Fires, Facebook & Free Speech: The 259th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, which has destroyed the neighborhood where Heather grew up. Why does California burn, how are fires different now than they used to be, what happens now? We discuss the Getty Villa and Palisades Village, and why we should care what happens to a wealthy neighborhood in West LA. Also: did the LA Fire Chief drinking the DEI Kool-Aid contribute to the devastation? And when are natural disasters not entirely natural? Then: Zucke...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, live stream number 259.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
We are here in our new studio, still working out the various kinks and idiosyncrasies, but anyway, obviously a lot going on in the world.
We will...
Always.
This week we're going to talk about fires and free speech.
Fires and free speech.
Various kinds of fires.
Yeah, the neighborhood that I grew up in and almost everything that I knew as a child is burning in L.A., and it's quite something.
Yeah, it's really a remarkable moment to see how many iconic places are, in many cases, just simply gone.
Yeah, in many cases, just simply gone, as you say.
And then, of course, Zuckerberg came out with a big announcement about Facebook Meta with regard to changing policies for censorship and fact-checking.
And content moderation.
So we'll talk about those two big things.
There are a number of other things going on that I had thought we might talk about, but that's going to cover us for today.
We will follow it up with a Q&A, live Q&A, available only on Locals.
Watch Party's going on Locals right now.
Please join us there.
In the Q&A this week, we'll be looking at questions as they come in.
And, you know, we'll probably be preferentially addressing those that are responsive to what we're talking about now.
So fires and free speech.
Fires and free speech.
And I will just say, you know, I had planned this long before we knew what topics we'd be talking about today.
But our longtime viewers will notice that I am wearing a quarter zip.
And I'm doing that.
In order to attempt to start a backlash against the backlash against quarter zips.
What is the backlash against quarter zips?
Well, I'm not exactly sure, but there is a...
You just made it up.
No, a massive upwilling of hostility against the quarter zip.
No, look it up.
I feel like this is your responsibility to demonstrate that what you've just claimed is true.
Not my job to falsify your fabulous claims.
Let us put it this way.
For the partisans in our audience, either for or against the quarters, if they know that there's a battle raging over the topic, and so they can decide whether they embrace my backlash against the backlash or whether they support the original backlash.
Yeah, all right.
Okay, so as always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
Companies who make products or provide services.
About which we truly vouch.
I don't know if that was English.
I think that worked, but none of the words seem to be coming naturally, as I said the previous word.
I think my struggles with the ad reads are contagious.
I think your struggle with the quarter zip is contagious.
That's possible.
Well, you can join my backlash against the backlash next week.
No, stop.
I like a quarter zip.
Me too.
That's why I'm starting a backlash against the backlash.
Except that you made up the backlash.
I really don't think it is.
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McCall.
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I think unless you have a W at the end, you have to pronounce that, Macca.
Whoa.
No, I'm going to pronounce it.
I thought I was going to be like Parrotlet.
When you said macaw.
Is that the game we're playing?
That game where we name different kinds of birds.
No, different kinds of parrots, dude.
Not just different kinds of birds.
I mean, if this is professional level, I agree.
Get with the clade.
Alright, yeah.
I would agree with you, but I do think it's macaw.
Macaw.
It's cooler if it's macaw.
Can you just add like a what to the end or something?
Yeah.
So what's the C? Crowds.
Make crowds healthy again.
Oh, it's m-cah.
There's not even a...
Man, see, you gotta...
Your poetic license has expired and you need to re-up it.
Well, your spelling license never existed.
No, on the contrary.
I'm licensed to spell in a very...
I'm like double-O licensed to kill through spelling.
Negative zero.
That's not a thing.
Negative licensed.
Yeah.
All right.
Second sponsor this week, where is our dog?
My goodness, this is her favorite sponsor.
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Even Fairfax, our epic tabby, likes it.
And Brett claims it's not bad either.
Not terrible.
Three years ago, when we were first introduced to Sunday's, Brett decided...
I think you had a good week after that, actually.
I did have a good week, and I felt honorable.
I was testing it on behalf of our audience so that our vouching would mean something.
I was trying to figure out if you were testing on behalf of our audience or on behalf of our audience's dogs.
Now, we did used to receive some comments from people suggesting that both they and their dogs watch Dark Horse, which is cool.
But were you testing it for the people or the dogs?
Here it is.
See, the dog food market is mediated through humans.
Mediated.
Oh, it's mediated through humans.
Good point.
Humans.
That's how the animals refer to the peoples.
Because they can't do the Y sound.
Somehow, it's just how they...
So that's how you know when they're talking, yes.
Right, exactly.
And so anyway, I was testing it so that our audience of humans wouldn't have to, ultimately on behalf of their animals, but approximately on behalf of our audience.
So I feel good about it both ways, really.
You know, I did the animals a solid, and I did the people a dry...
Also solid.
Yes, also solid.
Yep.
So, made for dogs, tested by cats and husbands.
At least husband and cat.
Tested by cat and husband.
I bet there are other husbands.
Oh, I think so, and surely other cats.
Of course.
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I'm reading this, and it's the humans who are likely going to be buying it.
Unless you've given your dog a credit card, which how did you get a credit card company to do that for you?
And was that a good idea?
Actually, I wouldn't mind giving a dog a credit card with a low limit just to see.
You'd learn a lot.
About what their preferences actually are.
Your revealed preferences in economic dogland.
A case of leashes, you know.
Oh, way to keep the door open always.
Yeah, that's a point.
Yeah.
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Speaking as a human, I would like to tell you about our final sponsor, Heather.
You want to tell me?
You want to tell them?
This is for them.
Well, see, that is an inanimate object, and in theory there are people on the other side of it, but at some level it's more natural for me to talk to you.
You think we're speaking into an abyss?
Nothing, nothing.
I'm saying it feels, it would be the same.
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Excellent.
Okay, we're going to start with the fire.
Okay.
There are many places to go here, and I'm not actually sure how to begin.
The Palisades Fire is one of many raging in Los Angeles right now.
It is the first of the fires that started in January of this year.
This is a weird moment for fires.
This is a really strange moment for fires in Los Angeles.
And even stranger, it seems to me, given how wet it has been, given how many storms there have been on the West Coast and how much rain they have gotten.
Often you will hear that a lot of rain early in the season makes a worse fire season later on once it's dried out, because as the Golden State becomes golden, because California is called the Golden State because of the chaparral, the grasslands that...
Turn from green to gold as the water stops coming from the sky in March, April, May, and by July, August, September, October, things are so dry that they've turned golden.
That makes for really bad fire conditions.
Add to that the fact that eucalyptus were introduced from Australia.
Some number of years ago.
And they thrive in fire.
They propagate with the help of fire.
And when fires come through eucalyptus stands, they tend to make particularly...
Fires get particularly bad.
Hot, devastating.
Hot, devastating, oily, explosive.
People will remember the Oakland fire of...
Wow, I can't remember how many years ago that was, but that...
Oakland fire that was so devastating was fueled by several species of eucalyptus that just wiped out entire neighborhoods.
Yeah.
And there is eucalyptus planted in a lot of places in California.
I don't know if it goes much north of the Bay Area, but certainly from SoCal, from Southern California, where we both grew up, up through the Bay Area, which East Bay is where Oakland is, there's eucalyptus in a lot of the places.
And indeed, the street where I grew up...
In the alphabet streets of Pacific Palisades, which may be gone.
It's hard to know for sure, although many places within blocks of where I grew up are gone.
The street where I grew up, and I think most of the alphabet streets of the Pacific Palisades, were lined with eucalyptus.
There's a eucalyptus tree in front of our house, in front of our neighbor's house, in front of the house beyond that.
And, you know, you walk around barefoot and you...
Pick up sharp things in your feet, and they leave these oily splotches on the sidewalk.
So all of those conditions make Los Angeles—oh, and LA is a very unusual city in terms of its layout.
In part, it didn't go up because of the earthquake risk, so it went out.
So it's sprawly.
And it's also stick-built, mostly.
It's not built with bricks because bricks fall down in earthquakes.
You could have done reinforced masonry of some sort, but it's mostly stick-built, which means built with lumber, which is obviously flammable.
But it's also, you know, being a city of the West, of the West Coast, has a lot of beautiful nature that has been retained.
And so certainly the edge to the, you know, ultimately to the West is the Pacific Ocean.
But there's also a lot of hills.
And so the Santa Monica Mountains, which are above and, you know, around on two sides, Pacific Palisades, where I grew up, is preserved nature areas.
And it's, again, it's sort of chaparral, some low-lying oak and such, all of which are highly flammable and susceptible to fires.
But I've never, I don't remember fires in January.
So this is highly unusual.
One more thing just about the setup for why is LA so susceptible to fires is that these winds called the Santa Anas come out of the east and the northeast, usually again in the fall.
Usually I remember the Santa Ana, I remember the fire season being September-October when It had been a long time since the rains, and so all of the plants, especially in the Santa Monica Mountains and the other nature areas, were dry, good tender.
And then these fierce winds would come out of the east and the northeast, whereas usually the prevailing winds are coming off the ocean, which are cooler and wetter.
And so these winds are fierce and dry, and that is what has happened.
There are winds apparently hitting 100 miles per hour in L.A. right now.
So, a couple points.
One, I've been thinking about the puzzle of California having been so wet in recent weeks, and yet this, I think, what is going to turn out to be a fire like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes in L.A., why those two things fit together.
And I suspect that what's going on is that this is not the growing season for anything.
So the wetness of the weather is likely to have run off and not been incorporated into the foliage.
I don't think that's true, actually.
Just because it's LA, because it's Mediterranean climate, I didn't think a lot about growing season when I was growing up, although I did watch my mother plant things and such in our garden.
But I'm remembering...
Interviewing at Pitzer College.
We could have been down there, right?
Which is in the Inland Empire, one of the Claremont colleges.
Like a view to Baldy, Mount Baldy.
Is that right?
Yeah, Mount Baldy.
In the shadow of the Angeles National Forest.
So it's considerably, a little bit south and considerably east of the Palisades.
But I interviewed there in January.
Back in 2002, and I got a tour of their botanical garden, and there was a lot flowering at that point there.
But these were cactus, these were arid-adapted, desert-adapted plants.
Yeah, but non-native, mostly, I would think.
Not entirely.
Well, anyway, I guess this is just an empirical question.
Is the anomaly of this coming on the heels of so much rain really about the fact that the rain doesn't persist very long?
Uh, in the ground and the plants are either, you know, they dry out relatively quickly if they're not incorporating, uh, the moisture into their, to their leaves.
It's also true that I think basically the entire LA basin, um, has very sandy soils.
Um, and so it does not, the, the water just runs through.
You don't, you don't, you don't get a water table.
This is why, um...
California in general, but SoCal in particular, Southern California in particular, is so susceptible to drought and often has water restrictions, certainly on landscaping, but even of use in your home.
There's very few ways to keep water in the ground because of the sandy terrain.
Yeah.
We will return to this.
I don't know very much about the wildland fire management policy around LA, but I do know from...
Other parts of the West that the management policy has been insane and has exacerbated these hazards in forested habitats.
What happens is there's this sense that fire bad and so all fire is suppressed which causes fuel to build up instead of burning off at some regular rate.
And the fact is this is classic welcome to complex systems stuff because a A habitat, a forest habitat that burns regularly, many of the creatures are adapted to survive it in ways that you wouldn't expect them to be able to.
So even a tree that gets charred, and in fact the most impressive, longest stands of trees in California, you do see these heavily charred trees that are still very much alive, you know, a hundred years after a fire that scorched their bases.
So anyway...
It takes out the understory and the trees...
Often, not always by any means, but survive.
Right.
So anyway, absolute fire suppression results in much worse fires when they finally get out of control.
So I don't know what's happened in LA. It's a very different habitat because it's not really trees for the most part.
It's not really trees.
And the trees that are there are often these introduced eucalyptus, which do provoke firestorms when they catch fire.
So I agree.
I don't know.
Definitely, the fire mitigation strategy in California at large has been insane, but I don't know what, if anything, has been done, can be done in LA proper, absent making sure to clear brush around your house.
But clearing brush around your house is not going to protect your house, as winds are racing over the hills at close to 100 miles per hour, and there's already been a spark.
I have a few videos I want to show, and I have a number of things I want to do here, but maybe the first video we'll show Jen is the one from Zeke Lunder.
I think I'm pronouncing his name right.
He's got a YouTube channel called The Lookout.
This is his...
A video he made, just a piece from a video he made at 8.30 a.m.
today, all from publicly sourced info.
I'd never heard of him before this morning, but he reports that he's been doing detailed fire mapping since about the year 2000, and he and his team are based out of Chino.
So let's just show 30 seconds out of his video here.
This is a map of the Palisades fire.
This is showing heat satellites from...
Two in the morning and then the purple is kind of my guess at where the fire is right now based on the webcams.
So basically the fire is burned from about San Vincente Boulevard in Santa Monica all the way to Malibu.
It appears to be all the way down to the ocean, all the way through there.
So if you don't know L.A., that may not mean much to you, of course, but And actually, let me show...
If you can show my screen here.
Here's a screenshot from that same video, that same Zeke Lunder video on the lookout.
In which which zooms out a bit, and it still doesn't show all of LA, although it shows a lot of it.
And in the lower left, you have the Palisades Fire.
It's the first of the current fires.
It's by far the largest.
Then you have...
To the northeast, the Eaton Fire, which is closer to where I was just talking about near Clearamite, outside of Pasadena, northeast of Pasadena, under basically in the shadow of the Angeles National Forest, whereas the Palisades Fire is in the San Juan Mountains.
And then you have another few fires, one to the north near Sylmar, and then I think at this point there are even a few more.
But most of L.A., It's not on fire, of course, just like most of Portland wasn't suffering riots during the summer of 2020. But that doesn't mean that it's safe to be there or that the entire city isn't devastated.
And I could show you hours and hours and hours of various footage of what it's like to be in various places far, far south of the Palisades Fire, and the sun is just blocked out from the smoke and all of this.
But this gives you...
A little bit of a sense of the scale, and actually one other thing I'll come back to.
So many of you...
I'll come back to the Getty, but many of you will have heard of the Getty, both because Getty Images is famous photographically, and then the Getty Museum is largely understood to be here, and that's basically at the intersection of the 405 and Sunset Boulevard, famous Sunset Boulevard, which goes from basically here, winds through, goes through Brentwood, crosses the 405, goes through UCLA, Beverly Hills, on and on.
That is actually the third Getty Museum.
The first Getty Museum hasn't existed for a long time, and the second Getty Museum is, I hope, not burning.
They apparently have saved it, but it's right in the heart of the Palisades Fire, and it's a place I spent a lot of time growing up with my mom.
We went there to draw, so I'm going to show some pictures from the Getty.
But one of the things that I think is confusing for people who aren't in LA is, I don't get the map, and even, like, I grew up...
In the heart of the Palisades fire, and you didn't grow up anywhere near there.
And when you and I talk about, like when you and I drive in LA together, and in fact, you and I did drive in LA together in June of this year.
We and our kids were there for your parents' anniversary and your dad's birthday celebration, and I drove our kids through the Palisades.
I'm so glad I did.
And I was driving because it's my old haunts.
You know, I took a turn up Chautauqua, and you're like, oh, I wouldn't have known to do that.
I would have gone up Temescol or Sunset.
And all three of those areas are now devastated.
Whereas when you talk about, you know, the area around the Tar Pits and Miracle Mile, I can navigate, but I don't have any intuition for it.
I don't know exactly what goes on between La Brea and La Cienega, for instance, which is a lot, right?
And what goes on between Chautauqua and Temescol and Sunset?
At this point is a lot of fire.
Just a lot, a lot of fire.
And PCH. Pacific Coast Highway, which is what Highway 1 is called as it goes through that part of LA, Santa Monica, and Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, has burned.
The houses on a big piece of PCH are gone, as are the businesses.
So I would just add that one of the important fire suppression...
methods involves fighting fires from the air and there are a number of different kind of aircraft.
There are some adapted jets that do incredible things dropping retardant and water on fires and there are helicopters that can drop a bucket into somebody's pool frankly and pick up water and part of the problem here is that the very Santa Ana winds which are Incredibly high.
Santa Ana winds is anytime the wind blows out of the east, but the Santa Ana winds in this case are also incredibly fast.
And let's just, I said this already, I know you're going somewhere, but the Santa Ana winds coming, any wind in LA coming out of the east will be a dry wind because that's coming off the desert, whereas any wind coming from the west will tend to be a wetter wind because it's coming off the ocean.
So a wind coming from the east will make fires more likely, even absent the wind part.
And, you correct me if I'm wrong, but the winds out of the east...
This part I'm certain of are incredibly rare.
It almost never happens.
The wind is reliably blowing off the ocean.
Prevailing winds are from the Pacific.
Here's the part I'm not sure about.
If I think back to my childhood in LA, my sense is that there are years in which the Santa Ana's never happened.
It's so reliable that it blows off the...
Pick a day for sure.
I think that, and I did not go back and look, but off the top of my head, I think that there were some Santa Ana days every year.
I think they tended to be in September and October in the 70s and 80s anyway.
And some years they didn't have any effects at all.
Were you going somewhere else there?
Well, I just wanted to say that the problem is that the winds in this case, the Santa Anas, are so high that they've grounded the firefighting aircraft.
And you can imagine what the predicament is if you're trying to fight fires like this in neighborhoods, even the triaging of what's unsalvageable and therefore you let it burn because taking people away from here, you know, to put them there means somebody else's house that might be saved is going to be burned.
It's a nightmare, especially if you don't have one of the major tools in the toolkit, which is aircraft.
Aircraft, largely scooping water from the ocean and flying in and dropping it.
And they were certainly grounded at night, and I think they're still grounded, at least most of them, because it's just too high.
I actually wanted to share next something I wrote in my first book, An Antipode.
And you can show my screen or not as you like.
So I've been publishing Antipode chapter by chapter on natural selections.
I've taken a break recently, but here's just a little bit from the first chapter, which is a book I wrote in 2002 about my research in Madagascar.
The Great Pacific was just a mile from our house when I was a child, and when I needed to be reminded of my own insignificance, I would head down to the beach to stare across the vast ocean.
In the spring, my father would drive us out of Los Angeles and into the desert, where my brother and I ran through endless fields of erupting wildflowers.
The golden orange California poppies, so garish and delicate, were my favorite.
Other than those few weeks each year, when sporadic rain caused flowers to actually grow wild, little grew without tending in L.A. I grew up, daughter of an Iowa farm boy turned computer engineer, believing that things don't grow unless people make them do so.
My mother made our garden grow.
Carefully doling out water and nutrients, and if she stopped, everything died.
Behind, under, between her plants, animals from the hills scurried, reveling in this unexpected bounty.
My fierce, loyal cat brought me alligator lizards.
She would bite off their tails on my bed, where she would leave the tail twitching for me to find.
It was a clue that somewhere in my bedroom a lizard with a bloody stump was hiding, terrified.
This was our game, hers and mine.
Every fall, scorching Santa Ana winds would come in from the east, pummeling our already parched city.
If the winds coincide with a spark in the hills, brushfires erupted, sweeping across chaparral and houses with similar abandon.
I remember one fire, coming over the mountains towards our house, now four, maybe five blocks away.
I stood on the roof with my father, a little girl, with all the neighborhood fathers on their roofs, hoses in hand, wetting down the tinder of our lives.
The fire, which we could not yet see, kissed our faces with raw heat.
Finally, my father ordered me down, back to the room where my mother had put my little brother and our two cats.
We were ready to escape to a car packed with family photos as soon as my father yelled go.
I fell asleep, curled on a pile of blankets.
The next morning I woke confused, sweating, my sinuses filled with ash.
The winds had turned, and the danger was past.
My parents were haunted by our closest call yet while the children and animals clamored for breakfast.
Actually, one more paragraph here.
We think...
because I don't have a date on this for me, that this is the same fire.
That you observed starting from your classroom at the Merman School the one year that you were there, which was in the hills a little bit to the east, but the same hills.
Yeah, I should fill in the details of that.
So it is kind of remarkable if the story connects you and me many, many years before we even knew each other.
But maybe the first, you know, I've had a weird life.
Some interesting events.
The first really interesting event that was larger than just an event in my life was I was in class one day at this school that I... I was a terrible student, so an experiment sent me to this school and it lasted for me one year.
But anyway, I was in the hills on Mulholland in school and the Santa Anas were blowing one day and I was sitting in class.
As the story goes, I was not really paying attention to the lesson because that was kind of my specialty.
And there was something flashing outside the window.
And despite the lesson going on in the classroom, I stood up, walked over to the window, and I watched these giant, what looked like balls of lightning erupting on the power lines where they were blowing back and forth in the wind.
And next thing I knew, on a hill maybe 100 meters from the power lines, there was a fire.
And that fire developed into what was called the Mandeville Canyon Fire.
So this would have been fourth grade for me.
But anyway, the Mandeville Canyon Fire broke out, burned down a huge number of homes.
But I came home from school.
Our school was evacuated.
And I came home and...
And I was talking to my brother and I said, you know, I think I saw this fire start.
And he said, no, you didn't.
And I said, yeah, I think I did.
And I described to him what I'd seen.
And frankly, he took it seriously.
And he said, well, you've got to tell somebody.
And so anyway, we ended up calling a radio station and they put me on and I described what I had seen.
And that resulted in my being called as...
I think the star witness in the case in which the insurance companies sued the Department of Water and Power for all of the losses that they had paid out because the Department of Water and Power was responsible for putting up power lines in a way that they wouldn't bank together in the winds, and they sent a crew out.
Who inspected the power lines where I had said I had seen this thing, and they found them melted.
So, anyway, the whole thing did result in them winning that suit.
So, weird story from my upbringing, and you, the love of my life, may well have been downstream of that fire.
Ready to evacuate.
So you lived in a part of L.A. where the fires never threatened you.
You were in the middle of miles and miles of flatlands in development.
Fancy.
Fancy neighborhood, but had no access to the mountains right there, the hills.
As much as the Santa Ana's came out of the East every year, I think, and there were some fires, that story that I read from That I wrote about in Antipode in 2002 is the only one that I remember being close.
The only one, and, you know, my father being my father and me being me.
You know, I was the only little girl on the roof helping, you know, helping hose down the, you know, a lot of us had cedar shake roofs at that point.
These fires are not like those fires.
That, you know, we could have easily, and many people did, lose their homes back then in whatever that would have been, 1978 or 9 or something, right?
But no one was on their roofs hosing down their homes in the Palisades here.
I saw some videos of people on the ground with hoses trying to do something, but there's been mandatory evacuation for a giant swath of area, including I think the entire Palisades, which is four broad regions.
I think the Riviera.
Part of the Palisades is the only one that has been maybe, maybe not burned down at this point.
But it's really hard to tell, and this is one of the confusing things.
Since I became aware of the fires yesterday, midday-ish, I have been ingesting information as much as I can.
From Twitter, from YouTube, from the various mainstream media, from my brother, who's not there anymore, thankfully, from my dearest friend Diane, who is not there, thankfully, anymore.
And she also grew up in the Palisades.
And nor are her family members.
From my sister and her kids, who are there, but not they're there.
Not in the path of the fire.
And it's really hard to tell what is actually true, because official maps say things like, there's about 2,500 acres that are burned, and it's stopped at sunset.
And then you get reports.
Well, let's show the Jacob Soboroff video.
From Instagram, this is a man who, well, he'll say it.
He grew up there, and then this also got replayed on, I think, the Today Show.
Hey, this is a message for my Palisades people.
It's a really tough situation out here.
I'm on Pampas Ricas, where Sunset meets Chautauqua.
I drove into the village earlier.
Most of the houses on Sunset between Chautauqua and the village have burned down.
On both sides of the street.
The firefighters are trying to save the fire station.
Ralph's is burned down.
Gelson's is burned down.
The car wash, the library, the whole area where the park is in the Huntington.
Many of the streets are on fire.
Alphabet streets.
Just hope everybody got out okay and everybody's looking after one another.
Just want to set my love.
So I am surprised at how emotional this is making me.
It has been a very long time since I lived there, many decades.
And my parents sold the house that my brother and I grew up in while I was still in college, or shortly, as we were heading to grad school, so in the early 90s.
But I know all of those places.
That he was just talking about.
And in fact, I almost posted on Natural Selections this week a piece I had written back in June when we were in LA, and I spent half a day walking alone through the Palisades, through the park, through the library.
I took you guys into the library.
And much of it was very different.
My parents were not wealthy when they bought the house in the Palisades in 1973, I think it was.
And by the time they sold it, it was definitely a neighborhood that was quite wealthy.
And the house that I grew up in has had many remodels that have made it unrecognizable.
So, you know, the house that I grew up in hasn't existed for a long time, unless you do a kind of Bark of Thebes analysis, you know, the Ship of Theseus analysis on it and say, well, it's still got the same bones because it has the same memories.
The place is there.
The village that he refers to, Palisades Village, was just like three blocks from my house.
My first job, my first official job, I had other jobs helping my tennis teacher run tennis tournaments for kids in Santa Monica.
I used to help run those because I was an organized and efficient person of 12 or 13. Tennis parents were less likely to yell at a 13-year-old than an adult who was assigning courts.
But my first job where I was getting like W-2 salary, I guess, not salary.
I was making minimum wage.
It was $3.35 an hour back then.
I remember those days.
Yeah, $3.35 an hour.
I was at the Baskin-Robbins.
On Swarthmore, I guess it was, across from Mort's Deli.
Mort's is long since gone.
That whole part of the village has been transformed into something kind of unrecognizable, but that's...
That's where the Erewhon is now.
There was, of course, no Erewhon back then.
My second job after I left Baskin-Robbins was at a video store on Monument.
I was the assistant manager in high school at the video store.
That has also, of course, there are no video stores anymore, but that's also been transformed into a very high-end little tiny shopping area with, you know, clothes that I couldn't afford now.
And none of that was there.
So the Palisades was always this beautiful...
It's an idyllic enclave with a small-town feel, but in L.A. It's not an incorporated city.
Santa Monica, you'll hear about, is actually its own incorporated city surrounded by the city of L.A. And Pacific Palisades is the Alphabet Streets and the Huntington and the Highlands and the Riviera and the village all together, part of L.A., but also its own thing, its own feel.
And it appears to be gone.
One more video.
One more video here.
The video from, I think this was Fox News report this morning, from outside the library, where I took you and the boys in June of this year.
In front of another home that has just gone up.
This is so difficult to watch.
Let me get out of the way.
You are looking at the Palisades branch of the public library here.
It appears to be a total loss.
One can only imagine the treasure stored inside the books, the material, the community library, a center of the community.
It appears to be a total loss.
the back of the Corpus Christi church and the school.
We're going to show you what that looks like in just a minute, but you can see the devastation now over where you see those flames and a little further to the right.
You can see the rest of what was the structures here and that continues and we continue to hear explosions just minutes seconds rather before going on the air.
We heard a very large explosion, we believe came from the back of the Corpus Christi church and the school.
We're going to show you what that That is where the Ralph's grocery store.
We're trying to make our way there, but we just keep running into these fires into the devastation, the destruction.
the city of New York City, a city of New York City, a city of New York City, a city of New York.
That's Berkshire Hathaway, a real estate firm that looks like It's so hard.
Cell phone connection is very, very spotty.
It's very difficult.
Sometimes you even look something up on a map to try to determine where you are.
I want to go over.
This is, we believe, again, part of Corpus Christi School.
The school's principal called us.
I'm told asked me to please come and check on the school on the church.
There is very thick black smoke coming from behind it.
We believe this is the building between, on the other side of the building is where the church is.
We saw at least one of the large church structures, a total loss.
All you could see was the metal outline of the Corpus Christi Church.
You just heard Maria Quivan celebrated so many important family moments at that church.
the community.
They are basically burning to the ground.
There are no firefighters here right now.
There are no firefighters here right now.
They're trying to save homes.
They're trying to save structures and basically it.
They just can't keep up.
The Santa Ana winds continue to blow.
You might be able to make out the American flag still blowing and all its glory up there, showing you how hard the wind continues to blow.
Those embers continue to fly, cause new fires, cause spot fires.
the city of the city.
And we're going to be talking about the city of the city.
The loss is immense here, and we continue Something just exploded back there.
The church, at least one major building.
We don't know if it was the sanctuary or what it was.
Appears to be a total loss.
And the homes, home after home, on block after block, just devastated.
Absolutely burnt to the ground, and so many homes continue to burn.
Firefighters on many blocks telling us they have no water.
Swimming pools trying to save structures.
They have no water.
They don't know why.
they're talking about possible broken pipes so see where did I want to go next I want to show a few pictures from non-destruction from the Getty Villa.
So, like I said, people will be familiar with the name Getty.
J. Paul Getty was just a little history here.
He was born in 1892 in Minneapolis, and he went to school, I think, at USC in Berkeley, although he didn't graduate from either of those places, and by 1957 was, according to Fortune magazine, the world's richest person.
From an inherited oil fortune, from hotels, restaurants, and real estate that was his contribution to his family's vast wealth.
He was fascinated with art and with antiquities, and he began collecting and opened his collections to the public in Malibu at the original Getty, which I didn't know existed until today, at his Malibu ranch in 1954. And then...
He oversaw the building of what became known as the Getty Villa in the Palisades, just above PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, in 1974, which was one year after my family moved to the Palisades, and it was very close, not walking distance, but very close to the house where I grew up.
I was five years old when the Getty Villa will have opened, and as I said, my mother used to take me there a lot.
For all I know, maybe it was five times, but it feels like...
30 in my memory.
I had no idea it opened that late.
Yeah, I didn't either.
It was there long before you and I were born.
Me too.
So this is history that I learned today from the Getty site, so I'm trusting it.
And I'll post that in the show notes.
And I happened to be back at the Getty Villa in February of 2020 in LA, right before COVID hit.
Actually, it was on that trip that I got COVID and brought it back to Zach and got us both incredibly sick.
Before we had any idea it was COVID and we were just saying, wow, I've never been this sick before.
What happened?
How is this possible?
But I was not sick yet at the Getty Villa.
And you can just show my screen and just walk through.
I think the Getty Villa is okay.
I don't know.
I can't tell.
It's closed, of course.
They say that because they cleared chaparral and brush around it, that it is hopefully protected, and certainly the collections inside, which is not what I have pictures of, will probably have been in fire-safe rooms.
But this is just...
Oh, and also, Getty never saw this.
Getty was living in the UK, I think, for the last few years of his life, and he died in the mid-late 70s.
And he planned this, but he never saw the Getty Villa.
Wow.
And in 1997, the Getty Museum that is more famous, that's on the hills above the 405 and Sunset, opened.
And this, the Getty Villa, closed for renovations for almost 10 years.
And it's been open again for close to 20. But it's just, you know, these were all part of Getty's personal collection.
That not, but a view from the grounds, which are a big part of how beautiful it was.
And it was outside in the grounds that I remember my mother and I sitting with usually pencil and paper or charcoal occasionally drawing.
And I think that's the last picture I have here.
Certainly it doesn't look like that anymore.
Certainly it does not look like that anymore, the Getty.
then you can you can clear my screen here um so there is a question uh in the case of a lot of structures but the getty makes the point well about the context that they will exist in after this even if the getty is essentially untouched which will have been No doubt because they were careful ahead of time and because it will have been a priority in firefighting.
But if it's basically an island of a surviving structure in what will look like a hellscape until it is transformed, which my guess is that will actually happen rapidly given that this is in LA. This is prime real estate in every regard.
But the rest of LA continues to exist, and this is prime real estate.
One of the things that didn't get said in the clips that I showed is that the schools are gone.
So the elementary school that I went to is gone.
The little, the public school, Palisades Elementary, which has since become a charter, but the...
The little private school I went to for two years after Proposition 13 was passed in California in 1970-something, which basically capped property taxes at the cost of the public schools.
And so California went from having maybe the best public school system in the country to having one of the worst.
My parents stuck it out.
I went to public school in fourth grade.
It was bussed for half a year into Baldwin Hills.
The kids from Baldwin Hills were bussed for half a year into Palisades Elementary.
But then the education was so poor.
It was so awful that I went to Palisades Village School.
I believe that has burned.
It had been transformed.
It had become a big, fancy private school in the Palisades, which it wasn't when I was there.
And Pali High, which is now Palisades Charter High School.
But Pali High...
is also gone.
That's not where I went.
I went to Crossroads, again, because of the downstream effects of Prop 13, which devastated public education in California.
Devastated it, I would just point out that the tax revolt resulted in That's how you
do it.
Maybe just to...
To finish off here, I've seen intimations.
I've mostly tried not to be paying attention to the conversations about this online, because I don't think it's mostly healthy for me, and maybe not for anyone.
Where there's a certain amount of, who cares, it's just rich people.
It's just liberals from LA. I have a couple of points in response to that.
First off, what is wrong with you, actually?
Even.
Even if it were true that the only people affected here were rich LA liberals, and even if the only people who were affected here were rich LA liberals who were contributing to the woke mind virus that's coming out of Hollywood and making all of our worlds less actually democratic and, to use their language, inclusive and diverse and equal, if not equitable, they're still human beings.
These are still human beings who may have lives that look so inconceivable to you that you cannot imagine them.
But they are human beings.
And furthermore, it's not true.
The Palisades has become a very, very wealthy enclave from the mostly upper-middle-class enclave that it was when I grew up there.
And I used to joke.
Back when these places existed, that yes, I grew up in the Palisades, but I grew up in the bad part of the Palisades.
And of course, there was no bad part of the Palisades, but the alphabet streets of the four main neighborhoods in the Palisades were the ones with the most affordable houses, and they were still probably not affordable for most people, but nothing has been affordable in the Palisades for a very long time.
But there are many places that are affected here, and this is going to...
This is going to devastate communities outside of the people who have lost their fancy homes.
I guess one thing, maybe this is a non sequitur, but one thing that we both saw yesterday when we were looking into this was people began to flee because there were evacuation orders in place for everything, I think it was like west of San Vicente.
I can't remember which way San Vicente runs, because as you may have seen from the map earlier, the coastline there is weird.
It doesn't run north-south, it runs east-west, and so the ocean's to the south.
So I feel like west of San Vicente, but towards the fire of San Vicente and up into the hills has been in mandatory evacuation since yesterday, and it continues to spread, and people were trying to get out when the mandatory evacuation orders came.
came down and there were a lot of very fancy cars trying to get out and they got blocked either by fire or by just traffic and people abandoned their cars in the street and took their keys which they shouldn't have done and so in order to get fire trucks into the areas bulldozers had to be sent in first to bulldoze these cars that had been abandoned in the streets because the people couldn't escape and had to escape on foot.
This is apocalyptic.
Truly, truly extraordinary.
All right, I have a few last things to add to the question of the fire.
One, there's a couple of things that strike me as could have been done better.
We know almost for sure they could have been done better.
You and I have been pointing to the hazard of eucalyptus for a very long time, and it's a dual hazard.
The problem with eucalyptus is that it's so ferociously successful as a competitor that it's very tempting to plant it.
Actually, it makes a good wood.
It has no pests.
It grows under horrendous conditions very effectively.
So if you want mature trees quickly, it's a very enticing prospect.
But it does create...
Terrible problems because of the oiliness and the fact that it is very well adapted to fire.
Even if the trees themselves burn, they sprout back from the stumps.
And you can imagine a very hot fire burns everything else out and then sprouts back from the stumps evolutionarily.
That's a win, but you really don't want it around people.
Frankly, it doesn't have any place in the Americas.
We should exterminate eucalyptus.
And we've commented before that it's all over the Andes as well, which is terrible.
Yeah.
So this is yet another, in addition to the fire suppression that makes fires worse in forested habitats and may well in chaparral, I don't know.
But eucalyptus is another intervention in a complex system that results in catastrophes that don't need to happen.
Second thing is you can tell from my story from childhood that the wires are an issue.
Yes.
And frankly, Wires are bad for people.
They're bad at a number of different levels.
Burying them is expensive, which is why utilities don't do it.
But in this case, you had energized wires remaining...
In the case of the fire that you observed from your childhood.
We don't know that that is what has happened here.
No, we do know that in some of the places that were burning...
People on the ground were finding energized wires.
And I think it was just chaos that, you know, as you point out, you can't even, as a layperson who has access to the publicly available fire map, the fire map is obviously not accurate.
My guess is that represents confusion and a breakdown in systems because there's, you know, because the entire system is overwhelmed.
But the point is, wires underground?
It's better aesthetically.
It is better from the point of view of electromagnetic waves, which may or may not have a consequence for human health.
It's better from the point of view of fire suppression.
It's better.
It keeps them on in storm conditions.
It may be contraindicated in earthquake country.
I just...
I don't think so.
I don't know.
For one thing, you'll remember Berkeley put all their wires underground.
That's true.
And it became much more beautiful.
So beautiful.
And you don't even realize...
I remember R. Crumb is somebody I don't...
Quite understand very well.
But I remember hearing him interviewed and him describing his compulsion to draw, to sketch scenes, and to make a point of including the wires, which are these terrifying, ugly, you know, life-negating structures.
So anyway, wires underground, eucalyptus extermination would be...
Wise and intelligent fire policy is a must.
But the last thing I wanted to say...
Actually, two more things.
One is...
Hold on.
Before you do, if you just want to show my screen here, I just did a quick search on Arkrum and wires, and this isn't the most wiry of any of his drawings, but here's one from 1980. Yeah, so this is the cartoonist.
There's a very strange documentary about him and his...
Very odd family.
But anyway, he's the guy who made the famous keep on trucking with the guy with his giant foot sticking forward.
But anyway, I think the wire point, this is a kludge that was appended to society when we went electric.
And the fact is, it's time for us to update this so that we are not suffering psychologically from having to look at these terrible things and that we get the benefits of a robust system.
That is shielded by the Earth.
If I may make things more complicated.
Sure.
I wonder how the wires underground affect the electrical field, magnetic and electrical field of Earth.
I think it improves it because I think the Earth is a better block.
Oh, but you're saying close proximity?
Yeah.
I don't think you're going to be...
I don't think if you are grounding, if you...
Feel benefits from being barefoot on the earth where you are and feel that it enforces your localness.
And I do.
And I think any human who had been raised where I was raised watching this would be affected right now, but I think I am particularly focused on place.
I always want to know when I'm talking to someone remotely, where are you?
Where are you in the world right now?
I think grounding specifically gives your body information about where you are and information that we have not yet been able to decipher, therefore, about what is to come.
And I wonder if putting the wires on the ground would affect that.
I don't know.
Well, let's just put it this way.
To the extent that electromagnetic radiation is a problem...
There's a question about where is it least problematic, and going overhead is not marvelous.
I would also suggest, I'm now out of my depth, but likely, if you were going to put it underground, you could put it in a way that was shielded.
So, anyway, there's an empirical question there that you and I are not expert enough to talk about.
I did want to point out that one of the glaring facts of Recent disasters is, and we don't yet know how this disaster will be treated, but I think we can have a pretty good guess based on the fact that it's in LA, and LA is what it is.
The intolerable thing is that the treatment of Americans who lose everything in a disaster is so highly variable.
And that effectively what you want, ideally if you want a system that works, you want people not to suffer from bad luck.
Bad decisions you should suffer.
If you do that, we evolve towards making wiser decisions.
But bad luck is something that we should hedge out by making a risk pool.
And insurance is supposed to do this, but private insurance does not.
Because private insurance, for-profit insurance, inevitably discovers that uninsuring people who need insurance most is profitable.
And I believe that shows up in the story.
I've seen hints of it already.
Hints that no one was insured for fire.
In the places where the fire has hit because insurance companies had long since ceased to give fire policies near the hills.
Right.
And so this is just something where, terrified by what government will do, will it abuse the power?
But this is something where government, which does not have a profit motive, must not have a profit motive, can create a risk pool in which we decide these areas...
Maybe are off limits or you're on your own because it's too dangerous to put a house there.
But if you're going to have a house, if we've declared this safe, that we can, you know, people in Appalachia should not be struggling for either resources to endure and escape a disaster or rebuild afterwards.
They're Americans like everybody else.
And so the uneven treatment.
Of different parts of the world, especially with the hint that it's political, is absolutely intolerable and needs a remedy.
But the last thing is, Jen, could you show the Fire Chief video that I happened across here?
This is the LA Fire Chief.
I'm super inspired.
She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future, one that includes a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity.
People ask me, well, what number are you looking for?
I'm not looking for a number.
It's never enough.
Out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 are women right now.
She's already looking at ways to change that.
She's quick to point out that doing so has a greater purpose, attracting the best and brightest for the job.
They feel included, they feel valued, and they feel part of a cohesive team.
The chief also checks another box when it comes to inclusivity and diversity at this department.
She's a proud member of the LGBTQ community.
That just kind of opens the door of people that thought, wow, I didn't even know that that was an opportunity for me.
When is that from?
How long has she been the fire chief?
I don't know.
This again.
So, let's talk about...
Let me start by saying, I know, she's in Portland and I lost touch with her, but I know a woman who was a Wildlands firefighter.
Actually a lesbian.
I think, never having seen her in the situation, that she was awesome.
She report at it, at the job.
I don't know.
She reported to me.
She did not...
She did not want affirmative action on her behalf.
She did not want handouts.
She did not want any DEI decisions made on her behalf.
She was drawn to it for personal reasons, trying to be as effective and powerful as possible, and she was a strong...
Strong, fierce, skillful woman who says she was almost always the only woman on the team, and that's as she would have expected it, and that most teams would have had no women.
This is a lesbian in Portland.
She was actually not firefighting up in the Western States, but who understood well what evolution has handed us with regard to expectations around what men and women, on average, are going to be doing.
The idea that every job is inherently equally open to every human being, regardless of either immutable characteristic or skill, is insane.
And it is tearing apart functional systems in basically every domain.
I want to highlight a couple things here, because I think the problem with this is it's a trap.
And the trap is...
Oh, you're against women in firefighting.
Well, I'm against women in firefighting to the extent that they are disadvantaged in doing the job by biology.
But I'm certainly not against any woman who is well endowed for the job and skilled at the job.
I'm not against anybody.
Trans, gay, I don't care.
But that is irrelevant to the discussion that you just heard her engaged in.
Because what she says, she says a couple things.
One, she says, No amount of diversity is enough.
Now here's the problem.
Longtime viewers will know that the analysis goes like this.
Anytime you exclude any population from eligibility, you are going to reduce the potential quality.
If the group you exclude is small, the degree to which you are likely to exclude the best people is small also.
To the extent that the group that you are discriminating against is large, the effect on competence and capacity is going to be large.
To bias and to say no amount of diversity is enough is to say we are going to select as much as we can from a tiny population.
Even if that population is exactly equally competent, and I don't think they will be, but even if they are exactly equally competent, what you are deciding is you're going to have a less competent firefighting force by making that decision.
What's more, you hear her talking in there and she says, it makes everybody feel included and people look at me as a lesbian, as the chief of police, and they think, I didn't even know that I could do such a thing.
An obsession with how people feel is Disqualifying for a job like this.
This job is about accomplishing something.
It's great that you are a compassionate human being, that you have those skills in your toolkit, but you need to be absolutely focused on doing the job and not overwhelmed by considerations of how people feel as structures are burning down around you and people are trapped and all of this.
So the insanity.
Just as with Boeing and all of the other examples where we've seen that diversity was our strength results in shocking failures of engineering, right?
The failure to detect that bolts were missing from a plane that was going to be pressurized on the inside.
You get there.
Yes, those kinds of things might happen in a world where you prioritized hiring the very best, but they will happen a lot less regularly.
And we have just turned civilization on its head, prioritizing people's feelings and the pretense that everybody is equally qualified.
You know, this is not a video game.
This is real life.
Firefighting is about people who understand the job that they are doing, have the courage and capacity to do it without overthinking the job, without obsessing about emotions or anything like that.
If you don't know that, you do not belong in a position of command.
Pure and simple.
Yeah, that's right.
I saw a video that I haven't showed here today of a man who had made it out and his house would turn out to be a total loss.
And he's standing, watching.
And the firemen are doing what they can on neighboring houses, but his house is gone, clearly.
And one of the firemen comes over to the barricade that they've erected that the man whose house is lost can't pass, and he hands him his cat, and he's alive.
And this man just breaks down, and he's happier beyond words, because the cat cannot be replaced.
And, you know, cat haters fuck off at some level.
Cat haters can be replaced.
No, but...
Obviously there are things, there are inanimate objects, especially in older times, which cannot be replaced.
But they are still things.
And it is the life that matters.
And this fire feels devastating to me, even though I don't know anyone close.
I don't have anyone very close to me who is being directly affected.
But it feels...
I actually feel homeless, which is very strange.
But watching this man, watching his house go down, and being gifted as if from the ashes, his cat with whom he shared the house, and seeing that that is what matters, is a reminder, can be a reminder to us all, I think.
Yeah, I relate to it all too easily.
And I also, it's a much smaller event, but I remember when the camp That Eric and I went to as kids was threatened very directly by a fire.
And which our boys went to for a few years.
Yeah, it was threatened by a fire just across the river that did not jump but easily could have.
I remember feeling like that homelessness is not a bad analogy.
Again, not a rational feeling, but it's...
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's right.
It's not rational, and that demonstrates that rationality is not all there is.
Just as what you were saying about compassion demonstrates that compassion is not all there is.
So we have these errors on both sides, and I don't like the both sides.
Reflection here because I don't think those are the things in opposition to one another.
But there are like stereotypical versions of those two things which can be invoked as, you know, rationality is like a male way of going through the world and compassion and inclusivity is a female way of going through the world.
And while that is very broad brush and very imprecise and there are plenty of exceptions, there is some truth there.
And rationality is absolutely the thing that you want under some circumstances.
And any plea to include other people in the conversation and listen to their concerns because they don't feel good right now should be shut right down.
And there are other situations in which actually what we're doing now is I don't know, building community or healing from a loss, and maybe that is the time to not have the analytical types bring in their graphs and show them, because some number of people are going to find that not just impossible to interpret, but actually destructive of the ability to heal.
So both of those things can be true, are true, under different circumstances, and we live in this crazy, un-nuanced world of, which one is it?
Which do you want?
And, you know, the last several years of crazy in society and higher ed and politics has, as I and we have said before, been one way to understand it is that we have had and embrace the toxic form of female typical behavior.
And it's not that there aren't plenty of toxic forms of male typical behavior, but what you never want is One form of toxic behavior excluding all other forms of behavior, and that does seem to be part of what we're living through.
Yeah, I will just add one thing that I'm going to feel bad if I didn't mention it before.
Whatever happened in Maui, in Lahaina, it is very much like what happened in Appalachia with the storms, where the official response Made no sense.
So, like, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Yeah.
And this is, I just want to say, it's simply intolerable, and I was going to feel bad.
I have Lahaina written down here, but I think I forgot to say it.
So anyway, I just wanted to make sure that it was not a glaring omission, because it would certainly be a glaring omission if we're talking about our responsibilities to each other.
We somehow fell down drastically on our responsibility to the people of Maui.
It has to be remedied.
It has to be remedied.
And those two events and this one all feel very, very odd.
Yeah, they do feel odd.
All right.
So, rather drastic change of topics.
And I admit there's a clip that is necessary for everyone to have seen.
In order for us to have the next discussion, it's a little bit long.
It's like four minutes.
But I'm going to have Jen play the clip all the way through, and then we're going to talk about its implications relative to things that we have discussed here on Dark Horse and other events that are taking place in the world.
So, Jen.
Hey, everyone.
I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
I started building social media to give people a voice.
I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
But a lot has happened over the last several years.
There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.
These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
More specifically, here's what we're going to do.
First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.
So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
The reality is that this is a trade-off.
It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Fourth, we're bringing back civic content.
For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts.
But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
Finally, We're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
It'll take time to get this right.
And these are complex systems.
They're never going to be perfect.
There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
I'm looking forward to this next chapter.
Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
All right.
It sounds like a different man.
It sounds like the same man in a different phase.
And on the one hand, it is hard not to be tremendously relieved at the idea that he is declaring a new era.
On the other hand, there's a lot to be disturbed about here, too.
And there's a third piece, which I just have to say.
This feels actually weirdly responsive to at least the issues that we've been raising.
There's a lot of language in common, too.
Yeah, he's talking about complex systems resulting in errors.
I would call them unintended consequences.
He's talking about trade-offs, which people will remember was the subject of my dissertation.
What he does not say is zero is a special number, but it's quite clear.
That he is responding to X. In fact, he even mentions X and acknowledges to his credit that instead of naming it something else and pretending that they came up with it, that they're going to employ something that he calls community notes.
And he says it's like what is done on X. So on the one hand, I think we just have to realize we absolutely predicted this.
The point of the phrase zero is a special number is that if you have zero platforms that allow freedom of speech, then that's a potentially stable system.
If you have even one platform, in this case it would be x, which leans in the direction of free speech, then it means that every other platform is suddenly under intense competition to Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So this is huge, and it does demonstrate the principle.
Zero is a special number, and X has driven a major change that is to the benefit of the citizenry of the United States first, and then ultimately likely to the rest of the world as well.
But there's a lot that's just off about this announcement, too.
And I want to...
Go back and just remind people if they heard it before and if not, to alert them to it.
I deployed a hypothesis.
I can't remember how far back in Dark Horse, but the hypothesis was about apologies and why they work.
And the idea was, it's strange that an apology has a meaning to us humans, right?
Somebody harms you and then they say some words and somehow that's better?
How do words help you if you've been, you know, harmed in some material way?
How do words remedy that?
And the hypothesis was that apologies function as a debt, an IOU. And so that's one of their two functions.
The other function, you know, a good apology isn't just, you know, in fact, it's a sucky apology if somebody says, I'm sorry you feel that way, or I'm sorry, you know, you were hurt, right?
If the apology is real, they tell you what they did that was wrong.
And in so doing, that greatly increases the debt that will flow to you if they do the same thing again, because they've let you know, I know exactly what it is I did.
Therefore, if you do it again, that's because you're not paying close enough attention or you don't really care or something like that.
So the idea is an apology has value for a reason.
It's completely absent from this statement.
There's no apology.
There's no apology.
So, what does that mean?
Well, he says a lot of stuff.
Like, it feels like a cultural tipping point.
Oh, does it?
And what happens the next time it feels like a cultural tipping point back in the direction of some powerful group of assholes who wants to censor the rest of us?
Are you just going to culturally tip the other direction?
You know, either he has come to the realization...
That the Constitution is what it is for a reason.
And that Facebook was wrong to do what it did for a reason.
And therefore, we in the public can expect him not to do it again if the winds of change blow back in the other direction.
Or he doesn't get it.
And the point is, well, you know, business-wise, it feels like a cultural tipping point moment.
And so we're definitely going to do the thing that people seem to want at this point.
You know, who could have predicted that?
So anyway, that was a...
Terrible attempt to sound apologetic where there's no apology in there at all.
I listened very carefully to it multiple times.
It's not in there.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
He also contradicts himself in here.
He makes the strong case that what has happened are mistakes that are the result of complex systems.
And I will point out, his use of complex systems raises a question.
Is he misapplying that label to complicated systems?
I actually don't think so.
I think he's talking about AI, in which case he is dealing with a complex system, especially as it interacts dynamically with what's going on in Facebook.
This is truly, you know, it's early, but it's the beginning stages of dealing with complex systems, and they will make mistakes.
On the other hand, he acknowledges later on that there was pressure to police misinformation without, he says, becoming the arbiter of truth.
Well, you became the arbiter of truth.
You appointed yourself.
That's what you did.
So PolitiFact was Facebook's fact-checking arm.
And PolitiFact, which came after you and us, specifically had as its worst offender status on its rating meter, whatever it was called, Pants on Fire.
And they gave you a Pants on Fire rating for talking about ivermectin, I believe it was.
I can go back and look.
You can go back and look.
My memory was that that was about the...
Because I wrote about it.
I can find it.
Cytotoxicity?
Trying to remember.
But anyway, Heather will find it.
But yeah, so they say they're firing their fact checkers, which thank goodness, and I hope those people struggle to find work.
I don't really like wishing that on anybody, but these people have created...
So much havoc in civilization and they have interrupted such an important process that they probably need a little alone time to think about the harm they've done so that they can, you know, find their humanity and not do such things again.
They also owe us an apology, which I'm not expecting to hear.
So in any case, my overarching point is this can't be a this feels like a moment thing.
This has to be a, it is wrong to censor.
There's a reason.
Yes, they have an obligation to prevent certain kinds of extreme and illegal content, but from the point of view of expressing opinions, right, wrong, or otherwise, that is how we discover what is true, in discussion.
And the idea that they were in a position to police Because they were somehow in the know was nonsense from the get-go.
Obviously, they were notably deaf, as we tried to point out thousands of times how this was implausible on its face.
Where do they have an oracle from which they receive the wisdom on what's true, and they can therefore apply that to us little people and discover it?
How does anybody at Facebook...
Outrank us in terms of trying to navigate the reality of a pandemic and various medical treatments.
You know, the fact is, we're evolutionary biologists.
It's relevant to medicine.
It's relevant to epidemiology.
It's relevant to vaccinology.
It's relevant to public health.
It's a relevant discipline, and even if we weren't.
Officially schooled in it, our right to talk about it and be in that conversation.
And frankly, to best the experts, if that's what we're doing, or to fail in the attempt, that is all part of being human.
And it's never their right to do this to us.
Yeah, in fact, I find a sentence in my very first Natural Selections post, which is where I wrote about this.
Are we to believe that PolitiFact has a supply of magical omniscient experts who are both freed from the usual rules of scientific conduct, leaving all hypotheses on the table, sharing what they know, assessing the hypotheses in a fair and measured manner, and utterly infallible?
Apparently we are supposed to believe that.
So, what I wrote about the...
The claim that they gave Pants on Fire was something we talked about, but we didn't get specifically flagged for it, was LabLeak, which they then backed off of themselves in May of 2021. And they then claimed that it was more widely disputed.
And the one that they specifically nailed you for was in your conversation with Robert Malone, which they did not give a Pants on Fire rating to, but a false rating, one step up from Pants on Fire.
And it was, as you remember, the idea that the spike protein was toxic or cytotoxic.
And what PolitiFact says was vaccine experts say there is no evidence that the spike protein is toxic or cytotoxic.
Yeah.
Well, there you have it.
So.
Obviously, Zuckerberg is responding to market forces and the political wins, and he is very late to the party on free speech, but...
Glad to hear I'm moving in this direction, but I would point out, it's not too late, Mark.
You could deliver us the apology that you owe us, and that would tell us a lot about this being something other than a business decision.
But let's point now to, oh, there's one of the things I wanted to say about Facebook, now Meta.
Facebook studied the question of its power to shift political dynamics algorithmically.
It's done this a number of times, but 2020 is one of the years actually in response, I believe, to the 2020 election.
It studied its own power and has discovered and published that it in fact has immense power to shape civilization.
You know, it's an unelected entity.
And because of where it sits in our discussion with each other, it has this immense power.
And it is aware of that because it is systematically studied.
I thought we knew that they knew that it was doing that in the 2016 election.
Yes, there's a whole history, actually, of studies.
But the 2020 election actually spawned a second tier.
I think Science Magazine is one of the places that this stuff was published.
Anyway, okay.
So now I want to switch gears and point out, okay, zero is a special number.
We were right about that.
That should be obvious to anybody listening to Zuckerberg's statement and coming to understand what it means.
Because, in fact, zero is a special number.
It's not about free speech.
It's about the fact that...
Theoretically, one party embracing free speech forces the others to embrace it for business competitive reasons.
And that's unfortunately what comes through in Zuckerberg's ham-fisted statement.
But here's what I did not see coming.
Musk, I believe this week, actually announced a change on X that goes in the other direction.
Oh, good.
To me, it is shocking.
Jen, do you want to put up his tweet?
Hold on, I have a copy.
I can't read it there.
Okay, so he tweets, Algorithm tweet coming soon to promote more informational, entertaining content.
We will publish the changes on at XENG, presumably meaning engineering.
Our goal is to maximize unregretted user seconds.
Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.
Okay.
Now, I understand the words.
I can imagine a naive person deploying the sentiment thinking that it was positive.
Yes, you own a platform.
You would like your users not to regret time there.
Hopefully correlated with the platform not being parasitic, that it is actually in some way enhancing life.
That's laudable.
However, the idea that you are going to attempt to evaluate what is negative and worse, that you are going to apply something algorithmic to it, there's lots of negative stuff in the world.
Commenting on negative stuff makes you a positive force.
You don't have a tool that is capable Of doing away with negativity for its own sake.
And in fact, what you have is a mirror of the same problem with the fact checkers.
So the fact checkers, all they can do at best, and look, the fact checkers suck way worse than they need to.
But if you had actual fact checkers attempting not to do political work, but to actually check facts, they would still have a problem, which is...
Anybody who sees things sufficiently far ahead will look like they are against the facts.
And you do not want to create a system, even if such people are very rare, the fact that they will end up in the milieu amongst other people who are actually wrong.
You do not want to say, well, look, 99% of the time we end up spotting things that aren't facts and labeling them.
If you're labeling the 1% of the time that somebody's way, way, way ahead than what you're doing, You are arresting the process by which civilization gets smarter.
And you're not allowed to do that, even if you have a 99 to 1 ratio.
So this here is the same issue.
Ideally, would it be better if we...
I mean, it's not even clear to me that eliminating negativity makes unregretted user moments go up.
Well, because my brain is on the Palisades fire.
I am thinking about my experience trying to figure out what was going on by using a variety of sources.
And it felt to me like, you know, every historical event is an historical event that is therefore singular.
So you can't really do a good comparison, but it felt like it was harder to find information on Twitter this time around than it has been with past dramatic events.
I don't have the same level of bias here.
I'm much more biased.
I'm much more emotionally invested than I was with the Maui fires, with Hurricane Helene, with any number of the recent things.
But it feels like it's getting harder to actually figure out what is true.
Buyers destroying places in Los Angeles is negative.
Is that the only rubric here?
Negative?
Because bad things happen in the world.
If what you're looking for is happy, then are we going to go back to the land of SSRIs and pretend that just having flat affect all the time is the goal for all human beings?
It doesn't seem wise.
Maybe that's not fair because it's just a tweet.
We don't know what the nuances are, but I agree that it sounds Potentially top-down, we know what's best.
Let us handle it for you guys.
Don't worry, nothing to see here.
We got you covered, kind of thinking, which I don't like to hear that from anyone.
Yeah, and in fact, it's also, to my way of thinking, a good bit hypocritical, because Elon is...
Very negative when he feels that it is appropriate.
And, you know, oftentimes when he feels that it's appropriate, I agree with him.
But if you're now going to deploy an algorithm against the rest of us, what you're effectively saying is that we're not in a position to judge when we need to fucking curse, if you know what I mean, right?
We, yes, lots of people will abuse negativity to...
To create engagement?
Sure.
But there's some analogy here.
It's counterintuitive that you shouldn't use an algorithm to tamp down behavior that you think sours people who are engaging on your platform.
It's counterintuitive why you shouldn't, but it's not very counterintuitive, frankly.
Right?
This is like free speech itself.
You know, the fact that...
Speech is free.
Does that make the speech good?
No.
Most things that people say are at the very least worthless, right?
A lot of things that people say are counterproductive.
Why do we have to protect free speech then?
Why can't we say only speech that is neutral or better?
Because you don't have a goddamn algorithm.
That's why.
So we protect speech.
And because the world isn't static.
You don't have an algorithm, and you're not going to have an algorithm.
An algorithm is impossible.
An algorithm to solve this problem is an impossibility.
It's an impossibility even at the level, if you imagine a hyper-intelligent AI that's better at this than a person, it's still not good enough, right?
The fact is...
You do not want anybody empowered to shut down other people on the basis that they know whether or not what those other people are saying is productive.
It's not a conceivable thing because you will necessarily not be able to deal with the outliers who are way ahead of their time.
Those are the last people you want to shut down.
So the real mystery here, Elon's a smart guy.
He's really got an engineering mind.
And when you hear him talk about engineering, it's strange that he would make this error.
It's hard to imagine, especially given, you know, he's the let that sink in guy, right?
When he took over Twitter...
Right?
Let that sink in.
He carried a sink in.
Brilliant.
Lovely.
But the point is, let that sink in.
You know what?
This is going to be a place where people are actually free to say stuff.
Get used to it.
Right?
Yeah.
Why would he be backtracking on that now?
Especially, here's the mind-bending thing for me, which suggests there must be something I don't understand.
Okay.
He has taken great risks.
And...
Weathered many slanders to get where he is.
To get to the point where he is now forcing Facebook to admit that it's copying X. Right?
That's a hell of an accomplishment.
He's gambled on Trump and been vindicated by an election that has now made President Trump the president-elect.
Okay.
Why on earth...
Would you surrender your lead, which just forced Facebook to embrace X-like community notes policies?
Why would you abandon that lead?
Why are you cannibalizing your own business?
And I have to tell you, there's an echo here.
So many places we've seen, especially in relation to fact-checking, you've seen platforms that ought to be indifferent.
Within the law to what people do on their platform as long as people are doing it, right?
They want to increase engagement.
We all understand that.
So why is YouTube throwing off popular channels?
Why would it do that, right?
Why are people cannibalizing their own business for some political objective?
That's weird.
That suggests some economy or some market that we can't see.
And at the exact moment that Facebook is at least making noises of coming to its senses, X is now making noises about losing its sensibility?
There's something so off about that.
You win a lead like that, you take a victory lap.
You don't backtrack.
Why would you backtrack?
I don't get it.
I think there's a mystery there.
I will say...
And the timing is odd, too.
It's almost...
If the two things were separated by three weeks, it would make more sense.
But the Facebook, the Zuckerberg announcement and the Musk announcement?
Yeah.
But also the timing relative to the inauguration, given that, as you say, Musk was at least partially responsible for Trump getting elected.
Yep, I agree.
So much presumably will change.
Why make a major change to your major platform in advance of seeing What changes on the outside might reveal?
Yeah.
Now, I will say, Musk took a lot of pushback on this, which I was heartened to see.
People spotted immediately that this was terribly onerous.
By the way, I want to come back to another change that he has announced, which I also find onerous.
So he got a lot of pushback.
Musk is an unusual person, and it's possible that the pushback...
Given that it is perfectly predictable, is anticipated and desired for some reason.
In other words, you could get your user base to force you to embrace, maybe it's protection against, I don't know, I guess it wouldn't be shareholders in this case.
I don't have anything.
So I don't know.
There's something very strange about it.
But I will say, in Musk's defense, He gambles big, he makes errors, he fixes errors, right?
And that's really one of the keys to the magic, is that he's not afraid, he's not paralyzed by fear of making an error, and he's very willing to take something that he got wrong and say, yeah, I did that wrong, now I'm going to do it right.
So I hope that he does that in this case, because, you know, zero is a special number.
That means you force, by going to one, you force...
The dominoes to fall.
If you backtrack and you leave it at one with Facebook being the home of free speech, yeah, I guess we all move.
But it would be much better if you had, you know, not all of the free speech eggs in one basket and it having a blue color scheme.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, and it, you know.
As you say, Zuckerberg hasn't apologized here, nor has he indicated a fundamental sea change in how he views the world.
So this appears to be a political or a fashion choice more than it is a deep-seated belief against censorship and for free speech, which is what many of us thought was true for Musk, but maybe not.
Second point is that even in this video, put aside the fact that he doesn't apologize, Zuckerberg says we're going to, I mean, some of it's super vague, but my notes as we were listening to this, he was going to dial back the filters and tune them and bring back civic content, which I guess I think is related.
It means letting back in some stuff and move the trust and safety teams out of California into Texas.
Interesting.
He does say get rid of the fact checkers, but the other stuff, remove most content moderation.
So almost all of the suggested changes are not absolute.
Other than getting rid of the fact checkers, they're like, we're going to do less of that bad thing we've been doing.
Or we're going to move these people that are doing the stuff that's political into a place that maybe is less biased.
There are almost no claims here of, actually, we're going to let you do you and see what happens.
Well, I will make one defensive.
They have to have content moderation because there's truly evil, illegal stuff.
Right, but he lays it out in many ways.
Yeah, I agree.
It's content moderation.
It's filters.
The way he says it, he leaves himself every room to backslide.
And so the way to think about this is, assuming that Elon...
Mm-hmm.
the free speech territory which you know x never got to a totally free speech platform not um and it's made some serious backsliding in in uh recent weeks to months um but to the extent that he's going to cede that territory and leave it in the hands of zuckerberg facebook meta uh,
That's a lot less secure because, as you point out, everything about the way he phrases this leaves him full leeway to make a different announcement six months from now and to have the worst of it come back.
And they both, all of them, whoever they are, always have full leeway.
But if it is clearly a...
Management or a business decision only, as opposed to a philosophical position, it is much more likely to fluctuate with the winds of how everyone is feeling or what the election said.
And what you want is some evidence of a philosophical relation and a position that is deeply felt.
Yeah.
And then there's, of course, the ghost in the machine, which is fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
Meta does have.
Yes, Meta does have.
And so it may be that this is a hostage video and that Zuckerberg is attempting to navigate the difficult job, some would say the unlikely, impossible job, of navigating shareholder responsibility.
In a market, you know, at some level one has to interpret the public corporations that have cannibalized their own business in favor of something else.
Yes, it may be that there's hidden pressure and that they're under threat and that they're actually doing their shareholders bidding by protecting their company from a federal incursion of some kind.
And we can't see that, and so we're angry as users, but they're...
Between a rock and a hard place.
We certainly saw a lot of that in the aftermath of 9-11 with companies creating backdoors for the federal government that they didn't want to create or seemingly did not want to create.
But it could be that Zuckerberg can't say, yeah, free speech is great, we screwed up, and we're not going to do that again because he doesn't want to tie his own hands.
Frankly, that's something we have to navigate because shareholders cannot hold the keys to free speech.
It's just not how it works.
No.
No, it's not.
Purse strings and free speech aren't going to go together too well.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
All right.
Is that it?
I think that's it.
That's it.
Yeah.
But we will be back in a bit with a Q&A on Locals.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Please join us on Locals.
We have a couple of Q&As every month.
We release Brett's Inside Rail conversations with the Dark Horse podcast guests there a day early.
You get access to the Discord server.
Lots and lots of great stuff happening there, including in 15 minutes our next Q&A where you can ask questions in the chat, I think is how we do it.
I've actually forgotten, but it'll be obvious to you, I'm sure.
We have our darkhorsestore.org with lots of great products and darkhorsepodcast.org website has updates on our upcoming calendar, when we're doing what, also has links to the store, all the other stuff.
I encourage you to go there.
That's darkhorsepodcast.org.
A reminder about our sponsors this week, which were CrowdHealth, Sundays, and Peak.
All fantastic, as always, because we do not accept sponsors that we don't actually truly vouch for.
We've got a couple of new sponsors coming up soon that we are also excited about.
We're supported by you.
We thank you for subscribing, for liking, for joining us on Locals, for sharing both full episodes and our clips.
Jen, our new producer, is doing a fantastic job on Instagram putting stuff out and on Twitter.
Check those out.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
