#150 The Time Traveling Money Printer (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 150th 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 how myriad stories of failure and corruption might be linked together beneath the surface by systems of power that know more about where we are headed than we are being told. With the collapse of FTX this week, connections between woke ideology and covid ideology have been made clear. A coming ce...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
Apologies to those who were watching live earlier, we had some technical issues.
We believe they are fixed.
So, without further ado, we are going to get on with livestream 150, not prime, multiple different ways.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and we've got quite a...
A set of things to talk to you about.
Yeah, there are some indications that it's the end of everything.
As we know it.
As we know it, and a lot of us don't feel fine.
No, not perfectly fine.
Not at all.
So unfortunately, after technical problems last week prevented us from doing a Q&A, the technical problems this week have pushed us so far back that we're not going to be able to do one this week either.
We are going to actually do four different streams next week.
So we are going to have a live stream in the normal time, number 151.
We're going to follow up the Q&A, which will have potentially triple the number of questions.
We never get to all the questions.
We will get to as many as possible, beginning as always with questions that have been voted on from the Discord server that week.
On Sunday of next week, this is again the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we are going to do a live stream, a special holiday gift edition at 9 45 a.m pacific on the Sunday after American Thanksgiving for just an hour talking about some of the products that we like without any sponsors.
And then we're going to follow that with our private Q&A that's only for patrons at my Patreon, for which the question asking period is open right now.
So if you're interested in being part of that Q&A, go over to my Patreon and join it.
And if you're interested in asking questions on it, again, that question asking period is open right now.
We really have a lot of fun with those.
They are small enough that we're able to watch the chat, interact with the chat, pick up some questions from the chat, and they're great.
So we've got We're going to cover some important stuff here today, but we're just going to do the one stream, and next week you get as much of us as you can handle.
Probably more of us than even we can handle, but four different streams.
It's basically an entire watershed of streams.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Right?
Yeah, kind of.
Sort of.
Close enough.
It'll be a series of stream moments, Watershed.
I don't even know how to do it.
I can't.
I don't know.
Something extreme.
Don't know.
But it's going to happen.
Four different streams, if that's what you're looking for.
Exactly.
We are on YouTube and Odyssey.
The chat is live on Odyssey right now.
And of course, you can be watching it or listening to it just about anywhere that you might watch or listen to such things.
In Natural Selections this week, my substack, I wrote about Portland, Oregon.
The city that we called home for four years, that we moved away from two months ago, and that I visited again last week.
Last week?
Two weeks ago.
A week and a half ago.
I was there for the election and wrote about some of what I saw there.
I called it a love story.
A love letter And an intervention.
So I encourage you to go there.
Also, we have, as we've mentioned the last few weeks, a fantastic new store.
We are working now with a couple out of the middle of the United States who both run the store and also have the print shop.
So all of the work that is coming, all of the products that are coming out of our new store, which is at darkhorsestore.org, is being printed on-site by them.
Do you have something to show us here, Zach?
Cool, so we have nothing new this week, but we've got a couple of new products in the last couple of weeks.
We have the Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply merchandise, and also we have this Lie to a Tyrant, where you've got some people Appearing to acquiesce to a tyrant, but doing everything they can to actually not comply.
And this is necessary in these times.
So we've got this wonderful artwork on a hoodie, on a shirt or two, and we encourage you to go there to darkhorsestore.org if you are interested in such things.
We are, of course, supported by our audience.
We are not supported by YouTube.
Even though they put ads on our stuff, they demonetized us.
So any money that they're making from us, we are not getting any of that.
We, of course, have Patreons, which we encourage you to join.
And we also have a Discord, which is available at our Patreons, which has a wonderful community associated with it.
They have honest and conversations.
That's not a thing.
That's no.
No.
Well, they have honest conversations about difficult topics.
They have book clubs, they have karaoke, they have virtual happy hours, and it's pretty great.
They're happy virtual hours.
I'm pretty sure.
Right?
Well, I think they're real hours.
The happiness is real.
But the hours are also real.
Okay.
Yeah, it's the happy hour that's virtual.
It's not the happy or the hour that's virtual.
It's the happy hour, which is some emergent property involving drinks.
That are lower priced and certain food items.
On account of them being virtual.
Right.
They should be extremely economical at that level.
Yes, I would think.
Anyway, that happens on the Discord, and I don't know if they've had that discussion.
Probably they're above that sort of thing.
All you can virtually drink.
Yes, indeed.
And we also have sponsors.
And we really do appreciate our sponsors, and we only run ads for sponsors who have products or services that we actually can vouch for, either personally or have someone very close to us who can do so.
So as usual, we have three, and let's go ahead and get those going.
And you, Brett, are first this week.
First up!
Our first sponsor this week is Thesis.
Thesis makes nootropics.
Nootropics are nutrients found in nature or in the human body that enhance mental performance in areas such as motivation, creativity, mood, memory, and cognitive processing.
They work best when combined with taking care of yourself generally, which includes eating real food, moving your body often, and getting good sleep.
You're probably already using a nootropic.
As one of the most commonly consumed nootropics is caffeine, but it is by far the least exciting.
Effective nootropics allow people to optimize their focus, energy, and mood based on the demands of the day.
For some people, nootropics can replace the pharmaceuticals that are often used to tackle problems like ADHD.
Thesis is unusual in the nootropic market in taking a very personalized approach.
They do not assume that what works for your brother will work for you or that what worked for you when you were under a deadline for a dreadful project will be the same thing that will work for you when a spark of creativity is necessary for a project you've been dreaming of for years.
Just as some people become alert after a cup of coffee and others can fall asleep, so too all nootropics have different effects on different people.
When Thesis first started out, they blinded their customers to what blend they were taking and took careful data on how everyone responded to the various blends.
Not surprisingly, different people responded differently to different Thesis blends.
Now more than 2,500 customers and millions of data points later, Thesis has created a recommendation algorithm to predict which blends of nootropic will work best for any given customer.
The process is simple.
Go to their website, take a short quiz, and they'll send you a starter kit with four different blend recommendations to try over the course of a month.
We've tried several blends now.
We have not liked all of them, but have found several very intriguing.
Creativity blends smooth things out a bit and adds a little clarity.
The logic blend facilitates focus, and your results may vary.
With fully personalized blends, there's likely to be a thesis that is right for you.
To get your own customized thesis starter kit, go online to TakeThesis.com slash Dark Horse.
Take the quiz and use the code Dark Horse at checkout for 10% off your first box.
Our second sponsor this week is Moink.
That's moo plus oink.
M-O-I-N-K.
An eighth generation farmer founded Moink and is working hard to help save the family farm and get its customers access to the highest quality meat on earth.
Did you know that 97% of the chickens served in the U.S.
are dipped in chlorine?
Well, family farms don't tend to do that, and certainly the meat that you get from Moink doesn't do that.
Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon right to your door.
Moink farmers farm like our grandparents did, and as a result, Moink Meast... Meast... Moink meat tastes like it should, which is to say, delicious.
Unlike the supermarket, Moink gives you total control over the quality and source of your food.
You choose the meat delivered in every box, like rib-eyes, chicken breasts, pork chops, salmon fillets, and more, and you can cancel anytime.
We love everything about moink.
The fact that the meat is grass-fed and finished on small farms, the lovely publications that come along with it, excuse me, and of course the meat itself.
Right now in our refrigerator we have moink bacon and ground pork and a turkey.
Our Thanksgiving is going to be delicious in large part due to moink.
Shark tank hoist... oh man... hoist.
I've got the oi sound now for moink.
Shark Tank host Kevin O'Leary called Moink's bacon the best bacon he's ever tasted, and I agree.
It is really fantastic.
And actually, we had some bacon kale pasta last night made with Moink bacon as well.
Really fabulous.
Keep American farming going by signing up at moinkbox.com slash darkhorse right now, and listeners of this show will receive free filet mignon for a year.
That's one year of the best filet mignon you'll ever taste, but for only a limited time.
Spelled M-O-I-N-K box dot com slash Dark Horse.
That's Moinkbox dot com slash Dark Horse.
And our final sponsor this week is NED, a CBD company that stands out in a highly saturated CBD market.
I'm having a hard time reading from my screen, so despite what our son looked before, I'm going to read from the paper.
I'm going to do it this way, though.
Hide it.
Okay.
NED was started by two friends who discovered that their hyper-modern lives were leaving them feeling empty, bewildered, and disconnected.
Something about this way of life, they say on their website, just wasn't working.
So they started NED.
You can buy CBD products in nearly every coffee shop or grocery store, but Ned's blends stand out.
I'm particularly fond of their De-Stress Blend.
Ned's De-Stress Blend is a one-to-one formula of CBD and CBG made from the world's purest full-spectrum hemp and also features a botanical infusion of ashwagandha, cardamom, and cinnamon.
CBG is a botanical... nope.
See, I just can't read today.
That's the problem.
CBG is known as the mother of all cannabinoids because of how effective it is at combating anxiety and stress by inhibiting the reuptake of GABA, the neurotransmitter responsible for stress regulation.
This combination leaves me, at least, feeling a bit easier with whatever comes my way.
Many of the CBD companies out there source their hemp from industrial farms in China.
Just like with low-quality alcohol, however, low-quality CBD can have undesired effects.
NED is USDA-certified organic.
All of NED's full-spectrum hemp oil is extracted from USDA-certified organic hemp plants grown by an independent farmer named Jonathan in Paonia, Colorado.
Also, Ned shares third-party lab reports and information about who farms their products and their extraction process on their site.
These products are science-backed, nature-based solutions that offer an alternative to prescription and over-the-counter drugs.
They are chock-full of premium CBD and a full spectrum of active cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids, and trichomes.
Ned's full-spectrum hemp oil nourishes the body's endocannabinoid system to offer functional support for stress, sleep, inflammation, and balance.
If you'd like to give Ned a try, a dark horse One Dark Horse listener only.
All Dark Horse listeners get 15% off Ned products with code DarkHorse.
Visit helloNed.com slash DarkHorse to get access.
That's H-E-L-L-O-N-E-D dot com slash DarkHorse to get 15% off.
Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life's most common health issues.
That is our sponsors for the week.
Man, the dyslexia is contagious in here today.
Good lord, yeah, that's unlike me, but there we go.
Yeah, that is very unlike you.
We did it.
It was very like me.
And yet you didn't do it.
I did.
You just turned it right off.
No, I did.
You did it too?
Yeah, I covered.
I'm glad it didn't show.
Yeah, well, you know how to cover.
I guess I do when it comes to reading out loud, which used to be one of my greatest fears in life.
When in class they would come around and everybody would read a paragraph, I used to not hear anything anybody else said because I had to figure out, count ahead to which paragraph I was going to have to read, and then I had to read it three or four times in order that I would not embarrass myself.
And you're not alone.
I didn't have that problem.
I always enjoyed reading until now.
Until today.
Until today.
And I didn't relish it because I didn't like being on the stage.
I didn't like having the camera faced at me.
But I enjoyed the reading part.
But certainly when we were professors, I saw how many students really dreaded this.
And you having told me that story, I could tell which of them were doing it and would tend to give them a pass so long as they could do something else that demonstrated participation, interaction, all of this.
And watching so many other professors really just say, nope, this is the thing you have to do.
This is what you have to do.
When already the professors themselves have chosen the kinds of tasks that work for them, and the ones that don't work for them, they aren't having the students do.
And so it presumes that you want a classroom, that you are creating a classroom that is entirely like you, which of course is not in line with what we actually hope for for humanity, or with what the new woke ideology would have us believe educators want either.
Yeah, and it doesn't work very well in part because just by nature of selection, professors tend to be people who are good students themselves, and so to the extent that the things that make some students not so great don't look like the things that make students great, having all the professors select the same kinds of activities because it seems natural to them is just a disaster.
Indeed.
I gotta tell you, I have now, I had forgotten this, but the worst thing is when you miscount Yeah.
You miscount the number of people ahead and you read the wrong paragraph three times, and then you suddenly discover, oh no, the person ahead of me is reading the paragraph I thought I was going to have to read.
You're reading a whole new paragraph.
You're thrown by the thing.
So did the anxiety make you innumerate?
I guess if you're not in a circle, it can be tough.
It can be tough, or somebody gets up and goes to the bathroom, or I don't remember exactly what causes you to be one-off, but it did happen more than once.
I still feel that trauma a little bit.
I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, man, did some things happen this week.
Really?
Yeah.
So, you're going to start us off, and we're going to talk for a while about Some of the bigger issues and the interconnections between them and much of what we've been talking about for, you know, for two and a half years now, really.
But we are, I do hope, to end with at least a little bit on the research that I was going to talk about last week about cats, domestic cats, and their perception, yay or nay, of human language.
Well, I'm really excited about this.
I still have not encountered this research, so I still don't know what's coming.
That's going to be awesome.
But yeah, all right, so let's talk about a little of what has emerged, and I believe when we did our podcast last week, The FTX scandal had already broken, but it was still very rapidly developing, and so we didn't... You, in fact, mentioned that you wanted to talk about it on air, and we didn't get to it, and it all seemed kind of like, what is happening?
Yeah, what is it?
And, you know, there's a lot of what is it still going on, and in fact, that's part of the motivation for what I had planned for us to do.
So, the way it's going to work is this.
I want to draw a kind of picture.
I want to connect some dots that I think deserve to be connected and basically advance a model for where we are and what these things have to do with each other.
And I'm not saying that this model is true.
And undoubtedly there are places where it will be wrong or at least imprecise.
But the question is, is the overall model
More predictive of events going forward than viewing all of the pieces in isolation Right that you know in some sense a number of things which we won't talk about this week Maybe we will get back to them next week have me considering the question of how it is that most people Go about thinking and reaching conclusions, and there are a lot of cases in which I'm watching people That I care about or have cared about who have reached what I consider to be
Utterly absurd conclusions about things, and anyway, thinking about how that happens is fascinating.
So in any case, one key thing is... And that is increasingly one of the themes that we talk about here.
How did people end up in such different places, and how do we reconcile with them?
There is that, and there is also the question Which I think is, in some sense, it's not a native question to us because the answer is something that has emerged in everything we've done, but a question of, well, how are you going to figure out what's true in a chaotic environment in which the facts themselves are being
Hotly debated and are not agreed upon, where the authorities themselves are alleged to be compromised, for example.
How are you to figure out what's going on?
Well, one thing that is certainly true is if somebody's got a model that's predictive, then that's a decent model.
And if it's more predictive than some other model, I don't care.
What credentials went into that other model or which three-letter agency is backing it and whether in theory we should be trusting those authorities.
The answer is if it's not predictive, it's not predictive.
Anyway, the point is, we're going to talk about a model.
If it's not predictive, it's not predictive.
But as you and we have also talked about here before, if you have no history of making predictions that are borne out by what turns out to unfold, then you also shouldn't be someone in whom people are putting a lot of their trust.
Right, right.
What you do when your predictions are right, what you do when they're wrong, what happens to your model as new information arises, these things are all critical.
And so anyway, maybe next week we can talk a little bit about some of the lessons of the present which I think are instructive and Kind of profound.
But for today, what we're going to do is we're going to look at a model that connects up certain things that, you know, in some sense, if you look at the news, and I don't even know what that means anymore.
I don't know where it is that we're supposed to go to find out what the news is.
Elon is making the argument that Twitter, in fact, is a better source and, you know, what kind of source is it even?
It's like an endless room full of people talking about things and you can listen in and, of course, most of what's said in any crowded room is probably of no consequence at best, but... But one of the things, one of the ways that Twitter differs from any of the mainstream media is that you get all the biases in one place.
That you can receive, you can not only get some piece that's been written by someone with some slant, but you can also get takes on it from the left, from the right, from all over the place.
But you can also get all the pieces that are written on some particular topic.
Someone somewhere on Twitter is going to have posted that.
And that means that it becomes more of a clearinghouse of news than anything from CNN to Frankly, I don't know that Fox is as far.
I'm not even sure which one I'm doing here.
I think CNN is more ideological than Fox in almost every regard at this point.
I can't speak to Fox generally.
I can say that there are certain places on Fox where one does tend to hear a perspective, which frankly doesn't strike me as left or right.
It strikes me as It runs counter to the official narrative and is often predictive.
But, you know, what you say, I hate to differ with you already, but what you're saying should be true of Twitter, but part of what we're fighting over is whether or not it will be true, right?
Whether or not it's a place where you are allowed to post every perspective.
And it hasn't been that way recently.
I mean, the number of people Who have highly predictive models who've been thrown off of Twitter in recent times is staggering.
Right.
But that is reversion.
Well, it is, and it isn't.
Jordan Peterson's back.
Babylon Bee is back, to name but two.
Yep, and then there are a whole bunch that aren't back.
Amethyst isn't a person.
Right, so I guess it certainly bears mention that the absurdity of the Dr. Rollergator suspension continues for no obvious reason.
It's such an absurd reason, you know, for those who don't know it, Dr. Rollergator was a An account that was satirical, but posted a lot of serious stuff, and was suspended.
I believe the explanation was for encouraging violence, and what it had done was it had suggested that somebody slap somebody across the face with a glove, which is something that is regularly posted on Twitter by other accounts that don't get suspended, and this was nine months ago at least, and it hasn't been restored.
So in any case, it's Elon, if you're watching, go down in the Twitter dungeons and see if Dr. Rolligator isn't there and consider freeing that account.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about the various pieces that are in play and build up a model and see whether it goes anywhere.
The first thing I wanted to talk about We have alleged that the blue team, which is my term for it because I don't like calling it the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party is something that has had an honorable role in history.
I just think something's happened to it and that's now not what the thing is.
It's behaving as something very differently and treating it, you know, it is like the family dog Sorry.
The family dog has gotten rabies, right?
And the point is thinking of the family dog, once it's got rabies, as the family dog is the wrong way to think about it.
That dog is now a serious problem.
So anyway, the idea that the blue team is some new type of force is important, and it's something we've discussed, and we will come back to it in a second.
I also wanted to bring back up a concept that I heard described very well by Peter Thiel.
I don't know if it's his concept originally or not.
It was just in a speech that he recently gave.
But he talked about there being two purposes for money.
And I thought this was a very useful dichotomy.
And the one purpose he described was as a means for exchange.
Which is to say you have some money and you can use it to buy things.
And money still works well in this way But then there's this other way in which money functions as a store of wealth especially dollars the world's reserve currency Right and the idea is that a dollar even though it is a fiat currency that basically has value because we assert that it has value not because you know a paper dollar doesn't have any intrinsic value much less a you know a decimal point on the screen, but nonetheless because
Of the durability of the United States, its currency is the world's reserve currency and has been so for many, many decades.
And so anyway, money functions as a store of wealth, right?
One thing you can do if you have wealth is you can put it into dollars and those dollars fluctuate in terms of how much they're worth, but the point is there is some stability to it.
And in fact, other countries have sometimes pegged their currencies to the dollar because of that That's stable value and what I'm increasingly realizing is that that second you would imagine that if that second feature of money were to disintegrate that it would take the first one with it.
And this is less true than you would imagine.
This is one of the curious things about the present is there is every reason to imagine that in fact the store of wealth is failing to function as a store of wealth.
That there's a great deal of uncertainty about the value of the dollar going forward in large measure because we have basically printed dollars as a way of getting out of crises and that's a very limited phenomenon.
But the store of wealth is ever more suspect.
And yet we're still using this object as a means of exchange, in part because something like crypto never figured out how to be easy to use, right?
Crypto was so hard to pay anybody with crypto that... Crypto worked as a store of wealth, but not as an exchange.
Yes, exactly, as an exchange modality.
Now the funny thing is it never really worked all that well as a store of wealth either because it was so volatile, right?
But it worked better in that modality, in your telling of it, in Thiel's second modality than in the first.
Yeah, it never worked as a modality of exchange because in part, and this is going to get to the FTX part of the story here, in part because in order to use it you had to go through an exchange to get to dollars and use those for exchange.
So it was at best a redundant and complexifying feature of the environment.
But I want to call attention to something that I think I haven't really described here yet, and it's something I suspect is playing a hugely important role in history at the moment.
And I'm just going to lay it out, and you help me get it to clarity.
Okay.
I have not heard this yet.
I call it the Time Traveling Money Printer, which I know is not a name that calls anything meaningful to mind yet, but you'll see why in a second.
Nope.
Time Traveling Money Printer.
Everybody has gone through the thought exercise of what would you do if you had a time machine, right?
And almost no matter what your values are, you come up with some version of, well, if I've got a time machine that goes forward, I could go and I could look at stock prices a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, figure out what was going to go up and that I could come back in time.
And buy some of that, figure out what's going to go down, I can short that.
And so you could create a big pile of wealth if you had a time machine.
Likewise, if you can go backwards in time, you know, you can go buy some Microsoft or Apple when they're nice and cheap, and you could become super wealthy by doing this, right?
Now, what I'm concerned about is that there's actually a class of elites that now effectively has a time machine.
And it doesn't have time travel in the technical sense but it has another mechanism of doing the same thing and it has implications therefore for the value of something like a dollar.
Because if somebody is capable of effectively printing money of their own without risking being arrested for counterfeiting, for example, then the point is they are robbing everybody who holds dollars because there are more dollars in circulation so every dollar is worth less.
Right?
So here's my claim.
If you have effectively insight on what is going to happen, historically speaking, and you share it, then everybody quickly picks up that insight and the markets will correct for whatever is going to happen, right?
They will build that into the price of whatever it is that you're looking at.
If, on the other hand, you have information about what's going to happen historically and others don't have it, then you uniquely can position yourselves for the change that is coming, create huge piles of wealth based on what is effectively inside information, and thereby rob everybody else who is using this place to store their own wealth.
Let's take one example that I think has become somewhat obvious.
There is strong evidence that COVID was circulating long before we in the public became aware of it.
We became aware of it effectively at the new year of 2020.
Right?
Tail end of January was the earliest for almost everyone.
Tail end of January was the earliest for virtually everyone.
So you're a month early already.
It was March before, you know, sort of widely understood.
Many people were aware in February.
Tail end of January is when, for instance, we became aware of it.
I don't think in the new year more than a handful of... Almost doesn't matter because, let's put it this way... If you are looking at information that's public and you put two and two together and you say there's something circulating and it could affect the world and other people are slow to realize it, that's legitimate.
That's insight that's driving it.
On the other hand, there's strong evidence That the virus was circulating at the Wuhan Military Games in September of 2019.
September?
October?
I think it was September, but it doesn't matter.
The point is, long before the public got any warning that there might be something worth paying attention to in this space.
Now, here's the question.
Who knew?
Right?
If nobody knew, if it was circulating and it just didn't dawn on anybody to test for it or figure out that there was a pattern, okay, then we're all in the same place.
If, on the other hand, Certain people knew what was coming, and instead of sharing that information publicly, what they did was position themselves so that predictable things would cause them to become wealthy.
You can short stocks for, let's say, cruise ships, which are going to take a terrible hit.
You could see some things that would obviously be elevated.
You might know who had You know, viable vaccine technologies that might become quickly relevant.
Who's to say?
But the point is, if you had inside information in September, October of 2019 that there was a great contagious disease that was going to spread as a pandemic, you might well be in a wonderful position to effectively print money.
And the key to it is you can't move in time, but you can slow other people down in terms of how quickly they realize what's coming, so that by the time they are saying, hey, maybe cruise ships are going to take a hit, the point is you've already shorted that stock, right?
So, the basic point is, well, is there a game afoot in which
Instead of trying to read the tea leaves better, instead of using expertise to figure out which things are undervalued and to arbitrage those markets, that instead the game is to delay the dawning of insight on the public and turn them into a never-ending sea of what would, in economic terms, be called greater fools.
Right?
And if that happens, right, if it happens once, then the point is you'll see a fortune created and it will rob everybody else to a small degree.
But if it becomes systematic, right, then it raises the question of, well, then what is, what are dollars?
Right?
If somebody is able to make dollars when they want to by being ahead of everybody else because they know what's coming, why are they ahead of everybody else?
Because they slow them down in the recognition of these patterns.
And the point is, well, that's not a store of wealth from the point of view of most people.
That's a scheme in which some people make great fortunes and others slowly have their wealth drained away.
Right.
So slowing down the awareness of people can look a lot of ways.
And I think you're going to go to a couple of these places, but is that where you're going next?
That's exactly it.
This is why I think we are fighting over What kind of place Twitter is going to be, for example.
So the idea is, if we, and the public, have a place in which to do some truth-seeking, if universities still function to seek truth, if journalists are still pursuing truth, then we have mechanisms that we can use to figure out what's coming, too.
If we can hobble those institutions, right?
And so the point is, well, there's no... What is the newspaper you would go to to figure out just the basic facts of what's taking place so you could begin to build a model of your own?
If we don't have that, because there is no newspaper that isn't a partisan rag at this point, Right?
If we don't have scientists who will tell us the truth of some important economically relevant field, what we have is people spreading narratives, then the point is, well, that creates a landscape in which this game can unfold again and again.
And so viewers of Dark Horse will be well familiar with the idea that zero is a special number.
This is really, I'm arguing, this is at least one good reason why zero is so special is that it creates that a landscape in which wealth can be drained away from most people who have stored it in things like dollars to those who have a privileged position as a result of the fact that sense-making has now become, it has descended into noise.
Can I just share one short paragraph?
Sure.
Right here.
I want to share a little bit more later, but this piece that probably, I actually don't know if you've seen it, but probably many of our audience has, by Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute called The COVID Crypto Connection, The Grim Saga, Saga.
I just can't read today.
The COVID Crypto Connection, The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman Freed.
Is it Freed or Freid?
It's Freed.
Okay, I'll just start over.
Peace published in the Brownstone Institute by Jeffrey Tucker this week.
The COVID Crypto Connection, The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman Freed.
One paragraph is, I will tell you, writes Tucker, what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science.
For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn't exist.
Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated, smeared and displaced.
This is exactly it, and this is why I'm raising this this week.
I think what has happened is the FTX scandal has allowed us to glimpse something, and it ain't the first time this has happened either.
In fact, I would point people to the Enron situation.
The Enron situation was a jaw-dropping case of fraud, but it was also connected to the red team.
Right?
It was connected to the Bush administration in ways that we never figured out.
And I believe what happens is you glimpse the tip of the iceberg and then we cannot help but use the tools from the past to try to assert what the object is.
You know, what is FTX?
Oh, well it was obviously a fraudulent exchange in which people put their money in and they thought that that money existed in someplace that they could access it.
But in fact, inside of FTX, there was no safeguard against them using it personally, against them investing it recklessly, right?
Oh my God, it was jaw-dropping.
But that ain't the half of it, right?
In fact, I would argue that that's really even the cover story.
That in some sense, what you've got is the blue team, which is a racket, mechanisms for doing things.
It has it There's a machine that we cannot see that shapes history.
And that machine has mechanisms for shunting large amounts of money into places.
And if we say, oh, that's money laundering.
No, it includes money laundering.
But the point is, this is really the shaping of history.
It is not in any way an accident, in my opinion, that the FTX scandal seems to touch Ukraine and energy policy, where there is now a war raging.
Where the Bidens have perverse incentives, where the information that was unearthed about Hunter Biden's laptop was silenced prior to an election, including the censoring of the New York Post, right?
In other words, there is some engine that knows where its bread is buttered, And it is capable of making things happen, right?
It is capable of slowing down the dawning of information about Hunter Biden's laptop so it does not play a decisive role in the waning days of the 2020 election campaign, for example.
I still don't think we understand why Ukraine shows up as a place that Hunter Biden was making a fortune that made no sense, where his internal email suggested Joe Biden is involved and there is now a war raging.
And we have, you know, the president of Ukraine is a hero but if you scratch the veneer you discover that's not what's going on there.
There's some story that involves Ukraine and energy and the Bidens, which we don't know, that involves the blue team and its ability to shape history so we'll think it's one thing even though it's something else.
There is.
I agree with you.
I don't know that anything is yet revealed on this front.
So I feel like it is a stronger position and it makes more sense to back up and to actually say what is this?
What are we talking about?
I don't feel like, I don't think you actually said like what is What is this?
What is a Sam Bankman-Fried and what is FTX?
Can we back way up and say that and then talk about the thing that we really do know in this case, which yes, Not only do we know more about it because it's something that we talked about and that actually we got tentacled by this thing directly, and so yes, we do know more about it, but that's not what we're talking about.
It's because it's actually clear.
There is a connection between the denigration of ivermectin Yes, I said it here on YouTube, as a possible treatment of prophylaxis for COVID and FTX and Team Blue.
I think, yeah, but we don't know, and that hasn't come out yet.
Whereas the funding by FTX of anti-ivermectin research is now known.
We have to.
So I agree with you.
We don't know what Ukraine is doing in the story.
We don't understand that.
What is FTX?
There is an official description of what FTX is.
Let's go there.
So the official description is that it was a crypto exchange and those who have used crypto No, that effectively you have to, if you want some crypto, right?
How do you get some?
Well you have to take dollars and you have to make it into crypto somehow, right?
So you have to, you have this electronic wallet and you have to get some crypto into it.
You have to buy crypto and the way you do that is you use an exchange.
Now the problem, and this has been Clear for those involved in crypto for quite some time.
The problem is it isn't obvious what you are getting when you go to a crypto exchange like Coinbase or like FTX and you use your credit card or you make a bank transfer.
That gets you some crypto.
Do you own particular units of crypto or is this an IOU where you have put money into this thing and as long as it remains solvent you can take that money out but that it is vulnerable because there are no particular tokens or fractions of tokens that in fact are yours?
It's like the distinction between having a gold bar in your hand And having an IOU for a gold bar.
Paper metals versus actual metals.
Right.
And so the problem is that in order to use crypto, and in order to get crypto, and in order to trade crypto, the exchanges were the best way to do this.
But the security of that apparatus was, we now know, effectively non-existent.
Because that money seems to have evaporated out of FTX and was spent in all kinds of crazy ways, including a personal loan to Sam Bankman freed for a billion dollars.
You know, things that make no sense.
Sometimes you need some cash.
That's true.
But, so that's the official story of what this is.
This is an exchange that went bad, that was badly managed.
And Enron is exactly the right analogy.
Well, Enron is an interesting case because there is one fundamental difference between Enron and what we see at FTX.
What's that?
Enron existed.
It was a company.
It did things.
And then it became a fraud.
It liquidated its business and it went into fraud full-time.
But the point is it had been a business.
And one of the things that is true... Am I misremembering?
They had either a whole building or a bunch of floors on a building and there's like one floor that was where all the fraudulent stuff was taking place and you don't go there if you don't want to see.
Or was that a different story?
No, I think you have the story Not quite exactly right.
But the point is that there was real work going on.
There had been.
And then increasingly the returns on real work were just so small compared to the fraud that the fraud took over Enron.
And in fact Enron started perfecting fraud and it used techniques where effectively it learned That if you told people under your employ, bring me a profit, and I don't care how you do it.
If you bring me a profit, I'll make you rich.
If you fail, I'll fire you.
And so people are innovating all kinds of ways to make a paper profit that isn't a real profit, and the point is they get rewarded, because in fact the higher-ups don't want their fingerprints on it, but what they want is a company that looks like it has a tremendous value, because of course that can be turned into real wealth in markets, etc.
Enron was a business that became a fraud.
FTX appears to have been...
These weren't serious people.
When you look at what they were doing on the inside, first of all, they were just flat-out liars.
And we will get to the connection with effective altruism, which is a philosophy.
But the basic point was, even in the way that they represented themselves, this was nonsense from the beginning.
There wasn't a business.
This was a con.
It's funny, one of the things that is revealed by this is that certain elements of the elite architecture are not ready to just surrender to the idea that this was just a fraud.
The New York Times is experimenting with resurrecting Sam Bankman Freed as the well-intentioned CEO of a company that got out of hand or something like that.
This is really the wrong way to look at it.
You have A non-serious entity and in part it's obvious that this is non-serious because it came out of nowhere, right?
Something fueled the belief that this thing was a real entity so that it skyrocketed out of nowhere into this hugely valuable property that was heralded by people as, you know, deeply insightful and, you know, forging the way and and it was nonsense.
So the I don't see rapid ascent as inherently evidence of being fueled from outside sources.
No, the question is, well, what did they bring to the table that was new that caused them to be so valuable?
One of a handful of crypto exchanges.
I'm steelmanning without... I'm trying to steelman without very much information.
I don't really understand what they claim to be doing.
I don't know the land of crypto at all, really.
But, you know, one of relatively few crypto exchanges and, frankly, probably one of the only ones that was explicitly on the ideological left.
Well, I don't know that... I don't know if the ideological left much matters.
Well, it matters in terms of having been able to attract people.
I mean, Bankman Freed is now famously on some kind of record, if we are to believe this, you know, to take a step aside for a moment, this Vox article, right, published by, what's her name, I think it's Kelsey Piper?
Kelsey Piper.
Yeah.
Oh, I guess I can't show my screen here, but I can read to you.
So what Kelsey Piper does, so Kelsey Piper, who had come to us to get to talk about ivermectin back a year and three months ago or so, something like that.
Also in the effective altruism and rationalist community, right, and a staff writer for Vox and in this article that she publishes in Vox a couple days ago, she does acknowledge that a grant that they were about to receive that Vox or something like something there was about to receive from either FTX or the Bankman Freed Family Foundation has been, you know, put on hold.
So that, you know, it's all entangled and, you know, there's this appearance of transparency now, kind of-ish, but not really.
But what she says she's doing in this piece, mostly, is basically just screenshotting a DM conversation that she has with Sam Beckman Freed on Twitter on the night of, I think it's November 15th, at the point that he's already in the Bahamas.
And just a couple things that he says, and these have been well described in places, but he says, We play this dumb game we woke Westerners play.
This dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.
So there's that.
I don't know what there's that means.
I'm saying.
There's that.
That is the game that he was playing whereby he got left-leaning investors from Hollywood, from the media, from places who have been taught to be hesitant about crypto because, oh, that's on the right.
Those might be Nazis, right?
So, you know, crypto seems like this dangerous place because it is somehow identified not as with the left, whereas this exchange was.
So that's one thing.
Well, but that makes a prediction.
Which is that the value of FTX arises because left-leaning people were using it as their exchange to access crypto.
I don't think there's any evidence that the flow through FTX was inherently left-leaning.
That is the prediction I'm making, and I predicted that will be true.
I don't know that we'll find out, but I guess given all of the big names that are still defending it and are still associated with it are on the left, I guess I don't think that's a very far out prediction at all.
Well, but I actually think the opposite would be very natural.
If this thing was effectively conning people who were left-leaning so that they would use it instead of, for example, Coinbase, then you would imagine that the left would be utterly irate at having been taken for a ride by a clear fraud.
Somebody who in His public persona was, despite being a billionaire many times over, still driving a Toyota Corolla because he didn't really care for the finer things in life, while at the same time he was, you know, hanging out in the Bahamas in a, you know, $40 million But it's one more of these.
What's on the outside of the package is not what's on the inside.
And over and over and over again, the woke left just takes it hook, line, and sinker.
If I'm in a little bit, I'm in all the way.
I'm going to keep on down that line.
Let me just share the other screenshot from this piece that Kelsey Piper reports on before we go back to what you're talking about.
He says, everyone goes around pretending the perception reflects reality.
It doesn't.
So that's his dismissal of the postmodernism that all of his stuff seems to embrace because he's in that ideological court.
And then he says, some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.
So it's possible this isn't what it seems at all, but no one is claiming the guy is dumb.
And, you know, why he would have this conversation with someone from Vox, you know, as his entire empire is failing, I don't know.
But that sounds like an admission of recognition of guilt to me.
Yeah, it's too dumb to be believed.
I mean, the guy is in so much trouble that the idea that he is going to speak off the cuff to a reporter and it's just going to turn out to emerge in public... I don't believe Kelsey and I don't believe him.
I think that this is an attempt to curry some kind of sympathy.
There was going to be absolutely no way to pretend that he Had not been, you know, hypocritical with respect to his values, but in some... So I think that this is...
It's a false flag of some sort.
It's a false portrayal of what's actually going on and our interaction with Kelsey Piper and the way she dealt with Ivermectin and what we know about how she's interacted with people we know well over the same topic.
I don't trust this at all.
I think we're supposed to believe that that conversation took place and he was careless and she's a little bit ruthless and this is the internal dialogue but I think it's bull.
We also know, you know, so your hypothesis and your prediction is that this thing was fueled by the fact that it sounded like it had the right values and therefore became valuable because those people with wealth who held those values were investing in it.
The hypothesis is there are a lot of people with wealth on the left who wanted to invest in crypto but they couldn't bring themselves to because it seemed a little creepy or icky or right-leaning or something and that FTX arrived being all vegan or something and they went there.
But we also see little glimpses of circularities inside the funding of FTX, where VCs who have invested in FTX are then invested in by FTX.
So the point is, something is using this engine.
It is sanitizing it.
It is infusing it with cash.
I don't know that.
That may be true, but that seems unrelated to the first point.
Well, my point is, I think it is a mistake to view this as an organically ascendant property that brought something to the table that was so valuable that it suddenly was this billion-dollar player.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that my hypothesis requires that that is therefore how FTX became the powerhouse that it was.
I think that to the degree that it had, a lot of investors, a lot of people who were So you're talking about people who are using it?
Yeah.
And then there's this other question about why investors bought anything about it, because its internal structure didn't make any sense.
Baroque.
They had an org chart that was insane in spite of the fact that it was a very new entity.
As you know, I'm a fan of org charts.
Is that public?
We have seen it, yes.
And it's Baroque.
But then there's no board of directors and any of the checks that you would expect to be ensuring that the thing was properly run on the inside.
And then, you know, you look at FTX and its partner Alameda And you've got a, you know, it's almost a literally incestuous group of people who do not speak like they know what they're talking about.
So the point is, it has the sense, it is very much like Enron's phony trading floor, right?
Yeah, and that's, I think that's it.
And I think, you know, believe or don't believe the conversation that Kelsey Piper reports with St. Benjamin Freed, you know, after midnight from the Bahamas a few days ago.
But, you know, there is in there, true or not, a sort of, you know, she's like, didn't you say that FTX never did X?
And he's like, yeah, technically that's true because it immediately went to Alameda and Alameda did X.
And, you know, I may have that backwards.
Maybe Alameda, I said Alameda never did.
And that was FTX.
Like, I don't remember which way it goes.
I don't, I don't know all of the machinations here, but it was that sort of like, yes, well, strictly speaking, literally speaking, what I said was true because I knew that you, no one could ask me the question that they wanted me to answer.
That's it, right?
Like, you know, I can speak truth and my conscience is clear if I think that the only thing that I need for a clear conscience is, did I in fact ask the literal question they Did I answer the literal question they asked, given that I created an entire thing behind me that no one can guess at, and therefore no one can ask me the right questions about it?
Yeah.
Until now.
Let's put it this way.
That's a game that always gets played.
You have to ask exactly the right question, or nobody will make even the most basic inference about what you're really trying to ask and give you an answer that actually makes any sense.
But let's actually get to the ivermectin stuff, because I think this is the place where we've seen the clearest glimpse so far of what this really was.
And let's be careful about what we actually know.
So the interesting fact is that the TOGETHER trial, which was heralded, this trial was Heralded as the largest randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of ivermectin against COVID ever at the time it was released.
It was released in a bizarre way where we were given the result, the supposed negation of the utility of ivermectin six months before the paper ever emerged.
So we were shown effectively a slide from a talk that claimed that they had tested ivermectin and it didn't work.
And the largest randomized controlled trial, which we are told, erroneously, is the gold standard of evidence.
But nonetheless, we were told this.
And then we had to wait six months to see the paper.
So there were all of these headlines that said what the result of the randomized controlled trial had been.
No ability to check whether the methodology made any sense, whether the trial was in fact underpowered the way pharma typically makes these trials so that they will show no efficacy of a competing compound to something that they wish to sell.
We couldn't see that.
And then the paper finally emerges and lo and behold A whole new set of headlines emerges, as if there's been some second major randomized controlled trial, but in fact it's the same one.
The methods section is opaque, so even figuring out what they did is extremely difficult.
I would advise people to look at Alexandros Marinos' publications on the TOGETHER trial.
It's jaw-dropping what they did.
It was underpowered.
It was underpowered in a way that was utterly systematic and cryptic.
In other words, they had a cutoff, among other things, they had a cutoff for weight.
And so that they increased the dosage with weight, which makes sense, and then they had a cutoff at which they stopped increasing it.
They didn't have a cutoff for weight of the participants.
The participants could be as obese as they needed to be, but the dosage stopped increasing at some weight of the participants in the trial.
Right, and so because COVID is serious proportionally to weight, the idea of underdosing people as they get, you know, if you cap the dosage at a per kilogram And then as people add kilograms, you stop increasing the dosage.
You are systematically underdosing people.
The heavier they are, the more underdosed they are.
That is exactly a cryptic way to say, oh, the dose was high.
It was X per kilogram.
The obese people are more likely to have been badly affected by COVID in the first place.
The obese people have been underdosed for the possible treatment, and so they are least likely to be positively affected by the treatment.
Also being the people most likely to have a bad outcome from COVID.
Right.
So this was not the only way in which the trial was underpowered, but it's one of them.
Also, I should point out that the trial promised to release their data and still has not done so.
But in any case, you've got this trial.
It's hard to follow the science under these circumstances.
Yeah, you can follow the headline is about all you can do.
But in any case, you have this trial, appallingly run, that FTX shows up as a... Actually, Zach, can you show my tweet on this?
Zach is going to show a tweet in which I've compiled a few screenshots of relevant items here.
Zoom in on that first one.
Well, so the first screenshot that Zach is going to try to zoom in on here is a screenshot on the Together Trials website in which they reveal FTX as a funder.
This is actually the second one.
Can we go right?
Yep.
So go back.
Twitter is not working very well.
There you go.
So here it is, funded by FTX.
Now let's be very clear.
Do we have a date on that?
Can you read it, Zach?
No date.
The FTX funding of the TOGETHER trial arrives late, after the Ivermectin arm.
Now that does not, this is going to come back, it's interesting.
So the funding of the TOGETHER trial by FTX is after the ivermectin arm.
After it's completed?
Yep.
Now, go to the next screenshot.
Okay, here you can see this is a news release from May 16, 2022.
The FTX Foundation supports the global expansion of the Trial of the Year award-winning Together Trial.
So the Together Trial won something called the Trial of the Year from the FTX Foundation and was awarded 18 million dollars in funding and purchase commitments.
Now, It is not 100% obvious what is going on here.
But $18 million is a huge amount of money in the realm of... Can you just put that back up for a second, Sax?
I haven't seen this before, and I was just reading... Yeah, so it's the Society for Clinical Trials, which is an existing society that I had never heard of before, has an existing award.
So this is not a new award being announced this year, but the TOGETHER trial wins the Society for Clinical Trials award this year, and they say, That they award it based on five key criteria, but do they say what those five key criteria are here?
They don't.
Okay, that's what I wanted to see.
It's not listed here.
I don't know what they are.
So, we can't know what this is, but we do know that a huge payment, 18 million dollars in fact, flowed to people who had generated a trial that systematically sabotaged ivermectin In a way that was predicted and that turns out to have been the case.
We can't see the data but we can see the methods and to the extent that we can reverse engineer what they did, it is exactly what you would do if you wanted to demonstrate that ivermectin didn't work in spite of the fact that it does.
Okay, so the question is, what role is this playing?
Well, the blue team clearly has doubled down a hundred times on the idea that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine do not work for COVID.
They have doubled down on the idea that the right way to address COVID is with the so-called COVID vaccinations.
And so what you have is a cabal advancing a story about what does and doesn't work.
That story is being sanitized and supported by garbage scientific work that is then rewarded at an extraordinary level by exactly this fraudulent entity that we have just discovered has been doing the bidding of the blue team, and of the effective altruism movement.
And at the point that Vox appears, pretends to appear, to be waking up to some of what it has been complicit in, that Kelsey Piper story is number one on the Vox website right now.
But number four most popular stories on the Vox website right now, when the Kelsey Piper story supposedly revealing the depths of the depravity and awareness of Sam McMahon-Fried is headlined, Going Home for the Holidays?
Boost, Mask, and Test Beforehand.
So that's the same cabal pretending that either there's awareness or there isn't, right?
If this is still the stuff being published on Vox at the same moment there's awareness over here about some of the tentacles that are all wrapped up in one another, and if you pull on one you're going to find something really, really bad inside, what could be big enough?
To wake it all up, to wake up this beast, and to stop having an article recommending that you boost before you go see your family.
Well, one thing, and one of the reasons that I wanted to have this conversation on Dark Horse today, is I think it is really important not to jump to conclusions about what some scandalous entity in front of us is.
In other words, I think we missed the boat with Enron.
I think we figured out what was going on in the Enron building, but we didn't figure out what role it was playing in civilization.
I think we are in danger of doing the same thing here.
The idea is we will accept something, something salacious about what was taking place at FTX and we will wag our fingers at them and we will fail to understand what its real role in the universe was.
So Enron is when?
Late 90s?
Early aughts?
I don't actually remember.
You want to look it up quickly, Zach?
Yeah.
Like the Enron Collapse or something?
Yeah.
Google Enron.
You'll immediately find... just sort of when it all goes to hell.
I think one of the... this is not then.
Whatever it was.
It's a couple decades.
It's December 2001.
2001.
Okay.
So, oh, right after 9-11.
Well, according to Wikipedia.
You know, I think Wikipedia isn't wrong about that level of history yet.
We're 21 years later.
This is not then.
But I know that it felt, to those of us who were still dedicated Democrats at the time, Like, and you said, Enron was a red team failure, right?
That appeared to be, and I haven't seen anything that suggests that it wasn't orchestrated by and perpetuated by and done by a bunch of people who would have claimed to have been on team red, as it were.
And there was, I'm sure, a fair bit of smugness and self-satisfactory back patting on the part of various Democrats who might have been doing something similar but weren't, or weren't discovered doing it.
And part of what we're seeing here is, well, of course the other side would do it, and it's 21 years later, and they learned some things, and there's more technological capacity, and it's worse.
It's going to take out a whole lot more than Enron did.
And can we do something more than having Team Red be smug and Team Blue be in denial?
Which I think is kind of what happened with Enron.
Team red was in denial and team blue was smug and it's like, okay, great.
I think this is, it's worse than that.
Sure.
The, we have looked at the tip of an iceberg.
We don't know what the iceberg is, but we have looked at the tip of the iceberg and this iceberg is involved in things that the blue team holds dear.
It is involved in a case that we know well in apparently rewarding people for having run a fantastic randomized controlled trial that was in fact an appalling randomized controlled trial that just so happens to have concluded that a drug that everybody swears doesn't work they concluded that it didn't work when the trial was set up in a way that would guarantee that outcome so the obvious question is
In the absence of things like universities, science journals, newspapers, truth-seeking apparatus that works in the public's interest, in the absence of that, in the total vacuum of the ability of some institution to seek truth on our behalf, Something is engineering the appearance of X, Y, and Z. In other words, there's a price point.
If you want something to be a fact, ivermectin doesn't work.
You want that to be a fact?
That's going to cost you.
It could be a fact, but it's going to cost you, right?
It's going to cost you 18 million bucks.
Well, 18 million bucks, that's a bargain compared to the money that will be made if ivermectin doesn't work.
It costs a lot more than 18 million bucks.
Oh, no doubt.
That award is a tiny piece of it.
If we're going to play that game, there's also the purchasing of all sorts of cheap offshore accounts to flood social media with snarky comments about how people advocating for evermectin are killing people.
There's all sorts of little branches of this that each cost some amount of money.
Sure, and I don't mean to suggest that 18 million bucks is enough to do it.
What I mean to suggest is we knew, and we said at the time, if somebody wants to go back through those broadcasts they will find, we know that we are facing some incredibly powerful thing.
We can feel what it is doing in and around this story.
We don't know what it is, we don't know how it works, but that it exists is something that is apparent if you have attempted to sort out the truth of these repurposed drugs, for example.
So, that thing, it turns out, lived in part at FTX.
It lived in part at Vox.
It explains the odd behavior.
And the thing that people... Prediction.
The Atlantic received some FTX-related money.
Well, the question is how deeply are you going to have to dig and how does this all work?
I will point out that I have argued that there are a couple different ways that this thing could work.
One is it could hire people to write garbage-y stories to not put two and two together and advance their argument in the Atlantic or the New York Times or whatever.
The other way is that it could basically cultivate freelancers.
In other words, one thing that could explain something like the FTX trial is that you've got a bunch of people who understand, huh, power really doesn't want ivermectin to compete with whatever the official treatments are.
And so, If you produce a trial that does that, if you function like an underling at Enron, where the superiors don't want to know what you're doing, what they want you to do is make the company look valuable on paper, right?
If you took that same approach inside of science and you said, well, power seems to want this drug not to work, and so what kind of work do you have to do to suggest that?
Maybe it will find me and reward me for doing that, right?
So the point is that after-the-fact award could be The evolution of a system of you freelance either in journalism or on Twitter as we've seen a bunch of you know self-appointed fraud seekers on Twitter who are interested in fraud on one side enough that they will invent it where it doesn't exist and not the least bit interested in fraud coming from the other side.
That's a conspicuous fact.
Are those people looking to be rewarded by something?
And does that thing look like this entity that we've now had a glimpse inside of?
Is the purpose of all the money flowing into this thing basically that it can reward and facilitate things which have a value to the team that's funding it?
In other words, laundering doesn't really cover that.
This is something beyond that.
Is this an incentivizing engine?
Right?
That it's supposed to look like a business to explain why it has all of these resources, but maybe it's something beyond that.
I think the last piece of the puzzle we need to talk about is effective altruism, because it shows up in the story.
I think a lot of people don't even know what effective altruism is, and it's worth connecting that piece of it.
So, effective altruism is like the 2.0 version of rationalism.
Rationalism was a school of thought that I thought had some promise to it.
I never loved it because there's a way in which it believes it's got a method for being fully rational and it doesn't understand that, yes, in theory ultimately that's the way it should be, but how you get from
Quadrant A where you're rational to quadrant B where you're rational when the intervening space is something you don't really understand, you know, you may want to relax the bounds of rationality a little bit because you may ultimately be more rational in the end if you do that, right?
Yeah, it assumes too much stasis in both initial conditions and what can evolve in the interim.
Yeah.
That said, it did some things really right.
It focused on a Bayesian understanding of complex systems, which is laudable.
It is the source, ultimately, of steel manning, which is a great technique that many of us have adopted.
So anyway, rationalism, there's good and bad, but it was largely good.
But at the point that it morphs into effective altruism, Wow, is there a bunch to say about what's wrong with that idea.
There's one thing right with it, I will argue, which is that what we as evolutionists know is that altruism, pure altruism, does not function.
It is a self-unstable strategy.
And that is because something that behaves truly altruistically is in a wonderful position to be taken advantage of by something that is not altruistic.
So the free riders drive the altruists to extinction.
And to the extent that the effective altruists have a point, their point is, well, maybe we can architect around that.
Maybe there's a way of architecting around it.
However, what it effectively becomes is a nightmare of a kind that history periodically sees.
First, it is worth thinking a little bit about utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism being the philosophy that says we should pursue that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number.
Which sounds extremely laudable until you start pressure testing it and you realize that there are certain things that it puts you in danger of, right?
For example, slavery.
What if you have a case in which enslaving people does a large amount of harm to a small number of people, but the net good is positive for the society that does the enslaving?
Well, utilitarianism would defend it, but that's obviously immoral.
So, the point is you don't want to embrace utilitarianism at the level of algorithm, because it will drive you into some places that we should never go.
Effective altruism is even one step more dangerous, right?
Because there's a recursion question, right?
There's a question of over what scale are you trying to do good?
And because, ultimately, the biggest scale and the most long-standing scale are the places where the maximum amount of good can be done, effectively it becomes an excuse for anything at a lower scale.
The correct parallel, I believe, is like indulgences on steroids.
Indulgences having been the program of the Catholic Church that allowed wealthy people to effectively buy the right to commit a sin For money, because the amount of good that the church could do with the money was supposed to exceed the harm done by the sin.
Right?
Now that thing resulted in the splitting up of Catholicism and the birth of Protestantism.
Because it was such a scourge, the idea that wealthy people should be able to buy their, you know, the good graces of God through this mechanism is obviously an absurdity and a corruption of the church.
And the point is, effective altruism has the same flavor, right?
And that flavor, it is not really clear.
I don't see the connection yet.
What's the flavor?
Let's look at Sam Bankman Freed.
Let's.
Okay?
Sam Bankman Freed was a fraud who took money from people and did not treat it with the proper care that he should have, either investors or the money of people who use the exchange.
Sure.
But he created an entity that was very powerful.
That is arguably defensible if, in the end, the wealth evaporated.
So that's not defensible.
Because the claim was that the entity was going to do larger good in the world than any individuals were going to be able to do.
Right.
And this is one of these cases where the loophole is as big as you need it to be.
Any evil at all can be ostensibly justified on the basis that it is necessary to fuel some larger good that will be done later at larger scale, right?
And so the basic point is you want complete freedom from morality?
Well you can get there through effective altruism because it's in no way bounded, right?
So it therefore removes every constraint.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Pay no attention to my actions.
My intentions are good.
And I'm just gaining power so that I can push all those intentions in the right direction.
Yep.
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
And this also raises the question about what they will do as the bankruptcy of that mode is literally and figuratively revealed.
In other words, to what extent is effective altruism having a A moment of reflection about what's wrong with what it believes and to what extent is it behind the scenes conspiring to keep itself going because it doesn't actually think that anything here has been demonstrated other than some, you know, bad business calls that caused its good thing to blow up.
So, in any case, There are a lot of messages in this whole picture here.
One of them has to do with do-gooders, right?
Effective altruism is like a kind of wokeness for, what would I even call them, a wokeness for people who aspire to being intellectuals.
And it has all sorts of outgrowth.
It's willing to partner, apparently, with those who would sabotage a good drug in the middle of a pandemic.
Well, here we get back to your point that you called, what, time-traveling money printer, right?
It's not...one thing that you could do is create history and know what you're creating and just be ahead of the game because you know what's going to happen because you're making it happen.
And another thing that you can do is make sure that the thing that could send you in one direction, like, oh, actually, this is a treatable disease, doesn't get discovered by, you know, funding and favoring and, you know, buying accounts funding and favoring and, you know, buying accounts and voices that basically make sure that no one who you would want to have at a cocktail party would ever think that a horse dewormer could possibly be something you could just treat COVID with.
Isn't that so funny?
So funny.
So, you know, there are a lot of branches of that attack on this one particular drug and on several of them, really, and on the individuals like Dr. Corey and, you know, so many others who are saying, yeah, actually, this is a, oh, never mind, right?
Like, I'm going to go, I, for instance, Dr. Corey, I'm going to go and treat people privately and you're going to keep on chasing me out of my work and I'm going to continue to treat people because, guess what?
I'm a doctor.
Like, you know, many of these people who got chased out of work were actually doctors who really did take an oath, and they meant it, and they care for patients, and they really did save people.
And that's not what most of these people who ended up making bank on COVID were.
And I think, so just the last four paragraphs of this Jeffrey Tucker article in the Brownstone Institute wraps up nicely, I think, a lot of what you're talking about.
This is again Tucker, a guy named Jeffrey Tucker, who I think is either the founder or the head of the Brownstone Institute.
All this time, while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world, the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn't exist, while its principal actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas, even as they preened about the virtues of effective altruism and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.
Then, the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.
The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and COVID.
But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real.
A lost generation of kids.
Declined lifespans.
Millions missing from the workforce.
A calamitous fall in public health.
Millions of kids in poverty due to supply chain breakages.
19 straight months of falling real incomes.
Historically high increases in debt.
And a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.
So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least.
Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above.
It's bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty.
To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.
Well, you're not cynical, but you did imagine it.
And imagine is the wrong word here.
You did see it coming at some level, to some degree, as it was happening.
You did predict it, and that's what this time-traveling... Money printer.
Terrible set of words together, but this time-traveling money printer concept of yours is getting at.
Well, there's one more thing it's getting at, unfortunately.
Believe it or not, it gets far worse soon if we are not wise about at least figuring out whether this is going on and getting to the bottom of FTX, and I believe that in some sense the game you are about to watch unfold, and I will say We have predicted the middle ground scramble with respect to COVID, and we have now seen so many versions of it that, you know, that prediction has done very, very well.
This is another prediction like that.
What are we about to see?
And one thing we are about to see... I don't know what you're about to say, but I hope you're wrong.
Me too.
Oh God, yes.
Totally.
Let's hope I'm wrong.
The prediction is?
The prediction is what we are going to see is a very studious and careful investigation designed not to find out what's going on.
to limit the damage and that behind the scenes, I would argue, what is taking place at this moment is what is called a Mexican standoff, where 14 people are pointing guns at each other in different ways and the linkages that have been erected during the movie are so complex that who where 14 people are pointing guns at each other in different ways and the linkages that have been That thing is happening behind the scenes because the true elites behind schemes like this are not dummies.
They don't go into these things vulnerable by doing bad stuff and not having a backup plan.
So they all have dirt on each other.
And so the question is, well, who's going onto the bus?
And some of the people who should go onto the bus can't go onto the bus, because if they go onto the bus, then they're going to take other people onto the bus.
This is a lot more than Shades of Jeffrey Epstein.
Well, and don't be surprised if this turns out to be connected to whatever the Jeffrey Epstein thing was.
But first thing we're going to see is we're going to see a seemingly hopeful effort to get to the bottom of this story by the powers that be that will in the end amount to what we got with Enron, which was a story limited to a tragic series of somethings that And that one floor that was so alarming, that one trading floor.
Right.
We're going to get another version.
We're going to get the blue version of Enron, right?
And what is really going on will be protected, because it has to be.
Because if it ever came out, wow, would the blue thing come tumbling down, right?
Well, you say that, but I just increasingly don't believe that there's anything that could be so amazingly clear and obvious and reprehensible.
Well, here's what it is.
That anything would come tumbling down.
You know the World Economic Forum and their embarrassing little... I mean, not personally.
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
And if you think carefully about what they're saying, they're not saying we will own nothing and we will be happy.
They're saying you will own nothing and you will be happy, more or less, or else, that thing.
Here's the problem.
This story already has The FTX story.
The FTX story has critically damaged crypto, which was already reeling from a somewhat inexplicable collapse in the last several months.
Let's just assume that the collapse of the value of crypto is just a normal correction.
But the FTX story has now taken crypto and it has shaken everybody's belief in it.
Okay?
And it is therefore... Everyone who had never invested in crypto is feeling real smug.
Right.
Maybe they should, but the problem is that it has kicked open the door for something that appears to have been marching forward anyway of its own accord, which is truly frightening and which most people do not really fathom yet, which is a central bank digital currency.
Now a central bank digital currency is effectively something that functions like crypto.
It has the advantages of being a virtual currency but it has the disadvantages of being a fiat currency and then it has a bunch of brand new disadvantages which is that effectively the money can be controlled by those who own the structure.
And this threatens to basically erect...
It's a shortcut to social credit scores and just having...
It's loss of freedom in one step.
It is totalitarianism in an app and a currency.
And the threat that this poses to the values on which the West is built really could not be overstated.
Many people have seen this.
There's a very good discussion of it between Majid Nawaz and Joe Rogan on Majid's last... Months ago at this point.
Yep.
It's very good.
Quite predictive.
There's also a piece that I'm going to point people to which I hope they will look at.
It's actually Volume 2 or Episode 2 of a series.
Both of the items in the series are excellent and I believe we talked about Volume 1 many months ago when it emerged.
It's called This Pivotal Moment.
And so Volume 2 is now out.
I will tell you, and this will give you a hint of what's really going on.
What is it about?
It is a video, High Production Values, that lays out the case for the fact that these central bank digital currencies are coming.
That they are part of a plan, that they will be used to control behavior, they will effectively be used to reward people and punish them based on whether or not they adhere to the kinds of behaviors that the power structure wants them to adhere to.
That it's a social credit score for the West.
And in any case, it is well worth a watch.
And actually, maybe, Zach, do you want to show us?
We've got the beginning of the intro to Volume 2 here.
Yep.
In episode one of this series, the case was made that we stand on the threshold of a radical civilizational change in which the nature of freedom in democratic societies, a system we have lived under for centuries, will be transformed beyond a system we have lived under for centuries, will be transformed
Where we are currently free to live the lives we choose, go where we please and behave as we wish, except where our actions are prohibited in law, under this new system we will only be allowed to do the things that we have been given explicit permission to do.
The nature of freedom in democratic societies will thus have become inverted, with our cherished and hard-fought for freedoms being transformed into mere privileges granted to us for compliance and total unquestioning submission to the edicts of those who control the system.
As unlikely as it may sound, the first critical step in this radical transformation was the introduction of vaccine passports, for vaccine passports were just the first internationally coordinated attempt to roll out a digital id platform that itself is designed to rapidly evolve into a social credit system similar to the one that people live under in china today in this news so um it's an excellent piece it lays out the case very well and i will tell you ominously that what has happened to this piece
it took off when it was first put onto youtube uh over a week ago and then it hit this phenomenon um i call molasses Where suddenly the growth of something that is apparently getting people's attention just stops, right?
Where the level of viscosity of the system changes.
What's more, YouTube seems to have put some sort of a strange limitation on this object that corrals how it is viewed.
So anyway, it's not surprising, given what YouTube has done to us, to Matt Orfalia, to others.
It is not surprising that YouTube would do what it could to limit the reach of this piece.
I would ask Dark Horse viewers and listeners to watch it, to give it serious consideration.
I would suggest going back to episode one as well and checking that one out and sharing it, which doesn't mean you have to agree with every element of the case, but I think the case is well worth airing.
And the last thing I'll say is I believe that what we've said here today, what's laid out in this pivotal moment, episodes one and two, also suggests something very important about what's going on at Twitter, and there's a lot of Everybody seems to think they know what's going on and lots of people argue, you know, Elon is cynical and you're all too dumb to see it and things like this.
The death of Twitter was predicted a couple nights ago where it was supposed to go offline because too many people had walked off the job.
Of course it didn't.
In any case, I would say... Wait, people are walking off the job or people are being fired?
Well, Musk gave them an ultimatum, and he basically said, he outlined what Twitter 2.0 was going to be, and what it sounded like, you know, I'm obviously not a Silicon Valley person, but what it sounded to me like was that What he was trying to do was build a startup in the ashes of Twitter 1.0 to make Twitter 2.0.
Which, frankly, sounds pretty cool, right?
If you could get that kind of burn-the-midnight-oil enthusiasm for building something that the world needs, if you could get that thing inside a well-established entity like Twitter, having gotten rid of all sorts of people who weren't really into it,
Yeah, I mean, I think knowing the university environment at home a lot better than that, than the business environment, the Silicon Valley environment, you know, you see these initiatives start up, you know, institutes and initiatives and programs and stuff within school, you know, schools start up within universities and, you know, branch in.
You know, they can be exciting and wonderful, but as you and I have been talking about for years, and as is well known to smart historians and many others, the skill set and energy associated with startup or with, you know, winning an actual interaction is different from maintaining something that is coherent.
Right, they're not, but that's part of why what he's proposing is exciting, is that he's not really talking about doing this with the same people who were keeping the lights on at Twitter.
Yeah, but my point is not, oh, well, you just need to keep those same people and make it work.
Not at all.
I think in general, and I've seen intimations that a lot of the losses in the tech sector right now, the losses of jobs, are actually from, like, HR.
And, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion teams, like, good, get rid of them.
This was the part of it that wasn't functioning anyway.
But if fundamentally, you know, startup growth, you know, the growth moment and the maintenance moment, which is much more than a moment, requires different sets of skills and different kinds of people.
Then trying to maintain this thing, this growth and acceleration and always something different on the horizon forever cannot...
Can't be done.
It can't be done.
Right.
But I don't think that that's what's going on.
I think what you're watching is somebody, well, and look, there's multiple interpretations of what's going on, right?
Some people are, you know, their point is, look, you're looking at a cynical actor and you're just too naive to get it.
And maybe that's true, but I don't think so.
I think if I'm reading the tea leaves of Twitter correctly, What you have is somebody who has made some interesting moves that have gotten rid of a lot of people who weren't on board with what he was trying to do anyway.
that he has the advantage of a benevolent dictator of Twitter.
And what people don't...
Benevolent dictator sounds like an oxymoron because people believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, which I have always argued is not correct.
That what power does is it selects for corruption.
And so when people end up with huge amounts of power, they tend to be very corrupt.
It does not mean that somebody who had power and aspired to something couldn't use it honorably, that they would find themselves corrupted by it.
And so, look, I may be wrong, maybe I am being naive, but I don't think so.
I think what's going on is that actually, look, there's lots of stuff I think he's doing wrong, but And he freely says so.
He says, hey, we're going to do a bunch of wrong stuff at Twitter.
It's coming.
You can guarantee it, right?
That's part and parcel of what he's up to.
But I think what he's doing is something that's evolutionarily wise, which is this is a new evolutionary phase, right?
That in effect, he is He's doing something that you and I have talked about might be part of an institution that really worked where it, you know, had to reboot itself rather than corporations that become old and take on, you know, a risk aversion because, you know, because they're so huge, right?
Something that was able to bootstrap its way back into that growth phase, maybe periodically, rather than try to continue in the growth phase forever.
Makes a lot of sense.
But anyway, my point about it here is different.
It is because zero is a special number, because we have a landscape in which a time-traveling money printer is plausible because we have no mechanism for figuring out what's coming on our own, right?
We don't have a newspaper.
We don't have a university.
We don't have science journals.
They're all corrupted.
Because we have that bad landscape, Twitter becomes a place that actually allows those who have retained their capacity to think and the courage to say what's true out loud and are not participating in the corruption.
It gives them a place to air what they've got and it doesn't mean it's not going to be tremendously noisy and it doesn't mean there's not going to be really awful stuff on Twitter.
Undoubtedly there will be, but The question really is, is this guy really trying to create a place that is an exception to the rules that have ruined every other institution?
I still have not seen the data point that says that's not what's going on.
And to the extent that it is what's going on, if we do want to get ahead of whoever it is that runs the time-traveling money printer and that has planned a central bank digital currency to keep us all corralled, if we want to get ahead of that, this is the best game in town.
This is our best play.
And if it turns out that Musk is cynical, that's a huge problem because we really don't have an alternative.
Yeah, I don't see it, if there is one.
I get simultaneously, immediately tired of talking about Twitter at all, and social media at all, and I also recognize that, to my enduring surprise, when I am trying to figure out what is happening on some subject, if I duck-duck-go it,
Or Google it, or go to the New York Times, or NPR, or CNN, or WAPO, or Fox, or any of the legacy media sites, I get less interesting and reliable news less quickly than I do if I do some relatively careful searches on Twitter.
And that is a bizarre state to find ourselves in.
It is two things, right?
It is a measure of how dysfunctional all of the things that are supposed to allow you to figure out what's going on are, and it is also an indication that Twitter, despite... it still doesn't make sense to me, right?
If you proposed Twitter to me, you said here's what we're gonna do, I would say that's not going to work.
Nobody's gonna do that.
Well, it's also...
Much as you began this episode by talking about something that Peter Thiel had said at some lecture about money having really two different purposes, Twitter has at least two different functions, whether or not, you know, purpose may not be the right word here, but, you know, it reads, and I certainly read it before I was on it, Before I ever joined it in 2017 as, you know, a social media site.
This is where you go to, um, to talk about yourself, to share your stuff with the world, to, you know, post things that are interesting to you and to find other people who are interested in the same things and to maybe talk back and forth with them and like, okay, maybe if like, if that's what you want to do, I guess, and it's going to be valuable to some people.
And, but this other thing, that we're talking about it doing is actually totally distinct.
Because of what we do, I end up on it and posting things and to some degree keeping track of how all those things do and I'm happier in any week when I've never gone on it in that form.
It's not good for consciousness.
But in those weeks when I've never posted anything or gone to, you know, But I've gone and looked for some, you know, news thing, gone to pursue some news story.
I don't react the same way.
And it is interesting, it is valuable, and you don't have to get dragged into, like, the personal side of it, like the social, like, oh, how does this universe view me?
Like, no, you can do this, even if you're logged in as yourself, but, you know, better if you're not.
But you can use this as an actual media site that's not a social media site.
And that, I think, I would guess, is what Musk is sort of alluding to with regard to, I can't remember exactly what you said he said, but basically that this is going to be the news source that we all use.
You said he said something like that?
Yeah, he said that, I'm trying to remember exactly, but it was something to the effect that Twitter was doing far better as a mechanism for crowdsourcing information about what's going on than any of the major news sources, and you've said the same thing, I 100% agree.
It shouldn't be that way, right?
We should be able to have a newspaper, but apparently we can't.
But I guess it will be a tougher sell I'm still skeptical, and I feel that I'm the most skeptical of social media of anyone I've ever met.
And I'm on Twitter, and I've done both of these things, and I see how much this is necessary and sometimes interesting and often a time suck almost entirely, and that this thing is actually, whoa, surprising, oh my god, it's actually a good news source.
And yet still, I find myself going, oh, that's Twitter.
Why are we talking about Twitter, for fuck's sake?
Right, so it's going to be a tougher sell for people if even I don't quite believe it and I feel like I should believe it more than anyone because I've experienced it.
Yeah, I guess what I would say is I actually think it's a moment to Override your instincts with respect to it, because I can absolutely see why it deserves to be discounted as a result of the fact that it is social media, and social media is itself net negative, and so powerfully so.
On the other hand, it's a little bit like... I don't know, what would the analogy be?
You know, in the Apollo 13 situation, right, where you've got astronauts and they're going to die and there are a certain number of objects on the spacecraft and you have to configure them into a filter that gets over the problem.
The point is, okay, I don't know that the people who started Twitter had any clue what they were building, and it's certainly a mixed bag, but to the extent that no other property can sustain a truth-seeking mechanism, and Twitter falls into the hands of somebody who looks like they're interested in facilitating that, I guess I would say
We are in no position to be picky about the fact that it's a social media site because at some level if the people who remember how to think are going to have to gather somewhere and nobody else is going to have them, then Twitter it is.
I mean, I think either you're not hearing me or you're talking to everyone else.
Because I have said, look, I'm sort of the living realization that although it's also the social media thing, which I don't think is healthy for people, if that is the thing that's necessary, or in this case, in this version of the universe we have come to live in, then it is paired inextricably with an actual, effectively, a news It's not an organization, it's an aggregator, yeah.
Then so be it.
And yes, do all the actual fact-checking, like actual fact-checking, not like one of those professional fact-checker people do on anything you find there, as you would for anything.
But do not start with a personal discounting of like, oh, well, I found it on Twitter, so I don't know.
That is an unnecessary discounting that shouldn't happen at the beginning of having found something on that site as opposed to CNN.
Like, really?
You're going to prefer the stuff that is going to come out of one of the mainstream sources?
I don't think so.
All right.
Well, I would say one other thing.
I think I am a little bit talking to you.
I'm also talking to them.
And I'm responding to something that I am seeing, which is We don't know what Musk is up to, right?
I think most people have not understood.
The gravity of the situation and the paucity of alternatives.
I think, if I look at everything Musk has said and tweeted, I think he does understand why Twitter is important.
And I think he does know roughly what he's trying to create.
And if that's true, then what he should be getting from us is the benefit of the doubt.
Right?
We should be approaching Let's put it this way.
I think part of what is being marshaled against him is an attempt to create an environment in which people that he's trying to help respond by hating him.
And I think he's pretty good at ignoring that.
I think whether it's autism or whatever it is, that he's actually capable of tuning out that thing that would capture almost anybody else's attention in that spot.
And that we would be wise if we agree that we don't have a better plan, and that this plan might be what it appears to be, then in fact we should be trying to help by being open to the possibility that it is what it looks like it is.
Well, I think we need to save this for another conversation because I think we're just talking past each other.
I don't know what the plan is.
I don't know what it appears to be.
Like, I haven't been paying much attention.
So, I think you are imagining that everyone else is in your head and going like, oh, well, is this the plan or is this not the plan?
It's like, I don't know what the plan is supposed to be.
So, I'm not saying I don't think the plan is what it is.
I'm just saying from, you know, from well before When Musk took over Twitter, my sense was, oh, actually, this works as a news aggregator.
This is not a social media site and a story.
This works as a news aggregator.
This is much more than what it's advertised as.
And it was getting worse at that.
Because of the censorship.
Because so many accounts, both people and institutions, are being shut down for saying things that the woke ideologues who are behind the scenes, having been hired to moderate content, were saying, no you can't say that, no you can't say this.
So it was getting less good at that, but it was really good at this thing, which No one was claiming it was good at it, and yet that is what it was.
So that in and of itself is interesting, and potentially sort of where media goes, given that apparently you can't trust editors, because pretty much all of the mainstream media organizations have been toppled by editors hiring idiots, I guess.
That's the wrong word.
I don't know.
them, but just let a bunch of people in the door who then take over and it's gone.
And I guess, I mean, that does, we really do need to finish.
And we have a cat here this week and I promised cats last week and people really wanted cats this week.
So I do want to talk about the story, but this is actually a decent segue to talk very briefly about another thing that I did want to talk about this week, which is an editor, emeritus and columnist for the Toronto Sun, Laurie Goldstein, who I've never heard of before, and I may be mispronouncing his last name, Hat tip to him for, on Twitter,
Pointing me to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario, their COVID-19 facts for physicians, and I can't show my screen with our current setup, so I cannot show you guys this, but on November 18th, which is yesterday, they updated their facts, their frequently asked questions for physicians, and I just want to read you a couple of what The College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario is recommending that doctors say to people, to patients.
Question.
Patients are asking me to write notes supporting a medical exemption from COVID-19 vaccines.
What do I need to know?
The answer is long and there's a number of paragraphs, and here are two paragraphs, not contiguous on the original, that the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario says that doctors should say to patients who are coming in asking for COVID vaccine exemptions.
"Generally speaking, there are very few acceptable medical exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccination.
Examples include an allergist/immunologist confirmed severe allergy or anaphylactic reaction to a previous dose of a COVID-19 vaccine or to any of its components that cannot be mitigated, or diagnosed episode of myocarditis or pericarditis after receipt of an mRNA vaccine." So that's one.
The other paragraph, not contiguous, It is also important that physicians work with their patients to manage anxieties related to the vaccine and not enable avoidance behavior.
For example, for extreme fear of needles, trypanophobia, they usefully give a big word there in case you weren't sure, or other cases of serious concern, responsible use of prescription medications and a referral to psychotherapy may be available options.
Overall, physicians have a responsibility to allow their patients to be properly informed about vaccines and not have those anxieties empowered by an exemption.
So what if you're afraid of toxins rather than needles?
So if you don't want our experimental medical treatment, we're going to either give you a different medical treatment or call you crazy and scared and have you talk to someone about that so you can get uncrazy and unscared and get our experimental medical treatment.
Right, they have defined out of possibility the fact that your trepidations might be based on the fact that this is dangerous.
Right, and this, remember, is the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario, not a fly-by-night organization, although we can hope that maybe they will.
So, one more quote from the site.
One more frequently asked question from the site.
Again, updated yesterday.
This is not months or years ago.
This is updated yesterday.
I've read about some drugs that might prove beneficial in treating COVID-19.
Should I be prescribing these drugs as a precautionary measure?
Can I prescribe them for myself or family?
No.
Many of these drugs have an intended use and prescribing them as a precautionary measure has or may contribute to drug shortages, compromising care for others.
Should these or other drugs prove useful in combating COVID-19, their use will need to be carefully managed to support those who need them the most.
So that sort of ties back in with the TOGETHER trial still being Promoted as the evidence that, for instance, ivermectin does not work, and really, I wish that the other trial had some sort of thing we could burn an effigy, or like, I could bring it out with like a head on a stalk, like, this thing is dead.
This is not what it seemed.
We know that from so many angles now.
And here we have, as of yesterday, mid-November 2022, the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ontario telling its members how to respond to patients or each other when they say, well, but aren't there some things I could use to treat COVID?
No, don't do that.
You're going to contribute to drug shortages.
Also, we don't know if those work.
All right.
I need two more minutes before we get to cats because your last bit there has Go for it.
Has closed the picture pretty well.
Great.
Twitter, like all such experiments, is an evolutionary environment.
As the other evolutionary environments succumbed to a kind of control that prevented reality from rising above noise, It proved an environment in which it was very hard to keep the truth secret.
What emerged was absurd censorship to cover that gap.
In other words, you've got an evolutionary environment.
Initially, it's people talking to each other about they don't know what.
Professionals end up there and start effectively fact-checking the world and saying, that's not really true.
Here's what's going on.
Here's the references.
It becomes an environment that surely is not what its inventors had in mind.
They have to go great guns on aggressive censorship, throw people off who are highly credentialed, who are in a position to say, that's not true, here's how you know, right?
So they're trying to turn it into a noisy environment rather than a signal-rich environment through heavy-handed censorship.
It then falls into other hands, and those other hands, the plan, I think, is to restore its nature.
The plan by Musk.
Yeah, is to restore the capacity for sense-making to evolve in this context, which it naturally tends to do, which you're saying you've used it for, right?
You wouldn't think of it as a place to, as a news aggregator, or a place to find out what's actually taking place, but you can.
But I find myself, like, I'll do searches in other places and then go to Twitter and try there, like, okay!
Right.
Now I can find it.
And so this, you know, it's like a little microcosm of sociality in which it's not that its fundamental nature is truth-seeking, but it's a place that is hospitable to those who wish to do truth-seeking.
Yes.
And so I think that is the plan, and to the extent that that's the plan, I feel like we should all get behind it, and vocally so, because zero is a special number, and this is the only thing that stands between us and zero.
All right, and I think we can go full circle because I imagine the founders of, if not social media, then the internet thought that it was mostly going to be videos of cats.
And it was for quite some time.
Right, so let's talk about cats a little bit.
All right.
We have only one cat on screen here and he's kind of sleepy, so he's not going to do a lot of... Okay, that was not bad.
Yeah, on cue.
Decent, yeah, but a little too dark for the camera to pick him up super well here.
Okay, so There's a new piece of research.
It's not impressive, but the topic is an interesting one.
So I didn't want to have spent so much time sort of like leading up to this, because it's really not a great paper.
And there's another paper that it references that's even a worse paper, but that has such a great conclusion.
I'm going to talk us through, in both of their cases, why the methods are kind of ridiculous.
And so we don't know what we know.
Like, we don't know that We know what they think we know now.
But still, the topic is basically one of what do any of those kinds of individuals that we speak to who don't have the same linguistic capacity that we do, understand of us.
And so there is, in this area of research, there are various acronyms, of course, because once you have an area of research, you've got to start with creating the acronyms, so as to sort of keep people out.
But you have like infant-directed speech.
Like how does infant-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech?
I would never let an infant direct a speech.
How does dog-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech?
How does cat-directed speech differ?
These are directed at, then.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a lot of research, of course, on infant-directed speech.
Everyone who's been a parent has noticed that they do or do not.
We didn't modulate our speech nearly as much as most people do when our kids were very, very young.
And I think we probably do much more for our animals, yes, for our non-human animals than we did for our human animals when they were very young.
And yet, we know, for instance, that from historical work, speech directed at companion animals shares aspects of speech directed at infants specifically with regard to hyper-articulation Right?
Shorter utterances, more repetitions, elevated pitch, and increased pitch variation.
Okay?
So all of those things you will recognize if you've ever had a baby or a dog or a cat or, you know, even a fish if you're that kind of person.
But probably you don't talk to your fish that way.
Some people might.
But again, hyperarticulation, shorter utterances, more repetitions, elevated pitch, and increased pitch variation.
All are things that have been noted as being true facts True Facts About the Companion Animal.
A reference that no one will get except for Toby if he's watching.
What is that reference to?
Ze Frank.
Ze Frank in a video called True Facts About the Leavier.
Oh, there are a lot of true facts videos.
It's been a long day already.
Those things that are true of the way that people talk when they're talking to babies in particular, and to some degree to companion animals, has been supported by a lot of actually good research.
The research just came out last month in journal Animal Cognition.
It's got three authors, de Meuson, Gontier, and Labouchet, they're French, and it's called Discrimination of Cat-Directed Speech from Human-Directed Speech in a Population of Indoor Companion Cats.
So the question is, can cats distinguish between speech that's directed at them versus speech that is not directed at them?
And this is a question that you feel somewhat strongly about.
Yes, for the record, my position is that cats don't even know their names and anything beyond that is wasted.
Okay, but knowing your name may be a different and lateral question to, do you know you're being spoken to?
Okay, and I agree there's something interesting here, especially in light of the fact, which I believe is a fact, that domestic cats that are vocal are vocal with their people, but they are not vocal with each other in the absence of people.
And, I think, hypothesis, they're not going to be vocal with strangers the same way.
They're going to be vocal with their people.
They don't do a lot of catcalling?
Sorry.
I think, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So also from just past research, which is two more interesting things that I didn't pursue all of the different pieces of research and to assess how good they were, but two other results not from this research that just came out in Animal Cognition last month, are that people raise the pitch of their voices more when talking to puppies than talking to adult dogs.
So the, like, I'm talking to a young'un thing gets added to itself when you're talking to a puppy who doesn't yet know versus a dog who kind of does, okay?
And also people modulate their pitch more when talking to dogs than to cats, okay?
As if, and this isn't to say necessarily that that's apt, but as if the people at least imagine that the dog may be interpreting more Two observations.
One, you could interpret that either way, right?
Like you wouldn't modulate your pitch.
Either you would think that the cat can understand you completely, which is then you've got some issues to work out, or you don't think the cat's understanding you at all, in which case you don't modulate your pitch really, but you will modulate your pitch for your dog, which you imagine could understand you partially but not fully, just like you would do if you were talking to a baby.
All right, two observations.
One, you could interpret that either way, right?
You could.
Either people, and I don't think this is true, but either people imagine their cats are more comprehending and the dog needs the exaggerated pitch to get it.
Talking to a cat is more like talking to a 12-year-old and talking to a dog is more like talking to a 2-year-old.
Not so much.
Talking to a cat is more like talking to a tree.
I was going to say a sponge.
And I don't mean that at all.
I fall on the other side of this.
Well, look, there are a lot of reasons to talk to your animal.
Some of them have nothing to do with your animal knowing what you're talking about.
Sure, of course.
You've got to practice your speech on them sometimes.
I think giving voice to what they might be thinking is a useful exercise.
Oh, it's wonderful, yes.
I had another point, and I've now... Maddy, do you remember?
Oh, the other thing I was going to say is it doesn't necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with what people think.
In fact, to the extent that dogs do get it, and they do.
They get a lot of human language.
They don't necessarily know what you mean, but they interpret a lot of stuff.
To the extent that that's true, they may be in effect training you.
In other words, to the extent that you exaggerate your meaning, When you're talking to your dog, the dog may be more successful at doing what you want it to do, and so you would become inadvertently trained to do that, whereas your cat, because it doesn't do what you want it to do, does not train you to alter your modulation.
Well, I think you're conflating two things there.
Are they getting you to effectively slow down, slow down and hyper-articulate and all of this, in order that they can learn more about how to understand you so that they can do what you want?
So there's a do I understand you and will I do what you want question, and we have to separate those because a cat's not going to do what you want, right?
Right.
But does a cat understand you?
That's the question we're trying to tease apart here, and it is harder because you can't basically do like a Like, just run this maze for me, and like a dog might look at you funny and be like, why would I do that, but okay.
And a cat's like, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna.
Right, it could understand completely what you want, and it could affect its behavior, not at all.
Yeah, so you're gonna need to be a little clever in your design of how you can figure out if...
If your animal is responding to you, and we know from a lot of previous research that, yes, infants are responding and learning from adult language the more the older they get.
Dogs are responding to human language, too, to a remarkable idea, but to a remarkable degree, rather.
But what about cats?
It hasn't been looked at, in part, perhaps, because they don't feel like collaborating, and so, like, how would you know?
So this new paper, again, really small study, I don't think so.
methods, quote, "19 cats were recruited to the study.
Out of them, 16 cats, parentheses, nine males and seven females completed the whole study." End quote.
I'm like, what, the other cats have better things to do?
What happened?
I went, okay.
Okay, so three cats were like, "I don't think so.
I don't think so." So it's a tiny little study.
It's also, it's indoor cats.
They're living with vet students in studio apartments.
Okay.
Okay, so it's really narrow in terms of what kind of cats are being asked to
To basically respond either to four kinds of speech, I guess it's going to have been, and I was paying more attention to the other one, but I think it was owner speech to other people, owner speech directed at cats, stranger speech to other people, like just ambient speech, and stranger speech directed at the cat.
So, you know, the cat is hearing four different kinds of voices, two different humans, One human whom they know well, and two different situations of the humans talking.
One in which they're just talking not to the cat at all, and one in which they're talking to the cat.
And the only one of those four situations, there was one situation in which the cats responded, and it was of course the one in which the owner is talking to the cat.
And they do show a response.
So, okay, small, 16 cats.
Again, three had something else to do.
Indoor cats, living, you know, with vet students, all of this.
But they did find that cats actually responded noticeably to owners talking to cats, but not in any of the, not human voices in any of the other situations.
Interesting if true.
Okay?
Actually, I believe that.
Yeah.
So, you know, cats discriminate.
So the conclusion, again, small study, is that cats do discriminate between human speech that is ambient and human speech that is directed to them, but only when it's from a person who they know.
And, you know, I'd love to see if, like, you know, from our situation, where our cats have four people who they know really well, and other people, I think, absolutely, our cats respond to our voices and not to some random person who comes in and is like, hey kitty.
I'd be like, what?
No.
You got kibble?
But then I also wanted to share a 2002 paper that's really ridiculous in terms of the method, so I have to walk us through that first.
But because the conclusion is so fantastic, I hope it holds up if ever the right study is done.
What was done is they've got undergraduate psych students interacting with a cat whose real name the psych students don't know.
They've been given a fake name so the cat can't respond to its name being used.
It's kind of funny, okay?
Engaging how human speech and also human feelings about cats affect how the humans will interact with them.
And so they're not, they're just given some like toys, some enrichment stuff.
They can't touch the cat and so that's also like some cats be like, yeah touch me, like oh you're not going to touch me?
What am I, why am I paying any attention to you, right?
But the study was trying to get at, like, what is a person's opinion about whether or not they like cats?
Does that affect whether or not the cat is interacting with them?
And also, what kinds of things that people might say to cats gets cats to interact with them?
In this case, it's all strangers.
The dramatic failing of this study is that they literally used one cat.
So they got one cat who's, let me see, I can't remember what the cat's actual name is, but the cat was going by Whiskers in the study.
And wait, no, I do have it.
I have it highlighted here.
Let me see if I can find it.
Sorry, guys.
Oh, here we go.
In the Methods, under feline confederate, a two-year, four-month-old female grey tortoiseshell cat served in the study.
She was unfamiliar to all of the participants.
Although the cat actually was named Tabitha, she was referred to as Whiskers throughout the study to ensure that her responses were not based on hearing her real name.
It was also thought that using a gender-neutral name would help reduce gender-based expectations of the cat's behavior.
Okay, that's all fine, except like one cat.
You can't do this with one cat because cats are singular.
Cats have personalities.
We have no idea if the results of this study are because Whiskers, no Tabitha, had particular feelings about particular kinds of humans because probably she did.
So all that is to say I have no idea if this will hold up.
But the results of this study were twofold.
One is not very surprising.
Women who self-report that they like cats are more likely to have cats unknown to them choose to spend time with them.
Okay, whereas men who self-report that they like cats, we're not better able to attract Tabitha to them.
It's not really cats, it's more like cats.
It's not cats, it's not cats at all.
And again, it's undergraduate psych students, right?
So it's this very narrow piece of reality.
But cats, cat.
Or less are.
I see I insist on using the plural because they did, too, until I went back and carefully read the methods.
Like, no, it's not a cat's situation.
It's really not.
But, okay.
Cat is less likely to approach strange men whose speech has a high degree of imperatives.
Like, come here and don't do that.
Which is to say, my conclusion, the way that I would phrase that, and they didn't, is cats avoid strange men who give orders.
And really, shouldn't we all?
So cats, cat, Tabitha, representing all cats, and I would say maybe should be representing like all mammals, avoid strange men who give orders.
And maybe if we all just kind of like started there and went like, okay, let's just figure out if I can know you better before I accept your imperatives to come here and do that.
Then we could maybe accomplish more in the world.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So that's all I got.
So should this ever be done with multiple cats?
More than one Tabitha.
More than one Tabitha that you're hoping that result will hold up.
Yeah.
They didn't correct for whether men were more likely to give orders?
I mean, they had imperatives being given by both women and men.
They did, on equal levels.
I don't think it was equal.
They did not tell the human, they didn't call them confederates, human participants, human participants in advance what kinds of ways to interact with whiskers.
They just let them interact.
But there were, so what they found, I think, There were cat owners and non-cat owners among them.
There were men and women among them.
Somehow it was only male participants whose data had to be deleted.
We aren't told why.
But there were imperatives that were given by women and the cats The cat, to not preferentially avoid the women giving orders, just the men, the strange men giving orders.
Well, that's interesting.
I admit that in addition to the male-female comparison, I'm also interested in within males, Canadian and not Canadian, you know, because I'm imagining that Canadian males are not that great at giving orders, except for Justin Trudeau, who seems to be an exception, though he may be Cuban.
I think we're done.
I think that's excellent.
Yes.
- Someone points out that we should take Tabitha's perspective and apply it to coaching as a strange man giving order. - Yes, so exactly.
If we could let, you know, Tabitha may have the wisdom of her generation.
This is from 2002.
Tabitha is probably, unfortunately, no longer with us, but I imagine that we could find a Tabitha for 2022 and find that avoiding strange men who give orders is, in fact, not the best way forward, either through a pandemic or not.
That's right.
Especially with all the lockdowns, Tabitha too may have I imagine that I will go a little bit deeper into the infant-directed speech, dog-directed speech, cat-directed speech literature, and I think there's just not very much in the cat-directed speech literature, hence this being sort of the best that I could find.
I'm pleased that I feel, I think that you were already there, but I feel like I've pulled you a little bit towards my position on the question only by being explicit about, like, do cats understand, you know, do cats understand that they are being spoken to when it is by someone whom they know?
And, you know, that first paper that was better done than this 2002 paper, the one that was just published last year, suggested yes, but it was very small.
I think that result will hold up.
Well, look, I don't have any doubt about this.
I mean, you know that I, when I need to find the cat for the feeding, that I whistle.
And that by whistling prior to feeding... Which you've never referred to either of the hymns as the cat.
The cat.
But, that by whistling before feeding, the whistling then produces the cat because the cat wants to eat, and so an inadvertent version of this undoubtedly happens because a person talking to other people in the environment of the cat does not suggest that food is about to happen, but a person talking to the cat probably precedes the cat getting fed fairly frequently, and so it wouldn't be surprising if the animal had detected that there was something about that kind of speech that means I should hang around the kitchen
And talking about carne asada does not bring out the cat, but bringing the carne asada out of the refrigerator does bring out the cat.
Does bring out the cat, for many comprehensible reasons.
So yes, I just don't think the cat has any idea what the hell we're talking about, even when we are talking about the cat.
Well, at the moment he's sleeping, so it's not a fair question.
That is true.
Yes.
All right.
It is finally... We've been on here talking to you guys, at you guys, for a little while.
We apologize for...
We apologize for all of it.
Not the part that wasn't our fault, though.
We are not going to do a Q&A this week, which means two weeks running, we're not.
Next week, right now, the question asking period at my Patreon is open, so go there if you're a patron, $11 or up, or join, ask a question.
Next week we're going to do four, count them, four live streams.
We're going to do live stream 151 of Dark Horse on time.
And under budget.
And under budget.
Are we okay, Zach?
Okay.
I don't know if it's going to be under budget, because I feel like I'm in charge of the budget, and I'm not sure we're under budget at this point.
And the Q&A, we're definitely going to have it.
We're going to have three questions from the Discord at the top of the hour next week, and then we're going to address as many of the questions from this week and last week and some from next week in the Q&A afterwards.
That'll be on Saturday after American Thanksgiving next week.
I don't know what day that's going to be.
My 26th and then on the 27th at 9 45 a.m pacific we are going to do a one-hour paid ad free mostly about products like holiday gift episode talking about some stuff that that we like that might also help you with your holiday shopping if you do that sort of thing it might help you even if you don't do that sort of thing and then we're going to take a break and then for patrons of mine only we're going to be doing our two-hour private q a which is always on the last sunday of the
The Month at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
It's a lot of fun.
It's small enough that we can watch the chat and interact with people, and I encourage you to join us there.
Although that's going to be a lot of time with us if you watch all of those.
We'll be tired of us by the end.
Hopefully you won't be.
For now, anything else you want to say before...?
All right.
Until next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
