#151 How to Think, not What to Think (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 151st 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 the difference between people who crashed and burned in the last few years, and those who remain standing. What was your position on SARS-CoV2 origins, vaccines, early treatment, masks, when those topics first came to your consciousness? Have your positions moved? Has your model of the world beco...
Without even looking I can tell you it's episode 151 and that's about as far as I've gotten with the relevant question.
Have you thought about it?
It is episode 151.
You are Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I am Dr. Heather Hying.
Zach is saying that he cannot hear.
Can you hear me?
All right, well, it is episode 151.
We are here at the Dark Horse Temporary, Permanent, Temporary, Permanent, Temporary Studio, I think.
And while the original host, main host, is getting his audio working, I will just walk us through A few other things.
We are going to do a Q&A today, unlike what we have done for the last couple of weeks.
We apologize for the tech problems.
So we have a lot of questions already queued up, but we will accept more questions as well.
You can ask those at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And tomorrow we are actually doing two more live streams, so four live streams this weekend.
It is November 26th, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving as I'm speaking.
Tomorrow, Sunday, November 27th at 9 45 Pacific Time, we're going to do a short one-hour holiday gift live stream and talk some about About things like that, and as if on cue.
Actually, on cue.
On cue, more or less.
We're going to talk about many wonderful things, including this fabulous object that was sent to us by a good friend.
A marvelous gift.
And anyway, you will find out more about it tomorrow.
Both the object and the friend are a gift?
The friend is a gift, as far as I'm concerned, frankly, to planet Earth.
But we can't gift him to others.
I wouldn't even try.
Yeah.
All right, so that my computer has decided to go to sleep.
Apparently we're boring it.
We're going to do that tomorrow at 9 45 Pacific and then at 11 a.m Pacific.
As always on the last Sunday of the month, although December we're going to switch it up a little bit because that would make it Christmas, we do our private Q&A which you can get access to through my Patreon.
So those are a lot of fun.
They really have a very different tenor Than the public Q&As that we do, in part because the audience is so much smaller that we're actually able to watch and interact with the chat and address things that come up in the chat in real time, which is wonderful.
So, this is the first of four live streams for us, your hosts of Dark Horse, this week.
Should I just keep talking now that your audio's back?
No, I'm now joining the chat.
The chat?
Well, that's how the kids say it.
So-and-so has now joined the chat.
Dr. Freud has now joined the chat at the point somebody makes an embarrassing linguistic error that suggests something Freudian.
I see.
So anyway, yes, I've joined the chat.
Sorry about that little hiccup with the audio, but here we are.
No worries.
The chat, the actual chat, not the one that Brett has joined, is live on Odyssey.
Or Dr. Freud.
I can't speak to that.
I'm not on Odyssey at the moment.
I have not seen, checked whether or not Dr. Freud is or is not there.
There's presumably someone alive right now who is legitimately a Dr. Freud.
Maybe they're on Odyssey.
I don't know.
I don't know.
This week at Natural Selections, which is where I write, I have a piece called On Hate Crimes and Child Abuse, and it's responsive to the Club Q massacre outside Colorado Springs this week at Club Q, which is
...denominated as an LGBTQ nightclub, and specifically about the response by some in the media that this was an inevitable thing to have happened, given that there are people out there who critique taking children to drag shows and giving them puberty blockers.
And that is an extraordinary and despicable claim, and I write about that some in Natural Selections this week.
And that kind of thinking is related to a lot of what you are going to be steering us through this week, I believe.
Yeah, we will talk in depth, but how one puzzles through these difficult questions is really the core of the matter.
Yeah, I will say this is of absolutely no importance really to anyone and of no relevance at all to anyone just listening, but I am stuck with my low rent laptop stand this week and that's it.
It's just dumb.
Top stand is way too big.
It doesn't really sit on me very well.
Anyway, I'm not pleased with it either.
I expect I will hear from some of you who aren't because that's the kind of thing that some people comment on.
It's already antagonizing me.
Okay, we have a new store as we've talked about the last several weeks.
It's terrific.
It's a small operation run by a couple who they both have the print shop where they make The merchandise and they also run the store itself and it's at darkhorsestore.org and you can find all sorts of cool stuff.
I'm sure we'll mention that again tomorrow with regard to the holiday gift episode, but you can get Do Not Comply, Do Not Affirm shirts, you can get Lie to a Tyrant, Dark Horse, straight-up Dark Horse stuff.
It's pretty great.
And by way of finishing up announcements and sort of general logistics, we are supported by you, our audience.
We are grateful to you.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channel, the main channel, the Clips channel, that's Dark Horse Podcast Clips on either YouTube or Odyssey, and liking and sharing both full episodes and clips wherever you watch or listen, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere.
And just a reminder that even if you're seeing ads that are not being read by us on YouTube, that doesn't mean that we are in the good graces of YouTube.
Nope, certainly not.
They are putting ads on our content and making money off of us, but not sharing any of that with us.
So they demonetized us for being really truly awful people, and apparently since we have not seen the wisdom of our ways, they have decided not to remonetize us.
Yes, yes, my interpretation was a little different about who is truly awful, but, you know, anyway, we can agree to disagree about that and have no other choice.
Oh, no, I think actually I agree with you.
Oh, no, no, you and I are not agreeing to disagree.
I am agreeing to disagree with YouTube because they have left me exactly zero other options.
Right, yes, yes.
Okay, you can join either of our Patreons, as I mentioned, next week.
Well, since we're going to have a lot more live streams this week, it won't be before you have a chance to see us again, but before next week's live stream, Brett will have one of his Patreon conversations, and tomorrow we have the private Q&A, which is online.
We encourage you to join it, and also on either of our Patreons, you can get access to the Discord server, where you can meet A wide range of people and engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, have karaoke night, book club, young or old, left or right, there's a spot for you at the campfire.
Okay, we also do have sponsors and we are grateful to them.
We only take sponsors who make products or offer services that we ourselves can directly and have directly assessed and decide are high quality or in a couple of cases as in one of today's Sponsors, we have a close friend who can directly assess and has said, yes, this is worthy of your sponsorship.
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Good food is real food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care in conditions as ancient as possible, given the constraints of the 21st century.
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All right, that's our sponsors for the day.
That is our logistics and our background, and here we are.
The end of November 2022.
Right.
Time marches on.
Time... I don't know if you've noticed that.
Time marches on.
Two and three quarters years into the public becoming aware of COVID.
Yes.
Now, I wanted to talk about something that's a little bit delicate this week.
I wanted to talk about the apparent exit from Twitter of Claire Lehman and Sam Harris.
And I don't want to talk about it because I think it's especially important to talk about those two and whatever choice they have made and the reasons they have made it, but I do think That their trajectory over COVID actually gives us reason to reflect on why the intellectual landscape broke apart in the way that it did.
But before doing that, I do want to say both Sam and Claire have been, as many people have pointed out, quite terrible to us over the course of COVID.
So just for the uninitiated, Who are they?
Sam Harris, as many will know, is primarily, I would say, a philosopher.
By training, he's a neurobiologist, or at least that's what he studied in graduate school.
He hasn't been a functioning academic after his degree, as far as I know.
In any case, he's a prolific author.
He's written on many important questions, including questions of free will.
He's written a very famous book on Lying, that is in fact the title of the book, about the harm that is done to civilization by lying being a normal process and argue that it is effectively never justified.
Anyway, he's also a friend and a member of what was loosely termed the intellectual dark web.
Claire Lehman is the founder of Quillette, which is an online magazine that was also affiliated with the intellectual dark web.
It was a very vibrant outlet for heterodox content during the height of the battles over Wokeness in the public sphere.
So it was a... I think it was founded in 2016, and when we became aware of it in 2017, it was ascending rapidly.
I think it was founded in 2015, doesn't really matter, somewhere in that neighborhood.
But in any case, Claire is the founder and the editor-in-chief of Quillette.
And so this week, Sam exited Twitter after it was, of course, those of us who have not talked to Sam don't know exactly why he exited.
It is clear that it was his decision to do it.
He was not thrown off of Twitter.
But he left after a brief back and forth over the question of Musk, Elon Musk, returning Trump's account to functionality on Twitter.
Now, as far as I know, Trump has not Tweeted, but his account is restored.
And Sam's point, which is consistent with things Sam has been saying for many years, was that Trump is such a grave threat to democracy and civilization that Musk should not allow him back on.
And this is obviously in conflict with Musk's stated objective to make a public square in which a wide variety of viewpoints are allowed.
So that's the long and short of it.
After Sam left Twitter, shortly after, Claire also inactivated her account.
And these are just, they're not, these accounts appear to be deleted.
And my understanding is That their owners have something like 30 days to reactivate them and they would come back as normal accounts having lost no functionality or followers or anything.
But if they don't reactivate in 30 days, they will be permanently invalid.
There are a few Washington Post articles on the changes afoot at Twitter that I want to insert in here at some point, and I don't know if this is the moment.
I think it's not.
Let me say the upfront part, and then we can come to what the Washington Post has... But I also have some things about your two types of people in the world, so I don't want to get either of those branches lost here.
Yep.
Fair enough.
The first thing I want to say is I don't think the exit of these people from Twitter is a good thing.
As much as I'm not happy with the way either of them has behaved towards us over the course of COVID especially, I think it is a loss to have These voices not present in what is either going to be or not going to be a new public square.
In other words, by what reads like taking their ball and going home, they are robbing Twitter of the potential to be a place where we restore the capacity that was once Explicitly defended by Sam, and certainly at least implicitly defended by Claire, which is to say a place where we hash out disagreements honorably, you know, without it being personal.
Twitter could become that potentially, but if certain voices decide they won't be there because their opinions being expressed there that they find are beyond the pale, then it can't be that.
And so I would say That I certainly hope that with the clock ticking on those accounts expiring, both of them will reconsider and I would ask people to be kind to them if they do come back and realize that we all have an interest in a public square that works and we do not want to get in the habit of driving people from it.
Alright, do you want to say what you wanted to bring to the conversation about the Washington Post?
It feels like a much less obvious place now, but I guess I can.
Okay.
It's your call.
I mean, we can... I'd like some water first, though.
I know.
Thank you.
Okay.
This is gonna feel like a non sequitur.
Taylor Lorenz, who is her own cultural phenomenon, wrote in the Washington Post a few days ago... Now my computer won't open it... So now of course I'm having a technical problem.
Was this her piece about online safety experts?
So you can show my screen now, Zach.
It's called Opening the Gates of Hell, Musk Says He Will Revive Banned Accounts.
The Twitter Chief Says He Will Reinstate Accounts Suspended for Threats, Harassment, and Misinformation Beginning Next Week.
And I just, there are a few things to share from here.
Here's one.
Quote.
Apple and Google need to seriously, this is a quote from the piece, but it's also a quote from someone named Alejandra Caraballo.
Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the App Store, said Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law's Cyber Law Clinic.
What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities.
It's like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause.
People who engage in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence.
I can't even begin to state how dangerous this will be.
So that entire paragraph basically is a quote from this person, Alejandra Caraballo, who, well, must be important.
This person is at Harvard Law.
Except they're not at Harvard Law.
They're at Harvard Law's Cyber Law Clinic, and Alejandra Caraballo is a trans person who is one of the most bullying and horrifying people on Twitter.
And when I went to remind myself of that fact, I found that Alejandra has blocked me.
So you can always see what people tweet by not going in as yourself.
And so it's possible to see that this Caraballo character is indeed full of censorious rage and a lack of recognition of reality.
And there's a bunch of claims here by someone who is simply at an institute called the Cyber Law Clinic that exists somehow within the affiliation of Harvard Law, who, pull quote, was then turned into a headline for Washington Post.
Okay, so that gives you a sense of what Washington Post is promulgating on the world as the effect of Elon Musk's attempt to restore a lack of censorship to Twitter.
Scroll down a little bit more in this piece and you get, experts say that bots and bad actors can easily skew the results of a Twitter poll and so basing decisions on one is irresponsible.
Quote, a Twitter poll can be manipulated.
There's nothing scientific or rigorous in any way about what he's doing.
It's true, said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director for UCLA's Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, who previously worked at Twitter researching content moderation processes.
So the two main people who are being cited in this article appear to have affiliations with elite institutions.
It's Harvard and UCLA.
And we don't have Fairfax on screen for those only watching.
You could show the full screen now so that people can enjoy the full Fairfax-ness of it all.
Our epic tabby.
Oh no!
And he's gone!
Sarah T. Roberts, the associate professor at UCLA, which is more of an affiliation than a clinical instructor or whatever Caravaggio is at the Cyber Law Institute at Harvard.
But the way that Taylor Lorenz has written this, it would appear that Sarah Roberts is an associate professor of, oh I don't know, a real field.
And no, it doesn't take much to discover that actually what Sarah Roberts is an associate professor of at UCLA is in fact Gender Studies, which you might have predicted if you had looked at anything that she has done, either in her former role researching content moderation processes at Twitter, or Now as an associate professor of gender studies at UCLA.
So just one more thing about actually one more thing about this and then one other one other article from Washington Post this week Glenn Greenwald nailed this with his assessment and Sorry so much got Closed down.
I will show here in a moment Zach He's just a screenshot shot Screenshot from Greenwald, breaking!
Allowing those disliked by liberals to be heard on the internet will literally kill many people!
Screaming face emoji.
Warn the most neurotic, mentally unwell, petulant, petty tyrants who have declared themselves online safety experts and are now called that by liberal media outlets.
He follows up: Taylor Lorenz miraculously found three or four people more neurotic, clearly unstable and censorship happy than she, bestowed them with fake expertise titles and now the Washington Post is blasting out her alarmist, asylum-worthy babbling to millions #journalism.
I don't know if Greenwald is always that snarky, but that struck me as just perfect in terms of describing what actually this is.
This is one person who's got a sphere of equally nutso people who don't know reality when it is right in front of them, and Lorenz is citing her little band of ridiculous friends, and the Washington Post is putting it across their their headlines.
Yeah, I don't know that I would call Greenwald snarky.
He's very, very sharp.
I mean, this felt snarky.
It's a little snarky, but I think like many of us, he has found that no institution is capable of functioning, and so he is now Out here in the Wild West being a journalist and then also being forced to comment on the environment.
Instead of just doing journalism, he's now forced to comment on the environment.
And what he's pointing to, for anybody who missed it, is the idea that there is an ideology that absolutely depends on a set of rules that applies to others and not to them.
That is the only way that this ideology makes its way in the world.
The point is all of the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching and fainting couch-reaching that is going on is people who have gotten used to having the walls have ears and a bias in favor of their perspective are now not so interested in living in a world where anything can be said and the platform cannot be brought down on people's heads for, you know, saying that there's evidence that ivermectin works or
That, you know, it's a mistake for us to encourage or allow children to be surgically altered because they utter something that someone takes as an indication that they will be trans or something like this.
You need a biased environment.
But I would also just point out, for those who are not paying close attention to what the Washington Post is, The Washington Post is a once great newspaper that is now owned by Jeff Bezos, a direct competitor of Elon Musk, I would assume in many realms, but in one very clearly.
He is also running a private space program.
This is somebody who has a personal axe to grind, potentially.
And has major contracts with the CIA.
So there's a question about what the Washington Post is and why it takes such an odd perspective and why it is broadcasting the opinions of people who clearly don't have a position from which to say something meaningful and authoritative but are being used as pseudo authorities to, you know, give the thinnest veneer of legitimacy to these absurd opinions.
Yes.
And so, anyway, that's the environment we're living in.
No newspaper works, no platform works, no university works, no science journal works, and one individual may, and I don't say this with certainty because I don't know, but one individual may be in the process of attempting to create a single place that functions in order to allow a balanced discussion of things about which we naturally disagree.
One more piece from the Washington Post with that frankly necessary background as to what it now is.
With a change of ownership, it doesn't come with a change in the banner, right?
It still claims that the central message of its being is democracy dies in darkness, I believe.
I haven't actually looked at the masthead, a physical masthead of the Washington Post recently.
Is this an observation or is that a threat?
Yeah, so that November 24th piece by Lorenz that I just quoted some of the supposed experts that she's got bolstering, you know, not bolstering, creating her entire argument in that piece, also cites an earlier Washington Post piece, earlier only by two days, which is this one, which you can show my screen.
I will also point out that for those of you who've been watching, I didn't point out with the previous one, but they're both, both of these pieces are filed under technology.
And you've got one of those experts, the gender studies person at UCLA, running some sort of a, you know, internet information thing, where, you know, these aren't people, I think, who actually understand anything about technology.
This is the societal implications of choices that people who are running tech companies are making, which is actually totally different from technology, and it's actually the same error that is being made with regard to science.
Right?
You know, the stuff that's being published in Nature and Science is actually, well, we really feel strongly about the societal implication of this thing that might originally have been found out by science, so we're going to claim that the thing, that our feelings about it, wrong though they may be, are the science.
And here, too, we have, you know, this claiming to be science.
This is the Washington Post, November 22nd.
Musk's free speech agenda Dismantle safety work at Twitter, insiders say.
Wait, wait, wait.
First of all, there's the beautiful insiders say, right?
Which is like fact checkers say, or scientists say, or any one of these garbage claims.
But the other thing is the phrase dismantles safety work.
We could spend hours on just this article.
Just the very first anecdote that they provide to make it clear to the readers that this is really happening.
Musk's free speech agenda is dismantling safety work at Twitter.
So say the insiders and they would know.
Here we go.
Hours after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in late October, the trust and safety team responsible for combating hate speech on the site received an urgent directive.
Bring back the Babylon Bee.
To some Twitter employees, the order was troubling.
The self-described Christian satirical site had been banned since March for refusing to delete a tweet naming Biden health official Rachel Levine its quote, man of the year.
Levine is a transgender woman and, this is not what the Washington Post say, but therefore a man.
And the tweet violated a 2018 rule prohibiting Twitter users from targeting transgender people by referring to them by the name or gender they used before transitioning.
Used before transitioning.
Assigned at birth.
Right.
Wrong, Washington Post, again.
Well, and I would point out that this has created, if you think, and I do think that there is an argument that it is not decent in the case of somebody who is actually experiencing gender dysphoria and makes the decision to transition, the kind thing to do is to Treat them as the gender they aspire to be.
However, this loophole... You can still point out reality, and frankly, you can still even make fun of them, because we're all allowed to make fun of people.
Right.
Well, that's just the question.
And especially, these papers have no standing.
The idea that we are to pretend that Chelsea Manning gave documents to WikiLeaks is in violation with the facts of history.
Right?
Not if you believe that there is a gender essence that was inside.
Jason, was it?
No, no, it was Bradley.
Bradley, yes.
But no, my point is, look, it's a goddamn newspaper.
It has an obligation to say, look, there's nothing at odds with the idea of transitioning to say Bradley Manning conveyed documents to WikiLeaks and later transitioned and now is known as Chelsea.
is known as, right?
Like, I actually feel like this is kind of missing the point here.
The Babylon Bee, which is hilarious if you don't know it, like, you know, look it up, and yes, it is back on Twitter now, and good for it, made Rachel Levine, I did not find a picture of Rachel Levine here for you guys, but made Rachel Levine Man of the Year, which is, you know, Wrong.
But not because it's calling Rachel Levine a man.
Because Rachel Levine is a man.
And Rachel Levine has actually helped destroy a lot of lives through the trans nonsense and also now the COVID nonsense.
Levine was like the head health official in Pennsylvania, I think, before being upranked by the Biden administration to something something and now gets to wear military regalia somehow.
But look, I don't want to pretend that we know the answer to exactly how moderation should be done and what questions should be moderated and what questions.
It's not a simple issue because there are things that we don't want on these platforms.
Rachel Levine is a public figure.
Rachel Levine has a family that she had as a man and she is now in this role Rachel Leibman is the father of children.
That is right.
And the fact that that is a difficult sentence to say, and have it be understood, is evidence of where we are.
It's not the responsibility of the Babylon Bee not to notice this, and it's not the responsibility of Twitter to police it.
Right?
The point is, this is a perfectly legitimate thing to observe, is interesting, ironic, funny, bizarre, it is all of those things.
And so anyway, Babylon B is back, and you know, again, the hand-wringing, the pearl-clutching, the feigning couch-reaching, all of the stuff that is occurring as a result of it, But like, Babylon Bee, having had its account taken down in March, so over half a year ago, for tweeting that Rachel Levine wins their Man of the Year award.
Like, that was the offense.
They were in Twitter jail for over half a year for that.
And that thing is the lead anecdote in the Washington Post evidence that, my computer has of course gone back to sleep so I can't see it, in their Headlined article, Musk's Free Speech Agenda Dismantles Safety Work at Twitter, Insiders Say.
Right.
Because allowing people to see that a satirical site thinks that Rachel Levine should get Man of the Year is dismantling safety work.
Right.
Just the whole idea of invoking safety.
Yeah.
And I would point out a case that we keep referring to, but I still think, you know, the Babylon Bee is back.
The Dr. Rollergator account is not.
The Dr. Roller Gator account was suspended in February for obviously satirically suggesting, I believe, that Jordan Peterson and Justin Trudeau availed themselves of white gloves with which to challenge each other by slapping each other across that Jordan Peterson and Justin Trudeau availed themselves of white gloves with which to challenge each other by slapping
And so what you can see in this is that the system has been turned into a partisan with rules that equate satire with violence, and then those rules are used to exclude people and then those rules are used to exclude people from conversation, which then destroys our ability to understand even what those in our community even think, because the conversation is now biased by a set of rules used to drive certain voices
Because the conversation is now biased by a set of rules used to drive certain voices out by claiming that they were engaged in violence that they clearly weren't.
And so anyway, the idea that there is anything noteworthy about somebody unhooking those unfair rules and having no built-in bias of the structure towards one perspective or another, the idea that
The idea that that is in and of itself alarming enough to drive people off of Twitter or to drive the Washington Post to report multiply on the hellscape that is apparently being opened up by free speech, a value on which almost all of us used to agree, right?
It's quite something.
Alright, are you where you wanted to go with the Washington Post?
Sure.
Okay, so my main purpose today was to point out a dichotomy that I think underlies much of what we are now seeing.
Including the loss of people like Sam and Claire from this discussion.
What I think they would say about why they've left is that they've been hounded by people and if you look on Twitter you will see that the conventional wisdom about what is true with respect to things on which they've both taken very strong positions has shifted radically.
And so what I wanted to talk about is Now that we are almost three years into the COVID phase of history, I want to talk about what happened with respect to people's intellectual standing and people's intellectual performance.
That there's an interesting pattern that I think comes down to a single dichotomy about which we can say a lot of nuanced things, but a single dichotomy that separates those who ended up severely damaging their reputations and those who in the end turned out to be right in spite of what may have been said about them before.
Now obviously I believe you and I are in that latter category where It is increasingly clear that our concerns about the vaccines were, if anything, overcautious, that our skepticism of their utility was well placed, that our belief that there are alternatives that might well have been applied that weren't being used because they weren't profitable seems to be accurate, and our argument that
This does not appear to be a natural pandemic, but in fact downstream of a lab leak that is in fact linked to some of the same people who have given us such bad policy with respect to treating and controlling the disease, that that also turns out to be well supported by the evidence.
So how the heck did we do it, right?
And why did so many others fail too, including Sam and Claire?
And the point I want to make is that I think there are really two approaches to clear thinking.
And it comes down to... That's really cute.
Does one attempt, as is now taught in graduate school in effectively every field as far as I can tell, does one attempt to figure out which model is best and then become expert in applying it?
Or does one deploy a model and compare its results to the emerging evidence and adjust the model accordingly and move in the direction of better and better models, right?
And my claim is going to be that our entire expert class was doing the former thing.
It was practiced at a game in which it would identify a model that was claimed to be the best.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but such a model.
And then it applied that model.
It applied it with great nuance sometimes, but it applied that model and it doubled down on it.
And at the point that model turns out to be false, they go down with the ship.
And that happened in the space of a very short time span with respect to COVID.
And often shouting about how the ship can't possibly be going down, because they were promised, they were assured, they looked into it themselves, the model is right.
The model must be right.
And that is the curious thing about this, is if you check in with these people, You do not get what I would ordinarily expect of intellectuals, which is at least grudging acknowledgement that they had taken a position that turned out not to be right.
And maybe I would expect amongst the lower quality ones excuse-making about how they got suckered by some piece of evidence that mesmerized them when they should have been looking at something else.
But instead what you find is a kind of insistence that no in fact they were right and They still are.
And so that is going to be the red flag.
If your position on COVID hasn't changed radically, then your position isn't your position.
It's something else, right?
It's you deploying a position held by something else.
And so anyway, what I'm going to argue... Yeah, go ahead.
There's... I just want to add in other ways of saying what you're saying whenever it occurs to me.
In science.
In the kinds of science that we were trained in and engaged in in many rooms under many circumstances and in many forests under many circumstances.
We were assured that you don't prove a hypothesis correct, that this was the falsificationist kind of science, of Popperian thinking, in which you can work very, very hard to try to falsify an idea, a hypothesis.
And if you fail to do that, if you fail to falsify a cherished or not cherished hypothesis after a lot of hard work, you have greater and greater confidence that it is true, but you don't ever completely know that it is true.
And so one of the things that I hear you saying here is, and we talked a couple weeks ago, and I wrote actually a couple weeks ago in Natural Selections, about the nature of certainty.
That, you know, are you comfortable with an idea?
Oh, other people who I am supposed to trust or I do trust say that thing is correct, therefore that's it.
One hypothesis, one thing, that's it, we're done.
Every decision I make is based, the decision tree may go on, there may be forks in the future, but that is unchanging.
As opposed to, there's a question, there's an observation, there's a set of things going on.
What could explain them?
I've got Hypothesis 1, which partially explains this, but doesn't explain that.
I've got Hypothesis 2, which is counter to that because it explains things differently and they predict different things.
I've got Hypothesis 3, and you know, especially with something as complex as COVID, the landscape of the last three years, you don't just have one set of mutually exclusive hypotheses.
There's the question of lab leak, there's the question of Vaccine safety, the question of vaccine efficacy, of off-label treatments of all of the various sorts that we have, and whether or not they're safe, whether or not effective, as prophylaxis, as treatment.
So, you know, lots and lots of different questions, but for all of them, are you keeping multiple possibilities alive in your mind at once, or have you concluded, you know what, this is it?
Nope.
I will not ever, ever conclude that if it's called a vaccine it could possibly be anything but safe and effective for instance.
I think that's very well said and I would just add to it that one thing that is true is That corrupt science will inherently be verificationist.
That falsificationism is incompatible.
It's almost impossible to do it well.
You might pretend to be a falsificationist, but if you look under the hood you will find verificationism where science has been corrupted.
But let me just describe the two models and You will see, I think, why one of them failed so badly with COVID.
It always fails, but it failed so badly with COVID.
Great.
The two models are you pick your model of the universe or a particular subset of the universe, some discipline.
How does X thing work?
And you apply it as an expert, but you don't question it, right?
And the other is you start somewhere.
And you start working towards a better and better model by adjusting, right?
Now my claim is going to be, I don't actually care where you start.
It is better to start closer to the target, but any process in which you actually adjust with response to evidence will eventually take you where you are going, and it will very rapidly surpass the static application of anything but an already excellent model.
Someone employing a self-correcting process who is farther from the truth is someone you would prefer to follow in their thinking, in their conclusions, than someone who is currently closer to the truth of that matter but is employing a static model.
Right.
Now, there is a degree of difference in that if you have a very mature understanding of some set of facts, then the model that somebody adopts wholesale may be pretty good to start with, and so their failure to adjust may not be a big handicap, right?
But what did we get with COVID?
We got a situation where nobody knew anything.
Right?
There were no good models.
So the fact that X person's model was three times as good as Y person's model had almost nothing to say about whether it ended up better.
The question was, are you adjusting your model and improving it?
Or are you keeping your model static and just applying it?
And so what I'm going to claim is that all of the people who failed so spectacularly have not substantially changed their opinions.
Now there will be little cases pointed out where people made little adjustments.
By and large the people who say that the vaccines are safe and effective have not changed their tune.
They in fact started with that as an assumption and they now report it as a conclusion and that this is actually evident You know, it just so happens that I tangled with both Claire and Sam over this issue before there was COVID.
I tangled with them about the question of whether or not vaccines are inherently safe.
And my point is, I'm still a big believer in this technology.
I still think it's one of the most marvelous success stories of medicine.
Traditional vaccine technology.
Vaccine technology in principle.
However, if vaccines are safe, It is because of a system that prunes the dangerous ones before they get to the public.
And we know of multiple failures where vaccines that were not safe got to the public.
And we know of many other failures where vaccines didn't get to the public but failed in the testing phase.
And what that tells you, if vaccines are sometimes not safe, which we discover in testing, and sometimes not safe, which we discover after they've been released to the public, There's nothing inherently safe about this technology, right?
So, if vaccines are safe, it can only be because of an excellent system that spots the ones that aren't and keeps them away from you.
I know we don't have an excellent system, therefore not safe, right?
I'm not saying any individual vaccine is harmful, but I'm saying the idea that they are inherently safe is dead on arrival.
And so if you adopted that, especially if you had it prior to COVID and then something was pointed at you and they said, here is a vaccine, safe and effective.
And you, of course it's safe and effective.
They all are.
No, that's wrong.
You've already demonstrated that applying your model is going to leave you in the gutter, right?
And it also, you were still going.
No, no, go ahead.
It also betrays, I think, the hesitation that we saw early in COVID.
If you can remember, remember the spring of 2020.
And what we were seeing, you know, at that point we were just beginning our live streams and it was There was a lot of terror, there was confusion, all of this, but overwhelmingly, one of my senses was exhilaration with regard to the scientific literature.
Because the scientific literature was open.
There were so many people at that point who As far as I know, almost no one in the very early days was being shut down yet.
Very quickly that started to happen.
But the pre-print servers were just full of papers.
And there was so much going on, there was so much research being done, that the voices of authority that decide for you which ones are good and which ones aren't, weren't doing the work.
Right?
These hadn't even made it to journals yet, so the peer review process, which is ridiculously broken, wasn't in the way.
The editors weren't in the way.
The journalists weren't in the way.
What you had, if you had the wherewithal and the interest, as we did, to actually wade into the scientific literature as it was being generated day by day in the spring of 2020, it's like, "Oh my god, there's so much here." And yeah, we can't possibly assess all of it, but how much preferable it is?
For us, and it should be for anyone, as time-consuming as it is, to go to the source and say, does this make sense?
Is this research good?
As opposed to, well, I don't have time for that.
I'm going to trust this guy, who no one had ever heard of before, who happens to run an organization that's under the NIH, who says, nope, not that, this, that, and oh, in Fauci we trust.
Like, that quickly became the thing that people did because they were scared, they were confused, they didn't know, they wanted someone.
To look at.
And that guy had a conclusion.
A few conclusions that we now can be pretty sure almost all of them were not helpful for humanity.
And what we were doing, and what many people were doing, but mostly not people who were on your screens, were saying, we don't know.
We think this.
Let's see.
Let's see what is being learned.
And that ability to actually look at the scientific literature quickly got polluted, of course.
Well, it did get polluted.
It got captured because, frankly, people were paying attention to what we and others were making of this emerging literature and it got in the way of whatever.
I still don't have any idea what the actual plan of those who enforced their narrative on us was, but the point is, whatever that force was that was enforcing its narrative, whatever its motivation was, it very quickly figured out that it couldn't very well have us discussing the, you know, pre-peer-reviewed literature with the public.
Oh my goodness, right?
That's too dangerous.
But I wanted to point out, though, I was thinking about The places that I personally have adjusted my understanding, in some cases radically, in some cases it has actually flipped, it's reversed.
And it's a never-ending stream.
I spent a couple minutes just thinking this morning about places where I had changed what I understood.
And in fact I realized that One of our first forays into this, I made a substantial error with respect to my understanding of the science.
The actual science, which was I believed that because we were dealing with an RNA virus that it transcribed itself into DNA, it reverse transcribed itself and installed itself in the genome, which turns out is not true for coronaviruses.
So just to use one of the pieces of jargon that many people will be familiar with, you thought and you said on stream, as I remember it, that because it was an RNA virus, it was a retrovirus.
Yeah, and not true, not how they work, so okay, embarrassing error for me right away, but immediately figured it out and corrected it, right?
Exactly.
All right.
I don't know how long I could go listing all of the places where I changed my understanding.
Many of them, maybe all of them, I think you share, but nonetheless I realized my position on the functionality of hydroxychloroquine Completely inverted.
Which we never talked about on air because it just didn't even hit radar, really.
This was actually my biggest embarrassment.
I do not have a good explanation for how I missed the fact that I was being misled by propaganda on this very useful drug until embarrassingly late.
That one was remarkably, that one got us both in a way that most of the, you know, things like two weeks to flatten the curve, like a lot of things that a lot of people accepted, like we never believed, but somehow the, it's a Trump delusion, and it's hydroxychloroquine, and there was a flood of information in all this, but yeah, I bought that.
Yep.
I bought it for a long time.
Yep, too long.
Yeah, and it's not true.
All right.
Ivermectin effectiveness.
Now mind you, effectiveness on two different fronts, both as a treatment for COVID and as a prophylactic.
My position on this has changed.
It has changed slightly because one paper that appeared to demonstrate extreme effectiveness did not turn out to be what it appeared to be on first pass.
I still think the experiment took place.
It gave a compelling result, but because the methods section It did not provide enough information, and the data set, when I requested it, was not forthcoming.
This is the one out of Argentina?
Yeah.
It's the Carvalho study.
The experiment is not reproducible, and so I said, you have to take this piece of evidence and give it zero evidentiary weight, because it is essential for science to be repeatable.
Now, I would make that criticism of many experiments on the other side now, too.
But didn't the LARRI meta-analysis remove it and get very much the same results?
That was a different study.
Oh, they removed a different paper, okay.
Yeah, so because it was not a randomized controlled trial, it wasn't in there in the first place.
It's a different study.
But yes, and you know, I had tests on because I wanted people to understand that the fact that you've got a study that turns out to be fraudulent does not invalidate a meta-analysis that included it.
In fact, this is one of the strengths of meta-analysis is that you can simply say, what happens if we exclude this study?
What does it do to the result?
And the answer was it didn't change it very much.
But my position on ivermectin effectiveness has largely changed because ivermectin effectiveness has largely changed.
Because the virus changed.
Because the virus is mutating, as viruses will do, especially with a strong selective force.
Well, strong selective force.
Now this one perplexed me.
At first I thought, is it reduced in effectiveness with respect to the later variants because resistance has evolved?
Which I initially said I didn't think was going to happen.
And apparently that is not what's going on.
I feel like what little I understand about ivermectin mechanism of action, it wouldn't be resistance.
Resistance is unlikely because there are multiple mechanisms of action.
And so the point is progress against one doesn't substantially alter the fate of the virus in its context.
And it's such a broad spectrum anti-parasitic.
Right.
So what apparently my understanding, I think largely from Gerrit van den Bosch, is that what happened is the virus adopted a different strategy in which it produced many, many more copies.
And so you had to drive the ...effective dose of ivermectin way up, which then creates side effects, which are not terrible side effects, but nonetheless, you don't want to be using this as a prophylactic at a dose that it's causing like visual side effects and things like that.
And it's not like you don't become a quadruped and start asking for a saddle.
No, that never happened.
That was the FDA spreading misinformation.
Incidentally, asterisk for later, I know we're on a roll here, but the FDA's lawyers made some interesting claims in court recently about what they did and did not say about ivermectin.
Yes, apparently them telling us that... It was just a recommendation.
Yes, just a recommendation.
But anyway, okay, so my position on ivermectin effectiveness has changed a little bit because my understanding of the evidence changed, but also because ivermectin effectiveness changed.
And the point is, a model that is updating with evidence then takes on the clinical change in the effectiveness of this drug and incorporates it.
A model that is static, that stuff doesn't work at all, remains static.
The virus is evolving, right?
So even a conclusion that is 100% right at time A, at time B may not be, precisely because the object in question that you were talking about, efficacy against or for whatever, has changed and therefore so should the interaction with it.
Right.
So should you expect the interaction with it to change.
So the point is, a dynamic model One, it gets better with respect to a static set of facts, and two, it's the only game in town with respect to a changing set of facts.
Right.
And I don't mean changing as in we know the facts to be different, but changing because something is rapidly evolving, for example, and therefore changing the utility.
Yeah.
The next one on my list is mask effectiveness.
We were famously early, or I was particularly aggressive on the potential utility of masks, and especially the mask that I was suggesting people use, which was practical because it wasn't such an impediment to life, turned out to be essentially useless.
Cloth mask, N95 is better, still not effective, but you know, may have some impact.
Vaccine effectiveness.
I was quite convinced by the initial propaganda, it now seems, that came out of the trials that were used to sell the vaccines to us, that the vaccines were likely to be important in the control of the disease.
We now know that they do not have even the most basic characteristics that would be necessary for them to be useful in this regard.
But I was initially taken in by the propaganda.
My position has changed.
Vaccine safety, I was always alarmed that these things couldn't possibly be safe in the way they were saying because safety doesn't mean harmless.
Safety means riskless.
And there was an obvious long list of potential risks that couldn't be eliminated at the point these things emerged.
And still can't be.
Still can't be, but the point is, I was actually too cautious.
Turns out, you know, I was worried That 20 years down the road we were going to discover a longevity difference between people who had taken these things or some slow pattern of tumors or autoimmunity would emerge.
Wow did that safety signal show up fast!
So, anyway, my position has moved in the direction of, wow, these things, not only are they unsafe by virtue of being risky, but they appear to be doing a huge amount of harm.
At the same time, they're not very effective at doing the one thing that was of primary interest, which was controlling the spread of the virus.
COVID origin?
I initially had a chart that, go ahead.
I'm just, I'm reminded with that last one.
So, so far, you know, I think we, so far basically we had the same, same positioning on, on almost all of these things.
The thing that was used to dismiss those of us who were concerned about COVID vaccine safety and efficacy early on, was that we were inherently the same people who minimized the risks of COVID itself.
And actually, so our friend Holly has written a piece called, it's such a brilliant title.
The End of Faith in Sam Harris.
And she actually, she does write by us and discusses his claim that we're those people and says, I know they're not.
You can just look at Dark Horse and see how seriously they were taking COVID, but also I, Holly, know they're not because I had COVID twice and here's how they behaved towards me.
So, uh, the thing that I guess I want to add, then, to your messaging here is, um, the ways that people are dismissed gets lumped into, like, you know, oh, if you're A, then you're A plus B. It's like, but I'm not.
And the fact that you can't see that it's possible to be A not B suggests, again, that you've been handed a bill of goods, that you've adopted a model that you didn't think through, that you just accepted it, right?
That the only way To have concern about the safety of the brand new to human experience COVID vaccines was to also be a COVID minimizer is an absurd position.
And the fact is actually that I think another place that I at least I have changed my positioning over time in the almost three years is at first like, oh god, you know, what is this?
No, it's not the flu.
It's different.
It seems to be worse.
Not clear.
No, it's definitely not a cold.
But the fact again is that not only do we have more information now, but we also have a change in the disease itself.
Long COVID is real and dangerous, and unfortunately at this point it's also true that because both SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA vaccines are using the spike protein as the thing that, well, SARS-CoV-2 isn't using the spike protein, but that is present in both of them, and because that is the source of so much of the cytotoxicity, it's hard in many cases to tell the difference between, you know, oh, do you have long COVID, or are you vaccine injured, right?
It is at least potentially hard to tell, right?
It's a confound.
It's potentially hard to tell, but it does seem that if you don't
For whatever reason, your genetics, your lack of comorbidities, your ability to treat early with all the things that we know you can treat early with, have a mild case of COVID and don't have lingering effects, it doesn't have to be a big deal, except that we still don't know what the long-term effects, very long-term effects, might be.
Yep.
I would say that there's a big lurking question to the extent that people are trying to apply what we're talking about, you know, okay, how am I not going to be on the wrong side of this?
How am I going to build an active model that gets better over time, especially if you're not somebody trained in a relevant field?
Well, part of the trick is figuring out how to proxy Trust and revoke it if somebody doesn't do this job very well.
But I would say one question that remains very active in my mind is, what are the chances that if we hadn't deployed the vaccines, we'd be done?
That this would legitimately have burned itself out.
And while that will sound fanciful, you're saying it would not have become endemic?
I am saying that because, let me point something out, Wuhan-1, it's gone.
It's extinct.
And so the question is, did herd immunity drive Wuhan-1 to extinction?
I've never heard that term before.
I can extrapolate what you mean.
Wuhan-1, you're basically the... it's not wild-type, but like, you know, if SARS-CoV-2 hadn't been frank-engineered in a lab, it would be the wild-type, the original virus that we were all dealing with in spring 2020.
Right.
So that thing is, and you know I will say that there is a complex set of questions around viral swarms, which I think are not well dealt with and need to be understood.
But one very live possibility, according to my model, and Who knows?
Next week I may understand why my model is wrong, and therefore this line of inquiry doesn't make sense.
But one very live possibility is that if we had done nothing that drove the evolution of these viruses, that we would be done by virtue of herd immunity, which would have been painfully acquired with many, many deaths, but nonetheless we'd be finished.
Finished with the virus, not finished as humanity.
Right, finished with the virus.
COVID would have burned itself out, right?
We'll never know.
I don't know that we'll never know.
I think we will never know for sure.
I think the point is this is a tractable question, this is a studyable question.
And what we have done by deploying a cartoonishly narrow vaccine is we have amplified the evolutionary signal.
We have asked evolution to play a game that it is master of, right?
Not only can you adapt, but can you adapt to something stupidly narrow?
Of course you can, right?
Easily.
And again and again.
So in any case, this is a place where, and I'm going to argue that the right way to think about these complex problems is to get over your instinct to leap to a conclusion, to leap to a conclusion of any kind, really.
The point is, you should maintain these things probabilistically.
Tough for people.
So tough for people.
Because people want certainty.
This I know.
Well, so... That is true.
It is true.
That's what people want.
But, you know, I used to play this game with our kids, where if they said something with certainty, I used to say, what do you think the probability is that that's not true?
And, of course... Or, how certain are you?
For very young children, the answer is... 100%!
100%!
Of course.
And the answer is, no, you just screwed up.
You just told me something wrong.
The probability should not be zero.
It might be a tiny fraction of 1%.
A tiny fraction.
Very young children you expect that answer.
Of course, but the point is you've got to break that habit.
And what we have is an adult expert class that we are now detecting Never got that lesson, right?
And so what this does is it creates a very bad mechanism for thinking that is cryptic in any place where your intellectual ancestors have done a decent job, right?
So the point is if you walk into physics, right, and you adopt the standard model, the standard model is pretty good.
It's pretty predictive and you can become expert at it, but you're not going to extend it if what you're doing is taking on that model And using it as a set of assumptions, which is fair, but if that's all you do, then the point is you can't detect where this thing doesn't work.
Right?
You're just going to keep applying it and you're going to rationalize it.
If you really don't know anything about the philosophy of science, or the history of science, preferably, mostly the philosophy.
If you have to choose one, it's the philosophy of science.
You probably can't do science well, because you don't have the model for what it looks like when there is uncertainty.
I agree with that, and I also think it's a little tough to say for sure, but one thing that is true, you mentioned Holly's excellent essay on Sam, and one of the things that she says in that essay is that Sam was an intellectual hero to her, and that twice Sam had delivered something into the world that had revolutionized her world for the better, right?
One of these things was the questioning of faith, and the other was his treatment of lying.
And her point was now, she is forced to part ways with her intellectual hero because her intellectual hero is doing things that not only are unacceptable, but don't fit with his own stated beliefs on these things before, without acknowledging that he's changed.
But here's the funny thing about that.
He's not the only close friend of ours who's said this.
This is a common phenomenon.
Wait, he's not the only close friend of ours who said what?
She.
Holly is not the only close friend of ours.
If I said he, that was because the other friend I'm thinking of is a he.
But I think this is a relatively common position, where people who got something from Sam, because he was good at this in some regard, are now stuck in the position of having to try to, A, grapple with, well, what was the stuff that I believed that was important before?
If he's now speaking in direct violation of it, if he's effectively OK with a conspiracy against Trump in the 2020 election, Yeah, then he's obviously not against lying So what was his whole treatment of lying?
Yeah, right.
So what was that?
But anyway, what I'm gonna argue is if you are one of these people who Whether you always did or something about recent history has caused you to embrace a I'm gonna find the best model and I'm gonna stick with it no matter what right if you do that then a couple things are true and
One, you, A, we can spot that you're doing it because if you think about how such a person would change their mind, right, you would have basically a threshold question.
Have you reached the point where the thing that you thought was Less than 50% likely is now more than 50% likely, at which point you would have to acknowledge a change.
Until then, there's no nuance.
As long as you think it's less likely to be true than the competitor, we don't see your changing understanding of anything, right?
The only thing you're reporting is a binary.
Is a binary, exactly.
Then the point is two things.
One, there's this totally arbitrary threshold at 50% where your opinion appears to suddenly snap into the other confirmation.
That's not how thinking works, right?
Two, you're much more easily gamed.
Right?
Because the thing is, how do you keep somebody who is using this cruddy mechanism for thinking on your team?
All you got to do is feed them enough garbage to keep them from hitting the threshold.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
They can have their own private doubts.
But the point is, you just feed them enough bullshit that they don't hit 50% and flip.
Yeah.
Right?
I think we're seeing a lot of that.
I mean, for one thing, we know that Sam proxied part of his understanding to Eric Topol.
Eric Topol is Christian Anderson's boss, so he has a perverse incentive that goes back to LabLeak.
This isn't somebody you should proxy to.
Likewise, Anthony Fauci.
Anthony Fauci is the person who offshored the work to Wuhan to get around the ban on gain-of-function Right, but why does he show up here?
You're talking about him proxying or him being a proxy for someone?
Being a proxy.
For a lot of people.
Yeah, so you have COVID descends.
Nobody knows anything about it.
What are you going to do?
Well, I'm going to listen to the people who know the most about it.
Well, who is that?
One of them is Anthony Fauci.
Oh, good choice.
You know why?
Because he stood there with his head in his hands while Trump was saying crazy things, right?
So Anthony Fauci becomes super reliable because he's the opposite of Trump, and of course that's a brilliant way to get Sam's attention, right?
So the point is, okay, I'm gonna proxy to that guy because he feels the same about Trump as I do, right?
Okay, well then Anthony Fauci now has a direct line into whoever is listening to Sam.
Right?
So, much better if we were able to tune into the, oh boy, I said these things were safe, but now I've seen a few things.
I still think they're probably safe, but wow, I'm not as convinced of that as I was because I've seen a few things that caused me to wonder, right?
That's the natural process.
Right.
But no public revelation.
Instead we get some garbage excuse like, well, I'm not going to get boosted because the CDC lies.
And?
Right.
But that's a non sequitur.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not an argument.
Right.
What it is is evidence of not thinking.
And my overarching point is we saw our entire expert class reveal that they were not thinking.
That they were doing something else, at least in this case.
And I would argue that probably that's because it's the habit of thinking that they got into.
And if what you did was looked at the competitors to this, And said, who are these people?
And what exactly do they think they know?
And the answer is, it doesn't really matter.
If they're using the equivalent of selection to build a model that works from any starting place, they will quickly outpace a group that has proxied in the early days of a chaotic situation where nobody knows anything.
So the best model they could possibly have embraced was bad.
Yep.
Right?
And the idea that anybody is sticking with their initial impression of Of vaccines, of repurposed drugs, of COVID origins, of any of these things, of the evolution of variants, of any of them.
Nobody could possibly be making headway with their initial model because it just simply wasn't enough to go on to build a decent model.
So the only people, the only game in town is people whose thinking evolves by a process that really is very parallel to natural selection.
I mean, that's really the core point, is what do you trust to build your model?
Do you trust picking the right one?
Well, that can work great if a bunch of really refined models exist and none of them are full of corrupt garbage.
But any other situation, no, I want something that irrespective of what model I've ended up in can morph into a model that works.
That's what I want.
And the problem is, I think, The propaganda engine was very good at portraying the process of evolution as evidence that it was not valid.
In other words, well, if this thing makes errors, right?
Ah, well, and that's classic media response, right?
Who was it who in part lost the presidential election because he was accused of being a flip-flopper?
Was that John Kerry?
That would be, I think that was John Kerry.
Yeah, so, whenever that was.
You know, the idea that you've changed your mind as a politician, that that's going to be the thing that means you can't hold office, like, I'm not saying that John Kerry would or would not have been an excellent president, but the idea that having changed your mind and being on record saying one thing and then later saying a different thing, well, that's just too far.
Like, that tells us, like, if people can be fooled by that, Then people can be fooled by anything.
If they really believe that changing your opinion as a politician should mean that you should not be in high office, well then we're done.
We're doomed, frankly.
Right, right.
It is a poison pill for anything that would function the right way.
So I wanted to close out this section with a couple of observations.
One, I wanted to point out, there's something that I, you've heard me say it many times, I think I've said it quite a number of times on Dark Horse, that if you say something that is wrong, right?
If you get something wrong, the process of admitting that you got it wrong is very painful for all of us.
But some of us are good at it.
Why are we good at it?
Because the pain that you experience in publicly having to reverse yourself is such a tiny fraction of the burden that comes to you if you refuse to correct it, that it's a bargain.
Expensive as it is, it's a bargain, right?
Now if you do it all the time, people will correctly infer that you're not doing thinking very well because you're constantly having to correct yourself.
But if you do your work well so that you don't have to correct yourself that often, And then you do correct yourself when you need to, that actually increases people's trust in you because they know why you're trustworthy.
Which is that you'll fix it if you got it wrong, and you'll alert them, right?
So, here's the crazy thing about that.
I don't know how many times I've said that, but I've given that riff many, many times in many contexts.
I also believe Sam has given that riff, almost exactly, right?
He has described this process, which means that at the very least his conscious mind is aware of this relationship.
Now, I think he's caught in a bind.
I think Sam has two ideological commitments in conflict.
He's a little bit like Hal in 2001 that has two conflicting programs.
You remember that?
Yes.
I just think that may be the first time that those two characters have been compared to one another.
But I think Sam has a belief in institutions.
Which I understand, because frankly we're really screwed if they don't work, but punchline, they don't work.
Not a one.
They're all busted.
We're more screwed if they don't work and most of us are pretending that they do.
Right.
That's the worst of both worlds.
So I think Sam has a desire to recognize what's wrong with the institutions, fix them, and get back to work.
And I think the point is it's way later than you think, Sam.
Those institutions are way more corrupted than you understand.
They're not coming back, right?
And you don't want any part of them because they will do to you what they just did to you with COVID, right?
They will mislead you and they will turn you into a fool, right?
That's not what you want to do.
So at the same time that he has a commitment to the idea that institutions are the way that we prevent oblivion, which I think is not wrong, right?
That we need institutions that work to prevent us from arranging oblivion for ourselves.
He's also committed to the idea that when you get stuff wrong you should correct it.
And that these two things are in competition and that his move this week to leave is about one of these things having one out over the other and it's the exact wrong one.
These institutions don't work.
They won't be rebooted and trying, you know, rationalizing that they're still close enough to functional that you can invest more in them and maybe, you know, put them right.
Is not a viable thing.
And I think, frankly, the alternative that the institutions are so far gone that you should do a proper accounting, correct your model, and apologize for what you got wrong, explain how it happened, and rejoin the conversation is the right thing to do.
And Sam is headed 180 degrees away from it.
Yeah.
He chose the wrong alternative at this moment.
Instead of absenting himself from this conversation, he should pay the price of getting back into reality space and he should move forward and he should contribute to the conversation as he did and, you know, affecting people the way he has affected good friends of ours by altering their understanding of the world.
That would be the right thing to do and I, you know, I hope that some time contemplating this off of Twitter causes him to realize that and You know, again, I hope people, if he does do the right thing here, people will be generous to him and they will, you know, not fail to notice how wrong he got things, but understand how it is that that happened.
I think that would be really important.
The last thing I wanted to do here is connect this To what we are seeing with Elon Musk, because I think if we take the model that you and I just talked about, where there are two kinds of thinking.
There's one kind of thinking that takes a model and applies it and becomes expert in how to apply it, but doesn't change it, doesn't question it.
And there's another model where you use evolution to get to reason.
I think it explains some of what we're seeing with Musk in a way that is at least worth contemplating.
So it goes kind of like this.
Musk buys Twitter.
There's some very interesting, I won't say cloak and dagger stuff exactly, but some four-dimensional chess in the purchasing of Twitter.
On again, off again, you know.
He buys it as a surprise, right?
And then he carries the sink in the front door and things go crazy.
Suddenly people are, you know, it's hemorrhaging employees except, wait a second, is it really hemorrhaging if those employees weren't doing anything?
Right?
Oh, Twitter's going to collapse.
Or they're doing the opposite of what they should have been doing.
Right, exactly.
So, okay, how much is...
Let me acknowledge something about my model.
versus how much does Musk understand exactly what this is, and he's getting rid of these people because he knows that he can't fix Twitter if they're still at their desks or at least able to log in or whatever it is that they were doing.
So anyway, let me acknowledge something about my model.
I don't know that Musk is for real.
I am behaving like Musk is for real because if he isn't, I don't know what the alternative play is.
We are in a very dire situation.
Without any institutions that function, without any places where we can discuss what's true, There isn't a good plan for how to fix the direction we're headed.
We're in very serious trouble.
So I want Musk to be for real because I think it's very important that Twitter become the first place that we can have a rational discussion in who knows how long.
I am not going to delude myself into believing that he's for real because it would be great and really important if he was.
In other words, I maintain this as, it's not motivated reasoning because it's not affecting my estimation of how likely he is to be for real.
I am just maintaining this as, this is worth, it's a little bit like the puzzle if you are in a canoe and you are headed towards a waterfall that will kill you when you go over it.
Do you paddle towards shore?
Yes.
Do you paddle towards shore if there is a 98% chance that your paddling will be futile?
Yes.
Do you continue to paddle towards shore if there is a 99.9999% chance that it will be futile?
Yes.
In fact, until you know for sure that there's nothing you can do, you paddle because what else have you got?
Unless you're looking for death, you fight for your life until you can't fight anymore.
Right, you do it, and that's frankly evolution has built us to do that, right?
You do it.
So, I'm hoping that he's for real.
I believe I see evidence that he's for real, but I believe that evidence is confusing people, and it's confusing people for exactly the reason that they were confused by us during COVID, right?
So, if you look at When I say on Twitter something like, zero is a special number, this is a very important battle that's going on, really we should be backing his play, all of these things, I get responses that are like, you don't understand.
He's just like the rest of them, right?
He's as enmeshed in the machine as anybody.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they come up with examples, right?
You know, Ukraine, right?
Ukraine is obviously not the story that we understood.
It's not just simply a tyrant having attacked innocent people and the president isn't a, you know, gloriously handsome, courageous freedom fighter and all the bullshit that we were sold, you know.
The Ukrainian pilot who was knocking Russians out of the sky, you know, left and right, all of this was just some, it was wag the dog, right?
Doesn't tell us what the real story is, but there's some real story and that ain't it.
Right?
Well, Musk provided Starlink to Ukraine for military purposes.
So is that an invalidation of the idea that Musk is on the right side because he's invested in this garbagey war, whatever its meaning is, as anybody else?
Likewise, you know, there's some famous tweet about vaccines where he goes all in on the idea that we should be vaccinating people for COVID as a mechanism for controlling it, right?
So anyway, there are all of these cases Where he or, you know, his belief in Neuralink and, you know, basically linking brains to computers.
Is this a good idea or is this the end of the world?
Here's my point.
I think the most parsimonious explanation for this human being's behavior is that he is a very smart, very independent thinker who is using an evolving mode In order to get to better and better models and that, um, boy, I just lost the key piece of this.
Oh, the bias towards action.
So there's this phrase in startup world, bias towards action.
And the idea is, yes, you could spend more and more time trying to think of better and better ways to make your thing launch.
Or at some point you could say it is time to take the imprecise thing we've got and launch it and then move forward, use the momentum to get somewhere.
And obviously you don't want no thinking in advance of action, but a bias towards action means that this person is actually biased in the direction of executing.
So, Musk clearly has an incredible bias towards action.
The number of projects that he has, you know, brought to viability is incredible and the nature of those products is impressive.
I mean, you know, okay, you're going to go after the auto industry and you're going to convert some large fraction of, you know, the moving back and forth to electric and there are no gas stations, so how are you going to How does anybody drive anywhere without gas stations?
Well, we'll do that part, right?
So, he's a bias towards action guy.
Who has an evolving model, and all of the places where people say, nah, he's just like the others, are cases where he's said something that he thought was right based on what he had, and his model has moved on, and maybe he hasn't updated exactly, but nonetheless, I think the point is, maybe he actually is for real, and maybe this play is what it looks like, and maybe, you know, he's now updating his model from the inside of Twitter.
He's willing to be wrong, and more than willing to update.
And boy do I hope that's right, because why are we in trouble if it's not?
Yeah, I hope that's right, too.
I actually have one more piece that's going to seem like a total non sequitur to add to the two-type-of-people-in-the-world argument that you've made here, which analogizes it to how people play Wordle.
Do you know Wordle?
Barely.
Okay, so for the uninitiated, of which I figured you might sort of be, and which I can therefore assume some people in the audience are, it's a single-player word game created a few years back by this Welsh engineer named Wordle.
And for his girlfriend, I think, although it bears similarity to some older games, pre-internet games, and the New York Times bought it this year, and so it's really, it's mostly, you can get it not behind a paywall, but the New York Times now limits, you can play like one a day.
Basically, you have six tries to guess a five-letter word, and for each of your guesses, all of which have to be legitimate English words, in each of the five-letter positions you are told whether that letter doesn't exist in the word at all, gray box, exists in the word but not in the position you put it in, a yellow box, or not only does that letter exist in the word, the answer word, but you got it in the right position, a green box.
And here, Zach, I'm going to ask you to show my screen.
So this is just from the Wikipedia entry on Wordle.
This is an example of a game in which someone's first guess was Arise.
The answer was Rebus.
They got it in six tries.
But you can see here, so usually when people report out Um, their answers.
You see people reporting out without the letters in the words, their answers, which is just a combination of grey, yellow, and green squares, which is the first time I, which is the first way that I ran into Wordle, is people reporting out these just, it looked like hieroglyphs.
Like, I couldn't tell what it was.
But you can see in this game that, that someone played and then put on Wikipedia, uh, the second word, guessed, has an initial letter of R, and each subsequent guess Also has an initial letter of R. The person here used the strategy of... I know that's an R. I'm never going to guess anything but R because R is R. R is there.
So this is an example of a game that I found online.
I just went through Twitter for people looking at Looking for people having posted their answers, this is a standard sort of thing that you'll see on Twitter.
This is how I think most people are playing Wordle.
As soon as you get a green square, again the second line there, the second line, the second position, as soon as you get a green square, you stick.
You never try anything else.
This is not the best way to end up figuring out what your word is going to be.
So I went and just played one game and it looks a little bit different and unfortunately I got too lucky the first time.
So this is, this is actually...
The better approach that is more likely to end with you at truth ultimately but may have you living in deep uncertainty with nothing right in the interim.
So my first guess here, I happen to guess something where four of my letters are correct but only one of them is in the right position.
For my second guess, even though I only was missing one letter, and maybe this wasn't even exactly the right move here, but because I only had the one New York Times, anyway, I only had the one thing, I picked another word with five common letters, none of which I had already used, to see if any of them were in the correct Answer, right?
And they weren't.
And that allowed me actually to go like, okay, what's left?
What's left?
And so, you know, this is not a perfect example because it makes it look too clean.
And that's not usually how it's going to be.
You're going to have a lot more uncertainty early on.
But hold on one more sec.
I'll just put my screen back on for a second.
And then this is, so by contrast, this one is a perfect example of why this doesn't work.
This is just another one I ran into today on Twitter.
Like, okay, this person guessed, their first guess, two of the letters are right, one of them's in the right position.
Their second guess, four of the letters are in the right position.
They didn't get it.
They didn't win.
They didn't solve the they didn't solve the Wurtele.
Because instead, like in unlike COVID, where there's a lot of complexity, and it changes over time, in Wurtele, like, oh, you know, in that case, the first, second, fourth and fifth positions, you always will know that and no amount of other guessing is going to take that away from you.
For God's sake, people, don't stick with those four letters.
You're learning nothing.
You're learning nothing by continuing to put those same letters into those same positions over and over and over again.
Find words that have as little in common with the information you already have and try those out.
See how those fit.
That's really interesting.
So what you're effectively describing is a mental algorithm that keeps you stuck on a low peak.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Wow, and that is highly relevant to what we've been talking about.
I think so.
And it also is relevant, one of the things that I think is a problem for Sam is that Sam in his own mind imagines that he's perfectly consistent.
Right.
Sam is a bundle of contradictions, right?
A guy who believes that there is exactly zero free will but that it is very important that we be vigilant about moral issues is in conflict with himself.
Now there's nothing wrong with that if you say I believe these two things, I know them to be mutually exclusive, I believe they both have some truth, and I don't know how they reconcile.
I'm interested, I don't know, but I'm not giving up either one of these things because I don't think either one of them is so wrong that it needs to be thrown out.
Right?
That's something you can hear, right?
Or Jordan Peterson, right?
Jordan Peterson does this well, right?
Do you believe in a God who answers prayers?
I act as if I do.
Right.
Right?
The point is that's how you do this.
You don't claim that my belief system is consistent across the board.
You say, here's a zone where I'm relatively confident.
Here's a zone where I'm relatively confident.
The thing in between is a place I can't be confident because I can see as well as anyone else.
It doesn't fit.
Right?
And so that ability to get from a low peak to a higher peak Is, I believe, tantamount to how much of your own uncertainty you can tolerate.
Exactly.
Right?
Yes.
Like, you need to be able to live in the uncertainty.
And, you know, frankly, part of why, for instance, people who have actually traveled, including, you know, immigrants who have actually lived in two very different countries, but people who have traveled and not just gone to the Disney version of, you know, your home in whatever place it is, but actually traveled What you're doing is going into uncertainty and saying, I'm going to have to be okay with this.
And frankly, people who travel a lot are indicating something about their personality, which says, I'm more than okay with this.
I kind of love the uncertainty.
I love the serendipity.
I love the opportunity to learn things that I did not see coming.
Yep.
And I will, if I can pat myself on the back, I think one of my better skills, one of the reasons that I do well in this game, is that I have a preternatural capacity to file questions as open and leave them there literally for decades sometimes.
And the experience is you even forget that you've got a question active.
It's simmering so low on a back burner that you don't even really think of it.
But it isn't closed.
You haven't leapt to a conclusion just to close it out.
And then, years later, sometimes decades later, the thing that you didn't know emerges, and just the cascade of like, oh, that completes, and then it has all of these effects, and the other things that you weren't able to put together.
It's a marvelous experience.
Yeah.
And I think it really is a question of...
We have a bad habit.
Our bad habit is leaping to conclusions, and that happens at every scale.
And basically to the extent that you have that tendency, it's an Achilles heel.
And I would also say that the flip side of this, the way, you know, we alluded to this earlier, but the way not to fall into this trap is very socially dangerous, but it's straightforward, which is to file things as possibilities, right?
So if we talk about, for example, conspiracy theories, you should be able to take every conspiracy theory and you should be able to say, well, what I may believe, let's take a good one.
The moon landing was fake.
I don't believe the moon landing was fake.
I believe we landed on the moon.
I believe it was a profoundly important historical event.
But I don't rate the chances that it was fake at zero.
In fact, I've delved into that conspiracy theory and I've noticed there are actually some pieces of evidence in it I don't know how to answer.
Things that are important.
So, I have a very low probability that actually what I was handed in terms of the moon landing is obscuring another truth, right?
But just as when you would ask our boys when they were younger, they mostly don't need to be asked this anymore, right?
At 18 and 16.
How certain are you of that?
An answer of 100% or of 0% is basically a non-starter, right?
There are things that, you know, do I have knees?
Yeah, I'm 100% sure of that.
But there is very little that goes into any kind of complexity space that you should rank as a 0% or 100%.
Well, I gotta say... The knees?
You're gonna go after the knees, aren't you?
Yep, I'm going after the knees.
I know, as soon as I said it.
Well, the reason to do it, yeah, of course, as soon as you said it you can spot, and I'm sure given a minute and a half you will find your own, you know, reason to reserve a very tiny percentage chance that you don't have knees.
But, well, all right, you haven't heard this from me yet.
I've been holding it back, and I'm not going to fully explore it here, but I will give you the tantalizing tidbit.
I have been mocking people, including Elon Musk, for his claim that there's a good chance we're living in a simulation, okay?
For one thing, his logic here, which is common to other people, is garbage, right?
The logic is, well, the number of simulations has to outnumber the number of real universes by a huge amount.
Therefore, statistically speaking, this is probably one, right?
Which is such a bad argument, right?
It's really, really bad because, hey, we don't know that there are any simulations of any level of depth that have ever existed.
So there may be one universe and no simulations, which means that all the universes are real.
So anyway, whatever.
You can take that apart.
However, I had the very uncomfortable experience a couple weeks ago.
Of realizing that although I still think the chances that we are living in a simulation are really, really tiny, that the chances that we are living in a simulation took a giant leap forward in my own understanding, even though I really don't like the idea and will be so disappointed.
Just point of order, I feel like giant leap forward is like final solution, which is one of these phrases you really shouldn't use out of context.
Even Mao didn't say giant leap forward, did he?
No.
So, anyway, the chances that we were living in a simulation to me was like 1 in 10,000.
Okay.
Maybe 1 in 100,000.
Yeah, what happened?
I realized that some relatively commonly accepted observations Are consistent with this in a way so that I still think it's less than 1% chance, but it took a giant leap in the right direction.
I will come back to this.
I told you I'm not going to provide the evidence yet.
I want to run it by a couple of people and just make sure that I'm not, you know, I haven't lost my mind.
Okay.
Because at the moment you sound like you have.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But OK.
Final, final thing from my perspective.
I promised to... We got some more stuff to talk about.
All right.
Well, then we can reserve this final, final thing.
Well, it is kind of late.
I guess I wanted to... I wanted to finish on pears, if I may.
A brief thing on pears.
But first, I already alluded to the...
FDA claim that the FDA telling people not to take ivermectin was just a recommendation.
I just wanted to very quickly, and I'll link to the Epoch Times article on this, in the show notes, a reminder of some of the things that are true, many of which we talked about.
Here on Dark Horse, the FDA created a webpage in 2021 titled, Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19, and later posted a link to the page on Twitter with the text, You are not a horse.
You are not a cow.
Seriously, y'all, stop it.
Was the y'all that really made that tweet.
Y'all, yeah.
A second Twitter post from the FDA was, hold your horses, y'all.
Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn't authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.
And on a separate page, the FDA stated, Q, should I take Ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19?
A, no.
Okay, so that and we have heard from many doctors and have experienced that doctors were, you know, shunned and scared from not writing ivermectin prescriptions at all, and those who did were being told by pharmacists, by their patients, that the pharmacist would not fill them.
So this was, and that was because the FDA had this, you know, shame and fear campaign going on.
But from one of the government's lawyers, quoted, quote, sorry, the cited statements were not directives.
They were not mandatory.
They were recommendations.
They said what parties should do.
They said, for example, why you should not take ivermectin to treat COVID-19.
They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it.
They did not say it's prohibited or it's unlawful.
They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin.
That's it.
All right.
This suggests a marvelous new government-instigated game called Simon Didn't Say.
Yeah.
Actually, and Malone has predicted that we would soon be hearing a great chorus of, well, we didn't force you to take the vaccines, which I believe is coming as well.
Yeah, and you know, I ran into even more sort of Hollywood and entertainment royalty this week who, you know, last year mostly, not recently, but got on the vaccine bandwagon and either strongly urged people or said yes to mandates.
People like George Clooney and Dolly Parton who are, you know, widely beloved, who I Well, I will say Hollywood is the most intense intellectual echo chamber on the planet by far.
The degree to which, you know, no defections are tolerated and these people are guilty of this.
Well, our model was what Fauci says goes and we're not budging.
You know, I saw, I guess it was a recent interview in which George Clooney was questioned about... No, I think somehow that's doing the rounds again, but that's from 2021.
Oh, it is?
Okay, well then hopefully George Clooney, who I like and respect, is smart enough to have seen through this by now.
If not, George, look back into it.
But actually, this does bring me to the final bit I wanted to get to.
Which has to do with what to do with the Died Suddenly film that emerged last week.
I think this week sometime, yeah.
You have seen it?
I did.
I did watch it.
So it was a Twitter premiere somehow, right?
I think they premiered it on Twitter.
I don't think it was a Twitter premiere.
I think it was announced on Twitter and it was a Rumble premiere, but it doesn't really matter.
It premiered somewhere this week.
You and I have both seen it.
I will tell you, I accidentally, I was watching on my phone, and I was trying to get out of a mode in which you saw all of the comments scrolling through, and I hit a button that I did not realize was retweet.
And the next comment I saw was, Brett Weinstein has retweeted this.
So I immediately deleted that tweet.
But anybody who saw it, because they have an alert, I did want to give some guidance on how to think about this thing.
I had a conclusion.
don't take that as any indication of anything was non-intentional and you can tell that because I deleted it within seconds but I did want to give some guidance on how to think about this thing I had a conclusion you and I have not talked about what your conclusion might be so just I mean for those it's called died suddenly and it's it's about the effects that the filmmakers purport to see from a variety of sources of
the widespread adoption of the COVID vaccines all Right.
Now, I'm alarmed about this documentary.
I would say at two levels of alarm.
One, I believe it contains something potentially very, very important, and it has fused that something to things that make it suspect.
Yeah.
The thing that I think is very important, and I'm not saying that this is true, but I'm saying it would be so easy to falsify if it wasn't true, that if we can't falsify it, that's going to tell us something.
That is a kind of piece of information.
The thing that it brings to light that one needs to take seriously is the possibility That morticians are seeing in cadavers a novel kind of what is being described as a clot, but it's not really a clot.
White fibrous.
White, fibrous, extremely large artery and vein blocking masses.
You might call them plaques.
But in any case, the idea, the basic... They have internal coherence and so can be pulled out of a cadaver.
Right, and they apparently have... And not just the veins, but the arteries, which is odd.
The consistency of rubber bands or calamari Is how they're being described now, I saw the first place I encountered this was Steven Crowder interviewed one of the same morticians who was talking about his observation and alarm and his talk with other morticians and what I would say is This film, made by a guy named Stu, S-T-E-W Peters, is it?
That's right.
He's at least one of the producers.
Right, who I don't follow.
I don't even really recognize him, except that there was an earlier thing where he was involved in advancing a story about snake venom and the vaccines that turned out to be nonsense.
A story that we also didn't back or believe in.
In any case, the mortician reports these calamari-like clots.
There's lots of footage of them, not only preserved in vials, but in this film there's footage of them being pulled from cadavers.
Could that be faked?
Of course it could be faked.
On the other hand, it raises a relatively obvious question.
Are there morticians who are not seeing this?
Who will come forward and say, yeah, not seeing it in my mortuary.
Right?
There ought to be lots of those if this is fake.
And what I will tell you is that people that I don't know well, but that I'm in conversation with, have friends in the so-called death care industry who validate the story that these things exist.
So if these things exist, and the timing of them is what it appears to be, which is to say not consistent with it being a COVID phenomenon, yes consistent with it being a post-vaccine phenomenon, then it needs to be investigated.
It is utterly unambiguous that this is an important question.
And the problem is that this film It overtly, almost, fuses it to utter nonsense, right?
It fuses it.
There's like a montage in the beginning with Bigfoot and 9-11 stuff, and I can't remember what else, but it was like a smorgasbord.
I don't know how you pronounce that.
I think only if you're the chef in the Muppets do you pronounce it that way.
I am not.
But in any case, it fuses it to these other things.
So, I read that as, there's lots of kooky ideas out there, and some of them turn out to be true.
Right.
With them not, I read that opening montage, generously perhaps, perhaps too generously, as we the makers of this film may or may not believe in the, you know, conspiracy theories that you will associate with footage of 9-11, of Sasquatch, of the moon landing, of this, that, the other, but, you know, the Kennedy assassination.
And let me just, you know, add that one in there because, you know, Kennedy assassination, which is one that I think a large proportion of Americans are like, yeah, that was... Yes, especially Americans with brains.
Yeah, so yeah, I would say actually... Let me just add one in there where I'm comfortable saying, yeah, that is not what the Warren Commission said it was.
Right.
My point would be, unfortunately, I think your mind is playing a trick on you where it is rationalizing away an unforgivable connection, right?
If this calamari clot thing is for real, Then it needs to exist on its own so that we can figure out what it implies about the rest of our models of this thing that we didn't know yet.
To in any way bring it close to anything preposterous like Bigfoot, which I would rate the likelihood of Bigfoot being real in the Pacific Northwest, as extremely unlikely, just in light of the fact that we never find skulls or skeletons or get a good picture or whatever, and we know that people have hoaxed, you know, and so-- - I mean, you're now in it, because you're now gonna get the Bigfoot community coming after us.
But luckily it doesn't include any actual Bigfoot, so... Yeah, exactly.
I'd be more concerned.
But anyway, point being, unforgivable to fuse those things.
Also unforgivable to take incredibly important sources like Peter McCullough.
Ryan Cole.
Like Ryan Cole, Steve Kirsch.
To have these people in a film in which low quality stuff, garbage stuff, and this very important observation.
Yeah, so there's a few errors.
I don't even remember what it is that they're showing, but they're talking about some very unlikely events that have actually happened.
Yeah.
And three times in a row, they're like, the probability is zero.
And I was actually yelling at my computer, like, duh, don't do that!
Right.
Right?
Like, you know, the probability cannot be zero of the thing that happened.
Right.
They basically are making an argument, a correct argument, about the number of standard deviations out we are, and therefore how unlikely this is, and then they are synonymous, they're basically rounding to zero.
Right.
Right?
And it's mathematically... And you don't round to zero.
In fact, it's exactly the subject of this episode of Dark Horse that we've been talking about.
The point is, you can have a very, very low probability and it's not the same thing as zero.
I still think I have knees, though.
Not if this is a simulation, you don't.
I mean, I think the simulation of me in the simulation thinks I have knees.
Oh, yeah.
That was too many simulations, but then that would happen.
Let's agree that you either have knees or simulated knees.
No, it's really three.
It's knees, simulated knees, or imaginary knees.
I mean, you could be a schizophrenic quadriplegic who thinks they have knees.
Quadriplegics still have knees.
They just don't work.
Oh, amputee.
Double amputee.
Yeah, thanks.
Sorry, I'm just trying to be complete about the various hypotheses here.
Believe me, the one I believe in is the one that you have knees.
Functioning, yes.
Yes, but anyway, my advice to our audience was going to be actually as much as I would like to tell you, don't watch this film because we don't know what it is.
The clot stuff, the pseudo-clot, whatever these structures are, rubber band calamari, whatever it is, watch it.
Evaluate for yourself what are the chances that these morticians, it's not an infinite number of morticians in this piece, what are the chances that they are not what they appear?
That they're a plant, you know, placed to convince us that these structures are real and that it will turn out not to be true because every other mortician In the Western world is going to stand up and tell us, hey, wait a second, I haven't seen one of these things, right?
What are the chances?
And don't those chances drop every day that the morticians don't rise up and denounce this film saying, hey, those things aren't real, right?
So anyway, I would say watch the film.
Do not let the film color your view of Ryan Cole, of Steve Kirsch, of Peter McCullough.
Process these things independently, and the film could be malicious nonsense designed to take this very important and effectively uncontrovertible piece of evidence and get rid of it by muddling it.
It could be that.
Process it separately.
Process the observations, the interviews, go back and look at Steven Crowder's interview, and then watch what develops in the coming weeks.
Is this being used to get rid of that evidence by saying, oh, it's part of some giant conspiracy theory that involves Bigfoot and 9-11 and who knows?
Don't do that, right?
Process the information that these morticians seem to be giving you independently.
And leave the rest of the film out, because it's not clear even what it is.
That's my advice.
All right.
Let's talk for just a couple minutes about Pairs before we sign off.
Absolutely.
Of course.
There's an account on Twitter, a guy named Paul Ferry, who is apparently a researcher at the University of Calgary, who does these sort of long, historic threads with pieces from newspapers.
Recently he's done one on the correct way to eat various fruits.
Historical accounts of the correct way to eat various fruits.
And he's got an 1863, it's fun, it's good, he's got an 1863 quotation from Henry Ward Beecher that includes the following.
Let me see.
Few people untrained by pomological conventions know how to eat pears.
They take them after a hearty meal.
They take whole ones.
They eat them.
Should their selection be good, they are fortunate.
If bad, they must eat the whole or give up.
Gather in your friends at evening.
The tea is taken and a mere souvenir of bread.
Now, while all are fresh, unstuffed and unsated, bring in your pairs, seven or eight kinds.
Let one man carve.
Take the probably poorest first, and yet your poorest must be good.
Give to each guest a section of the same pear.
Eat together from the one fruit and be united and magnetized by the spiritual essence of the one fruit.
So on from fruit to fruit and from kind to kind.
Thus each one without cloying or over fullness will have tasted of each kind and of every specimen.
Meantime, the conversation must abound.
Tell the great and wonderful stories of the new seedling, of the wonderful yield, of the immense size, of the freaks and fantasies, of luck and unluck, and this or that sort.
In short, have a real garden gossip.
Pears thus discriminately and unselfishly eaten will prove to be not the forbidden fruit.
That's marvelous.
Isn't that marvelous?
Yeah.
And it felt apropos this week of Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, where there is, we hope that all of you in the United States who celebrate American holidays have taken of much wonderful food this week and have much to be grateful for and have shared that with your family and friends who were gathered with you.
But I will say the particular description of how it is to share pairs as he's talking about matches very much what very often oh boy is the dog going to sit on the cat or the dressage section of the podcast has begun what I think very often it's been you and Toby and it's more often with apples than with pears sometimes it's mangoes
we'll bring to the table often it's not our entire meal you see it's after dinner we'll bring a cutting board and several apples and you will cut and share and we will talk and we will each have a bit of an apple and some you know it might seem that you know having been given a piece of an apple that isn't so good Like, oh, I don't want any more of that one.
Just went like, no, we're sharing the apple.
Maybe we can all decide that that one isn't worth eating and we can get rid of it.
But you learn so much about food and about individual variation, not just in the food itself, but in yourselves when you do it this way as well.
It's remarkable.
And it really is.
I mean, it's breaking fruit, not breaking bread.
But it's that.
Yeah.
And it's marvelous, too, because the Nobody knows how to make a great apple, right?
What we can do is take a tree that makes a great apple and we can propagate its branches by grafting them to things or whatever, but the individual variation... Apples are so far from breeding true.
Right.
And this is true within a lot of fruits, that a particular tree yields a special leaf delay.
I had this experience in Panama when I was doing my bat work.
I actually had a license to operate very tiny boats in the Panama Canal and I used to go to some of the abandoned mango trees that existed in the canal zone because the Panamanians... Abandoned meaning that they had been planted for their fruit-bearing capacity.
Absolutely.
They had been planted and were now abandoned because citizens were driven out of the canal zone when the canal was put in and it was basically maintained as a human-free zone.
And so there are all of these trees.
And some of them would give you these watery, stringy mangoes that weren't worth eating, and some of them would give you just the most incredibly delightful, you know, sweet and complex... And that was by tree?
Trees were reliable.
Yes, they were, and so a particularly good tree fruiting in a particular place would have me go back there regularly.
Yeah, trap lining like a common hummingbird.
Exactly, exactly.
Hummingbirds don't eat mangoes, but...
They would have trouble with that, but there is something amazing, the subtlety of the difference between one apple to the next, sometimes even within, you know, if you go to the market and you buy a particular strain of apple, but you still get one that's okay, and one that's delightful, and you know, the notes are very subtle, and so anyway, it is kind of a cool You typically have an apple or somebody else has an apple.
You don't share within an apple, but it does bring you together.
And here he's saying, don't do that.
Don't treat your fruit that way.
Don't take a whole apple and just eat it into yourself.
What's that point?
And there's a question about why we don't do this with lots of things, right?
Like a hamburger.
Wasn't on my list.
No, it shouldn't be.
Sorry.
You know, we sort of do this with cheese, right?
A board of cheese.
That one's particularly good, you know.
And because, you know, even, you know, it came from the same from marguerite, like, you know, well, but this one didn't ripen as well.
This one, like, this one is not as good as the last time I had that wheel.
Right.
The same wheel.
It's not the same.
But we should do it with wine.
In other words, I think far more interesting than the elite bottle of wine is the distinction between bottles that aren't so elite but that you could... Yeah, it's harder to do if there's just, you know, two of you and you aren't alcoholics.
Right, exactly.
Because it doesn't save, right?
But if you have a party, right?
You know, tasting a little bit of this and a little bit of that rather than large glasses of whatever.
Yeah, totally.
It's more interesting, and also... Well, I mean, flights, right?
Like, tasting flights are all the rage now in foodie circles.
Yeah.
For lots of things, and, you know, food to some degree, but, you know, cider flights, wine flights, cocktail flights, spirit flights.
Yeah.
But the idea of sharing them and adding the social component.
Yeah.
You know, if two people have a mirrored flight of something, then, you know, discussing what the individual things taste like to them, which may be different For reasons of physiology, or maybe developmentally different, or whatever is interesting stuff.
And I also, you know, I don't drink beer anymore, as you know, because wheat, right?
I can't drink it.
But I always liked beer better than wine because it was much more about variance than precision, right?
The vast array of different flavors and different beers is, I think, in some ways more interesting than So seriously, one show, you're going to take on the Bigfoot crowd and the wine crowd.
I feel like there's probably relatively small overlap between the two.
So you've got two pretty powerful lobbies coming after us.
The Bigfoot folks, I don't think they're big wine drinkers.
That's what I was trying to communicate.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's likely.
So yes, now we can add those to the list of people who count us as enemies, I guess.
Because you've claimed that wine doesn't have the variation for the palate that beer does.
That's what I heard you say.
It's more a level of refinement than it is a matter of variance, yeah.
There's a broader spectrum for beer.
Yeah.
Is that it?
That's my claim.
Okay.
Yep.
You heard it here.
All right, so anyone else we can offend?
Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure.
Okay, the dog is going to break something.
We better get off air before she does so.
She's wondering why she gave up her spot.
She'll never get it back now.
All right, well that was the first of four live streams that we're going to be doing this weekend.
Hang out where you are right now if you're listening live and we'll be back in about 15 minutes with a Q&A.
We're going to start with three, count them, three questions from the Discord server because every week they vote on a question they really want us to Answer, and because we missed our last two Q&A's, we've got three from them this week, but you can go to darkhorsesubmissions.com to ask a question.
We will not get to all of them, but we will get to as many as we can, and then tomorrow... But in the 15-minute break that they have, this would be a great time to stretch their knees, whether they are simulated, real, or imaginary.
Yeah, your certainty in your knee-edness should not affect whether or not you can stretch them.
Right, they need stretching one way or the other.
That I think we can safely say.
Totally.
Oh, see, now they're missing all the carnivore inaction happening down here at this point.
Well, we'll get back as soon as possible and see if we can replicate some of this.
We encourage you to join our Patreons tomorrow at 9.45am Pacific.
We're going to do a one-hour holiday gift episode.
Until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
