Truth Seeking in a Dark Age | Phil Harper on DarkHorse
Bret talks to Phil Harper on his recent trip to the UK. They discuss the process of truth seeking and how our present dark age affects it.Find Phil on X: @phillyharper (https://twitter.com/phillyharper)Find Phil on Substack: https://philharper.substack.com/Cartoon mentioned at minute 56: https://imgix.bustle.com/lovelace/uploads/1055/dba34200-2841-0133-775b-0aecee5a8273.jpg?w=760&h=508&fit=crop&crop=faces&auto=format%2Ccompress&q=50&dpr=2*****PaleoValley: Wide array of...
Hey folks, welcome to a joint presentation of the Dark Horse Podcast and The Digger.
I am sitting today with Phil Harper, and that is a near impossibility except for the fact that I am in the UK and I was here to do a couple of events with the World Council for Health, Tess Laurie's organization.
One of them was last night and Phil you were present at that event and we thought it would be a good idea to sit down and compare notes.
You and I of course met at the Better Way Conference in this very venue where we are sitting now.
When would that have been?
Two years ago?
Yeah, two years ago in this exact city where it all started to feel like a real thing for the first time, not something that was happening on computer screens.
People came out and were like, well, there's more of us than we thought.
That's quite right.
Actually, it was the first time for me meeting a lot of people that I had been interacting with and had been partnering with, in fact, over COVID dissidency.
So it was a powerful moment.
Anyway, it's interesting to be two years on from that and to see where we are.
How shall we start here?
Well, I wanted to talk with you, so I'm super glad that we've been able to do that.
Your talk last night, I think, is as good a place as any to kickstart.
The name of the talk was something like Dark Age or Enlightenment, the Hyper-Novelty Crisis.
And you posed this question, which was interesting to me because it split the room.
At the beginning, I would say around about down the middle.
Which was surprising.
Yeah.
This question of, are we entering a dark age?
Or are we perhaps leaving one and reaching an age of enlightenment?
But I didn't quite get your steer on that.
Not that you should wedge yourself to any position before we kickstart this thing, but I didn't see your hand get raised, Brett.
No, I deliberately didn't raise it because I didn't, you know, when you're the speaker, you don't want to influence people because they, you know, some of them are, you know, They have appreciated something you've said from afar, and if you put up your hand, they don't want to feel like they're wrong.
So anyway, I kept my opinion to myself.
On the other hand, It is interesting.
There was a time when I thought I was the only person who believed that we were in a dark age.
And then I met Steve Patterson, and I met him in part because he was talking openly about the fact that he believed we were in a dark age.
So I reached out to him, and it turned out that not only did he agree on that formulation, but he placed the beginning of that dark age far earlier than I would have.
So I still don't know whether I believe my formulation or his, but I definitely believe this is a cryptic Dark Age, and that that is a frightening prospect, because in normal human circumstances, a Dark Age might be a terrible thing to live through, but live through is what would happen.
In our dark age, the power of the tools at our disposal in combination with the retreat of enlightenment values is tremendously perilous.
And frankly, I don't think, if we don't recognize it, I don't think we get out of it.
Yes.
And I think it is hard to get a handle on that.
I spoke to Steve as well, and it's strange that we're covering the subject matter kind of twice.
This may be going out after that or before, I don't know, so we'll see.
But yeah, he mentioned 19, round about 1920s, the start of this dark age.
But like you say, if that's the case, if you were to ask a lay member of the public how they felt about that, is that the case, they would, Their instinct would be that we've lived through an enormous technological change over a hundred years or more.
Those two things are irreconcilable, really.
Well, no, I don't know that they are.
Okay.
Because there's a difference between a technological change and enlightenment.
In other words, you know, 1984 paints, albeit from a technologically primitive place in history, a technologically enabled dark age.
So technology is not synonymous with enlightenment.
But nonetheless, I do, I think, having encountered Steve Patterson's perspective and now pondered quite a bit what I really think the beginning of the dark age might have been, I think the answer is going to be something like this.
A dark age does not necessarily dawn across civilization all at once.
Maybe you only call it a dark age once it has, but it dawns sort of field by field.
And in my field, I don't think the dark age set in until 1976 or thereabouts.
Okay.
And so it's quite possible that Steve is right in general.
And that my experience is exceptional because I was in a field that was lively until shortly after I was born, so I was sort of, you know, I grew up in the wake of this period of discovery that was real, and in fact I knew the people who had in large measure brought about the discoveries of that era.
So to me, I wouldn't have detected the Dark Age because, you know, effectively in my pub, we were learning things, right?
So that's a different experience.
But if we imagine that it's a bit more granular than we would ordinarily say, that it only looks like a Dark Age across civilization in retrospect, but as it dawns, it's piecemeal, then that would make a lot of sense of how you would reconcile both the technologically vibrant then that would make a lot of sense of how you would reconcile both the technologically vibrant aspects of the period that Steve claims is entirely Dark Age and the difference in his opinion and So what is holding it back then?
What is this thing because let me put some examples in because last night I heard this phrase they a lot and it's an amorphous blob of concepts in my view sometimes too specific my view of it is it's much more an ambiguous thing that's holding progress back.
And I think that Steve is broadly right, that wherever you look, you often find there seems to be some scandal at the heart of so many disciplines.
But you mentioned 1976 or there or thereabouts.
What exactly is it, do you think, if you were to try to put words to it?
STEVE VILLACHICA: Well, I think, you know, again, I know my field better than others.
But I think several things have conspired against us.
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One of them is that there was a shift From the age of enlightenment, in which the discovery, in which the truth-seeking was done by people who were rich, for the most part, which I don't consider a good thing.
In fact, it has substantial downsides, but it did have one important upside, which is that it removes the readily corruptible nature Of the people doing the discovery.
Because they have no reliance on funds and whatnot.
Right.
It's not about keeping a job and competing for tenure.
It's about immortality.
And I guess what I would say is wanting to discover something important enough that your name gets remembered is a little bit petty, but it's awfully close to a proxy for something that would get you to strive to actually see what's going on.
Yeah, that's very interesting, actually.
Because that brings things into a very real space of how things even get funded.
That's very relatable.
That model, wherever you find it, is deeply, deeply problematic.
Because where the money is, is where the insights are.
You see this in the media industry.
You'll know this all too well with what's happened with the Dark Horse podcast.
You can see inside the mainstream media industry.
It's very difficult to hold a view in those spaces that's going to get you ejected from the theatre.
Right, and you are constantly asking the question, you know, even where there are places that you're reasonably confident you know where things are headed, there's a question of I mean, I hate to put it in these terms, but is that the hill I want to die on?
Do I want to look at the whole basket of things I'm interested in talking about, or do I want to talk about this one topic where I am far enough out of the mainstream that if I mention it, that will be used to portray me as a crank?
And, you know, what do I really care if I'm vindicated, you know, 50 years after my death?
And let me point out, I do care that the vindications come soon, not because I think it's so important, you know, personally, but because we are in a battle over something.
The question of who we are in a battle against is a totally valid one, but we have to win.
And so, if the vindications are very delayed, that means, in the meantime, we are not making progress against the thing that threatens us.
So I do think, you know, in answer to your question, one thing that's going on is that the fact that truth-seeking has become a career makes it extremely vulnerable to corruption.
And if you've lived inside of science, you either rationalize the corruption around you, or you discover that it's overwhelming, which drives most people out.
Well, it would become like any other job at that stage.
I mean, to use a really crude example, who could feel... You know, if you were washing cars every day, there's a story you would tell yourself about that.
It's completely at odds with deciding you're nobly going to go and tell the truth.
Because once you see it as a job, as a means to an end, it's just a way to get through the day.
And there's a whole range of gradients that you can use in that story, all the way up from teaching kids at kindergarten, to brain surgery, to hopefully not flying a plane.
You know, where it really matters.
But in the information sphere, in the places where we're relying on expertise, like what is happening in this space, in a sense, there was an academic in the UK, he was a Canadian or American academic, and he died recently.
His name was, I'll have to remember, Graeber, but he wrote this book called Bullshit Jobs.
Oh, his name is David Graeber?
David, right.
Is that right?
So this idea that everybody just has this Job that doesn't really fulfill them and is kind of bullshit and they privately know but publicly they hold a very different perspective about that position because they have to play the game.
That's much easier to understand in really in jobs that people don't really want to do because you just get on with it.
Who wants to, you know, be grinding all day long.
But in the intellectual space, I think that same kind of thing actually happens.
The people find themselves in these positions, they quietly, privately might get themselves thinking, you know what, I'm not actually 100% sure with this, but I don't have any avenue to go down to change course.
I'm stuck.
Well, it's worse than that, because the Weeding process is profound for reasons that are arcane and largely uninteresting.
The way the university solves its problem, the university is fueled by grant money.
And that grant money comes in when the principal investigator can spend as much of their time writing grants as possible, which means that the natural order of things is for the primary investigator to accumulate a laboratory of people who do the actual work not only of the laboratory, but of teaching.
And the result is that the system takes these people in as labor that doesn't have to be paid a full wage, because technically they're students.
They're seeking a degree and they're being subsidized through teaching, which means the PI knows which of their students are going to get a job.
The students don't know.
The students live under this false rubric of imagining, yeah, if I really, you know, stick to it, I'll find something, I'll get a job, you know.
And by the time they get to the end of graduate school, they're bitter because they've discovered the truth.
They've discovered how much hackery there is.
They've discovered that, you know, that they are being taken advantage of.
And most people, at the point that they realize That they've wasted the better part of a decade pursuing a degree that was used to pay them in lieu of money, leave and they're never seen again.
They go into industry or something.
And so the point is who's left over?
Well, the cutthroat people who were willing to claw their way to the top are left over.
And the true believers are left over, but it's not the people you would want to be doing the work, and so it's not as surprising that the work is cruddy as the public thinks it is.
The work is cruddy because the system is broken, and the process that the system is stewarding is so delicate.
The difference between science that is done well enough that it actually produces the correct product, which is insight, and science that is very close to that process but is distorted and produces sometimes the upside-down result, that difference is small.
It's like, I don't know how much you know about nuclear fusion.
Not as much as you might think.
Well, but you might know this.
Nuclear fusion is both capable of releasing fantastic amounts of energy from mundane starting materials, but it is also fantastically difficult to maintain the conditions in which that energy is released so that it becomes a self-sustaining process, which is why we don't have fusion-generated electricity coming out of the wall yet, and haven't.
It's always 20 years out, right?
The reason for that is that the conditions necessary to make this marvelous process work are very difficult to maintain, and I would argue science is like that too.
Yes, the conditions for it are not always perfect.
I guess that's why you would always find these periods in history where you have this massive explosion of activity, and you think in such a short period of time something amazing happened.
Because the conditions for that were right.
And you're arguing, and Steve is arguing, or making the case that, something changed.
The times are different.
But you're saying maybe 1976.
Steve's saying maybe 1920.
Something enters the phrase.
So if...
If people could, I mean, this is where, are we entering a dark age or coming out of one?
I'm actually optimistic about this in the sense that these tools that have been afforded to us kind of free people to some degree, not perfectly, from some of those forces inside the previous institutions of learning.
And you can now, if an audience or an interested group come with you, the shackles of all of that weird system of trying to impress person A and Looking for money to fund our research, all of that can kind of, to some degree, disappear.
But it's not super conducive to, like, the heavy sciences, where you need a budget to do your work.
Well, I agree with you, but people really have to break their addiction to the proxy of authority.
Right?
If you are of the belief, as I think most Normal people are, until some point, that in general, the authorities and the institutions in which they live are basically right about the big stuff.
They make some really embarrassing errors, but it's self-correcting over time.
So basically, if you say, I'm one of the enlightened people.
I don't have the time or the capacity to study all this stuff independently myself.
So more or less, with the acknowledgement that there is a great deal of noise in the system, the signal-to-noise ratio is such that I'm going to trust the institutions and the experts, and I'm going to be right a lot more often than I'm wrong.
If you think that that's true, you've got a problem now, because something has actually corrupted the institutional framework.
So every institution is now broken.
And as soon as you get out of that and you say, actually, you know what?
I do need to trust other people because I can't do all this work myself.
It's impossible.
Who do I trust?
Well, I'm going to trust people who have predictive power, who see things ahead.
Right.
If I track people's track record, then I know something about whether or not what they say is insightful.
And I want to watch what they do when they get it wrong.
Right.
If I know that they're capable of saying, OK, here's what I miscalculated in this place.
Here's what I now believe.
And I'm now going to adjust my overarching model in order to restore its capacity to predict more than other people's models.
If you find those people, it doesn't really matter what degree they have.
I literally don't care.
If you're self-taught, all the better.
The question is, does your model predict things other people's model doesn't?
That's the real test, and a degree is no longer a proxy for it.
Yes.
I mean, the problem with that at a societal level is that not everybody can do it.
And so you end up in a situation where the requirement for people who have expertise just remains.
And then you would become a lone, sole voice in the dark that says to people, you ought not to trust everything you hear from these institutions.
But people basically have no choice.
And I think my experience talking to people about this, and I mentioned this to Steve as well, I rarely talk about this outside of my work because the social danger of speaking about the lack of trust one ought to have in the very critical things you're told and taught to live in this society is basically what I call an anti-social position.
It works in our sphere in a sort of semi-professional space as you go out and speak to people and say, hey did you see this?
I've just uncovered that, and you'll often be talking with people who are going through this process of really deconstructing themselves and reconstructing themselves anew.
It's painful and it's difficult.
And out there in the realms of the real world, I'm super interested to think, what strategy do we even adopt that can work at a societal level?
Because we can't say to everyone, guess what, Earth?
You're now going to have to go into full-time research.
I think it's also something that Noam Chomsky spoke about.
He was the first, interestingly, he was one of the first people to open me up to something being wrong.
And I've gone on a journey from reading and engaging in the works of Noam Chomsky to suddenly being interested in Thomas Sowell.
And for anyone who's read those two people, they are worlds apart.
But Noam Chomsky says you actually, if you wanted to really understand the truth, And get to the truth and have some investment in the truth as a citizen.
It's a full-time research project and you wouldn't be able to live your life, you know?
Yeah, but you're... I mean, I hear what you're saying.
I don't disagree with any of it, but you're using the wrong metric.
You're really mixing two things.
And this is part of why Dark Age is not hyperbole.
You are saying Well, if we really just abandon the idea of listening to the experts, we are... Lost at sea.
We are lost at sea.
Yeah.
And for those of us who believe we are in a dark age, the answer is, yeah, that's the message.
We are lost at sea already, right?
And the only argument in favor of the experts would be that listening to them is actually Better.
Net-net, it's better for you to listen to them than to ignore them.
And that's not the simple calculation it sounds like.
They can be right more than they're wrong, but if what they're wrong about results in you hurting yourself, To a degree that overrides the benefit of what they do know, then ignoring them is the right thing to do.
And seeking people who are demonstrably expert in something is a much better plan.
So I am not telling you that it is clever in a dark age to abandon the university and listen to people on podcasts instead.
Right?
Do your own research.
I'm a huge fan of it.
But it is not a substitute for functional institutions.
But I would also point out, that's not my fault.
I've been pointing out the institutional problem for decades, and nobody was listening until COVID.
The Dark Age is not, it's not a metaphor.
The Dark Age is, you know, just the same way the Great Depression in the U.S., right?
Those of us who are too young to have seen it have this image of it as this sort of sepia-toned realm.
It wasn't sepia-toned, right?
The Great Depression was in full color for the people who lived it, right?
This doesn't look like a Dark Age, but guess what?
It wouldn't, right?
And it is one.
Pretty clearly.
And that doesn't mean... So I do want to push back slightly on your point about... Now mind you, I use this term advisedly.
Normies.
Normies, yes.
Right.
And sometimes I refer to myself as one.
It's an online meme, isn't it?
And it is a good approximation.
It's a funny term.
It's a bit like muggles, really, in Harry Potter universe.
Yeah, it's a little bit like muggles, except I think if you have a good model of it, the point is there are topics on which all of us are one.
Oh, for sure.
And then there are topics in which we're not.
And that that is actually useful for generating insight into what it's like when you confront a normie with something like the terrifying reality of what happened to us over COVID.
I would point out this.
During COVID, and by COVID I mean the crisis.
I don't mean the pandemic because there wasn't one.
I do believe there was a virus.
I do not believe there was a pandemic.
But, not by any reasonable definition in any case, but I lived in Portland in that time.
Heather and I began to experiment with something.
I think I started it because it's sort of my nature anyway.
But when people would say normie stuff about what was taking place, I would make a point of not agreeing and saying, actually, not how I see it.
Yeah.
And I would give a rough approximation of the Place that I had ended up.
And it was shocking how frequently the person on the other end of that would be liberated by knowing that you were not signed up for the mainstream narrative.
And they would just start confessing their own doubts.
Yeah.
Right?
So I think that's hovering out there much more commonly than we believe on more topics than we believe.
It's a huge gamble to take socially though, I think.
I think we spoke at one time about the difference between speaking about being treated and the idea that people could be treated during the COVID pandemic.
Again, I know there's a lot wrapped up in that now, in hindsight.
I don't know where I sit on that discussion or debate or whether I even have a You know, I'm not super interested in how that winds up, but there was this idea of the fear of discussing that versus the fear of the V word here.
It's like the most overwhelming taboo.
And so when you get into those spaces of challenging those things, it's a deeply, deeply antisocial thing to do in normal circles.
And I think everybody can feel that pressure.
But what you mentioned about the relief that someone then takes that someone has said, I think it's very, very true.
And to come back to that analogy we used earlier about being lost at sea, if in this analogy we collectively are lost at sea, we still have leaders, let's say, we have captains and boat staff in this analogy, there will be a time in this analogy where the captain still is of the view that we're not lost.
Yeah, and you may have to take over the helm.
But what you want, the huge relief comes when you are nudging and itching at this captain.
You're saying, look, there's smoke coming out of the engine room.
The sun is on the wrong horizon.
The star is on the wrong side.
All these signs are showing that something is wrong.
The captain isn't listening.
I can sense the relief that finally comes.
When the captain sits down with the normal people on the boat and says, we're lost.
Right.
That is, I think, what people are trying to itch towards.
And I'm less sure sometimes whether we will get that.
Because this catharsis that everybody wants, and I really truthfully put myself in that group, I kind of want some kind of acknowledgement from someone important that something went wrong over the last three years.
Absolutely.
All we will instead get is politics, very slight adjustments here and there, nudging... It just doesn't look like we're actually going to get it.
And so, to jump from one crude analogy of being lost at sea, desperately wanting the captain to admit that, to another...
And I know this is crude.
I really feel like there's an analogy here about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I know that sounds completely extreme.
But as that was happening, imagine it from the inside.
People on the inside had two personas.
There was a public persona that had to play the game and continue on as if everything was working fine.
And there was a private persona that even to oneself may have been more private than you'd like to admit.
I'm not saying that they would get home and be like, oh my goodness, it's all gone wrong.
It's a private growing feeling that something is wrong.
And the two are in tension.
Now those are the people in our current setup that I'm interested to speak with.
Because, you know, we're now at this they thing again.
This idea of an acute central point in this enemy system.
I just don't see it like that.
I see lots and lots of people Trying to get by in an incomplete, imperfect system, who I think, I hope, I believe, I have an intuition that there is a quiet growing scepticism inside of them that something is wrong.
And maybe, much like with what happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had collapsed a long time prior.
To actually officially ending, you know, when it was like, OK, this simply doesn't work because I've got no shoes.
I've just sold my child's coat to pay for some potatoes.
And there's only so far one's lying eyes can continue to cover the fact that something is very deeply wrong.
Where we are on that line, I don't know.
But I feel like we're certainly on a trajectory on it.
Well, I love this point, right?
Because and we really need somebody Excellent with history to tell us, you know, what was late stage Pravda like, right?
As Pravda continued to maintain the party line and that collapsed at the level of the populace.
What was it like to be watching the television with other people who were increasingly ready to admit that it was preposterous, right?
Yeah.
So that is bound to have been important.
And I would actually say I have been to the Czech Republic for the first time in my life recently, this year.
And I loved the Czech people.
I knew I would like them.
I like people generally.
But the Czech people were so fantastic.
And part of what made them fantastic was that they viewed themselves in realistic terms, right?
They had lived through this painful era that they were in no position to do anything about.
But the one thing they could do something about was not buy it, right?
So it was like this little enclave of people who knew better But, you know, yeah, they played the game, but I think they were better at being honest with each other, or at least some of them were.
And so it creates this culture.
And I would point to something.
I mentioned it last night at the event, but I really think it's very important.
In-person relationships, especially profound in-person relationships that are truly honest, are the antidote to this bullshit.
The ability to look one person in the eye, right?
Maybe it's your spouse, hopefully it is.
But the ability to look one person in the eye and say something like, I can't tell exactly what's wrong with this story, but I'm pretty sure they're lying to us, right?
And we're going to have to think about how to live through this era, right?
And the problem is that I see a lot of young people who have reached the false sophistication of thinking that a romantic relationship is something that might be nice to have, or maybe is something that's more costly than it's worth, and they're ready to dispense with it.
And my feeling is you haven't even really understood what its primary significance is.
Certainly a hell of a lot of work, but its primary significance is that you are actually in some way fusing your persona with somebody, and hopefully you've picked somebody who is worthy.
I say this to you having just met your wife and thinking you've done marvelously. - She very much has. - Yes.
But that is a very important immunity to have, far more important than any vaccine you might ever get.
Yeah, right.
And so that can be cultivated in communities.
But you know, it's one thing to have the television telling you something insane.
It's another thing to be sitting next to somebody on the couch who also knows it's insane, right?
The reification that comes from that shared reality that is, you know, Too tightly knit to be invaded by propaganda is really important, and much more so in anything that might arguably be a dark age.
And there was a discussion last night that perhaps that's why, well, I don't know where I sit on it, but maybe that's why it came under attack, the idea of both culturally and literally at times, I think.
The family unit came under attack.
Culturally, I speak of because it certainly in my circle of my social circle, it's much less common now to see a person of my age settling down, starting a family.
It's getting delayed and delayed and delayed further down the line.
There's some awareness of all of this, whether anyone has a solid view about why that's happening or whether it's More importantly, whether it's important is another thing.
But it's there.
We're in this thing that people discuss openly, and I'm not quite sure anyone could really put a handle on where the center of gravity is until much further down the line.
It might be 10, 15, 20 years until we look on this period.
Yeah, well, you know, this goes back to your question about they.
I am unembarrassed about referring to a they I cannot identify, and I don't think we should be embarrassed.
I'm coming from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist.
In fact, you probably don't know, I'm a tropical biologist.
Now, to be a tropical biologist means that you walk into the habitat that you study, and if you're any good at all, you know we don't know the first thing about it.
Right, like really almost nothing.
Tropical habitat is highly complex, arguably the most complex thing in the known universe if we include that these things contain people and therefore populations and shared cognition and all of that.
But in any case, you look at a tropical forest and it is not incorrect to discuss what creatures might have absorbed a particular Nutrient, right?
Or a particular wavelength of light that hit the canopy.
It is not incorrect to discuss the herbivory that is happening as the result of creatures you have not yet found, right?
These things are all Part of rigorous discussion, right?
You can see that the action is there before you know what did the action.
In our case, if all our antagonists must do is cloak their identity and then forbid us to talk about they in anything other than precise terms, they win.
So we have to be able to discuss them, but we have to be careful not to impose a belief in which we imagine When there's a range of possibilities to explain some phenomenon.
We can't leap to the conclusion that it was individuals deciding to do something when it could be an emergent phenomenon.
Yes.
We have to be agnostic about that.
Yeah.
And that could bring us to the next stage of this discussion.
If we say that, OK, perhaps we're lost at sea.
How long we've been lost at sea is debatable.
But there's some realising now, because of the crisis of Covid, that a lot of people recognised Hey, there's a problem here in medical literature.
Oh, hey, there's a problem here in medical science.
Hey, there's a problem here in public health.
And as that zoomed out, we're now at the point where it's, you know, you take Steve Patterson's view that, hey, there's a problem near enough everywhere, actually.
What you found in medical literature is in physics.
What you found in medical literature is in mathematics.
What you found in medical literature is in biology, and so on.
Intuitively, that feels Um, not too far from the truth for me.
I'm not too perturbed by that.
It's certainly not my radio, my first radio on these kind of topics, right?
So we acknowledge we're lost at sea, but the other part of your discussion last night was we are not in that context.
We're also entering into this hyper-novelty crisis.
And the two, again, are quite difficult things to reconcile, where the pace of change at the tail end of this arguably darker age is accelerating enormously, to such a degree that you made the case that
Whilst we have created a bubbling, effervescent, flowing cultural layer on top of humanity, and that's helped us with these things before, it is perhaps now superfluous to this attack from a rapidly changing world.
Let's jump into that.
What is this hyper-novelty crisis?
Okay, I want to put one more thing on the table before we get there.
Okay, let's do that.
And it really goes back to your initial question about how did we get into something Dark Age-like.
So, we talked a little bit about the perverse incentives that come from the career-based nature of truth-seeking now.
But here's this other phenomenon, which is really more organic.
Very often, something important is discovered in one place first, and then we suffer from the fact that forever after, it is overly identified with that thing, rather than identified with the full scope of places that it applies.
And at the moment, the one that I'm focused on is diminishing returns, which was first discovered in economics, where it's called diminishing marginal returns.
And it is treated as an economic law.
Now my claim is that it is actually a law of complex adaptive systems.
Anytime a system has an objective and is truly complex rather than complicated, diminishing returns will always apply.
So what that means is that you get a curve.
Maybe I'll just draw it so people know what we're talking about.
So, this is your return on investment over time, and we could make some very precise arguments about the conditions, but I would just argue that generally you should expect this because it's a law of nature that it will emerge when the two conditions I've mentioned are present.
What this means in a field is very unfortunate, okay?
Let's just say field X Field X is stuck, okay?
Somebody comes up with something that unsticks Field X, an idea that contains enough truth that suddenly you have this amazing burst of productivity because people now suddenly again know how to study the question, right?
That puts you on this steep face.
That steep face is a bargain, right?
That's a bargain zone, right?
Where you're getting really high payback.
Your return on investment is incredibly high, right?
Now, the problem is, when you have a competitive academic environment in that phase, right?
Suddenly, this school of thought has brought, you know, manna from heaven, right?
They've made the rain.
And it is treated as if it is true.
Because how could it not be true?
Look at how much productivity it's creating, right?
But it isn't true.
At best, it's approximate.
And the point at which you're going to plateau and pay ever higher costs for ever smaller returns is coming.
But by the time you get there, maybe you're two generations later, okay?
You're two generations, you're two academic generations later.
The founding generation is dead.
The people who remember that they made certain assumptions, who remember what it was like to be stuck and then to be unstuck, and then they're stuck again, but those people are gone or they've become irrelevant in some sense.
And the disciples don't know that the assumptions were actually made with some awareness that they might not be quite true.
And so, the point is, now the field, there's no second school of thought, because anytime anybody tries a second school of thought, they're derided as It's gate-kept.
Well, it's gate-kept, but it might also be just that the people who are descended from the generation that made such progress actually believe that alternative schools of thought are just wrong, rather than saying, actually, let's wait till our school of thought peters out, and then we'll look for the next school of thought.
That would be the rational thing to do.
Right?
There should always be a second school of thought.
And when the one school of thought runs its course, then the point is, well, you know, let's dust some stuff off and let's go back to the stuff that this school of thought can't answer and let's jumpstart productivity again.
And so you would climb a sequence of diminishing returns curves.
That would be the right thing to do.
But instead, The fields get mired in their assumptions.
And my claim will be every stuck field has broken assumptions.
And if you can actually spot which assumptions are wrong, you can figure out what the field is supposed to do.
It's very easy to beat a stuck field.
It's not easy to get credit for it.
It's not easy to get the field to recognize it.
But it's very easy to out-think a field that is, you know, spinning its wheels in a ditch.
It's a social problem rather than an academic problem very often.
It's a complex systems problem.
So which examples can we use?
to a career environment in which it just so happens that the people who are ascendant get the right to kill off those who are not making productivity at the same rate.
So which examples can we use?
Let's throw some people under the bus here.
Well, I would say in my field, there are assumptions, I'll point to one.
The idea that fitness is essentially synonymous with reproductive success.
Right.
That evolutionarily what creatures are trying to do is leave a lot of offspring.
Right.
Okay?
Now, on the one hand, most of the time, that's a great proxy.
For a great proxy for?
Evolutionary success for what we call fitness.
But they're not synonymous, okay?
Creatures that leave a lot of offspring can leave a lot of offspring because they have an advantage and that advantage can be a kind of superiority which is going to drive its inferior competitors to extinction.
And whatever the advantage is then goes to what we call fixation.
Or it can be that they cheated.
And that they have produced a lot of offspring by adapting too much, let's say, to short-term circumstances at the expense that their great-grand offspring will not be capable of facing the conditions that they're going to face.
Like, say, a bacteria inside a petri dish rapidly expands and, hey, I did really well in the context of this dish.
It hits the outer limits.
of the dish, it now has no evolutionary advantage to expanding that quickly because it's not figured out, how do we get out of this dish?
Or even better than that, okay?
I like the examples, the right style of thinking.
The problem is the dish is artificial, right?
What if we take the case of the bacterium that has the advantage that it decides to dispense with the capacity to tolerate an antibiotic?
And remember that antibiotics are not a human product.
Antibiotics are germ warfare agents produced by fungi and bacteria to fight each other.
So the evolutionary capacity to endure antibiotics exists, but in an era where there's no antibiotic present, they are a needless cost.
So a bacterium can get a reproductive advantage by dispensing with that capability.
- Because it's just energy, it doesn't need to expand. - Right, why?
You're carrying an instruction set for a molecule you don't need.
So, if you get rid of it, you can reproduce a bit faster, right?
Looks clever, until the antibiotic shows up again, and then it's the opposite of clever, right?
So, anyway, you know, in bacteria, I would argue that there's actually an elegant solution to this that we don't see very readily, which is that
bacteria are not single-celled organisms the way we think they are that they are uh... fascinatingly colonial and that what happens is there's a library at the back that remembers how to deal with the antibiotic and the plasmids that carry that information can be exported to the front line so that's a way of getting the best of both worlds basically reducing the cost of the trade-off Put that aside.
The basic point is there are lots of ways that you can cheat and look very, very clever in the short term, and then you get your comeuppance in the end.
And that will happen all the time, evolutionarily.
And if you say that reproductive success is synonymous with fitness, you will misunderstand every case in which they diverge.
Right?
Anyway, that's one place that you can take the assumption where when somebody says reproductive success, people hear fitness, and when somebody says fitness, they hear reproductive success, and they don't even realize that they've made an equivalency that is only approximate.
My argument is that happens everywhere all the time, and the real... if I were running the world, The academic world.
I would say, look, you should never have any field kill off the second best school of thought.
So what do you think stops... Why does that not crack through?
What forces are in place to stop that, other than being a professor in exile?
There's one component of this.
Is it ego?
I don't mean in the disparaging social term.
I mean that it's sometimes hard for people to let go of things they've invested a lot of time in, and so it just has this inertia it won't move.
How do you break through that?
Here's the problem.
The thing I've described with bacteria is the exact analog for what goes on academically.
Right.
The university that preserves a school of thought that is underperforming That university underperforms.
The university that puts everything in to the school of thought that's paying the dividends at the highest rate, it's winning in the short term.
But the point is, what that does is it causes that school of thought to dominate every university.
Nobody's banking on some other way of thinking.
And so the point is, at the point these things get stuck, literally nobody remembers that there's any other way of thinking about it.
Right, yeah.
So we're too far down the path with one particular method of thoughts.
Right.
Now compare that to the, you know, the Enlightenment mentality where you had gentlemen scientists, and again, everything's wrong with that.
It was just guys, it was just rich guys, almost exclusively.
Wallace is an interesting exception to that, but put him aside for the second.
When you had people competing for immortality rather than grants.
They're competing for ego, actually, in that regard.
Right.
Statues.
I'm willing to accept that's a little bit gross, but, and I mean grotesque, but the point is, if you're doing that, then you're actually thinking, What are all my colleagues doing wrong?
Because that's the way I'm going to get the statue, right?
I'm going to figure out what everybody's got wrong.
And so that desire to spot the error of your field is profoundly important.
And at the moment, fields just have veto power over it.
Yeah, that's it.
It's one thing to discover these problems, as many people in this COVID dissident space have found.
There are people coming out of the woodwork, as it were, now, slowly gathering a position that they want to take on this issue, because they think maybe the chips will fall.
It's one thing to create the insight that says, you know, the house of cards upon which your position is constructed is falling.
It's another thing to get people to actually acknowledge and realise that.
They're quite happy to just stay in this vacuous, odd space where nothing really makes sense and they're not open to discussion about that.
How you actually get the The public have to come with you, right?
This new paradigm is opening up.
Come with.
Let's go.
That's the part that's the difficult bit.
I mean, obviously, discovering that everything is wrong and that, like, we can make progress if we just change our mode of thought, of course, that requires work.
But it strikes me that one of the bigger problems I've noticed is bringing anybody with you at all.
Well, I do think there's another element here, which is the—I want to describe it with the correct level of breadth.
One way to see it is anytime that the truth is blurred with what is morally right.
The truth may in fact inform what is morally right and does, but they are not the same thing.
Things can be true and morally awkward.
Yes.
But the problem is we have fields, like let's say climate science.
The idea that humanity's fate rests on the truth produced about what is decidedly a complex system.
And that you have truth tellers, and then you have those who are muddying the water with nonsense.
And those who are muddying the water with nonsense must be silenced, because the fate of humanity rests on us doing the right thing in this place that, you know, only a select number of people are even capable of having the appropriate discussion.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, the problem is, okay, what happens if Eight discoveries in ten point to anthropogenic climate change.
But two in ten don't.
Well, The right thing to happen is to let the chips fall where they may and figure out all of the competing things.
And some of them are actually, you know, making anthropogenic climate change less significant than people thought.
Some of them are making it more.
And to figure out, you know, to build the model so it's actually predictive.
Yeah.
That's not what happens.
What happens is the moral imperative then causes you to purge anybody who finds awkward things, who even studies questions that have any chance of coming up with something else.
So you get an almost purely religious perspective, which leaves people like me, hey, I'm perfectly ready to discover that humanity is screwing up the climate.
But I believe it less and less because I know that, A, I know there are a great many things we are not discussing that have profound influences on the climate.
And B, I know that if the climate science itself said actually it's less of a problem than we thought, that the field would shut it down entirely.
Yeah.
I think that's a very, very good insight.
I think it's very strong insights, because the moral component I've discovered A lot.
It's in politics, it is there.
It clouds reality in such a way that you can't often find a route through.
The moral...
The quandary that people, everybody has to find themselves in and finding a difficult truth, acknowledging a difficult truth.
That requires charisma as well, something sorely lacking in the political space.
It really does because we, you know, these difficult questions require us to believe and invest in a leader who can get you through a very challenging and difficult thing to acknowledge.
Yeah, you need a Churchill or a Kennedy who can Give off enough strength and character that you are willing to entertain the possibility that things are not as you thought.
Yes, and the climate change is a very good one because I, you know, I wrote down here earlier, we've grown up in a stable state, really.
My youth was spent in a relatively prosperous nation.
I got a good education.
I have two wonderful parents.
I have like a nice stable family.
My whole And so this challenge comes along, and you have all of these kind of well-meaning, well-educated, well-brought-up, nice people, and they want to do right by that challenge.
Who wouldn't?
This is our first great challenge as a people, as it were, and our grandfathers and ancients have suffered through two world wars, and let's pick up the mantle and really solve this as best that we can.
I think you're right, that...
This perspective can actually very seriously cloud our picture of reality to such a degree that it does force us back towards this place that we started the conversation on as being lost at sea.
Because nobody would want to acknowledge, or has the capacity to acknowledge, well what if it isn't that?
There's a huge cost attached to us doing all of these things, if that's not the case.
And I'll give a real example of this.
I saw a comment on a YouTube video years ago, and I since saw it get used a lot.
Now, I want to precurse this story with divulging myself of a strong position on this.
I watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
I've grown up being very sympathetic to these ideas.
Me too.
And still broadly am.
But since this crisis has happened, perhaps like you, I have started to wander back towards the contrarians in this space and give them a second look.
Now, to come back to the story, the comments said, um, oh, you guys who want to argue against the action we might take on climate change.
So, you think we're just going to clean up the whole planet, clean up all of the air, sort everything out, and then it turns out that anthropogenic climate change is not really a thing.
Well, so what?
We cleaned everything up.
It's one of my favorite cartoons.
And in fact, I will have Zach dig it up and put it in here.
You know, yeah.
What if the climate crisis is a hoax and we fix the world for nothing?
Right.
Something like that.
But this position is also, I believe, not particularly strong, because if it's not true, we're already in a situation where the idea, the reality of this is having a material impact on Culture.
A massive material impact that I don't think that people are ready to acknowledge.
Not that they even want to or would like to, because from the perspective of the future is completely on life support.
Your children are going to have a very difficult time.
Crops are going to fail.
We're going to have mass migration.
You know, they paint this incredibly doomy picture.
That has material consequences if it's wrong, regardless of everything else.
So we actually have A responsibility to, I believe, to put ideology to one side.
And I often now try and find myself purging myself of ideology in the sense that not what do I want to be true, not what have I shown to be true, not what does my philosophy say to be true, but is this true?
Because the truth Really does matter, because if you are trying to start a family, or you want to have a relationship that starts a family, why will people do that?
If they're being told again and again and again, guess what?
Ten years from now, the whole world is going to be gone.
Just the other day, a friend of mine shared an article with me, and this is probably quite a common experience for people of my age, two years to save the climate.
It's completely normal to share these kinds of perspectives, and it triggered something in me.
I thought, I've heard this before.
Yeah.
I heard this in 2002.
Right.
I heard it in 2004.
I heard it in 2006.
You can actually do a very interesting Google search.
If you type in before, you know, you can time where the searches happen.
Yeah.
And you say, climb it and save the world.
You'll find again and again and again, we've been told the same message since I was a child, that we have 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, those dates have come and gone.
Now, that does not mean, therefore, that this position that the climate is changing is wrong.
I don't believe that.
What it means is, You're starting to see a picture in which we've been raised inside a weird hall of mirrors that has material impact on our lives.
We have a responsibility to be accurate.
And how we actually get people to acknowledge this without upsetting them and without cracking too many eggs.
Because like you've said, there is this very strong central moral drive that makes this thing an unquestionable Right, it is morally offensive to be analytically in disagreement, and that is an intolerable breach of a firewall that must exist.
- This is it.
I see this pattern everywhere.
It seems to come up in so many fields.
How dare you ask such a question? - How dare you ask such a question?
And so-- - Do you feel that pressure?
Oh, 100%.
I mean, I ignore it, but... You were in the cradle of that pressure, I guess.
In a way, that's what's brought you to public prominence, that you were the first person to get shot out of a cannon very publicly over something like this.
Well, I will say...
I'm not going to drag the audience back through it again, but I do have a story, actually I have a couple of them, but I have one story in my professional history as a scientist in which the world turned upside down Right in front of my eyes, and it alerted me to the fact that what I had believed all along about the practice of science was just simply incorrect.
So this is the story of what happened with my, what I thought was just an abstract discovery about something interesting about evolution, senescence, and cancer.
But the problem is that I accidentally stumbled into a realm Where there was a tremendous amount of money and prestige at stake.
A Nobel Prize, you know, profound career opportunities.
And because I stumbled into that realm that was medically important, or potentially medically important, I watched scientists stare down the truth, even though human disease was going to be the consequence of the game they were playing.
And what is this then?
Oh, well, all right.
The idea is the following thing.
Why we grow feeble and inefficient with age is a little bit of a mystery, because we are capable of producing new cells from old cells.
So I won't ask a dumb question about this.
I'm glad you brought this up, because we're having a baby, my wife is pregnant, and I'm aware that during that process, the mother is creating Stem cells, one way or another, themselves are being made in the body.
Yeah.
And the eggs for the baby, if it's a female, are being made.
So there's this ability to recreate a perfect biological organism inside of an aging human.
And it's like, this is possible for the baby, but for reasons unknown, it's not possible for you.
Right.
Now, there are two levels of reason.
One level of reason is that you are caught between hazards.
You are caught if you have the capacity to produce young tissue in any organ that needed it at all times and you just perpetually did that.
You would be overrun by tumors before you would ever get a chance to reproduce.
Okay?
That that capacity to repair your tissues comes with the risk of generating a tumor.
And so the body has a very elegant solution to this problem, which involves a limitation on the total number of cells that each of your cell lines can produce.
There are a couple of exceptions, but in general, any somatic cell line, a cell in your body somewhere, As a limit in terms of how many offspring cells it can produce.
And that means that if you get an unfortunate mutation that makes a cell deaf to the signals that it should stop growing, then it grows to a size and then arrests.
So there was a thing I saw about this where there was a treatment for DNA repair about, forgive the layman questions here on this, but it's something about extending these particular parts of the DNA.
Right.
And it was like, OK, this is working great, and it's reversing aging and slowing aging and whatnot.
And it's like, oh no, we've caused cancer.
Oh, yeah, totally predictable.
And every time.
Where have we heard this story before?
Right.
So anyway, that was what I was working on.
Right, OK.
So I spotted this tension between these two things, and it happened to resolve a very old question in my field.
And I shouted Eureka, or I was going to, until I realized that there was one gaping flaw in the whole story.
Right.
The gaping flaw in the whole story was that mice were well known to have very long telomeres.
Right.
And so that suggested something was off because why didn't they have very long lives, right?
This is the part of the, this is a particular part essentially of the DNA strand inside of a cell.
It is the ends of each chromosome.
Right.
And it's basically a, it's written in the language of DNA.
It is a series that repeats and it is not, it does not produce a protein.
So it's not a gene in the sense that the rest of the genome that we think of in classical terms produces proteins as a result of a sequence.
It's just a number of repeats.
And the more repeats there are, the more times the cell can reproduce.
Right.
Makes sense.
Right.
And so anyway, I had a Lovely model of how every tissue in the body could have its unique number of replacement cells set in utero.
Anyway, all beautiful, except the mice didn't fit.
And there's no way, you know, mice are mammals.
They should have effectively the same system we do with some alterations for size, perhaps.
But there's no way that they should have telomeres 10 times as long as people, given this model.
So it seemed like the model had to be wrong.
Well, to make a long story short, it turned out the mice don't have long chelomeres.
Laboratory mice have long telomeres.
And what happened was the colonies, and in fact there are many fewer colonies than you think.
In fact, all of the mice in the U.S.
come from the Jack's Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine.
And anyway, the cell lines, or the mouse lines, in these colonies had evolved to the conditions in the colony rather than in nature.
And the conditions in the colony The mice are thrown out after eight months of breeding, right?
Because that keeps the rate of production at its height, because mice reproduce slower the older they are.
So, what that does is it eliminates the possibility for cancer.
This is a hypothesis, but I believe it is the only hypothesis for the long telomeres of laboratory mice that remain standing.
So, in any case, The mice in the colonies have evolved these ultra-long telomeres because the threat of them succumbing to cancer before they are thrown out as breeders is eliminated by this protocol.
That creates model mice that, if you allow them to live to old age, they all die of cancer.
They don't die of old age.
And in fact, they're very bizarre.
So, you know, people will tell you that mice lie, that they're bad model organisms.
Well, this is a big part of why they lie.
This is one of these scandals sitting at the heart of one of these institutions and learned things.
Well, I believe this is... The voluntary rats are a problem, perhaps.
They are.
And in fact, we've seen the same pattern in other rodents.
We've seen it in chickens that are bred for food.
But To make a long story short, these animals are hyper-prone to cancer.
They are likely to be capable of enduring toxic insult in a way that no human being can, because they have effectively an infinite capacity to produce new tissues.
So any toxin that doesn't outright kill them can be endured, and worse than that, because they're all dying of cancer, If you give them something truly toxic, it functions like chemotherapy.
So it may actually make them live longer.
Now, the problem is we use these damn things for drug safety testing, right?
It's like there's one issue is upstream in the peripheries, and people almost don't want to know.
It's also extraordinarily complex, I think, to get people to really wrap their head around that issue.
So when you try and shout fire in the theatre, effectively, people, number one, they don't understand the word fire.
Yeah.
How do you go up there and say, everything downstream of this thing here, we have a big problem, because the data we're getting back from these experiments Is flawed by virtue of X and Y and Z. Is systematically flawed in a way that not only distorts everything we think we've learned from these mice about mammals, you know, these are our primary model of mammalian physiology.
Yeah.
And they're broken in a way that they don't have to be.
You could fix this problem, but hold on.
The problem is we also, because we use them for drug safety testing, and because they are biased in the direction of making toxins look not only non-toxic, but sometimes beneficial to health, because toxins function as chemotherapy, they are tailor-made to produce problems like we saw With Vioxx, Seldane, Fen-Phen, Erythromycin, all of these drugs that we think are safe that turn out to do damage, especially to the heart.
But they're not even doing damage to the heart.
The heart is where we see the damage because the heart is a special organ.
They're doing body-wide damage.
This is, again, a hypothesis, but I believe it's the only one standing.
So, as a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed graduate student, I found this thing and I thought that at the point that I published it that people were going to say, oh my God, and they were going to fix the problem right away.
Not because they were wonderful people, but because it didn't make any sense not to fix it.
Any year that it remained this way was going to be a year in which we published wrong things that were going to embarrass us later, in which we allowed drugs to come onto the market.
The material impact on people's lives.
I mean... Life and death of humans.
Right?
So I thought that they would have to fix it.
And that ain't what happened.
As far as I know... It's years ago now.
It's 20 years ago.
20 years ago.
But here's the thing.
I wasn't just some lone graduate student.
Screaming in the wilderness, right?
My advisor was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He was one of the greats of his generation.
And he backed this thing, right?
George Williams, the literal author of The Evolutionary Theory of Senescence, wrote a letter to Nature Magazine saying, take this seriously.
They rejected it without review.
So my point is, forget all of that at a scientific level.
What I learned from that experience, from watching Nature Magazine stare down my advisor and George Williams, the literal author of the Evolutionary Theory of Senescence, was that the system that I thought existed didn't.
Now, what that means is when we got to things like COVID, I had already seen human life put at risk.
You'd already drunk the Kool-Aid.
I had undrunk the Kool-Aid.
I had seen what happened to the people who drank the Kool-Aid.
And anyway, it put me in a position where I'm better able I will more quickly see that we are actually adrift at sea and the captain is delusional because I've seen it up close, you know, it happened in front of me.
It's a really good example.
It's a problem that exists right now that the mice that we're using to do these laboratory experiments to roll up these drugs are Flawed, put simply.
They're providing answers to the medical establishment that are incorrect.
But here's the next part of it, which should be even more concerning.
They're incorrect in a particular way that is useful to the industry.
And so I have this analogy of how the medical publishing realm works with regard to things like pharmaceutical products that end up on the market.
Have you ever done a Ouija board from the occult?
Nope.
Okay, so in my view it's an interesting game, it's an interesting trick, I'm interested in magic and these things.
I'm not interested in the occult demonic side by any stretch if that concerns people.
I'm curious as to why this thing works at all.
In case you don't know, or if you've never done one, the idea behind the game is that everybody places their hand on this kind of movable, friction-free object, and underneath is a series of letters that, so the story tells us, the spirits will come through and channel some message that arrives, right?
The rational part of me that understands what I think is happening here is that very slight movements in everybody's hands produces this.
Outcome.
And what's great about the trick is that broadly, if it's performed well in this group, everybody walks away like, wow!
Wow.
Wasn't that incredible?
Right.
But no one is really sure, even the people who think they might be driving it, was it me that did that?
Right.
Did I drive that?
This is how I feel like the medical industry actually works.
So in your example here, You have this mouse and we need the mouse because the mouse is giving us particular answers that we need to sell these particular products.
And it's the data that gets these products on the market is somewhat dependent on the long tolinase in these mice, so we can't come to acknowledge the long tolinase in the mouse.
Right.
At which point, in the Ouija board example, they are an ever slight, completely plausibly deniable nudge forthright away.
And nature can say, oh, well, we've probably got some problem in this, and we're not sure it's right for this magazine.
They have complete plausible deniability that it's actually because we subconsciously recognize that to remove this domino from the table creates a cascading effect that ruins everything and so it's just a slight Nudge away.
Like in the firing squad is the same idea, right?
If everybody pulls the trigger, who pulled the trigger?
No one really knows.
Diffusion of responsibility.
And you can walk away from that situation, about the mouse, thinking The they component of it is very specific.
It was because the scientific realm don't want a new idea or this or that.
You can come up with any story you want and you can plausibly believe it but we'll never be any the wiser as to where the center of this thing is because it's operating like this odd Ouija board with a hundred different people with their hand on the Well, I love your analogy.
on its own produces these outcomes and we're not really in the driving seat of any of it.
And you can be in the crowd as that's happening and thinking, "I think I know what's happening here, but I can't plausibly explain it to anybody." - Well, I love your analogy.
I'm a little worried that people will take it incorrectly, partially because they're motivated to hear Ouija board and laugh.
But I get exactly what you're saying.
And it is...
I think very much like you're describing, and worse than you thought.
Because you can also have an anti-social actor within the group.
It accommodates that entirely.
Because I've seen in the game version of this, you can really scare someone with that.
Because you can think, well, if I spell out a name that such and such knows, and you have complete plausible deniability that you just nudged it that way, no one would ever know.
Right.
And if you think about this, because Science is effectively a gentleman's sport, right?
The mechanisms of enforcement to keep, you know, it's basically the honor system.
And so experiments can very easily, you know, if the PI knows where their bread is buttered, it is very easy to push an experiment in a direction that just so happens to do good things for your career.
And this results in preposterous nonsense, which frankly, I saw it coming.
I didn't think inherently psychology was the place to spot it, but the replication crisis.
It was completely obvious that in a world of p-values that there was a way in which people who were playing this career game would even inadvertently create a world of beliefs that just weren't true through the part of, you know, you don't see the experiments they didn't publish, right?
And given what p-values are, this was inevitably going to create this issue.
A couple other things I wanted to come back to.
Oh, yes.
It's worse than you think because it wasn't just pharma.
Now, I don't know.
I will probably never know.
I don't think pharma knew that the mice were working for them until my work.
At the point that they discovered that, of course, they would become advocates for not fixing this problem because, frankly, I don't know how many drugs actually would pass a proper safety test if the mice weren't broken in this particular way.
It would be a Fraction of what are on the market but nonetheless So I believe that they have started protecting these broken mice.
I don't think they were doing it before But there's a bunch of other People who aren't pharma-based, who have a perverse incentive here too.
If you've built a career on papers that were distorted by these broken mice, you don't want your counter reset by the fact that you have to redo the experiments.
That's one thing.
You've got a world of mice in which some gene or other has been knocked out in order to create a pathology so you can study it.
Do you want to really have to redo mice that are built on a broken background?
No.
So the point is, the outsiders, us, have every interest in this being fixed, because I want to know what freaking drugs in my medicine cabinet are actually tolerably safe, right?
But from the point of view of the people using the mice, there is a pretty broad perverse incentive to keep things pretty much as they are.
And then here's the worst one of all.
And I won't go into the social details of my interactions with I betters in science over this, but...
At one point, I was collaborating, I will just say, I was collaborating with a woman named Carol Greider, who has now gone on to earn a Nobel Prize.
She earned it for the discovery of the telomerase enzyme with her advisor, Elizabeth Blackburn.
That had nothing to do with me, and it was a profound discovery.
So anyway, I'm not raising an objection about getting a Nobel Prize for that.
But anyway, I had partnered with her before she got her prize, and She had done what I couldn't do.
She took my hypothesis that laboratory mice have long telomeres, but that that will not be true for wild mice.
And she and her graduate student, Mike Heeman, ran an experiment and they discovered that in fact this was true.
And they came back to me very excited telling me, oh my God, the hypothesis is true, this is wonderful.
And I thought, well, hey, this is great.
I'm a graduate student, it's just made an important discovery.
Yes, partnered with laboratory scientists, but that couldn't be better really, right?
And I expected her to publish it.
And at the point that I went to publish my evolutionary work, I wanted to cite her laboratory work, because my evolutionary work depended on this result, which was a test of my hypothesis.
And I contacted her and I said, Carol, where are you going to publish that so I can cite it?
And there are ways of citing papers that aren't yet published, right?
In press.
And she said something to me that I was too naive at the time to understand what she meant.
She said something and it just rings in my ears now.
She said, actually, we're not going to publish it.
We're going to keep that in house.
You've just made a profoundly important discovery.
With huge consequences.
Immense consequences.
And you're not going to publish it?
That is unlike anything I've been led to imagine about the way science functions.
Yeah.
But you see why she did it?
Well, yes.
So this is the human element of this.
It's still a form of personal gain.
It's not necessarily just financial.
And again, it's something Asim Malhotra has said, and I'm sure everybody in this space has seen and heard that clip, that he became aware that there was almost rock solid data to demonstrate that a link between the mRNA vaccination and this effect, which is now actually broadly acknowledged, But at the time, they had this clear signal, we can just go and publish and it's ready and it's kind of like, you know, the equivalent of crystal clear 4K HD data, you know?
And they wouldn't publish because they recognised to publish this will be damaging for me personally.
It's hard to map those kinds of things onto people.
For me personally, I really struggle with that because I want to see the best in people.
I want to see someone Trapped in some odd system they can't get out of.
I want to see that it's the systems that's creating these incentives.
It's more difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that it's sometimes it's people doing this.
Yeah, but I get the loose parallel.
This one is, it's a more fascinating case.
It's not.
It's nailed on.
Here's the thing.
If you are in possession of the information that the mice are broken in a very particular way, you now have the ability to predict the outcome of experiments that other people will never see coming.
So this is this asymmetry of knowledge that you can then exploit?
Right.
It's insider information.
Yeah, like insider trading.
You don't think of insider information in science.
So in my naive graduate student mind, You have made a great discovery.
That's what this is about.
Of course you would publish it, because it would be insane not to collect your winnings.
In her mind, I think, the point was, well, okay, I can publish one paper, and then everybody has the information.
We can keep it in-house, and you could... how many different papers can you publish where you predict something amazing that other people don't see coming, and it's like you have a crystal ball.
You're that smart.
Wow, yeah.
So she did ultimately publish it.
Didn't mention me at all.
Literally did not acknowledge where the hypothesis come from.
But anyway, so the point is, if you're an outsider, You just don't understand what game exists inside this career environment.
And you don't understand that you really need your scientists to be You're not asking them not to be human, but you are asking them to put their desire to do good in the world aside, and to trust in the fact that discovering what is true is the contribution of science.
What to do about it is a separate process.
And I'm not arguing that scientists shouldn't be able to say, here's what we find, here's what it implies, and that should inform policy.
But the problem is, Anytime that the same field is a place that you are seeking the truth about something, whether it's climate or psychology or medicine, where the science and the therapy are housed under the same banner, you've got a problem.
Right?
Yes.
I mean, let's take psychology.
This is the easiest one of these to see.
My claim, as a biologist who has thought a great deal about human beings, is that we know very little about how to connect the phenomenology of human psychology to neurobiology.
We've got some gross anatomy that we can say.
We know how neurons work quite well.
But the point is, if you think that psychology is a story in which we treat a patient based on our understanding of the underlying neurobiology and neurochemistry, you've signed up for a fiction.
And so what I would hope for is a world in which we have actually two different names for the study of how the mind works And the study of how we treat people who have issues, right?
Those are not close enough together for them to be the same field, right?
which means that would be greatly liberating for the therapeutic side, clinical psychology, to treat people on the basis that here is how a patient walks through your door, here's the pattern of dysfunction in their life or in their mind, and here is how we interact with them in order to get here's the pattern of dysfunction in their life or in their mind, and here is how we interact with them in order to get them to That's one thing.
And then, separately, we study how the phenomenology of the neuron is scaled up into some sort of processing that we are only at the very earliest stages of understanding, right? - Right.
Instead, by treating them as the same thing, you open the door of therapeutic interactions with patients to the illusion that we know enough to mess with the neurochemistry Which has been a disaster.
Of course, you can map on top of that the other bonus incentive.
Of course.
It's there.
It wants you to find a particular answer.
So what we found is X and Y and Z, there's almost this ever-present looming force in the background that's like, well, maybe this would work, guys, right?
This could work.
And it's this encouraging voice in the space that wants to say, well, we found these things.
Maybe this can work.
And they can push that stuff through.
And now it gets to a stage many, many years in that For lay people to cook... I don't even like to do it.
I mean, even now it's making me uncomfortable because I know that as we make this video, there'll be people out there who've received those therapeutics, there'll be people out there who've had those diagnoses, who've been told that they have this particular thing.
I don't know.
But...
How you navigate through that space, especially when you get to the point of people receiving medication from a credible space that I certainly am not able to challenge.
All I can do is say, I've seen how these decisions get made.
Ultimately, we see the very sort of front end of it, that this prescription is what's been given to you.
But everything behind the gate, behind the door, when you really start to look, is very concerning.
There's all kinds of weird stuff that goes on.
And it makes you wonder, how did this therapeutic get from Right.
there to being labeled as useful for this condition and ultimately into the prescriptions of millions of people.
Right.
The work, it's not higher quality than what we saw with COVID therapeutics.
And once you've seen, you know, that things that look very much like science, they take the exact form of science, they're published, they look quite good to the casual observer, but they don't stand up to scrutiny when you get into the nuts and bolts of how the experiments were done.
Right?
Once you've seen that, and it's like, oh, there's this illusion of science that gets published in the top places, and actually there's a fair amount of work on the corruption of those journals and how it, in fact, happens.
And once you know that, then the point is, okay, well, what are the chances that this doctor who's telling me that this pill is going to address this cognitive malfunction is, A, perversely incentivized To tell me that.
B has a detailed enough knowledge to understand what the downsides might be.
You know, it's a preposterous story at some level.
Even if there are people who are occasionally helped by these things.
Yeah, definitely.
It always comes back to the same place where I personally always find myself, which is, dare I pick this rock up again?
Dare I look underneath?
What will crawl out?
Yeah, because it has, again, like with the climate thing, it's like, broadly, I'm on side.
I'm on side that we should sort our future out.
We should crack on, lower the carbon in the atmosphere and etc.
But having learned what I've learned over the last three or four years, I'm now in a position where it's like, do I want to go down that path to really figure out whether all of that is subject to the same problems that I've identified, and I'm quite content to discuss in this one domain.
As I'm getting older, I'm getting to the point of being more comfortable to say, it's very likely we're going to find the same thing.
And there's a kind of ontological shock that comes with that, that makes people uncomfortable.
Other people you speak with are comfortable, not in this space.
People relish the opportunity to discuss about it in this space, but it's such a weird thing to get into with people.
But I do want to come back to something, which was, I mentioned about there's a moral quandary attached to telling people that the future is going to be completely messed up by climate change, and this sort of overwhelmingly negative message about that, and how that has real implications if it's not true.
We ought to hold ourselves to the same standard, I believe, in this new, weird space that's emerged.
Do you think we sometimes paint a picture that may well be more conducive to clicks and views?
And are we subject to the same dynamics, do you think?
Are we painting a fair picture of what might come?
Well, here's the problem.
I spend a lot of time Watching myself to make sure that I don't fall into that.
I'm not accusing you of that.
No, I understand that.
But look, I think it's a real enough problem that I have watched myself to say, all right, in what ways might this migrate into my way of thinking?
And I will say I have a very remote relationship with the feedback on what I put into the world and how many people see it, right?
I do not Check in general.
Occasionally I encounter on one platform or another how many views a particular video has had.
But by not monitoring that, it is harder to fall into that trap, right?
What things it is that cause people to drop off, what things it is that cause people to sign up.
So anyway, I do think it is important to break that feedback.
I also think it is important to cultivate in oneself You know, just as I've advocated for a mindset like the gentleman scientists of old who are interested in being right in the end, it is important not to monitor the ebb and flow over these things.
But I will say that there is a, and you've done a very good job here, The fact that I don't trust the climate scientists at all, and I will say I don't trust the climate scientists because they are obsessed with models.
Yes.
Now, I know a bit about models, and I would say models are arguably useful in generating hypotheses they cannot be used to test them in a complex system.
I believe the models are another place where my analogy of a Ouija board is broadly correct.
There are so many inputs to them, it's like we can just gently, plausibly nudge this in certain ways and we can walk away and no one would ever know.
And maybe even I don't know that I did that.
Exactly.
You don't know.
You get a lot of true believers who are deploying models, and the point is, somewhere in the back of their mind is the idea, if they're still in the field, they probably believe the world is in immediate peril.
It is dependent on people waking up to a message.
I am part of a great movement of those trying to awaken the world to this grave danger.
It's very late.
Right, and therefore, as long as I err in a direction which causes people to wake up and do the right thing, how much harm is there in that?
They probably think that.
Now my feeling is, wow, is there a lot of harm in that, because you are talking about Intervening in a complex system where you are almost certain to create massive unintended consequences.
You just can't predict.
You can't predict.
And we know that one of the consequences that is being queued up has to do with the elimination of basic civil rights and sovereignty, right?
They are declaring an emergency that means we are no longer entitled to the rights that are the foundation of life in the West.
Like, for example, the right to travel, the right to have a car, drive where you would like to drive.
Right.
And the way all of those things are being discussed in a moralistic term, that's the part that I think is curious and interesting.
Because we're back at this idea of a they at this stage.
It's the moral core of that which drives that forward and it puts you into a position of pariah again.
Right.
To say, well, can we just hang on one moment?
And the moment that's done, the same dynamics which we've spoken about all through this podcast, it forces people out.
of the public square.
Right.
And you don't really make any progress from outside of the public square.
You're on your own.
Yeah.
Now, to your point about what happens to those who are in the contrarian space, and I don't think of myself as a contrarian, though, increasingly, because the institutions are failing across the board, one ends up in opposition to all of them, which looks like contrarianism.
But The risk that I see is that when you correctly glean that the truth-seeking apparatus is malfunctioning in a particular direction of climate alarmism, you do not have a corrective.
So one thing I see amongst my friends on the right is that they do not hear a distinction between concern over the environment and concern over climate.
These are synonymous.
Yes.
It's like the failure to distinguish between reproductive success and fitness.
And as a biologist and somebody who has been passionate about nature since I was a kid, I can tell you The Earth is in trouble.
I am not convinced it's in climate trouble.
I'm convinced there is climate change.
I know that there is a basic, non-model-based issue with the Arrhenius equation that carbon does, in principle, cause the Earth to trap some more heat.
But again, this is a complex system, right, in which that reality, which I believe is likely to be true, is embedded in a lot of factors and feedback loops.
And it's very hard to determine what's going on.
And humans that decide to take control of it are almost certain to screw it up, even if it were true that there was some sort of an emergency.
But the emergency about what we are doing to habitats and to creatures is real and utterly obvious if you are observing them directly.
I agree.
And these are one-way processes.
To the extent that you lose species, you do not regain them.
I have, through a lot of careful thought, arrived at the idea that it is perfectly reasonable to imagine That the way to steward the planet is to maximize the degree to which we preserve things that are valuable to people.
I would love to be a person who could say, actually, the creatures of the world are entitled to be here as well, and we have to steward the world with that in mind.
The problem with that is, does it apply to malaria?
Right?
I don't think it does.
Well, that's a huge and ethical, difficult question.
I think it's a consequence of living in a complex system.
Because like we've identified, when you stick your oar into the water, there are consequences you can't measure.
Right.
That's where this idea of engaging with the truth, trying to find the truth, is extremely hard.
Because once you've found it, you actually have to be able to contend with the consequences of what it actually means.
So broadly, then people might say, okay, well, I'll not acknowledge it or deal with it.
It's kind of a huge cosmic trolley problem.
It's easier to just ignore.
Because let's say, for example, in some bizarre argument, that Okay, you can solve malaria tomorrow.
Great, you take it.
But what you didn't see was that in doing that, X and Y and Z happened.
And we don't have that information to know.
But then you can think, okay, now we're stuck in complete paralysis.
Because to take that logic to its extreme, this idea that Okay, I grew up in a stable state.
I grew up in a stable economy.
I've grown up in a country and in a culture that believes that institutions, teachers, scientists, and clever, wise people can have positive influences in our lives.
You question that reality and think, actually, many of the interventions we're making are having these massive downstream consequences that we're only just beginning to identify.
There's a danger, I believe, to revert back toward a Buddhist philosophy of complete indifference, which is to say, I'm not gonna try and alter or change or shape the world at all, broadly.
I know this is a real kind of hashing of Buddhist philosophy, But broadly the philosophy that I think people are starting to pick up is that I can change myself.
What's important is me, myself, my family.
And everything external to that is whatever's going on.
And you become indifferent about everything.
Somewhere between those two very huge polarities, we have to find a path.
Yes, we can know something to some degree.
We can know enough that we can intervene in a way that we think and hope will become positive.
And we don't have a choice to revert back to just washing our hands of everything, which you mentioned is like our friends on the right.
I really share that view, you say, that The complexity of trying to solve the environmental question is often lost because the whole conversation becomes, well, any attempt to change or fix this is wrapped up with the worst possible intervention, the worst possible policies and laws.
And how you can Can we bridge those two very contrasting and difficult perspectives to say that we can actually make a difference and still feel confident enough to act at all?
Can we just be stuck in paralysis, fearful of ever having any influence on Earth in case she might screw something up that we didn't realize?
Well, you know, I've got a set of principles to deal with this, but I want to go back to the narrow question of should we steward the world For the purpose of human well-being, or should we steward the world for the purpose of preserving every element of the biota?
With malaria being the obvious test case.
Now my claim is, neither of these solves the problem completely of what you do.
Would eliminating malaria have downstream consequences that are negative?
It might.
but I'm willing to risk it given the harm of malaria.
Would eliminating Anopheles mosquitoes have downstream consequences that are negative?
Almost certainly.
They're playing a role in the environment.
Would it still be worth it from the point of view of the well-being of humans if we project indefinitely into the future?
I would guess so, but I would certainly want to gather people who don't have a perverse incentive to talk about whether or not there is any negative consequence that is as large as the ongoing costs that we pay over malaria, including what happens If people who are being weeded from these populations are suddenly not weeded, you know, it is possible to create an even worse problem as a result of the fact that this process has been altered.
So all of those things need to be discussed.
But nonetheless, I would just simply argue that if you simplify to the To me, counterintuitive idea that the stewardship should be about human well-being, I would argue it actually recovers the ability to protect all of the stuff that must be protected, because future generations have a right to a world in which orcas continue to exist.
Right?
It allows you to protect all of the things that are necessary, but it does not require you to treat them with a sentimentality that will cause you to do harm because, you know, some subspecies somewhere will be disrupted by this important thing.
So then you're arguing for a very balanced perspective about what humans actually are.
And it is a much more hopeful note to be It's actually tractable, is kind of my point.
Whereas the alternative, where it may be sentimentally nicer, is not tractable.
You're suddenly defending malaria's right to exist, and my feeling is anything that leads you down that road is bound to be a mistake.
This view you have is contingent upon what kind of vision we begin to build for what humans should become.
Because one vision is expressed most beautifully, I think, in the song by Radiohead.
Fake plastic trees, a fake plastic watering can for a fake Chinese rubber plant.
And you can follow that vision to its logical conclusion.
And it's as cynical as that song sounds, I do believe it summarises and shows us one particular vision for humanity.
And you would then say, well, we're cultivating an earth to facilitate that kind of a human.
It can lead us to ruin.
Yeah.
But there is another vision, which is amorphous and strange in my mind, but I can see it.
You raised the idea of orcas.
And I can already see this in the ground, in the ocean, you know, forests and rainforests.
It's a very different vision for humanity.
We'd still have a pretty big job on, I think, making sure we convince enough people that this is where we ought to go, you know?
Because if we don't, there's a very real danger we would retreat back towards this stratified internet adult singleton existence, which, as cynical as it sounds, we can all see it happening.
It's happening, you know?
Well, um...
You know, if I had, if there was one button I could push, make an alteration that I think would bring us in the direction of reason, it would be to break the connection between the idea of sustainability and any ideology.
My feeling is that actually any ideology that falls down on, and I'm not arguing that you can easily operationalize sustainability, but that loosely speaking, We are obligated morally to not leave a lesser world than we inherited.
Which is the subjective thing is the danger.
I don't want to be cynical about it, but people will argue what kind of world.
Some people would look at Las Vegas and say this is the vision.
Yeah, but here's my point.
I don't want to fight about Las Vegas, okay?
What I want to point out is you don't have the right to decide that future generations don't need an Amazon, okay?
You don't know what future generations will discover is in the Amazon that they need in terms of medicines.
You don't know what psychological impact it is, right?
Have we been driven crazy in part because we've Nobody has the right to make that decision for future generations.
What you do with the minutiae, I don't know.
I don't want us to be paralyzed by the inability to do anything because it might conceivably have a consequence for something.
So my point is, nobody has the right to make that decision for future generations.
What you do with the minutiae, I don't know.
I don't want us to be paralyzed by the inability to do anything, because it might conceivably have a consequence for something.
But I do think the big important stuff that we can see, right?
We have an obligation to preserve it, even if we don't think it's so important to people who can't speak for themselves because they're five generations out, right?
And what we are doing presently is we are liquidating the well-being of the planet.
Things are being lost that will not come back.
And whether you are a believer that these species were specially created by an individual who had a purpose for us, or you think these are the product of a mindless process that just happens to have created endless forms most beautiful, it doesn't matter.
Preserving it is the sensible thing to do.
Not preserving it, you know, it's not that you can't move a grain of sand, but to the extent that you are going to poison a landscape, right, because that landscape isn't really important to anybody, you are robbing future generations of discovering that that was actually valuable in some way.
And It's hard for me to imagine how that isn't a morally secure foundation, even if there are questions about how you would operationalize it.
So, to finish, are you optimistic about getting towards that?
What's your feel right now?
Well, look, I should tell you that I'm optimistic because it would do some good.
But I'm not going to tell you that.
I'm going to tell you the truth.
The truth is, I believe we are in grave danger.
A dark age is one thing if you have primitive technology, it's quite another if you have nuclear technology and beyond.
So, we have to wake up to that danger.
I believe we have an obligation to preserve what we have and that we are falling down on that obligation.
I believe it is very late, but I do not know that it is too late.
Which is why I'm doing what I do.
I want people to wake up.
I will say, on the bright side, in order to get There's an evolutionary metaphor for this, but in order to get from a low peak to a higher peak, a better state of being, one has to go through an adaptive valley.
The fact that things are very dark at the moment may just simply be necessary in order to break us out of our paralysis and get us to discover what we are supposed to be doing next.
So I don't find the fact of the darkness itself to be indicative that we won't Solve the problem.
But I'm very concerned about the mechanisms that we have at our disposal to even recognize that we have a shared problem.
All of us on Earth are tied together in a way that there's no conceivable divorce.
So what we collectively understand to be our Hazards and opportunities matters, whether we like it or not.
We can retreat to our corners and leave it to fate, but that's not a wise thing to do.
I think we could fix things, and I think we could make things substantially better than they have been.
I think we could frankly defend the ideals of the West, which is what I believe we should be doing.
We should be globalizing those ideals, that we have a global West in which all of us understand that Human life is precious, that what makes it precious is the liberty to be distinct from each other, and that that creates the dynamism of humans, that we are not all identical and that requires freedom, the purpose is not.
To enjoy or endure or whatever else it might be, that liberty is fundamental and that anything that is pushing us in the direction of eliminating liberty to deal with an emergency is bound to be wrong, if not an outright con.
So anyway, I'm hopeful in the sense that I believe there is still time and that people's growing awareness Means that there is hope for us to fix it, but I am also concerned that that dark age is resulting in people embracing Kinds of mysticism that actually will not end up productive in the end.
So when you say you want people to wake up, let's see if we can be pragmatic and practical about that for the people who maybe are already onside, they have friends, they have families, they live in a culture that exists.
What do people feasibly do?
My instinct is Has been, and I'm newer to this, is that my strongly held views may actually be wrong.
It's very possible that something that's motivating me quite deeply and upsetting me quite deeply is On closer inspection, not serving me at all.
That can come down to even things like class, perspective, ambitions, the ideas you have about the shape of the world that you're living in.
Is that part of it, to recognize that you might be lost at sea?
And then you can make progress from there?
I think that's it.
I mean, I love your analogy.
We are lost at sea.
The captain does not admit it.
And it will be You know, the moment at which hope will grow is the moment at which we do sit down with the captain and say... Are we lost?
Look, mate, you're not doing us any favors by telling us everything is fine.
Recognizing the peril we're in is really the first step to figuring out, okay, What do we do first?
Where do we go from here?
You know, how many lifeboats are there exactly?
Is there anybody coming if we board those lifeboats?
You know, these are important questions.
And you know, look, I think some people will be Some people are not ready under any circumstances.
They could literally be on a sinking ship and they wouldn't be ready to hear it.
Which is much like the analogy of the famous case, isn't it?
People went down with the violins, you know, rearranging the deck chairs, as they say.
Yeah, rearranging the deck chairs.
But the point is, look, ultimately, if you can't handle the concept that we might be on a sinking ship, that's okay.
But you don't belong in the conversation about what to do about it, right?
People in denial about that are not helpful in light of the obvious peril.
So, what we need to do is have a conversation with those who are ready to have it, right?
There is hope, but it will be squandered if we are constantly debating whether or not there's a problem.
There's obviously a problem.
And, you know, as has been the case with the COVID dissidents, The discovery that there were other people who had not lost their minds, who were seeing the same issues, who had different pieces of the toolkit we needed in order to navigate it, was A tremendously hopeful discovery.
Yeah, it was.
And I think in that analogy, if this helps anyone at all listening or watching, people got off the ship way before they got off.
People said this is actually just not working.
And many places across the world, they just cracked on and did their own thing.
From a certain perspective, It's still so all-encompassing for so many people.
But if you were traveling around the world at that time, as I was, the whole different range of ways in which people experienced that global pandemic and the whole rainbow of different perspectives that people had makes you realize, oh, There are a whole many different perspectives you can have about being on this vessel.
You can hop off at any time.
Well, actually, and that brings us to the really important thing, right?
We can see in what the World Health Organization is doing that there is a desire to make it impossible to navigate your own course.
They made it difficult.
They're looking to make it impossible to navigate your own course in the next emergency that they declare.
And that we must oppose absolutely vigorously and we must win.
Yeah, I expect incursions on freedom of speech, but if you can't recognize that we are somewhere lost at sea.
Yeah, well, freedom of speech mandates of any kind.
And I'm not arguing, you know, I see as well as anybody the game theory that in a perfect world would have you govern Your way through a pandemic.
But we don't live in a perfect world.
We're not going to live in a perfect world.
And in this world, you have to leave people the freedom to say, no, actually, I don't accept what you're telling me.
And I have a right not to be injected.
I have a right not to have By not to be locked into my home, not to be, you know, robbed of my ability to make facial expressions at another human being, right?
These things are beyond whatever model you've deployed, and you know what?
People get sick and they die, and you don't have the power to stop that from happening, and you don't have the power, you don't have the right to declare Some disease so important that you get to override the natural processes of science and deliberation.
If you've got a point to make, you have one tool at your disposal, and that is persuasion.
So get on it.
I agree.
I like that.
I think we can leave that there, Brett.
What do you think?
I think it's great.
Nice.
Yeah, been a real pleasure seeing you again, and it's been a great conversation.
