#196 War on Our Minds (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 196th 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.In this episode we discuss astronomical events, like today’s annular eclipse—that exist with or without human awareness of them. What would the ancients have thought of an eclipse? We discuss science, and the risk to us all as we take the S out of STEM, leaving an applied, human-centric set of fields that are missing their ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 196 Is it 196?
It is.
The 196th live stream.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I am of course sitting with Dr. Heather Hying as so often as for all of our live streams.
And we are Well, frankly, a little discombobulated because things are moving apace in the world and it takes a lot of processing.
But in any case, we have quite a number of interesting things to discuss today.
We've got a little business to take care of up top.
What have I missed?
You're looking at me like I missed something normal and essential.
Just waiting for you to wind down.
Oh, to wind down.
As if there's a spring in me that has perhaps a little too much tension.
But it's possible that it's true for all of us at the moment.
Yeah, it's a rough moment for sure.
So come join us on Rumble if you're watching somewhere else.
Subscribe to our channel there, please.
If you're watching live, join the watch party at Locals.
At Locals you can also find early release of guest episodes of Dark Horse, private monthly Q&A, which we're doing tomorrow.
It's usually the last Sunday of the month at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
We're doing a little early this month because we're going to be elsewhere.
We've got AMAs.
Zach and I did an AMA.
Brett has done them.
We have access to our Discord.
Lots of stuff going on at Locals.
We encourage you to join us there.
And we're not doing a Q&A after this live stream today, but we will be doing this private Q&A tomorrow.
And then we will be doing a Q&A after our next live stream, which is this Tuesday rather than Wednesday, after which we will have three weeks without any live streams.
But there will be a couple of guest episodes dropping during that time.
You will have to hold your questions during that time.
I thought we were maybe going to do some AMAs during that time.
Actually, you won't have to hold your questions, but stay tuned for information on when you can open the pressure release on your questions.
I'm gonna get on my game here.
Any moment, you'll see.
So, as always, we have three sponsors at the top of the hour.
Organizations, products that we actually truly vouch for.
Without further ado, let's begin those.
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I really do love knobs.
I appreciate it every time I go to brush my teeth.
Indeed.
And they've actually got, um, many people prefer a minty taste in their, in their dentifrice as do I, but they've got a new flavor, which if you're not someone who, uh, craves mint in your dentifrice, they've got a vanilla flavor that, um, I'm something of a connoisseur of vanilla having lived in one of the vanilla producing capitals of the world in Northeastern Madagascar.
Um, and while I prefer mint to vanilla, uh, it's actually quite compelling.
So they've got more new flavors as well now.
I have yet to try that.
I will say at some point, at some point when the world is not doing so many appalling and difficult to understand things, we should have a conversation about why it is that we read mint as synonymous with clean and fresh.
Anyway, I think that's kind of an interesting conversation to have, but I digress.
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Awesome.
And I have turned off my device, realizing that I forgot to do that before.
All right, where should we start?
Where would you like?
Why don't you Today we had an annular eclipse.
The world did.
And much of the world, of course, didn't see it.
But in the US, in parts of the US, it was visible.
And here in Washington, we didn't get 100%.
We got about 80%.
We got about a hundred percent.
We got about 80%.
And it's just, it's notable to think about astronomical reality that changes not a bit with all of the chaos that we humans are creating down here on earth.
An annular eclipse in which the new moon comes between the Earth and the Sun, the subscuring part of the Sun, or if you were in the path of totality, all of the Sun.
It does depend on you being on Earth, but nothing that we do down here changes what it is.
And that, especially in these so trying times, feels even more important than ever to be thinking about things that exist outside of human experience.
And I think it's over everywhere now, I think, it must be.
But the experience is seeing the Sun become a crescent and then becoming un-a-crescent.
Un-a-crescent?
Not a crescent, again.
And of course, it's a shape that we're accustomed to only seeing with regard to the Moon in terms of large astronomical objects in the sky.
But it is highly unusual and it raises, as do all eclipses and many other events as well, for me the question of what people who lived in cultures without astronomy, without an understanding of astronomy, must have thought.
Right.
I think the answers will be different depending on how close to developing astronomy they were.
The Maya had astronomers and astronomy, but I don't know that their understanding of what was going on extended to being able to predict annular eclipses, for instance.
Nor do I know to what degree the knowledge of the astronomers, the astronomer class, extended into the population.
So whereas now anyone with the internet could have seen that there was going to be an eclipse and whether or not they fully understand what that means, they could at least know it was coming and not go outside and be freaked out by what they saw in the sky.
But this would have been a very different experience not so long ago for everyone on the planet.
Many, many points in response.
One, I do think that there is something quite comforting about the fact that this is an event that is beyond human interference.
Yes.
And this is, I hope that this is not too dark a perspective.
You know, during the eclipse we watched a raccoon, who would not ordinarily have crossed our yard in the day, trundle across our yard.
Could be just a coincidence.
Well, he appeared to be trying to steal kayaks.
There is that, but of course he had that opportunity every other day of the week and he didn't do it.
So, um, there is the question about whether or not, uh, you know, so let's imagine human beings, uh, don't wise up anytime soon and take themselves out.
Eclipses will still happen.
They will still have effects on other creatures.
And even if we, as I fear, were to take out higher life on the planet, Eclipses will still happen 100 million years from now.
There will be something equivalent to raccoons that will be momentarily confused by these things.
If an eclipse happens on a planet bereft of life, does it still happen?
Well, yes, it does.
It sure does.
Right.
And so, you know, it could confuse microbes, photosynthetic plants in ways that would be totally uninteresting, and then it can confuse creatures with cognitive processing because the event's so rare that they wouldn't have a processor for it or whatever.
But anyway, there's something interesting and comforting about that.
You know, even the universe is really just not about us, you know?
Right.
We are fortunate to have our position in it, but we could screw that up and the universe will hum along.
That's right.
And I think, you know, this is a point, a point that I used to make to my and our students a lot.
And it's, it's how I opened up the story that I tell of the boat accident that I was in that almost killed me in Galapagos, leading study abroad, which is that nature is, and there are exceptions, of course, sometimes you will have a run in with something that very much wants to get you.
Right?
But in general, nature is not out to get you.
And the truth is in some ways, you know, I find it a relief, but many people find it at first terrifying.
The truth is actually that nature isn't different to you, mostly.
Right?
And astronomical events demonstrate that.
And, you know, the closer it is to both our space and our time scale, the more likely that truth is to be muddied.
That, you know, obviously things like pathogens who have, you know, an interest in infecting a host, the goal is not harm.
The goal is their own success.
So there is still kind of an indifference, even when the indifference on the other side means that a win for them is a harm to you.
But the goal is not the harm.
Right.
And as you know, but for listeners benefit, in my dissertation, one of my questions was, why are species more densely packed as you get to the equator?
And part of the answer to that is very shocking, which is, That as you get closer to the equator, the selective environment is dominated by things with a contrary interest.
Things that are in one way or another hostile to your well-being.
And that is in fact a more hospitable environment than in the temperate zones where the biggest challenge is the arbitrariness of the weather.
And that arbitrariness of the weather is so difficult to deal with because you can't rely on it to be hostile, right?
Some days it smiles on you and the next day it frowns on you.
And that arbitrariness is a destroyer of species.
It's harder to evolve a response to it.
So what Dick Alexander, mentor to both of us, your graduate advisor, called Darwin's hostile forces, really does divide importantly along this abiotic versus biotic line, where the abiotic stuff, the weather, the climate, the volcano, the earthquake, right?
Not only does it not know you exist, but it also cannot respond to you.
There is no way that you can do something differently to change what it does.
You might be able to outwit it.
Outwit is a weird word there, because there's no wit on the other side.
There's no potential for wit on the other side.
But you may be able to use your wits to get around the problem that it has caused for you.
There is no game.
There is no enduring game.
There is no back and forth.
There is no play, right?
And, you know, play can be very, very dire.
I use play as sort of a technical use here.
Whereas if it's biotic, there is the potential for a call and response, for a give and take, for some kind of interaction.
And, you know, we confuse those two things at our peril.
We do, and an investor would understand this, because in an investment context, let's say that you're running a firm that makes a something.
You know who your competitors are, you have a rough sense of what they will understand about what they might do to get in your way, and you can plan for that future.
Whereas, let's say that you make the same thing, but the energy markets are going to fluctuate with battles across the globe that you can't predict, because those battles are responsive to geopolitical events that are outside your expertise, or maybe outside of any of our ability to even monitor the things that cause them to happen.
How do you plan for that, right?
You've got production ready to go and then suddenly your supply of plastics dries up because a pipeline is blown up by somebody or a war starts.
So anyway, it's the arbitrary thing that's harder to deal with.
Right?
Your competitor is in one way just simply reliable, right?
You know you can put yourself in their shoes and you can plan accordingly.
Yes.
Unless they begin acting out of spite, right, in which they are willing to harm themselves in order to do harm to you, their actions should be predictable.
And even spite can be predictable, but it does change the game.
Yeah, and in fact there's one interesting place, so as Heather points out, spite, the definition, the technical definition, is the willingness to accept a cost in order to inflict a cost.
And this is, lots of things are spite, like policing.
We pay to have a police force, that's a cost that we as a civilization pay, in order to inflict costs on criminals so that they will decide not to commit crime, right?
So spite is an important mechanism.
Yeah, spite, prison, police, prisons, all of those disincentives are costs that we pay because... Yeah, I guess I would not think to classify it in spite territory.
Obviously, the goal is to reduce the need for the thing that you are doing.
Game theoretically, you're right, as I said and then you said, the definition of spite is just being willing to incur a cost to inflict a cost.
But if the goal is a long-term reduction in costs all around, that feels like it's not long-term spite.
Well, I mean, the whole point is why is there spite at all?
Why would you ever accept a cost to inflict a cost?
And the answer is for long-term reasons.
So it's sort of the, you know, it's the reason that we see the pattern and have a name for it.
Well, but individuals, individuals behave in ways that really do seem to be simply counterproductive for both them and the individuals.
There's lots of maladaptive behavior.
And that is very often where spite shows up in a game theory.
People are very often, especially in modern times, where you don't correctly perceive where your interests are because, you know, you're in a bar a thousand miles from home and somebody says something insulting and you don't understand that there's no conceivable game that could be reached by punishing them, right?
That kind of thing.
But You almost sound like you're speaking from experience, which I don't think you are.
No, I'm pretty good at staying out of bar fights for various reasons.
Yep.
But, oh, where was I going with this fight?
There was some important point, but I've now forgotten what it was.
Oh well.
Oh, well.
Thinking about bar fights.
I did.
I got it.
Here's what it was.
There's an interesting example of what you're talking about, about spite in the business context, that is actually written into our legal structure.
OK.
So anyway, this is a weird conversation to be having.
But there is an antitrust provision, which I think is now not enforced very much.
Antitrust was effectively gutted, I think, during the Reagan administration.
But there used to be laws designed to facilitate good competition and stamp out counterproductive competition.
Competition that destroys wealth is bad.
There's no reason that we as a society should want to see that kind of competition.
What we want to see is competition that drives us to innovate and make the pie bigger.
The antitrust violation in question is You are not allowed to sell your product at a loss in order to drive your competitor out of business, right?
A big firm can sell its stuff so low that nobody can compete with it because you're taking a loss and the point is you do that until your competitors are all gone and then you jack the price up and you recover the money that you lost.
In the early phase, that's bad for us all, right?
It means that the market doesn't get to set the proper price and that we get gouged as consumers.
So anyway, we tried to hedge that out with spite, right?
We make it a crime and we penalize you enough that it's not a productive behavior to engage in, which we don't do anymore.
But nonetheless, it was an indication of how civilization was really dependent on why is spite being employed.
I mean, it's tough, too.
I don't know this history, but I imagine that economies of scale being what they are.
You know, large companies that sell 100 products would, absent this ruling, this piece of legislation, this provision, want to be able to sell 10 products at a loss because as long as the 90 other products were selling at a profit, they weren't on balance selling at a loss, whereas a company that only sold 10 products can't afford to sell half their products at a loss, right?
But it's also true that if you're larger you are buying more and therefore you are getting them at a lower cost.
And so you can drive your competitors, your smaller competitors, out of existence without taking a loss.
Although, you know, so it seems that a one-to-one comparison isn't quite fair because the profit margin is what ends up mattering.
And I have no doubt that there is a Huge amount of case law arguing exactly that question, right?
Is this what I would call an efficiency of scale that a normal person would call an economy of scale?
Oh, thanks, man.
It's just a pet peeve of mine.
No, I'm just objecting to you calling me a normal person.
I know, just in this one regard.
But anyway, I'm sure that this has been argued, you know, if you think about something like Amazon, you know, if Amazon can spend 10 years losing money and drive everybody else out of the position of middleman so that whatever you buy, you buy through Amazon, then we're its bitch for the rest of eternity, right?
Oh, but they would never do that.
I think they might.
So I wanted to, if we can switch gears a little bit out of the spite thing.
I wanted to point out that this eclipse is what is called an annular eclipse.
And annular eclipses, we, I think the last major one that we encountered, maybe not, but I think the last major one that we encountered, we were living in Michigan and it was total for us.
Yeah, I mean, there have been several since then.
Annulars?
Yeah.
Okay, well, the last one I remember, maybe the weather made it impossible to see them, but I remember the annular eclipse was coming, and it's like, oh, you're going to be in the path of a total eclipse, but it's annular.
What that means is that the Moon, by virtue of its distance from us, is small relative to the Sun, so it doesn't completely cover it, and it doesn't turn dark.
Yeah, the two distances, right?
You know, distance from Earth to Moon and Moon to Sun.
Yeah, the relative size of these two things in the sky means that the Moon may cross the center of the Sun, but it doesn't completely close it out.
And because of the light amplification capacity of the eye, it really doesn't get very dark at all.
But boy, does the Sun look weird!
Boy does the sun lurk weird.
But here's the thing.
So I remember during that eclipse sort of feeling like, oh, that's too bad.
It's not a real eclipse, right?
And so I was kind of not even really thinking of it.
And then it happened.
Yes, and I remember distinctly realizing that the world around me, though not dark, had changed radically in a way that implied all kinds of weird stuff about things that I apparently had misunderstood every day of my life until then.
Are you going to provide examples?
I'm going to provide the one example that matters, but it was a million versions of it, which was that every place where light came through trees or anything else became an image of the eclipsed Sun with the Moon in front of it.
And it was like, I didn't realize that every little blot of sun that I was looking at was a yes, admittedly out of focus image of the sun, right?
I just thought it was like a splotch of light, and here it was like, oh god, what did this just imply?
Yes, I live among shadows, and I did not know that they were all individual shadows.
Projections.
It's almost like, you know, it's like a fractal Plato's cave.
You get out of the cave, you're out in the real world, but you're still in the cosmic cave looking at shadows on the wall.
So I remember this too very intensely.
And I remember later, the first time I was walking in some city at night and came under one of those new LED street lamps that cast these crazy grid shadow things.
And I don't even know how to describe them.
I think probably most urban dwellers or urban visitors have experienced these.
You see a reflection of the LED array.
Yeah.
And it's ugly.
Yeah.
And it's disconcerting and it feels dystopian and hyper-modern.
And the first time I saw it, my first thought was the only thing I've ever seen that reminds me of that before was those shadows of the sun during the annular eclipse in Michigan, and yet they are so utterly different in origin.
Yeah, it's like, it's like pixelated light.
It's like an insult to nature.
Right.
You know, on like a beautiful glow of even, you know, an incandescent bulb or something like that.
It's almost monstrous.
I think so, yes.
Aesthetically.
It's aesthetically monstrous.
But the last point I wanted to make about the annular eclipse and the fact that it reveals this thing suddenly is that, A, you make an excellent point, I think, that the ancients If the ancients were completely inept with respect to understanding what was going on in the sky, then they would be very caught off guard by an eclipse.
A society that had begun to figure out what at least the pattern of movements across the sky was, so that they could predict the pattern even if they didn't understand what it was.
Right.
They might not predict the eclipse, but they would at least know where the Moon, even though it is invisible to us at new, would be in the sky.
And they would be able to say, that must be the Moon crossing in front of the Sun.
Right.
Which brings me to our little modern predicament, where you and I have now moved to a new place.
We have an actual view of the horizon for the first time ever.
We've always lived in a forest before.
Right.
But it has revealed something about the motion of the moon that is indeed puzzling, and I'm doing a good job of not looking it up because I'm enjoying trying to sort through exactly how it works.
But the basic observation... Let me just interrupt you for a moment.
Whereas the Sun rises farther to the north the closer to the summer solstice, which if you're in the northern hemisphere as most humans are, is in late June, and is rising farther to the south, the closer to the winter solstice you are, that is a predictable trajectory across the horizon over the year.
At each of the equinoxes that's about equidistant between the northernmost and the southernmost rising of the Sun, which is going to vary depending on where you are on the planet latitude-wise, but you can predict it.
You can say, okay, if it's If it's October, it's going to be a bit like it is in February, and like that.
Whereas... Yes, so it's a sine wave across the year, where you could say, as soon as you correct the calendar for the slight error of the year not being an integer number of days, you can say, at this moment in the year, the sun is always going to rise at exactly that point.
At this moment, at this place, at this place in time.
The Moon, obviously, goes through its year around the Earth in 28 days.
What it does on the horizon of the Earth is nuts.
It is, yeah!
It's nuts, and it's not going to be that you just have to understand that that month is a Moon year and fix it, because when the Moon The moon is new, right?
When the moon is new, the opposite of full, that is because you are looking at the dark side of the moon.
It is on the same side of you as the sun, but that happens on the opposite side of the moon year, depending upon whether you're in spring or fall, right?
You're on the opposite.
So the moon will be either fully lit or fully dark at the opposite point, depending upon where the earth is in its orbit.
But anyway, the degree to which the moon moves per night.
Yes.
Uh, and rises in a different place is absolutely befuddling, even though it's obviously so thoroughly understandable that the ancients nailed this one.
I mean, you know, Venus is tough.
The moon is not.
Yeah.
Right.
But for us moderns, moon's actually tougher than you think.
Figuring out exactly where, where it is going to rise.
So I, you know, since we now have a view of a horizon and, and a view of both the sunrise and the moonrise because of the way we face, um, I actually, for the three, four, five, six days of the full moon and moments around it, will set my timer.
I will use modernity to help remind me if I am not already out there looking at it, to make sure that I actually see it if the horizon is actually clear, which of course for some months of the year Pacific Northwest, the horizon won't be clear enough to see it, but I sort of began thinking about this when we moved up here.
And I would be looking in one place, like, where, where is it?
And you know, it's a big horizon.
You don't, you don't miss it when it does come up, but often it'd be like, wait, It's over there!
What happened?
Just last night it was okay.
Yeah, I will tell our audience, because they will find it fascinating and bizarre, that when you say your timer, what that means in our house is an arbitrary selection of frog calls.
And birds.
It's not arbitrary.
I mean, I said, yeah, so I have Well, I didn't say random.
It's arbitrary.
I have Neotropical.
I have, of course, Own.
I have Bought and Created, but most of the ones that I play on my phone are purchased bird and frog calls from the jungle.
And so you get Aura Pendulos and various frogs.
And so that's what my alarms are set to and my timers as well, so that I don't get crazy modern tones from Apple.
I get to briefly imagine that I'm back in the jungle.
And it's really, it's the counterpoint to the LED grids that you see in the shadows when you walk in a modern city, right?
This is, you know, okay, the alarm on a phone is a modern phenomenon, but What you've done is the intrusion is now frogs from somewhere.
Yes.
Which, you know, that ain't normal, but it's... It's also not jarring.
Yeah.
And it's a nice way to wake up.
Oh, it's lovely.
And, you know, just momentarily being called to some far-off place by some frog call that you never hear at home.
The aurapendulas are a little harsh, but... They're a little harsh.
There's black and yellow aureoles they're related to.
They're black birds, big black Amazonian, all neotropical birds.
And they just, they're a little loud.
Yeah, they're a little, a little jarring.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You want to hear?
I can do an order pendulum call.
But we've found actually that order pendulums vary a tremendous amount over their range.
So this is really a... You've got the Central American call with the chk at the end, right?
Because in the Amazon...
That's right.
That's right.
Yep.
That is what they sound like.
Yeah.
That is what they sound like.
Okay.
So the last point I wanted to get to, I have a note to myself.
It says, if.
I see that.
Even I can read that.
It's only two letters and it says, if.
Two letters.
I was able to get through two letters without the dyslexia overwhelming the note.
But the annular eclipse, the one we saw back in Michigan that made the interesting projections on the ground, alerted me that the normal projections were more than I had ever thought they were.
It strikes me that there's some list of phenomena that suggest parts of physics that are not absolutely everyday experience, right?
The fact that an object drops when you let it go is an absolutely everyday experience that implies something about physics.
It's very hard to understand that all objects are attracted to each other.
If that's true, you know, why do I not feel this pen attracted to this zebra?
And the answer is because gravity is such a freaking weak force that you need something planetary scale before you can even detect it.
It is pulling this pen to this zebra, but it's un-detectable by normal means.
You should be glad now that gravity is not a spiteful god, because impugning its strength might come back to haunt you.
Well, someday we'll do a little exploration of gravity.
The degree to which Gravity is the key to everything that doesn't seem that it's being driven by gravity is amazing.
And I used to spend a lot of time pushing students into that recognition, pointing out how my bicycle, for example, is powered by gravity fusion.
But again, I digress.
The point is there are certain phenomena that one has rare access to either in time, something like a rainbow, right?
Which you never know when it's going to happen.
You learn amazing things.
I saw an entirely grey rainbow the other day.
Oh, what?
It was extraordinary.
I have a picture actually, which is on my phone, so maybe at some point you're talking I can send it to Zach and he can show it here.
I've never seen anything like it before.
But it was an arc in the sky in a place that I've seen a full color rainbow and it was so much fog and so much cloud and I was biking through it.
And I don't know what explained it.
Right.
Amazing.
So all right, I'll give you one.
I was driving.
a couple months ago and uh there was a rainbow and as happens when you're driving and there's a rainbow you know you it moves along with you which is fascinating um but i realized something which damn it i should have realized before um uh what i realized was that the rainbow reads as five or ten miles off
Because of a heuristic in the mind that causes you to put it in the context of mountains and buildings and things like that.
As if it's fixed in space.
Well, let's put it this way.
I think it is almost fixed in space, but it's very close to you, is the answer.
Right?
It's very close to you.
And the way I figured that out… And it would be like it would be changing other things about your universe if it were that big and close to you and followed the other rules of what matter does.
Right.
So it befuddles you because it behaves like a faraway object.
The moon moves with you when you're driving a car.
The rainbow moves with you when you're driving a car.
That seems to imply a very great distance.
Yeah.
But no.
And the way this became obvious to me was that as I was driving, the mist in the air that was being broken up, that was breaking up the light and causing the prism effect, was being intensified by the cars that were driving around me.
They were kicking up spray.
Oh, yeah.
And here's the kicker.
The spray, the rainbow continued, and it was in front of the guardrails rather than behind them.
So whereas it looked like 10 miles away if I looked up into the sky, as it got near the ground, it's like, oh, it's right there, right?
So anyway, the point is we each had a personal rainbow a few feet from us, you know, and we thought, you know, because I say, look, a rainbow, and then somebody, you know, 15 feet from me says, I see it too.
No, actually, you're seeing a different rainbow, right?
Yeah, it looks identical.
But that's good.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
But anyway, there's some list.
Imagine that you are one of the blessed humans.
Who had lived somewhere in which there were some rocks in your environment that were magnetic.
Okay.
Right?
I thought you were just blessed to have rocks.
No, a lot of people have rocks.
Yeah, I feel like that's true.
Yeah, so imagine, you know... Oh, this is your gray rainbow?
Yeah, that's actually, that's interesting.
That picture looks different from, it looks far bluer than I remember the experience being.
And in fact, I see some color there, whereas with the naked eye.
So this is, I'll just say that I was biking and this is at a place on San Juan Island called False Bay.
uh where it's often very foggy when it's no it's not foggy anywhere else and so as you're biking towards it you can see like i'm biking into a cloud i'm biking into a cloud and the experience of being in this place um i actually wonder i'm not sure um if this isn't an earlier one with one that felt like an actual rainbow so is that like i checked but it's just like the other day Okay.
Okay.
If this is the other day, then fascinating that once again, what, you know, what I'm seeing on the screen here looks actually more colorful, although still not brightly colored.
It was basically, I was entirely in a fog bank and yet I could see this bow above me or, you know, in front of me.
Which is not very clear, but it sort of demonstrates the fog.
Yeah, and so you're just seeing the top of the top of the bow on this one.
I think what's going on is that in general when you see well actually This is interesting because it's the counterpoint to what I saw driving.
I wonder if that rainbow isn't far enough from you that the very unusual cloud bank that forms in that particular part of the island... Obscured.
Yeah, that it basically grays out.
So you're seeing a light intensity difference because the light is being broken up into spectrums that you're differentially sensitive to, but it's being basically projected on a gray Atomizer of light, but that does suggest that that rainbow might perhaps have been farther from you than the one that I was seeing.
So that's interesting.
So I guess the question is what we need and actually probably.
I don't know how you do it, but there's got to be a way to figure out like.
The water droplets that are breaking apart the light that we see as a rainbow are actually some distance from you.
Right.
It seems like a rainbow is nowhere, but it isn't nowhere.
Right.
The particular raindrops that interact with the particular rays of light are somewhere.
But there are conditions which make it possible for many people to have individual rainbows, right?
So So it is somewhere in some place, but it is not everywhere in every place.
Right.
And it is some distance from you.
And it would be interesting to figure out how you can determine the distance.
Because you can't just do it based on the simple size of the thing.
Because of course the angle of the light is going to affect the size of the thing relative to your field of view.
But there's got to be some set of observations you could make.
Three or four things that would allow you to isolate.
Yeah, the things that broke up the light that I saw were 15 meters from me, or a mile from me, or a foot from me.
Yeah.
Be interesting to know.
But it actually makes the more general point.
If you were blessed enough to be an ancestor with access to rocks that were magnetic, and by the way, let me just explain why that would be the case.
All rocks are composed of molecules that have two poles but they are chaotically distributed such that they cancel each other out and there's no net magnetism so you just don't feel it most of the time.
Every so often a geological phenomenon like the melting of something will allow those atoms or will cause those atoms to become aligned in some way, right?
Like imagine I don't even know what would be doing it.
The alignment of the Earth's magnetic field, the liquification of something that causes you to have an alignment so that all the Norths are pointing one way, all the Souths are pointing another way.
You know this, but I find magnetism about as difficult to parse as anything in science.
It's really tough.
I'm going to be of no help here.
I obviously don't have it.
I've got like right-hand rule and that's about it.
Right.
But the point is, most humans would not have access to a magnetic rock.
They wouldn't encounter one in their entire life.
Some people would have access to some rock that they could reliably go to over a lifetime and be like, hey, let me show you this, you know?
Yeah.
And you would need, yeah, you would need rocks or a piece of metal or something.
But anyway, the point is, how many of these things are there that suggest a level of physics that is not implied by regular stuff?
Right?
You've got rainbows, you've got magnets, you've got the precession of a top, you've got... Projection of the Sun during an annular eclipse.
During an annular eclipse, exactly.
All of these things imply another layer.
And all of the greats... Tsunamis?
Sure, there you go.
Yeah, the uncompressibility of water and its relationship to between earthquakes and tsunamis, that sort of thing.
Sublimation.
- Right.
- Of one plate under another?
- No, no.
- No, no.
Oh, you're talking, oh.
- Sublimation, like if you live near- - Chemical. - If you live near a glacier. - Things change.
- Yeah, okay.
- Most people, I think- - What is subduction is what I was thinking.
- Yeah, you were thinking of subduction.
- Yeah, okay. - But sublimation, the change of a solid to a gas without going through a liquid.
Most humans would probably have no experience of that in an entire lifetime because the changes aren't abrupt in this way.
Right.
You know, and you know, you do have experience as a modern, uh, the ice in your freezer dehydrating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you don't, if you don't work through your ice a lot, the ice ends up a weird, it's a, it's a, it becomes a weird consistency.
And a weird taste, because whatever lands on the surface over all of the months that it sits in your freezer gets concentrated on an ever smaller surface area.
But anyway, what is that list of things that imply a deeper physics?
And what relationship do they have to the way that we came to understand how all of the physics of the universe works?
And what sort of developmental works caused the people who focused on these things and were like, no, hey, wait a minute, that means something.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah, we could invoke mysticism or how would we know, but the people who simply did that didn't make progress in their understanding.
Right.
And for some of these things, it might be hard to imagine what the practical use of understanding is.
But for most of them, I mean, even if there is no practical use for a particular thing, having the mindset, both individually and culturally, of, huh, I wonder why, hmm, what's going on there, is exactly the thing that predicts whether or not those people and that individual will actually become adept in the world.
Right, and it's actually the defense of what we used to call basic science, right?
The point is the people who pursued these things, I mean, maybe there were some of them that were hell-bent on getting ahead, but that's not what does it.
What does it is, damn it, what does that mean?
I've got to know, right?
I'm gonna pursue this because it's gonna drive me crazy until I figure it out.
Yeah, what we used to call, and still do to some degree, basic science as opposed to applied science, and it's really STEM, right?
STEM is necessary, but the math is fundamental, and the science builds on the math, and a lot of science builds on math so remotely that you don't actually necessarily need to know the math that it's building on.
Math and science are not inherently applied at all, whereas the two middle Initials in that acronym, tech and engineering, are inherently the applied versions.
I think one of the reasons that many people end up thinking, I'm not good at science, I don't do science, and math too, but let's just stick with science here because it's our milieu more intimately and more fundamentally.
Many people end up believing that they're not good at science and that it has no relevance to them, because the way it is taught to them and the way it is revealed into the world is actually an applied, what is the purpose, here are the things you need to memorize, here's what we already know, here are the facts, and none of those things are inherent to science.
Right?
It's not a memory game.
It's not a what-is-a-fact-ma'am, and it's not a what-use-will-this-be-to-us.
We would give up a fair amount of our modern conveniences if the T and the E in STEM disappeared, obviously.
But instead what we're seeing is the shaving away of the S. We're seeing a TIM focus now in many places, too many places, as if the science, without the obvious application, without the obvious focus on rote memorization, is kind of old school.
That's so last century.
Who needs it anyway?
And everything else will collapse without it.
Certainly the engineering and the technology will, but everything else will collapse without it.
And I mean, this is one of the grave errors of the 21st century.
It is.
Is abandoning the S in STEM.
And it is actually making us, I don't want to say measurably because that may be the one thing it doesn't do, but it is making us absolutely stupider.
Absolutely.
It's absolutely stupider, and it's making us so much more likely to be played, which is what is happening to us again and again, because people think— Across all the domains.
It's like they think that science is about absorbing what we've learned through this mechanism that they don't really understand and don't get good at using.
Observing what we've already learned and applying it to things that make our lives better.
Right, which means, well, how would you do that?
Well, I guess I would ask the experts in this field, and then they would tell me, and then I will report it as if I'm intelligent, and the answer is, no, actually, you're You're propagating propaganda because you can't tell the difference, because you don't have a bullshit detector that works, because nobody taught you how to think.
And oh, by the way, most of the experts don't know the difference either.
Right.
They're the lead dummies.
So here's the problem.
The idea that there's a list of phenomena that implies a second layer to what drives reality.
Obviously, the way, if you really wanted to make You know, really smart people.
You would expose them to these things in isolation from the ability to look up why they are the way they are.
And the question is, well, how can you figure out what this is?
And you may not get all the way there, but... As we used to do when we were professors.
Right.
So, you know, the don't look it up phenomenon we have used as a title is obviously a
A path not taken with respect to how education should work, but what a missed opportunity, and I do wonder if the obviously increasing stupidity and pettiness of planet Earth is not in part downstream from just this one simple bit of spreading myopia that, you know, science is a matter of listening to the experts, which it just ain't.
Right.
Well, that was unexpected and enjoyable.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering if we want to go next to Roger Waters.
All right.
There are a number of other things we were thinking about going to today, but I think it's a reasonable thing to do, and I actually think that what we just did is pretty good as an intro to it.
I do have to ask people for a little bit of leash here, because there's a way in which Roger Waters has become such a flashpoint, and this week is such a terrible, terrible week in the history of planet Earth, especially if you
Feel deeply the predicament of the Middle East especially Israel That in some sense I can full well understand the perspective that whatever may be true of Roger Waters and his Insights or lack thereof that this ain't the week to be hearing from him I can imagine that as a rational response and there's a part of me that it feels the same way but the reason I say some leash is
That I want people who know us to trust that we're exploring this for a reason.
And the reason has to do with what good might be done by treading in this difficult arena at this moment of maximum difficulty.
Let me just say, we're not going to show Roger Waters' video.
It's just, it's too long.
I do encourage people to go look at it, but I will describe it.
He just, he put out, if you want to show the screenshot here, Zach, he just put out a five minute video about a five-minute video about effectively, well, what he is thinking, I think it was dated October 11th.
So as of four days after the Hamas attack on Israel.
Yeah.
So anyway, it takes the form of an open letter, which he reads, and he describes his desire for what he thinks should happen in the Middle East, which I regard as perfectly preposterous.
And then he- You find perfectly preposterous what he describes as what should happen?
Yes, he basically is calling for a ceasefire at a moment when, you know, you have more than a thousand Israeli citizens dead under the most barbaric, intentionally barbaric circumstances conceivable.
And I don't know how many hostages there are, but a huge number of people imperiled in what we know are terrible circumstances and are probably worse than we can imagine.
But, you know, Ceasefire is just an incoherent idea at this moment.
That said, I want to explore a little bit the status of Roger Waters.
I have said some things about the man and I want people to understand all of the related and implied connections Can I just, I honestly have no idea to what degree our audience may not be familiar with what a Roger Waters is.
I have no idea.
So let me just say he was one of the, by some estimations, the lead creative talent in Pink Floyd, at least after Sid Barrett was no longer part of it.
And, you know, Pink Floyd, the band, of course, was an extraordinarily insightful and unusual band in an era in the late 60s, 70s, through they put out their final album, The Final Cut, in 1983, in an era of unusually insightful bands.
But they were unique among unique entities.
And they were, let me just say, they happened to be one of the only bands that I actually listened to Ever in high school because of my upbringing mostly with classical music and then I found them and went these people speak to me in a way that and it was mostly I was listening to music that had been put out well before you know my time.
Not well before my time but many years to a couple decades.
Enough so that actually one of the very few concerts I actually went to, literally the night before I started college, I drove several hours to see Roger Waters live in concert.
So this is music and a musician and an oeuvre that has been extraordinarily meaningful.
Yes, and I would say also deeply meaningful to me and I would say unambiguously meaningful to us.
You and I bonded over a shared appreciation for this when we met.
In high school.
Yeah, so and I would just change one thing about what she's presented about the history.
I really think you need to think about Pink Floyd as two bands.
There's the Syd Barrett band, and then there's what happened when Syd Barrett effectively lost his mind, left the band, and then there's the Roger Waters and David Gilmour band that followed.
And, you know, most of the albums that people know, The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon, are in that second version of Pink Floyd.
Wish You Were Here.
Yeah, Wish You Were Here, right.
Animals.
Yeah, Wish You Were Here, which is actually written, it is about Sid Barrett, I believe.
The idea is it is Roger Waters' lament that his friend Sid Barrett is not present.
Yeah, I think it may be.
But anyway, so Roger Waters has a kind of complex status in my mind, and I wanted to explore this because I think, especially this week, we are seeing, first of all, I mean, if there's so much first of all, I mean, if there's so much evil that we are forced to grapple with in light of the attack by Hamas on Israel, So, um,
That there's, you know, there's no shortage of terrible outgrowths of these events.
If there's one positive thing, in my opinion, it is that the anti-Semitism that some of us have been being and trying to call attention to is no longer a rumor.
Now everybody has seen it.
It has been, you know, the celebrations in the street across the world tell you.
These are not people simply celebrating a surprise attack.
These are people who know what happened in that attack and are not embarrassed by it.
They are not troubled by it.
And that is so... The implications of it could hardly be more profound.
These are people Who have zero empathy for the victims there, even though the victims were innocent.
These were not, this is not the Israeli government about which we could talk about what role they did or didn't play in setting the stage for this, but literally innocent people, including children, no empathy for them whatsoever.
So the antisemitism that many of us have been seeing and trying to raise the alarm about is now visible to many people who couldn't see it before.
And that is, um, A tiny positive thing compared to the horror that we've seen, but it is important because it's going to play a role going forward.
It is important, and I've heard individually from people who are extraordinarily sympathetic to Israel, who are saying now, I've been hearing Brett talk about him seeing a rise in anti-Semitism, and I haven't seen it.
And I didn't disbelieve that he was seeing it.
I'm not talking about, you know, haters or disbelievers.
I'm just talking about people who are saying, I hadn't seen it.
I didn't know what he was seeing.
It was cryptic.
And now it's not cryptic.
And people are reporting not just what we are seeing in public, but just at the individual level of People who others thought were friends aren't reaching out to ask, is your family okay?
Right?
It's like the veil has fallen and it has one friend of mine from Portland said it feels a little bit like what it felt like in Portland in mid-2021 when everyone had gotten behind, so many people had gotten behind the everyone must get vaccinated or else they're evil people.
And this is more terrifying yet and more heinous.
It is, and I hope two things have happened.
One, people who have no anti-Semitism to them at all couldn't see it and didn't know what to make of it.
And this week they are seeing it and it is causing them to think anew, which is good.
But there's another thing that I hope will happen, which I haven't seen yet, but my guess is if I read the landscape correctly, this is almost certain to happen, at least in enough cases to matter.
There are people, good people, who have been traversing the edges of this anti-Semitic landscape.
They have been trying to understand what to think about the presence of Jews in organizations that they see as hostile to humanity and pharma and government people.
Banking.
Right.
And they're trying to understand what to do with it.
And they're getting They are trafficking in these sort of shallow end of the pool anti-Semitic tropes.
They are trafficking in collective responsibility and guilt, which is really the sine qua non of anti-Semitism.
Of all of the bigotry that does population-level broad brush, if you're a member of X, you must be because X has done bad things.
If you are a member of X, you are a bad thing yourself.
Right.
Instead of recognizing that there are bad Jews, of which there are many.
saying the Jews, that's the place where you cross the line.
And the point is, and we will get back to the lineage level thing, which takes Jews out of this entirely and just says, actually, this is an evolutionary question that applies to an old style of interaction that all of us come from.
All of our ancestors did this.
But anyway, we'll come back to that in a second.
But I'm hoping Is that some of the good people who have been experimenting at the fringe of this very bad style of thought, this very dangerous style of thought, will actually be made aware of what slippery slope they're standing on the edge of.
They will say, oh, I don't want to be there.
That's not me.
That's a violation of my own values and they will step back from that slippery slope.
I really hope that happens because there are a lot of people that I do regard as fundamentally good who are experimenting with some fundamentally bad ideas and it is not helpful.
Yeah.
But back to Roger Waters.
I said A couple weeks ago on Twitter, and I do have a slight regret about the way I said it.
I was trying to defend Roger Waters' right to speak.
He had been invited to speak, I think, at the University of Pennsylvania.
Because he had been playing with Nazi tropes.
Yeah, but that's actually a bad rap.
But that wasn't the stated reason.
I think so.
We haven't said that yet.
I think the stated reason was anti-Semitism.
The claims about his playing with Nazi tropes are absurd.
Okay?
He's not playing with Nazi tropes.
This is somebody who is resolutely anti-Nazi and...
At a familial level, right?
This is a person... His father died fighting the Nazis.
Right, his father died fighting the Nazis, and he has been anti-Nazi, and he has been portraying Nazis as the evil sons of bitches that they were in his art for his entire history.
So that's a bad rap, okay?
I don't think that that is... that his, you know, putting on Nazi costumes and hooting at the audience is about him harboring Nazi sympathies.
That's really, really wrong.
But I do think, and I said in defending his right to speak, what I said was that back when I was at Penn, Louis Farrakhan had come to speak and we all knew he was an antisemite and we went anyway and I'm glad I did.
And I don't want to see Roger Waters shut down because of anti-Semitism.
I think he should be allowed to speak and people should go listen.
So I understood myself to be defending him, but I did acknowledge that I believed, after all of the evidence that I had seen, And in fact, he did harbor anti-Semitism.
But I want to be really clear about what that does and does not mean to me, because I have a feeling that when people hear a Jewish person say that somebody is an anti-Semite, it implies things to them that are not at least inherently true.
So, You have heard, you the audience, have now heard Heather and me talk about the fact that Roger Waters and Pink Floyd have a special importance to us.
And unlike some of the stuff that I listened to back then, I actually still find that importance.
Many of it, many of those things, you age out of them being useful.
They're just not insightful anymore when you become older and wiser.
Pink Floyd, there's still a lot of value.
It actually stands up really well.
And I go back and I listen to that stuff, With regularity, because it is meaningful.
What does that mean that I'm saying that this person who is responsible for things that I hold dear, I believe harbors antisemitism, even though I'm a Jew, and that means that I believe he has some bias against people like me, some unreasoned bias, some emotional bias that is not founded on facts.
Well, Let me just lay it out.
Hey, I think, um.
We have not done a good job, we, civilization, have not done a good job figuring out what we think about the difference between binary categories and spectra, right?
The fact that sex is being claimed to be a spectrum and that that's obviously tactical and sex isn't a spectrum, so we see the claim that something is a spectrum as sort of inherently suspect because we know that we can be tricked by people, you know, parading spectra.
Well, anti-Semitism is an actual spectrum.
There is rabid anti-Semitism, people who just think Jews should be wiped out, and we've seen them chanting and celebrating in streets across the world.
There is an entire range to blight suspicions that certain people harbor that affect interactions.
And I have never Thought that Waters was a rabbit antisemite in any way.
I just think he has a little bit of bias that is, you know, no doubt tied up in Complex feelings about the loss of his father and the nature of World War Two and who knows whatever else.
And the friends he happens to have made are more likely to be Palestinians than Israelis.
And I mean, I think that ends up predicting some amount of this, that if you know someone with a personal story and they are on this side rather than that, you are more likely to see that as the enemy who is doing ill in the world.
So, for those who would ask why I think this, after looking at lots of statements of Waters, looking at his desire, you know, in his art he does stuff, he dresses up as a Nazi and he shoots at the audience as he is very clearly portraying Nazis as villains.
Right?
So this is a guy whose art includes the portrayal of enemies for the purpose of the audience drawing the correct conclusion about them.
But he also, you know, the flying pig that flies above his concerts, he, you know, has put Jewish stars on them, they drop money, You know, he's had phrases put on them that are anti-semitic.
Now it could be that this is Roger Waters doing the same thing he's doing when he puts on a Nazi outfit and attempting to call attention to anti-semitism, but it doesn't seem like that.
And what's more, the thing that really caused me to draw a conclusion at all was people he has known well who report that in their interactions anti-semitism is apparent to them, including David Gilmour.
Right.
So, I don't think he's a rabid anti-Semite, and if we can get back to what he lays out in this letter of his, this open letter, it actually gives us kind of an insight as to where he is.
The letter, he is defending, he is both putting proposals on the table which make no sense in light of where we are, but he is also describing the world that he wishes to see.
And I guess I would actually just ask people who are trying to figure out what to do with Roger Waters to draw the following dichotomy.
This is not a man with any demonstrated capacity to understand the difficulties that block us from getting from A to B.
However, this is somebody with a very highly developed capacity to describe where it is that we should go.
And so, put aside completely, in my opinion, his suggestion of ceasefires, his solution-making, his process-oriented solution-making, but take very seriously Roger Waters' dream, and he describes it as a dream.
in this piece, because Roger Waters has had interesting dreams over the course of many years, and he has often put them into his art.
And those dreams, you know, for our audience members, let me just say that I am somebody who people often tell me that I'm very articulate.
I believe that the reason that I am articulate, if in fact I am, has a lot to do with wordplay.
Wordplay that came in the form of Playful banter at the dinner table, but maybe even more importantly, I pay very close attention to artfully constructed lyrics that are meaningful, that convey something important and do so in a way that lodges them in the mind specially.
And in any case, Waters has outlined various dreams.
These are not things that Roger Waters knows how to accomplish, right?
They may not even be reasonable places that could exist, but he has outlined some things in ways that resonate for those of us who hear them.
And in one particular, so in the letter here that he newly provides, He describes, in effect, a vision of a world after these conflicts are put to rest.
And that world is what I'm calling the West.
This is a world in which everybody is equally protected by the structures.
Everybody is equally protected from the structures and protected in a way that Liberates them.
Do I believe that if Roger Waters was in a all-powerful position to construct that world, would he do it?
Yes.
Do I believe that he would include Jews in that world in which everybody was equally protected?
I do believe that he would do that.
There might be some little nagging thing that he would feel that that was unjust, perhaps.
But nonetheless, I do think that he is telling it like it is with respect to what world he would like to see, and that he is a bit confused about the world as it is, and he's confused about the rules that would allow us to get there.
But I did want to point out one particular thing from a I think it is from The Wall.
It has to be from The Wall.
I wanted to point to a set of lyrics that I have known since you and I met.
That's a long time ago.
It is from a song that I think is called The Gunner's Dream.
The Gunner's Dream is the final cut.
Oh, it's the final cut.
Yeah.
All right.
I know that right away, just because you and I talked about The Gunner's Dream earlier, and I went back and listened to it.
Yeah, I had the feeling it was on the Final Cut, but then it narratively fits in with many of the things on the wall, which is why I was confused.
The Final Cut collects many of the things that were cut from earlier albums, I believe.
Oh, I don't know that.
But anyway, The Gunner's Dream is obviously a reference to his father.
His father, who died in World War II in Italy, I believe was shot down.
And in the letter that Waters released yesterday, he refers to his father and the death of his father fighting the Nazis, and he refers to his father's dream, which he says he shares.
So in the final cut, boy, I'm a little concerned about singing this.
For one thing, I'm still fighting that cough.
And for another thing, it always breaks me up a little bit for reasons that I think will become obvious.
Yeah.
So it starts out... This is verse two.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A place to stay... Well, hold on, hold on.
Floating down through the clouds, my memories come rushing up to meet me now.
And in the space between the heavens and the corner of some foreign field, I had a dream.
I had a dream.
A place to stay.
Enough to eat.
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears and what's more no one ever disappears you'll never hear their standard issue kicking in your door you can relax on both sides of the tracks and maniacs don't blow holes
So, Roger Waters describes the West, and he does it very eloquently.
has recourse to the law and no one kills the children anymore.
So Roger Waters describes the West and he does it very eloquently.
There are things included in those few lines that are beautiful in their compassion.
The fact that he carves out a place for war heroes in a world without war.
And the idea... In the same album in which he puts war criminals in a home for... The Fletcher Memorial.
Home for incurable tyrants and kings.
Yep.
So This is important for a number of reasons.
The outline of what the West is, is vital, and people are losing track of it.
And when I talk about the fact that lineage versus lineage violence is in a position to dislodge our understanding of the West and to replace it, because although the West is better, it is safer, it is fairer, it is less violent, it is more productive, it is more liberating, it is highly desirable for any human being to join something that is a stable version of the West.
But it is fragile.
It is easily vetoed by people who have something else in mind.
Waters is laying out a picture of the West, and one of the things as I revisited these lyrics for the first time in some time today, what I realized is the tragedy of how much farther we are from that description than we were even 25 years ago.
The idea you and I spend a lot of time worrying about what we say, what its impact on our safety will be.
The idea that he expresses where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears.
We cannot speak out loud about our doubts and fears, not in safety anyway.
That is a tragedy that we have lost that.
He talks about everyone has recourse to the law.
That is not true anymore.
That is a reality that we had within our grasp and it is slipping away because something else has taken hold.
And no one kills the children anymore.
Exactly.
And the point is this week you can see the status of children in this.
Even the Mafia leaves children out.
We are somewhere so desperately dangerous.
So.
I was going to sing a stanza.
Go for it.
From later in the same album, which is, I think, reflective of what many people are feeling right now.
The eponymous track from the album, The Final Cut.
Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes, I can barely define the shape of this moment in time.
And far from flying high in clear blue skies, I'm spiraling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.
This is where so many people are right now.
It does not provide a solution, does not provide a way forward.
That is the stanza of this album that stuck with me the most from the 80s when I first heard it.
As I understand it, it was written autobiographically.
This is something that was supposed to be on the wall at first.
And it is written by someone who is desperate, who is dark, who is at risk of ending himself.
Which is never a place that I was.
That was never me.
And yet this always resonated.
How?
And you know, and it's poetry has so much of what Waters writes is.
I can barely define the shape of this moment in time.
This is what we are all trying to do.
And we are being told what the shape of this moment in time is.
We're being told That some things are true that can't be.
And we are being told that this is just like what has happened before and there's nothing new here.
No.
No.
Well, let's say this.
I believe that we can be, we thinking people, we people who have not lost our minds in the last week, can be certain that we are being had.
Yeah.
We do not know who we are being had by.
At the very least, we can say that Hamas has engaged in an attack that it deliberately constructed to produce an overwhelming response.
Why it wanted that overwhelming response, we don't know.
Who its partners were, we don't know.
But the point is, at the very least, we are being had that somebody as diabolical as that is in the position to define what the rest of the world is allowed to do.
Right?
That is intolerable.
As for what we should do, we should think more carefully.
And those of you who have been following me on Twitter know that I've been actually more successfully than I was expecting, conveying the importance of understanding that there are two ways we can go forward.
Neither of them is Rosie Kumbaya.
They are both versions of human competition.
But one of them is honorable and productive and is actually the forge of very good things.
And the other one is diabolical and terrible and the stuff of all of the tragedies of history.
And we are literally standing.
Well, we are sitting, therefore we are not literally standing, but we are, we are literally faced, you know, we are figuratively standing and faced with a choice between two futures.
I rescued it, sort of.
We are faced with two futures and we really have to choose, but I swear the idea that people have the power to put you in a bind where you are told you have but one choice, that is them controlling you to the extent that there is but one choice.
That is something that you don't know, something you've never met, deciding on your fate.
A wise person, a wise nation, a wise planet would never allow that to happen.
I do not mean this to be trivializing, but I'm reminded of the words of Johnny Cash in a live – I don't remember if he's at – I think he's at one of his prison concerts.
I don't remember if it's San Quentin, maybe.
But he says – I'm speaking to the audience before asking them – to the inmates, his audience – asking them what they wanted to sing.
He says, you know, this is being broadcast.
England and they're telling me where to stand and what to sing and everything and I just I don't play like that Says you put the screws on me.
I'm gonna screw right out from under you And I mean this is it right like it, you know, you you tell me exactly what I need to do and actually the move should be Not if it's mandated by you.
It has to be, because if we are ever in a position of saying, well, we had no choice, we had to do the barbaric thing.
Create the choice.
You have to create the choice because, I mean, I think I really want you to be saying this part, but we were talking about this last night, like the part where the terrorists do X and therefore we have only one choice and it looks like we're obliterating terrorists, that is the terrorists winning because they have set your agenda for you.
Yeah, they are in charge of your generals.
So let me, I actually tweeted, Zach, can you put up the tweet that I sent you?
I think I more or less captured it.
So what I said is...
If terrorists can force the hand of mighty nations through acts of unimaginable barbarism directed against civilians, we should expect ever more shocking acts of barbarism to be inflected on civilians as terrorists struggle to maintain control of the mighty armies they command.
And just because a couple people misunderstood it.
The armies that they command are the armies of the mighty nations.
They are not the terrorist forces.
My point is they have effectively gained control of, you know, A modern army by telling it what it has no choice but to do.
And I would also point out, many people are botching the analysis of what Israel should do, what the world should do, on the basis that the moral situation here is clear at the most basic level.
Right?
The barbarism of the act Leaves zero moral ambiguity whatsoever about the perpetrators.
What we don't know, we know who some of the perpetrators are.
Hamas are perpetrators.
Are they the only perpetrators?
We don't know.
The status of Iran is ambiguous.
If Iran is responsible for this act, more than just favorable towards this act, then that puts it in a position of moral identity with those who committed the act.
Likewise, if these Hamas members trained outside of Gaza, maybe they trained in Iran, that would be one thing, but maybe they trained somewhere else.
But in essence, there's a question of who is on the list of people responsible for this.
And that is a very, it is a question that we must get right, and we cannot wait to get it right.
That does not mean that Israel should hold its fire relative to Hamas, but it does mean that no exploration of culpability is complete until you have the full list of people who are actually culpable, wherever they come from.
I'm troubled by the failure of people to spot that second question because the first question is so clear and people don't all get it, right?
They're so interested in nailing the certainty of the moral question, which is frankly a simple one, that they misunderstand that there are other questions that actually have to be asked at this moment.
I don't know how to make this point.
It seems to me that if there's any point that shouldn't need to be made, it's this one.
How many famous examples would we need of places where great nations went to war under false pretenses for us to get the idea that any time you are marching to war, You have to investigate the question of whether somebody is actually leading you to do their bidding and you are operating on the basis of a moral clarity for somebody else's cynical gain.
And I would just point out, you know, remember the main.
Alright, the sinking of the main in the Havana Harbor, the Tonkin Gulf incident, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The list of these things is long and it extends well into modernity.
So the idea that we should not be asking those questions now.
No, this is the only time to be asking those questions.
As you are marching to war, figuring out whose bidding you are doing is essential, right?
We must be unflinching about that for now and forever after.
There is no question about it because the demonstrated capacity of people to drive us to war under false pretenses is unambiguous.
It is just historically clear.
If there is any pattern that is clear, this is it.
So, I do wonder how we have forgotten that lesson.
I think people are under some kind of spell.
It does feel like a mass formation spell that has people arguing viciously, in many cases, not to ask these questions.
And those people are wrong.
No one can make out the shape of this moment in time.
And those who are trying are being told to sit down and shut up already.
Yes, they are being told to sit down and shut up already.
And I must say, I was very unhappy to see some of the pushback that Ephrat Phoenixon got for our podcast.
People accused her of all sorts of things like misportraying her level of expertise, which she absolutely did not do.
She did not portray herself as an expert.
She explained exactly what her understanding was based on, and the audience, because the audience is composed of people with a brain, is full well capable of placing her understanding in context.
What's more, nothing about what concerned people in that podcast is dependent on expert insight.
In other words, if I may just paint and An uncomfortable parallel.
What would be necessary to explain the failure of the IDF to either protect the border or to have a rapid reaction force that could cover for the fact that it had failed to protect the border is implausible in a way that we have not seen before.
My point is simply, if you try to, the idea that there's something that we don't know because we're not insiders and that it is somehow vital to our understanding of whether or not what took place makes sense or doesn't make sense according to the version of events we've been portrayed, it's not plausible.
It doesn't make sense.
You would have to have, you know, some explanation where, you know, the entire IDF or the entire governance structure of the IDF had decided To take hallucinogenic drugs for a month, and that's why they missed it, right?
You need some industrial strength explanation that just is nowhere, nowhere in sight.
So anyway, I will leave that question aside, but I do think in asking How we got here, who is it that wants us to make what moves, and by us I just mean all of the parties involved, which frankly involves everyone on earth.
We all have interests tied up in this situation.
But it is very important that we not forget what we knew even a few years ago, and if there's one lesson that crosses all of the crises we've seen in recent history, it's that People very quickly forget things that they understood very, very well that are important to defending their interests in the world, and we are in the process of doing that, and we have to cut it out.
There are a number of other things we were thinking about talking about today, and I think we'll save most of them, but you specifically wanted to discuss one thing that you think we used to all know that we have forgotten.
Do you want to go there?
Sure.
Since that is what you were just talking about, you just didn't get to the punchline that I thought.
Yeah, I'm trying to complete the thought.
I am spooked by the fact that we are not, as far as I can tell, I haven't heard any, you know, I obviously haven't read everything, but I have not heard discussion of the status of the neocons in the current scenario.
Now the neocons, for those who aren't real familiar with that term, were a group of American thought leaders, for lack of a better term, ferociously pro-Israel, but also decidedly in favor of Using American military might to reorganize the Middle East, right?
These were people who claimed that they were liberals who had been mugged by reality and had grown up and realized the world was a dangerous place, and that if we were going to make it a better place, we were going to have to go use American military might to fix stuff.
You know, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, David Frum, all sorts of folks.
Norman Podoretz.
The question is, the reason I raise this question is that back in the post 9-11 era, the idea that there were a series of wars that needed to be fought that would make the world a better, safer place in the end, and that the adults understood this.
It's kind of the neocon line.
And they wanted to go into Iraq.
They wanted to go into Iran.
They didn't get their war in Iran because the war in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into quagmires and bankrupted us and there was just no way that they were going to do it.
So they sort of disappeared from view for a while.
And they're not in view now, really.
I mean, we know, you know, we see their Twitter accounts, but they're not being discussed as players in this game.
And in fact, you know, some of them have died and, you know, maybe they're just not players in this game and they're spectators like the rest of us.
But I don't think that that's in any way certain.
And in fact, I have the sense that one of the things, you know, time has moved on.
The neocons are now on the blue team.
That's an interesting development, right?
They're partnered with the blue team, right?
So what that means is that as power shifted from the red team to the blue team, the neocons moved over to the blue team.
So they're still in power in some way.
And the question is, okay, we're being told that a war with Iran is necessary because Iran backed this attack by Hamas.
Well, you know, I don't know what's true.
But what I do want to know is that a group of people who had an idea 20 years ago that American military was going to be necessary to reorganize the Middle East, and that involves going after Iran at some point, I want to know that they are not driving us to do that very thing in a moment in which the world is maximally hospitable to the idea that something has to be done because of the barbarism of Hamas, et cetera.
So I don't know what to make of this.
I guess I'm hoping people will connect some dots.
What is the neocons role at the moment?
Why are we not talking about the fact that something that they wanted and didn't get many years ago is now back on the table as a result of events that we are told compel us?
Right?
Is that happenstance?
Could well be.
But it is not inherently happenstance.
And is there a new generation of neocons that don't fly under that banner?
And so we don't think of them in this way, who might be advancing these ideas in places that we should be aware that they are not just simply responding to events, but that actually there is potentially some Private analysis shared between them and not with us that suggests a requirement, you know, I would imagine it would be phrased in a similar way that, you know, the adults understand it's a dangerous world.
Certain things have to occur.
This is the moment in which they are possible because the world is now empathetic blah blah blah blah blah.
Is that conversation happening?
And is that conversation driving us in ways that we can't hear it out here in public?
Because we all have everything at stake here.
Right?
I keep saying we are in a battle between the West and lineage displacement.
These are the two versions of the world going forward.
We have everything at stake in what happens.
And the problem is that the Middle East is in a position to drag us back into lineage displacement competition.
Right, which will be a disaster for all of us.
And if we are to protect our interests, our interests involve, in my podcast with Efron, I said, Israel has a foot in both of these worlds.
I think Israel, given the freedom to choose, would choose to be a modern Western nation.
But it may not have the freedom to choose because of its context.
I don't know how to put it any more clearly.
The world's interests are tied up in this battle in the Middle East, and the dynamics are not symmetrical.
It's not like good will prevail.
In fact, I think what is most likely to happen is that evil will prevail, and evil will prevail in the form of a return that will spread across the globe to lineage displacement competition, right?
All of the tragedies of history arise out of that bad pattern, and if we are to avoid them, we have to become aware of it, and we have to Start navigating based on a long-term view of what's good for humans.
Indeed.
All right.
I think... I agree with you.
I don't think I have anything to add.
I think we've arrived at the end.
Crossed many Arubicons.
I don't think that's how that works, but...
I don't really know either.
All right.
We'll be back with another live stream in three days.
Tuesday at 11.30am Pacific.
And we will have a private Q&A tomorrow on Sunday, October 15th at 11 a.m.
Pacific, which you can join us at at our locals.
I encourage you to join us there for all sorts of reasons.
Other things are still true.
You can find my writing at Natural Selections.
You can find merchandise, including getting your Jake's Micro Pizza shirt at darkhorsestore.org.
Yum!
Yum.
Yeah.
Jake's Micro Pizza comes in all the flavors you have come to expect at your favorite pizza parlor.
It's a little smaller than you will have come to expect, but just delicious.
It's like regular pizza, only tastier and much, much, much smaller.
So much smaller, yes.
Jake's Micro Pizza.
I'll put on my mask when I'm done eating.
So yeah, you can get that and other things at darkhorsestore.org.
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I have one last note before we get to sign-offs.
You tell me when.
This is it?
Go for it!
Okay, the one final note.
I forgot to say this.
If Roger Waters wants to talk this through, I think it could be really cathartic for lots of people who have ambiguous feelings and are trying to work them out.
So I would absolutely welcome that conversation.
And we'll probably be nearby soon, Roger.
So think about it and get in touch.
So please subscribe, like, share on Rumble and elsewhere, but Rumble and Locals do us the most good and are the platforms that are most resistant to censorship and most in favor of free speech of any that we know and that we are associated with.
So please come join us at Rumble and Locals, and until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
