#149 If Not Amnesty, What? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 149th 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 certainty. How certain are you of your positions—on the efficacy of masks, SARS-CoV2 origins, mRNA vaccines, Ukraine, elections, trans, CRT, the police? Has your certainty changed over time? We discuss whether people on a particular side of many fraught issues are more likely to have adopted a position...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 149, which I'm told is prime, but it doesn't feel like it should be.
It really doesn't feel prime.
Yeah, it's that 9.
It's divisible by 3.
And 49 divisible by 7, it just feels unprime.
Yes, we are united and not divided over the divisibility of 149.
In any case, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
There was a false start to this podcast with a technical difficulty with one of the microphones, and as a result of that, we are going to clip this one.
We're starting here brand new, which means that our scintillating discussion of sticker adhesives is going to be lost to history.
It's an Easter egg for those of you who care enough about Dark Horse to watch live.
And so anyway, Indeed.
No, we're not going to repeat that here.
You missed it.
If you missed it, you missed it.
That's right.
And so you will never know.
You will forever wonder what is causing 11% of the misery in the Western world.
You won't know.
You won't know.
But those who watched, no.
Yeah, I was going to say next time beyond time, but we are hardly in a position to say that.
No, I would not say that.
Apologies for the really, really late starts all the time.
I wouldn't even think that.
Here we are in our new permanent-temporary-permanent-temporary-permanent studio.
Did I get that right?
It's permanent-temporary, I believe.
It's not ABABA.
I thought it was a permanent-temporary-permanent-temporary-permanent.
If we're going to be switching to iambic pentameter, I needed to know that a half an hour ago.
So you need lead time for iambic pentameter, really.
I don't think specifying ABABA, whatever, is inherent.
It's not inherently either iambic or pentameter.
Or pentametric.
It did seem like the direction you were going.
I might be.
I'm no fan of free verse.
I know.
But for podcasts, you kind of have to go with it.
Well, riffing, yes.
Riffing is pretty free.
Totally.
Yes.
Sometimes you get into a rhythm.
But anyway, here we are.
You get on a roll.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't know.
I didn't get away.
That reminds me of that moment in Flight of the Conchords.
But anyway, I digress.
I guess.
What moment in Flight of the Conchords?
There's a point at which one of the dudes, I forget which one it is, is rapping.
And he claims his rhymes are bottomless, and then he's got nothing.
Excellent.
He's the hip-hopopotamus.
His rhymes are bottomless, yes.
Yes, what a weird show.
Yes, Flight of the Conchords, C-H-O-R-D-S, for those of you who haven't heard of this show.
Yeah, it's a great one.
All right, so here we are.
It is Dark Horse Livestream number 149, here with our technical difficulties and our almost snoring dog, and there's a lot to talk about.
Yes.
But first, some business.
We follow these livestreams with a live Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you're watching on YouTube, the chat is live on Odyssey, and very soon after we are done, as we've already talked about, the video will be clipped.
We'll put it on Spotify as well, and we will also be on all of the podcasts.
So you can listen anywhere that you listen to podcasts.
Please join me also every week at Natural Selections, which is where I write weekly on my Substack, naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I did something that I talked about on Dark Horse last week, which is that I transcribed a piece of an episode that we did in January of this year.
I think it was episode 112.
I don't remember anyway.
I talk about Natural Selections.
We predicted that some among those who were crying for vaccine mandates and being very laughing at and harming those of us who were resisting the authoritarian and anti-scientific
advice and demands that were coming down from on high, public health on high, we predicted that they would soon basically try to disappear their sins.
And indeed what we saw last week or a week and a half ago at this point was a piece by Emily Oster in the Atlantic asking for amnesty.
So I transcribed for Natural Selections this week a piece out of our discussion from now almost 10 months ago in which we said this is going to happen.
And we can't, actually I recommend it.
I recommend going back to the conversation itself or looking at the transcript because we don't arrive at exactly the same place, we don't start at exactly the same place, we don't arrive at exactly the same place, but we do both mightily object to the idea that this should just be past and disappear into history without anyone learning anything and without any therefore assurances that it won't happen again and soon and perhaps worse.
Yeah, I read the transcript that you did, and I think it's important not only to see that it was predicted and that it is unfolding, but to understand why it was predictable, that there is a confluence between the interests of those
You know, members of the private sector who got it wrong, listened to the wrong authorities, and those who actually perpetrated this monstrosity of policy, that they have a shared interest in essentially finding new voices to slap those in power on the wrist, rather than to have a full accounting that says, how the hell did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?
And so anyway, we call that the middle ground scramble, and it is afoot.
So anyway, yeah, I recommend people go back and look at your substack on it.
Wonderful.
Okay, we also have a fantastic new store, as I mentioned last week.
And Zach, you can show our newest product here.
No worries, I just want to talk about the store a little bit.
It is run, not only the store, but also the print shop associated with the store.
So the online store and the print shop that's actually producing the merchandise.
are run by a couple right here in the United States.
They are amazing and the product quality is much higher and consistently higher than it could be when we were working with Teespring.
So we encourage you to go there.
Any chance you can make that any bigger?
So this is the newest product.
A couple weeks ago we introduced Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply.
And this is Lie to a Tyrant, which was generated, it was inspired by Brett ending a livestream a few weeks back by saying, Lie to a Tyrant.
And so here we have, that's just really hard to see.
But anyway, the artwork is fabulous.
Go take a look.
And this is, this is, I'm very pleased with this.
This is great.
And there's a whole bunch of stuff there as well.
So that's at darkhorsestore.org.
And we are, of course, supported by you.
We are grateful for you.
We appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing both our full episodes and any clips that are generated at Dark Horse Podcast Clips on both YouTube and Odyssey.
And YouTube is putting ads on our stuff, but they demonetized us fully, so they and only they are making money from the ads that they put on our things.
So, if you are in a position to and feel like it, we encourage you to join one of our Patreons, where you get access to private monthly Q&As, which are a lot of fun, intimate conversations with Brett, and also access to the Discord server, where you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, unwind with virtual happy hours and karaoke, young or old, left or right, there's a spot for you at the campfire.
And of course we have sponsors.
So the ads that we're about to read, which will be introduced with a sound, and um, and what's the opposite of introduced?
Out-reduced?
Out-reduced would be the modder that trailed by...
Yeah, finished, but anyway.
Yes.
There's a little sound at the beginning and the end of the ads, and whenever we are reading ads for those of you watching, there's a green perimeter around the screen.
So that's where you know when we are actually reading sponsored content.
Nothing else in our show ever is.
That said, we choose our sponsors very, very carefully, and we don't read ads for products or services that we don't actually vouch for.
So with that said, let us proceed with the three ads for today.
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All right.
Here we are.
My computer has gone to sleep.
I hope you have not.
At the point that you bore your computer into sleep.
Oh man, I've been there more than once.
Maybe you've been running on too long.
Yep.
It's possible.
Okay.
Can we start by talking about certainty?
I think so.
Excellent.
I was in Portland this week.
I went back to the city that we called home for four years, in part to see some of the amazing medical providers that I have formed relationships with down there, and yes, they do exist.
And in part, the timing was to be there for the election, to see what it felt like and to see if anything blew up.
I think we'll talk a bit about a lot of these things and I think my subsect this next week is going to be talking a bit about what I saw in Portland.
I don't have it In a soundbite or even a series of soundbites.
Yeah, there's just there's a lot to say about what that city with so much potential is and has and what it's doing.
But one of the things that I did while I was there was I met with just a wonderful woman who I'm not going to name her.
I failed to ask if I could.
I know she watches Dark Horse.
And she is finding herself Angry.
And in talking angry that so many among her circle of oldest friends and some among her family are responding to her like she's the problem.
And for not vaccinating her children.
For not wearing a mask when she's outside.
for not trusting the public health officials that we know have been lying to us now for a long time, and not trusting the next thing that comes out of their mouths.
For this, she is being told that she is wrong, and I began to say, yeah, they judge us, don't they?
And I realized in this conversation I had with her, no, we're all judging each other now.
We are all judging each other.
We are We seem to be, so many of us, increasingly certain of our positions, and I then, I also saw a piece of theater in Portland that put this into very sharp relief, in which a person who has simply adopted, it was a one-woman show, a person who has simply adopted
All of the narratives from the mainstream and the public health apparatus as the truth, as the only truth, as the forever truth, has said... I was watching her certainty and thought, well, okay, how is her certainty?
How are the people in our lives who are angry with us for making these decisions, that we feel more and more certain we're the right ones, how is their certainty different from our certainty?
And one of the things I arrived at was we didn't start out certain.
We started out skeptical and hesitant and employing the precautionary principle with things like, where's this virus from?
What might it do?
How's it going to proceed?
Let's use the wisdom that we do have as, for instance, evolutionary biologists, as bat biologists, as people with a history of thinking about granting agencies.
And figure out what we think might be true, and figure out what the predictions of those ideas would be, and let's see what happens.
And when, for instance, the COVID vaccines were beginning to be rolled out, and we were told they're safe, they're 100% safe, there are a lot of us who said, you just lied to us.
Not because we didn't, not because we knew that they weren't 100% safe, because we didn't, but because we knew that they couldn't know.
No, no, you got to be careful about that.
They could not be 100% safe if they didn't know whether or not they did harm.
They could have been 100% harmless, but the safety comes from knowing that they do no harm.
Maybe this is important.
It doesn't strike me as important at the moment, that distinction.
And I think that's going to muddle the issue here, because this is a very important issue, and I think you're going to have to let me not go down that semantic road for the moment, and you can do the clarification that you think you need to afterwards.
Our objections, not just us, but so many people, so many people's objections, people with scientific training, people without scientific training, people in all lines of work, at the point that a new medical treatment is brought to market and we are told they're 100% safe, what we know for sure is you can't know that.
There hasn't been time.
We are uncertain.
We were at that point uncertain.
We in fact figured, we assumed, we're going to wait as long as possible and then we'll get them because we're going to, we will get them probably, right?
And then weeks passed and months passed and more and more evidence did become public and it became clearer and clearer that actually, not safe, not effective.
By contrast, the people who were certain in the other direction started out that way.
They were told by people who were not telling them the truth, these are safe and effective, and they said, ah, they're safe and effective, and anyone who says differently is a conspiracy theorist and anti-faxer or whatever.
And so, the prediction I want to make, which is maybe, maybe prediction isn't even exactly the right word here, but the prediction I want to make is that even though I, at this point, I have a high degree of certainty that, for instance, the COVID vaccines are neither safe nor effective.
I did not start out that way.
And I think that if you take the two camps, such as it is, over in COVID vaccine territory, the what is wrong with you people, why are you putting us all in harm's way, take the damn vaccine crowd, and the absolutely not, I'm not going to do it, and what are you doing to your children crowd, At the moment, the people in these crowds seem to have similar levels of certainty with opposite valences.
But the prediction is that there are some people over in the I'm-not-getting-near-your-damn-vaccine crowd who started out that way, and they were also being non-scientific in their approach.
My prediction is that there are more people over in the I'm not taking that treatment crowd who started out uncertain and skeptical and hesitant and using the precautionary principle and using science and as more and more evidence came in developed a higher degree of certainty because that's what science does for you.
And that by contrast the people over here who started out certain that they that this was going to be the thing that ended the pandemic have changed in no way in their certainty, even as evidence has arrived in abundance to the contrary.
That their degree of certainty has not changed.
And when you see anyone with a position whose degree of certainty has not changed, you know they are not thinking logically, you know they are not thinking scientifically, and you know that for all of their talk about nuance and following the science and all that, they are wrong.
Whether or not they're deceiving themselves or just deceiving you, I don't know.
It doesn't matter, but they are wrong.
All right, several things to say about this.
One, I want to point out that there are two instances in which I know myself to have visibly changed my position in a way that you could even go back and check.
In this pandemic?
In the context of the pandemic.
One of them is at the very start.
The following thing can be found on Twitter.
You and I, as we've talked about before, did not know about the novel coronavirus until we emerged from finishing the first draft of our book, where we were deep in the Amazon, where we had no connectivity, unaware that there was a news story brewing.
As we emerged to the first place that your phone connects, a military checkpoint.
End of January 2020.
Yep.
We emerged to news.
We were in Ecuador.
We emerged to news that there was this novel coronavirus, which we started to wrap our minds around, and, oddly, that the first case had just arrived in Ecuador.
So we were getting information on our phone in Spanish, new case, novel coronavirus from China, etc.
As I looked into it, story was this was a bat virus that had jumped to humans.
I knew something about the family of bats in question, because I had been a bat researcher.
And I tweeted something that said, I haven't looked very deeply into this story, but so far it seems to check out, right?
I know these animals.
I know something about these viruses circulating in these animals.
It looks right to me.
And I got back a tweet from an account that I knew only online.
And the account said something like, yeah, right, it's a coincidence that this happened in a city that had a biosafety level 4 lab studying these exact viruses.
And I looked at that and I thought, what don't I know?
What the hell?
That is a weird coincidence.
That thought, what don't I know?
Anyone who doesn't ask themselves that question on the regular is also not trustworthy.
Right.
Thing is, so I retracted my claim that this story made sense.
I didn't yet know what made sense, but I knew at that point that there was something here that I had not factored into my calculations, so whatever I had said publicly didn't make any sense.
And, you know, it could have been that it was, that the story did check out and that the existence of the laboratory in Wuhan was a coincidence.
You know, which I guess I would have figured out over time, but the point is I believe the two tweets are separated just by accident by exactly an hour.
Right?
But the whole thing, the recognition that I had said something that I now knew was not grounded because it missed the whole set of facts that were potentially relevant, that's captured in the space of exactly one hour in that case.
And it could have been an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year.
It could have been anything.
It could have been anything, but the point is you went back and you said, ah, my level of certainty was too high, and as it turns out, the wrong valence.
Right.
And so, anyway, this is, I mean, you know, it makes, I remember my emotional state, that I like saying, hey, I said something scientifically about something in my own discipline, and now I've, you know, an hour later I've got to take it back.
Do I like that?
No, but it's far better, far better than sticking with a wrong idea because it would be embarrassing to admit that it was wrong.
Well, there's a sunk costs fallacy there too, right?
That you did not succumb to, but that most people do.
Well, I've already done the thing.
I've already, like, is it sunk costs?
Maybe that's not quite the right fallacy.
There's a, like, I don't- There's a good money after bad.
It's good money after bad.
Okay, that's it.
So I don't, oh, this is going to be bad.
This is going to feel really uncomfortable.
The longer you wait, the worse it gets, guys.
Well, you know, I think the thing that is important not to have done, right?
One could do the calculation and say, well, okay, I've just learned something I didn't know.
It changes my private certainty about how sensible the story that I've heard is, but it's possible that the story that I believe is correct is still going to turn out to be correct.
So if I can just... The zoonotic origin.
Yeah, if I can just put off making a correction, then it's possible the problem solves itself, right?
That's not... that is a way to get yourself in trouble, which is why I didn't do that, right?
The right thing to do is to say, actually, as of now I'm aware that even if the natural origin story turns out to be right, That it has to overcome a threshold that I didn't even realize existed, because I didn't know that that lab was there.
That's just so beautiful.
That, like, that right there, that is an encapsulation of both what you do, and what all scientists should do, and what everyone should do in communicating with the world, having made a statement, and having learned that there's more to the thing that you pronounced upon with such certainty.
Be like Bratz, like do that!
Well, you'll also, you'll be, you'll just be happier, right?
Because the fact is, the relief that you experience for having gotten yourself back to ground you're comfortable with, right?
The point is, you're actually taking a risk saying, yeah, I've looked at this paper, Seems to add up, thing emerged from bats, you know, in some normal way, right?
And then it's like, oh goodness, what didn't I know, right?
There's a fact I didn't have.
And then the point is, the point you say publicly, actually this fact potentially looks important, I need to know more about it, then it's not haunting you.
It's not lurking, waiting to leap out, you know, you're not You know, constantly keeping track of how much danger this thing you said is leaving you in.
So anyway, even just from the point of view of your own sanity.
It's an honest accounting.
It's an honest accounting that means that in the present you don't have to worry about saying too much or something like that.
And that's not to say, so I mean I think a different approach, the approach that I have tended to take, is I don't like, you know, until relatively recently, this is a hundred percent, like I just don't make pronouncements out into the world until I've actually, you know, I'm really prepared to do it because I don't want to have to keep track of all of the things that I've said that I then would do have to actually go and correct when, you know, when I'm wrong.
And obviously podcasting changes that dynamic quite a lot, but I was thinking specifically of social media.
There is such a joy and a human potential in sitting in uncertainty, in being like, oh, this thing is happening.
I don't know what it means.
I don't know what the significance is.
I don't know where it came from.
I don't know what it's going to do.
And yet, we In the following two months, we're having these conversations around our dinner table every day.
And we're like, you know, I think actually these conversations that we're having are worth sharing.
And that was actually what began the live streams.
I began to say to you as our boys' schools were being shut down, it's like, we actually have things to share.
And we weren't right about everything early on at all, by any means.
Right.
But we were having conversations by which We were demonstrating how you might figure out what is true.
And that's the thing.
It's not like, were you right?
It's like, do you have a process for becoming right?
The process for becoming right involves the uncertainty.
It involves saying things that turn out to be wrong, discovering that they are wrong, being honest with yourself and others about it.
That's the process.
And you know, science formalizes a piece of this.
But nonetheless, it's obviously the right thing to do.
Now, if I think back, I remember exactly where we were during this one hour wobble between perspectives here.
And I remember, I think, my thought process.
Why did I weigh in on a story that was so new?
Why not just hold off and see?
And I believe that my thought process was, how many bat biologists does the world know?
Right?
Not that many.
I studied under, actually, one who became quite famous.
She now, tragically, died very early in the field, Elizabeth Kalko, who, you know, you have probably heard that Xi Jingli was called the Bat Woman because she studied bats in China.
Well, no, the real Bat Woman was Elizabeth Kalko, and she was a force to be reckoned with.
The point is the world does not know very many bat biologists.
I happen to be a bat biologist with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and I felt an obligation to say something precisely because I didn't want conspiracy Undisciplined conspiracy thoughts to emerge from this.
People who showed up certain on the other side without any evidence.
Right.
Right?
Certainty at the beginning of anything like this is a tell.
Yeah.
You're not thinking carefully.
Are you trying to sell me something?
Are you just confused?
At some level it doesn't matter.
You're not thinking carefully.
Right.
So what I said was effectively You know, this isn't my story.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do know the bats, right?
I know that these viruses circulate amongst them.
The story I see written here makes sense to me, right?
And that basically says, look, on a first pass, this is a plausible story.
It wasn't a plausible story, it turns out, right?
And the process of discovery that led there does involve a willingness to be uncertain, including in the first hour after you've said what you thought was a... I mean, I didn't say anything.
I didn't say the story is true.
I said... I think it checks out.
It looks... It checks out.
It superficially looks right.
The other place where my wrong initial perspective is absolutely captured is masks.
Of which, as you know, I was... We talked a lot about masks.
We talked a lot about masks.
I was very early on using masks and advocating for them.
You made me so grumpy.
I did not want to go into stores masked early on, and you're like, it's the thing, and I came around, and then we both came around the other way.
And you know, look, I had a model in my head and I remember I talked about it I showed it on Dark Horse in which the idea was well how much I can use my camera to tell me how much light is blocked by a bandana and it's a fair amount and That, to me, suggested the likelihood that particles would be blocked.
And you can say, well, particles are too tiny, they go through the holes.
Apparently they do.
But photons are also very tiny.
What photons don't do is, you know, there's no flow pattern around a fiber.
The photon hits the fiber, it doesn't steer around it, whereas air flowing over probably brings the particles through the mask, which is probably why they don't work very well.
But the following thing also occurs to me in hearing your description here.
Which is that we had this recent, you know, you say we're all judging each other.
And I think this is true.
I think we are.
I know that when I see people wearing masks, I have a thought that I can't stop.
Especially when I see them wearing masks outside.
It's like, okay, how, what model is running around in your head, you know, years into this that you still think it makes sense for you to mask yourself outdoors But I'm going to say here's something to you that you often say to me while I'm trying to figure out what is going on in their heads.
And you say, it's not like that.
Very often, and I assume that in some cases it is a model and it's just a bad model, but very often it's not a model.
And this is to my point about they arrived at the certainty upon being told a thing and it doesn't get updated.
It's not a model.
It's not a complex living thing.
It's a conclusion.
End of story.
Done.
Right.
Now this is exactly where I'm headed, is that you and I had the following episode in our own life, a minor thing.
But you and I had an appointment with somebody and I can't remember which one of us had come down with a slight respiratory something, you know, a little cold that under ordinary pre-COVID circumstances would not be worth even mentioning.
You just would be like, oh that's annoying.
But we were going to meet with this person and in light of COVID For the first time.
This wasn't someone we knew before, right?
Yep.
I felt it was necessary to warn her and to give her the option to cancel the meeting in case this was COVID, right?
And she suggested, quite rightly, how about you wear a mask?
And I said, how about we don't wear masks and we meet outside and when we go inside to look at the samples or whatever it was that we needed to see, that then we will put on a mask.
But then... Two, in fact.
We didn't share masks.
No, we had two entirely different masks.
But I remember having the weird thought, like, I do not want the cost of being seen to wear a mask, which implies either a simplistic and wrong model of COVID, or No model at all, as you point out, is likely going on with any of these people.
And so it was like, actually, the fact that I don't wear a mask, I certainly don't wear a mask outdoors, but in this case, I was going to put on a mask, right?
Now that becomes complex.
It's actually evidence.
That pattern, if you saw, you know, hour after hour of not wearing a mask, and then, you know, slight respiratory something, and because I'm the person who might be spreading whatever it is, wearing a mask makes more sense.
You know, that's evidence of a nuanced model.
It's not evidence of the absence of a model, but because masks are something that we now judge each other for because of the way that they have been politicized, it was a tough calculation that shouldn't have been.
The right thing to do was to say, look, there's very little harm in it in this case.
I'm not committing to wear a mask, you know, in general.
It just happens.
As a courtesy, it made sense.
Last thing I wanted to say from your initial intro here is I think the failure you're talking about is extremely clear and consequential with respect to the doctors.
And I suspect that we can learn something about how civilization goes crazy.
That your point about certainty... Where are the doctors now?
Right?
I don't think you could be a working cardiologist or pathologist or oncologist or coroner.
And not be aware of the huge harm that we inflicted on ourselves.
I'm not talking about COVID.
I'm talking about vaccine adverse events.
I don't think you could be unaware.
And so where is the chorus of these doctors who got it wrong initially and have now realized that and are standing up and saying, you know, it's throughout my cardiology ward.
You can't miss it, right?
Where are those doctors?
Well, there are a couple, but it's not a chorus of them.
Why not?
Among the, you know, it's more than a handful, but relative to the Corps of Doctors, it's a handful.
It's a tiny fraction of doctors.
Most of them don't have wards anymore, right?
They've been relieved of duty.
Oh, that's not who I'm talking about.
You're right.
That's a tiny number.
The dissidents who came out, who initially said, hey, wait a second, what I'm seeing, it doesn't add up.
The claims don't add up.
I'm seeing stuff that's not being discussed.
There's a system that catches these adverse events.
We're not monitoring it.
Those doctors stood up, and it was a handful, and they largely are continuing to lose their positions, their editorships, etc.
I'm talking about doctors who Presumably did what they thought was right at the beginning, said what they thought was true at the beginning, now have incontrovertible evidence in front of them, and are not standing up now.
That's the thing.
And there are a couple who have.
There are a couple.
Some of them have gone halfway, which confuses me.
Once you've seen what the system... What's the halfway?
What's a halfway position?
A halfway position is, yes, these adverse events are very serious, but there is no early treatment option You know, there are no repurposed drugs that are worth consideration.
So the vaccines are still the right choice?
In some cases you get a partial like, you know, for many people they don't make sense, but, which I don't think is true anymore.
Most scientific articles about anything having to do with With vaccine adverse events still have to start.
I mean, you could just see the guillotine over these guys, over the researchers' heads.
You were told by the editor of the journal that you were not going to be allowed to publish any results that in any way show adverse events unless you basically bracket your article with, yeah, but they're awesome.
Still, it's the best way to avoid COVID.
And I think actually BMJ, British Medical Journal, is a very interesting exception that's emerging.
The editor of BMJ turns out to be, I think, the reason that we've seen so many interesting op-eds and some research being published there and only there among the major journals.
Right, and which tells you something.
The arbitrariness of you have some journal in which author after author is saying the same thing, and the point is, well, you know, under a different editor, but that journal have a radically different perspective, even with the same pool of readership and researchers who use that journal.
Editors are powerful.
It's not just for literature, right?
There's a reason they call it the scientific literature, because there is someone who is effectively not just It's not... I don't know if I want to go here, but the concept of midwife gets applied in a lot of places where it has no place.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, like, how could you object to midwife?
It's like, no, actually, sometimes what you're doing is helping create.
And midwives don't help create the baby.
They help ensure that a baby ends up in the world that was inside a mother's body and is safe in the world.
But the midwife did not help create the baby.
And so editors are doing more than midwifing.
Oh, yeah.
By a lot.
And I think especially in the scientific realm, those who aren't in science have this very strange cartoonish version of how it is that we come to know what we come to know.
And that's part of why you can get things like hashtag follow the science.
People are like, oh, okay, I'll follow the science.
I guess so.
That was handed down by science god.
Yeah.
And it's exactly that kind of cartoonish Vision.
So yes, if the editor of a journal changes, can the journal change its direction?
Absolutely.
Oh, absolutely.
What is the Atlantic today?
It's not a scientific journal under any circumstances, but the point is that used to be an important publication in which things were hashed out and now it's effectively a highly politicized rag that still has high production values and so people still take it seriously.
But what I wanted to get at with the doctors is I think the most brilliant and diabolical move of the public health authorities involved getting the doctors to very publicly speak as one at the very beginning of the vaccine rollout.
In other words, The way doctoring is supposed to work, information accumulates clinically, right?
Doctors see patients.
If they're any good, they cannot help but notice patterns.
And by getting the doctors on the record, effectively challenging any And part of the way that was done was by giving it to the doctors first.
It was by giving it to the doctors and all the other health care professionals first.
getting the doctors to do that, somehow it made it very hard for those doctors to reverse course.
And part of the way that was done was by giving it to the doctors first.
It was by giving it to the doctors and all the other healthcare professionals first.
And this was, you know, I had one doctor who did end up taking and being glad that he took the vaccine, but early on he was like, what are they doing?
Why, like, we can't know.
Why, why would you put the entire healthcare force, workforce, at risk with a new experimental treatment first?
And, you know, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that one of the side effects, perhaps intentional at least by some, was exactly this.
Now that it's all you who've taken it, and it's your job to make sure that everyone else takes it, You have some complaints or what?
Because you're already dosed up.
Yeah, which is not true.
And actually there's a... What's not true?
That you're already dosed up.
This is a... I think that this is a...
A intuitive and wrong perspective that has lots of people failing to realize where they are in this program.
In other words, there is a dose-dependent relationship.
We can see it to some extent already in the evidence, in the data.
There's a dose-dependent relationship between these, especially the mRNA vaccines, and the hazard.
The more you have, the greater your risk.
Absolutely.
But still the difference between 0 and 1 is rather large.
Right.
And we can see that some sort of model is where the fact that so few people are taking the boosters...
tells us that lots of people have updated something in their model whether they've become agnostic about the whole thing and they're in their minds procrastinating and you know they just haven't gotten it yet or whatever they're doing something is protecting them from getting further doses even though they haven't stated you know what I used to think X and now I don't because and that's the thing we're waiting for right like it's it's it's those sorts of
Admission makes it sound too onerous, right?
But honesty.
Be honest with yourself and then share that honesty at least with the people whom you shamed and debilitated.
At least share your your newfound honesty with those for whom your being wrong had a direct negative effect.
And you won't know until you do it.
If it's not something that you're used to doing, you won't know until you do it.
But you will feel so much better.
Right?
It's not easy to say, hey, I really screwed this up.
I thought I had it right.
But it's really not easy to say.
But you will just viscerally feel a huge weight off your shoulders in doing it.
And by and large, you know, The game theory says it's all about the future, always.
It can't ever be about anything else.
And so the point is, when you say to somebody, even somebody who, even if you've been terrible to somebody because you were absolutely sure that they had fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, whatever that means, right?
You may have been terrible to somebody.
And if you say, look, I screwed it up.
Here's how.
But I understand that I did.
I feel bad about it.
I won't do it again.
Right?
If you say that to somebody, it is not in their interest to say, well, I don't accept your apology.
You know, there's nothing you can do to mend this.
In general, especially if you have a relationship that has content that goes beyond whatever took place over COVID, people will forgive you.
People will be decent to you and you will just simply not have to live with that Fear of, you know, what happens if it emerges.
Well, so the idea of people will be decent to you.
Those of us who have been, you know, vilified and, you know, we have been quite lucky.
We haven't lost people or jobs or, you know, been told to stand outside on Christmas and such, as many people have.
Those of us on that side of the things are not the ones who aren't being decent.
Right?
But one thing that I hear in what you're saying, that I hope is true but I'm not sure it is, is the kind of heartfelt, I looked inside of myself, I'm seeing the new evidence, and I behaved badly and I was wrong.
That, hopefully, can help rebuild trust.
But one of the things that has frayed and decayed, and in some cases it's irreparable, is trust between people.
And so, again, from conversations I had this last week, what I'm hearing from people who have not been apologized to, who have lost relationships, who have lost livelihoods, all of this, but one thing I'm hearing from them is I don't know if I want the relationships back, because I won't ever trust them again.
And it's not about, like, I won't trust them because they hurt me, but specifically the thing that was said, and I heard this on more than one occasion, was, I gave them what I knew about what the evidence was, and they still vaccinated their children.
I don't trust them.
I will never trust them with my children again.
And, like, what do you do?
I don't know what you do.
No, I'm afraid we all do and it's built in.
The real thing hinges on the distinction between a pro-forma or hedging apology and a real one.
And the reason that it hinges on that is not some touchy-feely thing.
A real apology in which the person has done the accounting of their own wrongdoing is the insurance that makes them safe to deal with going forward.
Perfectly safe?
No.
But none of us are perfectly safe.
So there's a principle, right?
At the point that a company has had a major scandal, what was it?
I'm not going to mention the brand because I'm not 100% certain of it, I've forgotten, but there was a tire company that had covered up the fact that there were blowouts that had killed a number of people, right?
The point is, in the aftermath of that scandal, There's actually a degree of safety in buying those tires.
Because of all companies, that company cannot afford to have the pattern continue.
And so you would expect extra vigilance.
In fact, you would expect that that company might be willing to take a loss on each tire in order to ensure that it was clear that this pattern had gone away.
The extra scrutiny from the public because of past wrongs will make for extra vigilance on the part of the company.
Right.
So, what I would say is, and in my personal policy, which I have said before, A complete accounting of what you did wrong, if it really is complete, is sufficient.
Now there are people here who I believe committed knowing wrongs, who can't apologize and never will, because to do so would be effectively to confess to crimes.
I think you're talking a different level though.
This is funny though, because having just spent time with that transcript from almost ten months ago, I feel like we're having that conversation again at some level.
The issue is not so much, did they see that it, like, even someone who says, oh wow, oh, I see now, I shouldn't have had my children vaccinated with these vaccines, with these ones.
I won't do that again.
Even that leaves open the reality.
Like, it doesn't change the reality that You were the sort of person, and you know, the one I was talking to, this one particular conversation, she invoked my mama bear's piece, subtext.
She said, she said to me, you, my once dear friend, are the sort of person who gave up being a mama bear and trusted someone who'd already lied to you and let them have your children.
I can't trust you with my children ever again if you do that.
I don't care what kind of apology you make.
I don't care if you know that you were wrong.
The fact is, there's something in your head.
There's something in your head that allowed you to sacrifice your children.
And no apologies changes that.
Look, I get it.
On the other hand, a full apology would involve the recognition, which is very hard to reach, that you put your own children in danger because you trusted something that you knew you should have known better than to trust.
Right?
So the point is, if somebody said that to you, like, I can't believe that I allowed my children To be vaccinated in this way, when, you know, I was being told, hey, even if these vaccines work, the risk goes up the younger you are, and the risk of COVID is spectacularly low, right?
If somebody says, hey, I now get that that message was available to me at the time, and I allowed myself to be blinded, and it had a, it placed my kids in danger, Right?
If somebody said that, then the point is, how likely is it that somebody who has had to wrestle with the terrible knowledge that they put their own children in danger, is going to blindly do that again?
And if they did start to blindly do that again, and you said, hey, do you remember that time that you took this... But I feel like...
You often say to me, no, their minds aren't like that, right?
And I think, you know, the 15 years that we spent really teaching college students, like actually really getting to know 25, 50, 75 students really well over the course of a quarter or two or a full academic year or more, gave us both the sense of like, almost everyone's reachable.
Almost everyone's alive in there and is waiting if they haven't already discovered it.
To be sparked into creativity and productivity and invention and discovery and exploration and so many interesting things.
It was the very rare student, even at this really non-elite college, who couldn't be inspired into doing some interesting work.
And yet, and yet, we see at the population level where we don't know any of these people.
We don't have access to them and their individual minds on a daily basis for weeks on end or months or even years.
That people are making decisions not based on, but why do you think that?
Okay, tell me, okay, let me give you why you shouldn't be thinking that way, or why you think I shouldn't be thinking this way.
Without access to them at that level, it looks like it's not a model.
It's just a conclusion.
No, no.
Look, I think you're mixing two things.
A, I disagree with you that almost everybody is reachable.
I think almost everybody starts out reachable.
But in college classrooms, people were young enough that it felt like... A, they were young enough.
B, because your and my classes were so oversubscribed, and they tended to be oversubscribed because students who had gotten a lot out of it told other students who would get a lot out of it... So the college wasn't selective, but our classes were.
Our classes were selective.
I do believe we are all born in a condition where we can, unless you're broken, you can be reached early, but then you lose that capacity.
There's not a boundary, but it's a slope.
Right.
And so my point is not, hey, everybody who did wrong here can apologize and we can be back to zero.
My point is the people who are capable of delivering the necessary apology can be made safe.
Because the whole point is it's the self-accounting that allows you to deliver an apology that doesn't have any You know, gray areas or, you know, places to hide some kind of self-deception.
The full accounting that says, here's how I got it this wrong, is itself a demonstration that the person has updated their model.
Either that, or they have to be diabolical and willing to say this and not believe it and not care.
Which is very few people.
I guess I think there's a third category, and I'm not sure.
I hope I'm wrong, but as I heard it, you just described an apology that involves a description of the ways that a person was wrong.
Inherently, a company is an update in the reliability of their decision-making in the future.
Or they're diabolical, and they're reporting something that doesn't correspond to a change in the way that they're going to behave in the future.
I think, unfortunately, that there are a whole lot of people who, in order to, like, oh, I just want this relationship back.
Oh, can we just do, like, family holidays again?
Okay, you know what?
I thought about it.
I saw you were wrong.
fear that that's what people are actually thinking.
But like, I thought about it, I see that we were lied to, and I made the wrong decision, and here is why, but here's why I won't do it again.
And yeah, I'm making like a caricature of it, I'm kind of rolling my eyes, but I feel like there's people who can deliver an apparently good apology who will be internally kind of like, "Oh, this is pro forma, but I gotta get through it because I really like this person." I really like my sister.
I really like my cousin.
I really like my friend from high school.
It's my work buddy.
It's my boss.
I gotta just do it.
And okay, are we good?
I'm really sorry.
Okay, good.
Let's go have a beer.
And I feel like there's a lot of those people.
And I'm worried about them because I feel like they're obviously, from the past three years, hiding in plain sight.
I am not arguing that somebody who delivers an apology necessarily deserves a cleaning of the slate.
My point is a proper apology that involves a self-accounting that did not do the following thing.
The accounting you are afraid of, and I also agree it is there to be feared, is the accounting that says, what is the minimum I have to acknowledge in order to get past this?
The grudging apology, the minimal apology, that thing is strategic.
And it is functioning to preserve the capacity to do similar things in the future.
I want no part of any... Even if none of that is conscious.
Right.
Whatever mechanism it is that says, I really, I want to get past this.
And you know, you can hear, people who are actually good at apologizing, you will hear.
They are not monitoring whether this is enough for you to let them off the hook.
What they are trying to do is tell you their own argument with themselves.
I'm angry at myself, here's what for, here's what it looks like inside, and I'm just going to talk.
I'm going to let you see that, and then you're going to decide if that covers what you saw, right?
And you may say, actually it doesn't.
I hear what you're doing there.
You have found this seven things that you did wrong, but you've missed these other two.
Yeah, like, think on it some more, and then come back to me.
All right, yeah, and hopefully we've all been there on both sides.
Like if we're adults past, you know, the age of I don't even know what, but, you know, we presumably all of us have done wrong unto others and had wrongs done unto us that warranted complex apologies.
And sometimes the difficult conversation that happens does involve exactly what you just said.
Yeah, you've got some of it, but you don't have all of it.
That's not enough.
Damn.
Go back.
Go back.
Think more.
Come back to me after you have.
And if they do, then what you have is somebody who is now hyper-conscious of this hazard that exists in them.
That's the point.
If you do this properly, then you end up conscious of things that most people are not fully conscious of.
How often does this even happen?
You and I do this with each other.
We do.
And I think the audience, if you're watching, Part of what you're watching for is because you can tell that we do.
That we are actually honest with one another.
And it's not that we're always perfect with one another at all.
But we have both been on both sides of that.
With each other.
Have I been with other people?
I don't know.
So we are lucky to have in our lives each other with whom we can do that with and with whom we do.
I don't know that most people have someone with whom they can do that, that it wouldn't just tear apart the fabric of the thing and it disappears into the wind.
Yeah, I mean this goes to a different conversation that we've had multiple times here, which is... Not so much here, this being the permanent, temporary, permanent studio.
Oh no, we have never had this conversation here, because this is the first conversation we've had here, but in the past on Dark Horse we have talked about the painful upgrade to one's Friend group that occurs in crisis because people disappoint you and they're actually telling you something that you need to know.
They're not up to the challenge of being, you know, they can be a friend under simple conditions but if a friend who cannot be a friend under difficult conditions isn't really a friend.
And so you lose those people and you gotta not Do everything to get them back, because if they're not capable of at least apologizing for what they actually did wrong, then it's not something to invest in.
But the other thing is that people surprise you in the other direction, and you encounter these folks who you didn't know before, who are up to that challenge.
And so I'm not telling you that the world is going to be full of people who are capable of delivering a high-quality apology and deserve The forgiveness that comes from it.
But I'm telling you that that's the thing you're on the lookout for.
And to the extent that you encounter people who do that, I think it makes total sense to put them in a very different category than you would put somebody who has not made eye contact with where they've been.
Yeah, but yes.
Yes, I agree with you.
No but, I guess.
No, a but, which is that One of the things I saw this week, one of the reasons I started thinking about certainty, was I see no holes, I see no tatters in the shield of certainty that the people who have accepted pronouncements from on high since the beginning of this thing have.
If anything, they're more entrenched than ever.
And they're more self-satisfied than ever, and they're more eager to laugh at those of us who don't agree with them than ever.
So, yeah, I want those people, with the real soul-searching and the real apologies, to start coming forward.
But, you know, it's like the entire world is now politics.
No, I mean, everything is politicized by some force, but it doesn't own everyone.
And, you know, you said something in your setup here about the tendency, if you were to look at the group of people who are certain in one direction versus people who are certain in the other direction, it was an evolutionary process in one direction and absolutely not in the other.
And this, I think, is key, right?
The fact, if you haven't spent time, if you haven't decamped from your position and seen the other side, then you don't really know how deeply you believe it.
And in fact, who is it?
Hume, who formalizes this principle?
You know, he who cannot articulate the other's position knows little of his own or something like this.
That sounds potentially humey.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's definitely humorous, but not that humorous.
No.
But anyway, the point is when you have an asymmetry like this where one side gains people over time, right, You've got two sides that are claiming something is in evidence.
That's another prediction right there, right?
So, you know, I said the level of certainty has changed on one side and not on the other.
And the second prediction here that you are making is one of the sides is gaining people and the other side, the prediction, is going to be losing them.
And we know they are!
Because people have actually gotten vaccine injured, for instance.
How many people do you know who started out thinking these so-called vaccines were dangerous and now think they're safe?
Right, that's the first, yeah.
It's not a known category for a reason, and it's because the evidence is... There were people, like the doctor I referred to, who was like, don't do this!
You've got to wait a little bit.
And I was like, oh, okay.
I'm not going to take it.
Okay.
Well, but then that goes to the point that you and I were disagreeing on, which is the difference between safety and harm.
Yep, that's right.
So let me use a different analogy than I've used in the past.
Is it safe to get in your car drunk and drive home?
No.
Does that mean you're going to crash?
Nope.
You could get home absolutely unscathed, right?
So the point is, harm and safety are two different things.
We understand the difference very easily.
And you're right that it's important.
To say that you weren't harmed doesn't mean that it was safe.
And I feel like that's a formulation that I immediately grok and that I think almost everyone would too.
Yep.
You can say, just because I wasn't harmed doesn't mean it was a safe thing to do, whereas looking at it on the prospective side is harder to distinguish between the two.
Right.
Well, people, you know, this is the problem of the bluntness of language that comes from us all using a shared glossary that we, you know, some of us use things very precisely, we're very technical about it and we mean only what it is that we intend to imbue into those words and other people just sort of hear it loosely.
And so the idea of, you know, is that pharmaceutical safe?
Right?
Well, you know, if you talk to me, you're talking to somebody who spent an awful lot of time thinking about how pharmaceuticals might be unsafe on the basis that we have test animals that don't tell you what it is that test animals are supposed to tell you, right?
So, you're getting a technical response rather than a, you know, safety, harm, what's the difference?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Sorry, I lost, there was some other thread I wanted to follow there.
Well, we could switch gears a little bit, unless you wanted me to try to prompt you to think about what the thread was?
I guess there was one more piece, which has to do, and this is my own soul-searching here.
I think when I hear you talk about this, and I hear you talk about the anger at people, I check with myself to see whether I'm angry, and then I find something funny that I can't quite figure out.
I know it's real, but I don't know what it means.
There's some way in which I know myself to be angry at certain people who did not do well by us in the circumstance, but I don't feel the anger.
It's like some part of me feels it, and then my conscious mind is shielded from it.
And I have a feeling that that's serving a purpose.
That there are things you can do if the emotion doesn't penetrate to the part of your mind that decides how to act.
Yeah.
And presumably there's also a huge cost to that.
You know, anger didn't evolve for no reason at all.
Anger evolves for a very good reason.
And so there are places where you want to be able to keep it absolutely in check.
So that it cannot drive your behavior and there are other places where it is important that it be seen and I think probably Whatever For whatever reason I am constructed in the odd way that I'm constructed I'm paying one one cost in order to get to some benefit and you know I saw this in one other place that wasn't about anger and
There are two places in the Evergreen story where I run into the same observation about myself.
One is that initial confrontation outside my class, the one that got captured and the one that put me in the public eye.
I remember that interaction.
I remember feeling my leg shake, as if there was, I don't know, fear or a very strong emotion of some kind.
But I remember thinking, that's odd that my leg is shaking, because that's not how I feel.
Right?
So I think some part of me felt it, and some other part of me didn't.
And the part that didn't was the part that was talking to the students, which was very effective.
You know, people say to me about that scene, they say, I couldn't have done it.
Right?
And I think the point is, oh, that's because there's some circuitry that blocks some emotion from rising to some level of feeling.
The other place is when I had tried to go to school on my bike and I had run into evidence that I was being ambushed in some sense, that there were students waiting for me in a place where I was known to go and I Deviated and I went to the police station and I talked to Stacey Brown the police chief and she said I don't think you're imagining it.
Go home and get off your bike because we can't protect you.
You report that when I came through the door that I appeared shaken like you've never seen me shaken.
I don't remember being shaken.
I remember thinking I can't believe this is happening to me in 2017 in my own neighborhood in the United States.
You know this thing I was going to say that's written in literature, which, no, you don't.
The way that people describe people who've been really scared or traumatized is having an ashen face or a gray face.
And whenever I read that description, I think, what?
What?
But that's the thing.
That's what I saw in you.
Just the color was gone.
It wasn't bloodless.
It was just, you looked like you were almost in black and white.
Yeah, it's funny because I think I was having an analytical response which was, what does it mean to be hunted in your own neighborhood and have the police told they can't intervene?
What has to be true in history?
Where are you in history when that happens to you?
Right?
And so that was like, Huge mental update.
And it's one, you know, it's an update.
I haven't gone back.
I believe that that's where we are in history.
But the emotional part of it didn't even get recorded.
Yeah.
Right?
I didn't, I don't think I felt it in some sense, and I don't remember it.
But you clearly do.
You saw it.
Yeah.
I'm not sure that I would remember.
I mean, you I said it to you and you've recalled it to me enough times now that I now have a very clear memory of the memory at least.
I think that I would be remembering it with as much acuteness because it did feel at the time like it was the most X that I'd ever seen you.
But it's always hard to know for sure.
How many layers of memory on memory are you making and to what degree are you now buying your own story?
Well, I guess... I'm talking about me.
Yeah, yeah, I got that.
I do wonder, you know, you and I have recognized that I have some severe deficits with respect to normal functioning in the modern world, keeping track of stuff, right?
Time.
Time, for example.
And that in emergency circumstances the opposite seems to be true.
Right?
I wonder if this thing isn't related to that.
I think it is.
Yeah, I think it almost has to be.
I think it is.
Yeah.
All right, you were going to switch gears.
Oh boy, okay.
Okay, switch gears into reverse then.
This is just a little... I've got two other things, one of which is kind of related, one of which is not related at all.
We're going to end by talking about cats and language and people.
A little piece of research that came out that's kind of fun.
And you might want to talk about something, but one of the things that I was reminded of in Portland this week, which I am gratefully not reminded of here on our new island home in the San Juans in far northwest Washington state, is that so much of what is happening in cities is the celebration and promotion of mental illness and addiction.
Shellenberger's book, San Francisco, does an amazing job, actually, of describing the various ways that people end up living on the streets, and he talks specifically about what a What a sleight of hand.
What, you know, a kind of a diabolical sleight of hand it is to just be like, well, they're homeless.
That's what that category is.
It's homeless.
Because that then allows people, many of whom are, you know, well-intentioned but wrong, to say, well, if your problem is homelessness, then what you need is a home.
Right?
And so, you know, ah, then we have all these things springing up, all these organizations springing up.
Like, what we need to do is, like, you can't do anything about any of this until you have a home for them.
Like, that's the only solution.
It's like, Actually, there's a lot of categories of people who are living on the streets.
And some of them are not down on their luck, had a series of bad events happen to them and maybe a couple of bad decisions, but are really working hard to get themselves off the streets.
That is not the description for most of the people I'm seeing on the streets in Portland at this point, right?
Too much of it is at least partially facultative.
Just to say, by choice.
And too much of it may have started that way and then it's compounded by mental illness, by addiction.
And you know, the way to deal with drug addicts passed out on the streets with their pants around their ankles is not to gently ask them if they'd like cleaner surroundings in which to get high.
That's not it.
That's not how you do it.
And similarly, the way to deal with anxiety is not to encourage and promote it.
And I I was thinking about going into a whole riff about Willamette Week.
I don't know that we really want to do that.
So Willamette Week is Portland's free news weekly, of the sort of which exists in many, many big cities.
L.A.
Reader, Seattle.
No, no, no.
What Katie Herzog used to work for.
I can't think of what the Seattle one is called.
Anyway, I'm sure there will be people in the chat who figure it out, or Zach's about to figure it out.
The Free News Weekly is a thing, and it's always been pretty left-wing, and it used to have sex ads on the back pages, but it always has, in the last third or half, is like, what's happening in the city this week?
Here's the live events, here's the music, here's where to go, here's the things that are happening.
And when we first moved to Portland, I started donating to them on a monthly basis.
I love a good free News Weekly.
And then they just took aim at us.
They totally went after us, really despicable, and our book.
And I don't know, I just stopped giving them money at that point.
Yeah, I think that was at least defensible.
I mean, it wasn't a make it or break it for them, I hope, level of money, but For God's sake.
Did you figure it out, Seattle?
The Stranger, that's right.
That's the Seattle version of Willamette Week in Portland.
Anyway, I will say that as despicable as they became, I went looking, I picked up, I have here the most recent, I can't even find it now, this is the most recent Willamette Week from this week that I just picked up when I was in town, and I looked at their endorsements also for the election, and I guess I'm a little shocked.
That they are doing a much better job of being careful than they have been.
And the easiest example to use here is Portland, of course, has been managed completely god-awfully through COVID and presumably before that then as well.
But that has been particularly revealing.
And one of the things, one of the ways that it has been driven into the ground is by the city councilman, person, woman, city councilwoman, Joanne Hardesty.
Completely awful.
Like, really made so many bad decisions.
Managed to get the police defunded before finally it was not totally defunded, but largely defunded.
And then the funds were ultimately returned at the point that the homicide rate spiked.
Like, you know, all of the stupid things that we're hearing about.
Largely, those policies were coming from her, and then they were adopted by City Council.
She was a City Councilwoman.
And in May of this year, well, we endorsed her in the City Council race, and there were lots of people running, and in the primary, two people got the most votes, such that they were in the election this last week, which was Joanne Hardesty and Rene Gonzalez, who we actually had the good fortune to meet at an event back, I don't even know, I guess before the primary sometime, so in May or something of this year, April or May of this year.
And he seemed great.
And he indeed became her only contender in the election.
And Willamette Week switched their endorsement.
And they actually wrote an explanation of why and said, Hardesty is no longer the right person for Portland.
She has demonstrated that she is not doing what's right for Portland.
And they endorsed Gonzales.
And Gonzales actually won.
And good for Portland.
There's a whole lot not going on right for Portland right now, but congratulations, Renee.
That's awesome.
That is a sign of hope.
It is a sign of hope.
And it was also a sign of hope when I saw that.
And there was a number of other things in Willamette Week that I thought, huh, maybe they're getting a clue.
That would be awesome.
That would also help, because that is, of course, a publication that is read by the most entrenched, the people who are least likely to have models of what their opinions are as opposed to having received wisdom from on high which in some cases might be a blammy weight i look forward to their apology yeah that's not gonna happen to us you mean yeah yeah that that would be great um a number of them are due in fact yes so all that said which is my like oh actually cool
keep on doing that However, they're still publishing comics like this one, Zach, which I hope you have ready, called Anxiety Garden.
And I'll just read it for those who are listening and not watching.
The The comic more widely is called Anxiety Garden, so right there you know something about it.
It says, Hi, I'm Alicia, which is also the name of the person who creates Anxiety Garden.
Hi, I'm Alicia.
You know, the pandemic has been long and hard, but did you know it's not over?
And the longer we pretend it is, the longer immunocompromised people like me are stuck in limbo.
So keep masking and getting vaxxed, or else.
I don't really know how to take that.
So, I went to this person's website.
And this person's website describes them as, Alicia Gatlin is a queer, disabled, non-binary comic artist making zines about rheumatoid arthritis, mental health, and niche interests.
Why are we letting the uninvestigated and wrong conclusions of those who are celebrating their own anxiety drive people's sense of what makes sense at an individual and public health level?
Why would we do that?
Why would we let the anxious drive policy?
The anxious are specifically anxious which is getting in their way of making sound decisions for themselves and others.
So, I want to link this up to where you started.
Yes, it does link, I just didn't quite see the way to shoehorn it in, so go for it.
Short circuit.
There are certain categories that we are now told we are morally deficient if we don't feel a particular way about them, right?
It's nonsense.
This is not how feeling a particular way about things actually works.
But we are told that you have to feel this way about people who entertain hypotheses of collusion, right?
You have to feel this way about people who are hesitant about so-called vaccines, right?
You have to feel This way about people who, you know... Dress in women's clothing and want to go into women's bathrooms.
This way about Ukraine.
This way about January 6th.
This way about Trump.
This way about everything.
And so it's the hijacking of a Superficial model of the world, right?
How should you feel about people who suffer from anxiety?
Well, I should feel compassionate towards them.
Yes.
Okay?
Does that mean that I am required to like a cartoon from their perspective that ends on a note that it threatens people who don't have this anxiety?
In fact, attempts to induce anxiety into them?
And for people who come to a different conclusion, and frankly the right conclusion, about whether or not everyone doing this thing that they want you to do is actually going to help them.
It's not.
But to answer your question, why are we letting blank?
Yes.
If you are a News Weekly, like Willamette Week, and you have a piece of your layout to spare for such an exercise, then all of the people who feel obligated to have a particular reaction to it tell themselves, oh that was a good cartoon, or I'm glad that was there, or whatever it is they tell themselves.
And it is the exact equivalent Of people... remember how comedy became really, really unfunny and you could kind of tell it had become really, really unfunny because what people were doing was they were applauding the laugh lines rather than laughing at them?
Right?
The point is that... That's good.
I hadn't noticed that thing.
That's right.
It's that same thing.
So you imagine that this comic, which isn't funny, and by the way is... Threatening.
Threatening.
Yep.
Right?
Causes people to do the equivalent of applaud Something that they don't really believe in because the point is the applause is about I'm signing to that You know, are you an anti-vaxxer?
No, I'm signing on to these vaccines that kind of thing, right?
so that Reflexive view and this is actually the same thing took me a long time to understand it But it's the same thing as this business with the term homelessness.
Yes, right The point is homelessness is a symptom Right?
And it is no better, no more useful a description of the population that finds themselves, yes, without a home amongst many other things.
Right?
It is a bit like, you know, you've got somebody and they've fallen off a boat and they're beginning to succumb to the waves and you diagnose them with pneumonia because they've got fluid in their lungs.
Right?
It's like, no, they're drowning.
Get them antibiotics!
Right, exactly.
Throwing antibiotics off the back of the boat at this drowning person is not a useful remedy, any more than giving these people homes is a useful remedy, because it doesn't address the core problem, right?
Yeah.
And so anyway... I woke up the dog with my cry for antibiotics.
Right, no, you don't have to take any.
No, you don't.
Someone in the chat said the dog will wake up the more you get antibiotics.
Oh, no!
That's awesome.
She knows that was a good argument.
No, no, my argument.
Give him antibiotics.
Oh, there you go.
So anyway, I guess the idea is, how many years did I hear the term homelessness and not question it?
Right?
Well, it was a different population in the 70s and 80s, it was.
It was.
I'm not sure, I mean, you know, we know that a lot of homelessness actually was the result of, you know, Reagan-era policies that emptied, you know, asylums of people who didn't have the mental capacity to hold down a job.
They were struggling with mental illness.
And so the point is their homelessness is no more homelessness than it is institutionlessness.
Right?
The point is they were Kicked out of institutions that had taken, I'm not arguing... Having presumably being, maybe not kicked out, but people who ended up in institutions, not everyone, but many of them, their families were like, I'm at my wit's end, I can't do, this person has a condition which renders them uncontrollable by me in my home, even though I love them, or I'm trying to love them, and therefore they need to go there.
And then to have them released onto the streets, like, well that's gonna work.
Great.
So this all, all that we have talked about today raises a question that has just been bothering me for many, many years.
And in fact, it started bothering me over respiratory illnesses long before there was COVID.
Which is, there is no good guidance on what we collectively are supposed to do about a respiratory illness.
Right?
If you think there is good guidance, oh, you're not supposed to go to work.
Well, do the labor laws protect you for not going to work when you have it?
Do we have some way of demonstrating that you have such a thing and so that we know that we are collectively better off if you don't go to work because you might spread it to 50 people while you're there?
No.
If you think there's good guidance, where's the threshold?
Are you supposed to not go to work for a cold?
Arguably, we shouldn't go to work with a cold, but then you wouldn't have... How about if you don't have sick leave and you're working an hourly wage?
Right.
So the point is, there is no guidance on, yes, we are not supposed to go to work when we have an infectious disease that we might communicate to others that we have contact with in the course of our work, right?
There is no guidance.
You are supposed to infer something That is incompatible between your responsibility to other people and your responsibility not to lose your job, your responsibility to your family to keep the roof over their heads.
Potentially to your employer as well, with regard to, like, I'm on deadline, I gotta get the thing done, whatever it is.
Right.
And COVID actually began It did a terrible job of it, but it began to have a discussion.
How is this disease spread?
Finally, we're going to talk about that, are we?
What are you supposed to do if you have it?
What are you supposed to do if you've contacted somebody who had it and you don't yet have any symptoms?
All of these things are, you know, there's some question.
Is it communicated by people who don't have symptoms?
Now I still don't think that that's as clear as people have come to imagine.
Right?
We're supposed to believe that it transmits without symptoms.
There's something a little suspicious about that idea because symptoms are in fact largely due to the mechanisms that pathogens use to transmit themselves.
Point of order.
A lot suspicious about that idea.
A lot suspicious.
But nonetheless, were you to imagine No, no, don't go there.
No, no.
multiverses.
No, no, don't go there.
But there's one in which public health doesn't suck.
No, no.
Okay.
Imagine sometime in the future after our species has gone extinct and been replaced by another.
Go back to the multiverse then.
Okay.
Imagine in some other version of the multiverse, public health does not suck.
And what it does is it studies the way disease actually transmits.
It It puts forward that information and then experts who are actually expert in something discuss what the best policy is with respect to a cost-benefit analysis that is made explicit.
In other words, we're not going to get an infectious disease to zero, right?
Have you become a utopian then?
No, darling, I'm not a utopian.
I'm a believer in something, which I don't want to use too many technical terms, but you might call it good governance.
And no, I haven't seen it in a very long time, if ever.
But the potential exists, and it needs to exist.
It does.
And this is what the Game Bean movement is about.
How could you jumpstart good governance in a context where bad governance has so much power?
Yeah.
I'm back from the multiverse.
I'm not a believer, for those of you who are feverishly writing angry letters.
I do believe in a very small amount of free will.
I don't believe in the multiverse.
It's a big reveal party here today.
What else?
And I don't believe we're living in a simulation, but I do believe there are two pieces of evidence that go in the other direction.
Maybe we'll talk about that next time.
Oh, I thought you were going to say you don't think we're living in a simulation, but you do think we're brains in jars.
I am not.
The rest of you, that's between you and your god.
So our cats are on Walkabout this week, and maybe since I have something specifically to talk about with regard to cats and some research, maybe we should do that next week when our cats hopefully will not be on Walkabout.
Will not be on Walkabout.
Maybe we should save the cats' language and person discussion for next week.
So that they can wait.
There is an awesome end point that I'm just not going to give away.
You feel confident in this, because as you know, I don't even think the cats know their names, so their ability to have any opinion whatsoever on the rest of what you have to say... We've been at it for a while, it's a totally different thing than anything we've been doing, and it would be nice to have cats in frame when talking about cats, don't you think?
We should talk in front of their backs, not behind them.
Yes.
Yes?
All right.
Well, I'm glad we've agreed on something.
That's a start.
I think, I mean, I don't even know when we started because we had so many technical difficulties, but I think we've been going on for a while.
Zach also can't tell us.
The stream started an hour and 40,000 minutes ago, but that includes multiple timers and things.
Well, I think it's getting late here and we're still going to do a Q&A.
Yep.
So we're going to stop this for this week.
We will be back same time, same place next week, hopefully with better everything and more cats.
And if you are with us live right now, you can stick with us.
Give us a 15-minute break or so, however long it takes, and we'll be back with a live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Any logistical questions you can send to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Not questions that you want us to address on air.
That's, again, darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Consider joining our Patreons.
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Read Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century if you like the kind of thinking that we're deploying here.
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