Fooled Again? The 281st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss war, regime change, cyber-attacks, libertarianism, and driving. In what ways are Israel’s attack on Iran reminiscent of events from the past? Are the neo-cons back, or did they never go away? It would seem that we are being frog-marched to war. Speaking of destabilization: North America's largest publicly traded wholesale distributor of natural foods (UNFI) was hacked, leaving market shelves empty at tens of thousands of stores. In better news: Bret returned from FreedomFest,...
Hey folks, welcome to the 281st Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I'm, of course, sitting with Dr. Heather.
Hi.
I believe 281 is what's called a megaprime by elite mathematicians.
Am I right about that?
No.
No.
Okay.
But keep going.
Is it prime at all?
It is, and you know it is.
Okay, so a megaprime is any prime greater than three, and it is called a megaprime because it's big.
Good.
That does sound like the work of the elites.
Right.
Well, it sounds about the average quality of the work of the elites at this point.
pretty much phoning it in.
No, I mean, when I looked it up, I looked it up, and it turns out to be all sorts of crazy primes, most of which I thought, I don't know that these exist, nor do I, in the end, care that much about that level of priminess.
They're phoning it in no matter what.
Yeah, I don't remember any of the categories of primes.
Eisenstein prime was one.
An Eisenstein prime.
Interesting.
Which is fun to say.
Yes.
Not named after Charles.
Presumably not.
Presumably not.
Not being a mathematician.
It's not his thing.
Yeah, he's more big picture bio kind of stuff than zoomed in on the primes.
All right.
Well, I am still a little bit scatterbrained.
I have just arrived back from an exhausting but tremendously fun Freedom Fest.
It was my third Freedom Fest is, get this, the largest gathering of free minds on Earth.
And this time it was in Palm Springs.
Is that their tagline?
Yeah, I think so.
It's at least very close to their tagline.
I mean, it's big.
Fine, but that's the kind of claim that you would roll your eyes at if you weren't saying it yourself.
Here's the thing.
I think it is.
It is said ironically.
But anyway, it's a fun time, and it is a very eclectic group, and I find them very welcoming, even though I...
And anyway, I recommend it.
It was very hot this year.
It got up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit in comparison to last year when it got up to 117 degrees.
But anyway, interesting stuff.
We will talk a little bit more about what I was doing at Freedom Fest a little later in the podcast.
Yes.
I find that, But in no way have you held constant the place.
So the idea of the temperature at the conference was this versus that is, Admittedly, both extraordinarily hot places in the desert southwest, but it's a bizarre thing for you to have said while alighting the actually crucial piece of information.
Well, this is an error that I intended to throw.
I figured because it's such, this is in fact...
What pieces of information that you need to know are missing?
What is that claim based on?
What are we supposed to make of the experts saying this, that, and the other?
Your brain has to find the, well, if that's relevant, in this case it's a trivial claim.
If that's a claim at all, obviously you would have had to have been controlling for the wear.
Unless libertarianism is hot, which I think is the message.
I'm trying to remember what it was the first year I went, what the temperature was.
I think it was hot, but it was definitely not this hot.
So maybe it's getting hotter.
But in any case, yes.
You said last year was hotter.
Last year was the hottest.
I guess that's true.
Also in three different locations.
All right.
First one was Memphis.
Second one was Las Vegas.
And the third one was Palm Springs.
And you're right.
What we have is a trend towards greater heat and then an oscillation.
And yes, I know I don't have nearly enough data points to make that claim.
But I'm going to anyway, because, well, that's what it's like being a free mind.
That's a terrible conclusion.
The hell are you trying to kill us all?
No, no, no.
I painted myself into.
Do not make claims that a silly and overreaching use of the data at hand is what it means to be a free mind.
Because that, unfortunately, is a lot of what people are concluding from the world at the moment.
Agreed.
Thankfully, there's nobody who watches us who would nitpick such things.
I'm digging myself a hole with you.
I can see that.
All right.
So we are going to talk a little bit about what I was doing at Freedom Fest and how that went.
We are going to talk about the drums of war beating as we have warships in motion to the Middle East.
Maybe we should start with the ads.
I think so.
And I see you've thrown me a curveball.
I did not throw you a curveball.
I will say that we are going to do a Q&A after this.
So we already have a question coming in from our Discord server.
And you can ask questions.
I have no idea where.
If you go on Locals, Jen, is that right?
Okay.
So that's where the Q&A will be shortly after this live stream.
So please consider joining us there.
What we need is some sort of an interface that allows you to just kind of pray your questions into the ether and then we pick them up.
No, we don't.
We don't need that.
I think it'd be useful.
We have, as always, three ads right at the top here.
And despite Brett claiming that I have thrown him a curveball, Only ever expected to read one ad and is always the first or the last.
And so you always have a 50-50 chance, even if you have not in fact looked at the sheet of paper in advance of being correct.
Well, in this case, I have.
And so I will not be caught off guard by this.
I'm just going to go into it seamlessly.
Nobody's going to know that I was surprised.
That our first sponsor...
Well, they're not watching, though.
They're just listening.
That's true.
At least half of them.
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Excellent.
Yeah.
Should I go next?
I think you should probably do the next one and the next one.
All right.
Okay.
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Armor colostrum, speaking of which, maybe we could use some right now, ocean spray is flowering at the moment here, and I think both of us have some pollen in our sinuses.
Definitely pollen.
We should talk about whether or not it's likely to be the ocean spray, which we can probably deduce from some natural history.
Of us or of the ocean spray?
of the ocean spray well the ocean spray is all flowering right now and many people in these parts I do not know if those many people are correct, but I did not simply put together the observation that it is flowering in abundance, and we both are a little congested.
Good.
Well, we'll come back to it briefly.
Okay.
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I'm not going to make those promises, but it's possible.
It is rare that you dangle a modifier like that.
Well, it's not dangle, it's just on the next line.
Yeah.
We're dangled onto the next one.
Yeah.
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All right, so let us briefly return to the question of allergic reactions to pollen and ocean spray.
Now, I admit I have not been paying close attention to this plant.
I don't really know it.
I sort of know it at a distance.
Is it insect pollinated or are the things from which it gets its name, the flowers that look kind of misty, they're so tiny, are they wind pollinated?
Oh, I don't think it's wind pollinated.
Okay.
But it may be actually.
So here's Right.
Yeah, and which obviously, well, I know where you're going, but I'll let you So my point would be people often make the mistake of looking at showy plants that are in bloom and they think, Well, that's why I'm having allergies, when really some showy plant that's in bloom is blooming at the same time as some inconspicuous plant that's blooming like a grass.
I mean, the grasses are obviously blooming, but...
Right.
But the point is, in general, plants that are pollinated by insects or birds or any animal are not likely to induce allergic symptoms because...
So in general, a showy flower, which is an attractant for an animal, is an indication that something is not likely to be an allergy trigger.
I do know of one substantial exception to this pattern, and that substantial exception Is Scotchbrew, which is an invasive plant here in the Pacific Northwest.
It's got very showy yellow flowers and is widely thought to create very serious allergy symptoms in many people.
So I've never understood.
There's a paradox there to me.
Why is this clearly insect pollinated plant causing allergy symptoms?
I've never heard a good answer to this question.
What did you just find out about ocean spray?
You know, I only went to a couple of sites.
The suggestion is that it's pollinated by insects.
But it's big, not particularly brightly colored, white non-fragrant flowers that are in big clumps.
I think the name is based on what it visually looks like, but it tends to be in pretty high wind places too, which suggests wind dispersal or wind pollination as a mechanism.
Although maybe it's wind dispersed, I don't know.
What I've found doesn't specify what kind of insects.
We have a fair bit of it.
It's lining a couple of streets that we drive down frequently.
We're lucky to see a number of gardens yesterday, and there was like ceanophus that was just filled with bumblebees.
There were a number of these plants that are flowering profusely right now in the Pacific Northwest that are filled with obvious pollinators, and I don't see any hanging out in and around the ocean spray.
So I wonder about the assessment that it is obviously insect pollinated.
And, you know, maybe it does a little bit of both.
That seems like too generalist a strategy for most plants.
Well, but imagine this.
Imagine that you are a plant that disperses effectively to new habitats.
you might find yourself in a habitat where your pollinator isn't found.
So it might be there are plants that have a showy flower in hopes of attracting a pollinator and have a...
Do they detect that now insects are showing up and change to a smaller pollen grain that can blow on the wind?
I mean, yeah, strategy switching.
We know this happens with regard to plants becoming able to reproduce asexually upon discovering.
That they are lacking a mate.
They can't find gametes of the other sex.
So why not strategy switching of this sort as well?
Yeah.
Especially if selfing is not possible in those plants.
In other words, if they have to pollinate another member of the species in order to reproduce, then you might imagine that the detection that pollinators are failing to pick up pollen.
Might trigger a switch.
Anyway, interesting hypotheses.
make obvious testable predictions.
Yeah, and I guess the one additional issue with the claim that the two of us may be suffering from mild, A, I never had any seasonal allergies at all until recently, and it's pretty minor for me.
So that, of course, raises questions about what that's about.
It's not going to be about childhood vaccine schedule, for instance, as many seasonal allergies and food allergies that come on in childhood probably are.
But also, we both grew up in Southern California where ocean spray does not exist.
So this will not have been something that our immune systems could have reacted to early on and identified as not-self.
It is not-self, but we are only being exposed to it fairly recently.
Even though we've lived in the Pacific Northwest for many years at this point, this particular plant is much more abundant here than it has been anywhere else that we have lived.
And, you know, we haven't gotten any obvious details Yes, that's true.
So it also raises the question, given the chaos of plants around us, does something flower at approximately the same time?
So it feels like ocean spray is what's doing it amid some tree or grass that we have had a lot of exposure to.
And there's a lot of grass going right now.
Yeah, for sure.
You know what else is happening right now?
Oh, God.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
So before you start, a number of, I don't even know how long ago, a month, two, three months ago or so, I read a little bit from a piece that I had published in County Highway, writing the field notes column, as I do for them.
And the piece was sort of observations about, about the,
And what I wrote then, and read just a little piece of, I don't know, maybe it was February or March, Was an invocation, a plea to not feel compelled to spend so much time in language and reaction space.
And I think this was in part a request for me to not have to spend so much time in language space.
I mean, I do think obviously we see people being reactive in the news and social media, you know, everywhere all the time.
And I've had people come up to me this week who know us from this.
And I don't want to need to have an opinion about that, especially without knowing.
So we're going to talk about a number of things today about which I would be very happy to not be having language and opinions on anything.
Anything publicly for a very long time.
I just wanted to say that.
Yeah, I get it.
But the world we live in, it's not even...
This was not a criticism of you.
This is an acknowledgement to our audience that this is...
That me having to show up and use language all the time at this point, especially having not had access to the various other kinds of expression that I used to have, artistic forms of expression for a very long time, I get it.
We're being marched to war.
This is...
Our fates are going to be altered by what we do if we fail to march to war when we need to march to war because it's in our interest as a nation and the interest of our children to do so.
We will pay the cost of that if we are marched to war because it's in somebody else's interest.
And it's not in our interest, and we will be paying the cost of that.
And the history of this is so recently made apparent by what I would argue are parallel circumstances that as much as I don't want to be talking about this either, and, you know, it forces us to engage things in which neither of us are expert.
We, this is really our duty as citizens.
And so anyway, I hate that we have to talk about things that we haven't studied, but nonetheless, we're there because some force wants us to go to war and figuring out whether that is a noble force or a malevolent force is just simply important.
So anyway, let me try to And let's just say that there is a way in which the march to war with Iran, which looks like a march to American war with Iran, we currently have forces moving into the area, and that can of course just be posturing,
but nonetheless we are posturing as if we are likely to To join Israel in its war, which it has now started with Iran.
Yes, there are provocations that have come the other way.
But nonetheless, we've got...
Well, let us remember that back on October 7th of 2023,
And at that time I was very alarmed by the noises that I was hearing from what I consider to be partisans inside Israel and inside the U.S. and Britain who Seemed to be reflexive in their assessment of what was taking place.
And one of the things that alarmed me greatly was that there was a generalized response to questioning how October 7th could possibly have happened.
The story of October 7th, of course, is quite shocking in the sense that it occurred on the anniversary of a very important previous battle that Israel had fought.
It seemed to involve the total abdication of military responsibility by the forces that would have been imagined to be on that border.
So effectively, Hamas fighters marched into Israel and met almost no resistance and fought and killed and murdered for eight hours or something before finally being driven back over the border.
In any case, the desire to just simply establish that, yes, there had been some incompetence and that explained everything and that Israel was simply left.
war in the Middle East.
They'd gotten us involved in war in Afghanistan, which I'm embarrassed to say now I supported at the beginning because I thought that we had no choice but to go into Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, but not Iraq.
Right.
I did not support the war in Iraq.
And the war in Iraq, of course, turned into a very obvious Quagmire rather quickly resulted in a huge expenditure of American resources, a very substantial loss of life beyond what we had seen on September 11th, and it became very difficult to get out.
We didn't accomplish.
Yes, Saddam Hussein was eliminated, and Saddam Hussein was a terrible guy, but as for whether or not this improved Iraq, it does not seem to have.
Something like a half a million to a million Iraqis lost their lives as a result.
So my sense is we weren't really allowed to question the march to war in Iran because neocons were very effective.
I mean, in Iraq, sorry, because neocons had been very effective.
At making the case that we simply had no choice.
It was in our interest.
We can fight them there.
We can fight them here.
We can fight them before they have elaborated their weapons of mass destruction program, or we can wait for them to have truly terrifying stuff.
And that history needs to be on people's minds, as does some earlier history, in order to figure out where we even are with respect to the current issue.
With Iran.
And there are very strange noises taking place here.
But back on October 10th, 11th, 12th of 2023, this is what was on my mind.
I've found some.
I obviously did a podcast with Ifrat Fennexson, an Israeli who had served in the IDF.
She had not served there recently, did not represent herself as having done so.
But nonetheless, she talked to me about how this looked from inside Israel, from a skeptic's position inside Israel.
And I took a lot of flack for that, and I took a lot of flack for my concern about what role neocons might be playing in the present.
I reminded people.
I felt like I hadn't heard the word neocon in a very long time, and it was surprising to me that it wasn't.
What I said privately, and I wish I had said into a camera, was, can we at least check these people's alibi?
Can we figure out where they are, what they're up to?
Because the history is that they had a plan for remaking the Middle East, and their story was essentially...
The Middle East is a very dangerous place.
The right way to fix it is to go around and engage in regime change operations and put responsible people in power so that the Middle East becomes a part of the modern world that we can simply interact with.
Now, that was stupid on its face at the time.
It did not pay any attention to how the Middle East ended up where it was.
But nonetheless, they were very compelling.
And Iran was on their list of regimes that needed to be forcibly changed by military action from what at the time might have been called or was called the Coalition of the Willing.
This was cobbled together by the Bush administration, a group of nations that were willing to go on these regime change adventures.
Bush too.
Yes.
So the problem was that the quagmire in Iraq was so devastating that It caused the American public to lose its appetite for the neocon line that we needed to be engaged in aggressive regime change operations in the Middle East.
So Iran never got addressed in the neocon form, and it effectively went into a dormant state.
It's not like the neocons gave up on the idea that it would be necessary to attack Iran.
And it just simply didn't happen, and the neocons weren't a feature of our discussion for decades.
And then suddenly, as the war in Gaza broke out, the relevance of Iran and the necessity, as some would have it, that we go and engage in regime change in Iran was suddenly back on the table.
Was concerned about this.
I think we have documentation of it literally from October 12th of 2023.
So do you want to put up the, um, I think it's on October 12th, 2023.
And I'm going to read most of it.
It's long, but it will give you a sense for where I am now and how I got there.
So I'm responding to Restef, who has taken me to task for asking questions about what happened on October 7th.
We're talking to Ifrat Fennexson, who he says overrated her expertise.
I think she told us exactly her level of expertise.
Yeah, that's not how I remember it either.
I thought she was very transparent.
I thought Restef was very unfair to me and especially unfair to her.
And I will say that Restef, the reason that this exchange is happening, On Twitter, with this level of detail, is that Restef is another COVID dissident.
And so one of the things that October 7th did was it shattered the coalition that had been built up over the crimes of COVID.
And people like Restif going aggressively after me, I guess I understand it.
He, you know...
Obviously, the atrocities of October 7th say so.
There's, of course, a lot of water under the bridge as to what those atrocities were and weren't.
But nonetheless, here's my...
Is this from 2023?
2023.
Okay.
This is from October 12th, I believe, 2023.
The precise date doesn't matter.
After my podcast with Ifra.
So I'm going to read it.
It's long.
I may skip a paragraph or two.
And I did, in looking at it this morning, spot one error, which I will correct when I get there.
Sorry, struggling with the allergies here.
I say, rest if you ask, quote, Hamas slash Iran initiated barbaric terror.
A barbaric terrorist attack to harm Israel and promote their jihad agenda.
Agree?
End quote.
Answer.
This is my answer.
Of course, with the exception that I don't know if Iran initiated, funded, or aided this act, or merely blessed it.
They are different violations, and the distinction matters.
I'd be happy to explain why if it's not clear.
The actions of Hamas that the world witnessed, or can reasonably infer, were barbaric in the extreme, and that barbarism, we can be certain, continues with the hostages.
This is inherent to Hamas.
I view all Hamas militants as beyond redemption by their own choice.
If I had a button that would destroy all Hamas operatives, I would push it without hesitation, and I'd feel nothing...
That said, if I had a button that would destroy anyone, irrespective of their flag or motive, who consciously facilitated the success of this operation, knowing the barbarism that would be unleashed upon innocent civilians, I'd push that button too, because those people would be guilty of the same irredeemable depravity.
Please tell me you would push that second button too, so that I can know, with certainty, that our disagreement is one of evidence and analysis alone.
I am not saying it was an inside job.
How would I know?
I am saying that given what we can ascertain from the outside, I believe something on the inside has to have been working for the opposition.
That could be a mole, back doors in electronics, blackmail, all of the above.
Global interest exists in the conflict, and I will not pretend otherwise.
I am open to any explanation that can account for the glaring paradox at the heart of the narrative we have been given.
The most modern army on earth, and the most frighteningly capable intelligence service in the world, administered by a decidedly hawkish government, inexplicably removed all layers of defense from the Gaza border on the 50th anniversary of a historic military conflict, all apparently in spite of an urgent warning from Egypt, and by coincidence, we are asked to accept, while those forces were absent, an unprecedented operation was launched and succeeded in massacring the largest number of Jews since the Holocaust.
Predictably forcing a conflict that will create winners and losers across the world.
And you are asking, this is the important part and the reason I've dug this up, and you are asking me to hold my questions until after, quote, the war.
On what planet does that make sense?
May I ask you, what war are we insisting that I accept?
The war against Hamas?
I agree that destroying Hamas is more than justified, and having seen civilization turned on its head by the war on terror, I am frightened by anyone who doesn't see the problem with war as the chosen paradigm.
Killing terrorists is good.
Making war on terrorism is a broken concept.
Is it a war against Gaza I am to accept?
I do not.
For starters, there are children in Gaza.
They are innocent by definition.
They are entitled to have us exhaust every possibility before we consign them to any such fate.
Of course I understand that Hamas is responsible for that precise bind, that it created it and exploits it deliberately.
Damn them to hell for doing it.
But we must be better than our enemies, and this is a completely unacceptable place to ask that we put our questions aside.
Or are you suggesting that the war against Iran must precede rational evaluation?
I'm sorry, but again, no.
A quarter century ago, a group of Americans decided that the US military should be used to reconstruct the Middle East.
We never got to making war on Iran, not because it wasn't on their schedule, but because the rosy scenarios those demons painted about invading Iraq and Afghanistan led us into shameful, ruinous quagmires, which killed the public appetite for such insane recklessness.
That alone negates your claim that we should rush into war and hold our questions.
We need to know now, is war on Iran back on the table?
Because the Neocon game plan was paused.
Rather than scrapped all those years ago.
Okay?
That seems to me like a hypothesis that makes a prediction.
And now, this is me stepping out of reading my tweet.
I'll go back to it in a second.
But this is me putting forward a hypothesis in 2023, just after October 7th, that says, are we going to be marched to war in Iran?
And if so, we need to ask every question right now about how this is happening, because war with Iran was somebody's plan, and it was put on pause.
All right, let me complete reading this tweet.
There are many questions that must be addressed.
Not least is this.
What broke inside the Israeli self-defense system that allowed this to happen?
In any normal scenario, finding the obviously massive vulnerability would be a universal obsession amongst those with the moral high ground.
The Israeli people need to know, at the very least, that the same exploit can't be used against them next week, next month, or next year.
And the people of the world need to know if the force marching us to a very dangerous conflagration is Hamas alone or something greater.
I do not understand how it is not our duty to the dead, to their families, and to the many hostages living in terror at this hour to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
I simply do not know how many times the citizens of the world would need to be dragged into war under incomplete, misleading, or outright false pretenses before we accept that sidelining questions and stigmatizing people asking them in good faith so we can rush to war is always a mistake.
And on that last point, how dare you attack your friend and fellow dissident, Ifrat Fennigsen, for asking obvious questions that should be on all our minds.
She explains her level of expertise, its source, in the podcast itself.
Any thinking person can put her comments in proper context.
May justice come swiftly to the guilty, may the innocent be returned safely to their families, and may the world find its way to a stable and lasting peace.
Brett.
Okay.
So, I was heartened to find that I had put all of that in text with a date stamp.
This was not public?
like it was text.
Yeah, it's a tweet.
I mean, you can see the timestamp right there.
3 o'clock, October 12th, 2023.
Because what it means is if you're at all honest about the way to view Predictive power has to be your guide.
People who told us that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program, and then it turned out that they didn't, those people should lose credibility.
And the next time they tell you somebody has such a program, you shouldn't listen to them.
When somebody says, You know, on the eve of war in Gaza, hey, I'm actually really concerned that this is going to globalize and it's going to do so through an attack on Iran that the United States is going to be dragged into.
And then what do you know, as President Trump is apparently in negotiations with Iran, Israel attacks Iran and then...
So that is the United States being marched into a war by Israeli action that is, again, apparently Ill-considered at best, if not intentionally designed to create that effect.
So I don't like asking these questions.
I don't want to live in a world where we can't just simply have an ally and basically trust that they are on the up and up.
But the history tells us we can't.
And in this case, the fact that I was predicting in 2023...
And it just so happens that events are unfolding in exactly this way means maybe I'm not right, but you should be listening because I did predict the history.
That's exactly right.
I mean, I think over and over again, we end up being told this is not the time to ask questions.
This is not the time to question the mainstream narrative.
This is a time of too great peril to question the experts.
Over and over and over again.
And it was relatively easy, I felt on more solid ground, to question the experts when they were claiming expertise in fields relevant to what I understand to be, what I know about.
You know, claims of scientific truth, when there's patently no science going on, are easy for us to point to and say, the emperor has no clothes.
statecraft and and politics being realms where we have no lived experience if you will renders me not any more inclined to listen to those who claim expertise on the basis of their own expertise which is always a circular argument but also not sure
And so in that domain, anyone, you, anyone, but in this case you, who demonstrates predictive power, which is the, you know, it's the coin of the realm across every domain, is indicating that however you got there, you have insight.
Like, you know, it doesn't matter, right?
Like, that will be the, that will, at least over in science space, that will be the way to tend to discredit those with predictive power.
Well, tell me exactly how you know, where the steps how you got there.
Like, I don't, it actually, that doesn't, that's not necessary.
And could it be useful to be able to delineate all the steps?
In some cases, yes.
In some cases, precisely no.
Because being explicit about the process can render the process Unreplicable, right?
I don't know what was going on in your head that caused you to look at October 7, 2023 and think to Colin Powell in 2003 giving us bad information whether or not he knew it at the time or not.
He did not.
He certainly claims that.
Marching into war But connect the two you did, and it's possible you're wrong, as you say, but there's prediction here, and that is not just the realm of science.
That is the realm of truth deciphering and meaning-making across all of the ways that we are trying to understand what is true.
Yep.
And, you know, I'm really not saying that my model is right.
I'm saying that my confidence is, So I'm feeling like actually I'm probably paying attention to the important things and I will say it's the dogs that don't bark that call my attention.
Right?
The fact that there was no discussion that I was hearing about neocons in the run up to an immediate aftermath of October 7th.
Where had the neocons gone?
It was like they were no longer a force.
We don't have to worry about them.
And I think what happened is we got a new generation of neocons.
Most of our current neocon behaving people, people we can diagnose as neocons based on what they say, were not around for that discussion in the run-up to war in Iraq.
This is a new generation.
I call them neo-neocons.
Now there's one exception, interestingly.
Douglas Murray, young as that makes him, was a neocon at the time and claimed that he wrote a book.
And he remains steadfastly on that side.
And, you know, to his credit, he's intellectually consistent.
I think he was dead wrong in the fact that he has not corrected his model based on the fact that history embarrassed his side, I think is troubling.
But nonetheless, he doesn't pretend to be other than he is.
And I appreciate that about him.
But here...
Thank you.
I have become increasingly convinced and increasingly explicit about the idea that we are misled into thinking we have to process all of the information which causes two errors.
One, it causes us to step back when, in fact, You're never going to have all the information and you need to figure out, you know, just as people on a battlefield have to deal with the fog of war and having totally incomplete information on who's in the battlefield and where they are, who's a friendly, who's an enemy, right?
That is a problem.
You still have to somehow act rather than just say, well, we don't know enough to fight this battle.
You're going to lose if that's what you do.
That's one error.
But the other error is if you hold yourself responsible for processing all of the information, you will process a large amount of bullshit that has been put into the world to mislead you or is distracting for some other reason.
Instead, it makes sense to process a smaller amount of information that you find reliable, For some reason, because it checks out from multiple perspectives.
So the fact that the neocons existed, the fact that they had a more or less explicit plan that they talked about each other with and frequently said things about in public, means that was a force.
I incorrectly thought they had disappeared.
I thought the embarrassment of what had happened following our disastrous decision in 2003 had resulted in them being no longer a force.
That was my error.
Turns out there's still a force.
There's a new generation of neocons, the neo-neocons, and that I think we should be very concerned about where they're pushing us right now.
Some other things that I think we need to be figuring out how to process is this story of a sudden need for the U.S. to step into a war against Iran to bail out Israel, which attacked Iran thinking,
But somehow, that story, which seems very separate from the Jeffrey Epstein story, is not inherently separate, because of course there's all kinds of circumstantial evidence that suggests that Epstein was an asset of something inside Israel, likely Mossad.
The idea that there is something in that quadrant that exerts control on the U.S. based on compromise means that we can't even be certain what the position of those who are trying to advise us and govern us would actually be absent this form.
So what is the relationship between these stories?
I don't know.
Then there's the question of Colin Powell.
Many people are too young or the event is too remote in history for them to remember how this went down with Iraq.
But it is very important that people know what it felt like to those of us who watched, and I believe I watched live as Colin Powell went to the UN and gave the speech that caused us to go to war in Iraq.
In which he said there is evidence that they are developing WMDs.
That was the claim.
Not only that, it was beyond there is evidence that it was a...
And I remember very well the artist renderings.
They're not photographs.
They're artist renderings of semi-trucks that were traveling Iraq.
And they had these giant, like imagine you go to that beautiful brew pub with the giant gleaming, are they steel?
You know, chambers in which the brewing takes place.
So they had these weapons labs that were traveling the roads of Iraq, generating bioweapons.
Why?
Because if they were any static place, we'd bomb them.
And so they want to keep them on the move.
And so, you know, that's how sneaky this weapons of mass destruction program is.
And, you know, like, so like, literally, you're in the situation where what turns out to be a total fiction has been rendered by artists in such a way that you think you saw it with your own eyes.
Right?
So I couldn't find the weapons program images.
They're out there.
I just forgot to look for it till too late.
But can you put up the picture of Colin Powell holding up this vial of something at the UN?
So people need to understand, Colin Powell was a force to be reckoned with politically.
He was widely understood to be a very good guy because he's black or was, but he's now dead.
because he's black, he was very compelling, he had risen through the ranks, he had good credibility on multiple fronts.
When he went to the UN and he told us that he was certain that the evidence he had seen was incontrovertible, that the program existed, that Saddam Hussein was a maniac, which I think he was, but Saddam Hussein was a maniac who was on the verge of having enough bioweapon stuff to...
When he put his credibility on the line for this story, it pushed the world over the edge.
And it specifically pushed the world into war with Iraq.
And the reason that I say that I believe that Colin Powell didn't know is that they burned him, right?
They burned his credibility.
This is somebody who could eat This was somebody who was on that trajectory, and he had the goods, right?
He wasn't a stuffed shirt.
He was highly articulate, able to persuade people, had great relations with people in Washington.
So anyway, his credibility was fatally compromised by this one speech that so many of us saw.
And his public regret over it later seemed very genuine.
So I think they burned him.
They decided it was important enough to get the U.S. into war, that they took this asset of theirs, right?
And they wrecked it.
So that's something I think needs to be on people's mind.
And if you were old enough to be around and cognizant at that time, you need to remind yourself of what it was like as we were deciding whether to go to war.
And Colin Powell made it happen.
And if you're not old enough, you need to...
Because, frankly, the history of war is such that there is often, if not always, a false justification.
Somebody wants you to go to war.
Is it really in your interest to go to war?
Well, you're going to be told it is.
And you're going to find out at the end of it whether they knew what they're talking about.
But in general...
And if you're not asking that question on the front end, you're missing it.
But then here's the other thing.
So in terms of things that are missing from people's models, they need to realize the neocons are back.
They may not travel under that banner.
They need to realize we don't know what the implication of Jeffrey Epstein's story is for geopolitics, but it's not going to be nothing.
We need to know that Colin Powell, In a situation that was not identical but had many similarities pushed us into war that we came to regret as a nation because we couldn't get out of it and because the amount of treasure in life that was lost in that conflict was spectacular.
And as bad as it was for us, it was way worse for Iraq.
And then finally, The thing I have yet to hear anybody else mention, and I'm not saying it's not been mentioned, I'm just saying it's not a big enough part of our conversation that it's showing up where it should, is that the problem with Iran is the result of regime change by the West.
Full stop.
So what people don't know in general is that in the 50s, between 1951 and 53, Iran was...
And Mozadek nationalized the oil companies, or the British oil company, what is now British Petroleum, but was called by another name at the time.
He nationalized, effectively, the control over the oil in Iran.
Now, you may have mixed emotions about that.
You've got a company.
It's doing business in Iran, extracting oil.
Presumably Iran is getting some benefit for that.
But you can imagine the Iranians discovering or realizing that they didn't have a good deal, that they had a hugely important resource, and it would have become apparent by the early 50s.
How important that resource was, not just in terms of its value in terms of wealth, but its strategic importance, that you might imagine that somebody like Mossadegh would think, well, actually, we have everything we need to be a well-run, prosperous, powerful country right here, because we are sitting on this huge oil resource.
And unfortunately, the way our deal is structured with Britain.
The benefit of that oil is largely going to them and not us.
That's our oil.
So he nationalizes it.
I'm not saying that's the right decision or the wrong decision.
I really don't know enough about it.
But the point is, his nationalizing of the oil industry in Iran resulted in the British and the U.S. MI6 and the CIA overthrowing What was the result of that?
They installed a monarch, the Shah.
Now, there's a history there with shahs, but never mind.
Fact is, we went from having a Iran on a trajectory towards modernization, towards secularization, as had already occurred in Turkey.
And it went from that to a monarchy where it continued with a strong degree of Western modernization, which then all resulted in a massive Islamic theocratic revolution that ousted the Shah and replaced him with the Ayatollah.
it causes people to rebel.
Right.
Regime change from the outside.
So, to the extent that we have people championing regime change in Iran right now, yeah, I get it.
I am not happy with the Iranians potentially having weapons of mass destruction and a theocratic viewpoint in which many of us are just simply irredeemable.
Right?
That is a very dangerous situation.
But it's a situation I don't want to have made worse based on the naive notion that as much as the history of regime change operations in the Middle East is a shameful one of utter failure, I don't want to be told, well, this time it's different.
The answer is, you had President Trump negotiating with the Iranians.
What the heck is going on?
Did he know?
Was he engaged in tricking the Iranians and distracting them while Israel was going to attack them with Trump's knowledge?
That's one possibility.
Did the Israelis go after Iran and undercut the president's negotiation with them?
That's another possibility.
And the answer is we're not in a good position to even know.
And I will say the noises coming out of this administration are...
Frighteningly discordant with each other.
So can you put up the...
There's a statement from the Director of National Intelligence in March.
The Director of National Intelligence is Tulsi Gabbard.
she is the highest most highly placed intelligence official and she said in march So here it is.
He says, The United States intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khomeini...
Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
So that's Tulsi Gabbard in...
And I'm not saying that she was right, but I am saying if President Trump thinks that they are, whose information is he going on who's above Tulsi Gabbard?
There isn't anyone.
Or did something happen in the period since March that has changed that assessment?
And of course there is this discovery.
That Iran apparently has uranium enriched beyond the level necessary for civilian power generation, which is, of course, their claim as to why they have nuclear materials at all.
I don't know entirely what to make of that.
I don't think it's a clear indication one way or the other.
Yes, it does point in a direction.
It's evidence of one kind to the extent that it is reliable, but it is not the decisive piece of evidence you would think it is.
Do you have Tulsi saying what she said in March?
I should say DNI Gabbard.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.
In the past year, we've seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public.
Okay, so that's a very clear statement.
She's telling us the state of our understanding.
It's not obvious why I can't see that she would make anything up.
And so what I would like is if...
I would love some sort of a clear statement that says something like, actually, evidence has come to light since my statement in March that has changed my understanding, etc.
Instead, what we have...
I think this is yesterday.
You don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon.
But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one?
Because Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.
I don't care what she said.
I think they were very close to having it.
Right.
Now, on what basis does he not care?
Does he have better information from somewhere?
And if so, why doesn't she have it?
And what?
Well, I would, I don't really, It's just him.
That's just offhand responding to a reporter.
That's how I read that.
I agree with you.
Look, if there was some indication, right?
And she did put out something.
That basically says she put out a video, strangely high production values, that shows the Golden Gate Bridge being destroyed by a nuclear weapon, saying how terrible nuclear weapons are.
It doesn't contain anything that I can see about Iran.
But anyway, it is a strange statement for her to be putting out in the present.
But it is incumbent on the administration.
To provide a coherent narrative.
It should be a true narrative, but at least we should be able to follow it in order to assess whether or not it is true.
And what we're getting are noises that are inconsistent at best.
And I just think that that's incredibly disturbing in light of the fact that we seem to be hurtling towards a war that is the result.
of aggressive action by Israel.
I'm not arguing that Iran is innocent.
Their support for attacks on Israel is, I think, well established.
But nonetheless, you have Israel choosing a moment in which to attack Iran, ostensibly over a weapons program that those of us in the public cannot assess directly.
The information that we're getting from the administration is inconsistent at best.
I'm afraid that what's going to happen here is we're going to end up at war in Iran.
I'm told, calm down, Brett.
It's not like Iraq.
There's no plan for boots on the ground in Iran.
Well, apparently there wasn't any plan for us to be attacking Iran anyway, and suddenly that's on the table because...
So I don't know the fact that there's no plans for boots on the ground now means that we won't next be frog marched into boots on the ground, just as, you know, when Iraq, when the Iraq war went bad and it was clear how spectacularly we were going to be embarrassed by the other forces there.
You know, we needed a surge in order to, you know.
But the problem is, we in the public, who have every interest in preventing, frankly, our young men and women from dying in Iran and our resources being squandered on a foreign conflict that won't result in an improvement in the region,
we have every interest in Not being spectators, in which we're simply given a story that explains why these massive quantities of resource and these huge numbers of our military are going to be put in danger in the Middle East, again, in a place that we were told we had to do regime change, you know, more than 20 years ago.
So I think that's all I've got here.
It isn't the time to ask questions.
Oh, one last thing.
As I keep saying in various different venues.
Benjamin Netanyahu, there are so many data points where he has done things that have been absolutely terrible for Israel and reckless with respect.
He is apparently, and this is, I don't have any direct information, but when I talk to Israelis about Benjamin Netanyahu, they tell me he is very unpopular.
He would have been out long ago if not for the conflict.
So effectively, what we have is a situation in which the jeopardy to Israel is keeping Benjamin Netanyahu not only in office, but I'm told potentially out of trouble over his corruption.
That he has a perverse incentive that involves Israelis doing what people do when they are under threat, which is rallying around their leaders.
So I do have a fear that that's part of what's going on here, too, is that, you know, I don't think any of this is in Israel's interest, but it may very well be in Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yahoo's interest.
And he, I can say with some confidence based on how he behaved relative to COVID, which is a topic you and I know a lot about, that he appears to be one of these people who, through whatever mechanism, is very comfortable with causing death to people he doesn't seem to care about.
I don't know that there are people who are off that list, but for most of us, we are not important to him.
And, you know, So, you know, it's bad enough to be pushed into war that might be in the interest of another nation and not your interest.
It's even worse if this is...
That's a very frightening prospect and it's one I think we need to at least be paying attention to.
Speaking of destabilizing forces, there's something I don't know if you've encountered yet, but it just feels like there are things going wrong at every level from every angle.
Since you've been away and not mostly cooking for yourself, you haven't had occasion to be at our local food co-op recently.
To be shopping for produce and other perishable goods.
So you may not have noticed, as presumably some in our audience have, that there have been more than a week of big gaps on grocery shelves.
And it turns out that a publicly traded company that I'd never heard of before called UNFI, United Natural Foods Incorporated, was hacked.
On June 5th, I think it is.
And they are North America's largest publicly traded wholesale distributor of natural, organic, and conventional foods.
They went entirely down.
They served, they provided much of the perishable foods and some non-perishable foods to over 30,000 retail outlets across the United States, including being the major distributor to Whole Foods.
Also to many co-ops because, again, natural and organic foods is their specialty.
And they just stopped all deliveries because they'd been hacked and they had no ability to do their business.
And they're still down.
And it's still not clear what happened exactly, except hacked.
And there's, you know, phased in now work happening.
I don't need to show anything.
What?
Yeah.
Alright, so ostensibly, there should be a huge amount of organic foods rotting in that pipe.
So they have suffered, I don't have any of the numbers up now, but something like, you know, 17% drop in market cap, of course.
But, you know, more to the point for the rest of us, you know, they're a middleman that no one knew existed unless you were in the business.
And so, you know, we have a friend in the business who has been a manager of food co-op.
And I'm looking at the shelves going, it looks fine.
He says, well, with canned goods, we can have enough backstock that we can make things look full.
Because you look at the expiration date on these things, and we're still several years out.
And so we can have enough backstock if we have storage to keep those shelves looking full.
But look around at the other places in the store, including produce, and you find things missing.
And my thought was, well, okay, but, you know, it's seasonal.
You're talking about buying organic.
I don't expect there to always be, you know, unlike if you shop at, you know, one of the big corporate chains buying commercial commodity produce, where, like, any time of year I need to find green beans.
Any time of year I need to find oranges.
Like, no, if you're trying to shop organic and seasonally available, When something is missing, you figure it got bought out, you know, like, or it just wasn't available yet, right?
So, and, you know, we don't have a Whole Foods on the island, so presumably it was more obvious to people at Whole Foods, but just like this interface of, like, natural, organic, and corporate, right?
Because they they do tend to have you know green beans from Chile at all times of year, right?
But giant cyber attack on the nation's largest It's down.
And yes, incredible amount of food waste.
Where's it going?
What's happening to it?
We don't know.
But also, it points out the incredible fragility of all of our systems.
Fragility.
And I must tell you, this sets off my spidey sense.
And this happened days before what's happening in the Middle East began with this newest round.
So, you know, there's just so much happening right now that it's impossible to keep track of everything on any of these channels, much less a sufficient amount to bring yourself to feeling confident that you know what you're seeing on multiple channels.
And so as you were talking, I was like, oh, wait.
Like, there's this other huge thing that we haven't even talked about because you just got home, and I've been thinking about, kind of, but I don't know what to make of it.
I've not heard it even mentioned.
All right.
Here's a screenplay for you.
The cyber attack is designed to interrupt the flow of these organic goods so that the elites...
You're not signing on to my screenplay.
You know, we're talking about such remarkable volumes of food.
No, not really.
Well, but the people are.
And the key to the screenplay is that these people, as much as they're perfectly comfortable having us eat Toxic garbage themselves know better.
And therefore, if they were going to divert a bunch of food into some sort of preservation mechanism for themselves, it would be the organic stuff.
It would be the organic stuff, and I guess my initial objection is having...
yeah, it's been a couple of years since we're just not settled here yet.
Um, but you know, I, I spent, We have not been in a position to grow our own, but we had local farms where we knew the farmers and we were able to get Get delicious food from our local farmers and canned and preserved and such.
And at least at the small kitchen level, it's a tremendous amount of work.
and it would require a tremendous amount of facilities as well.
Yeah.
Facilities.
Facilities.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, I mean, there's a screenplay there.
We should think about that.
No, we should not.
Well, that screenplay makes a certain number of predictions.
What?
Doesn't matter.
All right.
Are we good with the presumably somewhere rotting huge amounts of organic food?
I mean, I'm not good with it.
But we've explored the topic as far as we're going.
Yeah.
All right.
So, I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about what I was doing at Freedom Fest.
By the way, I think those of you who want to see what other people and what I was doing at Freedom Fest, I think you can get access to the material by commenting with the word digital on some of the Freedom Fest materials that they put out, and then they send you a link.
I can't be certain of that, but I know that that was true while the conference was going on at least.
Okay, so I was doing a couple things there.
Mainstage talk on the racket that has taken over our education and research institutions.
But I was also there, and I did a couple of things on what I call Libertarianism 2.0.
And the idea here is that I have come to understand that I misunderstood libertarianism as a younger person, that I had regarded as sort of a ridiculous, non-viable philosophical perspective, and I've come to realize that I had that wrong, that in fact liberty is the one value that one can reasonably choose to maximize.
And the reason for that, this goes back to my work on trade-offs, if you try to maximize other values, You get a dystopia, and which dystopia you get depends on which value you try to maximize.
But if you try to maximize, for example, justice, you'll get a pile of skulls.
You could argue that communism is an attempt to maximize justice, but the problem is it produces a system that punishes those who are contributing and rewards those who are not, and therefore is wildly unproductive.
So it tends to result in starvation, it tends to result in tyranny in order to keep people from revolting due to the starvation.
So anyway, you maximize any variable and you get a dystopia.
Why is liberty an exception?
And what I've come to understand as an older and wiser person is that liberty is different because it's integrative.
In order to be free, you have to deal with all of your other concerns.
You effectively have to balance all of the trade-offs.
And that means that actually liberty, not only is it something you can afford to maximize, but that you probably should get good at it because the more liberated you are, the more problems you've solved in some way.
But this is something you were saying.
long before you thought the libertarians were making any sense well i've got so i mean i i believe we wrote something like this into hunter gatherers guide but i certainly remember you um speaking in this way uh in the
immediate before math shall we call it and aftermath of uh of what happened at evergreen in 2017 with regard to um precisely with regard to liberty being the thing the value that then That frees us to come closer to maximizing other things simultaneously.
Yeah, you're right.
I'm not saying that this is...
Precisely because the...
And you had, at least in 2015, I think before that, were pointing out why justice cannot be your prime value.
And this in context of, like Jonathan Haidt saying, is a university about truth or justice?
Well, but over in a political space, if you're choosing between justice and freedom, you have to choose to prioritize freedom.
And yet then, at that point, maybe it's just because you hadn't met any actual libertarians yet, but you still weren't advocating for the political ideology, for lack of a better term, being called libertarianism.
This is an important distinction.
There's a difference between the movement of libertarians, who I am coming to understand.
There's a lot of silliness there, but there's a lot of high-quality thinking and very good people and all of that.
But my understanding of liberty in the abstract and the ability to maximize it goes well back.
I don't even know how far back it goes, but yeah, well before 2015 even.
So I've gone from being, you know, as a young person in my 20s, I thought that ideologically this was an absurd perspective.
What was?
That the obsession with liberty was childish.
I now understand it's not.
It's actually wise.
I don't know at what moment that dawned, but my understanding that there's actually intellectual awakeness over in political libertarian space is much later.
That really awaited my meeting Angela McArdle.
So prior to meeting Angela McArdle in what must have been 2022 or 2023.
My last interaction with a libertarian was Joe Jorgensen, who had run for president on the libertarian ticket and had not impressed me.
I had an interaction with her.
In 2020.
Yeah, in 2020.
And I found her just completely unwilling to step out of her own perspective.
Far enough to even hear what I had to say.
So, like, okay, not a living movement over there.
There's no intellectual life.
And before that, I interacted a little bit with Gary Johnson back in the days of...
Yeah, who the libertarians, many have told me, he's not exactly a libertarian.
I did find him interesting.
But anyway, suffice to say that when I met...
making the world a better place.
And she's done some important stuff.
At this conference, for example, Ross Ulbricht gave a talk.
Ross Ulbricht, who has recently been freed.
From a life sentence that would actually have had him die in prison.
There's no parole in the federal system.
So his life sentence would have resulted in him having gone to prison as a young man and dying there at whatever age.
While Angela made a deal to get him out.
A deal with President Trump who pardoned him.
So that was a very material accomplishment.
And the speech he gave at Freedom Fest was actually...
He talked about what it was like in prison.
And anyway, it gives a lot to think about, and I would totally suggest people find it.
I'm not sure if it's available yet online, but at the point it is, I would look at Ross Albrecht's speech anyway as a testament in part to Angela's vision and capacity to get things done.
But in any case, I did two things.
At the conference, explicitly about this Libertarianism 2.0 idea.
One of them was a podcast, which I think is not quite out yet, with Matt Kibbe, who you and I know through Brownstone.
Very lovely guy, who when I started talking about Libertarianism 2.0, got very interested.
He wanted to have that conversation.
And so he set up a podcast, just him and me, which we recorded there.
And then we did a panel.
And the panel was very well attended.
But anyway, it was very well attended.
I was a little concerned about deploying my model because I can imagine a bunch of people who've dedicated a lot of effort to libertarian thinking, having some progressive liberal show up and tell them how to think about libertarianism.
They were interested in first principles thinking.
They allowed themselves to be challenged by the model I put on the table, and they responded well to it.
They kept talking to me about it.
So anyway, I wanted to tell people just sort of what that model is.
Maybe the panel will become available and you can find it.
But the basic idea is that...
Not Libertarianism 2.0?
I don't think you said that yet.
Maybe you didn't.
So the basic idea is this.
Libertarians tend to come through the door with the sense that coercion is bad, which I agree, and that you should want to minimize it.
That coercion just should be that it's an offense and we should get rid of it.
And my sense is we should definitely be biased against coercion.
But that paradoxically and counterintuitively, there are places in which coercion liberates, and when it does, we should allow it.
And the example that I use is if we allow everybody to choose what side of the road they want to drive on, then you'd be crazy to drive more than a couple miles an hour because you never know when somebody's going to come hurtling down your side of the road and hit you head on.
If we all agree, To drive on one side of the road, let's say the right side of the road, then you can drive at 60 miles an hour.
How much freer are you being able to drive at 60 miles an hour?
Well, you can get a lot farther in a day.
You're a lot safer, so you don't have to buy a car that's a tank in order to withstand the head-on collision you're likely to be in if you do anything else.
The point is, oh, is there coercion involved in getting everybody to drive on one side of the road?
Yeah.
There is.
We arrest you if you do the other thing.
That's coercive.
It's violent, ultimately, because if you resist arrest, they have to get the cuffs on you.
So it is coercive.
It's ultimately violent, but it's well worth it.
The liberty that comes from it is well worth the price of just surrendering your right to drive on the heterodox side of the road.
And there are a lot of things that are like this.
You know, the regulations that allow Airplanes to be extremely safe, and they really have become extremely safe.
Those regulations allow you to fly anywhere you want in the world within 24 hours.
That's an amazing level of liberty.
It's worth the coercion that goes into making sure the maintenance is done correctly, that the design meets certain specifications, all of that stuff.
Is it ultimately coercive and potentially violent?
Yeah, we might lock you up if you, So we lock you up.
That's violent.
But it's worth it because it net liberates.
And so my now radical perspective, I guess, is the real question is not, is coercion good or bad?
Is liberty good or bad?
Liberty is good.
Coercion is bad.
Is government good?
Well, no.
It's a necessary evil.
But the question is, what's the ratio?
How much liberation versus coercion liberates you maximally?
That's the question.
And my point is, we should not walk in thinking we know the answer to that question.
We should just agree that the objective of the exercise is to liberate individually, and that things that liberate are good.
And from that perspective, now we can ask the question, well, what is the right?
Ratio between being free and being coerced.
And if the answer is the right ratio to maximally liberate people is zero government, zero coercion, then I'm on board.
Now, that's not going to be the case, because when you have zero coercion, what you get is warlords, and the fact is you're not free at all.
When you have warlords or the mafia or whatever it is, extracting all of your resources and threatening your life because there's no force ready to coerce them not to.
So it's not going to be zero.
But let's at least agree that if it turned out to be zero, that would be great.
Right?
Because as little coercion as possible is desirable.
We should be biased against coercion.
But our ultimate objective can't be to get rid of coercion.
Our ultimate objective has to be to liberate people.
And whatever it is that liberates people is the right thing to do.
Now, one last caveat before people start hurling tomatoes at their screens.
Don't do that.
Yeah, it's not good for the screens, especially if they're not under warranty.
I'm looking for the tomatoes.
And at this moment, your tomatoes may be worth A tremendous amount.
Yeah, I've now lost my train of thought.
We have deranged on...
It sounds very simple.
We're trying to figure out what the ratio of coercion to freedom is that actually liberates.
That is straightforward enough.
The difficulty in doing that comes from the question of proximate liberty versus ultimate liberty.
And I would similarly say abstract liberty versus realized liberty.
The only liberty that should count in this equation is realized liberty.
And that liberty has to be long-term, not short-term, because you may very well be able to be liberated in the short-term by accepting the necessity of coercion in the long-term.
That's not a win.
But in the abstract, that which liberates people durably over the long-term is good.
And we should be pursuing it.
And if the libertarians, this is the capital L libertarians, were to embrace this, they would, I think, make a lot of progress with people who currently think the way I used to, that libertarianism is an absurd ideological position.
And the point is, no, do you agree that liberty is good and that, you know, we should be trying to maximize it?
A lot of people would be open to that conversation.
I think that's right.
This is going to seem like a non sequitur, but I think I want to share some wisdom from Matthew Crawford, as we call him, Matthew 2T Crawford.
Right.
And I don't remember if I shared this with you or not, but it feels relevant here, although it's not exactly on the question of liberty versus coercion, but rather on the question of political ideologies.
forming narratives that suit them.
In his...
I first became aware of Matthew Crawford from his book Shopcraft as Soulcraft, which I've spoken about here before.
It's an excellent book.
He's a terrific human being and an amazing writer and thinker, and in 2020 he published his at least third book.
I at least have read three of his books, Why We Drive.
Toward a philosophy of the open road.
So Matthew Crawford has a PhD in economics from Chicago and has left his inside the beltway, I think, job doing economic analysis to open up, apologies if I get some of the details wrong, many years ago now,
a vintage motorcycle repair shop in Virginia because he found the work therein much more compelling and analytically And I read Shopcraft as Soulcraft shortly after having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and maybe only because of the proximity and time, but I think not.
I read Crawford's Shopcraft and Stillcraft as sort of a latter-day Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance.
So here we have Wiery Drive, and he...
In her 1961 masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs noted that everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.
They seem to stretch and rend the fabric of social interaction, which requires a certain intimacy of scale and fluidity of movement.
To make way for cars and all that comes with them, such as parking lots, gas stations, and major arteries, city streets are broken down to loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot.
Neighborhoods that were once marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled.
The rise of the automobile is closely connected to the transformation of American cities in ways that Jacobs and many others, including myself, regret.
This complaint is prominent in the new urbanism.
But on Jacobs' account, this connection isn't entirely a causal one.
We blame automobiles for too much.
She finds a prior cause of the degradation of American cities in urban planning, the kind that seeks to optimize the city according to a plan hatched from on high, without a street-level understanding of what makes a place thrive.
She offers a thought experiment in which the automobile had never been invented, but the modernist project is left otherwise undisturbed.
Think windswept plazas and high-rises, or model suburbs of socially detached nuclear families.
In that case, the automobile would have to be invented.
She writes, For people to live and work in such inconvenient cities, automobiles would be necessary to spare them from vacuity, danger, and utter institutionalization.
On Jacob's account, the connection between the automobile and the deadening of cities is not a straightforward one.
Rather, it is one of those jokes that history sometimes plays on progress.
She notes that the rise of the automobile in everyday transportation happened to correspond with the period during which the ideal of the anti-city was being worked up in architecture as a sociological development, legislatively and in the way cities are financed.
She insists that, quote, automobiles are hardly inherent destroyers of cities and remarks that the internal combustion engine, as it came on the scene, was potentially an excellent instrument for abetting city intensity and at the same time for liberating cities from one of their noxious liabilities, end quote.
She means a horse.
Recalling his boyhood in London in 1890, an English architect wrote in 1958 of the three- and four-story stables that dotted the city like today's parking garages.
Again, we're talking about 1890s London.
Three- and four-story stables.
Stables.
That's a new one on me.
In London in 1890, the chandeliers of upper-class homes were, quote, encrusted with dead flies and in late summer veiled with jiving clouds of them.
Despite the numerous corps of boys darting around among wheels and hooves to clean up after the horses, the manure flooded the streets with churnings of pea-soup that at times collected in pools over Brimley curbs.
Cartwheels would fling sheets of such soup, where not intercepted by trousers or skirts, completely across the pavement, so that the frontages of the strand throughout its length had an 18-inch plinth of mud-parge thus imposed upon it.
The cleanup crews who manned the mud carts, mud carts, ladling up the soupy mess, were clothed as four Icelandic seas and thigh boots, oil skins colored to the chin, and souesters sealing in the back of the neck, routinely splashing pedestrians in the course of their work.
And then there was the noise, a thing beyond all imaginings, as iron-shoed horse hooves collided with cobblestones and the deafening side-drum tattoo of wheels on these same cobbles, jarring from the apex of one set to the next like sticks dragging along a fence.
Plus, the creaking and groaning and chirping and rattling of vehicles, light and heavy, thus maltreated, as well as the clanking of harnesses and all such horsey stuff.
On top of all this, one had to endure the sound of other human beings trying to communicate over the din, the shrieking and bellowings called for those...
For a given amount of horsepower, an automotive engine is cleaner and quieter, Jacobs points out.
Further, the power of mechanized vehicles and their greater speed than horses can make it easier to reconcile great concentrations of people with efficient movement of people and goods.
The problem, of course, is that there are simply too many cars, so they work slothfully and idle much, often progressing no faster than a horse.
And there is the rub.
The explosion of automobile use in the 20th century and resulting congestion is a complex story that can be told in a number of ways, but clearly it was not a simple consequence of consumer demand for automobiles in a free market.
Rather, it was in significant measure a consequence of policy choices by public authorities.
The construction of roads for automobiles was massively subsidized, at the expense of public transportation.
According to James J. Flink, the public...
Sorry.
According to James Flink, Flink interprets these investment priorities as a transfer of wealth, with working-class streetcar riders in effect being taxed by city planners and politicians to make possible middle-class automobile use.
In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Progressives embraced road building as a jobs program, with an eye also on the utility of highways for national defense.
This at a time when Adolf Hitler was constructing his Autobahn.
Progressives embraced automobility as a government project well suited to the exercise of their enthusiasm for state-directed investment, rational planning, and national vigor in the tradition of Herbert Crowley's new nationalism, which greatly influenced FDR.
The Works Progress Administration, a key element of the New Deal, provided ten times as much funding for streets and highways as for public transportation.
But it wasn't until after the war, during the Eisenhower administration, that construction of the interstate highway system began.
It was a project of Napoleonic ambition, undertaken in an era when the state enjoyed a level of prestige, credibility, and legitimacy that is hard for us to imagine in 2020, when this book was published.
Surely enhanced by success in war, permitted the use of Napoleonic methods as well.
As Dan Elbert relates, government experts laid out the system's 41,000 miles of highways.
Government planners decided where to put the 1.6 billion metric tons of rock, sand, cement, and asphalt in the system.
In the process, they scripted and supervised people's movements, choosing where they could alight and escape.
To do all of this, they raised entire districts of homes and shops using eminent domain to condemn and take privately held land.
We're almost there.
This history offers challenges to both automotive libertarians and anti-car progressives.
The motorization of America and all the economic progress and social dynamism that came with it was not simply an eruption of individual freedom, as expressed through consumer choice.
It was, to a significant extent, an undertaking of the government.
But by the same token, the congestion and sprawl that came with our over-dependence on the automobile cannot be blamed on a mistaken libertarian faith that the hidden hand of the market will bend individual choices toward the collective good.
On the contrary, our over-dependence on cars was engineered by the state, energized by the same faith in central planning and sincere, if short-sighted, devotion to public felicity that has always been the pride of progressive governance.
These are lessons we do well to keep before us.
To make this history pertinent to today's situation, we need to recognize that initiatives of central planning now often come not from the state, but from tech companies that aspire to quasi-governmental platform status.
This fact scrambles certain of our intellectual habits and political reflexes, or it ought to.
Given how much our daily lives are nudged and steered into channels engineered by tech firms, one can no longer sensibly adopt a conceptual demarcation between the private sector and government.
In this moment of ambiguity about the driverless future, various interests have recognized a brief window of vast opportunity if they can advance a profitable interpretation of cars, roads, cities, and mobility itself that will come to seem the only reasonable one." That is brilliant.
He's so good.
He's really good.
And it so clearly illustrates this two things.
Complex systems versus complicated systems thinking, right?
These ideas that you're going to increase this value because if you do this, that will be the result never works in a complex system because the nature of complex systems is unpredictable and if you think you've predicted them, you're wrong.
And it also clearly illustrates the likelihood of unintended consequences which is closely related but also a Fatal flaw in the way we build our models of these things.
Because if what you did was you said, you know, we're going to make this change to cities which will result in this benefit, and then you did an honest job of accounting what the net benefit was and also all of the costs you didn't see coming, whether the benefit was realized, all those things if you did that your model would get better over time and what you would discover
But because what we do, we just play this dumb game, which you see on the liberal side in all sorts of contexts, which is, if we do this thing, this will be the result.
And then if you do the thing and that is not the result, they either pretend that it is the result, or we didn't do it well enough.
So the point is that the commitment that the result will be that which we planned is baked in, and there's no overcoming it.
There's no overcoming it.
Elsewhere in the book, Crawford points out that, well, so in that section I just read, he points out that there was already an anti-city sentiment because of the nastiness that having city streets filled with horses created, nastiness and noise.
But he points out elsewhere that Of course, as you would of course expect, and that none of us are old enough to have lived through either the pre-automobile city or the early automobile city.
It was total chaos with a lot of death and destruction early on, because no one knew either how to drive, but presumably the people behind the wheel did somewhat.
But it's like everyone was deer in the headlights.
Every human being was acting like the naive deer who's standing in front of your car going, I don't know what that is, but maybe I can stare it down.
And so there was a lot of destruction from automobiles early on.
And presumably the anti-automobile activists, of which I imagine there were many, were pointing to that as evidence that this will never work.
This is despicable.
we have to stop.
And, I mean, that feels...
What we are hoping for is that the transition will be brief and there will be as little collateral damage as possible and that we will get to a better place.
And it is almost impossible without, for me, I had never considered what pre-automobile cities might have looked like post-industrial revolution but pre-automobile.
I definitely don't want that.
Okay, so we did need a solution.
And there are too many cars, but are cars, you know, especially if you control for the amount of power, better than horses for getting people around?
When you take into account everything that he is talking about?
Probably.
Yeah.
Mostly, for most things that people want to do.
Right.
But this, again, actually tells the story of some ideal level of coercion.
Yes.
Think about these two things.
One, emissions controls.
He writes about this too.
So the fact is a modern gasoline internal combustion engine is amazing.
In fact, we are now fighting over a non-toxic emission that they put out, CO2, which is something we put out, right?
This is an elegant machine that puts out very little beyond CO2.
And yes, we can talk about what the effect of CO2 is on heat trapping from the sun.
But if there's one thing, it is.
It is a totally normal molecule that we ourselves put out that you are breathing all the time, irrespective of whether or not there are any of these engines.
And the engines are so good as a result of the fact that they were forced to be through coercion, right?
You and I remember, I better because I live farther inland, but you and I remember what LA was like in the 70s, right?
It was super polluted.
There are more cars there today, but it is not notably polluted in that way because...
Right.
The air doesn't look yellow, whereas the air was always yellow in the 70s and early 80s.
It sure was.
So the point is saying, actually, you are required to make these engines highly efficient, which is effectively what they do.
That worked very much to the benefit of not only Los Angelinos, but people all over the country, because those...
The car market in California was so big, it didn't make sense to make a California version and a version for everywhere else.
So California's elevated standard for pollution controls globalized, right?
So that's a really good thing.
The other one, though, is cell phones and cars.
Cell phones, when people try to use a cell phone while they're driving, it's terrifically dangerous.
The equivalent of being drunk or worse.
There's room to A, coerce people into not doing it.
You've got to put your cell phone down while you're driving.
There are pressures because people want to be able to access their cell phone while they're driving.
There's pressure to do so in a way that is not dangerous.
In other words, CarPlay and Android Auto that allow you to Get the advantage of some of these programs, the very profound advantage to a driver of, for example, navigation, up-to-date navigation, that your cell phone knows where the traffic is and routes you around it, which has unintended consequences, of course, routes you through people's neighborhoods who I have, you know, I use nav.
I can perceive...
using nav making me less good as a navigator oh yeah and and and crawford specifically writes about um some of the safety features that we probably should have and some that he thinks we shouldn't have but most people think we should have and features that he thinks are bad for everyone and basically you know all and it's not just safety features but you know all of these things sort of well to use the phrase you used earlier but like frog marching us away from being you know embodied
people driving machines around and experiencing the road into these docile, passive things that got into our own private thing and had it take us someplace.
In fact, what comes up next in that section that I stopped reading at is him talking about a car that has various modes where you're kind of driving, although any car that can do a self-driving thing But it has these modes where you're literally moving farther and farther from the wheel where you can just kind of hang out.
How does that count as driving?
And yet, this is what is happening to us in almost every domain of life.
Those things that we used to actually have physical embodied interaction within the universe, we can think we are still doing, and to some degree we are, but with each increase in convenience, in efficiency, in streamlining, with each, like, you know, Can I just get the bot to do it?
the robot or the bot or whatever.
Can I get the Roomba or the AI to just take care of the things so that I can be left to What are you doing?
I don't even know what my phone is, which is good.
Is this what you do when you're freed, when you have your robot on your floor cleaning up after you?
In which case, let's lose, lose, actually.
Because you'd be better off cleaning up your own messes and therefore learning what kind of messes you make.
So, two things.
One.
This is exactly the conversation that you want to have.
What is the impact of these things?
And I don't know what to do about the more the things do, the less you have to do.
There are ways in which I find this offensive and other ways in which it's a beautiful thing.
And ultimately, this is another one of these things that's hard for us progressive types to understand about libertarians is when people are freed.
Most of what they do is squander the dividend.
There may not be any better thing you can do.
The point is you need to be given the freedom to squander your time, and those who don't will actually outcompete those who do, causing a pressure.
And in any case, at the very least, we need to have a conversation about which of these things is worth forcing.
It's exactly the conversation about coercion.
And just to take one weird example, people will find this strange, but I promise you I have a point.
I got, somebody offered me, and I didn't even know who it was at first, a spot at the BMW Performance Driving School during this libertarian conference.
Perfect, right?
Very libertarian that you should be able to go drive other people's.
Performance cars like you can afford them around a track and all of this.
But anyway, the last event of the day-long course was the professional driver.
They're all race car drivers who do the teaching.
And the professional race car drivers take the students in the car and they show them what a professional would do on the track.
This is the course that you've been driving all day and now a professional.
Now the pro is going to show you how it works.
Should be driven.
I mean, they've been instructing you all day, but it's very different than being in the car and hurtling around the track the way these guys drive.
And I definitely felt my seatbelt doing something funny during this thing.
As the guy's throwing the car around the track, right?
my seatbelt is doing more than just simply tightening up on me.
And I commented on him as he stopped and he said, you know, This is a production car.
It's a fancy one, but it's one you could just buy.
And so it has all of the normal stuff, including the traction control that you have to turn off in order to drive it properly on a track and all of that.
But anyway, you said, you know, one of the things you're feeling is that the car is detecting This aggressive driving, and it is effectively deducing that an accident may be the next thing that happens, so it's preparing you for it, which means all kinds of things.
It will roll up your windows?
Really, why?
Because the curtain airbags don't work unless the windows are closed.
I had an incident on the road that was not my doing, and I thought there was a chance that there was going to be a collision.
I, without thinking about it, I rolled up my window really fast because it occurred to me that, like, how are these airbags supposed to work if your window's open?
Right.
So apparently the car is doing a whole lot of thing.
And, you know, the point is, okay, would you rather be free to have your windows down during an accident or would you rather that the car override your freedom and roll up your windows?
I think I'd rather the latter.
I hope the calculation was done correctly.
That it does it when it actually improves my odds of surviving rather than making an error that could kill me.
Presumably those errors do exist.
But you want the car that does the right amount of stuff for you.
It's galling when the car does stuff you really would rather it didn't.
I hate the car when it nannies you over your lane position.
Yeah, I mean, this is a longer conversation.
And, you know, obviously I brought it up by reading from Why We Drive, but I also knew that you had just done this day at the BMW driving, whatever it's called.
Performance driving school.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've talked before about owning a Tesla and being deeply ambivalent about it, that it is both exactly the right car on an island, you know, where you're limited in terms of how far you can go.
And if you've got a charger, it's effectively free.
It's effectively free.
Gas prices are high.
And so, you know, there's just...
a lot of savings and it needs almost no maintenance and there's been there's been like go to a dealer right exactly um on the other hand it's got a lot of jankiness and um and that's a separate thing but my biggest objection to it is feeling like i'm not really driving yeah and you know
I who learned to drive many decades ago and my parents insisted that I learned to drive manual You know right right up front and my first car was manual And it was already you know many years old So you know I got a car from the 70s when I started driving in the late 80s That was a manual transmission Toyota Corolla that It wasn't a sports car.
It wasn't a sporty car.
You remember this car.
But it was fun to drive.
And you felt everything that you did in it.
Yep.
And you don't feel what you do in the Tesla.
Well, some of that is the Tesla.
Some of that is modern cars, which, of course, Matthew 2T Crawford discusses that you're...
And it's a shame because in many ways, modern cars are just simply superior to the old ones.
Just the reliability and efficiency of these things, what comes out the tailpipe, these things are actually now highly refined, which has nothing to do You could have both.
The problem is that it's that.
It's like the combination of vague and controlling.
Yeah.
It's aggravating.
Well, you know, it's funny.
The existence of the, I don't know.
What the business structure of the Performance Driving School is.
But it is very clear, and they're very upfront about it, that the reason that BMW participates in it the way they do is that so many people buy a BMW after doing this course.
So what does that mean?
What it means is instead of doing the right thing for the course, which is to They want you to experience a bunch.
So we ended up driving a bunch of different cars, which I found never-endingly annoying, though it did mean that we got to drive the fanciest ones.
but it also meant that you at some point are on the racetrack with an SUV.
And it's like, What am I going to do here?
But it's not the right vehicle.
It's just too high, right?
But the degree of difference between these ostensibly performance automobiles and the road feel is profound.
Even though, likely, I don't know if this is the case, but increasingly these things have become fly-by-wire.
The Tesla has to be.
But the remoteness of the systems that you're using to control the thing and the actual systems that function is often through a computer interface, which of course allows It allows it to be adjusted to whatever the preference of the market is rather than whatever preference you'd like and then of course you can choose a certain number of these things which means that the car
doesn't even have an inherent relationship between these things.
It's sort of what you're choosing the interface to be which makes it even more confusing.
And sends us further down the path of imagining that life is what we make it, that reality is a multiple-choice test.
And we can be like, oh, I like that thing over there, and I like this, and I like that.
And the fact that those three things would never go together in that ratio or set to those levels in a physically constrained system never occurs to you because the car or whatever it is you're talking about hasn't.
It's trying to protect you from the discomfort of knowing those things, which puts you further and further out of reach of actual reality.
Yeah, and it creates a crude mental model, whereas life would ordinarily have built a high-quality model because you were interacting with physical objects that had a nature, and sometimes an object is, you know, deceptive, right?
An object, if you...
It's like, oh, that's a very different object.
Yeah.
But it's still subject to physical constraints rather than software constraints.
Yes.
And the software, you know, is by its nature arbitrarily connects the parts of the thing and means that you just, you know, it turns you into a consumer of driving rather than a driver.
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
Well, we'll be back again in a few minutes on Locals with our Q&A.
And then it'll be nine days.
We're going to be back a week from Thursday.
Because I've got a little travel coming up now.
I will not be going to the BMW Professional Driving School.
Unfortunately, I think.
As far as you know.
It's just nowhere close to where I'm going.
Oh.
Yeah.
I mean, if they want to move it.
Airplanes.
Liberty.
I'll be driving and not the Tesla because I'll be going off island and Tesla's The infrastructure for road trips in a Tesla does not exist in a way that makes it fun to try to do a road trip on a Tesla.
I know you and Toby have one successful one, but I have tried simply...
Vroom, vroom.
Exactly.
So join us on Locals.
Consider joining us there for the Q&A that's going to start in just a few minutes.
Check out our sponsors, which that's not up to date.
Our sponsors this week were Timeline, Carraway, and Armra.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love.
Eat good food.
If you can get it.
Sorry, that was a comment.
You didn't listen to the first one, did you?
Be good to the ones you love.
Well, it's a question of the level of coercion.
In this case, I figured the net benefit came from pointing out that eating good food was downstream of a supply chain that is apparently screwed up by hacking.
Yes.
Sorry about that.
No worries.
I mean, it wasn't you who hacked UNFI, was it?
I can either confirm or I did not hack it.
Thank you.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food.
