#146 Art, Science, and the Quest for Truth (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 146th 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 science, art, and the shared values and virtues between them. We often discuss how science and scientific institutions are failing; this week we discuss the failure of artistic institutions, as well as the political ideology of Wikipedia, which is destroying it from the inside. We also discuss ho...
It's just, you know, you see a lot of new things when you travel.
It fills the mind and I did not have the mental focus to concentrate on the three-digit number that would tell us what... Which normally you would be spending your days doing.
Not all of them, but you know, a good couple hours.
Some part of every day.
Yeah, meditating on the number.
It's livestream number 146.
It is.
And since we came to you last week, eight days ago, there's been a guest episode of Dark Horse, which has been released, the first of two of similar strain.
You want to say a few words about that?
Yeah, I sure do.
It's a really interesting episode, and we will talk a little bit more about it later in the podcast.
But in any case, it is a live stream, not a live stream, it is a live discussion that I recorded with military whistleblowers And a lawyer, a former officer who is now representing military whistleblowers.
And we talk about the effect of mandates on, among other things, military readiness.
So, in any case, I would encourage everyone to look at that podcast.
I think the reaction to it has been, for the most part, quite positive.
And anyway, it's provocative stuff.
You'll find it on our YouTube channel, on whatever Podcast app you use.
It's on Spotify.
Spotify.
Yep.
All those places.
And we do not have a live stream next week.
We'll not be coming to you having either pivoted 90 degrees, as we did this week, or maybe even the full 360, which you can't tell, but we can claim we did.
But we won't be doing that next week.
We will not be here.
But there will be one, maybe two more guest episodes of Dark Horse coming to you in the interim.
This week, however, we are here.
It is Sunday, October 16th.
Is that right?
Yes.
And we are going to follow this live stream as we usually do with a live Q&A, starting with a question that comes out of our Discord server every week, which they vote on, which is, they're awesome.
And then you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, whether or not you're on the Discord server.
So, other housekeeping things.
If you're watching on YouTube, you can switch over to Odyssey and join the chat there where it's live.
We have our store, darkhorsestore.org, where you can get Dark Horse merchandise.
And totes and backpacks and shirts and such with epic tabbies and Pfizer breakthroughs and YouTube community guidelines and other things.
I don't know.
I was going to say and the like, but I don't know that there's a like there.
It's Dark Horse inspired merchandise.
We came up with all the ideas on the store and work with an amazing artist who does the renderings.
If you want to thumb your nose at power or you like cats, it's the place for you.
Or dire wolves.
Or dire wolves, for that matter.
Okay.
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We thank you for liking this video.
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And you can share the entire episode or on YouTube and Odyssey.
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A reminder that YouTube is not our friend, which we wish they were, but they're not.
They demonetized us.
And although if you're watching on YouTube you may see ads that we don't read on here, that doesn't mean anything about what we are suggesting.
So for instance, actually, when we were monetized by YouTube, when we were able to make any money off of YouTube, we could set the ad schedule such that you never got our show interrupted in the middle by YouTube ads.
We always turned that feature off.
Now that YouTube is running ads on our show and not paying us any of the revenue they are generating, they put ads throughout.
This seems wrong in several, several ways.
So consider whether or not YouTube is your friend.
They're certainly not ours.
You can watch us on any of those podcast venues that Brett mentioned.
You can also join either of our Patreons, which we encourage if you are inclined to do so.
Brett has a couple of monthly conversations there.
We do a private monthly Q&A on my Patreon.
And on either of them, you can access our wonderful Discord server, where wonderful people engage in honest conversations without fear of being canceled for having an opinion that isn't what everyone else already has.
And also, we have sponsors.
So every week we begin our show with reads from three sponsors whom we have carefully chosen.
We do not read ads for products or services that we don't actually vouch for.
So without further ado, here we go.
All right!
Our first sponsor this week is Thesis.
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You're probably already using a nootropic.
As one of the most commonly consumed nootropics is caffeine, but it is far from the most exciting.
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They do not assume that what works for your brother will work for you, and that what worked for you when you were under a deadline for a dreadful project will be the same thing that will work for you when you need a spark of creativity for a project you've been dreaming of for years.
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Heather has tried several blends now and has liked them all.
They have, she has returned to several-- - I have not liked them all. - Sorry.
My reading skills are not great at this discussion.
No, but this is actually important, right?
This is the point, that a thesis does not expect you to enjoy all of them or to get a benefit from all of them.
It wants you to try them out and to see which ones work for you.
Have been to like them all.
It says here.
Right.
She has returned to several repeatedly.
Creativity blends smooth things out a bit and adds clarity.
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With fully personalizable blends, there is likely to be a thesis that is right for you.
Get your own customized thesis starter kit.
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Wonderful.
Our second sponsor this week is Moink.
That's Moo plus Oink.
M-O-I-N-K.
Moink.
An eighth generation farmer founded Moink and is working hard to help save the family farm and get its customers access to the highest quality meat on earth.
Did you know that 97% of the chickens served in the U.S.
are dipped in chlorine?
Well, family farms don't tend to do that and certainly the meat you get from Moink doesn't.
The farmers who generate the meat that you get from Moink don't do that because the meat doesn't dip itself.
The meat's not going to dip itself.
Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon direct to your door.
Moink farmers farm like our grandparents did, and as a result, Moink meat tastes like it should, which is to say delicious.
Unlike the supermarket, Moink gives you total control over the quality and source of your food.
You choose the meat delivered in every box, like ribeyes, chicken breasts, pork chops, salmon fillets, and much more.
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We love everything about Moink.
The fact that the meat is grass-fed and finished on small farms, the lovely publications that come along with it, and of course, the meat itself.
Shark Tank host, Kevin O'Leary.
You know we're on screen, right?
Yes, I'm trying to send Zach a text very subtly.
Okay, okay.
Door open.
Go on.
We love everything about Moink.
I don't remember where I was.
Ah, the meat itself.
Shark Tank host Kevin O'Leary called Moink's bacon the best bacon he's ever tasted.
I agree.
It's amazing.
Keep American Farming going by signing up at moinkbox.com slash darkhorse right now, and listeners of this show will receive friable filet mignon for a year.
That's one year of the best filet mignon you'll ever taste, but for a limited time.
Spelled moinkbox.com slash dark horse.
That's m-o-i-n-k box dot com slash dark horse.
Okay, our third sponsor, our third and final sponsor this week is Mudwater.
That's M-U-D slash W-T-R pronounced Mudwater.
It's a coffee alternative made with four medicinal mushrooms plus herbs and spices.
It's got a seventh, the caffeine, as a cup of coffee.
You get energy without the anxiety, jitters, or crash of the coffee.
And it's delicious.
Each ingredient was added with intention.
It has cacao and chai, lion's mane mushrooms, cordyceps, chaga and reishi, turmeric and cinnamon, among other things.
This is a terrific product, either on its own or as a warm drink in the morning.
You can drink it black or with cream or honey or both.
Mudwater also makes a non-dairy creamer out of coconut milk and MCT, and also a sweetener out of coconut palm sugar and lucuma, which is the fruit of an Andean tree used by the Inca.
And you can add either the creamer, the non-dairy creamer, or the sweetener if you prefer those options.
Or mix and match a bit of their coconut milk and MCT creamer with some honey from your favorite bees, or if you don't have favorite bees, honey from your favorite beekeeper.
And if you don't have either favorite bees or a favorite beekeeper, I really don't know how to help you.
Who doesn't have favorite bees?
Yeah, I don't.
I don't know.
The flavor is warm and spicy with a hint of chocolate plus masala chai, which includes ginger and cardamom, nutmeg and cloves.
Try blending it into a smoothie with a banana and ice, milk or milk-like substance.
Milk-like substance?
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Visit Mudwater.com slash Dark Horse to support the show and use Dark Horse at checkout for 15% off.
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And that is it.
We're out.
All right.
I'm going to start the hour with a couple of minor corrections from last week.
We talked about Jon Stewart in some depth because of a recent interview that he did with the Attorney General from the state of Arkansas I want to say?
I don't remember.
I think it was Arkansas.
Apologies if I got that wrong.
And in sort of riffing a little bit about who Jon Stewart is, because we didn't prepare, we didn't do any of our homework on who Jon Stewart is, because we used to watch The Daily Show back when he was the host, I said a couple things that weren't quite true.
He was not the first host of The Daily Show, but he was the one who made it huge.
And he also did not become a farmer after leaving The Daily Show.
I actually gave him a bit more credit than I should have.
I thought that he had become a farmer, but he and his wife bought a farm, but they didn't use it to grow things.
They turned it into a sanctuary for abused farm animals, which is honorable.
And now they've got a larger piece of land, which they use as a sanctuary for animals that were destined for the slaughterhouse and or live markets.
So, he doesn't actually grow anything.
He's not a farmer, but he's a farmist.
He's a farmist.
He's farm-adjacent.
He's farm-on, but not actually farming.
Can we agree that he's far more likable than a lot of people?
You know, I think so, but I gotta say that interview did not inspire me any.
Well, we'll see.
Maybe he'll level up.
I mean, I think, you know, in large measure, what we said was critical of, you know, how deeply he dug before he ventured an opinion that is at odds with reality.
And, you know, I would like to believe that he is an honorable guy.
I really think that's true.
And that upon discovering his error, he will level up.
That's my hope.
I hope so, too.
I guess, you know, we've been, some people appreciate, a lot of people appreciate what we're doing, and we appreciate hearing from you.
And some people, a few people who are long-time fans have said, could you ease up on the vaccines and the trans already?
Like, it's always vaccines or trans that you're talking about, and the COVID vaccines.
And when I see that critique, I think, but these are the two places that feel like we are seeing most clearly the failures of the most number of our systems, and we are at a tipping point.
So many people are being damaged.
And, you know, I'm not obsessed, but I can't avoid it.
Everywhere you turn, you run into these stories with people getting it way, way wrong and doing damage to people, often who are innocent, right?
And I feel like, you know, Jon Stewart going on air and citing institutions that are getting it wrong in many places as the evidence that it's okay to hormonally transition your prepubescent or, you know, stop the development of your prepubescent child.
I'm sorry, but, you know.
Have you met humans?
Like, do you really have that little understanding of what humans are?
And so, I guess I have, in some ways, less patience for the people who are going along with the trans thing than for the people who have been hoodwinked by the COVID vaccine authoritarianism and media play that has been so universal.
It just feels like, actually, because you have been living on this planet, you have enough information to know that this is not okay.
Well, I agree with that.
I also think, you know, yes, we did not choose these topics.
We would not stick with these topics so long were we free to be talking about what we think is most interesting.
The problem is some stories diagnose the system.
And what we are dealing with is a catastrophic failure of our system based on the collapse of every institution on which it depends.
And really, I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it really is every institution, and if you think it's not, I challenge you to find the institution that is even treading water while speaking the truth and looking out for common people.
So, to the extent that you may find us too long on topics that are really no fun, the reason is because until A, these are among the very best ways to see the failure of the system, and the failure of the system really is the meta-topic.
And until these things correct, we know that we are nowhere, right?
These are the glaring instances that most people can see.
You know enough to know that, for example,
There are two sexes, and that when your major scientific journals start speaking as if that's not true, based on some finding that they imply has been attained by science generally, A, they're lying, B, you can see it, C, your intuition is enough to tell you something is way the hell off, and then it leads you to D, which is, okay, we need an extraordinary explanation.
To get to why your major scientific journals would be saying anti-scientific things.
So we're at least in that quadrant.
And that really is the larger point to us focusing on these things and revealing all of these examples.
The fact that the examples keep emerging, that we are not having to delve into history to find new egregious examples, tells us that whatever is wrong with our system is still very wrong.
And it still owns these properties that, frankly, the public must recapture.
Exactly.
One more correction from last week.
Sure.
Inquiring minds want to know.
You asked, I don't remember exactly, you were making some pun about EUAs, maybe, in which you spelled inquiry with an E. And I said, rather dismissively, honey, that's not how it's spelled.
Well, I looked into it, and it turns out that inquiry and inquiry are both No longer really used, but both historical uses or spellings for the term that enquire with an E is more common in British English than in American English, but disappearing as well.
Traditionally in England, enquire with an I was reserved for more formal occasions, and enquire with an E just meant to ask.
Oh, an inquiry versus to enquire.
I don't know which one you're saying where.
An inquiry is a formal... Which spelling is that?
Oh, I have no idea.
So what are you making?
I can hear it.
Yeah, an inquiry, presumably with an I, is like an inquest, right?
It's a formal process.
It may well be the same, really.
I didn't look into that.
Actually, our OED is still boxed, because almost all of our books are still in boxes.
We're still waiting on our bookcases.
Well, I also would say that having our OED in a box prevents anybody from messing with it, which I'm pretty sure is going to happen sooner or later, so that we can no longer even look up what words used to mean when we bought these books.
No, no.
We've got a hard copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, for which I am grateful.
But yeah, actually I went to look at the OED online and they wanted a lot of money and I may end up doing it, but I thought, no, you know, we got it in a box somewhere.
It comes with a magnifying glass.
It comes with its own drawer for its own magnifying glass.
Absolutely.
It's kind of a flimsy drawer, but Yeah, but I wanted to point this out, because you weren't going to discover this.
No.
No, and I believe that this marks a win for you, for Brett, in the spelling category, which I admit I never expected to see happen.
Well, this is two wins, really.
In the spelling category?
Yes, because I believe in... He's greedy, is he not?
I mean, come on!
Look, I'm just... I'm into just...
Well, look, first of all, you've got to give me a little leeway here, because having won a spelling point, I really strategically have no choice but to quit at this moment, because... Instead, you're trying to double up, if that's okay.
No, I'm celebrating as I'm seeing my exit at the end of this episode.
I had no obligation to tell you about this.
You did not have any.
The two wins are that I happen to have sort of been in the right neighborhood with respect to inquiry and enquiry.
And?
Well, by misspelling some things last week, I came close to solving the problem of, you know, fact-checking, right?
So using spelling as a solution is not something you would expect me to do because I'm not good at it.
Anyway, I thought that was kind of a win, and then here, too, this... Okay.
So this is the pinnacle of my spelling career, certainly.
Yeah, or last week was.
Last week.
And anyway, so... Which I mentioned just to point out that you're already on the downslope.
It does feel that way.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, anyway.
Well, congratulations.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And it was very kind of you to dredge that back up and reveal it here in front of our entire audience.
Yeah, indeed.
All right, so we have a few places we want to go this week.
I don't know if you want to start?
You want me to start?
Why don't you start?
Why don't I start?
Okay.
I guess before we really launch into the content, I will say I mentioned that we turned the set 90 degrees.
We're still not in our final place where we will have...
In the shade.
Yeah, the camera is actually slightly tilted.
You can see the wall to Brett's right is the wall that we have usually been sitting in front of.
And that's a real, that's not a virtual wall.
That's the real deal.
People are so unhelpful.
I imagine that's... All right, this must be scintillating for those listening to the audio version of the podcast.
So scintillating.
And where was I even going with that?
Thanks, Zach.
Sorry.
Well, I… Should we start over?
I don't remember.
I was mentioning that for a reason and I don't remember now.
That we are not on our final stage.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
I had some cool segue.
I guess, oh, I know, I know.
I've forgotten the cool segue, but the piece of information I wanted to convey was that here with our kludged setup that we have to set up, that these two guys have to set up and break down every week, we don't have an ability to screen share with my computer.
So I don't have the things that I would love to share in order to really reveal this next little story.
We talk a lot about science and the need for science as a tool for humanity, for a functioning democracy, for systems that actually allow us all to live our best lives and prosper without getting in other people's ways.
And we have in the past talked some about art as well, but not as much.
Although long-time listeners and viewers will recognize that I in particular, but also Brett, are very much advocates of art as a necessary... and our screen just went to something funky.
Okay.
That art and the arts are absolutely necessary and critical components of the human experience as well.
And that art and science, interestingly, when we were college professors for those many years, for those 15 years, a period of our lives which seems ever more distant somehow,
I often found that the approaches, that the curricular tools, the pedagogical tools, and that the kinds of ways of learning and approaching the world that artists and scientists took, and that art students and self-identified art students and science students had, were much more similar to each other in many ways than
Those being employed by the social scientists and the humanities types, which was a little surprising.
And I think in part it's because there is actually a tremendous amount of creativity in science that those who don't do science think of it as being all about the rigor and the metrics and the reductionism And again, those of you who are familiar with us will know that we very much value rigor and that metrics and reductionism have come to replace much of what is actually science and our stand-in for that.
And of course, that's part of how we get to proclamations like, follow the science, which tells you right away that the person saying that has no idea what science is.
So the openness to observation, to new patterns that you may not have seen before or been able to explain before, is part of what brings both art and science together.
Can I add a dimension to that?
Please, go for it.
So I also find very interesting the The confluence between these two things.
And it seems to me that you've just pointed to one, you know, that the artistic exploration reveals these things.
But there's also a way in which in many kinds of art, maybe all of them, the solving of technical problems allows the artist to say some things that couldn't otherwise be said.
And I'm thinking at the moment especially about sculptors.
And the fact that a sculptor can take a piece of stone and a really skilled sculptor can make it appear to be a very sheer piece of cloth, right?
That is an amazing gap to jump, to take something as hard as marble and to make it look soft and cloth-like or to make it look like skin in a compelling way.
And so anyway the point is what you and I say about the importance of interacting with physical systems in your education systems in which there's no social evaluator of whether you succeeded or failed.
Now you could say that the viewers of the art are the evaluators of whether you've succeeded or failed but nonetheless the point is if you didn't get close then it isn't even really going to reach an audience worth reaching.
And this is so this becomes less true the more abstract your art.
Yep.
But this is very much true for craft, craft effectively being functional art.
Whether or not it's beautiful is to some degree in the eye of the beholder, but whether or not it's functional is not a social decision.
Is the table level?
Does the vessel hold water?
Does the blanket retain warmth and not ravel at the edges?
And, you know, I'm reminded, too, this is something I've said on here before, of my discovery late in our graduate careers of pottery, where I was at that stage in the scientific process, or at least the stage in graduate school, that is the most tedious for many people.
Because we were both doing fieldwork, all of the creativity was already past.
I had done the observations.
I had made the hypotheses.
I had collected the data in the field.
I was now back in Michigan having to do the statistical analysis, which had its moments, and the literature review, which had its moments, but then the write-up, which leaves no room for creativity.
It's not the kind of writing that has any intrigue at all.
I actually, I wrote a different book at the same time as I was doing that to help me, you know, find my creative outlet that way, but I also started doing pottery at a local artist cooperative in Ann Arbor and I found it so appealing in part because it brought together, and I mostly did wheel throwing and so I was mostly making functional pieces, but it brought together an ability to learn a bunch of technical stuff
About glaze chemistry, about oxidation versus reduction, firings, about different cones, about different clay bodies, about the forces that your hands and the wheel put on the clay in different speeds at different directions, all of these things.
But also, when you hold a piece of pottery in your hand, does it feel like it's the right weight?
And if you haven't ever considered that, maybe you think, well, I wouldn't know, but Trust me, you would.
You know, maybe not to the degree that I would.
You know, you probably don't automatically turn a piece over to see how it's been trimmed when you find a new piece of pottery, but many pieces, especially made by potters early in their work, including, you know, we still have a couple of these of mine, like they're just too heavy.
Yeah, it's more clay than you need to do that job.
It's more clay than you need to do the job and if on a bowl the walls are thicker at the bottom rather than having been not just imagined but actually executed with something akin to perfection.
Right, now the potter could choose, once they've learned to do the thin-walled thing, they could choose to do something that, you know... It doesn't have to be thin, but even depth is actually... you know, thin for porcelain so you get some sheen through it maybe, and thick for stoneware or red clay.
So I wanted to point out, Making a bicycle frame is not exactly art, right?
There is an art to it, and in fact, Story for another time, there are these bike builders, storied bike builders, French bike builders called the constructeurs, who knew things about how to build a bicycle that we still have not been able to unpack.
We don't know why their bicycles work better because it was not explicit what they were doing.
It was something, so there is definitely an art to it.
But what I wanted to point to is just at the technical level, and I've built exactly one bike frame.
But it's both gorgeous, and it is the bike that you ride.
I ride it all the time.
I would love a chance to do it again.
There are some things about it I would change, but no, it's pretty darn good.
But it took me way longer than an expert would have taken.
There are some mistakes in it that I know are there.
But the thing I wanted to point to, I built it with a technique called fillet brazing.
And Philip brazing involves liquefying brass and using it essentially like a solder to join tubes together.
And if you see a bike that's had this done to it, unless somebody's gone out of their way to use only a transparent coating on it, it looks like the tubes just seamlessly blend into each other.
It's a smooth transition from one tube to the next.
As opposed to the, is it the brazing that leaves the... As opposed to welding.
Welding, which leaves a line of liquefied, you know, if you take two steel tubes and you weld them together, you've got the place where the steel was liquefied at the joint, and you can see it.
Which can also be done very well, but it's not nearly as subtle.
So the thing about the fillet brazing, so the liquid brass is the fillet, right?
What is fillet?
I don't know this word outside of this context.
I don't really know.
It's the...
- The comparing term for a chamfer is if you have two edges that are like this and you cut them so it's 45 degrees at each.
- So Zach's, I don't know how well people can hear Zach, but you said it's a chamfer.
- No, a chamfer is when you have two edges and you cut them so maybe it's not 45-45 but it's two angles and it's flat.
- Yep. - And a fillet is when it's rounded and you can do that with different algorithms.
- Okay, so Zach is saying a fillet is a rounded joint, which makes perfect sense with what I'm describing.
But the point is...
There are ways to do a fillet badly, in which there will be voids inside of it.
That's not a strong joint, and it will fail.
The correct fillet is full of brass all the way through, doesn't have bubbles, doesn't have cracks, anything like that.
Oh, just like with clay, just like with canning, just like with anything.
You don't want air pockets.
But here's the connection to your point about pottery.
An amateur can do a perfectly good fillet, but what they do is they use too much brass, and then the thing that makes the fillet smooth is all of the work afterwards where you come back and you eliminate all of the brass you didn't need, and it takes forever if you have done an amateur joint.
The joint will be just as good when you're done, but you might spend ten times as long getting it done.
On the cleanup.
Yeah, on the cleanup phase.
Which was very, very interesting to discover.
I certainly, my fillets were good, but wow, was there too much brass.
Yeah, and do you want to give a shout out to... Of course, of course.
Yeah, I did this at the United Bicycle Institute in Ashland, Oregon.
They have a two-week course.
They will teach you to do this.
You don't have to fillet braze.
You can use lugs.
You can do fillet brazing.
At the end of it, you have built a custom bike frame.
You choose everything about it.
You design it.
You build it, and I haven't looked into it recently, but it's pretty close to cost neutral, right?
What you would pay for a custom bike is more or less what it costs to build one.
Well, if you don't include your time.
So I think it's a two-week course, and then I think you also did the three-day TIG welding at the end.
So that's a lot of time for a lot of people.
But if you're in a position where you can afford that time and are thinking of buying a custom bike frame, maybe make your own.
But then you do also have to You get it perfect and then you also have to paint it, which isn't free.
Yeah, but anyway, it's a great experience.
Maybe half the people in my course actually went on to build bikes professionally.
It's a course for people who are serious about it.
Anyway, it's a really cool thing to do and living in Ashland, Oregon for a couple weeks is cool too.
Okay, so we're talking about art because I see art and science, and we both do, as bulwarks against stupid.
And, you know, all human inquiry ought to do that to some degree, but art and science in particular protect against stupid and help us find truth and beauty and our shared humanity.
And both are failing.
And I was collecting for a while and have not collected all of the pieces that I wanted for here today, but this week a contact of ours in the American entertainment industry sent me a few things that I wanted to share.
Not as indicative of the entire system, but clearly indicative of something that is going on specifically in the movie industry.
Specifically, we've got some standard requirements from auditions, which again, I would share my screen here if I could, but I can't, so I just have to pull it up.
Apologies, I wasn't totally prepared for this.
So, some standard This is, again, standard requirements from auditions in the entertainment industry, in the American entertainment industry.
We have the first one.
With regard to COVID-19, talent must be vaccinated.
Boosters optional.
Parentheses not required.
Second one, COVID-19.
Again, requirements for auditions in the entertainment industry.
Vaccination and booster, if eligible, are required.
Kids that are not eligible for a booster just need to be vaccinated.
And the third one, and this is A little small for me to see.
So this mentions Zone A, and I asked this contact of ours what Zone A means.
So before I read what the standard requirement from this edition meant, Zone A refers to those working at the center of the job.
So that's going to be the talent, the director, the director of photography, the script supervisor, the assistant directors, hair and makeup, just like the crowd gathered around those in the center of the scene being shot, those who are hands-on with the talent.
So that's what Zone A means.
So, FYI, this again from the entertainment industry, this production will require mandatory vaccination for those working in Zone A, which includes the ages 5 to 11, as of February 18, 2022.
If you are offered a role, you would be required to verify that you're up-to-date on your COVID-19 vaccination, and your employment in Zone A would be conditioned on that validation.
Up-to-date means the following.
A two-dose Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination series, and if eligible, a booster dose for those who are five-plus months past their second shot.
Currently, the Pfizer booster is approved for everyone ages 12 and up.
Or, a two-dose Moderna COVID-19 vaccination series, and if eligible, a booster dose for those who are five-plus months past their second shot.
Currently, the Moderna booster is approved for everyone ages 18 and up.
Or, a single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccination and, if eligible, a booster dose for those who are two-plus months past their single dose.
Currently, the Johnson & Johnson booster is approved for everyone ages 18 and up, but an mRNA booster is recommended in many cases.
Fourth bullet point.
If you are not eligible, if you are not yet eligible for your booster shot, your vaccine status is considered up to date.
You must obtain your booster promptly once you become eligible and submit validation that you received your booster dose.
So, this in the week that what was already well findable in the early documents has become mainstream news, which is that Pfizer didn't actually test in the clinical trials for whether or not their shot blocks transmission.
And of course, there's all sorts of gaslighting and reconfiguring of what was actually said going on now about like, well, they never claimed they did, and this, that, and the other.
It's like, what possible explanation explains mandates here, in the military, in the government, for ferry workers, for medical workers, anywhere, if the thing isn't blocking transmission?
How do you make an argument for mandates if it's not blocking transmission?
And how, therefore, are people arguing that they never claimed that it did, but maybe most to the point, how is it that our military, that our entertainment industry, that other places are still requiring this insanity?
How is that happening?
I agree.
Arts have fallen.
Science has fallen.
Arts have fallen.
It's such a simple set of points.
If it doesn't block transmission, then on what is the mandate based?
And why would you not value the risk, even if we didn't know that there were harms?
And we absolutely do know that there are now harms.
But even if you didn't know.
By value the risk you mean assess the value of the risk?
I mean incorporate it into the calculations.
Certainly the idea that these mandates are being pointed at young people, children.
Five and up.
Five and up.
If you want a job in the entertainment industry, if you're that kid, if you've got that kind of talent and drive and it's not just your parents or something, you have to take on this crazy cost?
So it is How does one even describe it?
You are being forced to demonstrate your failty to an anti-scientific mandate that actually Puts your life in jeopardy in an age-stratified way.
Not only is the risk of COVID age-stratified so that young people really don't need these things.
Again, it's not blocking transmission, so vaccinating young people, it would be immoral to vaccinate them to protect old enfeebled people, but it's especially insane given that this does not prevent them from transmitting the disease by getting it or transmitting it to people who are at risk.
So the the the steel man response there will be uh but uh the vaccinated are putting all of the unvaccinated are putting all of the stress on the system by showing up in hospitals and droves and therefore it's your obligation to the system to
Well, there are 16 different responses to this, but A, look, if the problem was that we were in an emergency where we really had insufficient resources to deal with all of the people who are being sent to the hospital over COVID, then And there was a shot that actually reduced the chances of you ending up in the hospital.
Right.
It still would not be acceptable to vaccinate kids, especially given that they have an extra risk from the shots, and especially given that they have low risk from COVID.
As a matter of fact, exceedingly low risk if they have no comorbidities.
But you wouldn't be firing doctors and nurses, right?
You wouldn't be crippling the system by reducing the number of resources we have to throw at the people who have ostensibly been sent to the hospital and You wouldn't be simply punishing the unvaccinated, which of course, again, makes no sense here.
But you would be saying, this is a moment in which we cannot afford any high-risk behavior, right?
If falling off your motorcycle can send you to the hospital, and you're going to take up a bed, and somebody's not going to have a bed, and they're going to die because of it, this is not a moment for motorcycles, right?
Or only to and from work, or whatever, right?
We are not across the board telling people do not engage in high-risk behavior because COVID is filling our hospitals because it's not.
Nor are we telling people, and this is a point we've been making from the very beginning, nor are we telling people to take the parts of your life under control that you can take under control and deal with the comorbidities that you may have that you actually have agency about.
Okay?
Yep.
Once you are an adult, if you have metabolic syndrome and are pre-diabetic or fully diabetic and have the beginnings of kidney disease and are morbidly obese, there is a very good chance that it's going to be extraordinarily difficult to get yourself back to a baseline that is considered very healthy.
But you can move the needle in the right direction.
And it is those comorbidities that are creating the most number of problems, certainly for the young, but even for the middle-aged and early elderly with regard to COVID.
And there are things that frankly take no significant effort on your part at all that make a huge difference, like vitamin D, which we're not recommending.
Right?
So the whole system is clearly hell-bent on getting you not only to accept anti-scientific beliefs, but to put your own health at risk over them, even though it doesn't give a shit about your health from the point of view of telling you, yeah, you should take some vitamin D because it is likely to help you fend off this disease far more effectively.
It's not interested in your health in a positive sense.
It is interested in you not resisting Nonsense at a medical level and that raises all kinds of questions.
It does.
It really does.
Okay, so science gone off the rails.
The arts gone off the rails.
Wikipedia!
Gone off the rails.
We're not going to spend a ton of time here.
We've talked before about the loss of what was a relatively new and extraordinary resource for all of humanity to the woke crowd, but there's a, and I'll link this in the show notes, There's a Twitter thread, of all things, but that shows the references, that has the receipts, on some of where the money that you might be giving to Wikipedia is going.
So everyone who uses Wikipedia gets those requests at the top every now and again, or sometimes, you know, some months it's all the time.
that says, you know, we are reader supported.
I don't remember exactly what it says, but you know, we rely on you to support us and you know, it's very expensive to do what we do, yada, yada, yada.
Well, we find in this thread, and again, I'll link to it and I can't show you right now, that in a decade, Wikimedia spending has gone from $10 million in 2010 to 112 million by 2020.
That's an order of magnitude and that's a lot.
And yet, it's basically the same website, right?
So what happened?
Maybe it's that more people are using the site.
This is Ashidas, the person who is making this thread.
Says maybe it's more expensive to run.
Well, nope.
Website hosting cost only $2.4 million in 2021, which is less than it did in 2012.
So that's not it.
But what we find, so Wikimedia Foundation is basically the overarching I don't know exactly what it's called.
It's the parent organization.
It's the entity, yeah.
It's the entity that funds Wikipedia.
Their own website shows that less than half of what they spend goes to directly supporting the website, and they break it down as follows.
42% direct support to websites.
14% administration and governance.
13% fundraising.
13% fundraising, 31% direct support to communities.
Hmm, what's that?
What's direct support to communities?
Certainly sounds good.
Sounds good.
I like supporting communities.
Communities ought to be supported.
I like support.
Support's positive.
And direct, well, you cut out the middleman.
You wouldn't want the middleman.
Well, Wikimedia Foundation is probably a middleman, but OK, never mind.
We don't want to pay attention to that.
But no, the middleman here is directly supporting the people that you would definitely want to support, because what we do know for sure is that Wikimedia, Wikipedia, is neutral.
They are philosophically neutral, politically neutral, of course.
They tell us that, right?
Aren't they?
Well, I will tell you that I gave, as you know, I gave a talk at Arizona State University at the launching of their new Center for American Institutions.
Yeah, say something about this.
This is where you were.
Keynoting.
Is that a verb?
I think it's a, I mean, isn't it?
Keynoting.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
But what were we talking about?
ASU, Wikipedia.
Back further.
The direct support to communities.
Direct support to communities.
Damn it, I've lost it.
I'll have it back in a second.
I did that to you.
Okay, you did.
I definitely want to hear about, I want them to hear about your talk at the keynoting, okay, at ASU.
Oh, I know what it is.
In preparing for my talk, I was talking about, because this is the Center for American Institutions, I was talking about the across-the-board failure of our institutions.
And one of the institutions that I used as an example was Wikipedia.
And in looking at that example, I did something that I just don't do anymore, ever, which is looked at my own Wikipedia page and found It's gotten even worse, and more preposterous, and more completely at odds with easily ascertained facts than it was before.
It's just a fable.
It's not just super slanted, it's actually factually wrong.
It's factually incorrect, right?
It's not that it misinterprets the facts, it reports things that didn't happen, right?
And, you know, of course there's no real recourse.
Anyway, so yes, it's looking for a nice synonym for clusterfuck, but I can't find one.
No, no, it's hard.
It's hard.
So I did, when thinking about this, I didn't actually know that you had talked about that two days ago.
But I went and I was like, okay, I'll check.
I'll see what my Wikipedia entry looks like.
Yeah, it's crap.
It is bad.
They are so bad.
And you just got to wonder.
But if you want to know what album human is, you can look it up on Wikipedia.
You can!
And presumably, that not being a politically charged topic, as apparently we are, you can get accurate information.
Sure.
So Wikipedia emphasizes a neutral point of view, but Wikimedia is openly politicized, as this thread points out.
So, for instance, here we go.
What we mean by racial equity.
This appears to be a screenshot of the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, white male imperialist patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power, and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide.
These modes of privilege mentioned above function as setting the dominant social, political, legal, policy-oriented, and cultural norms around the world.
Okay, so they're... what did they claim to be?
Oh wait, hold on.
They claim to be... I've lost it.
Taking a neutral point of view.
Doesn't sound neutral to me.
I mean...
Do they even hear themselves?
No!
They're trying to define a term like equity.
A term that I will point out used to have, you know, a meaning.
Right?
They can't even define it without reference to specific groups?
Right?
They have to define good people and bad people in order to define equity?
This is insane.
Yes they do.
So just one, I'll just take one more example here from this thread and again I'll link to it.
The person writing the thread said okay well let's see what some of this direct community support looks like.
And many millions, many, many millions, tens of millions go to, you know, in the form of grants that the Wikimedia Foundation makes from the money that you donate to Wikipedia and turns it into grants that it's calling direct community support.
Well, the SEARCH Foundation received a quarter million dollars of donor cash.
The SEARCH Foundation stands for STEM En Route to Change.
The grant was given to provide a two-year investment to the Search Foundation to support the expansion of their signature program, Vanguard STEM, which amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, women of color, and non-binary people of color in STEM fields.
The Search Foundation will leverage cultural production, including multimedia storytelling, to advance non-traditional forms of knowledge creation, to build freely licensed and open rich media content about STEM leaders of color, and address inequitable representation throughout scientific fields.
Fabulous.
However, on closer inspection, it turns out to be even more unusual.
They are proponents of the intersectional scientific method.
The intersectional... I think we took science too early to have learned the intersectional method.
Is it very good?
I've got an abstract from them.
Alright.
In describing how Vanguard STEM descended from counterspaces, we draw on speculative fiction to define a Vanguard STEM hyperspace as a fluid place-time that is born digital and enabled by social media, but materializes in the physical world for specific purposes.
As black women in STEM, we consider how our situated knowledges and scientific expertise inform our process.
There's been one new video on their site in the last year.
They discuss issues in science like objectivity, which they're against.
Here's just a couple of screenshots from this video with some text from it.
So we always want to talk about an unbiased approach, but is that really what we want, they ask.
Objectivity, they say, is sort of a conquering gaze from nowhere.
That's a direct quote, but that sounds real colonialist to me.
This is the supposed STEM initiative that got a quarter million dollars from the Wikimedia Foundation and it's hardly the only one.
So do you understand this to be where a large fraction of them when they beg you on Wikipedia and they say please donate so that we can keep doing our important work and you think they're saying That this is necessary to keep Wikipedia functional, that they're in fact delivering it to these political causes?
Is that what's going on?
Well, like I said, and you know, I have not gone deeper than what I find, you know, clicking through some of the links and such in this thread.
But what the Wikimedia Foundation's website itself suggests is that of the money that they receive, they have 42% going to direct support to the websites.
Websites, they say, which I guess means Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation websites.
I'm not sure exactly if there's additional sites.
14% to administration and governance, 13% to fundraising, and 31% direct support to communities.
And included in that direct support to communities and maybe making up the vast majority of that direct support to communities is the grants that are going to organizations like this, whatever the hell that was called.
So they are pretending to be objective as they are misreporting the facts on Wikipedia and politicizing the world out the back door.
Yep.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Yep.
So that's science, art, once public access, publicly written encyclopedia, which that was new.
We've had science and art for ages.
We did not have a publicly available, widely, just incredible encyclopedia for the masses until, I don't know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, right?
Wikipedia is since the turn of the last millennium for sure, and it's dead now.
Yeah.
I mean, it still exists for things that really can't possibly have any political component, but you cannot use it in the way that you could use it before, and you certainly can't donate to it and hope that it will go to help, you know, un-politicize anything, because it's actually behind the scenes making the culture worse worse.
What you can't do is trust it, right?
At best what you can do is trust your own assessment of what topic might be so far from anything in which there is a cultural battleground that it might actually report the facts uninflected, right?
But how good are you at knowing where the bodies are buried?
Yeah.
If you're going there, presumably you're at least somewhat ignorant of the thing for which you're going.
Right.
As I pointed out at ASU, the worst part about having Wikipedia and Wikimedia so thoroughly politicized Is that they take up all the oxygen in the room.
That we desperately need an encyclopedia available to everyone that is dedicated to reporting the facts of every discipline as best as we understand them and this prevents us from generating it because we have something that looks like that and used to aspire to be that and is now just taken over by insanity.
Yeah, no and you know to harken back to last week's show, exactly as fact-checking festivals are springing up by these new fact-checking organizations, which itself wasn't a thing until fairly recently.
Exactly at that moment, we have the denigration and effective disappearance of Wikipedia, such that the ability of the average person to actually assess what is and is not true has become much more difficult, if not impossible, in some regards.
Yeah, it couldn't be a bigger tragedy.
And really goes to the larger point that you need a special explanation for the failure of every institution simultaneously, right?
That's not the result of just, you know, mediocrity.
It's the result of something else.
Yep.
That's what I got.
That's what you got.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I have something, and that was pretty heavy getting to this point, and I will say what I have is, I think, great news.
Okay, so let me preface what you're going to say by saying you were in Arizona.
Yes.
You were keynoting.
I was keynoting, yeah.
And you were supposed to come back yesterday, and I'm not going to name names because hopefully they redeem themselves, but the airline that you were traveling on delayed your flight so much that you missed your next flight.
And you and Zach were stuck on the mainland last night.
And so you just got here very shortly before this live stream.
And as such, we have really not talked at all about what you did or about what you're going to talk about.
So I'm just like, I don't know what he's going to do, guys.
All right.
That was my preamble.
I told you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to deliver some excellent, excellent news, I think, for all of us.
I'm going to have to get comfortable then.
Yes, I think I would settle in.
The excellent news is that I have apparently I have finally lost my mind.
Oh boy.
And the reason that this is good news, I mean, you know, it's not without its downsides.
You're going to share the evidence for this?
I will.
Okay.
But the reason that this is good news is that I have been on a very unfortunate winning streak predicting terrible things in the world that have then turned out to be true.
So the winning streak isn't the unfortunate part, it's the fact that... Oh yes, no, it is.
If I had been wrong about all these things, we'd be in a much better position, but having been right about them, we're kind of screwed.
So, the good news is that I continue to predict things that are very unfortunate, but it turns out, according to Robert Wright, that I have now lost my mind, and... What's that?
Yeah, so Robert Wright... Robert Wright, author of...
We're author of The Moral Animal and Non-Zero, a book I have quite liked.
Let's see if I have it here.
Okay, so it says, you want me to read it?
Sure.
This is Robert Wright tweeting, tagging you.
I've not seen this before.
So, Brett Weinstein is seriously suggesting that Democrats have maintained the vaccine mandate for the military because their goal is, quote, degrading military readiness.
In the past, I've argued that some of his crazy-sounding theories aren't completely crazy.
I'm not arguing that now.
Right.
So, Robert Wright.
When did you suggest that Democrats maintain this vaccine mandate for the military because they're screening military readiness?
This sounds like something you might have proposed as a hypothesis on the podcast you just released.
Yeah, I would have said that I had proposed it as a hypothesis.
Apparently, according to Robert Wright, I advanced it as a theory, meaning that it was really the only viable explanation.
That does not sound like it at all.
It doesn't sound like me.
So if that in fact happened, that is evidence that I have finally lost my mind.
Which is good because it would be awfully bad if, you know, something that had the ability to degrade our military readiness was in fact degrading our military readiness in a form that we cannot escape, right?
Because the military readiness is rather important to the protection of our free society, so it would be an alarming emergency if that were happening.
So in any case, here is what I am going to suggest.
So you want to just you don't want to talk about what you actually said?
No, because I think I need to talk about this with Robert on Dark Horse.
Okay.
So, what I'm going to do, and look, this is actually, you know, you've heard of win-win situations.
This is a win-win-win situation.
And the reason it's a win-win-win situation is that, I can't remember, it must have been the second to last time that Robert and I had a discussion.
I believe this was on his podcast.
His own accounting was that his audience thought I wiped the floor with him.
So this is a chance for him to actually redeem himself, right?
And if he can demonstrate that I have in fact lost my mind, we all win, because as sad as that will be for me going forward, it does mean that we're in better shape at a planet level than I think.
Well, I mean, I think you're being slightly unfair.
Can you pick that up again, Zach?
I've never seen this before, but does he say that you've lost your mind?
He says crazy-sounding theories aren't completely crazy.
He doesn't say that you've lost your mind.
Oh, he certainly implies it.
What he's saying is, and he's correct, in the past he has argued that although certain things that I say sound crazy, maybe they're not.
He has argued that.
And what he is saying here, it's a backhanded compliment.
Basically his point is, I'm not going to argue that anymore.
The implication being that I am crazy.
No, I don't get that from this, actually.
The implication I get from this is that this thing that you said, which no, you did not propose as a theory, but you proposed as a hypothesis, presumably next to other hypotheses, he thinks that this is completely crazy.
He's not saying he thinks you're completely crazy, he says he thinks it's completely crazy.
First of all, if you read it carefully, what he says is he's not going to do that anymore.
He's not saying, I'm not going to do that in this case.
He's saying, I am no longer comfortable with the idea that maybe some of the things that Brett says that sound crazy aren't.
I'm not going to do that.
It can be read both ways.
I don't think so.
Nonetheless, Robert, if you would like to defend yourself on Dark Horse, I would welcome that conversation.
And my suggestion is that we have this out and figure out whether or not I am in fact seeing False things, or whether or not I am actually perceiving something important and real, and that in order that you feel comfortable with this proposal, we just take the conversation and broadcast it however it goes.
No editing, nothing you have to worry about.
You'll get to say your piece, I'll get to say my piece, and the audience can decide for itself.
All right.
We're there.
All right.
You want to do anything else?
No, I mean... So, we haven't been going for very long, and there's one point you wanted to talk about.
you wanted to talk about.
Okay.
I...
Okay, go for it.
This is a very clumsy segue, which again, Robert, is evidence that possibly supports your hypothesis.
The clumsy segue.
I don't think it's helpful.
I don't think that's what he said.
Go back and take a look at it.
I just did.
The thing that we are forgetting to discuss.
Forgetting?
Yeah.
Or choosing not to.
Nope.
Forgetting.
Okay.
Is the Pamela Peresky situation which I believe we must discuss.
Okay.
So Pamela Peresky is a friend of ours.
She is a psychologist.
She has, she did an awful lot of work as a She was the research assistant on The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
In any case, she is a very thoughtful, courageous person who has recently had her account suspended on Twitter.
Now, the reason that her account was suspended on Twitter, I believe, ought to alarm us all.
She posted a series of pictures linked to some hashtags, very obscure hashtags I'd never heard of before.
And these basically told Twitter that Twitter needed to address the fact that although their terms of service forbid a person to encourage self-harm, that there were in fact communities of people, On Twitter, very graphically, injuring themselves, posting the evidence, and effectively egging each other on.
A seemingly obvious violation of Twitter's terms of service.
Now of course in an era in which all institutions are upside down, What Twitter did was instead of barring the accounts that were doing this, or pulling down the hashtags in which this was being done, or eliminating the posts in which it was being done, they suspended Pamela's account.
Now, that is an amazing inversion of reality.
Up until five minutes ago, we could all agree that self-harm was bad.
Especially young people engaged in self-harm.
It's a psychological problem.
It is a serious one.
And the idea that Twitter is going to play some role in which it allows people To encourage each other into this behavior is a very dangerous precedent.
But to have Twitter respond to a psychologist pointing out that this is happening by suspending her account as if she violated the terms of service is beyond nuts.
Yeah, no, it really is.
She today published a piece on Wesley Yang's substack called Year Zero, titled, Twitter is actively contributing to the spread of serious self-injury and suppressing those calling attention to it.
I've read a couple pieces of it and skimmed it, but we'll post that as well.
And it goes through the history, even before she showed up looking at this, of Twitter doing nothing about pictures of and encouragement of self-harm.
All right.
It's truly remarkable and it is in keeping with other moves afoot these days.
Now I will say, if you decide to pursue this and look into what she posted, what hashtags we're talking about, beware!
You are heading into a A graphic and violent realm, and you should be warned.
Don't do it unless you feel you can handle it and that it, you know, here's your trigger warning is basically the point.
But I also wanted to say something else about it.
Pamela is not the only friend of ours who has found themselves suspended at Twitter.
Twitter in particular.
And the The problem, the reason that these people don't come back is sometimes that they are barred for life.
And sometimes because Twitter insists that in order to come back what you must do is delete the tweet and admit that you violated the terms of service.
I believe that many of our friends who have faced this are actually, you know, and it is the result of I don't know which set of people you're talking about now.
that they are actually making a mistake.
And what I would say is there is-- - But by not deleting it.
So I don't know which set of people you're talking about now.
So the people who do delete it and come back on Twitter or the people who don't delete it and stay absent from Twitter? - The people who stay absent from Twitter and refuse to admit that they have violated the terms of service, I believe are making an error.
And the way I would suggest that we look at this is, you know, let's say that we walked onto a battlefield and we found our troops had draped their equipment in some kind of camouflage.
Right?
These people are engaged in some morally compromised behavior because they're lying about their equipment, right?
I don't understand the scene yet.
Well, they're trying to trick people into thinking they don't have equipment that they do have.
That's like a lie.
Okay.
So my point is actually our understanding, it is a child's understanding that says it is wrong to lie.
If you are fighting for a just cause, Using camouflage to hide yourself or your equipment is a perfectly justifiable activity even though its purpose is to mislead.
Right?
Now my point would be Twitter is apparently fostering the exchange of images in which those engaged in self-harm encourage others to engage in self-harm.
That is A very dangerous behavior.
These people are the enemies of those of us who would protect young people from such encouragement.
I think there's maybe an even bigger, more generalizable thing here, which is the realization by many that all you have to do to game a system is say, not me, but you.
Uh, you...
In this case, Twitter comes at Pamela and says, oh, you violated our terms of service.
She's like, I didn't do that.
They were already doing it.
It's like, no, you did it.
No, they did it.
The mob comes to you at Evergreen.
You're racist.
No, actually, the thing that you're doing here is the racist thing, and you're destroying the functional system.
The people who are gratuitously posting and encouraging self-harm are destroying the functional system.
There's something here around, like, oh, we're going to get a jump on this person's legitimate claim by claiming that they're doing the very thing that we're doing.
Well, and I will go, it's worse than that.
And it's worse than that in the following way.
The world is actually measurably safer with Pamela Peresky minding the space.
Yeah.
Right?
For sure.
This is a very honorable, careful, thoroughly educated person who... Compassionate.
Compassionate.
Somebody who I'm not even sure I know what her politics are.
She's very even-handed, right?
So this is a force for good.
This is a force for good that in one instant gets tossed off of Twitter and can't come back because it would involve a lie.
But my point is, that lie is like fighting the Nazis and using camouflage to do it.
It's not a lie.
Well, but the lie comes with, I mean I think as you said, you know this better than I do, but I think it's not that, it's not just a lie, it's an admission of guilt.
Yeah, but my point... An admission of guilt feels like a lie that has more weight than some lies.
Right, my point is it's a bad thing to admit that you committed some crime that you didn't commit.
Twitter is not a court of law, right?
It is not in the business, or at least it's not supposed to be.
Well, sure, but my basic point is lying to authoritarians who are involved in upending the functional aspects of our system is not a moral compromise.
Lying to them on any topic.
And so what I would advocate is that for those who are actually trying to make the world better, if Those who are trying to make the world worse, whatever their reasons are, decide to target you, right?
And use your own integrity to get you to remove yourself from the game?
Don't let them.
Don't let them.
Right?
If you're up against Nazis, lie to them and don't let it keep you up at night.
Right?
That's what you do.
Now I'm not saying Twitter are Nazis, but what I'm saying is use the Nazis to figure out whether or not your principle stands.
And if lying to the Nazis is not something you will do, then you're actually a problem.
If lying to the Nazis is something you will do because you understand that it is important to get the job done, Then you can continue to play in the game.
And my point is, look, we are worse off for the friends who have been eliminated from Twitter because they won't admit that they violated the terms of service.
We are worse off.
Certainly we are worse off for having lost some of these people.
I guess there's a hidden component that is precisely hidden.
We can't know what the effect is, which is that having said to Twitter, yes, I violated your terms of service when you know very well you did not, you don't know what kind of file is being kept.
You don't know how that will be used against you.
Right.
So then, if it were me, and it surely will be at some point, right?
I mean, I've faced enough of these close calls, I've been thrown off of Facebook, and then restored when it became obvious that I hadn't done anything and couldn't have done anything.
But if it were me, if they sent me that thing and said, admit that you violated the terms of service, I would make the minimal admission, and then I would, next tweet would be, I just lied to Twitter.
Twitter is not an official entity.
It is not the arbiter of good.
It is not a judge of whether or not you have committed a crime.
At best, it is an arbiter of whether you have violated its terms of service, and obviously it is doing that in a malicious and incompetent way.
This is all true.
The game theory will be different for you than for someone with, you know, an or more than one order of magnitude fewer followers and no blue checkmark.
Well, right, but I guess my point would be what we have to do, and you know, we are doing it right now, is pointing out that this is not a simple matter of, hey, I'm not going to admit something I didn't do.
Twitter has all the cards, right?
So you are playing against somebody who has all the cards.
What are you entitled to do, right?
You are not under oath, right?
You are admitting on a platform something, and you are free to say, here's why I did that, because the elimination of me from that platform actually makes the world more dangerous.
So I'm coming back, and here's how I'm doing it.
But you recognize that it's conversations like this that explains our Wikipedia entries.
No.
I mean, go ahead.
It's a joke.
This is exactly why they hate us.
This is exactly why.
Because we say, actually, no clothes.
Dude, there, Emperor, no clothes.
They're emperor, no clothes.
And they don't like that.
And somehow we stuck up on them.
And so it's hard to get rid of us now, whereas it will be easier to get rid of Pamela and some of the other people whom you are referring to without naming them, because they don't have the platform I agree, but A.
But, so they're going at us by demonetizing us and by shadow banning and by writing slanderous things on Wikipedia and, you know, all these other ways.
And the fact is, sorry guys, we still get so many people contacting us saying thank you, can you?
Keep going.
I'm in such and such a situation, and I can't speak up here, but I can share what you do with these people, and this is how we build reality and truth and honor back.
This is how we do it.
This is how we do it.
But realize who you're up against, what their actual authority is.
And I guess the point is, to the extent that Twitter's actual authority only extends as far as Twitter, and what they've done is thrown you off Twitter, lying to Twitter Right?
The point is, you want to be back in the environment where people are talking.
I guess if it's really, if the extent is really just Twitter, if the Twitter universe is entirely self-contained, and they've said you can't come back until you do X, Well, I mean, it's not self-contained.
The fascism is alive and well.
than Twitter, but all of that rests on the assumption, which is that the Twitter universe is self-contained.
Well, I mean, it's not self-contained.
The fascism is alive and well.
Twitter is maybe even acting under duress from the executive branch.
We've certainly seen the executive branch pressuring platforms to get rid of certain voices that it finds inconvenient, which is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, of course.
But nonetheless, the point is, Yes, they have a lot of power because Twitter is a place that matters.
To the extent that we rob them of this weapon, we actually make that place better.
Right?
We keep the place one of diverse perspectives and I think it is incumbent on us to do it.
I would point out there are more artful ways of navigating this particular conundrum.
And I would point again to John Campbell.
Not on Twitter, but on YouTube.
Dr. John Campbell.
Yes, Dr. John Campbell.
It's confusing.
He is a doctor.
I think he professionally was a nurse, but in any case, he has an excellent YouTube channel in which he explores the various ins and outs of research on COVID and its various treatments.
He's done an excellent job, and he is extremely careful, and his analyses are excellent.
What he has taken to doing, and this may not be his most recent video, but it's in the last several of them, was he points out the evidence that suggests that there is a major problem with, for example, the acknowledgement
The gap in which the Pfizer executive admitted in the European Parliament that Pfizer did not have evidence that transmission was blocked by their so-called vaccine.
But they were moving at the speed of science.
They were moving at the speed of science and John Campbell lets his emotions show, and he becomes angry in this video, and he says, I do not know what those words mean, and I have been studying science since I was 18 years old.
Right?
This is nonsense.
But at the end of his video, he says, look, I'm not telling you the facts here because, and then he shows YouTube's terms of service, where it forbids you to say anything that might imply the vaccines, the so-called vaccines do not block the transmission the so-called vaccines do not block the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
So the point is, YouTube currently forbids you from saying something that was admitted by a Pfizer executive in the European Parliament, right?
That's how glaring these contradictions are.
So anyway, my point is, look, Pamela hit some tripwire and got tossed off of Twitter and can only come back if she will admit to Twitter that she violated their terms of service, which she didn't and was, the entire accusation rests on the fact that which she didn't and was, the entire accusation rests on the fact that the people Twitter is not doing anything about are violating Twitter's terms If all she did is broadcast that, hey, why is this going on on Twitter?
Then the point is, well, if she violated the terms of service, then all of the people that she's pointing to did too, and Twitter is not acting against them.
So, point being, They don't deserve this weapon, and we are making a strategic error if we allow that weapon to have all of this power, right?
It's like somebody has illegitimately pointed some rifle at you, right?
That's a powerful weapon.
It is not a moral compromise to grab that rifle and pull it forward.
And that's what I'm suggesting that we do.
Take this weapon from them and remove its power by simply recognizing that there is no moral compromise in lying to Twitter about whether you violated its terms of service in order to get back into the discussion that takes place on Twitter.
Awesome.
Okay.
Well, maybe that brings us to the end of this 146th live stream.
It is the 146th.
146th Dark Horse live stream.
Somehow it's a tough one, isn't it?
Yeah.
146th.
Sixth.
Sixth.
46th.
146th.
This became deeply uninteresting there.
That was my fault.
Alright, we are not going to be back next week, but we will be back in 15 minutes.
So, that was maybe said in the wrong order.
Right.
We're going to do a Q&A shortly here, starting with a question from our wonderful Discord server, as we do every week, and then with questions from you at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You are encouraged to read A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
You can find it in more languages every month at this point, including English, which is the one we wrote it in.
And join our Patreons and share.
Subscribe, like, share.
If you are here listening or watching and you made it all the way to the end, presumably there's something of value for you here.
So, give it a like and help us take that weapon away from the platforms who, for reasons that remain a little bit baffling, really don't want reality discussed.
In the meantime, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
