In this 147th 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 Colombia—what was it like in the 1990s, versus now? Building on our experiences in Latin America for the last few decades, and Bret’s trip to Colombia last week, we discuss approaches to Covid, to food, and to life. Also: hummingbirds. We also discuss the American Federation of Teachers, and PEN Americ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 147, which is a pseudo-prime number.
It's not prime.
No, it's not prime.
It's not pseudo-prime.
Well, it seems like it should be prime.
Seems like it should be prime is rather a different thing.
I don't think so, though, as we were talking about in the long run-up to today.
We are, incidentally, Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein.
I was going to explain that.
Talking about how it's 3 less than 150, and 150 being a multiple of 3, clearly it's not prime.
But 49 by 3, 7 by 7 by 3, 21 by 7... That is a wicked method you've got there.
I'm going to have to adopt that method.
There'll be fewer pseudo-primes if I do.
Don't.
No.
This is not a good category.
No.
It's not a good category at all.
No, it's not a good category.
But, you know, the era of good categories is over.
No.
Wrong.
Here we are.
Part of the reason we come to you every week is in defense of, this sounds banal and uninteresting, but in defense of good categories, in defense of the concept that there are real categories in the universe that are therefore both That can be understood and are therefore worth defending as categories.
Well, I know from people who come up to me and say this, and I know they come up to you and say this also, that the role we seem to be playing is keeping people sane.
Now, I notice that nobody ever says we made them sane, right?
It's a matter of preserving a sane state.
Holding on to, yeah.
Holding on to what sanity they still have rather than generating or bootstrapping sanity from nothing.
So anyway, that's something we might take up later.
But for the moment, keeping people sane seems like a reasonable investment.
Yes, and in service of that, we have, in addition to these live streams, we have guest episodes that Brett is putting out.
You've got two now with members of the military and former, current and former members of the military, I believe.
Whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers from the military with regard to vaccine mandates, COVID vaccine mandates in the military.
You've got another guest episode coming out to Halloween.
I think, yeah.
No, on Monday.
Monday.
Also in service of hopefully keeping people sane and maybe bringing people into a greater understanding of how to maintain sanity and live in this crazy hyper-novel world, we have Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is being published in all sorts of cool languages that we don't speak.
So we just have to take their word for it that it's being translated right.
I just saw the cover for the Chinese edition and it's got a whale on it.
And I was asked to okay or not okay the cover, and I said, I guess.
It's a nice whale, although I don't really get the connection, but... Yeah, it's... I was like, as long as it's about whales and not whaling, which we are not in favor of, then okay.
Yeah, well, I mean, if you're in sufficient pain, whaling is justified, but... It's spelled differently.
I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug in this case.
I think that may be a good thing from the point of view of that particular pun.
Yep.
Okay, so we are on YouTube and Odyssey.
Chat is live on Odyssey if you're watching live.
Other things that we or one of us does that we hope that you can use to help keep yourself sane and share with others is Natural Selections, which is my sub-stack.
This week I published what I called a PSA, a public service announcement to mama bears to defend your children.
In it, I point out that mothers, being women, are more likely to be both agreeable, which is a term of art in psychology, referring to being less likely to rock the boat and disagree with those in front of you, and also that women are more likely to behave and also that women are more likely to behave in ways that reduce harm and that reduce risk, and that both of these tendencies are being gamed by authorities and others to convince women that the very things that are harming children are the things and that both of these tendencies are being gamed by authorities and others to convince women
And so I implore women to To start asking questions of what they are hearing from everyone, you know, us, authorities, everyone, and come to your own conclusions.
And at the point that you discover, even if your days, weeks, months, years into affirming or complying with something that you come to understand is harming your children, Stop stop it and and reverse course and even if this means and in in the moment Your child or children are going to be upset with you, and it's going to cause It's going to wreak havoc in the moment consider
The truth of a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, what are the conversations you will have if, and I use those words advisedly, if you affirm your child's declared gender identity or you comply with the injunctions to give your children experimental medical treatments against a disease that doesn't really affect them, then, you know, stop and think about it.
And so that's on my, that's on Natural Selections this week.
Let me just say, I think that I have not read your piece yet.
I was, as you know, in transit.
Which we will talk about.
We will talk about it.
But anyway, I haven't read your piece, but I really like your framing.
This is the first I've heard it, that basically maternal instincts are being gamed.
In other words, maternal instincts are being used.
And really female instincts, specifically.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're being flipped on their head.
They're being used in a paradoxical way to do exactly the opposite of what they are there for, right?
The protection of children is being compromised by the misapplication of these maternal instincts.
That matches exactly what I've seen.
Yeah, thank you.
Obviously, I think it's right.
It's what I'm proposing.
There are many people who are saying things like this.
But, you know, specifically, for instance, the idea that if you do not affirm your child's new declaration that they are the sex that they are not, they might commit suicide.
And then how will you live with yourself?
Well, I would say, look carefully into those claims and ask yourself, if you allow your child to take puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or get surgery, they will be compromised forever.
And then how will you live with yourself?
Like that that that is the harm that you can actually avoid.
So all of which you know I encourage you to to go look at that piece and I also made the audio read of that my audio read of that piece publicly available not just for paying subscribers this week usually the audio reads are for paying subscribers only but the the little piece of graphic that I made and Zach you can show now to go along with the audio piece do not affirm do not comply we are we've turned into merch
Which, because we don't yet have our new studio, we can't show you on the site just yet.
But I want to say, so, Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply darkwear shirts are going to be available at some point within the next few minutes on our new store.
Shirts, hoodies, and the like.
In service of that, I also wanted to say a few things about our new store.
Sure.
Because we mentioned a couple months ago, I think, that we have a new store, and I didn't really say much more.
We had a cat fight in the background here.
We're just so thrilled to be working with these guys.
It's a small family operation.
It's a couple, just like we are, running their own business out of the middle of the country, out of Kentucky.
And they are just awesome.
They are an independent small business who are supporting independent voices.
If you ever have a problem with an order, you reach out to them.
You're going to reach a real human being, one of their small team, all of whom are awesome.
And they themselves are Dark Horse fans, is how we came to be familiar with them.
So we have shared interests, shared values.
And basically, if you see something there, if you just want Dark Horse branded merchandise or a Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply shirt, or they've actually got their own print shop too.
So they're doing all the printing and the embroidering in-house.
So the quality control is extraordinary.
The quality is high, and the quality control is excellent.
Yeah, the quality is very high, the quality control is excellent, and so if you want that, you no longer have to get that through some sort of big, amorphous, anonymous thing.
You are supporting us, but you're also supporting another small business that is both a media management operation and a print shop.
So we encourage you to do that, and that's at darkhorsestore.org.
Okay, we are supported by our audience through, you know, the ads that we run, which we'll get to the three ads that we run at the beginning every week, and through people paying to access natural selections, through our Patreons.
Tomorrow we have our private Q&A, our monthly private Q&A on my Patreon.
Next week we will have, you will have your private conversations on your Patreon, and You know, we no longer make money the way that people usually do if you're seeing us on YouTube.
We were monetized, and we got demonetized by YouTube.
And we'll be talking a little bit today, actually, again, as we have before, about misinformation and disinformation.
But we were demonetized, presumably because some intern there imagined that we were guilty of mis- or disinformation, and we weren't.
I don't think it was an intern, but okay.
And we, you know, we continue to be demonetized by YouTube, so as such we encourage you to join us at our Patreons or on mysubstack or any other way that you can.
Also, if you are interested in any of the sponsors that we read ads for, please do consider going.
We actually are very discerning and we only take sponsors who make products or offer services that we really truly stand for.
So without further ado, here we go with the ads for this week.
So our first sponsor this week is Seed.
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I always prefer eating real food to taking pills, but I have to say I really love this product.
There are a lot of things that you can do to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them.
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But a lot is hidden in those words.
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Okay, our second sponsor today is Sole, S-O-L-E, a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
Sole is one of our two footwear sponsors, and we truly love them both.
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The cats do not wear sole, but if they could, I'm sure they would.
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All right, our final sponsor this week is Ned, a CBD company that stands out in a highly saturated CBD market.
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You can buy CBD products in nearly every coffee shop or grocery store, but Ned's blends stand out.
And now I'm going to speak as if I was you.
I'm not going to do my devastatingly good impression of you.
I'm just going to use your words.
Do you have one?
So good.
Really?
I've never heard it.
Yeah.
You keep it from me.
It'll freak you out hearing yourself as if you're standing in front of you.
I don't believe you.
Yeah, I don't really either.
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Individual?
What other kind are there?
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You were going to call him indefensible, weren't you?
Jonathan?
I apologize.
If I was going to call you that, it was an error.
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Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life's most common for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for Hell on, Ed.
Hell on, Ed.
All right, that's our sponsors.
So today we are going to talk about a number of things, and Brett, you are going to start us off.
By talking a little bit about where you've been and what you've seen and what it means.
Yeah, so I had the pleasure of visiting a country that I have been to exactly once and only briefly before.
I was in Colombia.
I was invited to give a talk at a medical conference.
The conference was fascinating.
I met very interesting people.
And I will say I had a number of thoughts about Columbia now having visited.
The last time I was there was... It was definitely 1997 or 1998.
I cannot remember exactly which.
I don't think it much matters.
But at the time, There was exactly one place a gringo could go in Colombia, and if you even stepped out of that place, the risk of being kidnapped was incredibly high.
This is not like when they tell you, oh, don't be out after dark in Managua where you have a High risk of being robbed, but your risk is still, you know, a tiny fraction of 1%.
This was if you step out of the zone where you are protected by the military, the likelihood of you being captured by the FARC and being held for ransom was through the roof.
Can I just say, the reason you ended up, and it was Cartagena, is the place that you ended up, the reason that you ended up there is that you were doing research in Panama.
And in Central America, unlike the places that we've been in South America, unless you have a long-term visa, which are very hard to get, in Central America you have to leave the country every, I think it's 90 days maybe, but you just have to leave the country for like 72 hours and then you can come back in and get another 90-day visa.
Whereas in At least the places we've been.
In South America, there's a cap on the number of days that an American, for instance, can spend in the country per calendar year, and you can't get around it like that.
But you had gone with a couple of the people you knew from Puerto Colorado Island, where you were doing research, to Cartagena for 72 hours to deal with the visa.
Interesting you say that.
I don't remember that being the case, that that's why I did it.
You're right about the pattern.
It may have been that somebody else in my group needed to do it, and they were, you know, Panama and Colombia are bordering.
In fact, Panama used to be part of Colombia, and it was inexpensive to go.
It's possible I've just forgotten that I was... I mean, you were there for so many months you had to do a number of those trips, and that was one of them.
But in any case, I was in Cartagena.
I didn't really know what Cartagena was when I was there.
I was delighted by the place.
It's a beautiful colonial city, very well preserved, so it was lovely.
But I actually, I was walking down the beach in Cartagena one day and I was stopped by a soldier who was like, yeah, don't, you can't go beyond this jetty, right?
This is the end of where gringos can go.
And he wasn't saying, because I'm the authority and I have a gun and I'm the big bad man, he was like, you're going to get hurt.
Yeah.
You're going to get disappeared.
Having now returned to Columbia, I asked Columbians if that was an exaggeration and everybody validated the story, that this was that dangerous.
So I think the most dangerous place on earth for at least those from the United States.
But anyway, so here I was returning in 2022. - Which I should say, it was supposed to be us, right?
We were invited to give this talk.
Absolutely.
And as it turns out, there was stuff to do parenting-wise back home, and so we decided it could have been you, it could have been me, we decided that you should go.
So you were there.
Yep.
And tell us about it.
So, a number of things are true.
One, it is amazing, and I think there's some lesson here for all of us, right?
We are watching our civilization do some very bizarre and truly dangerous things, but it is worth understanding that a place like Columbia that was literally impossible to go to because of the danger ...is now quite hospitable.
Now, I was told that there was a certain amount of danger walking around, not so much from things like the FARC, who apparently still exist and still harass people.
Oh, they do?
Well, they've been driven farther from inhabited places, is my understanding.
They've been driven effectively farther into the jungle by a concerted military effort.
And so the danger is more about petty crime and things like that.
I must say I didn't feel that danger at all.
I walked around as much as I could in Bogota and then later in the back country, which I'll tell you about.
But anyway, it was... there's something profound about being in a place that you literally couldn't go at an earlier point and now being able to walk around freely.
And you do see police presence all over the place.
I probably shouldn't have been surprised at how different it felt from Ecuador.
They're very close together, of course, and there are some similar things about them, the capitals and the Andes, and they have lowland tropical forest and all.
So there's some things about the country that are superficially similar, but there was only one or two places that it really felt like, yeah, this could be Ecuador.
So that was interesting.
I am very excited for us at some point to explore, well for me to get to Colombia, but for us to also get to Venezuela and Bolivia as well as Peru.
Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela.
I want to say Ecuador and Bolivia for sure, and maybe parts of Peru and parts of Bolivia are sort of understood to be much more similar.
And, and yet, you know, Ecuador has so many different ancient cultures and, and modern ecosystems as well.
So it's not, it is both surprising and not surprising that Colombia, which as you say, is superficially similar in terms of being a South American country with, you know, with High Andean all the way to Amazonian ecosystems, and a capital that you were in, in the Andes at altitude, should be reminiscent to some degree, but also wildly different.
Yeah.
Reminiscent, but wildly different.
And you know, when I think about the difference between American states, you know... Oh, west of the Cascades in Washington feels different from Idaho.
Right, and even west of the Cascades from east of the Cascades is... Right, that's exactly it.
Yeah, it's radically different.
So anyway, it's maybe not as surprising as I was surprised.
But I noticed some interesting things.
First of all, Columbia had serious COVID mandates and travel restrictions, which it has recently lifted.
Which was why we weren't going to go originally.
Yeah.
I was required to have a negative COVID test within, I think, 24 hours of travel to get into the country.
And they did ask me for it.
So that is still there.
But there was no other restriction.
But I noticed the following interesting pattern.
I saw far more people wearing masks than I would say is true anywhere in the United States that I've been in the last six months.
Which, if you were to compare between American states, I would say that masks were a really good proxy for how crazy people were over COVID narrative, right?
At this point, yeah.
This was absolutely not the case in Colombia.
In fact, the pattern was...
Random, as far as I could tell.
You would frequently see people walking down the street, talking, enjoying life, and one was wearing a mask and the other wasn't wearing a mask.
They're outdoors.
And I began to puzzle over this because, you know, it's such a, you know, a flashpoint
In our culture you know whether you are or aren't on board with whatever the narrative is that you know it's really it's it's wrecking relationships and there was no sign of that here so the question is really why if there's no sign of that if people don't you know if one person who believes in the masks isn't feeling the need to implore their friend oh you should wear it too because you might get COVID and it'll be this that and the other what is going on?
I have seen pairs of people walking down the street west of the mountains on the west coast in which one is masked and one is not.
I think every time the woman is masked and the man is not when it is a couple like that.
Is that a pattern that you noticed?
I would say it was more women than men.
There was really very little signal that I could find.
Maybe there was signal and I just didn't figure it out.
But anyway, I also noticed some other things that I think are connected.
And I'll tell you what I put together, which I did run by my host.
And he, I think, thought it was credible.
The doctor who put together the conference?
Yeah.
I don't know if we asked him if we could mention him.
I feel confident we can at least just say.
Dr. Ben, so the other thing I noticed was that Colombians were very much going on about their lives.
There was much less of a sense of COVID trauma having disturbed normal patterns.
This looked like Latin Americans doing what Latin Americans do, right?
I was there over a weekend in Bogota People were dancing, not only were they dancing in places where dancing was the thing, but you know, couples would get up and they were dancing in a cafe because the song that was playing delighted them or whatever.
So people were falling in love, they were holding hands, they were dancing, they were singing.
There was a great, I had to work a little bit to find an authentic food place and I was getting dinner there in the place next door. - 'Cause you were staying in like conference land. - Yeah, unfortunately I was in conference land.
So it was a long walk to anywhere.
But there was a great, really good band playing a lot of-- - This was at the Colombian Steakhouse that you found.
Yeah.
They were next door and they were playing lots of Latin rock songs that I didn't recognize but that were compelling, and then occasional covers of songs that I both know and like.
I can't name off the top of my head what the Colombian music... Oh, we got a cat with something in his mouth here, if that is worth dealing with.
We're doing a little predation interlude here.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'm just thinking, okay, I can, you know, there are known musical traditions in, I assume, every Latin American country, and I don't off the top of my head know.
I'm embarrassed to say, I don't know for sure, I'm wondering if cumbia is actually the Colombian variant.
But I guess I didn't mean to put you on the spot at all.
I was wondering if you felt like you were hearing something that was Colombian specific, or if it was sort of, you know, Latin American rock.
It was young, modern, sophisticated rock and the things that they chose to cover reflected the same thing.
So like, you know, Radiohead.
That's not the average band you hear covered.
Yeah.
But here it was.
So anyway, life looked surprisingly normal.
The masks were completely at odds with that interpretation.
And what I concluded was Columbians have lived under various kinds of tyranny, lots of it driven by American drug policy, right?
So they've lived under Basically a regime in which they lack control at the large scale.
And so what I concluded was that what I was watching was people who had learned to sort of send whatever signal you need to send to authority.
So that it leaves you alone enough that you can live in the interstitial space and that's your life.
And if, you know, if decades at a time are going to be lived under a tyrannical regime, you have to figure out how to do the stuff of life under its nose without getting its attention.
Yeah, this is actually consistent with the next new piece of art that we have coming out that's going to be on merchandise that we're working with our amazing artist on right now, which emerges from a line that you gave, I think, at the end of the last livestream, or maybe it was two livestreams ago, which is, lie to a tyrant.
Yeah.
Right?
Do what you have to do to be real and honest.
It sounds like what you're saying, even though there's not a particular tyrant here that you're referring to, whether I tell Columbia.
Give the little nod to the authorities and then get on with your life.
And then get on with your life in between places that it's watching.
Right?
So anyway, I thought this was great, this sort of A, sort of reminded me both the fact of Columbia having gone from a place that was totally unsafe to a place that is now safe enough that at least I didn't feel threatened walking around.
That is heartening, right?
They've gone from a regime that was completely intolerable, you know, at the height of the drug war and the FARC revolution, to a state that is totally recognizable and, you know, I mean, let's put it this way.
Life there is crazy, and the people there are crazy, but they're not as crazy as we are, right?
We're all crazy.
All people, all these cultures have their own idiosyncrasies and their own... So what's the... I guess I didn't expect you to say that.
What's the crazy that you think you do see?
Well, I mean, first of all, this is another topic we're talking about.
There is a way in which, in Latin America, you and I have seen this so many different ways.
Life is unfortunately cheap, and it's very disturbing to see it, right?
The exhaust that comes out of a truck that you can't get out from behind is absolutely toxic.
And it's not even, nobody even notices it.
It's so ubiquitous that it's just like, what would I even do to notice that some toxin is being spewed into the car I'm traveling in, right?
People, interestingly, People huge percentage of the population on the roads is on motorcycles, right?
A lot of people aren't wearing helmets.
People are, you know, women with their, you know, seven-year-old kid on the motorcycle going to school, right?
All sorts of stuff that would jar you if you saw it here is commonplace.
I saw one very funny instance.
We were out in the backcountry, really quite remote, and a child On a motorcycle.
He must have been 12 years old at most on a full-size adult motorcycle.
Just him.
Just him.
Bare.
He had no shirt on as I recall it.
Certainly no helmet, right?
Nothing like protective gear, right?
He's on this bumpy road.
Dirt road.
Yep.
He's got two pieces of rough-hewn lumber from obviously the local mill.
Like dimensional lumber, but rough hewn.
Really rough.
Long and thin.
The kind of boards you would see, you know, used to... Siding?
Yeah, siding, make a roof, something.
But anyway, he had the front of these boards, which were probably 8 feet long, 10 feet long, tied to the back of the motorcycle and the back was dragging on the ground and he was just motoring by.
I mean, it was charming.
He definitely solved the problem of how you're going to get the lumber home.
But, you know, there was a way in which there was so much.
And also, I have to say, I just can't even solve this puzzle.
Somehow these back roads in Colombia There is always exactly enough room for whatever two vehicles have just met to pass.
There's like, you know, three or four centimeters beyond that.
But it doesn't matter, right?
It could be two cars, it's three or four centimeters... And you're up in the Andes, are you... sometimes there's like a precipitous drop on one side, or were you not in that situation?
Oh yeah, it was all kinds of... well, I mean, at the very least there are gullies where if you were, you know, a few centimeters too far you might end up sliding over and being stuck there all night, but... Sliding over and stuck is different from falling into the abyss.
Yeah, from falling into the abyss, right.
No, it's definitely preferable.
I think so!
Without being all the way at good, you know?
But okay, so there's a way in which life is cheap in a way that is familiar from the developing world, but what really struck me was that I was now That familiar, there's nothing I can do about the danger, so I'm just not going to let it rule my life thing that happens in the developing world.
I am now detecting that in the so-called first world, life has become very, very cheap.
Oh, how?
Well, I mean, if you think about all the things that have taken place during COVID, the fact that you've got, you know, Huge numbers of adverse events.
The press isn't very interested in figuring out what they are.
You know, we're kind of not doing autopsies unless we absolutely have to.
There's a way in which, you know, we're normalizing absurdly tragic deaths, right?
Very young people.
Oh, you know, young people.
Sudden adult death syndrome strikes again.
And so anyway, there's always, you know, that jarring comparison between your culture and really any other culture.
I mean, it even exists with the tiny little distinctions between us and Canada.
And the bigger the gap between your culture and somebody else's, the more profound the comparison is.
But these comparisons now are revealing things.
We're more traumatized than the Colombians by what we've just been through, right?
Maybe they were toughened up by what they went through in the period before.
Well, it sounds like, I actually don't know, but I know we were also told that we must accept more stupid things.
So they were told to mask and there were at least vaccine mandates for visitors.
And I don't know specifically about this, so it's possible I'm wrong here.
But I know that in many of the Latin American countries, Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica, I believe, and I think this is pretty much across the board, that early treatment was available over the counter from the beginning.
Basically, there was no attempt, and I remember the head of state in El Salvador was busy talking about vitamin D early on, too.
But, you know, the drugs that, you know, we shall never mention by name for fear that we somehow become re-demonetized, even though we're still demonetized, were just available and people were using them and they were even being given out by governments in Mexico as, you know, understood to be early treatment and in some cases prophylaxis packs.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's possible that some Latin American country didn't do that, but I don't know that to be the case.
And so even if many people are still masked and we know there have been vaccine requirements until recently, at least for visitors, that doesn't mean the degree to which basically the gaslighting of the populace was happening at the same level that it was in the United States and Canada and the UK and Australia and New Zealand.
Basically, the English-speaking countries of the Western world had such an extraordinary degree of gaslighting, such an extraordinary degree of like, well, if you're trying to figure out what's going on, you must be guilty of misdisc and malinformation, so we're going to shut you down.
And it just went counter to everything.
And I think, to your point, and that was such a switch from what we had come to expect, Whereas the Colombians, having been effectively held hostage by not a government but a set of organizations that were outside of the government for so many years, came to figure out how to sort of pretend to pay allegiance and then go on with their lives.
Yeah, I think this is quite the case that effectively under tyranny, I think I believe this, under tyranny one is always gaslit.
And if you have had enough of that in your history so that you've kind of gotten used to the idea that certain channels are compromised and they'll say stuff to you and it may even govern what you have to do, but privately you don't have to believe it, right?
That that gives you a kind of immunity.
And what happened in the United States, at least, was that people were used to these channels being noisy, but they were not anywhere near prepared for the order of magnitude of bullshit that flowed through them.
And so, you know, I mean, this really is what the big lie means, right?
The big lie is that the lie is so big that you can't imagine it's a lie because it just, it's beyond what would credibly be misrepresented.
And actually, this goes to another point, which, you know, it put me in a weird spot The day I gave my talk was the day that the CDC, it's very hard to describe this with enough precision to be perfectly accurate, but the CDC recommended to the states that they put the Not even, actually.
So the CDC put together a committee of 15 people who voted unanimously to recommend that the CDC then recommend to the states.
And so Walensky still had to sign off, and of course she did.
But the unanimous vote by the 15 to 0 committee to put the COVID vaccines on the recommended schedule for childhood vaccinations was what happened.
Yes, so it's almost impossible to even describe.
The committee recommended that the CDC recommend to the states that they require children to get these vaccines in order to go to school.
Well, people are saying that now it's going to be required by the states.
And I actually go into this in my in my sub stack this week.
It's like, you know, this is what happens now.
Unless you speak 100% carefully, you get fact checked out of existence.
And what the fact checkers never say, because they are actually political agents and not fact checkers at all, is actually Even under the best of conditions, in which the states are really being honorable and careful and trying to do the right thing, which of course is not the case, but even under those conditions, the CDC's recommendation is what you follow.
Like, you have to actually go well outside of what is expected to say, actually, I'm going to do something different.
And of course, you know, Florida is doing something different.
They're getting no end of shit for it, right?
Well, okay.
I'm just gonna...
I'm just going to say it.
Do it.
I am so sick of fact checkers.
I am totally ready for fact chess.
Right?
Can we just go up a level?
Nice.
Yes.
All right.
And then?
And then four-dimensional fact chess?
Oh, wouldn't that be something?
Man.
I mean, and if we used real facts, that would be... I feel like that's what's being done to us, actually.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
While I was there preparing to give my talk, the keynote actually, the conference, the CDC went through this charade.
And it was, you know, it was thoroughly absurd, right?
Did you see the video of the votes?
No, I didn't watch the video.
These were Zoom gatherings with person after person masked on their Zoom call.
Oh god, no!
Presumably from their own home.
Right, these are true believers.
Oh my god.
Who have now recommended... Or they just, they know it's theater.
I think these were true believers.
It's worth looking at the video.
True believers in the cult that is now doing so.
And here's the crux of it.
I feel like this recommendation actually Crosses a boundary that for some they will follow it across, but for almost anybody who's still got any independent mental capacity at all, the idea that with a disease as age stratified as COVID in the hazard it poses, and a vaccine age stratified in the other direction,
For its hazard, the absurdity of recommending these vaccines for children is unmistakable.
Yeah, no, I mean this is, I know you haven't read it yet, but this is exactly what I was writing about in Natural Selections this week.
It is exactly this, I mean that that was, this is actually a piece that I had written Many weeks ago, and I was like, I'm just looking for the right examples.
And we got two of the right examples with regard to trans and with regard to childhood vaccinations this week.
I was like, okay, there it is.
Yeah.
But at some level, this is now an unmistakable atrocity.
Yes.
Right?
We are not talking about an ambiguity.
We are talking about recommending treatments that are dangerous, and in fact, most dangerous for the population in question here.
We're talking about Denying people education for refusing them, for behaving reasonably we are going to deny people education?
That is like...
Ghastly, at an incredible level, that this would happen to children.
And then for the CDC to play its game.
We're not requiring these things.
We don't have the authority to do requirements.
No, we're not.
Heavens no, we're not requiring.
Many of you have never heard of us before COVID and now we're on everyone's, the tip of everyone's tongues, but we certainly don't have any authority at all.
How could we?
Look at us!
All we did was recommend.
If the states are going to, you know, ensure your children, that's the state's problem, right?
It's just like, it's amazing.
And even just the mind blowing fact of, okay, let's Let's understand the CDC, let's take it more or less at its word.
Why?
Sorry, but like, why would we do that at this point?
Because it is its own reducto ad absurdum.
Okay.
Okay?
So if the idea is, well, the CDC is just making a recommendation, the states, of course, make their own judgments, that's, you know, why wouldn't the CDC under a democratic regime be, you know, championing states' rights, right?
It's, okay, absurd on its face, but now let's imagine That the states do what they are apparently going to do.
You've got a bunch of rebel states that aren't going to recommend these things and you've got a bunch of states that are going to engage in the usual slavish devotion to authority and are going to require them.
So now you've got a patchwork country in which the inexplicable Completely unnecessary harm to children is going to be done on a state-by-state basis.
Those people who have the means to move themselves out of states are going to have an advantage over those who are condemned to stay in the state that they are in because of a job and the need for it, or who knows?
I mean, you know, this in sort of with the opposite political valence, this is true with regard to reproductive rights, with regard to abortion.
Right.
So, you know, and we've always had the division over things like the Second Amendment, over reproductive rights, over death penalty.
But now for the election that's in a week and a half, we've got abortion and now childhood vaccination against COVID.
On everyone's minds.
And there are a lot of us who find ourselves pulled in opposite directions by these two things.
By knowing that many states are going to go stupid on COVID and preserve the right to at least early term abortion for women.
And that other states are going to preserve the right to early term pregnancy termination for women.
Or did I say that twice?
Did I say the same thing twice?
Either way, like, stupid on COVID and, to my mind, smart on reproductive rights, or the opposite.
Either way, you've got to take one thing that is not sane, and it's not compassion is overused and it's weaponized, but it's not compassionate.
Well, I'm afraid it's worse than that.
A, to the extent that what we have are ideologies, political ideologies or political banners, and that these banners essentially have an incoherent package of beliefs that comes with them, things that actually are not inherently related to each other, but my team believes these things and not those things.
And that this is now going to become a geographic phenomenon where we are losing the agreement that holds us together as a nation.
This obviously leads in the direction of some sort of dissolution of that nation.
Which is, of course, an extremely short-sighted catastrophe and leaves lots of us stranded, right?
Stranded where we would like to choose where to live as a constitutionally protected right.
We would like to choose where to live based on things other than the ideology of the governance structure.
That is the exact opposite of living in a free country where the ideology of those in power in your state is such a profound influence in what you can and cannot do and how you will and will not live that it might cause you to have to move between states.
I can't believe we're here.
It's really stunning.
Yeah, and both of these happened this year.
And those in power in states, both in red states and in blue states, are making decisions that are causing people to flee.
And now it is quite clear that we've got We've got political things running in opposite directions with regard to the slate, to the teams that have been agreed on.
And this is in part the problem of a two-party system.
There are a lot of us who, you know, for us, we've always voted blue.
But there are a lot of people who have always voted red who are now going, like, I can't do that anymore, but I can't go blue.
And I've always voted blue.
I can't do that anymore, but I can't go red.
Like, where are the options that actually represent careful, nuanced thought and care for both individuals and recognizing that we live in a society and are going to need some society-level protections?
Like, where is that party?
Where are those politicians?
They exist...
One person here, one person there.
We got Tulsi Gabbard saying, I'm done with the Democrats.
But it's not, as far as I know.
She didn't say, I'm becoming a Republican, because that's not an option, right?
Neither of these parties is an option anymore for a very large number of us.
All right, so two more points.
One, the division, and now increasing geographic division, profound enough to cause you to move rather than just grumble at the people who run your state.
That thing is also causing the loss of nuance in the positions.
Even the position that is closer to your own has lost nuance because the point is the people who constitute a natural break on the perspective aren't in power enough to matter, right?
So in other words, if it's one party rule in each state, then what you get is, you know, look, I'm not I'm comfortable with the Blue Team's complete abdication of responsibility over reproductive rights.
As I've said many times, I believe the right to an abortion exists and that right decreases through the... You said Blue Team?
Yeah.
Well, the blue team seems to think it's sophisticated to imagine that there is nothing morally interesting that happens at all until the moment of birth.
And the point is, well, I don't think any rational person believes that.
But if the idea is you have to choose between, you know, sacred zygotes... The two points, conception and birth, are the only moments in a human life that matter at all in discussing whether or not abortion should be allowed.
No, sorry, someone else set those as the two moments or the ones we have to be talking about, and neither of them is the right one.
They're both intolerable.
I'm not saying, you know, I actually think that the religious perspective is tolerable at the individual level.
An individual can believe that coherently and in a morally consistent way, but you can't apply it across a population where religious beliefs vary, right?
That's not acceptable.
What's more, you know, as we talked about before, The idea that the sacredness of zygotes is such that you have to, you know, that women have to carry the product of rape to term, right, is bonkers because the point is this actually generates a strategy for rapists.
It's not what, you know, it's not what you do.
So the lack of nuance on both sides is a disaster and the idea is that now we're going to have to pick your poison, like which bad Philosophy do you want to live near or live under is is not a good thing So anyway, the CDC made its move right before I gave my talk and I felt compelled actually, you know
What kind of person would I be if I saw a, a, an atrocity, a slow motion atrocity unfolding in front of me, a medical atrocity, and I didn't say so at a medical conference.
So I took the risk and I Told him exactly what I thought this meant and exactly what it implies about where we are in history and didn't know how that was going to go over.
But it actually, I got lots and lots of positive feedback over it.
I may at some point make that piece.
As you know, I don't usually, I don't ever write a talk in advance, right?
I may have notes and know where I'm going.
In this case, first time in my life.
I wrote it out word for word.
It really needed to be precise.
So, anyway, that was interesting.
Interesting that the conference, you know, medical conference, full of people who, I can't say that they all shared the perspective, but enough of them did that, you know, the feedback was not, you're a crazy person, but it was, whoa, thank you for saying that.
Just to be clear, it wasn't mostly allopathic doctors.
It was mostly naturopaths and osteopaths.
Yep, yep.
It was a heterodox conference, for sure.
But, you know, I don't know what the total number was.
A lot of people were remote.
There were hundreds of people in the room.
I think there was a thousand.
Yeah, more than a thousand, yeah, who were attending some way.
In some way.
So anyway, that was fascinating.
But okay, I guess there's also, maybe I should just move on to the, after the conference was over, my host did me the honor of letting me join his family on an adventure where he took me deep into the Andes to a highly unusual rock formation that unfortunately I don't have any pictures ready.
To show.
But in any case, basically the, you know, it's cold, high altitude Andes.
There's a location.
The Andes are, at least in this spot, and I think all over, are the result of sea uplift.
So this is an ancient seafloor.
Has been lifted, you know, thousands of meters.
So it's going to be limestone.
Yeah, it's limestone karst.
And just, you know, people who haven't spent time in the tropics at all, or if they've only spent time in the lowland tropics, like they went on a like a jungle adventure to Costa Rica or something, will imagine simply that the closer to the equator you get, the hotter it is, right?
But as is, you know, interesting and relevant to things that we have thought about and worked on, and specifically as you have worked on with regard to latitudinal diversity gradient, Just as the biota gets more diverse the closer to the equator you get, it also gets more diverse the closer to sea level you get.
And that analogous pattern is also consistent with the farther from the equator and the farther from sea level.
So both latitudinally and altitudinally it gets colder and drier and less diverse.
And so you could be real close to the equator, as you were pretty close to the equator there, but at 8,000 feet and it's really cold.
It's quite cold and the Biodiversity, as you point out, goes down.
I mean, it's still plant-wise, it was pretty diverse.
But you lose the charismatic megafauna first, just like, you know, at the poles you don't get a lot of terrestrial, you don't get diversity of terrestrial megafauna.
Yes, except there are interesting exceptions, and one of my favorite creatures is an exception.
There is an inverse altitudinal gradient to a point.
There's obviously a point at which you're so high it's not true, but the Hummingbird diversity.
Yes, yes, yes.
Goes down.
It's still, there are a fair number of hummingbirds in the Amazon, but there are more of them at the mid and semi-high elevations.
And like three to six thousand feet-ish, something like that, right?
Cloud forest and even a little bit, a little bit into paramo, but it's sort of, they start to die off as you get higher.
Yeah.
Not die off.
Yeah, there are some.
You're at the edge of their range.
Up in paramo.
Actually, Zach, would you show some of these creatures, whatever order.
Yeah.
All right.
This is one of your photographs from this trip?
Yeah, can you move... Fantastic.
Yeah, this actually... So, well, this is actually... If you can move the picture of us to the other corner.
If you can't, you can't.
This is in Bogota.
Really?
And Bogota is at 5,000, 6,000 feet?
Something like that?
Yeah, it's above 5,000.
So, higher than Dunbar.
Anyway, I went to the... I was feeling...
I don't know.
I was having a nature deficit disorder moment, and I, you know, I was stuck in Bogota.
I couldn't get out of Bogota far enough to see stuff, so I went to the botanical gardens, which were actually spectacularly good.
Really beautiful.
No, Bogota's actually at 86.
Really high.
Yeah.
Third highest capital in South America after Quito and La Paz.
Yeah, it's up there.
Wait a minute.
I'm going to just check this.
I'm not sure I believe this.
You keep going.
Alright.
So, I went to the botanical garden, hoping to find nature, and I did find a couple interesting things.
I found a Cecropia tree, a tree that you and I are... it's a big genus.
You and I are well familiar with Cecropia.
It's an early successional tree.
It puts out a fruit that's actually slightly tasty.
It's certainly not bitter.
But anyway, bats and birds love it.
I don't think there were any fruit bats at this altitude.
In fact, I'm sure there weren't.
Early successional means it comes in early, it grows fast, its wood is light, it dies fast.
Yeah, and in this case, Cecropia's wood is light.
It lives fast, it dies young.
Yeah.
Like balsa, which is the one that most people will think of when they think of like what's a tropical wood that's not a hardwood that you use that's light.
Right.
So, cropia is light not by virtue of the wood being less dense but by these cavities that are in every segment of the tree.
Right.
Which get inhabited by Aztec ants.
But anyway, I found some Cecropias in the botanical garden that were in fruit, and there were lots of birds flying in and out, which was cool.
But I wanted to find hummingbirds.
I love hummingbirds, and I love photographing hummingbirds.
And I was just not having any luck, and then finally I heard one in another corner of the botanical garden.
And you hear that, like, chip-chip-chip.
Um, and I, uh, I didn't think I was gonna be able to chase it down.
I saw it was kind of high in the tree, you know, no chance of a photograph, but at least I saw it.
And, uh, then it moved down and I started to figure out its pattern, you know, where it was going, where it was feeding.
And anyway, I eventually, um, managed to get a couple of nice photographs of it, uh, right before, right before sunset.
And so I even go to the next picture.
Yeah, it's not of a hummingbird.
These guys... What is it?
I am not 100% certain.
Let me tell you what I saw and see if you can figure it out.
I don't have a clue.
They look flycatchery.
And what happened here... So I think if they were flycatchers... There's just one bird in this photograph, right?
No, there are two birds.
You see the yellow-breasted bird.
Oh, that looks like a fruit from here.
This is so far away and so small.
This is not a fair test for me.
You have to show me the picture up close.
Nothing to do about it.
Anyway, this second bird that has its wings outstretched here was doing this interesting thing that I took to be a display.
It was hovering in front of this other bird that's sitting on a branch.
Now the thing though is these are both yellow-breasted so I don't think it's a flycatcher because I think the flycatchers where I was were dimorphic and so I think this has to be two males.
Somebody who's watching is going to tell me That maybe I've got it wrong.
Either these aren't flycatchers or that this particular... I mean, flycatchers are a big, big group, so I don't... I have not...
I've got a cool bird guide to the birds of the Andes, including Columbia, but it's still in a box and I didn't know that we were going to be doing this, but there are a lot of flycatchers and a flycatcher is, if memory serves, a clade.
It's a description of history rather than just a description of ecology.
I think that's absolutely right.
And I believe that many places that there are flycatchers in the Andes, there are multiple species.
That said, within a clade, it would be very interesting if some of them were polygynous and some of them were monogamous.
The reason that's relevant here, as you know, is you said that you think they're dimorphic.
If they're dimorphic, they're probably polygynous.
If they're not dimorphic, if the males and females look alike, they're probably monogamous.
Yeah, and in fact monogamy is common enough in birds that if the clade has many species in this spot, then probably some of them are.
So anyway, maybe this is male displaying in front of a female, but we'll find out.
Okay, go on.
All right, this is a large dragonfly.
Go on.
This is all Bogota?
No, no, we are now actually in the outskirts of a town called Vialeba, which is a colonial, well-preserved colonial town, kind of with mission architecture.
It's a very beautiful place.
So that was where that potential fly catcher was.
This guy is actually in the Limestone Karst location, which is near a town called Pignon.
And anyway, this particular photo, that's actually A plant that you and I have grown.
It's hard to get it to flower, but it's crocosmia.
Yeah.
And this hummingbird was feeding there, which I thought was really cool.
So that is a different crocosmia than we have grown here in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm not surprised that there are multiple crocosmias.
But you also came back saying that you think crocosmia is native to the Andes.
I asked, and it's always difficult to know whether they're telling you that it's just found commonly in people's gardens or whether it's truly a wild plant there.
But yes, that's what they told me was that that plant is wild in the area.
Okay, you want to go to the next one?
And then here, Edgar, who was our... That's the name of the bird?
Guide.
No, no, the bird's not Edgar.
Okay.
Edgar is a lovely gentleman who invited me to, you know, he saw I was interested in hummingbirds and he invited me to his house where he had indeed, he and his wife have planted a tremendous number of hummingbird plants, which actually makes the photographic job much more difficult because you never know where the bird's going to be.
Just point of order.
It looks like Crocosmia is native to South Africa.
Oh, there you go.
So that must mean it's either... I can't imagine it's invasive, so it must be just grown ornamentally in the Andes.
Okay, so anyway, he invited me over and it made it really difficult.
One species endemic to Madagascar.
Interesting.
A little search engine is a dangerous thing.
Yeah.
All right.
I think that's all I have photo-wise.
That's beautiful.
I'd have to go back and look, but I think you've shown three different species of hummingbirds.
Absolutely.
I think it was a violeteer, and a hermit, and I've forgotten what the third one is.
It's interesting that you pronounce it that way.
I think of it as the violet ear because that's its name for the purple splotch on the ear, I think.
Violeteers.
Yeah.
Well, I have no idea whether I made up the pronunciation or not.
All right.
Oh, I did have an anecdote I wanted to tell you.
Awesome.
I thought it was sort of, it's a cognitively interesting anecdote from Columbia.
Okay.
We were driving down this really, you know, pretty typical back road, which is to say slow, super bumpy.
Dragging along pieces of lumber behind you or not?
Not a piece of lumber attached to the vehicle anywhere.
We're driving along and there is a rooster By the side of the road.
Nothing interesting about that.
Also, Edgar and I are different.
Nope, didn't catch the gentle bird's name.
Anyway, the rooster, as we reached the rooster, the rooster lifted its head up from feeding and darted in front of us, nearly getting smashed.
Oh no!
And I shouted, why?
To a car full of people who speak Spanish and French.
It was just Ben who speaks Spanish and French.
And English.
And English.
Yes, he speaks English as well.
And he looked at me like, that's an odd question.
But I realized, you know, I heard myself say it and I thought, that's interesting because that joke, you know, sometimes I will prepare for a joke and I will wait sometimes many years for the opportunity to arise and the joke will emerge and it will either go well or fall flat, but anyway, it's a conscious thing.
This was nowhere in my conscious mind.
My subconscious mind had that one queued up, ready to go.
Why?
So did it get hit?
No.
No, but I also have no idea why it crossed the road, it just did, and somehow my subconscious... Oh, he went all the way across?
Yeah.
I see.
But anyway, I thought it was interesting because it suggests something about the subconscious mind's construction.
I don't think it could possibly have been It must have been queued up somehow, waiting for the average.
It's interesting.
Your setup, I didn't get it, because I don't think of the, why did the chicken cross the road, is not about an imminent, like, it doesn't place us At any particular moment otherwise.
So in this case I thought the why was about like why now?
Like what are you doing?
What's wrong with you?
Oh yeah, there's lots of reasons to ask that question.
But I know why I asked it and I just didn't see it coming.
And you also don't have an answer?
No, I don't.
Although it did remind me.
I can't remember.
I'm a little frustrated I can't remember.
Did I?
I I once constructed very consciously a joke in this genre.
Did I talk about it on Dark Horse?
Here, I'll try it on you.
Either way.
Your producer slash eldest son and I don't know.
We don't know.
You're both rolling your eyes at me simultaneously.
No, we're just shrugging our shoulders like, I don't know.
Why did the dinosaur cross the road?
Because it was chicken.
Oh.
Okay.
Yeah.
I like that one.
It's a well-constructed joke.
It didn't result in a tremendous amount of laughter, which is usually not a good sign.
But anyway, it is what it is.
No, I like it.
It's good.
It's phylogenetic.
It's a thoughtful joke.
It's phylogenetic.
It includes a double entendre.
It's a well-constructed joke.
Yeah, it is.
It's good.
All right.
Yeah, maybe I'm at the end of my travel log.
You're done talking about Columbia for right now?
Yep.
Okay.
Well, that's all awesome, and I hope the three of us get to go back there with you at some point.
Oh, absolutely.
Sorry, Doug.
You're probably not included in that, but she gets other adventures, doesn't she?
She does.
She does.
All right.
I want to talk a little bit about the AFT.
Which is, AFT Washington, as a state quote from their website, is a state federation affiliated with the 1.6 million American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO.
So this is, we get this publication, still, because when Evergreen faculty voted to become unionized many years ago, several years before we left, that's a whole story unto itself, which we are not going to go into now, but Evergreen faculty voted to become unionized And when that happened, we became members of AFT Washington and began to receive their publication.
And somehow, despite our very public departure from Evergreen, they did not catch on.
So we've continued to receive this publication.
And they've continued to send it to us, even with our changes of address.
So I don't even know what's going on.
Yeah, but we got their newest edition while you were in Columbia.
And I took a look because these publications often prove interesting.
And this one did.
Basically, I'm even more worried about the state of education now than I was before I took a look at this.
There's a piece in here...
It's called Disinformation in Journalism, the Shape of the Landscape.
So again, this is the publication of effectively the Teachers' Union, including many people in higher ed.
Washington branch that represents the unions for most educators across the U.S.
who are unionized, which isn't all, but is many.
So, this whole piece, again, Disinformation and Journalism in the Shape of the Landscape, the whole piece is really deeply slanted, as you might expect, right?
It finds nothing but truth and honor over in Democrats' side, and sort of error and conspiracy thinking on the other side.
It makes claims that whatever Republicans have said is clearly mis- and disinformation, and whatever Democrats have said is not.
And the problem, the article states baldly, about halfway through, is that the mis- and disinformation are explicitly political.
And this, they are telling us, is what the problem is.
So, specifically this paragraph, and I'm going to come back to this paragraph, but this paragraph in this piece is...
Disinformation is intensely political.
PEN America, which is an AFT partner, did a survey of journalists last year that included a question about which potential sources of disinformation are the most egregious cases.
76% of respondents said right-wing conspiracy theorists.
70% said politicians or political organizations.
Left-wing conspiracy theorists and foreign government actors didn't even come close at 35% and 30% respectively.
Our entire political landscape is being reshaped by misinformation.
So, I'm going to read that paragraph again after I talk a little bit about what I found on the PEN America and the AFT websites.
Okay.
Because... Oh, you didn't find missing disinformation, did you?
I think I did.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I guess you're not very surprised by that, are you?
Not as surprised as I might be.
Oh my god, yeah.
Let's just launch right in.
Okay, well, PEN America did a survey of journalists.
So, journalists we know to be very left-leaning, right?
And let's see what PEN America is.
The survey of left-leaning people done by what kind of an organization to see how much we can trust the survey results.
At the top of PEN America's website, we have a link to their most recent report, which is titled, Reading Between the Lines, Race, Equity, and Book Publishing.
And here's an excerpt, and this is not yet one of the screenshots I sent you, Zach.
An excerpt from the piece that's at the top of PEN America's website is, Recent activism and reform efforts have pressed for a broad scope of actions to overcome systemic racial inequities in the publishing industry and achieve sustained, holistic, and structural change.
PEN America's research and interviews suggest that measuring and addressing racial representation in employee hiring, author lists, and published content are key metrics for evaluating long-term diversification.
Okay, so we got Affirmative Action 2022 edition.
The most egregious and actually anti-inclusive and nastiest form of frankly racism that's happening in publishing today is being explored and appreciated by PEN America.
Also at the top of PEN America's webpage, and there you can show the next screenshot if you will, Zach, they retweeted the author of an LA Times op-ed which reads, I'm hoping you-- - Are you sure this is the screenshot you wanna show? - The tweet?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
But yeah, so that's too small for me to see.
Let me just... No, it's fine.
I will just pull it up because I didn't have it up yet.
So this is a tweet by an author that Pan America has retweeted.
If Elon Musk follows through on his promise to create open season for disinformation on Twitter, he will risk destroying free speech in one of our global villages in the name of trying to save it.
It doesn't sound very good.
It doesn't sound very good at all.
And when you click through on that LA Times op-ed, what you find, among other things, is, and you can go to the next thing, is this paragraph quote.
This is again from the LA Times op-ed.
When arenas for public discourse are flooded with disinformation, free speech begins to shed its value.
If audiences lose their grip on what is true and what is false, they can become primed to distrust everything, and it becomes impossible to persuade people, even with the most compelling argument or evidence.
If platforms are riddled with propaganda on political falsehoods aimed to skew election results, prospects for genuine discourse on matters of public policy or local affairs evaporate.
If the search for reliable information yields nothing but a morass of commingled facts and falsehoods, people eventually stop searching.
So, clearly, having recently come back from Colombia, I am in a mindset to try to translate.
Please do.
And my sense of what they have just said is that they had to destroy free speech to save it.
Yes, that's exactly what they said.
Furthermore, the examples they give here include, like, you can point to places where the so-called left, the Democrats, have done exactly the things that they're talking about trying to fight against, but they don't recognize that.
The idea that the 2016 election was affected by Democrats who were coming in and trying to make sure that Trump couldn't possibly be elected never shows up in these analyses.
Asymmetry is the weapon underlying all of this.
The asymmetric application of whatever standard or definition you want to apply
The whole thing is done, whether you're talking about detecting fraud in scientific publications, whether you're talking about accusations of some moral defect, any of these things, it just requires you to take the standard and point it at those people and, you know, do anything necessary to prevent it from being applied to your own side.
That's right, that's right.
So, as it turns out, the author of that piece in the LA Times, which was retreated by PEN America, is no other than the chief executive of PEN America.
So the organization, PEN America, that did this survey to assess whether or not there was political bias and misinformation in U.S.
journalism right now has just a little bit of a problem with political bias.
Okay, just a little bit.
Okay, so AFT.
Let's just go and check out AFT's site.
So this is again, I think it stands for the American Federation of Teachers.
And again, they're a branch of the AFL-CIO, which is the largest educational, basically union that covers educators in the U.S.
In a piece near the top of their site, AFT's site, called Pulling Together to End the Pandemic, which is not brand new even though it's near the top of their site, which was written as vaccine mandates descended in the summer of 2021, they write, this is the end of this piece, Every one of our members plays a vital role in our state's schools, communities, and the lives of Washington students, as well as in the Union.
Staying safe and keeping others safe by doing what you can, whether that's masking or vaccinating or both, is as essential as you are.
The more we pull together, the faster we get the boat we're all in out of the pandemic.
Grab an oar, and let's pull.
I think they've revived the canoe metaphor.
Oh, I hadn't spotted that, but you're right.
This is the canoe metaphor.
Oh my god.
And it's also... yeah, I mean, I guess this is... when did you say it was written?
Summer of 2021.
I think it's 13, 14 months ago.
Back when people still bought the idea that they now claim they never said that these things blocked transmission.
They're lying.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
Yes.
Exactly.
Yes.
But this was as Inslee, this is again Washington State, this was as Inslee had already declared mandates for I think it was K-12 educators, and then separately many of the colleges had mandated for their employees.
And then a state politician, who actually we knew someone who worked on his campaign, had said, no, no, no, you've got to mandate more widely.
So this is someone who would run on an extremely liberal progressive agenda, who's now saying, you know, definitely force people to do things that they shouldn't be doing.
Anyway, all of which is to say that both the AFT and Pan America are both extremely quote-unquote left, I'm going to say pseudo-left, leading organizations.
And the AFT has written this piece decrying how political the myths and disinformation is, meaning how right-wing it is.
And the only piece of evidence they provide for that is a survey of journalists done by Pan America.
Journalists are left-leaning, PEN America is extremely left-leaning, and stupidly so.
I still insist on saying pseudo-liberal, pseudo-left.
It's not what the left stands for.
It's the blue team, which claims to be left.
It's blue team, yes.
So how many among the smallish number of right-wing or centrist journalists are going to respond to a survey by PEN America, when PEN America is what it is?
How many?
Therefore, you know, this is terrible social science.
This is terrible logic.
It's being used as evidence in a piece in the AFT's publication, which is supposedly a piece by and for educators.
How do we expect students to emerge from an educational system where the union members are publishing this kind of crap, this total garbage, that is passing for thought and logic and research?
It feels hopeless.
Honestly, when I read this piece, and I wanted to talk about this specifically because I think it's so uninteresting and banal that it would have passed by most people's notice.
Most people wouldn't have read it, right?
Why would you read such a thing?
But my point is, it's everywhere.
The really bad logic, the inability to even track that what you have just cited as evidence does not constitute evidence at all.
And in fact, the fact that you used it as evidence suggests that you couldn't find evidence if you needed to, and that the problem may be the reverse of what you think it is.
This is extraordinary.
It is.
I don't think we've come up with a good term for it yet, but the idea that every institution, just like Maternal Instinct, is being turned to its exact opposite.
That we have an academy full of academics who are learning to avoid doing their job at an incredible level, right?
Yeah.
You know, presumably thousands of statisticians who aren't going to spot the abuse of their discipline.
We've got doctors who aren't going to spot a pattern of medical harm that's right in front of them and completely avoidable.
Everybody is going to avoid doing what they're supposed to be doing.
And so the idea that a publication that is Ostensibly about a union of people who are dedicated to elevating, to enlightening students as to how to think is going to be confronted with upside-down logic that they will then steadfastly avoid noticing, right?
Can't say that!
At some point, you've got to see the pattern, right?
Every institution is the inverse of what the thing over the door says, right?
The Center for Disease Control is The Center for Disease Expansion.
Right, exactly.
So, I don't know.
Disease and Funding Expansion.
Yes, exactly.
It is, yeah, this public entity which is supposed to be dedicated to controlling disease is actually spreading medical harm and functioning at the very least on behalf of private interests, right?
It's upside down and backwards.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
So, I know you wanted to say a little bit about Elon Musk and Twitter.
Absolutely.
I thought that PEN America op-ed, that PEN America penned LA Times op-ed, which suggests that Musk's taking over Twitter is the end of the world, not quite in those words, would be a decent segue to you talking about Musk.
All right, so let's talk about Musk.
So Musk obviously is completing, I think now has completed, the deal for Twitter.
He revealed this with what I think is just an epic stunt in which he carried a sink into the building and said that he had now taken over Twitter Let that sink in, which is so clever.
That's good.
Yeah, it's really, really good.
I'm a big fan of it.
Anyway, I will say I find thoughtful people who worry about things like freedom of expression, informed consent, these kinds of issues.
Are divided over whether or not Musk represents a huge win for those of us who believe in traditional liberal values including free speech or whether Musk is a cynical entity who is abusing the trust of those of us who want to see this as a very positive move.
I find it interesting that we are divided over this.
I must say, I believe those who are cynical about this... Those who see his move as cynical.
Who see it as cynical.
They're not necessarily being cynical.
No, they're being cynical.
I think they're being cynical in the sense that something positive, a rare positive thing happens and they are so mired in recognizing how bad things are that they can't even see that we are in a better position today than we were a week ago.
I'm just objecting to the idea that that's inherently cynicism on their part.
Well, I think it is exactly cynicism, because what they are doing is they are being reflexive, applying a conclusion, yeah, this is just more of the same, to something that is actually, I think, 100% unique, and at the very least, difficult to assess in terms of its impact.
So what do you make of it then?
So first of all, long-time viewers of Dark Horse will have heard us say many times that zero is a special number.
And the argument needs repeating.
It's a really important one.
The idea is If there was a university where they still believed in truth-seeking and would subjugate all other values to it, right?
Well, all the reasonable people would seek to send their kids there, right?
Were there a newspaper or a newsroom of any kind That we decide, you know what, business wise we're going to take a gamble.
Let's do journalism.
Let's figure out what happened.
Let's not think about whether or not this is good for our team.
In fact, we don't have a team.
We're just going to pursue the truth.
Team truth.
Yeah, team truth.
If team truth had a newsroom, you know what?
Instant economic winner.
Everybody would want that publication.
Even if they had an ideology and they still subscribed to their ideological thing, they would subscribe to the objective thing so they knew what was going on before they got around to screwing up the analysis with their political stuff.
Everybody would do it.
So it's indeed mysterious.
There isn't a single university that still functions, a single newsroom that takes advantage of the giant demand for actual journalism, right?
Why is there no platform in which you have access to everybody and free speech is the value that is pursued, right?
Obviously, we all want to go to a place where we can listen to what we want to listen to.
And yes, a lot of people will listen to garbage if we do that.
But the point is it's a winning economic strategy.
Why doesn't it exist?
So basic argument is zero is a special number.
The number of functional universities has to be zero.
The number of functional newsrooms has to be zero.
The number of functional online encyclopedias in which you can actually check out whether something is or isn't true has to be zero.
What Musk has done here is he has made a credible play for taking the number from zero to something that isn't zero.
He's gone non-zero.
I'm resisting saying from zero to one because that is of course the title of Peter Thiel's book and I don't mean to evoke it here.
But the point is a world in which any property that has access to the population at large is a safe space, to use a charged term, for the discussion of real stuff, for the pursuit of truth, for candid conversations.
Any place in which that's actually the governing principle is a mortal danger to Goliath.
Right?
Goliath needs the number to be zero.
Today the number is marching towards non-zero.
And what's more, there's actually an interesting phenomenon which I really didn't see coming.
Not only do you have Musk having taken Twitter private with the explicit desire to make it a place where speech is free with some limits yet to be described, but basically erring in the direction of free speech, right?
But we also have Jack Dorsey, who is bringing a platform online with apparently... Dorsey was the Twitter CEO.
He was, and he stepped down.
And he's got some new project.
He does.
It's, I believe, called Blue Sky.
So I don't think, I mean, people have seen it, but I think the beta Well, what do you see as the Dorsey property?
What is it making a play against?
What's more, you have Rumble making a credible play against YouTube.
Now one of these properties functioning and- Well, what do you see as the Dorsey property?
What is it making a play against?
What part of the social media or media market is it in?
I haven't seen it on the inside.
It's not clear to me how it fits with the other two.
Forgive me, Jack, if I've got this wrong, but I think it's something in the neighborhood of a Twitter 2.0 kind of phenomenon, at some place where discussion would happen that would be governed by different principles.
All that really has to happen is one of these three plays has to function, and all the better if it were two or three of them, right?
Because then one can get compromised and it doesn't rob the landscape, it doesn't take us back to zero.
So what I want to convince people of is that A, I don't know if Musk is for real, but everything I see, everything I know from all of those years that we did professoring and all of the unusual people that we knew, all of the students, this does strike me as a guy who's made so much money that he can afford to gamble this amount on something more interesting than money, which is I think what he's doing.
I'm not sure that this is a business play.
My guess is he's not surrendering the business play.
But that the idea is, alright, look, he's a guy who wants to bring internet to everybody, you know, using Starlink, right?
He wants to take humans to Mars.
This is a guy who gambles on big, interesting stuff.
And while I have concerns about what Starlink does to the sky, I have concerns about all of these technologies, I think I understand the human being.
The human being is somebody who, you know, A, to quote Jim Rutt, knows how to execute, right?
This is a guy who isn't just an idea guy.
He knows how to execute and get stuff done.
B, he I think he's bored with the tyranny, right?
And I mean, you know, look, he's been part of it at times.
He was, you know, a vaccine proponent and all, but the point is, I think... Well, a proponent and a proponent of mandates.
A proponent of these vaccines, a proponent of mandates is very different.
I don't think being a proponent of the vaccines is inherently a tyrannical move.
Oh, I don't see a tyrant.
That's kind of what I'm saying.
You said that as evidence that he had been somehow over in tyranny territory.
I think what I, look, I'm watching a human being, very unusual one, right?
This is a really unusual person, and this is somebody who has interesting interests, which some of them are frightening, you know, the Neuralink stuff.
I don't know where that leads.
I don't love the idea that people are going to look to Mars and think maybe we don't have to worry so much about the Earth, but none of it matters.
The real question is, is this guy Good to his word.
Is he doing what he says he's doing?
I have no doubt that he is delighting beating rotten people at their own game.
I know that that's got to be driving him.
But I also do have the sense he is interested in creating a platform where the conversations that need to happen can happen.
Twitter's an interesting place to do it by far not the biggest of these properties But it is a place where journalists and scientists and other people whose opinions actually do change things Duke it out and so anyway, I'm I'm hopeful.
I don't see a better play on the horizon anywhere.
And the key thing for our audience who knows what zero is a special number means is that that is why this is important.
It's not the first of many battles.
The argument of zero as a special number is that if the number is zero, we lose.
If the number is anything other than zero, we win.
Which means he better watch himself.
That unfortunately, the amount that is at stake Here is the kind of stuff that Goliath pulls out the exotic tools to deal with.
And, you know, we've already seen the threat of an investigation, you know, that they're going to go after his businesses.
They're going to investigate him for attempting this.
They being?
The powers that be and the properties they own.
There's going to be a legal investigation into his business dealings looking for who knows what.
That sounds like a governmental thing.
Yeah, it is.
That's what I was asking.
Who is they here?
Well, I don't think they is the government.
I think they is whatever has captured the government and uses it for its purposes.
But the basic point is, look, I don't think that's the limit of the hazard that comes from making a move as audacious as this one.
Anyway, it is what it is.
He's a very smart guy.
Certainly he is aware that he is up against the most ferocious concentration of power that has ever existed, I think.
Yeah.
But, you know, if anybody's up to it, he probably is.
And he also, you know, if you think about, I'm going to mention He who should typically not be mentioned, but if you think about what Trump did, part of what Trump did that appealed to people so much.
He's not Voldemort.
Ivermectin's Voldemort.
Oh, right, right.
Okay.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Trump played in social media space.
Yeah, right.
He gave himself an everyman kind of vibe.
By, you know, through Twitter, really.
Right?
Do you remember the speech he gave in which he Rickrolled everybody watching the speech?
No.
He gave a speech in which he basically... You know, and yes, I had a particular aversion to watching Trump as many people who had always voted Democrat did, but I have to say I haven't really watched political speeches in a very long time because they're all Oh, terrible.
And Trump was no order.
He was very, very difficult to listen to.
But, he actually rickrolled people?
In the speech, he says, you know, he's talking to Americans, he says, you know, I'm never going to give you up.
I'm never going to let you down.
And everybody who was watching it who was familiar with this was like, wait, what?
Did he just do that?
You know?
So anyway, but the point is, all right, say what you will about Trump, but it was a kind of a humanizing, playful thing.
I mean, that's his genius right there.
I don't want to say humanizing playful, but is figuring out how to get the attention and loyalty of people, even if and sometimes because by means that antagonize and polarize such that you get, you know, You know, at least some size of group that hates you so fiercely that, as fiercely as this group over here that now loves you.
Right.
Which now is also the game the Democrats are playing, and maybe they're playing it all along too, but he was the one who was like, this is what I'm going to do.
Right, and you know, the Democrats try this, right?
They're just not as good at it.
Yeah, they're not as good at it.
Right, you know, they tried to, they found a guy named Brandon It's different.
They're not good at it.
But anyway, the point is, there is something.
At the point, I always liked the battle of the fish on the cars, right?
The Jesus fish.
First you had the Jesus fish, and then you had the Darwin eating the Jesus fish, and I can't remember what the next Christian iteration of that battle was.
Was.
But it's fun.
It's good.
But yeah, playful is a good way to play these things.
So anyway, Musk is like, to my mind, he's like White Hat Trump in this regard.
He's very good at the meme game, right?
Very good.
White Hat Trump, okay.
And you know, I mean, the stunt with the sink.
Okay, you're the richest guy on earth who's just made an audacious play by buying this one-of-a-kind property in which the elites of the world battle it out with bots and everybody else, right?
Okay, that's serious stuff.
And what he does is he walks in with an actual sink that makes him look awkward because it's not easy to carry.
The dude is playful and he is having a good time.
Well, it always seemed like part of Trump's thing was to create enemies, that the fact of an enemy class, which is to say most Democrats, gave more fuel to his fire, gave more cohesion and loyalty to his base.
Whereas, I don't get the sense from Musk that he wants or needs enemies.
Right.
Like he's getting them, but I don't think anything he's doing is after that or depends on it.
Yeah, this is exactly it.
And actually, I think you've nailed it here.
A, this is not a needy person.
Right, right.
Yes, another big difference.
A huge difference.
The needy, powerful man is a very dangerous phenomenon.
This guy isn't needy.
Doesn't seem to be.
Not needy.
I will remind people, the day it was announced that he had become the richest man in the world... Musk?
Yeah.
I didn't know that was true.
Yeah.
Oh, you didn't know he was the richest man in the world?
No.
He's very rich.
And the fact that I didn't... What's up?
I thought he kept going back and forth, so it wasn't like a specific point.
Well, there was a specific point at which it was announced, and it was like the first time, you know, Musk has become this thing.
So, you're going somewhere.
Remember that.
I do think that this just continues to point out the difference that, you know, one of the things about Trump from well before he was president was he was always talking about his wealth.
Right.
Talking about what his standing was, and sometimes it was lies, sometimes it wasn't, right?
But that's not... Elon just is.
Right.
I don't think he ever talks about that standing, and maybe I'm wrong.
I honestly don't pay that much attention.
His tweet from that day captures it, and it could be a brilliant ploy to... Oh, didn't he was like, back to work?
Yeah, he was like, huh, that's odd, back to work.
And it was like, that is exactly, you know, I don't think anybody ought to really be comfortable with one individual having that disproportionate level of power.
But if somebody's going to have that disproportionate level of power, you do want it to be somebody who regards it as, well, okay, that happened.
It's kind of just an arbitrary fact.
Right.
Back to work.
And the fact is the guy does work.
Yeah.
He works a lot.
And he wasn't, yeah, he wasn't working to attain that benchmark.
He was working because he's interested fundamentally in what he does.
And we can and should disagree about whether or not some of those projects are things that should be happening and whether or not there should be, you know, curtailment, et cetera.
But, uh, he's not driven by the social accolades and the public recognition of him having attained them.
Yeah.
I must tell you, maybe I'm a sucker, but I'm just not in any way frightened by his values, right?
I may disagree with them, but I don't have the sense that this is somebody who wants a world that I would think is terrible.
I may disagree.
Well, I mean, I guess I see in him a tech utopian, and I find that terrifying.
I find the tech utopians As I always have.
Fairly terrifying and I think that he's got some naivete around, you know, around living on Mars for instance, right?
And around what Starlink will do to our ability to understand our place in the universe just by looking up at the sky.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree that that's a hazard, but I guess the point is, to the extent that he's a tech utopian, I don't have the sense that he's an authoritarian.
Yes, I think that's right.
He wants to liberate people, and you know, he may want to liberate them to do something that we would find horrific, but you know, liberating is the key ingredient.
I'll say one final thing, which is he is now actively Searching and interacting with people on Twitter about the idea of, okay, now he's got it.
What exactly is he going to do to moderate it?
Because you can't not moderate.
At the very least you have to... You have to be able to at least receive complaints from people and have, you know, things like doxxing taken down.
You have to adhere to the law, first and foremost, and then there may be things that are legal that are clearly wrong.
Yeah.
Right?
Pedophilia.
Well, that ain't legal, but... You said you've got to deal with the legal... You've got to deal with the legal stuff first, and then there's stuff that's this side of the law, but clearly wrong or undesirable for the platform.
So you've got to moderate it somehow, and even with the legal stuff, where you can just say, well, that's the law.
That's the line.
You still have to figure out what's over it.
So there is a genuine problem.
Now, I tweeted at him yesterday that there were some people in the Game B space that I thought were very good at these kinds of puzzles.
And that he was saying, look, there's going to be a council.
My point would be there's some people who have done a bunch of thinking down this road already.
A council?
A council to figure out how to moderate Twitter.
But I would also say it occurred to me later That back when Game B was an actual group of people who met, I came up with something like a plan for governance that was impractical.
It wouldn't work.
It was just a kind of a proof of concept.
Here's something you could do to solve the problem, but you can't really do it to a civilization.
But it occurred to me you could do it with Twitter.
And so anyway, I want to make the offer.
He wants to reach out through any of the people we know in common.
And you think it'll work?
Yeah, I mean, let's put it this way.
Part of the value of the idea is that it evolves in the right direction.
And so I think it could work with Twitter, whereas I don't believe there's much there from the point of view of governing.
There's no possibility of a positive feedback, like a runaway process.
The opposite.
I think it would inherently tend towards the solution he's looking for.
So anyway, it is what it is.
All right, well, there's one more thing you were thinking about talking about.
Yeah, it's kind of heavy.
Okay.
But I also feel like people will understand why it's necessary to talk about it.
Okay.
I had a very odd experience this morning.
Having gotten home yesterday?
Yeah.
No, you got home.
The day before.
Yeah, okay.
So you haven't been home very long.
I haven't been home very long.
I woke up with the sun this morning.
Thinking about stuff.
And I was reading a few things on my phone.
And I read Caitlin Johnstone's piece about how people who depart from the narrative on Putin and Ukraine are viewed and treated.
It's an excellent piece.
I recommend it.
She's often very good, and she's really excellent at this particular job, so good piece.
Then I read Steve Kirsch's substack, in which, to my horror, he describes and provides some evidence surrounding Peter McCullough.
Having been removed from one of his professional credentials and essentially evicted from his role as editor of a major journal in his field.
So this is a highly decorated doctor with an incredible publication record.
Steve Kirsch reveals a personal email in which Peter McCullough says that he's been shoved out he's been pushed out of this journal and that there was no he wasn't allowed to present his case that basically he was just given the the the boot over email and certified letters and then Steve Kirsch reveals that he
Republishes what the journal says happened and the journal says that Peter resigned because he had other Basically wanted to go spend more time with his family or one of those nonsense things, right?
So it's you can see the two things side by side and there's no reconciling them So something is afoot with respect to that but anyway at the end of reading Steve Kirsch's piece I'm not sure exactly what happened on my phone, but somehow the next screen that showed up was a browser window.
And in the browser window was a DuckDuckGo search, as far as I know, already completed on the word suicide.
Which you had not done.
I absolutely did not conduct a search on the word suicide in any time in memory.
And it's not the kind of thing, you know, sometimes I search a word because I don't know how to spell it.
I'm not sure.
And so I'll search it in order to see whether I've got the spelling right.
This isn't such a word.
I know how to spell it.
There was no explanation for why this browser window with that search would have come up and obviously phones are complex.
I'm sure we can come up with explanations that would account for this showing up in that way, but I also know that we have been a sticky wicket for Goliath, and one can imagine that such a thing would You know, could scare certain people off or worse.
But anyway, I thought it was necessary just to say, look, I had this happen.
I wonder if other people have had it happen, right?
That or something similar where something that could be a message is delivered in such a way.
Maybe somebody's got a technical explanation of how that search could have happened without, you know, I don't know what it would be, but without it having a nefarious explanation.
But I did think it was necessary to say this is not, um, this is not a thought that occurs to me.
It's been a very long time since I've had any thought in that neighborhood.
In fact, since having a family, you know, people have suicidal thoughts occasionally, but having a family displaces all of that.
And I just, Thought it was necessary so that, you know, look, there are obviously hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and criminal liability and all sorts of things, the kinds of things that people do terrible stuff over.
And, um, I felt it was necessary just to, uh, to make it clear that if that was some kind of a message, then, um, This idea is nowhere in my thoughts.
The only time... Something would happen to you.
Yeah.
And the explanation after an investigation is suicide.
You are saying here and now that it was not.
Well, I will tell you the conditions under which I would consider it.
The conditions under which I would consider it are, let's say, that I had a terminal illness or something so destructive of the capacity to contribute to my family that I was much more of a hindrance than I was a help.
In such a circumstance, obviously, there's an argument for this, or, you know, under torture that shows no sign it can end, where there is no hope, right?
Such things, obviously, I don't want to say never, ever, ever, because there are circumstances in which this is a rational response, but what I will say is under, you know, I've got so many reasons not, you know, as tough as the world is, I have a wonderful life.
I have people who are depending on me, whom I love and do not wish to strand.
I do not wish to traumatize them.
I have selfish reasons to want to live.
Do you want to see how this works out?
Yeah, I do not like the idea of dying and not getting to know how stuff that I was part of ended up, right?
That galls me a little bit that that can happen to you.
Well, there's going to be some things left hanging.
Sure, sure.
But, you know, the big stuff that's in play, I'd kind of like to know how it ends up.
So anyway, I think it is... I mean, I think the job is done.
Maybe it was a technical glitch.
If it wasn't a technical glitch, maybe it was just a message designed to scare.
If it wasn't that, if it was a warning, I don't scare easily.
We can't afford to have a world that's governed by people who threaten as a mechanism to get what they want.
So whatever the explanation is here, I feel the discussion needed to be had.
And I feel better for having done it.
All right.
Well, I think that brings us to the end of this almost two hours.
But we're going to take a break and come back for our Q&A afterwards.
And we'll begin with a question from our Discord server this week, as we always do.
So another reason to get onto our Discord server, which you can get access to from our Patreons.
And then we'll be taking questions from you, which not from you so much, because you can ask questions all day long.
All day long.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And I guess there's one other thing I wanted to say, which I should also start putting the announcements at the beginning next week, which is that at some point, probably near the end of November, maybe beginning of December, we're going to do an episode not at our usual time, basically talking about just different, just talking about stuff, products that we like that aren't sponsors. just talking about stuff, products that we like that aren't
Often made by local producers, small producers that we have come to really appreciate as a sort of like, if you do that sort of thing, as the holiday season is coming up, things that you might consider as gifts for those that you might be interested in buying things that you might consider as gifts for those that you might And so although this could result in no emails at all.
It could result in an awful lot!
I will say that our darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com can receive suggestions.
And what else?
I think we'll be back in 15 minutes or so with that Q&A and in the intro.
And until we see you again for the main episode, same time, same place next week.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
