefs that are in conflict with factual evidence and is completely indifferent to the comparison between the two.
Yeah.
Is about the fact that this is some sort of brand new cult, right?
It has two things going against it.
One of them is it wants perfectly dangerous, insane things and it is in no way tested by any process.
Right?
So the point is, it's like somebody came up with this bullshit and now wants to hand it down with the authority of God.
And the point is, the authority of God is not about a deity.
The authority of God is about the test of time.
And no time has passed here, right?
So what we're watching is a cult of some kind of power structure, some kind of power structure that wants the right to alter the most fundamental things about civilization on the basis of beliefs that are completely wrong, but it hasn't even demonstrated that it knows anything that would allow it to last a decade, right?
Nothing at all.
This is actually highly relevant to one of the things I wanted to talk about, which I could insert here or I could hold off.
It's your call.
Let me just insert one of the things that I was hoping to talk about.
out, it's going to feel very not in keeping, but I know that you're going to be able to return to this.
I ran into this story this week, Zach.
What is the tampon tax?
$20.
28 states do not charge sales tax on menstrual products.
This is on a site called usafacts.org, which is a site I had never heard of before, which if you look, we're just gonna, we're gonna try to Look at what they say they believe.
Principles.
USA Facts believes that facts deserve to be heard.
Democracy is only successful when it's grounded in truth.
We're here to provide that grounding with trusted government data that's both easy to access and understand.
We standardize data straight from government agencies and present in plain language with helpful visualization so you can understand the history of programs and policies.
Okay, and they say a number of things here about being comprehensive, understandable, factual and unbiased, contextual.
I don't know about people-centric.
I don't know what they are claiming there.
And it's started by a former CEO of Microsoft, current owner of the LA Clippers.
I don't know why that's relevant, but you always see those two things together with regard to this guy.
Oops, I lost the, oops, take away my screen for a second sec.
Thank you.
So the original article here that got me to this site, what is the tampon text, begins with this sentence.
About a quarter of the U.S.
population are women in the 15 to 49 age group, and while not everyone in the group needs menstrual products, footnote, it's an essential part of life for many.
So just before I go to that footnote, I will say the question is one that may not be of interest to many of our listeners and viewers, but it is a question about if you are one of the, you know, half of Americans who at some point in your life are likely to end up needing menstrual products, And this is something that is necessary that you did not choose, that is just part of what your life is, should that thing be taxed, right?
And so that's what these data are being collated to address, like which states do, which states don't.
But this footnote, not everyone in the group needs menstrual products.
The group, again, being women in the 15 to 49 age group.
Footnote 1, well, it turns out these people don't know how to write footnotes because footnote 1 is irrelevant, but it's actually footnote 3 that they mean here.
Wow, that's tiny, too.
For those of you looking, you can now see it says, women outside of this age group and people of any gender who menstruate may also need these products.
Now, again, this is on a site, USAFacts.org, that has described itself, and indeed I will find here the Washington Post interview of this guy, Steve Ballmer.
Zach, you can show my screen again if you want.
The Washington Post interview of the guy who founded USAFacts, this is an interview from 2017, it says again, the former chief executive of Microsoft and the current owner of the LA Clippers, he describes himself here as a pro-facts partisan.
Okay, so he's trying to be clever here.
He's a pro-facts partisan.
So on this site, which describes itself as many ways as it can think to as being about facts, not about opinions, not about caring about your feelings, not about, you know, choosing an ideology, it has snuck in to the footnote of this article, the idea that You are a woman if you say you're a woman, and that is going to mean that we can no longer talk about, basically, menstrual products being only for women.
And it feels to me that this is very much precisely, if I may, Zach, precisely about the same kind of thing that you are talking about here, with regard to sneaking in ideas that are just bald-faced against what everyone can see, right?
What you, how you feel, how you want to dress, how you want to present.
So some people won't agree with this, but it's all good.
But then claiming that how you feel and how you want to dress makes you the thing that you're not.
And therefore causes a site that claims to be about facts and is being, you know, was started and led by so-called pro-facts partisan to tie themselves in knots writing footnotes that make no sense at all.
is a sign that we are not in a reality-based universe at this point.
It is exactly that, that we are not in a reality-based universe.
And what I was going to argue as part of this model is that we talk about these things as virtue signaling.
I'm going to argue that there is certainly an element of that, signaling your virtue to people.
What these really are, though, more fundamentally, is shibboleths.
They are Shibboleths, yes.
They are Shibboleths.
And so imagine for a second that a cult- A Shibboleth being a word that the pronunciation of which can identify whether or not you are of this or another tribe.
Right.
So, the basic point is the word Shibboleth itself is arbitrarily, the correct pronunciation is arbitrary.
And somebody who has just learned your language, you know, a spy, may be able to read it and pronounce it in some way.
But among the various ways, you know, Shibaleth, Shiboleth, whatever you might say.
Sepulveda.
Sepulveda.
My favorite one for whether or not you're actually from Los Angeles or not.
Sepulveda.
But it reveals that you're not one of us.
And the point really is, Those of us, you know, us who are playing the role of the secularists here looking at the woke going, wait a second, what you just said is so wrong.
I can, I can explain to you exactly why it's wrong.
And we're completely missing the boat.
And the point is really the wrong or the better, because what you want, if you're going to inflict this stuff on doctors, for example, right, you want 17 things that doctors now have to say that they all know aren't true.
So that somebody who's not really with you and is just hoping this will blow over.
Reveals themselves, right?
You only want the people who are, you know, will do anything to stay in, and therefore will sign up for whatever nonsense you've decided is medically sophisticated.
I think I lost track.
Who's the you here?
Which side is the you on?
If you are the revolution, Like the woke revolution.
Well, woke is one version of this, but if you are the revolution that is going to use fiat to hand down, here is how you are to behave.
Salman Rushdie, he is not an acceptable human being anymore.
You are to accept that he is no longer acceptable and that that has certain consequences.
You are to accept that these treatments are safe and effective, right?
JK Rowling is no longer an acceptable human being.
Right, if you are going to accept the handed down from on high conclusion about who's in and who's out and what's true and what's false and how we are to behave, right?
That's the point, is that this is either one or several cults Haven't passed the test of time that are now behaving with the authority to make us subscribe and anybody who doesn't subscribe is Cast out is punished all sorts of things happen to them.
So some sort of secular equivalent of a fatwa and People therefore who don't get cast out increasingly are Accumulating beliefs it at odds with the basic facts of reality, right?
How can that be right?
Well, I This is how that can be.
And I would argue that in one sense, the secularists are again, in some ways, at fault here.
Because what's happened is it's this phenomenon, apparently various people have said this, the religion shaped whole.
To the extent that it is true that religion is a product of evolution.
That its purpose is not to tell you how the universe works, but to tell you how to behave.
It is a narrative structure that comes with prescriptive recipes for well-being.
And that the stories that come along with it are at odds with the facts either because those who wrote those stories didn't have access to the facts, right?
Or because the purpose is to be at odds with the facts in order to figure out who's on board and who isn't.
So what we are dealing with is a bunch of cults that are using an architecture built into the human mind, right?
The desire to have somebody tell me how it is that I should behave in a confusing world.
And if that somebody is an ancient tradition that has passed the test of time, then there will be at least some wisdom in the prescriptions of how to behave.
Not in the facts, as they are described, but in the what you're supposed to do.
The thou shalt and thou shalt nots will carry wisdom.
That is not the case for some brand new cult that is handing down pseudo-wisdom and nonsense stories by fiat, backed by threat.
Right?
That's where we are.
Well, it's not inherently the case.
So your point is, if it's ancient and it has persisted, there is very likely to be some wisdom there.
If it is modern, and therefore it has not stood any test of time, that is all we know.
It has not stood a test of time, and therefore the near certainty that there is some wisdom therein is much lower.
Well, I'm going to go a step further and I realize you are correctly repeating back an argument that I just made a few minutes ago that we have to be indifferent as to whether or not it will stand the test of time.
In the case of the modern cults, I don't think we do.
These particular active cults that are using this religious modality to feed us prescriptions by fiat power because there is science.
And we are able to look at the things that we have been told about what we must do, and we are able to evaluate the question of whether or not they did function to our benefit, right?
So, for example, the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness, which we were handed by Fiat.
These vaccines are safe and effective, right?
Follow the science.
That's what we were told.
Now, we can see that story coming apart.
And so the fact that we have been handed something that caused people to harm themselves or to take risks that they didn't need to take.
Why were children vaccinated with these things?
If they stood effectively, no, a healthy child stood effectively, no risk from COVID.
Why would they accept a treatment that would expose them to significant risk?
In this case, what we have is an early ability.
The test of time has already proven these things false, I guess is what I'm saying.
In some cases.
I mean, I think it's too easy to go like, okay, well, here we're talking about this one, here we're talking about this one.
This is already falsified.
Sure, we got lots of these things.
They're already falsified with varying degrees of the recognition of that falsification.
I will say, though, to interject, again, one of the things that I wanted to get to, ultimately, is that the CDC has updated its COVID guidelines.
And so let us just talk about that a little bit here since you raised it.
NPR reports.
NPR reports on Twitter.
Who knew?
They say, the update isn't a huge overhaul of the existing guidance, but it does represent an increasing focus on individuals making their own decisions about their level of risk and how they want to mitigate that risk, said Dr. Marcus Plessia, Chief Medical Officer for... I didn't look up what that is.
So NPR's summary of the CDC's updated guidelines, and I'll show you the actual CDC guidelines shortly.
The summary has four bullet points.
Those exposed to the virus are no longer required to quarantine.
Unvaccinated people now have the same guidance as vaccinated people.
Students can stay in class after being exposed to the virus, and it's no longer recommended to screen those without symptoms.
The second bullet point is the doozy, right?
Unvaccinated people now have the same guidance as vaccinated people.
Well, isn't it obvious then that hidden in that bullet point is, we recognize that effectively you are the same.
That these things for which so many people's lives have been destroyed, and I'm not even talking about the vaccine injured, I'm talking about those who have resisted and therefore have lost opportunities, have lost jobs, have lost family, have lost friends, have lost all of these things.
Or now it's going to just quietly slip in.
Oh, by the way, it's fine.
Never mind.
Not even an R-Bad, though.
Not even an R-Bad.
Hold on.
Let me put up the actual CDC document.
Let me put it up in the PDF form, though, so I can show.
So here's the CDC document that It's in, yeah.
This is from August 11th, a couple days ago.
CDC's Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Healthcare Systems, United States, August 2022.
They, of course, put out a lot of these things.
This is the most recent one, and if we scroll down to see, Vaccines and Therapeutics to Reduce Medically Significant Illness.
Let me just make this a little bit bigger for those reading along at home, except that doesn't really work.
Yeah, that doesn't really work, so I'm just gonna have to, you're just gonna have to squint.
COVID-19 vaccination.
They start by saying COVID-19 vaccines are highly protective against severe illness and death and provide a lesser degree of protection against asymptomatic and mild infection.
Then, receipt of a primary series alone, in the absence of being up-to-date with vaccination through receipt of all recommended booster doses, provides minimal protection against infection and transmission.
Being up-to-date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.
That is a huge admission.
And it's not that suddenly there's a lot of new data out, or there's a lot of new analysis of existing data.
No.
These are things that we have known, and I don't know what prompted this report now, but what we are seeing is
We, the CDC, are going to put out a report that allows those organizations who have been listening to us as if we are the law, which they are not, to start treating the unvaccinated like full people again, while acknowledging that actually these vaccines What do they say?
Provide minimal protection, and provide a transient period of increased protection, which wanes over time.
So, I agree with the interpretation that you put on it.
This is a tacit admission.
Yes.
Right?
What it functions as, though, the whole point, and again, longtime viewers and listeners of Dark Horse will remember discussions in which we talk about the fact That sometimes the correct narrative emerges in the end.
But what must not happen from the point of view of these power players is that they must not vindicate those who were right about it at the time.
So they do not go back and clean up the record.
This is a perfect example of that.
And I would say that what they are doing Maybe Catholics will bristle at this.
But, you know, again, this is not an attack on Catholics.
What they're doing, though, is effectively doing this by encyclical.
Right?
They are simply updating the wisdom from the Oracle.
Right?
The person with the connection to God is telling us what the new wisdom on the vaccines is.
And the new wisdom on the vaccines is that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are equivalent now.
Right?
They are not saying, actually, our old story fell apart so violently that we are forced to backtrack.
And you, by the way, probably ought to figure out who was right about that in the first place and start listening to them because they had us beat from the get-go.
They will never say that.
No, they will not.
So, what they are doing is simply updating the guidance.
And you're only supposed to care.
Yeah.
about the immediate belief structure of the thing that hands down the instructions by Fiat.
That's why the encyclical works here.
And, again, it is because whatever it is that has captured the CDC is functioning to create something that fits a religion-shaped hole.
A religion-shaped hole is not about figuring the truth of the universe, it's about figuring out what am I to do?
Right?
And what am I to do is, oh, I am now to start treating the vaccinated and unvaccinated equally, which of course you should have done all along, right?
What's more, it lags the reality, right?
It does not pay any attention to the accumulating evidence that in fact these vaccines have been harmful Right?
Have actually crippled people's immunity.
It completely ignores the fact that even the data that they use to argue that these things have some substantial effect that, yes, wanes over time, ignores the fact that they create a vulnerability when you're first given them.
Right.
So this is all, you know, coming down this is this is Oh, by the way, there's a burning bush on that mountaintop over there.
And I spoke with it.
And I came down with the new wisdom about how it is that we are to behave.
And you're never going to believe this.
But I know that we were, we were busy scorning and throwing out of our homes and our theaters, The unvaccinated, but as of now, we're going to stop doing that.
Yeah, right?
Yeah, we encourage you to stop doing that.
And you know, I was for a while on a weekly basis checking with, for instance, the local theater companies, you know, who's going to let us in?
And I just I gave up a couple months ago.
I was like, I'm done.
You know, these people are insane, and they don't understand anything about reality or science.
And they're just never going to let people who didn't take the jabs back in.
And it turns out that quietly without, you know, without some of us noticing, I just got told yesterday, oh, yeah, actually, at least here in Portland, Oregon, suddenly, most of these places are letting in the unvaccinated, aren't checking, aren't asking for negative tests.
All of it.
And, you know, again, the question that, you know, I'm stuck on, and I know that this is exactly part of what you were talking about.
Like, I'm stuck on, like, what changed?
What happened, guys?
What happened in your own head?
And for the most part, people don't operate that way.
You know, I want to know what happened, and I want accountability, and I want some damn apologies at the societal level, and I want this to never happen again.
And instead, what we see is, well, what the CDC said, but oh, well, it's just a...
A lot of mumbling and a lot of like footnotes and whereas, just if you would put on my screen for a moment, Zach, again, a tweet from someone I don't know.
I don't know who this is.
Politically homeless too, is what they call themselves.
A thread regarding the news of the CDC's new guidelines in no particular order.
I was not allowed to volunteer at my kids' schools for over a year because I wasn't vaccinated.
A family refused to carpool with us because they said they were uncomfortable with their son sharing a car with us.
We had been ratted out by a mutual friend who said to the other mom, well, you do know they aren't vaccinated, right?
We were uninvited to Good Friends to share a vacation house with them.
A long-standing tradition was ended over medical choice.
They all got COVID anyway, of course.
My daughter couldn't attend a theater production with her school's theater company because Denver Center rules.
50% of the restaurants and many businesses in our neighborhood were off-limits to us.
I won't forget which ones.
I'm just going to read this because we don't have any of these precise stories, but it's a freaking match for so many people's experience.
We had to eat ice-cold lunches out of a backpack huddled outside with frozen hands when we skied at Vail Resort because we weren't allowed inside the lodges.
I could never get warm.
I bailed on the rest of the season after just two days of my pass.
Wasn't worth it.
I wasn't allowed to stay in a hotel or eat in any restaurant for a work trip to DC.
I had to cancel altogether as it made travel there impossible.
My husband, having trained already for six months, was banned from participating in an Iron Man event.
A group of his friends told him over text that he was endangering them and their families and they told him he couldn't stay in the Airbnb with them for a trip they had been planning.
They no longer speak to him.
I was called a conspiracy theorist by dear friends and was left in the dust by them socially.
I would have given one of my kidneys to these friends.
They cut me off after a vax that didn't stop transmission or infection.
My teens experienced unbelievable amounts of stress.
We didn't book a trip.
I was disinvited.
My husband was fired.
So yes, and it goes on and on.
I lied to some of that.
So yes, I am seething a bit right now, having read the CDC's new guidance, knowing that this is what the guidance should have been all along, minus the ridiculous masking.
I want apologies, and I want assurances that this won't happen again.
I know that won't come, though.
This that thread speaks for a tremendous number of people and Those, even those who became skeptical, who didn't get boosted, who did their first shot or first two shots and then said, no, actually no more, I'm not seeing it.
This set of experiences is invisible to a majority of Americans, at least, and I think in most of the weird world.
And that invisibility means it is more likely to be able to happen again.
Yes.
I, of course, share exactly your sense of ire and your desire for an apology, because of course an apology would involve some power to prevent it from happening again.
Yes, you could reference the apology.
Exactly none of that has been conveyed here.
Right.
Of course, again, that is perfectly predictable that it would go through this.
So the real question is, those of us in our position, how do we push the point and say, not good enough, not nearly good enough.
And here's the never again problem.
We had a system in which reality was arrived at through processes, journalistic processes, dialectic processes, scientific processes.
That's how Western civilization works.
They bypassed the entire thing.
They decapitated it, and they handed us down directly as if they had gone up a mountain and talked to a fucking burning bush.
They handed us directly, you know, as if from God, here is the things you are to believe and to act upon.
They were wrong, they did tremendous harm, and they brutally punished those of us who stood up and said, you couldn't possibly know what you're saying.
The mechanisms to know do not exist.
You are lying if you are claiming to know these things because you couldn't.
Even if your conclusions had been accurate, you are lying in claiming that you can know these things when they claimed to know them because they couldn't possibly have known them at the time.
And I love the metaphor of decapitation here, because then what they did is they took the head, no longer attached to the system of science, to the dialectic, to the process by which we actually come to understand truth, and they stuck it on a stick, and they put it in front of us and had it jaw off at us.
And a lot of people believed it, said, okay, that talking head Well, and they also used a childish, cartoonish mechanism built into the minds of many people to trigger this.
I mean, remember how Anthony Fauci became Anthony Fauci to all of us in the public who didn't know who he was?
Right.
He was the guy who had his head in his hands next to Trump listening to, you know, Trump be unscientific at the podium.
Yeah, it happens.
Trump got some stuff right and he got some stuff wrong.
But the fact is, Anthony Fauci was visually in the minds of people the mental alternative to Trump, which is why he was imbued with Well, no, and it was also, as it turns out, as you just said, Trump got some stuff right and he got some stuff wrong.
As COVID was emerging in that spring of 2020, and he was, Trump was being his usual blustering, off-the-cuff, pain-in-the-ass, you know, bombast.
It was really easy to think, oh my god, if only we had someone who knew what they were doing, and you could see some of the stuff that he was just getting wrong, and some of the stuff's like, no, could you not, right?
And so to have someone who appeared to have You know, the premature of science and of history and of sobriety and of, you know, just he was there on his own recognizance and he knew what he was doing.
To be in that sort of face plant, like, oh, I'm so dismayed to be working for this man.
It felt like the antidote.
And because it was easy for many people to think, If not for Trump, we'd have this thing kicked.
We'd know what to do, and this would be over already.
Obviously, it was going to be Fauci was the answer.
Right.
And that visual impression of the sober, scientific, dweeby, but highly competent alternative to the bombast who reads stuff on the internet and can't keep it to himself, right?
That thing was architected, and it just so happens that the sober alternative happened to be a guy, one of a tiny number of people central to the process of bypassing the gain-of-function research ban and offshoring the work to the very lab that likely released this thing.
Right?
It's almost beyond, it's so preposterous, it's almost beyond plausible.
No, you would have taken a few of those characteristics out of the screenplay, because it would have been too much.
It's too much.
It's too cartoonish.
It's too much.
But, I mean, actually, can we play the video of Anthony Fauci?
We're watching a video of Anthony Fauci earlier this week at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Center in Seattle, speaking kind of off the cuff.
It's interesting.
Well, you can't hear him, so let me tell you what he said. you can't hear him, so let me tell you what Okay.
It's only, it's like a 50-second thing.
Yeah, it's a 50-second thing.
Most people have probably seen it already, but... Please tell them what they said without actually adopting his voice or his mannerisms.
I'm not sure that I can recover from that.
Oh, okay.
Okay, we're going to try it again.
again.
It's in the middle.
It's still well working.
Alright, skip it.
Sorry about that.
Anthony Fauci, and I will not imitate him for- Marital reasons.
For marital reasons, because I don't know if what he's got is contagious, but anyway- I just would never be able to look at you the same way.
What he effectively says with obvious- Glee.
Glee, delight, pride, all of the, you know, I don't know how many sins are involved, but- I don't think there's any gluttony.
I'm sure there is.
But anyway, oh, the dude, you know, he's diminutive, but he cuts a fine figure.
But anyway, what does the man say?
He says that apparently there's something dubbed the Fauci effect.
So far as I can tell, he dubbed it the Fauci effect, but something called the Fauci effect in which people are applying to medical school because his scientific competent Blah, blah, blah.
Modality has inspired them to take up medicine by his model or something like this.
Because, he says, I, Fauci, symbolize integrity and truth.
Not to me, he doesn't.
I know.
I just looked up the little blurb.
What actually does he say?
The Fauci effect, more and more people going to medical school, he claims, is because he symbolizes integrity and truth.
I'm paraphrasing here.
In this era of misinformation, he invokes January 6th.
Yeah, he invokes a range of things from January 6th to whatever.
It's true, yeah.
My god, it's been, I mean really, it's like, it's 52 seconds.
It's quite a thing.
And he really crams a lot in there.
It's the equal of that one where he said that he was science.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know, it's so much the man, you know, the wizard behind the curtain.
But anyway, point being, This is the structure that decapitated the thing that we, the messy thing that we used to have that figured out what was true medically speaking and what wasn't true and what to do about it.
They just supplanted the whole thing.
They got between your doctor and your pharmacist, something that is unprecedented, right?
And they just started handing down These encyclicals that change the behavior of our entire medical establishment.
And anyway, I wanted to point out a couple things about this, right?
So they're functioning in a religious modality.
They've, I would argue, tapped into the religion-shaped whole issue that is especially open for those people who are secular.
Right?
Which is going to be a higher number of people on the left, which is part of why this is going to be more effective.
Higher number of people, highly represented in science.
But in any case, this is part and parcel of a radical shift, a radical revolution that is taking over the entirety of the West, right?
What they've done is they have begun to hand down by fiat A description of the truth, right?
Remember when they tried to tell us that the virus couldn't possibly have emerged from the laboratory in Wuhan?
That was just a simple matter of, well, here's the truth, and we're handing it down.
Well, I mean, they're still doing that.
Of course.
I mean, there's a recent Christian Anderson paper that we referenced a week or two ago.
Yeah, they're on that.
They're also, sorry, I know you're on a roll here, but the CDC guidelines, the new CDC guidelines also kind of obscure the fact that now Yeah, natural immunity is real, and it's just as good as vaccine-induced immunity.
It may last longer.
What?
Hello again?
What did you say?
Because weren't we fighting over this?
Scientists were being scoffed at for claiming that natural immunity could possibly be a real thing.
That having had COVID, you might actually have immunity, and therefore not have to submit to the also-formulated-in-a-lab version of the immunity that came via a syringe.
And in fact, you have the Oracle from on high handing down factual claims like natural immunity does in no way obviate the need for COVID vaccination.
You have it participating with social media labeling things that are true as false.
You have the Department of Homeland Security declaring three kinds of falseness terrorism, one of which literally involves truth, which is inconvenient for government and causes distrust of it.
The whole thing is about, look, here are the beliefs you will now subscribe to.
Their relationship to reality is not the point.
And anybody who feels an obligation to reality is about to out themselves because they're going to be forced to mouth certain truths that are simply false.
The labels are going to be reversed.
This is all a matter of a cult inflicting its new belief system all of a sudden.
And it is going after truth.
That is to say, there is no major journalistic establishment that is independent of this.
The university system itself is mouthing the shibboleths.
History is being rewritten by the same Oracle-based mechanism, right?
The 1619 Project etc.
We are simply taking a version of history that serves an ideology and we are imposing it over actual history.
We have the guilt and innocence of people being a matter of encyclical as well, right?
So the raid on Mar-a-Lago is supposedly justified by the fact that this is the most law-breaking president in history.
That's why we get to go after people the way, you know, developing countries used to, you know, political factions used to go after each other.
Really, what's he been convicted of, right?
And even just the goodness and badness of people, right?
And this is another place where the rubber meets the road.
Human beings Because we have been forged by lineage against lineage competition, we are wired for that.
Just the same way we are wired for religion, we are wired to want to know who's on the team and who isn't on the team.
This is something that the West did the best job yet of getting past and is now being uninvented.
We have returned to a place where we're supposed to figure out, oh, who are the good people and who are the people who are my enemy?
Right?
We are not supposed to say we are all Americans, for example, right?
And we are united by that even over if we differ over policy and what the wise direction to go would be.
We are Americans first, right?
No, no, no.
The question is who's good and who's bad, right?
And you know, yeah, sometimes that's the question of, you know, who's Jewish.
In this case, it could be a question of who's vaccinated.
But the point is, these things are all being handed down by the same mechanism which is being imposed over the superior mechanism that the West – yes, it never completed the project – but the West innovated and developed in which we had another method for figuring this stuff out, like falsification.
Collaborating on a project even if we disagree over the particulars right so we are being returned to a previous world without the benefit of the narrative structure or ideology having passed through the test of time and at least being valid in some sense, right?
It's valid in no sense.
It is in fact in direct conflict with reality in a way that causes people who follow it to do very rapid self-harm, right?
So this is, I think this is becoming really clear.
And if you are shocked by the attack on Salman Rushdie, you should be equally shocked that a different flavor of the same is taking over Western civilization and replacing all of the mechanisms that have stood the test of time.
The only alternative we have to that team-based modality, that is being replaced by something in which some oracle is going to decide what...
What you need to do, what you need to think, who you need to attack.
And the fact is, there's just, there's no future in this.
There's no future.
We cannot play those games with the kind of weaponry at our disposal.
We cannot play those games with the number of people on the planet.
We cannot play those games with the amount of industrial power at our disposal.
This is just a fatal proposal.
It is.
It doesn't seem to be coming from one place.
You know, one of the things that I think often now is, boy, wouldn't it be great if we had a president?
Now, I don't know who could be president at the moment, who would be standing up in the various ways that such a person would need to stand up, but certainly having someone who has been MIA since before he attained the presidency, it's not a good moment for that.
One thing that we have been observing since before COVID, which was not really observable, which couldn't be seen by many who like us saw the problem in the academy, but weren't scientists and so couldn't see the problem within science, is
The process of science has become so market-driven and so much about money and so much about who you know, and therefore both a social and a financial process rather than a process of discovery and of understanding what is true, that it is now a game, and therefore it is gameable.
And so I think I will save for another time a discussion.
I wanted to talk a little bit.
There are just a number of stories now of important, impressive scientists or important, impressive scientific findings on which lots of things are based, be it ocean acidification or the Alzheimer's research, where, oh, as it turns out, just flat-out fraud.
We just made up the data, turns out.
Now, kudos in the couple of cases that I just mentioned to the whistleblowers who said, ah, no, uh-uh, this is not how science works.
But for each one of these things that is discovered, on which basis someone's reputation is made and therefore their career is apparently guaranteed, how many are not discovered?
How many of these of these scientific findings that we are basing our understanding on are actually One person, one flawed human being, who at some point dreamed of being a scientist, presumably with all of the best intentions, and then found themselves instead in a social game and a financial game, and made one, then a couple, then a series of extraordinarily bad decisions, and threw science overboard.
And now we have a scientific record.
This is far outside of COVID, but of course COVID puts this all under very sharp relief, that you can't look at and know what you're seeing.
Because when are the data actually the data?
We don't know.
We don't know anymore.
The level of fraud that we are now hearing about in science is extraordinary, and of course that's going to be a tiny fraction of what is actually going.
A tiny fraction.
In fact, it's an exact analog to the p-hacking apocalypse in psychology.
What I mean by that, I will tell you, I was railing against p-values long before p-hacking had come to public attention.
It's inevitable that you will have this development based on the fact that you have so much at stake In who succeeds in finding a pattern that they can publish and who doesn't.
And the process is obvious.
Right.
If you understand statistics well enough to be doing these sorts of tests, you can see how you would do it if you didn't have integrity.
Well, even inadvertently, right?
Even inadvertently, but there's... If nobody publishes the studies that come out insignificant, you have a survivor bias.
Right, so the system can do it inadvertently by the publication bias.
The system can do it inadvertently and a scrupulous person can turbocharge it.
Yes.
And the point is...
Is there any reason to think that that's limited to psychology?
No.
I guarantee you it will happen in every field in which statistics play a prominent role.
What's more, what you're describing is inevitable based on the fact that this is in effect a realm of science done by the honor system.
And it is not that science done by the honor system is implausible.
It can be done by the honor system, but not with the system of incentives.
With the system of incentives deployed the way they are, it is inevitable that people who are really good at cheating will rise rapidly.
And people who learn how to coordinate across a discipline and cheat will rise rapidly.
And so this is going to be an epidemic.
And it in part explains how it is that our system was decapitated because the fact is it was very feeble.
It was in a compromised state based on the fact that fraud will have played a major role in bringing us to where we are.
Yes.
That's all exactly right.
And what a precipice, honestly.
What a crazy precipice to find ourselves on at looking over it.
And to return to some of the earlier points, to be looking around going like, You guys can see, right?
You guys can see that we're at a cliff's edge.
And many people are saying, "I don't, what are you talking about?
We're good.
It's all good." Well, you can now go to the restaurants, right?
So it's fine.
Right, which to me sounds a little bit like, sorry, we jumped the gun.
Jews are now welcome at the restaurants.
And it's like, okay, I remember not being welcome there last week.
And, okay, it's all well and good that I have more restaurants to choose from this week.
I do like the salad there, but... But now I know what you're capable of.
And, frankly, I'm not going to those restaurants.
Right?
I just, the point is, okay, you've announced what team you're on, and the fact that your team is playing nice this week is irrelevant to me.
You've told me who you are.
I will say, too, with regard to... I haven't gone and looked at the various restaurants, because I think some of them are also lifting their vaccine mandates here in Portland.
But at the theater sites, there's always some fine print, and it's actually the same font size as the regular, but it seems like the fine print that they kind of don't expect you to read, which says we can, of course, reverse this reversal at any time.
If guidelines change... Guidelines?
Guidelines from whom?
On what basis?
If someone, anyone walks in and says, I have guidelines.
Oh, okay.
Right.
The guidelines have changed.
Therefore, nope, not you.
So what they are is saying, we are on team encyclical.
Right?
So the encyclical has, of course, we're going to follow the CDC wisdom because, you know, it's the CDC after all, but of course, you know, you know.
We're going to follow the current CDC wisdom, and nobody can tell you that except the Oracle, you know what it's going to look like a month from now.
So yeah, there's that.
We're not fortune tellers, are we?
Right.
All we can do is follow the CDC, right?
Well, no, not when, and this is really the important point, is you do have a choice.
The CDC has been wrong the entire time.
It's been wrong on essentially every major issue.
If you had done the opposite of what it suggested, you would have been far better off.
Yes, go to the beach.
Don't get vaccinated.
Definitely go to the beach.
Do get yourself some ivermectin, some hydroxychloroquine.
Right.
Get your D. Get your D. Right.
All of these things.
So the last point I want to make is what is your real choice?
If the CDC is now functioning by oracle and encyclical, right?
And Anthony Fauci is the reason everybody's going to medical school and that tells you exactly what kind of doctors they're going to be.
Does that mean he's both science and medicine?
I think it does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the big two.
That's a lot of weight on his rather small shoulders.
But anyway, I don't think there's any reason to talk about his size.
There's so many reasons to rail against Anthony Fauci.
He's a giant.
There's no question about it.
No, I mean that.
He is a giant.
He's a giant threat to our medical well-being.
But nonetheless, here's the thing.
In this process, it was necessary for this Oracle encyclical fatwa cancel process, the one that declared malinformation to be terrorism, and then in the fine print said, oh, malinformation are true things that cause you to distrust your government, right?
That's your Department of Homeland Security.
It was necessary to target people who were using some other process, spotted the CDC guidance as nonsense, And we're speaking about it openly, basically trying to use the process that Western civilization naturally does use, right?
I don't know if you saw, but Alex Berenson talked this week about information that he came by through a discovery process.
You mean legal discovery?
Yeah.
In which the White House had effectively overtly pressured Twitter to throw him off, right?
By name.
Right?
Now that is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but it also tells you something about what's going on.
You've got wanton disregard for our constitutional rights.
You have active antipathy for journalism and anybody committed to engaging in it.
We have seen the very same thing targeted at us over engaging in science openly.
But this is effectively the declaration of heresy, right?
This is the targeting of apostates.
This is the same mechanism as that Fatwa stuff, right?
It did not involve the literal attack, the physical attack on Alex Berenson.
But what it does is involve an attack on the ability of people to interact in polite society, the ability to earn a living.
The ability to distribute the product of your work in public, right?
This is an attack on something very fundamental and concrete, even if the attack is more abstract than an attack with a knife.
And, you know, Alex Berenson suffered that.
We have suffered it.
Joe Rogan has suffered it.
Obviously Pierre Corey, Robert Malone, Ryan Cole, all the doctors.
So the point is, what can you do if the CDC is now a, what would the word be, a publisher of Well, A, you will know that the people who do know, to the extent that they exist, are amongst the heretics and the apostates.
How will you know which of the heretics and apostates are actually capable of doing this kind of work and which ones are truly cranks?
Predictive power.
You will follow science, right?
The scientific method says you should be interested in those apostates to the extent that they have been ahead of the CDC.
That would be very interesting.
How are they doing that?
What mechanism are they using?
What, you know, Physiological models, are they acting based on?
Right?
You should put more and more stock in people who have predicted accurately ahead of time.
Gerrit van den Bosch, for example.
So, you do have a choice.
It's not a good one.
And we have to restore a system where institutions can function.
But in the absence of it, you are not flying completely blind.
You're going to have to actively seek out those who have made sense and have been revealed to be accurate by the test of time.
Yes.
And I think, maybe we should just end there, but one thing that that reminds me of is when you talk to people who are taking the guidance from on high, listening to the encyclicals and the oracles and such, they will often say, well, I can't see the future, can I?
I don't know what's going to happen.
I'm just going to have to do whatever they tell me to do at some level.
Usually they won't say it quite that clearly because that sounds too much like they're following, like they're acting like sheep, but it is in fact what they're doing.
And there really does seem to be a belief among many of those specifically who have no background in science that predicting the future is akin to magic.
There is no knowing what's coming, is there?
And of course, predicting the future is exactly what scientists do, not globally necessarily, within some confined domain that they have established as, this is the observation that I made that I'm now trying to explain.
And I've got these hypotheses that I've generated and now I'm figuring out which of the predictions, what predictions I can formulate for each hypothesis that, if true, must demonstrate that that hypothesis is false.
That is a form of predicting the future.
And when people say, well, I can't, I couldn't possibly know what's going to happen next, can I?
You think, well, maybe you should either.
Start honing that skill yourself, or at the very least, start thinking about who among the people whom you could be listening to seem to have that skill, and maybe pay them more heed than those who consistently get it wrong.
Because the CDC seems to be playing the role of the Oracle, of the Encyclical, of that organization that will make the future better than the past, and yet they are doing it wrong over and over and over again, Throw them out.
Stop listening to them.
Well, I want to make one further point, that you could spot this as it emerged based on one unavoidable tell.
Science, even when done beautifully by people who are really committed to the search for truth above all else, is messy.
Right?
As it emerges, there is always conflict over interpretation of a particular result.
There is always the revelation that certain results don't mean what they appear to mean because the methodology used was not robust.
There's all sorts of noise.
And so the point is, when we say science, we mean a bunch of different things.
To the extent that we sometimes mean that which science has discovered, right?
That is one legitimate use of the term science.
We do not mean what did it discover this morning.
We mean what that it has discovered has stood up well enough that when you build it into a model, you get smarter and not dumber.
Right?
Now, my point about the CDC and everything that functions as a part of that pseudo church is there was no process.
Right?
The process that would have been necessary for them to arrive at conclusions that were worth anything at all would have been a process of discussion.
There would have been evidence that did have noise and conflict.
And instead what we were done, what was done was we were assured that that process had taken place privately.
By companies with a conflict of interest, that the evidence that came out of it was very, very clear, and that we would know that as soon as we were able to see it 75 years from now.
They tried to hide the fricking evidence, and the point was, well, do you really have a process that's trustworthy?
Because it sounds like maybe you don't, and you just want to tell us the prescription that comes out of it.
Well, there's another piece of this.
I mean, we could go on forever here, but there's another piece of this, too, which is the sense among the elites.
And as, again, long-time listeners will know, neither you nor I like the idea of the elites.
The elite is trotted out as a way to shut people up.
We are the elite.
We know what we're doing.
There's a special process by which you can enter the elite, and then you earn the right to make decisions for those who are not elite.
And the elites really have gotten used to being able to say, don't worry about it.
We did the work.
You don't need to see our work.
Here's our conclusion.
Accept our conclusion.
Sit down, shut up, take the jab.
It came from a Frozen ferret badger steak.
You know, natural immunity isn't any good.
None of these pre-existing treatments will help you.
Just take our word for it.
We are the ones with the lab coats and the fancy credentials and we went to all the best schools and we know all the right people.
We go to all the right parties.
And if you don't believe us, well, that's on you.
And also, we're not going to actually let you make that decision for yourself.
So this is a kind of, again, hubris that we find in every domain, in journalism, in academia, in politics, in every domain.
But we saw this, and I'm sure we saw this long before that, but I remember running into this attitude at a very non-elite institution at Evergreen, where many of our colleagues treated students like this.
You don't want to see how the work is done.
I'm just going to give you the conclusion so that you can go on your merry way.
And if there is a place where that has, if there is any place where that kind of attitude should have no place at all, it's education.
Education is exactly where everyone who showed up should be able to get their hands as dirty as they want to get them.
But one of the things I think that many people have learned in the last two and a half years with regard to COVID is a lot of people, a lot of people, are a lot more willing than most of the so-called elites are willing to give them credit for to try to figure out what is true and what is best for them and their families on their own, and they are done taking so-called elite authorities at their word that they actually have their best interests in mind.
Because most people are actually capable of thinking for themselves and want to do so.
Which goes to the other tell.
At the beginning of the pandemic, actually when you and I started doing the Dark Horse live streams, we were fascinated to be looking into the pre-print literature, the non-peer-reviewed literature, right?
That literature was vibrant.
It was noisy as hell, as it was bound to be.
It's been through no process other than You know, something about what captures your attention because it's being discussed or something along those lines.
You know, and most of the work was maybe not high enough tech, but like required enough of an infrastructure so that it wasn't just randos on the street going like, I'm going to throw something up on the preprint server, right?
It was people, people with labs, people with experience, people with some history working with viruses or pandemics or, you know, something, you know, so.
It was professionals.
Yeah.
But their work had not individually been put through a process.
The point is, what was high in that milieu?
What was high?
Transparency.
Yeah.
Right?
Not perfect.
You don't know that people didn't, you know, fraudulently write these papers based on no experiment that had actually been run.
But the point was, it wasn't some hidden selection process.
Right?
Then you institute peer review, right?
The pros catch up and peer review gets back on its feet and it starts controlling what you see of what was done.
There are weird reversals, papers that have been accepted for publication being unaccepted.
Right?
The process has become a whole bunch more opaque.
And then there's the level of opaque at the CDC, which is effectively total.
We're not going to tell you how we came to this.
We're going to tell you that it's evidence-based.
Right?
And so I guess what I would say is the very nature of this process is that there has, because of the noise that is inherent to the generation of actual evidence in complex systems, there would have to be a process.
You would have to see evidence of that process to have any confidence that it took place.
Because otherwise, if you can pretend that there was a process and then just hand down its supposedly evidence-based conclusion, then a cheater will do that because it's obviously the right, it's the efficient thing to do with respect to getting people's behavior to change without, you know, bothering to deal with the conflict between what you're telling them to do and bothering to deal with the conflict between what you're telling them to do Yes, that's right.
Good.
Terrible, but good.
Terrible, but good.
Yeah, okay.
Well, after a rather shaky start due to problems mostly outside of our control, I think we got some good places today.
Yes, I agree.
We are going to take a break and we're probably going to do a short Q&A this week because we ran long and we have A lot of stuff going on right after this live stream today.
So once again, we'll not be here next week, but we will have a guest episode pre-recorded with Brett in this usual time slot.
We will be back two weeks from now with another live stream and then a Q&A.
At that point, the private Q&A that we do once a month will be almost ready to happen, so I encourage you to go into my Patreon in the next couple days and join if you haven't, and see if you want to ask a question for that private Q&A.
Brett's Patreon is also live and thriving, and the Discord community that you can get access to at either of those is really quite vibrant.
Go for it.
Check out the Norman Fenton discussion I had on Dark Horse.
Has that been released yet?
That's Saturday.
Oh my goodness, I have erred grievously.
Yes, so that's what you will have access to a week from now.
It's pretty great.
I think you will really dig it.
When we are not live next week, nobody can stop you from achieving greatness, right?
Or fighting the power.
And I suggest you put at least some of that time into those two activities.
So you can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com right now.
Email any logistical questions to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
And until we see you next time, which might be in a few minutes and it might be a couple weeks, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
