Peril in The Main Stream: The 209th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 209th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss misinformation and how dangerous it is, especially to mainstream researchers and media. We dissect research that claims to find evidence that “doing your own research” actually cements false views, and find that the research itself is so methodologically flawed as to be incapable of delivering...
Livestream number two hundred and I forgot to look it up.
Nine.
Two hundred and nine.
Yes.
All right.
Not prime.
It is not prime.
So that's the end of that.
I mean, we could factor the thing, but that's no fun.
So eleven by nineteen.
Wow, you are obviously prepared, and I accept your factoring.
We have been too often unprepared on the question of crime, speaking to antagonized people.
Is that right?
Okay, well, then we have dispensed with the issue.
We can move on to paying the rent and substance.
You are Dr. Brett Weinstein and I am Dr. Heather Hying, and we are here as usual on Wednesday.
We were not here last week because you were elsewhere, which you will speak a little bit.
I will speak.
And mostly we're going to be talking at the end of the hour about places you can find us and such, but we encourage you to go to Locals always.
We have the Watch Party going on, we release guest episodes early there, You have access to our Discord there, but just today we've released something very exciting, and there's going to be a lot of activity on Locals in the coming weeks.
Do you want to say something about this?
Sure.
So, Zach and I were just down in Panama with Michael Yan, who was showing us various things, including the major migration across the Darien Gap,
the Panama Canal situation construction projects and Chris Martinson was on this adventure as well and on the last day of it he and I sat down and started unpacking what it was that we had seen trying to make sense of it and I think you will find it quite fascinating for the moment it is going to exist on locals alone in part because in unpacking
Where were you?
So for the people just listening, Zach just put up a picture of you and Chris talking in front of a camera.
You've got an uncharacteristic look going there.
You've got your rubber boots, which is absolutely mandatory garb for lowland tropical rainforest, but they're folded down and you've zipped off the bottom of your pants.
So you're not feeling in too much risk here.
Where are you?
Where is that?
That is in the canal, in a cove.
There was a particular cove I wanted to go to, but the boat driver was reluctant, so he found us a cove where we recorded a little something.
The podcast that we've put up is actually after that trip in the hotel, and it goes in great depth in terms of what we both think might be the meaning of the things that Michael Yan showed us.
And Zach has added in some of the footage that he took while you were down there as well, so there's footage from the Darien and such, right?
Yeah, I think people are going to be fascinated by this, and I actually think, you know, these ideas are so new in some cases that it takes a little while to let them settle and see how certain one is or whether something else emerges, but I think this is going to change people's view of what's taking place pretty radically, and it is, I am certain, worth your time.
I was wrong.
It's two hours.
It's not the way that works.
I think it's about three hours, so it's a lot of material.
But it's two hours.
Oh, good.
So you just saved an hour right there.
But it's-- That's not the way that works.
That's not the way that works.
Really?
I mean, close enough.
Anyway, it's good stuff.
And I don't think anybody's going to be bored about it.
Cool.
So we'll talk just a little bit about some Panama stuff here today, and I want to talk about misinformation.
I want to talk to you about misinformation, Brett.
Wow.
Yeah?
And ruling from... ruling?
Not ruling.
A ruling from the Federal Court in Canada, which is good news.
It just came down.
And I think you have another something to talk about as well.
But that's what we have on deck for today.
And we're not going to do a Q&A today, but we encourage you to go to Locals and check out this Conversation between Brett and Chris Martenson, which includes footage from their recent trip that Zach took in Panama, including the Darién.
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All right.
Maybe we should start by talking about misinformation.
All right, let's talk about her.
Um, okay.
I didn't know we were talking about her, but go for it.
Well played.
No, no, misinformation.
Okay, good.
So, hat tip to a Twitter account called greenleafforward.wtf on Twitter for pointing me to an analysis in, excuse me, an analysis in Washington Post, here it is, you can show my screen here, by a guy named Philip Bump called, Doing Your Own Research is a Good Way to End Up Being Wrong.
Now, I don't know why the picture came in blurry here.
It's of January 6, because of course it is, but it doesn't matter.
It's not germane to the discussion.
I'm going to read just a little bit from this WaPo op-ed, and then go in some depth into the research that he is basing this conclusion on, which was published at the very end of 2023, and which has a supplementary information section 105 pages long, most of which I managed to get through, and it is
Rather remarkable how it is that these researchers and then an analyst at the Washington Post managed to conclude that what you definitely should not do if you're trying to determine what is true is try to figure it out for yourself.
So, Bump writes in Washington Post in the last week or so, when was it?
It was January 17th.
There is an outsized appetite for derogatory, counterintuitive, or anti-institutional assessments of the world around us.
This is in part because alleged scandals are interesting, and in part because Americans like to view themselves as independent analysts of the world around us.
Note what's missing from that.
It might also be in part because the institutions have dramatically failed us and anyone who doesn't think so has not been paying attention.
That's just one other possibility that is not mentioned here.
The extent of institutional succotude is conspicuously left off the list of causal agents.
Of the reason for the outsized appetite for anti-institutional assessments.
Outsized.
Outsized.
Yeah, outsized.
Okay, so here's just a couple of paragraphs from, again, this is the Washington Post analyst's version of a review of this research that I'll go into.
Although conventional wisdom suggests, oh this is, he's actually quoting here the research, Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation will produce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim, the authors wrote.
Instead, they continued, quote, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them, end quote.
Later, they summarize the process, quote, when individuals search online about misinformation, they are more likely to be exposed to lower quality information than when individuals search about true news.
So that's it.
That's that actually makes some sense that if you are actually trying to find things that assess whether or not things that are false are true, there's likely to be less information about it out there because it's not true.
And you will run into lower quality information because the thing you're actually looking for isn't true.
Well, but that hinges on That hinges on the assessment of what is true and what is false being accurate.
Right.
The methodological flaw here is... Well, you haven't heard the methodology yet.
And quote, those who are exposed to low quality information are more likely to believe false and misleading news stories to be true relative to those who are not.
Look for info, see bad info, accept the bad info.
So that's Bump's summary.
The mechanism is explored at length, but in short, false claims or other rumors often generate fewer hits on Google, meaning searchers are more likely to encounter unreliable information that aligns with their assumptions.
Then he says, "The paper is dense, Benton's summary is useful.
I decided not to go to Benton's summary, whoever that is.
I decided to go to the paper.
It is dense.
They did a lot of stuff and there's a, you know, there's a lot of data.
There's a lot of, they do five different experiments.
You can give me my screen back, please.
Five different experiments, all of which are basically, and then we'll walk through the paper a bit, and then really where the devil in the details is in the supplementary information, which is so often where it is with research, right?
But basically what they did was they recruited people to look at articles.
And then they asked some of those people to do their own Google searches, or however it is that they wanted to do it, to try to figure out if these articles that they had read were in fact true, and see if their conclusions before and after they did their own research had changed.
And after they had done their own research, participants were asked to rank how true the article was on a seven-point scale.
And I actually have a image here, which I've closed down.
Let me just find this.
This will become relevant later.
The seven-point ordinal scale that they use, you can show here.
The seven-point ordinal veracity scale.
To determine how confident a respondent is of their evaluation, we ask respondents the following question.
And it's, you know, it's, of course, it has to be.
It's qualitative.
It's seven points.
They don't, they at least don't call it, they don't They don't exactly call it quantitative, but they're pretending that it is.
They're asking people to give an assessment of how true they think the article that they've read is after they have evaluated it by doing sort of standard Google-y search things.
And I definitely need my screen back here.
So, what they're doing is they're having these respondents assess via Google whether or not something is true or not, and then describe whether or not they think this article is true or not.
But how do the researchers know it's true?
How are the researchers assessing truth?
These things are published out there, they're articles.
So first off, let's talk a little bit about how they source the articles, and then how they source the truth, because that's awesome.
I mean, if they have a beat on the truth, we should just be going to these guys.
Abso-freaking-lutely.
Imagine that you could just have a central repository of truth where you could go and you just know whether something was accurate or not.
That's freaking awesome!
That's fantastic.
Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad the Washington Post brought this to our attention.
It's fantastic research.
Just not to belabor the point, but I'm going to keep doing it, the entire research hinges on Okay, you think this, you respondent, you experimental subject, but only we actually know if the thing is true, so we get to assess whether or not you have gotten closer or farther from the truth, because we know the truth and you don't.
Okay, so where'd they get the articles first of all, and then how did they assess the truth of the articles?
They used five types of media outlets, and they do include a list, although it's just long, and I'll show you a little bit of it maybe, but the five types of media outlets are mainstream liberal, mainstream conservative, low-quality liberal, low-quality conservative, and low-quality of no political bent.
I've had some low-quality liberals.
Low-quality people of all political stripes.
But the thing I want to point out there is that the counterpoint, this binary that they've created, is mainstream and low-quality.
That's their binary, that's their categorization scheme.
And, in fact, when you go in and you look at their assessment, which, again, I haven't told you yet how they've assessed these, but you look at their assessment of the articles that they were finding in mainstream outlets of both liberal and conservative events, amazingly, wow, they're just all true.
Now, not entirely, but almost all true, whereas the low-quality ones, well, no, that's, you know, that's where the, apparently that's where the shit hits the fan.
This would seem to be somewhat circular in its reasoning.
The tautology would seem to be.
And again, I haven't yet told you how is it that truth is being assessed, but if mainstream is true, is found to be more true, based on what now?
And that gives us the answer to how it is that they decided, oh, it's mainstream versus low quality, because mainstream is inherently high quality.
This, incidentally, this was published before, but the LA Times just fired a bunch of journalists because they're either going under or about to.
And, you know, if people aren't questioning the mainstream outlets at this point, I don't know.
I don't know what.
Go on.
Well, there's so many ways in which this is absurd, but one of them is the number of places where the mainstream has flipped positions is shocking.
It invalidates the methodology straight away.
Well, no, because I haven't told you the methodology.
That does not invalidate the methodology inherently, but it could, depending on what the methodology is.
Well, I'm interested to hear, but it's hard to imagine how If the mainstream flips 180 degrees, if we go from, you know, COVID is definitely zoonotic in origin to lab leak is probable... Right, but so I am telling you that in their results, they find that the mainstream tends to be true.
They did not say, they did not make the obvious error of saying, oh, well, mainstream is true and everything else is low quality.
That would, I mean, that hopefully would not have gotten published.
But what did get published is frankly more dangerous because it's just slightly more cryptic.
So here it is, the article, Online Searches to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase Its Perceived Veracity.
That's the title of the article, published at the very end of 2023, and I'm going to just read a few bits from it before explaining in more depth what they found.
We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower quality information.
Our findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground their recommendations in empirically tested strategies.
I don't know who there is here.
So this actually strikes me as potentially very, very evil, frankly, but I cannot figure out what they mean by there.
Here we go.
So they did five sets of experiments.
They're all basically very similar.
They're not the same, but they're very similar.
For all five studies, we used a pipeline, which was also pre-registered, to select popular articles from both mainstream and non-mainstream media sources, and then distribute them to respondents and professional fact-checkers.
Parentheses, a full explanation of this process is provided in the methods.
We'll get there.
The methods are not, of course, Did you notice the order in which many primary literature science articles are published has now been mixed?
The methods come at the end, at the very end, because it's admitted that no one wants to see them anyway.
You actually have to dig for the methods.
I know!
That's an admission that this is not science.
I know!
That's the case here as well.
The methods are at the very end.
And then a lot of the methods, actually, the details are in the supplementary information, which It actually took me a while to find, and I'm good at this.
Well, it goes to what we have said on a number of topics, where something is designed to get you not to pay attention.
Totally.
Yep.
And designed to get you not to pay attention is a red flag that you may be surrendering something in what you're not looking at that might matter a great deal.
I don't even know what the conversation might have sounded like to justify this.
Like, oh, it's just so much text in the middle.
Don't we want to get people to the results?
There's no results without methods.
The reason that the order has been
uh you know summary which is a little bit of a cheat but like summary up top and then you introduce the question and and the hypothesis and then you explain what you did to test the hypothesis and then you get to the results that were emanating from those methods and then the discussion of those results if the methods come last it puts the light of the whole thing and frankly brings into question whether or not you were actually doing um the scientific process in the order in which it must be done in order to actually get results as opposed to just new observations
I mean, it really does.
You know, obviously the order could be...
It could be an innocent stupidity.
But it's all over the place.
It's increasingly all over the place.
If you have a phony field that its purpose is effectively to rationalize mainstream thought, then of course method would be an afterthought, because the only thing the method can do is upend the conclusion that you're trying to reach.
Right?
Yeah.
So you could imagine that just cognitively they are telegraphing something that is pretty shocking.
Yes.
You know, that they wouldn't notice that this was an absurdity, right?
It's like, it's a cart before the horse kind of thing, that if you were, you know, working backwards from a conclusion, you know, of course you wouldn't get why it mattered.
Right.
One more, a couple more things from the actual, the main paper as opposed to the supplementary information.
Um, a key challenge was establishing the veracity of the articles directly after publication, a period during which assessments from fact-checking organizations were not likely to be available.
To this end, we sent out the articles to be evaluated concurrently by a group of six professional fact-checkers from leading national outlets.
The fact-checkers could rate articles as true, false or misleading, or could not determine.
Each article was then labeled as either true- Okay, that's not even the worst of it.
You ready for the next sentence?
Each article was then labeled as either true, false or misleading, or could not be determined based on the modal fact-checker evaluation.
And they used most of these, they had up to six, but most of them had four or five.
Most of them had five fact-checkers.
These fact-checkers go in within 24 hours of something being published.
These are professional fact-checkers, so they must know what they're doing.
They ascribe one of three conclusions.
True, false or misleading, or couldn't determine.
And then whichever of those three conclusions is most common, because that's what the mode means, is most common among a crew of five fact-checkers, becomes the truth.
That article was true because three of five fact-checkers said it was.
Two professional fact-checkers, which already is no arbiter of truth, may have said false or misleading, but if three out of five said it was, that's the mode, that's the truth, and any person who read that article and went looking for themselves and went, oh, I don't think so, well, if three out of five fact-checkers said so, you're wrong, buddy.
And, I mean, the degree to which this is a What's the polite term for a fractal clusterfuck?
Are they assessing the veracity of these things?
They are engaged in some kind of searching themselves, which if we are to believe the conclusion of this paper, which preceded the method, Then suggest that they may be misled by whatever research it is that they did.
I've got some more detail on this.
Oh, you do?
Yeah, a fair bit actually.
Here's one.
Here's another place in the paper determining the veracity of articles.
One of the key challenges in this study was determining the veracity of the article in the period directly after publication.
I should say so.
Whereas many studies use source quality as a proxy for article quality, not all articles from suspect news sites are actually false.
Well, thanks for that.
Again, like, but the inverse is true.
All articles from mainstream sites are actually true.
You don't even say that.
Other studies have relied on professional fact-checking organizations such as Snopes or PolitiFact to identify false or misleading stories from these sources.
However, the use of evaluations from these organizations is impossible when sourcing articles in real time because we have no way of knowing whether these articles will ever be checked by such organizations.
Again, They didn't not use Snopes or PolitiFact because they recognized that Snopes and PolitiFact are ideologically captured organizations.
They didn't use them because they weren't sure that Snopes or PolitiFact would get around to it.
Yeah.
So these poor authors had to do something else.
As an alternative evaluation mechanism, we hired six professional fact-checkers from leading national media organizations.
To also assess each article during the same 24-hour period as response.
So also, these people work for the so-called mainstream news outlets.
They are, of course, more inclined to think that the articles from the mainstream news outlets are true.
In Studies 4 and 5, again, they did five slightly different sets of experiments.
In Studies 4 and 5, given the onset of the pandemic and the potential harm caused by medical misinformation, The professional fact-checkers rated the articles 24 hours before the respondents, so that we could show respondents the fact-checkers' ratings of each article immediately after completion of the survey.
These professional fact-checkers were recruited from a diverse group of reputable publications.
None of the fact-checkers were employed by a publication included in our studies to ensure no conflicts of interest.
And were paid $10 per article.
The modal response of the professional fact-checkers yielded 37 false or misleading, 102 true, and 16 indeterminate articles from Study 1.
Give me my screen back for a second and let me show you.
From, hold on a second.
Yeah, this is from the Supplemental Materials.
Fact Checker Agreement.
This is, you know, statistically convoluted inter-rater reliability statistics for fact checker evaluations of articles and studies.
They evaluated 265 articles.
Percentage of articles with unanimous agreement was 44.6%.
Okay, give my screen back one more time.
Allow me, if I may, to read a couple of paragraphs from my very first Natural Selections piece, which was called Fact Checkers Aren't Scientists.
When we were in the middle of you in particular being defamed by so-called fact checkers, PolitiFact, which is partnered with Facebook to be their fact-checking arm, has a six-tier rating system for their Truth-O-Meter.
I didn't make that up, that's what they call it.
The most egregious rating, the one that they say they only deliver to the least true statements, is Pants on Fire.
This is described as being applied to something that is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.
Indeed, Pants on Fire connotes something worse than a complete untruth.
It suggests a lie.
A lie.
Liar, liar, Pants on Fire goes the childhood taunt.
Those statements earning a pants-on-fire rating by PolitiFact must be pretty awful, and so must be the people saying such things.
Well, guess what?
That's not how science works.
But then, PolitiFact is not a scientific organization.
Nor are fact-checkers scientists.
Any organization that conflates the veracity of a statement with the intention of a person making the statement, as PolitiFact does with its Pants on Fire rating, is not even pretending to hide its anti-scientific bent.
Here's one example of where they applied this rating, to the Lab Leak Hypothesis in September of 2020.
Of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, PolitiFact wrote, That is, of course, proof that fact-checking doesn't work.
then, but the political wins have.
Exactly.
And by May of 2021, PolitiFact had changed their minds, saying in an editor's note that they have removed this fact check from their database as the claim is now understood to be more widely disputed.
You don't say.
That is, of course, proof that fact checking doesn't work.
Exactly.
That is proof that fact checking does not work.
So as does the fact that the fact checkers set to the task in this experiment did not agree.
Exactly.
That actually completely stunned me.
Any article on which they're fact-checkers of dubious fact-checking capability, how about, any article on which they did not agree should not have been included.
Right.
By, you know, just to be consistent with their own still flawed, but their own metrics, but no.
So there's a lot in the supplemental information.
There are a lot.
I just started looking through the headlines, the hundreds of headlines, like in 265 articles, that they had both the fact-checkers, there's arbiters of truth, and there are hapless respondents who sometimes believe things that weren't true.
Um, went through.
So this is for, um, studies two and three.
Headlines for articles chosen from the low-quality conservative news stream.
And so, you know, they, they looked at low-quality liberal news stream, although they couldn't find as many low-quality liberal outlets.
Funny.
They just didn't have as many.
Um, but they had equal numbers of, uh, mainstream conservative and mainstream liberal outlets and a lot of, uh, low-quality outlets that they couldn't quite decide what they were.
Um, Let's just look at the top one here.
Why are volcanoes all over the globe suddenly shooting giant clouds of ash miles into the air?
That's the headline from January 13th, 2020.
Modal fact checker rating.
Again, we don't know if that means 3, 4, 5.
We don't, like, it means just a majority of fact checkers of whom there were probably only 5 on this said, yeah, this is false or misleading.
The topic they say is science, and then interestingly the lien of the article they give is neutral.
So the methods and the supplemental information does not actually give complete information.
They do not tell me which... they do not give links to or tell me exactly which article this is, but they tell me the headline, they tell me when it was published.
So if you will give me my screen back for a moment.
What I find when I look And then you can put this back up, is this, which I suspect is not the original place this article was published, but exactly this headline one day later.
Why are volcanoes all over the globe suddenly shooting giant clouds of ash miles into the air?
January 14, 2020.
It's possible this is a totally different article, but when I look for various keywords and such from the time, I find a few articles like this, but nothing is anywhere close in terms of this headline.
And this is the headline of the article that they say they looked at.
Obviously this is clear to you, but it is obscene that they would deny you the ability to know that you were evaluating the correct article because you could invalidate their method by discovering that things that they had rated as false or misleading are actually true by doing your own research, which would of course invalidate their premise.
I am clearly likely to be suckered into believing misinformation.
You know why?
You know how you can tell?
Because I'm doing my own research.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
So this one, which again, I've given all the caveats I think I can about, you know, whether or not this is actually the article that they had their people look at, claims that there certainly hasn't been a lack of seismic activity so far in 2020.
So when I go, if I can have my screen back again for a moment, when I go to Actually, I'm just going to read this off my screen.
When I go to the links in that article, I find several volcanic eruptions within a couple of weeks of that article being published, and I checked several of them, and just three are... So this was published January 14th, 2020.
The headline is, again, Why are volcanoes all over the globe suddenly shooting giant clouds of ash miles into the air?
which the immodal number of fact-checkers, not to be less than three or more than five, assessed as a false or misleading article.
In Alaska, volcano Shishaldan in the Aleutians on January 7th erupted, sending ash 19,000 feet into the air.
In the Philippines, volcano Tal on January 12th erupted, shooting ash and steam six to nine miles vertically into the air.
And in Peru, on the same day, January 12th, Volcano Sabancaya erupted, shooting ash 24,000 feet vertically into the air.
So, patently, this false and misleading article can't be about the false and misleading nature of it.
It can't be about, were there several volcanoes all over the world shooting ash vertically several miles into the air?
They were.
I checked those claims against other sources, but the sources for two of those that I just read, the sources linked in the original article, were from the relevant volcanologists or geological places for the regions where they were.
So it was actually primary right there in the article.
So that raises the question of what might be false or misleading, because the vast majority of that article is just like, here's another one, here's another one, here's another one, here's when it erupted, it went sky high, ash miles into the air.
So the only place it could be false is Y. The Y. But that's not...
A well-worked out piece of science, so...
A, that's not a well-worked out piece of science.
B, the article doesn't make a claim.
The headline says why.
And then, and the guy starts with like, well, I've been talking about this.
And he ends with basically suggestive language around, I think, something bigger is afoot.
I think there's something bigger afoot.
And he has a link, he doesn't even say this, but he has a link in the article to, granted, a Christian apocalypse site.
Saying, you know, this is what all this means.
That's not even in the article!
Now, again, I'm not 100% sure that this is the article that they were assessing, but remember that seven-point ordinal scale.
Having read this article as a respondent, as an experimental subject, doing just what I did, you know, or, you know, I don't know, maybe less, maybe more, and saying, well, were there volcanoes shooting ash You know, miles in the air?
Recently?
All over the world?
Oh!
Oh, there were.
There were.
So, when you were asked, then, to... I'll just put this up again.
If you were then asked, having read that article and having done research on its veracity, and now you're asked, okay, now that you've evaluated the article, we are interested in the strength of your opinion, please rank the article on the following scale, from definitely not true to definitely true.
When I read that article, I think, I don't know that I trust the guy writing it, and I certainly don't buy the one link that I find at the end that goes to a Christian apocalypse site, but that's not even in the article.
The only claims he actually makes in the article are, hmm, something's happening.
There's a pattern.
Something big is happening.
I think something big is afoot.
And the evidence for that something big is happening claim is, frankly, irrefutable.
So if I were asked if I was a respondent here on in this crazy piece of research Definitely not true to definitely true.
I might if I were being a little bit I think frankly now I would I think that's a little careless Be like, oh, I'm not sure like the guy doesn't seem totally trustworthy But everything that he claims that he actually claims is true.
I might have given it a six I think I should have given it a seven because that's definitely true everything that he actually says That is fact-based.
All the claims that are factual.
All the claims that are factual are in fact true and fact-based.
But remember what our friends at fact-checking organizations claimed, which was, again, why are volcanoes all over the globe suddenly shooting giant clouds of ash miles into the air?
Modal fact-checker rating false or misleading.
- Yeah. - Or Azak.
- Well, I would just, not that I think that they are actually thinking this carefully, but just to give the devil his due.
- Yep. - My guess is that they are saying the false or misleading part is that there's no pattern that this is more than in previous years.
That's the part that, at least from what I've seen, it also makes it very hard to evaluate This guy does give specific links for the things that have happened this year.
They have a lot of wiggle room, but my guess is that's where they are able to... But they are inferring.
So, you know, why are volcanoes all over the globe suddenly shooting giant clouds of ash miles into the air?
Suddenly is a little bit, you know, enthusiastic.
That's an editorial claim.
And there is an implied hypothesis that this is happening now and it hasn't happened before, right?
He doesn't even really – like, it's implied.
It's an implied hypothesis.
Suddenly – well, that's what I just said.
The suddenly is the editorial here.
So my point really is, with regard to this, How could you, as an experimental subject, have assessed this?
Because there is, in the headline and in the last paragraph of the piece, an at least implied hypothesis of there's something bigger going on here, right?
But the vast majority of the article is just, here's another, here's one, Here's another one.
Here's another one.
Here it is.
And it's mostly Pacific Rim, but it's not entirely.
He doesn't say that, but I was looking, like, maybe it's not all over the world.
Like, no, it's all over the world.
There are a bunch of volcanoes.
So I would also point out that the suddenly is in the title.
Very good chance he didn't write the title.
At some level, who cares?
No, no, I get it.
But how are you?
What does true to not true mean?
What did the fact-checkers assess that they went false-misleading?
The fact-checkers were told true, they got three options.
True, false and misleading, or undetermined, couldn't tell.
Whereas the experimental subjects weren't offered a misleading to not misleading option.
They were only offered a true to not true option.
So even if fact-checkers were actually arbiters of truth, and even if somehow, even though they're arbiters of truth, a lot of times they get it wrong and the mode of their responses is still the right way to do it, even if those things were true, which neither of them are, Still, you have to give them the same task as you give the respondents.
You don't get to offer the fact checkers true or false or misleading, and then only offer the respondents true to not true.
What do you think?
It's not a legitimate scale, and frankly, with articles like that being included, maybe there's something misleading there, because we haven't been told what's happened in past years, and the hypothesis is implied that this is happening more now.
But in terms of what is simply displayed on in the article, it's true.
So, I'm sorry, true to not true doesn't fit.
Well, I mean, I do have the sense...
This is driving you crazy because it isn't what it masquerades as.
Which is science.
Right.
But there is now an ecosystem of... I don't even know what to call it.
So remember the definition of malinformation.
Malinformation are things based in truth that cause you to distrust authority.
This is the inverse of that.
This is malinformation to the negative one.
Yes!
It's fiction that causes you to trust authority, right?
This is pseudo-quantification, shoddy methodology.
It's nonsense.
It's a failure of deductive logic that assumes access to effectively a divine slate of truths, which simply doesn't exist.
And everybody knows it doesn't exist.
So the point is, if you were...
I think it's also important that people understand the relationship between this and cargo cult science.
Yes.
So cargo cult science is a very famous piece written by Feynman who describes Put that in the show notes.
Vast scientific failures that follow a pattern where people get involved in going through motions that appear scientific and discussing things in ways that sound scientific, but without doing the philosophically proper work to make their conclusions justified, resulting in false things taking on the veneer of science.
So we have this censorship complex that has decided that it wants to prevent us from discovering certain things by silencing voices, by declaring certain claims fictional.
It has been embarrassed again and again by us small fries out here in podcast land who have demonstrated that lots of things that have been declared pants on fire and worse... - Not mainstream media.
Not mainstream at all, therefore must be low quality.
Right, it's insane, and you know, it runs afoul of This principle which I deploy sometimes, which is that every great idea starts as a minority of one.
Right.
If you're going to decide that you can just check with people as to whether or not something's true, then you're basically saying that we're never going to learn anything new again because we're going to keep shutting down people who come up with something that we haven't figured out yet, you know, while they're still in the minority.
So there's no method here.
There's none, right?
This is high-tech sophistry.
Yep.
And You know, it's like you're damned if you do.
Do you get drawn in as you have and explain all of the insanity buried in... Oh, I haven't explained all of it.
Well, do you set yourself the task of saying, here is why this paper, which claims some thing, some conclusion, is actually not sufficient to reach that conclusion?
The reason I think it's important is because there's a good chance this paper just could have gotten created and disappeared and no one would have read it ever.
There's a decent chance that it could have gotten grabbed by one of these new organizations whose business it is to make sure that no one disagrees with the orthodoxy.
And what actually happened was it got picked up by, you know, someone who calls himself an analyst at Washington Post, who admits in the article that he wrote that it's dense, and he doesn't admit it, but he, you know, he basically It seems to me that he likely didn't read the actual research, but it also seems to me that he's ideologically captured and he wanted to believe what he wanted to believe.
And so when you actually go in, I didn't know what I was going to find.
I mean, my bias going in was I did not expect it to be brilliantly done.
And I expected, frankly, I expected there to be some more games played with the mainstream liberal versus mainstream conservative outlets.
And they look pretty clean on that, like they, you know, they have their fact-checkers coming up with, you know, oh those things are, you know, basically the fact-checkers are caring less about liberal versus conservative as mainstream versus little guys.
That's what the fact-checkers were biasing towards.
And, you know, you could say, you could argue, no, you got it wrong, you got it backwards.
The fact-checkers found that because the mainstream media sources are more likely to be true are more likely to be reporting actual truth than the so-called low-quality sources.
And maybe if you recognize that there are just a hell of a lot more smaller media sources, yes, there will be more things that are wrong just based on the numbers.
But The idea that at this point you are trusting the mainstream because it is mainstream, and you've pulled fact-checkers who don't work for any of the organizations that they're actually including in this research, but they work for, like, these are professional fact-checkers who are working for mainstream outlets who are being asked to go in and assess the veracity of articles that, you know, with regard to COVID,
What most people thought was clearly wrong.
Some of us were saying that at the time, some of us were missing some of those things and getting other things, but why?
How is this still happening?
And this was sent to me precisely with the line something like, you know, this again?
This is still happening?
It's important because this is still happening, because they're still up to these tricks.
Well, of course they're still up to these tricks.
There's an industry.
There's an actual industry that is basically creating work designed to sideline people who keep embarrassing Goliath.
Right.
And so that industry has set about the task of making things look scientific.
And this is not an article designed to be read.
This is an article designed to be cited.
Right.
That's the difference is.
And we see this in all over the place.
We see this now with respect to things like the randomized controlled trials that supposedly proved that ivermectin didn't work.
Once you get into the details of what these things were, they were incapable of testing the question properly at all.
They were designed to fail.
But what you really need is the headline that says this has now been tested and we've established a fact.
Now, you could look at the claim That they had a method for figuring out whether or not this worked, and you could spot on its face there will be no method.
Because there is no mechanism for figuring out when somebody has a belief that seems scandalously off now that turns into the mainstream belief.
five years later, right?
There's no method.
There couldn't be a method.
What would that method even be?
The only conceivable method would involve a very long period of time in which you saw whether if we do this test today, 25 years from now, did the fact that we thought was a fact stand up or did the facts that we think are facts not stand up, right?
Right?
If you did a very long experiment, you could conceivably figure out some sort of a trend, but you're still not establishing whether something is true.
What you're establishing is how stable it's become, whether the interpretation flips back and forth or stabilizes into one thing over time.
So, of course this wasn't going to have a method, because there isn't one.
There's no conceivable method.
Well, no, I disagree.
There is a method.
And I mean, this maybe is my main point.
There is precisely a method.
And so if we speak imprecisely and say, oh, there's no method, they're going to be able to say, of course there's a method, you can see it.
I don't mean that there's no method in the paper.
I mean, there's no method to do what they claim there is a method for.
But I do think that we need to be precise when we can.
about the methodology, which is A, buried, B, abstruse, and C, even so, even in the supplementary information, there is not everything that you would need to fully assess what is going on here.
But even here, it is not possible for that method to have done what it claims to have done.
Right.
And indeed, no method could.
Yes.
In fact, we have.
It is impossible to ask this question given humans.
There is a method we have to work in this direction, and it's called science.
Yeah.
Right?
Sorry, let me change pages.
It's impossible to ask this question given humans in the short term.
Right.
Well, let's put it this way.
The strength of science in establishing what is factually true is that it does not claim anything as permanent.
Right?
There's nothing it can conclude that couldn't be upended by better information later.
So the point is, science, its very strength is that it admits this method can't be.
Right?
That there is a way of establishing what is true, and that is formulating a hypothesis.
It makes predictions.
If those predictions are borne out in experiment and no other hypothesis predicts those same things, then you have a theory that doesn't make it permanent.
It means it is still up for falsification.
Given more evidence, which, you know, you don't have to know very much of the history of science to see the pattern.
Right.
Right?
So anyway, science is the method, and they're trying to replace it with social garbage, right?
This is people who really don't know how to think doing a different job, which is trying to give the veneer of science to things that don't deserve it.
That's right.
I do want to share a couple more.
Sure.
This is, again, from the supplemental information of this paper that was published at the end of 2023.
This is the top one.
There's some weird type font thing there.
From late May 2020.
Remember late May 2020?
Things were weird.
Things seemed like they were as bad as they could get, and then George Floyd died, and things went even stupider.
Your immunity passport future begins to materialize as airlines call for digital ID tracking systems.
Well, the modal fact checkers declared that false or misleading.
And, uh, and that was a a science article, apparently.
Um, one more in here, uh... Oh, Chinese, from June of 2020, Chinese scientists escorted out of Canadian Biolab sent deadly viruses to Wuhan.
False or misleading?
Okay.
From May of 2020 again, Fauci says he wears a mask to be a symbol of what you should be doing.
That's right, it is true and the topic is science and lean of the article is neutral.
Just to show what class, what is being classified as science and what seems neutral.
Oh my goodness!
And one more, Um, this is from, let's see, I've lost the thing that I wanted.
What to do from this?
Well, this one, June 2020, CDC, more Americans drinking cleaning products than ever before.
That had no mode.
That was one of the very few where the fact checkers actively, actively disagreed.
This is the one I wanted to show, line four from table S14.
Forced vaccinations will control your life, warns Religious Liberty Group.
That's labeled false or misleading and also in science.
And I wanted to end there because one other thing that I wanted to do before we move into talking about Panama is, so again, that was forced vaccinations will control your life, Warren's religious liberty group.
And it's labeled false or misleading by the mode of, by, you know, three, four or five fact-checkers who were asked to assess this, which strikes me as interesting in light of what the Canadian federal court did this week.
The Canadian federal court this week declared that Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act during the Trekkers convoy and after it was unconstitutional, which is remarkable.
So thanks to Dan Arcand who sent this to me.
He's the Canadian patriot whose letter documenting the early stages of the Trekkers convoy.
And the mood of the country, the mood of Canada, and how it changed this truckers convoy began.
He sent that to us in late January of 2020 and I published that on Natural Selections and it became one of my most widely read and appreciated pieces.
He... Dan sent me to an article in True North News, which I'll post, but I also took a look at the original ruling, which of course, as you might imagine, is kind of long and legalese.
But, hold on, this is not... No, this is it.
Okay, so I'm just going to read a little bit from the conclusion, again from the federal court in Canada, which has found that the emergency use of... Trudeau's use of the Emergency Act during the Trager's Convoy was illegal, was unconstitutional.
This is remarkable.
Writes the judge, At the outset of these proceedings, while I had not reached a decision on any of the four applications, I was leaning to the view that the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was reasonable.
I considered the events that occurred in Ottawa and other locations in January and February 2022 went beyond legitimate protest and reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order.
I had and continue to have considerable sympathy for those in government who were confronted with the situation.
Had I been at their tables at that time, I may have agreed that it was necessary to invoke the Act.
And I acknowledge that in conducting judicial review of that decision, I am revisiting that time with the benefit of hindsight and a more extensive record of the facts and law than that which was before the GIC.
GIC is the Governor in Council, which is the body that made the decision.
My preliminary view of the reasonableness of the decision may have prevailed following the hearing due to excellent advocacy on the part of Council for the Attorney General of Canada.
Had I not taken the time to carefully deliberate about the evidence and submissions, particularly those of the CCLA and CCF, that is the I can't find it because I'm hearing.
The CCLA is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the CCF is the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
They're two public organizations.
He writes, the judge writes, their participation in these proceedings has demonstrated again the value of public interest litigants, especially in presenting informed legal argument.
This case may not have turned out the way it has without their involvement, as the private interest litigants were not as capable of marshalling the evidence and argument in support of their applications.
Just an aside here.
He actually refused to... I'm not a lawyer.
I don't know the language.
He refused to hear several of the private litigants.
He decided they did not have standing.
They had certainly had cases and they had grievances.
And, you know, to my untrained legal eye, they looked legitimate.
um but he had he he said he declared several of the private litigants not not that did not have standing a couple of the private ones did um but it was as he says here it was the public litigants um who whose testimony really changed his mind and remarkable for this judge to have said that here i have concluded that the decision to issue the proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness justification transparency and intelligibility and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration
So that's remarkable in many regards.
The public order emergency was not – the conditions were not satisfied and there never should have been a public order emergency.
So that's remarkable in many regards.
One, it lets you see how much we must have vigorous public debate because effectively if you had successfully demonized the position, if the censors had been successful, it's not obvious that the challenges necessary would have reached this judge.
And this judge would still have the inverse view of whether or not this was tolerable and justifiable.
Yeah.
I mean, his characterization of the protest in here, in this finding in which he reverses, in which he says, no, that was unconstitutional, guys.
You can't have done that.
In that document, his description of what happened in the truckers' convoy in Ottawa strikes me as practically the opposite of everything that I know to have happened, not having been able to be there because, again, not vaccinated.
I told you at the time, and I actually said this on another podcast recently, this is the only protest that I have ever known about that I really, really desperately wanted to be at.
And of course, In part, the point was, like, no, you can't come.
Yeah.
Yes.
You, unvaccinated foreigner, cannot come into our country.
Yeah, well... So, you know, unacceptable breakdown of public order.
Just, you know, the people that I know, including Dan Arcand, who were on the ground there, you know, that's not what was being reported by the people who were involved in the actual protest in the truckers' convoy.
But this judge had that in his head, because that was what was being reported in the mainstream media across the board, and he changed his mind, and he reversed this, and that's amazing.
So thank goodness for the heroes who stood up.
I was thinking in particular of Viva Frey, who I didn't know before this, but his reporting on the ground put the lie to the mainstream story of what was going on there.
And we have photographer Dan Aponte, whose photographs I published some of.
He was just taking pictures of these people who were there, and gosh, they didn't look like Nazis.
So, except the one guy with the flag, as if on cue.
Yeah, there was a guy.
I don't think Dan took a picture of him, but he was doing these portraits.
I assume that he was there to legitimize the argument that this was, you know, off-kilter.
And then after that guy showed up, and we're not Canadians, so we're going to forget all of the relevant stuff here, but showed up at a statue of someone who Canadians really hold in high esteem.
Members of the confine, members of the protest, were there basically guarding the statue afterwards for the entire rest of the protest to make sure that no idiots showed up and did anything stupid like that again.
Yep.
The whole thing makes very clear the importance of our ability to talk, right or wrong, outside of these controlled narrative streams.
And I think It is hard to overestimate the effect that we are actually having on history, resorting to unfettered conversations over the internet.
And therefore, how important it is that we defend our right to do that from things like the WHO pandemic preparedness plan, which actually, if we're done with this, I would just briefly shift to this other topic.
And we are going to get to Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, right?
Yes, we are.
But let's just say...
Those who have been following this podcast or who saw my interview with Tucker Carlson will know that the World Health Organization has been attempting to finalize alterations to their pandemic preparedness plan that involve absolutely tyrannical surrender of sovereignty that they have been plotting to
allow anything at all to be declared a public health emergency and then on the basis that something is a public health emergency to erode our ability to discuss things in public, to mandate treatments including gene therapy.
It's a really frightening set of provisions.
But here's the important part.
I have been getting murmurs that actually we are having an effect and that the pandemic preparedness measures which were hurtling towards ratification in I believe May of this year are actually faltering.
This stuff was designed not to be read.
We were supposed to all think it was too bureaucratic, COVID's in the past, not paying attention.
And because several people, including maybe most especially Meryl Nass, have been cracking these changes and calling attention of other COVID dissidents to it, we've picked up this story.
Anyway, it is now faltering.
So Zach, will you show that Guardian article?
So here we're showing the Guardian on, I believe, the 22nd.
of January.
Global pandemic agreement at risk of falling apart, who warns?
And then I'm going to keep reading if it's big enough for me to see from here.
Can you scroll a little bit?
Yeah, would you do that?
It says, plans for a global pandemic preparedness agreement risk falling apart amid wrangling and disinformation, according to the chief of the World Health Organization, who has warned that future generations, quote, may not forgive us.
Now that is an interesting claim that we should come back to.
Shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO's 194 member states decided more than two years ago to start negotiating an international accord aimed And ensuring countries are better equipped to deal with the next health catastrophe or to prevent it altogether.
Or to prevent it altogether.
Interesting.
The plan was to seal the agreement at the 2024 World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making body which convenes on the 27th of May.
However, Tedros, whose second two names are tougher to pronounce, Says, the Who's director general said the momentum had been slowed down by entrenched positions and a torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories.
So he doesn't call us out by name, but he certainly mentions our effect.
He warned that if nobody was prepared to seize the initiative or give ground, the whole project was at risk of going nowhere.
Okay, Tedros told the WHO's executive board in Geneva on Monday, time is very short and there are several outstanding issues that remain to be resolved, etc., etc.
So, anyway, the point is, we are not— So, the paragraph that I see, Tedros said, claims that the Accord would cede sovereignty to the WHO or give it the power to impose lockdowns and vaccine mandates were, quote, completely false.
We spent a fair bit of time.
I went through one of those documents in a very detailed way, and we talked about what was in it.
And what he said there is completely false.
Well, so Tucker surprised me by showing me Tedros claiming this on video, that there was no surrender of sovereignty, and I then went back later and listened carefully to what Tedros said, and it's very interesting.
His claim was based on the fact that we live in countries in which we are represented, and that they are surrendering their sovereignty.
You've already ceded your sovereignty.
Oh, we talked about this, actually.
We talked about this on our last livestream, I think.
You live in a representative democracy.
We've just taken over the reins.
Your representatives have ceded your sovereignty to us.
Right.
But here's the crazy part.
Tedros is now saying, well, the thing is in danger of faltering because of lies and misinformation, when in that clip what he said was, you have to get your representatives not to do this if you don't want your sovereignty.
Eroded that basically your representatives are your mechanism for deciding what you do and don't want to do and now he's complaining about the fact that that's what we've done, right?
We have exerted pressure on our representatives.
They're not interested in signing up for this.
That is our sovereignty and He doesn't think it's legitimate.
So anyway, it's a fascinating topic, but really my overarching point in showing that We're not powerless.
We are supposed to, part of the fifth generation warfare stuff is that we are supposed to feel powerless.
We're not powerless.
We're talking about a small number of people raising the alarm amongst large audiences using the tools of the internet, using Twitter and Rumble and the various tools that we are allowed to use to spread the word And the fact is, people do care.
They are paying attention.
And we have to keep fighting.
Now, just one last caution.
When you get on the scale and you see a number that you like, it's not a sign that you should start eating more and not exercise.
It's a sign that you should keep going.
Right?
So the point is, this is good news.
If we have to fully derail that treaty, right, we cannot say, oh, Phew, it's over.
For one thing, these people don't take no for an answer.
And if they can't do it through the World Health Organization, they'll do it some other way.
So we have to be vigilant.
And when we get Goliath back on his heels, we have to keep going.
So that's the message here, is we are having success.
We are not supposed to know that.
But having discovered that we have power, we need to exert it and drive the tyrants back into their cave.
All right.
So that's that.
Now, should we talk about Panama?
Yes.
I was just trying to pull the cat into view.
Yes.
The cat.
The cat.
All right.
Who so rarely shows up anymore.
This is Fairfax, everyone.
You'll remember Fairfax.
All right.
You'll at least remember his ears.
So let's talk a little bit about what Zach and I saw in Panama.
I believe Zach has put together a kind of a montage.
This will give people just sort of a sense for what we were doing.
We were there from the 15th to the 21st.
Yeah, the 15th to the 21st.
All right.
So we took a trip, a river trip, to visit one of the transit camps in the Darien Gaps.
So the Darien Gap, I should say, is the gap in the Pan American Highway.
As the Pan American Highway goes from the Northern reaches of North America to the southern tip of South America.
There's a place where a road has never been completed through a very dense piece of jungle.
It is not that a road could not be completed through the Darien.
It is that it has never been feasible to do it because the jungle is effectively ungoverned.
So we took a trip into the Darien Gap to watch the migrants.
This is one of the migrant camps.
And we were able to walk through this camp.
We talked to numerous migrants coming from all sorts of places.
What else you got?
- What have you got? - That's what I have prepared for that. - Okay.
So we also went, sure.
We saw this remarkable construction site This is a place where a bridge is being installed at the end of the Pan American Highway.
This is a massive construction project.
These are materials being delivered for the completion of this many million dollar bridge that is being constructed for no offsets.
They're going to be a foundational pillar for this bridge that they are constructing out of rebar there.
This is a massive project.
At the end of the Pan-American Highway leading to nowhere, leading simply to jungle, right?
With no explanation.
Did you ask anyone?
Yeah, we asked the foreman of the project and his answer made it even more mysterious.
He said that the villages that exist beyond the end of the Pan-American Highway in the Darien Gap grow a lot of yucca.
And yucca is a root I am particularly fond when it has been properly fried.
It's very delicious.
On the other hand, it grows all over the tropics.
There's really no reason to be transporting huge amounts of it from the Darien.
And even if you were going to transport huge amounts of it from the Darien, you wouldn't need a bridge this big.
There's something remarkable going on.
These people are literally building a bridge to nowhere.
The best they've got in terms of explanations is that there might be some desire to transport Yuka from villages to the rest of Panama.
But anyway...
So as I understand it, you do not want to talk sort of a lot more broadly here now about some of what you saw, in part because the conversation that you and Chris Martinson had at the end of the trip that is now on Our Locals, it includes a lot of things that provide necessary background to understand what is going on.
Yes, and I will say It is quite hilarious to discover people who think they're building a bridge to transport Yooka when that could not possibly be what's going on.
Chris and I sort through what might be going on, and it's a lot less funny.
So anyway, obviously we are working from an incomplete set of information.
We are having to piece together Possible meanings hypotheses from what it is that we saw that's something that has to be done carefully and Anyway, so yes, I don't want to speculate wildly here.
I think, I think you'll be well, uh, it's well worth your time to watch Chris and me sorting through it.
Um, may I just add really quickly?
Sure.
Um, we discovered a lot of stuff on this trip.
Uh, we did a lot of things including talking to migrants, uh, which we have video of, lots of different stuff, and, uh, stuff will be put out in various places, but if you want to discover a lot, um, that we learned from this trip, going to locals is the place to be, including, um, like I said, those videos of migrants, videos of You're talking about things and places and... I think maybe the two of you are going to go on camera and talk about what you've seen as well.
But there's going to be a lot of discussion and revealing of stuff that we saw and learned on this trip, mostly on Locals.
So I guess as long as we're here, you want to show those couple of... I got a couple good photographs.
One in the canal.
That's not enough information yet.
Oh, you're intentionally being vague.
Got it.
So, okay, so let's talk about this.
Some of you saw this on Twitter.
It was put out on Twitter by some of the folks we were with.
It's a very damp Howler Monkey.
It is a very damp Howler Monkey.
Hold on.
So let me just say what happened here.
We were coming back from a trip on Gatun Lake.
Gatun Lake is the large freshwater lake Actually, I'll just give a little background.
The French attempted to put a canal through Panama.
They failed because they didn't understand that yellow fever and malaria were mosquito-borne, and they did foolish things like put tables and beds sitting with their feet in cups of water to prevent ants from getting onto them, which then of course created a way for mosquitoes to breed.
Yep.
They also had a poor plan for making the canal.
They were going to dig it straight.
And what the Americans realized, I think it was de Lesseps who figured out that the way to do it was to dam the Chagres River, creating a large lake, which would greatly reduce the amount of actual digging that needed.
There was a lot of dredging that needed to be done, but a lot less digging than would have needed to be done to dig straight across Panama.
Although even so, the little bit of digging that they did do is called the Culebra Cut, meaning snake, and it's not straight either.
So like nothing that the Americans ended up doing except for the locks at both ends are particularly straight.
Yeah, I mean, it's not even... I didn't mean straight that way, I meant just dig, dig, dig, rather than create a lake, which would allow, you know, required the ships to be elevated, but it made the project tractable.
So, in any case, that situation is pretty interesting.
Now, almost three million years ago, something like 2.7 million years ago, North and South America were connected by the Isthmus of Panama, which the geological evidence suggests rose from the sea, and of course... Ish.
It's like a 12 million year process.
It's that moment of like 2.8-ish million years ago.
It's like the end of like a 12 million year process, which involves both, you know, drift and uplift.
It resulted biotically in creatures moving in both directions, and interestingly, the pattern was not haphazard with respect to which competitors won out in this.
It's called the Great Faunal Interchange, and it's a pretty interesting story.
Let me just say that when the Great Interfinal Interchange happened on land and, you know, rejoicing in the land, what happened in the seas was the Great Schism.
The Great Schism.
And because these waterways between the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific, which had always been open, were now closed, and there's some remarkably excellent research, actually, Because we can actually date the moment of the land bridge forming very precisely, we can actually figure out differences in evolution, gene evolution, organismal evolution, gene flow in the marine organisms on both sides.
And the fact that we terrestrial biologists view this as a great faunal interchange suggests that we are suffering from a certain amount of schismism.
Yeah, discrimination against the schism of the seas.
Yes.
Now, interestingly though, in 1913, when the canal was completed, it reinstated a division between North and South America.
There is no land crossing other than, well, when I was there doing my work and you were there as well, there was one bridge.
You've been back to Panama since then.
I haven't been back.
Yeah, I think when I did my study abroad there in the mid-aughts and early teens, I thought that there was still just the Bridge of the Americas, but I may have missed it because we weren't hanging out in the canal zone mostly.
There are at least now two more bridges, but nonetheless, these are not ways that a creature is likely, you know, a creature in four lanes of traffic.
That's not how it's done.
So anyway, the creation of the Panama Canal basically reinstituted a schism between North and South America, and interestingly... A land schism, yeah.
Yeah, this seems...
Seemed impossible.
It is also, even though the canal is elevated above sea level on both sides, facilitating the exchange of sea life between the Pacific and the Caribbean.
And do we know, is that like stowaways on boats, or is that moving in with the locks?
There has been some stowaway, there's been some bilgewater stuff, but this is actually apparently creatures being pulled in behind boats.
And the surprising thing about it is since the canal is freshwater, you would think that most ocean creatures wouldn't tolerate it, but apparently there are now ocean fish being routinely pulled out of the canal by fishermen.
And there's also saltwater intrusion, which is a problem because the freshwater for Panama City largely comes from the canal.
But anyway.
So many problems.
Yeah.
I digress, though.
So we were coming back from a trip on Gatun Lake out to Barrow, Colorado Island, which is where I did bat work.
And I was sitting in the front of the boat, kind of waiting to see birds, and I realized there's something in the water.
And I said, what's that?
And Matt said, I don't know.
Matt was one of the people who was with us on this trip, and we diverted the boat to go look at it.
And it turned out to be something I'd never seen before and nobody else present had seen before, which was a monkey swimming across the canal.
So here's that monkey.
So this is a howler monkey.
The canal is way too wide for...
He's got an otter tail, doesn't he?
Yeah. - Oh.
Anyway, you can see him swimming, and you'll get some sense here in a minute or two how far he has to go.
The canal is way too wide.
It'd be difficult, you could do it as a person, but much harder as an arboreal.
Yeah, so again, the canal here is a lake.
People imagine the canal is locks all the way through.
And as we're watching this monkey go here, this, uh, I think it's a freighter, um, came cruising through and just barely missed the monkey.
And you can see how delayed his transit.
Yeah.
So we've.
And the monkey basically gave up and stopped swimming after that boat had passed.
And this guy had a net in his boat.
We were reluctant to pick the monkey up because there was a very good chance he'd get bit.
But anyway, this guy had a net and he put him in a tree.
Now, I find this whole thing Fascinating, and it's almost impossible for me not to see it in symbolic terms, right?
I mean, for one thing, this monkey's habitat was divided by a canal put in in 1913, and that means that habitat that a monkey like this used to be able to transit even in the treetops is now something that he has to contemplate swimming to get across.
Now, what would motivate him, you know, how bad do things have to be wherever he was to motivate that?
These waters are crocodile infested.
When you and I were there, we used to swim regularly and the crocodiles, with one notable exception, did not harass people unless you got between them and their nests, their nests of babies.
That is apparently no longer the case.
The crocodiles are now, they kill people somewhat regularly and people no longer swim there.
And this monkey was swimming in a place that is apparently dense with crocodiles.
Is it possible, I mean, you don't know, but it's possible it wasn't a choice.
It's hard to tell when a monkey is wet and there was very little there for scale, but he sort of looked little for a howler.
I thought so too.
He looked young and, you know, he looked bedraggled, but that's just because he was.
But he could have fallen out of a tree and then sort of been disoriented and not realized what way to go.
I'm pretty sure he was well-oriented because as we stopped to look at him, other boats saw our behavior and came in and started looking at him too.
And he didn't start spinning in place or something, he just kept going.
Their action disoriented him and then he kept reorienting towards the shore on the other side.
Including us, we kept getting in his way too.
He knew which way he was going.
- And after the big ship. - Yeah. - But anyway, it is, there's something about watching this animal who is in a newly unnatural habitat That canal is a profound feature of the landscape, obviously.
I came to think of it as like an aorta of the world economy and actually it's even more so than when we were there because The canal has been upgraded and improved and the amount of cargo that is capable of moving through this thing is absolutely stunning.
So you've got a huge fraction of the world's economic activities passing through this canal and this monkey whose world has been divided by it is now confronted by these immense ships.
So anyway, it does Does in some way mirror all of our predicament, right?
We're living in an unnatural world in which forces that are almost too big to consider have profound impacts on our ability to just even simply operate our program and do whatever it is we should be doing.
Anyway, so I thought that was... Here we are narrowly missing being plowed under by giant entities that were not of our choosing.
Totally.
And, you know, it's hard to convey what it was like to look at this ship.
Like, I took a lot of photographs, none of them good because, except the one of the monkey at the beginning here, but it was very hard.
How do you capture?
If you capture the ship... And it's a speck, the monkey doesn't show up.
It's a speck, and if you capture the monkey, then it's like, you know, some weird background, but... The difference in scale is too immense to convey photographically.
Absolutely.
But it was also interesting to watch, you know, this animal is a migrant.
And in some ways his predicament isn't that different than people crossing the perilous Darien Gap for, you know, because wherever they're fleeing from conditions are bad enough that it is worth contemplating that journey.
We have some other stuff to show as long as we're here.
Yeah, so we'll just show a few photos to Give people a sense of what we were looking at.
So this was on our river journey.
That's a cormorant that has caught a catfish.
That's so cool.
We saw lots of... That's your photograph?
Yep.
We saw lots of indigenous people actually spearing catfish.
I've never seen this before.
People with masks and spears.
Like snorkel masks?
Yeah.
Just by the side of the river spearing fish.
So they'd be looking underwater with their masks, and then they'd come up and spear them?
Well, typically they would look at us through their masks, and then they would go back to... But how were they... they were hunting with their eyes underwater?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
In pretty muddy water.
Yep.
Interesting.
All right, so here's me with one of the Centifront guys.
The Centifront is the part of the Panamanian government that is charged with guarding the border.
I will point out, this is you, a Centifront guy, dressed incredibly warmly for 90 degree weather with Sun, you know, yeah, I didn't I didn't buy anything I think he looked awfully comfortable for a guy wearing as much as he was in that heat But I mean we were all just soaking our t-shirts early with sweat.
Yeah.
Yeah again Okay.
All right Oh, here's the lock of the Panama Canal, which I'd never gone through the Panama Canal before I've lived in it, but I never gone through the lock.
So this was a pretty cool experience There's Zach and me before the lock fills.
We're sort of moving in the small ships that you can transit the canal in, get tucked in with the big ships so that water is not wasted in the transit.
Oh, here I saw an osprey catch something, probably.
I'm not actually sure what it was, but anyway, I thought that was a nice photo and a good shot.
It's really nice.
So anyway, if you're interested in more about our conclusions from that trip, definitely go over to Locals.
We will talk about conclusions from that trip more in the future, here and elsewhere.
So anyway, stay tuned.
I think that's all I got.
All right.
Well, I think we've arrived then at the end.
So yeah, just to hit it one more time, go over to Locals.
Please, please join us there.
There's been a watch party going on now.
We've got our Discord community over there.
Release guest episodes early there before they are released to the public.
But, you know, right now, in the wake of this trip that Brett and Zach took into the Canal Zone and the Darien in Panama with Michael Yan and Chris Martinson and a few others, there's just already there's a release of some very important stuff there, and we encourage you to join us there.
Yeah, let me just, I'll add one more thing I forgot to say.
What we are really navigating in that discussion that Chris and I had is the question of whether or not this is an invasion of the U.S., why there is such a large Chinese component to it, and these are things that need to be thought about very carefully.
But anyway, that's all discussed in that video.
Yeah, I mean, I guess, since you just said that, the thing that has been most surprising to me about hearing, not just from you, but from others who are eyewitness to what has been happening, is that it is not entirely, or even in many places, largely Latin Americans who are coming across the border.
Yes, there are many Latin Americans, but the degree to which this is somehow a global phenomenon that starts actually in Quito, Ecuador for a lot of them, tells a different story.
There's something afoot.
Yeah, indeed.
All right.
So join us there.
Also, actually this Sunday on Locals, we'll have our monthly private Q&A.
So at 11am Pacific for two hours and open now is the question asking period for that, which you can also get to on Locals.
Gosh, I guess lots of other stuff, but check out our wonderful sponsors this week.
That was Moink, Seed, and Paleo Valley.
We'll have links to everything we talked about in the show notes, and a reminder that we are supported by you, our audience.
Given that we're going to be putting a bunch of good stuff up on Locals, an easy way to support us is to go over and join on Locals.
