The Question is Moot: The 217th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 217th 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 the Supreme Court, the First Amendment, Covid, censorship, DEI, the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, and affirmative action, in the context of Murthy v State of Missouri. We also talk about Goliath being a combination of emergence and collusion, and how facts are being used to support existing narr...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 217.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
We are remembering how to count backwards from three, doing an okay job at this point.
I think I got this one nailed.
Yes.
Speaking of numbers.
Yes.
217.
Not prime.
It's not prime.
Nope.
Because three, not three, 31 is a factor as therefore is seven.
31 and 7.
Yeah, I should have seen that coming.
Anyway, for the part of our audience who tunes in only to find out if this week's numbers are prime, you can leave now.
They're reluctant to look it up for themselves.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, today we're going to talk about a lot of good stuff.
Goliath, collusion, emergence.
Some stuff going on at a conference in Chicago.
Data, evidence.
We're just going to keep throwing out nouns.
We're just going to throw out nouns.
Contextually speaking, we are going to wrestle with some very important modern current issues, but you are going to find, if you've been a longtime viewer of the podcast or listener of the podcast, that many of the tools that have emerged in various places over the course of many years are suddenly relevant all at once in some sort of chaos, and we're going to try to figure out where to stand to look at that chaos.
The face you made while you said relevant was, I don't know, amusing.
I'm excited to see that again.
The relevant in the room.
Yes.
The relevant in the room.
The relevant in the room.
We had some friends on the island this weekend, and at one point you were talking about some of the snark that happens on Twitter and using this really nasal voice, and our friend Drew said, it's like double italics.
He's speaking in double italics.
Double italics.
Yes, I was ridiculing a particular Twitter voice, which, you know, it could happen live.
You never know.
That's one of the things about a live broadcast.
Yeah, indeed.
Indeed.
So, hey, join us over at Locals.
That's where the Watch Party is happening.
There's a great conversation that Brett had with pathologist Ryan Cole up there for local supporters and lots of other great stuff as well.
That's where we do our Q&As and not today, but we did last week and we will again in a week and a half.
So, lots of great stuff there.
Please consider joining us over at Locals.
And, of course, we have three sponsors at the top of the hour, as we always do, for whom we are very grateful.
We'll start there and then we'll launch right into the rest of the show.
Without further ado, our sponsors this week are Momentous, Moink, and Seed.
And although I will say I am reading the Moink ad this week because it's the middle one and I always do two because I'm better at reading than you are.
I'm happy for you to do two.
I mean, let's just be honest.
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Salmon is particularly tough.
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Yeah, it's gonna require a certain amount of creativity.
They're not famous for their vocalization, salmon.
They are, amongst other salmon.
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We're just going to have to agree to disagree, which is not something we usually do on this podcast, but I don't think we're going to do that either.
All right.
I'm not quite agreeing to no such thing.
Agreeing to no such thing.
Well, I guess we know what the rest of this particular episode is going to be about then.
Yeah.
Okay.
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Yes.
All right, where are we starting?
Wherever you like.
I've got some things to add in to what you've got planned, but you've got a lot planned.
I've got a lot planned.
All right, so again, as I mentioned up top, there are a number of issues coming together They fit very clearly into a model that you and I have been building up on a number of different topics, but where to stand to see it is not so obvious.
So one of the topics that we are going to address today is what took place in the Supreme Court yesterday in a hearing on a case that was originally known as Missouri v. Biden.
It is now Martha v. Missouri.
Zach, do you want to show the Supreme Court case itself?
Put that up.
So this is a case that surrounds the... Can you embiggen it a little bit?
Thanks.
I know.
All right, there you go.
So this is a case that involves several friends of ours who are fighting the censorship regime that we discovered had been impacting the freedom of speech online where the federal government had been coercing and coordinating with
the social media platforms to restrict the flow of information from dissidents.
So this case has now made it to the Supreme Court in part, and a hearing was held yesterday Do you want to show Aaron Cariotti showing the lining of his jacket as he is headed to the Supreme Court yesterday for oral argument?
So Aaron Cariotti is a doctor.
Whose speech was restricted during the the COVID crisis.
There he is showing the inner lining of the jacket that he wore into court.
I am listed there somewhere as somebody whose speech was being restricted.
Presumably a reference to the removal of The Malone Kirsch podcast or the Pierre Corey podcast.
But in any case, so oral arguments happened yesterday on this case, and the world of people who is concerned about the censorship industrial complex or whatever your particular term for the phenomenon is, was abuzz and indeed aghast at some of the things that took place during oral arguments.
I will say that I am in a increasingly familiar situation of being shocked but not surprised by what I heard.
Zach, do you want to play the clip of oral arguments that I sent you?
Justice Jackson?
So am I.
My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.
I mean, what would you have the government do?
I've heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe, don't do it, is not going to get it done.
And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.
So, can you help me?
Because I'm really worried about that, because you've got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government's perspective, and you're saying that the government can't interact with the source of those problems.
And, Your Honor, I understand that incident, and I guess what I tell you is the government
OK, so in that talking, I won't say it's an exchange because really we were just hearing from Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, who has put forth before that clip began a hypothetical in which there is a a viral phenomenon of kids jumping out of windows because of something that's being said
Online where she is effectively arguing that the federal government would have not only a right but an obligation to To step in and tamp down the spread of whatever this was that was causing kids to jump out of windows.
And so she is arguing two things.
She's arguing, one, that the First Amendment has some sort of an exemption for places in which the federal government has an overriding interest in defending the public from something spreading online.
And Then, uh, so I wanted to point out a couple things about this.
That argument to me sounds like something you would hear in moot court.
So moot court is a tool inside of legal education where something that looks like a court is set up and people who are studying the law take, they participate in a mock trial that has no implication
But allows them to test out various things and this is not so different from Speech and debate in either college or high school and I will say I had a history in speech and debate early in my high school career And one of the things that is true is that you are often handed an argument that you are supposed to defend.
This is, in fact, a feature of being a lawyer.
You may well be representing a client that you detest, but the client has a right to a defense, and that is your obligation to give them the best defense they can get.
And so you, as a lawyer, might be charged with making arguments That you don't believe but making the best arguments that you believe are in the interest of your client and moot court would be a place that you could learn this now The disturbing thing is we've got a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court leveling an argument that you might expect if somebody had assigned them the defense of a position that was not tenable and said do your best and
So, this clip or, you know, these quotations from yesterday's proceedings have spread fairly widely.
I've seen them.
Many of our listeners and viewers will have seen them.
But neither I nor I think almost anyone else has seen anything from the larger context.
So if I may, without knowing myself the larger context, try to play devil's advocate by using what some of the media is saying.
Um, I would, I would ask you what, what you say to the fact that the New York Times, okay, we expected of them, but also Reason, um, which is a libertarian publication, which admittedly got COVID so wrong that perhaps this is, this is...
This is informing the journalism they're doing.
Point out that, and again, I don't know this from direct experience, but that both Justices Elena Kagan, also on the left, like Brown-Jackson, and Brett Kavanaugh, on the right, seem to support or reinforce what Ketanji Brown-Jackson was saying.
And so if I may, here's the reason.
Hamstring in the government, a viral narrative distorts Katonji Brown Jackson's understanding of free speech.
If partisans have one thing in common, it's confirmation bias.
So, you know, we know what the valence of this piece is going to be.
But if I scroll down here, they argue that, like so many viral narratives, Jackson's comments were fairly benign in context and were actually echoed by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Okay, so the New York Times talked about Kagan Reason talks about Kavanaugh and Barrett, both are on the right.
Perhaps most ironically, her remarks spoke fundamentally to the crux of the case.
The government, of course, does not have the right to punish someone criminally for the vast majority of speech, but does it have the right to persuade?
Here we go.
"No," Aguinneaga said, "because that's still protected speech, no matter how dangerous.
That might very well be the correct interpretation, but Jackson's take that such a view could place too much restraint on the government is one that is held by many, including, it appears, some of her more conservative colleagues.
Kavanaugh, for example, invoked his experience working with government press staff who regularly call reporters to criticize them and try to influence their coverage.
Would it be illegal for the feds to prosecute those journalists for pieces that cast them in a negative light?
Absolutely.
Is it beyond the pale for the government to express what it believes to be true and seeking better coverage?
Not necessarily, Kavanaugh said.
So before you respond, I will say that the idea that we are looking for what should be happening in a court by saying, well, we don't like what she said necessarily, but look at what he said and they agree and therefore that must be okay, that's not actually good thinking.
But put that aside for the moment, given that Kavanaugh appears to be making, you know, an argument that is similar if not phrased in quite so abstract and therefore easy to make viral way.
Well, I frankly do not know where reason is coming from on this because the central issue even the the plaintiffs in the case are Agreed that the proper remedy is for the government to speak if it has a contrary position Then what it should do is broadcast that position which doesn't interfere with anybody's speech rights.
So what?
what Brown Jackson is arguing is that when the government has an overriding interest that it has a right and an obligation to interfere with speech.
To suppress as opposed to to speak.
to suppress and I believe in this case it's going to come down to the technically they may not have been acting to suppress but the ferocious power of the government and its entanglements with things like social media platforms puts it in an excellent position to coerce so even this is one of the the questions that is raised by the case
Even in the case that what is happening is a coordination of the government with these platforms, it is still coercive in nature because saying no to such a collaboration is potentially dangerous to these businesses and their ability to continue doing what they're doing.
But I did want to depart, you know, you and I have spent a lot of time on Dark Horse talking about diversity, equity and inclusion and all of the disastrous consequences that flow from this perspective.
Even though I think you and I both have sympathy with the idea that civilization is not the opportunities in civilization are not evenly or fairly distributed and because of that there are things we would consider remedying but diversity equity and inclusion is such an upside-down nonsensical response that it creates a hazard to To the Republic.
And frankly, I think what we are seeing in this case is strong evidence of a couple things that we have advanced as hazards.
I can't remember where exactly I said it.
I think I said it in a couple places and it would have been early.
It would have been back in 2017, 2018.
I said that what it wasn't called woke yet, right?
Woke was used as a term but it was we were talking about social justice back at that time and What the social justice?
Faction was seeking I argued was affirmative action in every interaction at every scale at all times and my argument was Even if you're a believer in affirmative action, which I no longer am Even if you believe in it, you cannot apply it at every scale in every interaction at all times.
It makes no sense and it is going to destroy the fabric of civilization.
Right.
Right.
So to take one obvious example, the so-called progressive stack in which you call on students on the basis of their degree of historical oppression is an absurdity in a classroom where you're trying to teach people how to think more deeply about things.
It just simply can't work that way.
You can't do affirmative action in the queue of people asking questions in a classroom.
And there are many stages at which the inequality in distribution of recognition or jobs or whatever, resources, whatever it is, is not due to the system that you are looking at.
It is due to something upstream.
And the example that comes to mind, which may seem far afield here, is James Damore's Google memo, where he put together research that was accurate, that pointed out in part, well, much of what he was doing was actually that pointed out in part, well, much of what he was doing was actually looking at why there might be differences in interests between men and women
I then went and looked at what are the ratios of software engineers that are being designed by colleges and universities as an imperfect but decent proxy for where is Google hiring software engineers from?
They're, you know, introductory, they're base-level software engineers.
And they The ratio of men to women early career software engineers at Google at the time of Damore's memo in 2017 was 4 to 1, and the ratio of male to female graduates in computer sciences at both the bachelor's and the master's degrees In, I think it was 2016, the most recent year for which the data were available at the time was, in fact, 4-1.
So, maybe there's a problem.
I'm not convinced there is, because there is real reason to think that there are differences in interest between men and women.
But even if there were, the problem doesn't exist at the level of Google, because for Google to hire in a different ratio than what is being produced by the universities means that what Google would now be guilty of is discriminating against Men.
And this is, of course, what is at the foundation of all of the affirmative action practices, which is, in order to discriminate for X, you have to discriminate against Y, and you have to become just fine with the fact that that is what you are doing.
It is no longer plausible to pretend that you aren't discriminating against someone else if you're discriminating for the person or the group that you are trying to discriminate for.
Right so I want to that point can be seen in two different ways and I want to argue that both of them are important right so positive discrimination is the fundamental basis of affirmative action.
Right.
It is not an argument without a defense, right?
You might temporarily have to discriminate in a direction to correct for past discrimination.
That is not inherently a valid argument, but it is a, it is a, a, it is viable as a position, even if it doesn't carry the day.
But there is another aspect to it, which is what is the consequence for civilization if you start doing this?
And there are many.
This is a classic case of liberalism run amok, where you're focused on something that you'd like to solve, an inequity problem, and you are under focused on all of the downstream consequences that will arise if you engage in your particular remedy.
You don't understand the unintended consequences.
And so what I was arguing back in 2017-2018 is that if you do this at every scale at all times, civilization will absolutely come apart.
You'll destroy it.
And I believe that we are now seeing this.
And you know, this happens if you say, well, You know, a security guard at a, uh, a shopping center, uh, should enforce laws against shoplifting differentially based on who it is who's doing the shoplifting, right?
Uh, the people sitting on a jury, uh, should apply the law differently depending upon the skin color or sex or gender of the person, uh, who is, uh, being prosecuted.
Right.
You can't have a civilization that runs based on these rules.
And what I think, you know, what we said back in 2017-18 was, look, the bridges aren't going to fall down right away.
It's going to take time.
Right.
But that will happen.
And it's going to become an unrecoverable problem when it does.
And of course, now we are seeing doors fall off of airplanes.
And we have a credible question about whether or not that is the result of the policies that are stated on the Web pages of the companies that build the airplanes.
And here I think we have another example.
Now, the problem is that there is a built-in defense, which is that to say that what is going on in the Supreme Court is the result of diversity, equity, and inclusion failure sounds racist.
And what I want to do... It's also unfalsifiable.
Right.
Well, is it unfalsifiable?
I don't think it's so unfalsifiable.
It has that problem because you can apply that to anyone who has any standing in the so-called progressive stack.
You know, anyone who's not a cis, straight, white male, you know, able-bodied, etc.
You could say, ah, well, that's just a DEI hire.
So it is both something that can be widely distributed as an accusation and it's unfalsifiable.
Therefore, I'm skeptical of its utility.
I wouldn't say it's unfalsifiable.
I would say it is all too easily abused.
I think that's true.
The go-to response anytime, and this is one of the terrible downstream consequences, is that, you know, presumably if you are a minority you are as entitled to make natural errors and say foolish things as anybody else.
So the point is this will become a, it will become a burden on exactly the populations Sorry, it just occurred to me that one of the arguments that I think we've talked about here, one of the reasons that it can be beneficial
Think 10 years ago when college campuses were still somewhat functional, right?
One of the reasons it could be beneficial to be conservative on a college campus as a student is that you were in such a minority that you had your ideas and your values questioned constantly.
And therefore, by the time you got out, you either had become a not conservative or you really knew where all the weaknesses in your arguments were.
You knew what the best arguments on the other side were.
And you knew how it all fit together.
And you stood on solid ground and you knew what that ground was.
Whereas as a liberal in college, you don't get pushback very much.
And therefore, you're going to come out, regardless of the actual strength of your arguments, not being as certain of where those arguments have their own weaknesses, what their strengths are, and what the best arguments on the other side are.
Similarly, 30 years ago, 30, 35 years ago, when I was coming of age as a woman and looking to go into science, and there were increasing numbers of women, but still a minority, the argument was made in, for instance, feminist the argument was made in, for instance, feminist circles like, oh, it's not fair.
Um, that, uh, basically, you know, any foot fault is going to be taken as evidence that, uh, that you don't know what you're doing, you don't belong here, and therefore people who are a minority in a field trying to get in—a woman, a black person, you know, whatever—um, have to be better, have to be stronger, have to—have to avoid error more tenaciously lest they be understood to be not fit for the job.
And there may be a little bit of, there may be some truth in that, but the argument I would say is actually that creates anti-fragility, that creates strength, and I'm not saying it's fair, there is bias everywhere, but being a minority and somewhat unexpected
Actors in a field, trying to get into a field where your presence is not yet established as the standard way of being, may actually create a kind of strength such that the early people in fields, you might argue used to be, had proven themselves above and beyond what they would have had to had they been a member of the dominant class.
And what woke, what DEI is trying to do is totally unhook that, totally unhook the strength that could have emerged as a result of not being as common in the field.
So I think we should call this the Thomas Sowell effect.
OK.
Because I don't know how familiar you are with him, but he is so utterly dominant in this regard.
Yeah.
That, you know, he is simply better.
He's an economist, right?
Yeah.
OK.
A black and an older black economist who is who's He's an absolute ace.
He's really great.
But anyway, I want to actually take the risk of making the diversity, equity and inclusion argument for the absurdity that took place in the court yesterday.
And I want to do it to prove that this has nothing to do with racism.
I'm not a racist, that's been reasonably well demonstrated, but I can just make the argument in a way that I think it will be obvious why we have to have this discussion and it doesn't make you a racist to want to happen.
So it looks like this.
Let's say that I was a racist.
Let's say that I ascended to the presidency and I announced that I was going to appoint a white man to the Supreme Court for an expected vacancy.
Well, what have I done?
What I've done is I've just told you that I have a priority that is higher than merit.
Because what I've done is I've told you that the search space for the person who's going to inhabit that spot on the court is not the entire population.
It is a subset of the population that I prefer for whatever reason.
And the chances that the most qualified person is outside of that search space is quite substantial.
For one thing, I've excluded women, right?
Maybe the most qualified person for the position is a woman.
By saying I'm going to appoint a white man, I've excluded that person, which means I'm going to get something other than the top qualified candidate.
Now, it happens that Joe Biden, amazingly enough, said that he was going to appoint a black woman to this position.
Zach, do you want to put up that headline?
He did.
He did.
So here he is.
Biden says he'll name a black woman as Supreme Court pick by the end of February.
And just to be clear, this was not, he knows who it is and it's a black woman and he's just keeping it quiet.
He said, these are the demographic features that I am guaranteeing my pick will have once I figure out who that is.
Right.
Which is, which is different, right?
It's an important distinction.
Now here's the absolutely ugly part of this.
If I, as a racist president, decide to appoint a white guy, I've eliminated women, and I've eliminated racial minorities, and I've left some much smaller fraction, but it's still a very large population.
Yeah.
In the case that you announced that you were going to appoint a black woman, well, people who are classified by the U.S.
Census as black make up something like 14.4% of the U.S.
population.
Is that all?
Yep, and women are currently something like 50.5% of the population, and it's not exactly true that if we combine these factors we come out with something.
It'll be close to 7.2% of the population is the search space over which Biden announced he would be looking for his next Supreme Court justice.
Now, Add to that actual historic racism, which has kept both women and black people out of the upper echelons of the law.
And that's going to be an even smaller group.
Right.
So this was going to be my next point, which is if capability was exactly evenly distributed across all populations, which I believe that that is a plausible state to arrive at.
No, I should put that another way.
Asterisk on that, we'll come back to it.
But if capacity was evenly distributed, the chances that the most qualified person for the next spot on the Supreme Court was going to be a black woman was something like 7.2%, which is not very likely.
If you add to that your point, which is that actually capability to inhabit that spot is, if it means anything at all, if all of these arguments for let's broaden access to the highest quality education to populations that have not had equal access to it, if that's meaningful at all, then the fact that some populations have been Systematically excluded from those opportunities will mean that the number is even less than 7.2%.
So, what we have is a president who has announced, who did announce and then followed through on something that does not make you a racist to notice.
Makes the chances that the most qualified person did not get the job uh exceedingly high the chances that the person was in the pool identified was 7.2 percent or less all else being equal so we now have a person who is the result of that
Obnoxious announcement by Biden, frankly, if you know, if he had searched the landscape for the most qualified person and it had happened to be a black woman, that'd be great.
And she wouldn't suffer under the stigma of the analysis that I've just delivered.
But because Biden announced this ahead of time, she whatever her capability will suffer from that stigma.
So none of this is racist.
It's analytical.
It is statistical.
It is logical.
And we now have an argument being deployed in the Supreme Court that the... I mean, it's absurd at two levels, right?
One, it argues for an exception to the First Amendment when there's an overriding need by the federal government to do something.
So that effectively puts the ability to exclude the First Amendment in the hands of the federal government.
Which is what you're supposed to be protected from by the First Amendment, so that is nonsense.
But it also weirdly argues that the government has speech rights.
That's not what this document was designed to do.
That's upside down.
Now, right or wrong, the founders of this country had a fear of the power of government.
And so what they did was they awarded the people freedom from the government's oppressive Influence.
It guaranteed the people the ability to speak no matter what against the incursion of the federal government.
It's the exact opposite of what this sitting Supreme Court justice is arguing.
So at some level, here we are faced with a mighty, a very important set of questions.
Censorship of doctors and scientists during the pandemic.
And we've got a Supreme Court justice who has turned the Constitution on its head, and the answer is, well, are you supposed to not notice that that happened?
That doesn't make any sense.
Are you supposed to comment on it?
Does that open you up to accusations of racism?
Maybe.
But anyway, what have we landed at?
We've landed at sophistry has now taken over the Final bulwark against tyranny, where the Supreme Court is entertaining notions that are completely outside the Constitution.
So how we got here is a question.
What can be done about it is a question.
And I would point out, there's another nuance here.
If the government had been absolutely right about everything it had said during the COVID pandemic, this would still be an absurdity taking place in the Supreme Court, right?
If the government had been right and Jay Bhattacharya and Karyati and all the others had been wrong, Then the government still wouldn't have the right to shut them down, and for very good reason, because it is the ability to hash out competing ideas that allows us to figure out what's true.
So even if the government had turned out to be right, they still would not have had anything like a right to shut down the speech of these plaintiffs.
That may be the most important point here, and it's going to be a very hard point to make.
Well, it should be.
It should be easy, it should be obvious, but the idea—so, how easy will it be to twist the position that you just stated?
You don't think the government should be able to let the public know when it's right about things?
I mean, I guess that's a way that I could frame this to make it sound like you're crazy, right?
But that's what the Constitution is.
And frankly, we do not now, we never did, and we never will live in a state of perfect knowledge.
It is impossible.
It is impossible, regardless of the situation, add to that an emerging situation in which there is complexity upon complexity upon complexity and, by the way, lies upon lies upon lies with regard to early COVID stuff, And you have a bunch of scientists, including us, but these are scientists who are actually doing the work of the COVID, right?
Trying to figure out what is true.
Precisely what they have trained to do.
Precisely what it is that they have said, that they decided decades ago, you know what I want to do in life?
I want to seek truth and I'm going to do that through science.
So the government comes in and says, you may not do that.
We will get in your way as much as possible, because we know.
What do you know?
It doesn't matter what they claim to know, but what is it that you're claiming to know?
What we're doing, what Jay Bhattacharya and And Aaron Cariarty and the rest, I don't have the list in front of me, were doing was precisely trying to figure out what is true and how remarkable that anything, any entity at all, including and especially the government, should come in.
And in fact, we saw this from individuals to the World Health Organization to the CDC during COVID.
All systems and individuals at every single level coming in and saying, you can't do that.
We know what truth is, and that's not it.
You know, which epitomized with Fauci declaring, I am science.
And the world didn't sit up and take notice when any of this was happening.
So, yes, this is our moment.
This is the moment.
And to have a sitting Supreme Court justice argue that, well, the First Amendment is all very well and good, but really not how It's too dangerous.
Right, and nobody is arguing that the government shouldn't be able to put its perspective into public.
What we're talking about is the government's ability to silence others who put a competing idea into public and, very importantly, to do it cryptically.
So that you cannot evaluate, right?
This is the problem of false consensus, where you have the impression that there's some wide agreement across doctors or scientists or both, and the answer is you have no idea how broad that agreement is, because you have no idea who's self-censoring, who's being silenced, you just don't know.
Which then leads to another really important facet of this story.
which is you have the court which interestingly in this case seems to be divided three appear to be staunchly in favor of defending the first amendment and the protection of these plaintiffs three who appear to be against it and three who appear to be grappling with Who are the three who are grappling, do you know?
It's Kavanaugh and Barrett.
Is it Kagan?
I think it is Kagan.
So those are the three who show up in the various Like mainstream media pieces that I found.
Yeah, and then you have people who seem to understand what's at stake and are applying the law as it's traditionally been understood are Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
Exactly.
So, okay, the court is divided three, four, three against, and three grappling with the implications.
It is a fascinating moment, but It's a very disheartening moment because it reveals another dynamic in play, one that I think we were talking about last week.
Positive feedback.
Right?
Unfortunately, these justices don't have a better source of information about what just happened.
They're downstream of what the government did.
They are confused about how wrong the government ended up being on issue after issue over the course of COVID.
of what the government did.
They are confused about how wrong the government ended up being on issue after issue over the course of COVID.
Right.
And they are presumably under appreciative.
This isn't just a COVID issue.
It happens that these plaintiffs are fighting on the basis of their being silenced over COVID, but this applies to questions of electoral integrity.
It applies to, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop story.
It applies to the coercion for Americans to support interventions abroad.
All of these things are subject to this coercive influence.
And these justices are not outside the system.
They're supposed to be as outside the system as they can be.
But there's no escaping the fact that their source of information is polluted by the very thing that they are going to rule on.
When the Constitution was framed, the three branches of government did have some chance of being independent of one another.
It isn't possible anymore, precisely as you say, because the source of information that we are all getting is universal.
Yep.
And it's worse than that because the people who run civilization almost without exception went to college.
And they also can't possibly be that old, right?
Even the ancient ones aren't that old.
So the degree to which the class of people that is charged with understanding the rights the founders granted us, figuring out how to apply them in novel circumstances that the founders couldn't possibly have imagined, right?
These very people All sat in classrooms in college and heard whatever it was that was being taught there.
Now we, on this podcast, talk frequently about the absurdities that are being passed off as knowledge on college campuses, right?
We've literally heard arguments that 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 4, that men can become Women, we have seen academic institutions and philanthropic institutions embrace the idea that we are not only free to but obligated to discriminate in the present because of past racism.
So what I'm getting at is The positive feedback comes not only in the form of the members of the Supreme Court cannot help but be misinformed by the sources of information that are polluted by phony consensus that is being marshaled at the hands of the federal government, but they also are
Downstream of the of the fashions of the university which have been going off the rails continually since the 90s.
Yeah, okay, so I don't think I agree with this line of thinking, because if what you're arguing is that universities are not now, but also have never been a place where learning could happen, then okay.
But if you're not arguing that, which I don't think you are, the justices in the Supreme Court are our age or older.
Yep.
So some of them may have had some college or law school in the early 90s.
But mostly, you know, we were seeing some highly questionable behavior on the parts of some faculty and students when we were in college in the late 80s and early 90s.
And I've talked about it here and elsewhere.
But that does seem to have been the beginning of a moment where things were going off the rails.
And then it kind of went underground for a while.
And then in like the early 20 teens, it exploded back on the scene.
And the universities have gone completely off the rails at this point.
So the fact that the universities are now adrift, to put it mildly, doesn't say anything about what they were and what the educations of the sitting Supreme Court justices are.
I just, I don't get the connection.
All right.
Good point.
Let me refine my point.
These people are somehow walking Models of jurisprudence, and I mean models in the sense of they internally operate based on things that they learned, things they've concluded, things that they've encountered.
But that milieu cannot withstand contact with all of the things that are young enough to have been influenced by this.
And so, you know, each of these Supreme Court justices seems like an individual to us, but they have clerks and staffers.
They have clerks who are coming out of law schools that are now highly compromised.
Yeah.
All of them.
They read journals that are now edited by Let's imagine for a second, I know this is going to scare the hell out of you, but let's imagine that the world of legal reasoning isn't any healthier than the scientific reasoning, that the journals are as bad as the scientific journals, that the The professional schools are as bad as graduate schools are now.
Well, then the answer is, look, okay, so suppose these people really are, in general, old enough to not have been influenced in this way in the classroom.
But the entire world that they're embedded in is heavily influenced by this stuff.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we were having drinks with a lawyer friend last night who assures us that, in fact, the law schools are gone.
Are gone.
Yeah.
Right.
So not surprising that we are grappling with what should be obvious constitutional protections that every Supreme Court justice should spot a mile away and say, well, of course, the federal government doesn't have the right to silence doctors who want to tell us what they think right or wrong.
Doesn't matter.
Right.
Right.
Of course, this is so obvious.
And yet nothing is obvious.
Right.
The same thing that makes it not obvious that men can't become women.
Makes it not obvious that this is a First Amendment violation.
And so that's what I'm saying, is that this actually is, the doors are coming off literally and metaphorically.
Right?
Yeah, the doors aren't coming off literally in courts of law yet.
No.
Airplanes.
Airplanes.
Yeah, exactly.
Door plugs.
Not doors yet.
You're exaggerating.
I bet that matters a lot to you as you're sucked out.
It's not a real door!
Yeah, exactly.
It wasn't even supposed to leave through this.
Right, it didn't even say exit.
Right, so anyway, that's all very frightening.
Sure.
And, you know, it connects to a number of things.
One, I wanted to just point out the connection, right?
The universities have gone off the rails.
You and I have been pointing to various reasons for this, but one of them that I think we've been quite right about is that because these environments have become palaces of abstraction, rather than places where people encounter physical systems and are forced to grapple with They're unyielding nature.
They are places now where total nonsense can take hold because the world, you know, it's not like you decide you can fly and the next thing you, you know, broken your jaw as you fell on the floor.
It's you come up with wrong ideas and nobody's in a position to tell you they're not true.
You know, I have been a defender of liberal arts and sciences for a long time, and somewhat to your chagrin, you have not been compelled by what they have been for longer than I have.
And liberal arts and sciences always largely plays over an abstract space, right?
And in fact, there is an unfortunate I don't know.
assumed by many people that, you know, a trade school is where you go if you're doing sort of embodied work, if you're doing physical work.
And the life of the mind is the place for you, is the place where, you know, that's what you're growing in, like a four-year college or university.
But I think actually, so that hasn't necessarily changed, I don't think, the focus on abstraction in colleges and universities and certainly in, well, at least most grad school and professional school, I would have thought that medicine being inherently about the human body I would have thought that medicine being inherently about the human body could have remained outside of abstraction space for a bit longer, but apparently not because you have doctors But what we have seen changing
for the last several decades now, which feeds directly into the colleges and universities, is the loss in elementary schools, and indeed in middle and high schools, but especially in elementary schools at the very youngest ages, when the kids are learning how to be, what to be, what is it to be human, all of these things.
We are seeing the loss of pee, of music, of theater, of art, of recess.
We are seeing the loss of these things that seem not academic, right?
That seem, oh, well, that's not what you go to school for.
You can do those things elsewhere.
And in fact, some of those things you can't, a lot of people can't do elsewhere because they don't have the resources or the time, but some of them are inherently about the group and about learning how to cooperate and compete with groups, sports, music in the form of an orchestra or a band, theater.
This is about attuning yourself to not just your own needs and interests and proclivities and passions, but to those needs and interests and proclivities and passions of other people.
And what do we have instead in this impoverished landscape of schooling for young kids?
We have sit down, look forward, raise your hand when you have something to say, or you have to go to the bathroom and basically just like, listen to what's on here, write it down.
Okay, listen, like, it's just, like, this information loop in which there's no possibility for emergence or beauty or joy or passion or anything.
And I do think that the embrace of the fully abstract life That we see in so much of the world now is yes downstream of what's happening in higher ed, but it's even more directly downstream of the loss of the non-abstract, fully embodied activities and behaviors that used to be a part of all lower elementary school education.
Yeah, I agree with this and I feel like it is embedded, it is encapsulated in your sign-off, go outside.
Get outside!
Get outside!
Get outside so you don't lose your ability to think.
So I wanted to... And I have something to say to that later.
We'll get there.
But there's some new research that claims that the sun will kill you.
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
All right.
I wanted to add a few more points before we move on to phase two here.
One is that there is an interesting nuance to all of this, which is free speech reigns or is supposed to reign out in the adult world, the marketplace of ideas, the public square.
Education functions differently, and this is a delicate point that I want to make very carefully.
Education is inherently a coercive environment.
Now, hopefully, when it works, it is nobly coercive.
But here's an interesting little puzzle, one that actually I think is legally difficult to explain.
When we were professors, we were employees of the state.
Yep.
If a student showed up in our classroom and in response to a lesson on evolution said that in fact the universe was 6,000 years old and that we were mistaken that all of the creatures of the earth are related to each other and that in fact each one was created specially and we said in fact the evidence that that is not true is overwhelming
And the student continued to raise their hand and just simply reassert this we would be well within our rights to tell them that they shouldn't to not call on them and if they spoke out of turn to Discipline them to send them to force them out of the class if they disrupted the ability of the other students to learn the lesson it's a coercive environment if that same student Were to make those points in, you know, the central square of the college, we would not be within our rights to tell them they weren't allowed to make those points, right?
And that is as it should be.
So there's something about the curatorial environment inside the classroom that empowers professors to use coercive methodology around issues of speech, even though they may be in whole or in part employees of the government.
I guess I would say that curation and that situation that you just described never happened in either of our classrooms.
What you and I both did was from the very first day say these are the kinds of things we're going to be grappling with and there's a very good chance that if you are religious yourself you're going to be interested in grappling with them and willing to but if if you do in fact believe in the fixity of species in a six thousand year old earth and And that everything was put here by special creation.
You're going to find this very challenging, which is terrific.
But if you are here only to argue those points, which have no standing in a scientific context, you should find a different place to be.
We're not going to force you out, but you should find a different place to be.
And in fact, we did have, we had lots of religious students.
And we got along well with them.
But we didn't have young Earth creationists.
There's a few things that are completely incompatible.
There's a few kinds of beliefs.
There are fringe beliefs that are completely incompatible with a scientific evolutionary understanding of life on Earth.
And we would have been within our rights.
But in fact, to stop calling on such people and to talk to them outside of class and say, you know, this has no place here, you're being disruptive in a classroom where everyone else is trying to learn and you are getting in the way of the 49 other people learning, whatever it is.
But the best way to do it, of course, is not through coercion.
It's through clarity and transparency up front about what it is that you're up to, and thus encouraging people who really have no interest in opening up their minds to find someplace else to be.
Yep, I don't disagree with any of that, but my point is, you know, maybe if you're excellent at it, coercion plays no role.
But the fact that it is obviously a viable mode, you know, the fact that the professor is incentivizing... This is my classroom.
Right.
And the point is the whole endeavor requires that this function this way.
And you could make the argument that, you know, our campus is one in which we believe in uh, reality and you're not allowed in, you know, the central square to advocate for the fixity of species either.
And you'd be wrong.
Right.
Right.
For good reason.
There's a reason that the boundary is at the, at the classroom.
Um, and so anyway, there's a whole other question as to why that's true and how it functions in the context of the first amendment.
But nonetheless, the point I wanted to make is people have taken on a belief system in an environment that is coercive, even Even when it works correctly, It is at least allowed to coerce students in the direction of enlightenment.
That is what it is supposed to... that is what that tool is for.
Yeah.
They then take the things that they have learned in that environment, which are increasingly garbage-y, and they move into an environment where that coercion is no longer supposed to be relevant, right?
Because the government is not supposed to be preventing you from speaking.
It's forbidden to do it.
Right.
And yet, they are now in the position of interpreting whether or not coercion might actually be allowed, and they don't get it, in part because their education's failed them, and in part because they now have some sense of, like, well, actually, as long as we're coercing in a direction that I'm fond of, then, you know... Right.
It's kind of working out for me.
Right, which then raises the other issue, which is amazing that we're having this discussion in 2024.
Because on the one hand, the people who are pushing us in the direction of embracing censorship that violates our most central founding principle, yes, they temporarily seem to be on the team that has power, but they're telling us constantly that Power could be taken by a tyrant.
Now, I think they're full of crap, but...
If their concern is that somebody who would have the awesome power of the federal government is looming just off stage, and they're about to... Tyranny for me, but not for thee.
Right, exactly.
So at the same time they're trying to panic the public over the danger that Trump will abuse the powers of the federal government, they are attempting to enlarge those powers into an unholy monster.
And it's just...
Galling to watch both of these things traveling in parallel.
Yeah.
So, you know, I just wanted to remind people of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, right?
John Rawls argues that you want to make rules that you would be just as happy to live on the wrong side of, right?
You don't make rules on the basis that I'd like to have that power.
The point is, yeah, maybe I have that power now and maybe I won't in the next round and I want a rule I mean, this is what the courts are, right?
The courts are supposed to be blind to who's making the argument.
They're not supposed to be Ibram X. Kendi refuges where the thing that matters most is the color of the person who's been accused of something.
It's not supposed to matter at all.
Right.
Okay, so I think I've made, oh, I did want to make one more point.
I'm really unsure of it.
Okay.
The go outside thing.
A doctor whose name I'm going to keep out of it because until I hear him say it publicly, I'm not sure he wants his name attributed, but a doctor who I trust and quite like told me that what he has seen in medical schools in recent years is apocalyptic.
And what he describes is that the best medical students, So let's just clarify here.
When you say best students, you mean best at gaming the system.
They will show up with the best GPA at the end.
tests that in fact it is possible to spot a correct answer even when you don't understand what's being discussed based on the way the test is constructed so let's just clarify here when you say best students you mean best at gaming the system they will show up with the best gpa at the end not used to be a good student could mean someone who was gaming the system and just knew how to how to get the good grades but it could also mean
frankly the kind of student i was who was actually learning things you know for people for whom the system was actually set up appropriately enough that they could learn within the system and thrive and excel within it you You are not talking about that second kind of good student.
You are talking about the first kind of I'm talking about a top student who is not necessarily any good at the underlying thing.
I'm not talking about a good doctor.
So anyway, I find, and by the way, I've mentioned this to other doctors that I know, and they have acknowledged that this is a serious problem.
So have the tests become... I can't think of the word... standardized?
I mean, that surprises me.
If the tests are all standardized across medical schools, that that's possible to be done.
So I think... Oh, I don't know that they've been standardized between schools.
No, it doesn't matter.
But if within each school there are these effectively standardized tests where... I mean, it's just... There's obviously a lot in medicine that you can't game.
Right?
The pancreas is the pancreas, the aorta is there, and blood pressure may not be a good measure of a lot of things that we currently think it's a good measure of, but it is a measurable metric.
It is a metric that can be measured.
There are a lot of things about the human body that you can't game.
Right, those human bodies presumably do not show up on most of these exams.
Now, I would imagine that surgeons are going to end up being an exception to this pattern because they have to be able to actually do surgery.
And so the point is, it is, again, where the physical and biological world intrude on the abstract world that you will find the exceptions.
But here's the crazy point that I'm not sure of, but I believe it belongs a place on the table.
We have morticians calling attention to anomalous blood clots that have risen in the aftermath of the vaccine campaign.
The mRNA vaccine campaign.
Right.
You have morticians that are now Telling medicine about something that medicine is refusing to acknowledge and I believe this is correct because I've looked at the evidence But I've also talked to Ryan Cole about it And apparently this pattern is very real.
Okay, the clots are anomalous their Commonality is rising at a spectacular unmistakable rate and they are being discovered by morticians now more doctors are aware of them than are acknowledging it because of the coercive environment, but Here's the thing, the morticians are, at the end of the day, you can't be an abstract mortician.
Right.
You're either preparing bodies for burial or you're not.
It's a physical environment.
And to the extent that we have doctors who are phonies because they've been gaming exams.
Now, obviously you can't do that completely, but could they fake their way through the parts that actually involve the physical universe?
And could they be phony doctors prescribing drugs based on lists of symptoms?
Yada, yada.
Whereas the morticians at the end of the day are still morticians because there's no abstract way of doing their job.
That would explain the pattern of morticians calling attention to medical phenomena that medicine has missed.
Yeah, I see it.
I do.
Maybe, well...
I have a couple things, including this crazy new finding about sunlight being dangerous.
But do you want to go to Goliath first?
Well, there was a phase two.
Phase two involved, we're not going to do the whole thing, but I wanted to point out Alexandros Marinos' tweet from yesterday or the day before in which he outlines a hypothesis that I thought was important.
Do you want Zach to show my screen here?
Yeah, can you make it large enough that we can read it?
A little more is good.
So I'm going to read some ways into this tweet and people who are longtime viewers and listeners will recognize that this actually fits with what I've described as Goliath being a composite of collusion and
And I believe what Alexandros is talking about here is a hypothesis of how the emergent part of Goliath is partnered with the colluding part of Goliath in the case of, let's say, these censorship regimes and a lot else.
I will start reading it.
If I start screwing it up, maybe you'll take over.
Maybe.
Okay.
So, Alexandros, in a tweet titled, A New Hypothesis About Why All Our Sense-Making Institutions Seem to be Failing at the Same Time.
We often lament how seemingly everybody whose job, everybody whose job is to figure out the truth, media, academic, journals, doctors, courts, universities, even the military, seem to have lost the plot right about the same time and are not even trying to do their job, instead behaving first and foremost as defenders of an emergent narrative.
On occasion, I've mentioned that our culture is becoming aware of the construct of a narrative and is developing language and means to describe its contours.
When we talk about the current thing, or the various derangement syndromes, or even about disinformation, misinformation, or even stochastic terrorism, what we are talking about is factors that contribute to and are the result of prevalent narratives.
What might have previously been highly specialized discourse between academics has broken through to the mainstream.
So, this is my hypothesis.
For better or worse, people in positions of power increasingly conscious of the narrative-shaping power of their words and actions are now deciding what to do, consciously or subconsciously, taking into account not just whether the action is right, but also whether it will be helping our current or hurting the narratives they subscribe to.
In other words, instead of the story emerging according to the facts, the facts are emerging according to the prevailing story.
This 2016 piece in the New York Times is emblematic of the newfound self-consciousness on behalf of journalists.
Its final paragraph contains this gem.
It is journalism's job to be true to the readers and viewers and true to the facts in a way that will stand up to history's judgment.
What might seem a fairly innocuous statement that this is after the quote, this is now Alexander's again.
What might seem like a fairly innocuous statement is in context, a call to moralize the selection and angling of facts being presented.
What does it mean to be true to the readers?
Which readers and which journalist has a time machine to know what will stand up to history's judgment?
Why is true to the facts not sufficient?
Because, as the piece's title explains, Trump is testing norms of objectivity in journalism.
Yes, you heard that right.
It's Trump's fault that journalists have to water down their objectivity so they can avoid being judged by history.
Now, Alexandros goes on, but I think we've got the gist of it.
He's arguing, in effect, a version of these accepted pieces of wisdom from on high are now functioning through each of the people embedded in the system as they are attempting to push the world in the right direction from whatever position they hold.
In the case of journalists, that means that they no longer see themselves as distributing a Coherent interpretation of the facts as they stand, but they are actually activists advancing a narrative with positive consequences, which of course will lead you to absurdities as
Sam Harris, among others, has been advocating for in which circumstances that are very dangerous cause you to do things like suppress the information on Hunter Biden's laptop because having the truth out there at the wrong moment is unthinkable, right?
This is a justification for all manner of lies which would explain exactly what we saw During COVID, which is a nonsense narrative that carries a protective force as if it were true, because it appears to lead people to conclusions that are desired for whatever reason.
Now, Zach, would you put up the New York Times piece from yesterday, I believe, that I sent you?
New York Times piece?
Yep.
I didn't.
All right.
Well, I'm going to read you... Do you want to plug your computer in so he can show?
Yeah, let's do that.
It's not going to go very much farther.
There we go.
Sorry, folks.
All right, so what I want to do is read you... So you want to full screen it so that Zach can share your screen.
Yeah, yeah, but this is start by a March 17th New York Times piece I find the picture they've chosen prejudicial prejudicial, but it will be hard to defend that The title of the piece is how Trump's allies are winning the war over disinformation Subtitle their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online
Now, this is a newspaper.
What's more, it's the New York Times.
Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.
The filtering of election lies sounds like a noble pursuit.
Stymied sounds like some sort of unfair
It's just exactly what we were talking about with regard to the Supreme Court, you know, Katonji Brown Jackson's statement that basically the First Amendment is all very well and good, but not now, not when things are so tense, not when things are so important.
You know, that presumes perfect knowledge.
That presumes that in the past people were confused and ignorant, and now a lot of people are confused and ignorant.
But amazing that we happen to live in this moment where a few choice people have actually arrived at nirvana and omniscience, and they know everything that is true and right.
And if we would just listen to them, then we too could be blessed, right?
So that's what is implied by the idea that the government should be allowed to basically impinge on First Amendment rights with regard to COVID over in Murphy v. Missouri.
And here we have the New York Times basically arguing, we know what's true.
Come on, guys, we know what's true.
And so, you know, go back up to that headline.
And so, if you know what's true, They're winning a war over disinformation, which they're the disinformation guys, and their claims of censorship, obviously wrong, have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online.
Everything is consistent with the narrative that they have, and this is to your point, that this is exactly what Alexandros is talking about in that hypothesis that you read.
And if you imagine that all of the people who are producing this stuff and then consuming this stuff are all embedded in the same social milieu.
Yes, they go to different levels of cocktail party or whatever, but the point is, there are levels.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
You've got a scrappy cocktail parties, you know, and high class cocktail parties.
But whatever, yes, they're all embedded in a milieu where this doesn't read as weird to see in a newspaper, right?
Where this reads as normal.
It reads as just, well, how, you know, this is just a description of the facts.
All right, so they've taken a little license, you know, linguistically, but they've got to make it interesting to read.
But this is, this is factual to some people.
In the wake of the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, a groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of lies that has fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power, social media companies suspended Donald J. Trump, then the president, and many of his allies from the platforms they use to spread misinformation about His defeat and whip up the attempt to overturn it.
The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress, and even some Republicans sought to do more to hold the companies accountable.
Accountable!
I mean, it's just incredible.
Academic researchers wrestled with how to strengthen efforts to monitor false posts.
Right?
All of this assumes that you know what a false post is.
Or that you're monitoring.
Mr. Trump and his allies embarked instead on a counter-offensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives.
They have unquestionably prevailed.
Oh my god, now I'm terrified.
Right?
I mean, it's amazing that this is in a newspaper, but if you take Alexandros's description and you imagine how such a thing gets written, commissioned, and then written, and then edited, and then published, and then consumed.
And the point is nobody in that chain sees anything wrong with it because it is so thoroughly consistent with a narrative that they have taken in and accepted as driving And then, of course, this brings us back to the Supreme Court.
You want to show us some more?
No, we're good.
This, of course, then brings us back to the Supreme Court because I don't know what publications the justices of the court read, but the justices are reading
Presumably things like the New York Times which have this narrative drive which trade on False notions that are now being distributed through the entire class of college-educated people who are now staffing their clerkships and Editing their legal journals and all of that.
So the point is it's it's a system that is actually dismantling the goose that lays the golden eggs, which is a system of That was structurally built not to favor anybody.
The bit in Alexandros' hypothesis that you read part of here that struck me most, and there's some more gems farther down, but was this.
In other words, instead of the story emerging according to the facts, the facts emerge according to the prevailing story.
And he's got, later on, he's got a piece out of out of the New York Times, the CDC isn't publishing large portions of the COVID data it collects.
In his analysis, you've got a single organization who is tasked with not just figuring out what data to collect, but actually collecting it and then analyzing it and being also the policy arm.
And, you know, there's no way that those things shouldn't be separated.
But we have something even more obviously wrong.
If the only organization that is allowed to collect certain kinds of data simply isn't sharing it with us, and we were reporting on this.
We're not journalists, but we were effectively reporting on this through COVID, where it was clear that there was just a lot of information that we were not privy to.
Back when Walensky was the head of the CDC, she would say things like, man, when I saw that thing on CNN about the tests, I didn't even know what she was talking about.
Conveyed.
She betrayed the fact that she had actually learned unnecessary things about COVID from watching CNN.
She, the then head of the CDC.
So, you know, not only do we not have the supposed scientific experts, Demonstrably knowledgeable about anything they need to be knowledgeable about.
But some among their minions are deciding, actually, yes, we collected those data because obviously we should have, but we're not going to share those data because what if, what if those data don't fit the narrative that we all know?
Because again, we are the blessed ones and we are in complete and total possession of the truth.
If these data don't fit with that, you know, omniscient narrative that we have, then people might make bad decisions.
So we can't have that now, can we?
Yeah.
Now, I wanted to point to two things.
I'll try to remember them both.
One is the model in which there is some authority like the CDC that collects the information and distributes it.
Is very like the academic, the coercive, sometimes coercive academic model that I described, right?
If you go to school and you think that the purpose of your being in school is for you to hear a recitation of the facts, maybe with, you know, clever phrasing that will make it easier to remember.
Yep.
You are in an environment where the truth is simply something that arrives at the podium and in the textbook and you absorb it.
And this isn't very different from that, right?
Okay.
So it's not a textbook in this case and it's not a professor, it's the CDC.
Right, so you will not be troubled by the inability to challenge it because the idea what's somebody gonna do stand up in a college classroom and challenge the textbook, right?
That's not something that's being modeled.
But the other thing is And my blood pressure just jumped every time I heard this, but on college campuses, you frequently hear, you know, in recent decades that intent doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is consequences, right?
There's obviously one true element of this, right?
If somebody runs over your kid, whether they were gunning for them or not, it doesn't change the fact that they're gone.
Okay.
That's true.
On the other hand, there is a reason that we do treat intent as fundamentally important, right?
We don't just look at consequences, but this entire, um, Mechanism that takes conclusions and then turns them into filters that edit the facts that we are allowed to encounter all appears to be predicated on some simplistic idea that the only thing that matters is the consequence of what you write.
In this case, you write something so that it results in more people going and getting an inoculation, right?
Its relationship to the facts, if you believe that the only thing that matters is consequences, its relationship to the facts is beside the point.
Right.
The question is, what is its impact?
Right.
There you go.
And so.
I don't know.
Did we find the right place to stand in order to look at this whole mess?
I think I think we got somewhere.
But.
Obviously, something is happening at many different scales.
We can see it.
In the Supreme Court, we can see it in the pages of The New York Times.
What is its impact going to be?
That's perfectly clear.
It's going to take apart this system, and if you think that's a good thing, maybe you'll be in favor of it.
But if you realize how much this admittedly flawed system does for us, you'll be horrified by the idea that somebody who doesn't know what's supposed to replace it Would be advancing ideas that are going to result in its decoherence.
Yep, right.
It's like somebody getting you know angry at The comfort of their seat on an airplane and deciding to take it apart in mid-flight Not to put too far in a point on it not Okay, also revealing how how bad So many of our institutions are.
A Twitter account called Bad Lefty pointed out to me this article in the British newspaper Daily Mail.
Now, I don't know anything about the Daily Mail.
I suspect from this one article that it's a complete piece of crap all over the place.
So I'm just going to start by saying that.
But here we have, sunbathing for just one day increases your risk of heart disease and stop the body fighting infections, study finds.
So I didn't quite read that with the right...
And sunbathing for just one day increases your risk of heart disease and stop the body fighting infections, study finds.
Experts found going from no heat to moderate heat triggered worrying reactions.
It is no secret that sizzling in the sun for long periods is bad for your health, Apologies for these crazy ads.
As well as the headaches and risk of heat strokes, sunbathing dramatically increases the chance of skin cancer, with 70% of cases of the disease linked to sun exposure.
But now, researchers have added two further serious harms to the list, heart disease and a wrecked immune system.
So it goes on and on and on.
Scientists from the University of Louisville in Kentucky found that just a day in a hot outdoor environment can raise telltale signs of inflammation in the body by at least 10%.
So this all sounds like garbage, and frankly, my bias is the framing that it's in with all these pop-up ads and everything does not help me trust it anymore.
But what I do when I see a piece like this is I go and find the original research, obviously.
So, later on in here, they say they're using the Universal Thermal Climate Index.
They're talking about inflammation.
They've got the name of the lead study author, Daniel Riggs, and where he's at, the University of Louisville.
I figure I have enough.
I take this to Google Scholar, and I just plug in all the usual kinds of things that I do when I'm trying to find a piece of research.
Like I have one of the author's names, Riggs, I have where he is, that won't help.
I don't know where it's published, they don't say, but I have a number of keywords.
And search finding primary literature is one of my fortes, and I cannot find it.
I cannot find it anywhere.
I cannot find it at all, and I'm searching, you know, from 2023 forward, because this is brand new, it's probably 2024 forward, brand new.
So finally, I just go into a search engine more broadly and just start plugging in things.
And I find a bunch of other stories that seem to be related to the same research.
And one of the other media stories that is far better than this one points out that this is not actually a piece of published research.
This is based on a talk that was given at the Epidemiology and Prevention Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Scientific Conference in Chicago that is happening right now and is sponsored by, wait for it, the American Heart Association.
The American Heart Association Chicago conference, which is happening right now on epidemiology and prevention slash lifestyle and cardiometabolic scientific sessions is where you can find all the PDFs of all the abstracts has the abstracts, that is, the summaries written by the researchers in advance and submitted to the conference, and the conference then got to decide, do you or do you not get a slot where you get to have the talk?
And the abstracts are now available and have been available since the start of the conference two days ago as we speak.
So, while there is no paper, And I obviously wasn't at the talk, and none of the papers that I find, none of the media reports say much more.
We do have an abstract.
So, here's the abstract for the research in question.
Again, the American Heart Association, we've talked before about their incredible bias.
This is titled, and again that's Riggs, that's the lead author, as was displayed in that terrible article in the Daily Mail, Associations Between Short-Term Outdoor Heat Measures and Markers of Immune Response and Inflammation.
Well, first thing that you see as you begin to read this is this has nothing to do with sun exposure at all.
Okay, so the Daily Mail just has it completely wrong.
The Daily Mail is some kind of tabloid that's just trying to scare people into staying out of the sun.
However, that's not the biggest problem here.
So you are now going to get more people being confused about whether or not the sun is good for them or not, but let's just take a look at the methods.
Adult participants, aged 20 to 70 years, were recruited from a neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky during the summer months of 2018 and 2019.
Circulating cytokines and immune cells were measured in 624 participants at baseline.
Heat metrics, including temperature, net effective temperature, and Universal Thermic Climate Index, UTCI, were calculated as the 24-hour mean on the day of participant's clinical visit.
Linear regression models were used to estimate associations between heat metrics in each biomarker, adjusting for socio-demographic and behavioral factors.
In case that was too jargony and technical, they had 624 people come in and have a blood draw.
And then, they also said, what day was that?
What was the temperature outside?
What was the mean temperature for the 24 hours on that day?
Oh, actually, maybe that's not enough.
Maybe let's do some other measures of heat.
Let's take the mean other measures of heat from that day outside, which is not where they were.
We don't know what time of day it was.
We don't know anything else about them.
We don't know if they came from air conditioning themselves.
If they live in air conditioning, then the idea that it was hotter outside shouldn't matter much at all.
No, no, it could matter in the inverse way.
It could be that the air conditioning is causing this.
This is such crap.
And, you know, usually I would not.
I refuse to.
When I find research that looks like something I want to talk about and I don't have access to the paper, I will not talk about it until I have access to the paper in this case.
Because so much hay is being made of this research in the media already, even though the only thing available to the public is an abstract.
And presumably some journalists were in the room when these people gave their talk.
I don't know.
I hope so.
But so we have an initial Giant error, in which the Daily Mail and some of these other media outlets, so-called, are claiming that it's sun exposure that is correlated with markers of inflammation and reduced immune response, when it has nothing at all to do with sun exposure, and the authors do not claim that.
So that's just, like, bad journalism.
But then there's bad science, Here, where they did an incredibly simple thing.
This research took nothing.
624 people.
That's a lot of blood.
But they had a bunch of blood drawn, and then they went, OK, let's go look at whatever NOAA had to say, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to say about the heat that day in Louisville, Kentucky, and see what we could say about cytokines.
So this is a total bloodbath, this paper.
It's incredible, right?
Go back to the headline.
Can you go back to the headline?
In the Daily Mail?
Yeah, hold on.
Sunbathing for just one day increases your risk of heart disease.
Sunbathing for just one day increases your risk of heart disease and stop the body fighting infections, study finds.
So again, study did not find that.
Study was crap, but study did not even claim to find that.
Yeah, I'm left, the connection between this abstract and that report is stunningly remote.
Stunningly remote, and so if I had, if there were a paper, And I had finally found it.
I probably would have attributed my failure to find it for a long time to the fact that this piece says almost nothing about what is true.
On the other hand, I was plugging in the right keywords.
I didn't say sunbathing and such.
I was like, you know, UTCI and inflammation and immune and heat.
heart disease, they're backing out heart disease from cytokines.
Uh, so if I have my screen back here, let's see the, um, um, what did they say?
They've got... Hot weather can interfere with a variety of biological processes, including the promotion of systemic inflammatory responses, which play a critical role in the progression of cardiovascular disease.
So I think they're just taking inflammation as a general indicator of, well, which play a critical role in the progression of cardiovascular disease.
Now, that's in the intro, so I don't know what they claim to have found.
Short-term heat exposure may trigger an inflammatory response characterized by innate immune activation, as evidenced by results of higher total monocytes, classical monocytes, and TNF-alpha.
Moreover, short-term heat exposure may impair adaptive immune response.
These results suggest that exposure to high temperatures may increase susceptibility to infectious agents, environmental exposures, and accelerate the progression of cardiovascular disease.
Again, for those just listening right now, no, these results do not, because they did not demonstrate that any of those 624 people actually had had heat exposure.
All they demonstrated was that there is some correlation in days when it is somewhat hotter, and it was never all that hot even, actually.
Right.
Nor, I mean, and this is in part at least the fault of the journalists, nor did they establish anything about heart disease.
They simply established that cytokines and heart disease have something to do with each other.
Right.
So, you know, I mean... Well, yeah.
The science here is impossibly bad, which is, you know, okay, so somebody did some bad science and reported it.
That's not a thing.
At an American Heart Association conference.
Right.
American Heart Association, which has a, you know, murky origin story as a industry, uh, trade effort, uh, I believe involved in the legitimizing of seed oils early on.
But, um, yep.
The science is cruddy, but isn't supposed to have gotten the attention of the world, right?
It was some bad paper that was presented at some conference.
The journalism that reports it is absolutely hyperventilating over nothing, even if the science were accurate.
It says almost nothing about the things.
I mean, it doesn't say anything about sun exposure, and it certainly doesn't say anything about heart disease, nor is it even capable of it, because are you telling me that on the day that the heat was high, that that day's heat correlated with the heart disease?
I mean, how do you even connect these things?
So, interestingly, there's another paper, there's another abstract from the same conference that is taking the media by storm.
I think I know which one it's going to be.
Can I guess?
Yes, I think you do know.
Because I've read this reported several times.
Is it going to be the paper that says that intermittent fasting causes… Early death.
Yep.
Amazing.
Already cued into the fact that maybe that was going to have the same origin as this other one, I more quickly found the abstract for this paper.
Here we have it.
Again, abstract out of the American Heart Association's conferences going on right now in Chicago called Epidemiology Prevention Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health.
This one, the title is Association Between Time-Restricted Eating, also known as Intermittent Fasting, and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality.
I'm again just going to read the methods.
Maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger.
Participants aged at least 20 years who completed two valid 24-hour dietary recalls and reported usual intake in both recalls were included from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003-2018.
Mortality status as of December 2019 was obtained through linkage to the National Death Index.
An eating occasion required consuming more than 5 kilocalories of foods or beverages.
Eating duration between the last and first eating occasion was calculated for each day.
The average duration of two recall days defined typical eating duration, which was then categorized as less than eight hours, eight to ten hours, ten to twelve hours, twelve to sixteen hours, reference group mean duration in U.S. adults, and greater than 16 hours.
Multi-variable Cox proportional hazards models were employed to estimate the association of eating duration with all cause and cause-specific mortality in the overall sample and among adults with cardiovascular disease or cancer.
Adjusted hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals were derived.
So, most of the methods are in that very first... I mean, it's a bunch of statistical stuff, but are in the very first sentence.
They went to something called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 to 2018.
Apparently some vast database of data.
That's what databases tend to be full of.
The good ones.
The good ones.
Participants who were at least 20 years old who completed two valid... complete, I guess.
There may be other measures for validity, but... I lost it.
Two valid... my god, I lost it.
Oh, there it is.
Dietary... 24-hour dietary recalls.
So this is self-reporting on what they say they ate and when.
Twice.
And reported that that was usually kind of what they did.
These are the people.
And based on two days of self-reported recall, in which some people say, yeah, actually I restricted my eating window to eight hours or less.
Have you ever, like, have you ever, you probably have, I don't actually know if you have, have you ever tried to accurately, accurately, and it has to be in this case fairly precisely, recall not just what you ate but when after the fact?
Very difficult.
It's very difficult.
Furthermore, people think that they're better at it than they are.
People lie about what they eat.
And especially if people say that they are doing intermittent fasting, they will tend to lie about the windows during which they ate and misremember.
Both things, both lie and misremember.
Two Voluntary recalls is all it took to be included in this study.
And then, yeah, you have apparently early death in people who reported twice that they were engaging in intermittent fasting by only eating within an eight-hour window on those two days.
Furthermore, there is one other very last thing in the results.
Here we go.
Eating... I can't do it.
Eating duration of more than 16 hours in a day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality in people with cancer.
So, if you don't sleep as much as you should be, because eating in a more than 16-hour window in a day means that you're not sleeping eight hours, and you have cancer, apparently that's going to help you out.
When I saw the headline on this one, My thought was, okay.
Whatever.
It's garbage.
Right, but I don't know how it's garbage.
Is it worth the effort to figure out the way in which it's garbage?
And I still, I don't know, right?
Like, I can't, because all we have is the abstract, the only thing I can see here is, well, I know right away that two days of self-reports of intermittent fasting as evidence that these were people who were chronically intermittent fasting is not sufficient.
It's insufficient, but presumably there's all sorts of other problems here.
We just can't tell because this is all we got.
Okay, but this is just me leaving the reservation.
First of all, there's a dramatic perverse incentive here.
You've got two papers from some weird conference.
Neither paper makes any sense on scrutiny of its abstract.
That are making a splash in the world of people who imagine that they are data driven, right?
Yes.
That incentivizes people to do whatever it is that resulted in this.
In other words, garbage science that results in a dubious conclusion that can be transmogrified into sensational headline.
That's a career path, right?
It sure is.
What's more... I've had several career paths.
That takes... I've had lots of people being paid to do that.
You do that right for long enough, you're gonna end up a goddamn influencer.
I'm telling you, it could happen.
Um, but the, and this is happening at some conference, maybe this is a well-established significant conference that has recently gone off the rails, or maybe the whole point of this conference is, hey, we need some conclusions for some reasons.
Um, you know, so one of these looks like a, you know, pharma would love it if you, Got over your addiction to being in the sun because vitamin D obviously is in danger of, vitamin D has unfair advantages in the competitive market with pharmaceuticals and they would like you not to be making vitamin D.
So, that would be one thing.
For us, if you're sick.
Right.
And the problem is that when you find out that the American Heart Association, I sure hope I have this right, American Heart Association has this murky history.
I believe this is right.
Yeah, I believe it is right.
Maybe look it up to make sure.
When you realize that this is a thinly veiled trade group, or at least that its origin story looks like that, it raises the question about what, you know, it has given a lot of bad advice that turns out to be upside down.
And so anyway, the question is, Quibono is really what I'm getting at here.
Right.
So, okay, go ahead.
No, I'm not.
It's going to take me some time to figure this out.
I, you know, I don't.
You asked me to try to figure it out, but I can't.
I can't do it super quickly.
Okay.
History.
All right.
Well, that's fascinating.
Yeah.
And it makes me wonder, those are the only two abstracts I looked at, and there's hundreds of them.
Right, what else is in the report?
There could be some gems.
So, at some level, you know, any new, dire-sounding, excuse me, health pronouncement that comes out in the next week, like, see if it doesn't have an abstract at this conference in Chicago, because that was surprising.
Like, two of these things that are showing up right now, both attributable, and you know, and they had these abstracts up, and they were, they were,
They were embargoed until the start of the conference on the 18th of this month, and then suddenly they're released to the world, which I hope I'm wrong about this, but I also suspect that a lot of the press on both of these papers was actually done without even being there, without even seeing the talk, which, you know, a talk will have more information and will allow for Q&A.
I hope.
I mean, that's what conferences are supposed to do.
And so, if these insane media reports are not even based on having seen a talk and having had the potential to engage with the authors of the study, but it's just that abstract, which you guys, the entire audience now, has as much information as those journalists did.
And you can see in the one case, the stories were just completely wrong, and I didn't bother going into all the intermittent fasting.
Media reports because they just were all saying the same thing and basically if the research is bad then you can't say anything and We have no reason to think the research is good.
Well, there is I Can't figure out what it is, but there is some connection between this and what we were just discussing with respect to the journalists Being part of some activist effort to advance some narrative and in some ways just superficially speaking the the medical freedom movement
is focused on taking actual control of your health by, for example, being aware of your vitamin D deficiency and doing two things about it.
One is going into the sun and the other is supplementing if you can't get to the right levels through sun exposure.
And the other has to do with managing your weight And intermittent fasting is something that works for a lot of us.
So the idea that these things are inherently bad because they happen to be viewed as good by people who are countering the conventional narrative fits with the central question.
It fits.
It also serves, you know, the Goliath.
It is some, as you said in response to Alexandra's hypothesis on Twitter, some combination of emergence and collusion.
It fits with the idea that there are forces that benefit from accelerating the Cartesian crisis.
Even if it's not clear, like why does taking down intermittent fasting, who is that going to help?
What product is it?
What precise financially perverse incentive might exist?
Isn't it also true that it serves an industry that uses fear and coercion and doctors in lab coats to push their products into people?
It serves that industry to put everyone on their back foot at all times.
I don't know.
I thought I finally had a sense of like, well, I'm going to make vitamin D while the sun shines, and I'm going to be out there in the infrared, and it's good for me.
And sometimes maybe restricting my eating window will help We'll help me, if I was getting close to something like metabolic disease, back that off.
Now we have research.
This is research done by credentialed researchers, scientists, who say, no, no, no, that's not true.
Much as people used to complain when we were growing up, in like the '70s, '80s, into the '90s, like, oh, why is it that, you know, we were told that X was bad for you, and now it's good for you, and something else is bad for you, and now it's a new thing that's good for you, And those stories were relatively easy to track.
It was relatively easy to find that the margarine producers, she wanted you to believe that butter was bad for you, which it's not, right?
But now, it is just better to have a confused populace.
It is better to have a populace that can't sink its teeth into something that is concrete and real and go, you know what?
It is the middle of the day.
It is early spring.
It is sunny.
It's not now, but imagine that were true.
I'm going to go outside and get sun on my skin, and I'm going to expose as much of my skin as possible, given the temperature it is out there, and that is going to be good for me.
Oh, no, no.
The media informs you the opposite.
You're going to give yourself heart disease.
Don't say you weren't warned.
You have the sun.
Well, if you're not going to help yourself, we can't help you.
If you're not going to take our advice, then what is it that we can possibly do for you?
Like, you did it to yourself.
Like, these are the fear tactics!
Yeah, it does.
The beleaguered public ends up with no choice but to simply just accept what it's told because the idea of trying to ferret out what's actually true in an environment where the quality of the information is so low is unthinkable.
Right.
Which interestingly brings me to something I tweeted earlier this week.
I said, those with better information have a decisive advantage over their competitors.
Given that, it's not hard to understand why every truth-seeking institution would fail all at once.
It's just hard for most people to accept that in 2024, accurate information has been fully privatized.
So, you know, yeah, the Cartesian crisis is a feature, not a bug, if you are in a position to transfer other people's wealth to you because they are ignorant.
So it's cultivated ignorance at one level.
And, you know, I would also just point out, it's not obvious to me that the American Heart Association, I don't know what their connection is to pharma, but both of those weird conclusions would be good for an industry that profits when people are not healthy, right?
It leads them to suspect exactly the things that might liberate them.
An industry that profits from people that aren't healthy while having created the right to claim that your lack of health is your own fault.
It is remarkably both coercive and demonic, frankly.
One last thing before we sign off.
You have also a last thing?
I have a last thing.
I can make it quick, but you go ahead.
I wanted to point to, and you can put my screen up here, what I published at Natural Selections this week.
Called, and thank you for the subtitle, Never Cave to the Mob, A Big Flat Cautionary Tale.
T-A-I-L.
Nicely done.
Thank you.
So, long-time Dark Horse viewers may remember a conversation that you had with Jacob Shockey back in, would have been probably late January, mid-late January of last year, 2023, so 14 months ago now.
He is the founder and president of what was then the non-profit that was then called The Beaver Coalition, and it has burnt to the ground, not his doing, and he has phoenixed it back up, and it is now called Project Beaver.
And that conversation between you and Jacob was extraordinary, and it was about both the important and necessary role of beaver, especially in North American landscapes, and especially, especially Western landscapes, which we understand to be a land of drought and Fire, but when appropriately mitigated by the prevalence of beaver, is not that.
It is a lush place, still drier than some parts of the continent, but relatively lush.
That was downstream of me having published a piece on natural selections 14 months ago about the role of beaver in North American landscapes.
And what happened as soon as I published this piece is still something that we're not being 100% public about.
But basically, as is conveyed in this in today's or yesterday's natural selections here, is that a member of Jacob's board at the time, of the Beaver Coalition's board, looked me up online, discovered that I looked me up online, discovered that I am a hateful and bigoted transphobe.
Because I do not believe that men can become women.
And in fact, that's not a belief.
It's just a scientific truth.
And demanded of Jacob that he denounce me.
And, um, say that he did not know of my hateful beliefs and that that would allow her and the rest of the board to perhaps forgive him his friendships.
He refused.
And, um, she took it out.
Like, she managed to create a mob that took out this incredibly important and utterly unrelated to anything about human sexuality organization.
And so, in January of this year, Zach, if you would show this, please.
In January of this year, I asked Jacob, Uh, who is a former student of ours and a longtime friend.
If he was interested in, uh, in ruminating on what had happened, uh, now that it's been, uh, some time, and he said, publicly, and he said yes, and he proposed that we write letters to one another, which we did.
Actually, he actually handwrote me letters and sent them to me in the mail, and, um, I typed a letter back to him, uh, because my handwriting is appalling.
But, um, What this is here is that letter exchange, and it is a little bit opaque because all of the details, all the salacious details are not in here, and we don't name any names at all.
But what it also has, what I encourage people to go here and read, is also, and I allude to it in my letter to Jacob, and he then goes into some detail about some of his past work, where you and I were both his mentors.
No, I was in Panama with him.
We had been his professors together, but I was in Panama with him and his peers, his colleagues, when they did this just groundbreaking and incredibly challenging, both in terms of the physical environment and logistics,
And the political and the science, like everything about it was very challenging work on the relatively newly named and discovered species, the pygmy sloth, which lived on this island of Escudo de la Veragua in the Bogos del Toro archipelago in the Caribbean side of Panama.
And what happened there, which Jacob also relates in this letter interchange, was Scientists with more power and prestige came in, tried to strong-arm Jacob and his peers into giving all of their work to these people.
These people had both no respect for the sloths that they were supposedly researching, nor to the local people who are indigenous people who live on a comarca, which is basically like an empowered Indian reservation in Panama.
The people on the Comarcas in Panama have much more power, including with the Panamanian government, than Indians have in the past on Indian reservations in the U.S.
And so Jacob and his peers did excellent work, both with the Pygmy Sloths and also working with both the Panamanian government and the Indigenous Council.
These researchers with more power and more prestige came in and tried to roll over them.
And in this particular case, they got stopped because I and one of their other mentors wrote letters to the appropriate authorities, and this group of researchers decided it wasn't worth their while, and they wandered off to make trouble somewhere else.
But it revealed how broken, how tragically broken, Even fields where you imagine, just like in medicine, you imagine people go into doctoring because they want to heal people.
You imagine that people go into conservation biology because they're interested in the fate of the animals, and perhaps the people who live in the landscapes where the animals live, and at a more global level, the planet.
And all too often, that turns out not to be the case.
So, I encourage people interested in any of that to go check it out.
Awesome.
I think I will hold my final, final thing for a future date.
Okay.
You're looking at me like something has gone terribly wrong.
No, no, no, no.
That's not true.
I was just debating in my mind whether it made sense to, but I think so.
All right.
Well, uh, then we have, um, before we sign off, um, you can check out our store at darkhorsestore.org where we've got things, all of these available on shirts and many of them on stickers and bags and such.
Uh, digital book burning.
Yeah.
Um, that's a terrible, terrible, terrible sign of our modern times.
That's, uh, that's, that's bits and bytes going up in smoke there.
Zeros and ones.
And yeah, we've got that.
We've got Dark Horse, straight up Dark Horse March blueberries because oxidants happen.
Yes, they do.
All the rest.
Lots of good stuff there.
Okay, so no Q&A today.
Please go check out Locals.
We've got terrific content there.
If you support us there, we benefit, but you also will.
And right now, there's a fantastic conversation that Brett had with Ryan Cole, pathologist, there.
While you're there, you could consider subscribing to our Dark Horse channel on Rumble, but it of course helps us even more if you support us at Locals.
We've got a variety of places that you can find us, but I write at Natural Selections.
We have our Locals channel where you can find us.
And we of course have these great sponsors this week, which were Momentous and Moink?
Exactly.
And Seed.
And Seed, yes.
And Seed.
And we will put links in the show notes as we always do.
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