YouTube Backs Down: The 284th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss YouTube, flash floods, science, and Epstein. First: a head injury explains our late start, but all is fine. Then: four years after being demonetized by YouTube, both of our channels have been remonetized. Why were we demonetized in the first place, and what did we refuse to do to get back in the good graces of YouTube? Also: flash floods are often tragic, but does it inherently follow that they are due to anthropogenic climate change? Similarly, does not believing that mRNA s...
Hey folks, welcome to the slightly delayed Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 284, I am reasonably certain.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haing.
We are obviously arriving late as a result of an incident that occurred as we were just about to start the podcast earlier today.
Would you care to share what happened?
Absolutely.
So I was driving and I had coffee and a fox kit ran in front of the car and I stopped short and did not hit the fox kit and I sloshed coffee on my beautiful linen pants.
And then I had to stop and observe the beautiful fox kits because the fox kit was running across to his three friends.
I think they're littermates, beautiful.
And I was cursing and I threw my coffee out and by the time I got to where I needed to be, I had to clean off my clothes.
And so walking into the studio where we have our former, now temporary producer, our permanent son, Zachary, at the helm here, I was rushing a little bit and it's been raining here.
And as I rounded the corner to come in, my shoe slipped and I fell.
And yeah, I cracked my head on the concrete floor of the garage.
So I've had a CAT scan.
I did not get head staples.
I got head sutures.
I also had an x-ray to the knee because I fell on my knee too.
And I seem to be okay, although I'm not super happy about any of this.
So your head seems to be okay.
A lot of blood.
There's a lot of blood.
I did a cursory check of the pavement.
It is also okay.
Yeah, the concrete seems uncracked.
Uncracked.
So.
Demonstrating that concrete is harder than my head.
Yes, an irresistible force and an immovable object have run into each other.
Which one am I?
Detente.
You are the immovable object, in my experience.
Seriously.
You don't find me be an irresistible force.
That's amazing.
Wow, did I miss an opportunity?
Good lord.
Curry favor with my wife.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm going to be reliving that moment pretty much from here on out.
And I'm the one who apparently doesn't have a concussion.
Yes, neither of you, neither you nor the concrete have the concussion.
So that's good.
Yes.
And I should just a point of clarification.
Some people who do not know you will have heard your indication that you threw out your coffee as if you hurled your coffee.
Oh, no.
I just like, I did not want to risk getting even more coffee on my clothes.
So I dumped it into a bush.
Emptied your coffee.
Yes.
All right.
So we have a number of things planned today.
Some big dark horse news that we're going to talk about at the top.
And we're going to talk a little bit about the Epstein situation.
And we're going to talk about, I don't know how you want to describe related to the floods.
Flooding in Texas.
Okay.
Good.
But at the top of the hour, we have to pay the rent.
We do indeed.
We have to pay the rent.
So I think I'm fine, but I'm definitely a little less in it, a little less with it than I was hoping to be for today's live stream.
We were two minutes away when this happened.
Literally happened at like 1128.
So I'm feeling just a tiny bit out of sorts here.
Which is too bad because we have a new sponsor this week.
I don't know, did we have a green perimeter thing?
Okay, we're there, man.
New sponsor this week about which we are super thrilled.
So thrilled.
Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us and we are thrilled to have them as a sponsor.
Absolutely thrilled.
It is the amazing garlic from Sundry's Farm.
And I brought one, actually, this helped break my fall.
Thank you, Sundry's Farm Garlic.
I had it in my backpack when I crashed to the floor.
I brought the music variety.
We have several varieties that they sent to us.
It comes in these beautiful bags.
Garlic is amazing.
I'm going to say a lot more about it, but I mean, check this out.
This is just, this is like, in fact, maybe the least interesting of the garlics they sent to us.
They've got these just so much, so much amazing stuff.
So much beautiful garlic, and it smells great.
Yeah, it does.
And we left it in my backpack when we went to the ER just now.
So now the ER smells like garlic as well.
The ER smells like garlic and fewer vampires than before we were.
Yes, yes, you're welcome.
You're welcome.
Amazing Friday Harbor ER.
No more vampires for you, at least for a little while.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
And this garlic is truly amazing.
And it really, like, we've, we've now had several of their, I want to say varietals, and I'm not sure, given like the grape connection, I'm not sure that's the right term.
I think they're using the term varieties, but they really are noticeably different.
And, you know, we haven't kept them long enough.
We just go through it pretty fast to know about the differences in like storage capacity, like how long they last before they start to go bad.
We just have never had any of it go bad.
But it's clear, like these guys, they know garlic well.
They're growing in a perfect place for garlic.
They've got this amazing garlic terroir going on in these volcanic soils of Idaho.
And just, I mean, the story that their origin story online is also amazing.
The guy is also a smoke jumper.
So he's helping put out wildlands fires.
And the woman's also an artist and a creator in other spaces.
And they've got a beautiful child.
And it's just a great operation.
You know, it raises a question, though, because lots of foods we have discovered as we have moved to a higher quality version that actually their shelf life is way longer than you think.
Things seem so bad quickly because they have such a long supply chain before they ever get to you.
And you're right.
These guys' garlic lasts forever, but in part that's going to be because it hasn't, you know, run down the clock on a ship at sea.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you might begin to wonder, how is it that we know we're just like, they're just our sponsor now?
How do we even, how are we making claims about length of time that they last?
They've actually been sending us garlic for a couple of years without any expectation of sponsorship.
And we were just accepting these beautiful gifts and eating their beautiful garlic.
And now they're a sponsor as well.
So this is not, it's not like last night was the first time I'd used their garlic.
Far from it.
We've been eating their garlic for a couple of years.
Absolutely.
It's really amazing.
So again, sundriesfarm.com.
Code Darkhorse.
And that's still the Sundry's Farm ad read, which I could read again, but I think that's strange again.
I think they got it.
Yeah, I think they got it too.
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Yes.
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Quoting a research article published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2022, cited on this piece of paper as superscript 2.
Yeah, it's a superscript 2 indicating a footnote here at the bottom of the page, right where it should be.
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I'm good.
Oh, you're very good.
It's one of my least interesting traits, but okay.
Yes.
An irresistible force indeed, whether or not I realized that five minutes ago.
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Awesome.
All right.
So let us talk about the big strange news here in the land of Darkhorse.
We have been seeing strange behavior on our YouTube channel and received word that our channel has been or was in the process of becoming eligible for remonetization.
And we wanted to talk a little bit about what this does mean and what the history has been.
So let's maybe reconstruct the timeline.
Is that where we should begin?
Yeah.
So both of our channels, our main channel, which is Brett Weinstein, and our Dark Horse Clips channel, which is created in 2020, were demonetized five years ago, almost exactly.
And we have received no money from YouTube in those five years.
Here, you can show my screen here.
We just have a few screenshots from the time.
On June 2nd, 2021, we received our first warning for, this is from the Clips channel, a clip from your conversation with Dr. Corey, Dr. Pierre Corey.
The policy by which we received a warning was that this was medical misinformation, and we appealed that decision, and the appeal was rejected.
Then again, still on the Clips channel on June 15th, we received a strike for six different clips.
So somehow they put a bunch of clips that they striked all into one strike, all on the basis of medical misinformation, all of which we appealed, all of the appeals of which were rejected, including clips from, again, your conversation with Dr. Corey,
clips from your conversation with Robert Merlone and Steve Kirsch, and then a clip in which I was discussing the conversation that I had with Toby, our then 15-year-old son's pediatrician, in the week after the EUA was put through for the COVID vaccines for 12 to 17 year olds, in which the pediatrician was explaining that I was a bad mother for not having my child vaccinated, and I was pushing back.
And I told that story, and that was clipped by our awesome Clips guy at the time, and that was removed again for medical misinformation.
That was all one strike on the Clips channel, and that was on June 15th.
On June 12th, so now on the main channel, a few days before that, we received a warning for, again, the conversation that you had with Dr. Corey that you titled COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century.
Again, the policy that we apparently ran afoul of was medical misinformation.
We appealed.
The appeal was rejected.
And on June 18th, we received one strike for your conversation with Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.
And then Kirsch, I'm pronouncing him like he's a cherry liqueur.
I apologize, Steve.
And then also the 80-second live stream and the Q ⁇ A that we did associated with that.
And that 80-second live stream was, again, the live stream in which I told the story about interacting with Toby's pediatrician at the time and rejecting his appeals to authority and how bad a mother I was being for not letting our healthy young son get a COVID vaccine.
Both, all of which apparently ran afoul of the medical misinformation policy.
We appealed all of them, although that's not here visible on the screenshot from the time.
And then we heard, your channel is no longer eligible to monetize.
That was on the main channel, and we also got that on the Clips channel.
Your channel is no longer eligible to monetize.
Why?
Because of harmful content.
Content that focuses on controversial issues and that is harmful to viewers.
And we have now walked through all of the clips and the full episodes that were either given warnings or strikes that were the entire content that were considered controversial, harmful to viewers.
So I want to make a couple points here before we move any further into this discussion.
One point is this is about you guys.
This is about our viewers and listeners.
This is about preventing you from hearing a discussion that your health, your well-being, your the information on which you might formulate a reasonable consent to taking the vaccines that they were pushing or might reject it in favor of a safer, more effective alternative.
You need to be able to hear that information.
And YouTube thought that actually it was important that you not hear that information.
So they have now, I don't know if you've said this, they have now restored these videos, put them back up.
Yep, they're back up.
And one thing we haven't said also is that at the time, they told us via a few different modes that if we simply agreed to stop talking about these sorts of issues, they would remonetize us immediately.
And we refused multiple times.
Not only that, but it was clear from the pattern of strikes and warnings accumulating that since we had no intent, we were not willing to stop talking about these issues because these issues were absolutely vital and we have a toolkit that allowed us to navigate them that made them useful for other people to hear.
Since we were not going to stop talking about these things, the trajectory was very clear that we were going to lose these channels because that is the automatic consequence of, I believe, three strikes accumulating on any channel.
And that would have happened in short order in light of the centrality of these topics back in June of 2021.
What we believe interrupted that process was what Joe Rogan called an emergency podcast, where when I told him what was going on with our channel and YouTube, he had me and Pierre Corey on in order to prevent that process from unfolding any further.
So Pierre and I made the case on the Joe Rogan experience.
And what happened next is, to me, fascinating.
We have to speculate on it based on indirect evidence because we don't know what was going on on the inside of these conversations at YouTube and maybe Google.
But it appears that their embarrassment at having struck our channel caused them to stop doing that.
We have not received another warning or strike in any of the intervening period between June of 2021 and June of or July of 2025.
But it was also clear, so they stopped interfering with our ability to put up content.
We talked about COVID, vaccines, repurposed drugs, all of it.
LabLeak put those videos up and they did not mess with those videos.
But they appear to have in some way that we have to speculate about limit the growth of the channel.
So our channels, both channels, were in the process of skyrocketing with respect to viewership.
The Eclipse channel was in fact quite new and it was quite new.
I realize I misspoke.
Maybe I broke part of my energy brain.
It's been almost exactly four years, not five.
Four years.
Five years of COVID.
It's been four years since we were demonetized.
And the Eclipse channel was started sometime early summer, I think, mid-summer of 2020.
So it was about a year old at the time.
It was about a year old.
And in that one year, it had essentially caught up in subscribership to the main channel.
So they were both somewhere in the mid 400,000s at the point of this strike.
And the behavior that we then saw, so we had a, you will all remember what June of 2021 was like.
What we were talking about was central to people's thinking about COVID, and the channel was growing rapidly.
And what we saw was a plateau in both channels where neither of them cracked 500,000, even though they had been rising towards it.
Effectively simultaneous with the demonetization.
So not only were we suddenly at income zero, which was huge, but our ability to grow our audience, quite aside from our ability to make a living doing so, was throttled.
Right.
So actually, can we show that screenshot from the Clips channel?
This is from the back end.
If you have a YouTube channel, you get access to analytics.
And here you can see that plateau in the Clips channel at the point that YouTube made whatever decision they made inside to stop harassing us with strikes.
So we were no longer threatened with being evicted.
But the channel growth stopped.
And we continued to post clips on that channel for years after this.
Yeah, we did stop something a little less than a year ago.
Something a little less than a year ago, we stopped, but we continued after that.
And you can see where this plateau begins.
And it's because the other channel grew slower, it's a little harder to understand the analytics.
But nonetheless, we saw the same thing where we were frustratingly just below 500,000 subscribers for that entire period until this week, right?
And then in the process, and there's a lot of back and forth about where exactly you are in the process of being remonetized, people saw a huge uptick in ads on our podcasts.
That was not.
Which, incidentally, YouTube did continue to sometimes run ads on our videos even while we were demonetized, which means that they were making money off of our off of our content while we were not.
Yes.
But in this case, a lot of people were frustrated at the number of ads that were on our videos.
That was not us doing that.
We had no control over that.
I think now that control may have been restored.
But anyway, that's as of yesterday, as far as I know.
So to make a long story short, something went on inside of YouTube.
It seems to have absolutely capped our ability to grow our audience, which was growing spectacularly at the point that that cap was imposed.
That cap seems to have been lifted.
The videos that were taken down have all now been restored.
Interestingly, to me, that seems like a tacit admission that those videos were valid to begin with.
And the remonetization has now allows us to make money from the YouTube channel, which they've been making and giving us none over the course of this time.
So there's a lot to unpack here.
One thing to say is, and this is a little bit of a delicate conversation, I don't like talking about money.
I actually really don't even like thinking about money with respect to our channels precisely because there is an obvious danger that you can get sucked into when you discover that holding certain opinions, you know, makes you wealthier and holding other opinions makes you poorer.
I don't really want to be in touch with that.
That's right.
That's part of why advertising, the advertising model that we have is working really well for us because we actually reject most of the sponsors that approach us.
But in general, advertising creates exactly that same challenge.
Either advertisers demand control over editorial content or the people who are creating the content feel the pull, know that if they lose certain advertisers, then they won't be able to do what they need to do.
And so they convince themselves, usually it's done through self-deception rather than outright lying.
They convince themselves that they hold opinions that they may not actually hold in order to keep the sponsorship they have.
And so this is a similar issue.
So in general, I don't like talking about the money precisely because it should not be a guide.
The money should come because what you're delivering is valuable.
It should not be telling you where to go.
And I feel very proud of the fact that we did not flinch in the face of YouTube's overt attempt to get us to shift what we were talking about.
In fact, I want to show the Twitter exchange that I had with YouTube over this at the point that the demonetization came down.
didn't actually remember that you'd done something publicly.
There were certainly a lot of So I can't read this at that size.
Can you read it, Heather?
No, I can't.
Do you want me to do it?
Yeah.
So this is on June 11th, 2021.
This is before the demonetization, but after at least the first warning and maybe after the first strike.
I don't remember the time.
And I think the screenshot is of one of the videos that was removed.
Okay.
My June 1st, Brett writing on June 12th, on June 11th.
My June 1st discussion with Dr. Pierre Corey of COVID-19 Critical on the Dark Horse podcast has been removed by YouTube for allegedly violating their community guideline against spam, deceptive practices, and scams.
The channel was given a warning, the first step toward removal.
Team YouTube responds the next day, jumping in to help.
We forwarded your video to the right team for a review.
We'll share updates here as soon as we hear back.
Appreciate your patience in the meantime.
And you wrote back the same day, what patience?
Stop stammering and wake the boss.
So I'm proud that we did not, because obviously it would have been, at a business level, very wise to just simply steer ourselves to other topics.
The money coming in was very substantial.
The money had just become very substantial that we were earning from YouTube.
Yes, all of a sudden it became...
Right.
And so anyway, the pressure was very high for us to do this, but between you and me, there was never any issue because our value in the world comes from describing what we see and explain it.
Our value in the world comes from our values in the world.
Right.
So I don't like having to be the one saying this, but the point I would like people to derive, or one of several.
One, this is about you and your right to know what's going on.
And the mechanism here is to have people who speak in plain English describing to you what they're seeing in the world, what resonates and what strikes them as incorrect and why.
And I think that was very valuable.
We hear that from people all the time.
But the other thing is that the, yes, the money on YouTube, although YouTube does not pay very much per click, the aggregate money, because the audience is so huge on YouTube, can be staggering.
It can change your life radically, which it was in the process of doing at the time.
And the point is the cost of saying what you needed to hear and doing what we needed to do to continue delivering that message was astronomical to us in terms of what we lost from YouTube.
Not only in terms of if you extrapolate out the money that we made the one month that real money was coming in on that channel, or I don't know even how to describe it, but money that to us seemed spectacularly good.
That's one cost we can extrapolate out.
If every month after had been something like that, where we would have been.
But the other thing is, and I think it's even more important, frankly, is what would the audience have looked like if YouTube had not stepped in and started interfering with subscribership?
And they could have done that.
I see three possible ways that could have happened.
It could be that the numbers are phony.
I don't think that's likely to be true, but it could be, which has profound implications because it means that even when we source advertisers outside of the YouTube ecosystem, they pay based on how many people we're reaching.
So if YouTube makes it look like fewer people are seeing it, that has impacts on our other sources of income.
It has impacts on if you go to write a book and you approach a publisher.
The question is, well, okay, how big is your audience?
That affects what your deal looks like, what your advance looks like.
So there's that.
They could have interfered with what we could see.
They could have interfered with subscribership itself.
They could have prevented people from subscribing, and that could have been a limitation.
They might have unsubscribed people.
We don't know what the mechanism was.
But I mean it feels to me like one of the easiest things and most likely things for them to have done.
You said you know they could have interfered with what we could see.
They very likely interfered with what you could see.
Yep.
So they very likely you know it's it's it's the algorithms stupid.
It's the algorithms and if the and if and if certain kinds of content never show up in your feed, you don't notice it's missing after a while because you don't even remember that it exists or you never knew that it exists.
So if we are considered medical misinformation that we are doing harm to people by talking about COVID vaccines and repurposed drugs and whether or not pediatricians should be strong-arming mothers in front of their children, then who knows what YouTube is capable of, actually.
Yep.
So in real time, let's figure this out.
I believe that the public has every right to know what the ecosystem that adjusts what they get to see and don't get to see looks like.
They have a right to know what the incentives behind the scenes look like.
The question is, should we explore something about what the income stream looked like at the point that they cut us off?
Entirely up to you.
All right.
Well, why don't we do that?
Do you have the numbers or remember them?
No.
Okay.
I don't.
I don't.
You know, there were some other things going on today.
Yes, quite right.
Quite right.
Okay.
Well, maybe we'll come back to that.
But suffice it to say, we have something like a tacit admission by YouTube in restoring those videos.
Videos, I will point out two of those videos, the Steve Kirsch Robert Malone video and the Pierre Cor video, we did as live.
Even though those were guest episodes, we did them live specifically because we were concerned about YouTube interfering with people seeing them.
And so anyway, those videos have not been available on YouTube in, well, since June of 2021, you can now go see them on YouTube.
They have been available on other channels like Rumble.
But anyway, they're back on YouTube, which I think is an important development.
It really does acknowledge that those videos were never in violation of anything real.
They've also quietly changed their community guidelines.
And so is this evidence that they have learned some lesson?
Do they not owe us some acknowledgement of the lesson that they have learned?
Or do they reserve the right to go back into this authoritarian tyrannical mode and start censoring what you can hear people discussing?
I mean, it's the PolitiFact debacle all over again, with greater repercussions for us this time.
But I don't remember which totally legitimate claim of yours it was.
It was about lab leak, I think.
You were talking about lab leak and politifact, which wasn't that wasn't the PolitiFact one.
I remember what the PolitiFact one was.
What was it?
PolitiFact.
The PolitiFact is Facebook's fact-checking arm.
Yes, it was on the question of the cytotoxicity of spike protein.
Yes.
And so you were given, if we're remembering the right one, certainly we may be amalgamating.
But you were given, they have either a five or a six point system for how much lying you're doing.
And you got a liar, liar, pants on fire rating, which is their top rating for like you really, you could not be farther from the truth here, dude.
And then later they quietly, silently changed their view on the topic itself and undid your liar, liar, pants on fire rating entirely.
Yeah.
So and they and like I'm not I'm not just being a child here.
That's literally what they call their rating.
They call it liar, liar, pants on fire.
That's PolitiFact's name for their you're really egregious here.
Serious, sober, fact-checking entity.
All right, but a couple things that need to be said.
One is when we refused to budge and continued to talk about the important issues surrounding all of the circumstances under the COVID regime, it was our audience and our advertisers that allowed us to continue to do what we did.
YouTube created a giant problem for us in terms of our ability to just earn and do what needed to be done with respect to our family.
The fact that there were advertisers who stepped up and were willing to advertise on our channel, despite the fact that we were obviously controversial, A, we are tremendously grateful.
And B, you in the audience need to understand the value of that, that there are people who actually are not cowards about this sort of thing and don't flee from controversy and understood that actually this was a good channel to be associated with because we do our best to speak the truth.
In fact, I think a majority of the sponsors that we have had over the years have come to us through our amazing ad broker precisely because someone there, or if not all of them, listened to Darkhorse and had gained things from Darkhorse.
This wasn't simply a business decision for most of our sponsors in which they were willing to put up with our perhaps, you know, deemed to be by some people cranky scientific views.
These were sponsors who were excited about, enthusiastic about being associated with us.
And I think, you know, in the just about four years, we had just started taking on sponsors at the point that YouTube demonetized us, which was lucky timing for us.
And we've only had, and we've had a number of sponsors, and sponsors come and go, and you don't expect someone to remain doing an ad once a month forever because the market falls off.
We've literally only had one sponsor ever leave because they suddenly discovered what we thought about some things about which our positions have not changed.
So it's just another reason to actually be for us to be enthusiastic about, but also for you, our audience, to be enthusiastic about those ad reads that we read at the top of the hour, which we were very hesitant to be involved in at all, but we're so fond of our sponsors at this point.
Yes, we really are.
And also, you know, the audience for sticking with us and supporting us in many different ways in which you guys do support us.
And I think you may have more you want to say.
For the moment, what I want to point out, we take a lot of crap from various people.
Accusations get leveled at us.
The one I find most annoying is the grifter one.
Because it is particularly galling to pay a huge price for saying what you believe to be true, come hell or high water, and then to be accused of saying what you're saying because it's remunerative is nonsense.
And so anyway, maybe we will return to the question of what things looked like for one month before YouTube cut off the flow entirely.
But let's put it this way.
This was a financially, it is obvious what direction we should have gone, and we went the other direction because it was the right way to go and regret nothing about it, right?
There's no question our life would look very, very different if we had capitulated.
But it was the right thing to do.
We're doing fine.
I'm not complaining about our quality of life or anything like that.
But let's just say there are powerful incentives being used to keep people on narrative.
And that means that there are far fewer people saying the things that you need to hear, right?
There are forces trying to make it impossible for you to hear those things.
Those forces break out all kinds of weaponry.
And I guess lastly, I would just say, in addition to our marvelous advertisers, our wonderful audience, our friends also, the ones who stuck by us, in particular, Joe Rogan, who stepped in.
I think if he had not stepped in when he did, we would have lost the channels.
And I don't know where we would be today.
Presumably be doing something else.
But nonetheless, that was an important move.
And this is what you discover when you turn down the offer to continue making a huge amount of money.
If you'll just shut up about these three things, when you do that, what you discover is that you are wealthy in lots of other ways, that the quality of your friends, the quality of the people who are paying attention to you, your ability to sleep at night.
Your ability to sleep at night, to look at yourself in the mirror and feel good about the person staring back.
All of that is another kind of currency.
And it is a shame that the dollars are playing such a huge role in what people think.
But I think many of us have learned that even your health may depend on seeking out the people who are resistant to those forces, right?
There was an overwhelming chorus of people in total agreement.
And the small number of people who were willing to pay a price, you know, we paid a price in terms of our channel.
Many of our doctor friends paid a price in terms of their licenses.
Yes, all of those things.
And then there's the huge cost to your reputation and the having to listen to people accusing you of all manner of...
We were killing people.
Yeah, granny killers.
So anyway.
And now, now it is actually easy to be publicly pleased, even when people come up to us as they do and say, thank you.
Because I was watching Dark Horse, I didn't get the COVID vaccine, or my wife didn't, or my son didn't, or, you know, I didn't get my children vaccinated.
And we were hearing that at the time, at the point that we were being accused of killing people for voicing concerns about both the safety and efficacy of these effectiveness of these vaccines.
And we felt good about hearing from those people then.
That only gets easier over time as the evidence grows ever stronger and more incontrovertible that those products that were thrust upon us by the pharmaceutical industry were never safe nor effective.
Yeah.
I think probably the most common thing that you and I hear is that hearing from us allowed them to dodge the shot.
And they were very glad that they did, having seen what happened to other people they knew, etc.
And the other thing, the second most common thing that we hear is that you kept us sane, which is interesting.
The phraseology is often exactly that.
And there's a sense of like, actually, you know, the world went crazy and it was very hard not to be swept away in that crazy.
What you needed were people who weren't crazy, who were trying to get it right.
And, you know, we made plenty of mistakes as we have been, you know, straightforward about.
But that simply doing your work visibly so that other people can check it, can discuss it.
Nobody's saying you should accept this.
It's just, here's how we got to the conclusion we got to, that that allowed people to feel like, oh, maybe I'm not crazy.
I have these concerns.
I don't know how to phrase them because that's not what I studied.
But what I'm hearing can't possibly make any sense.
Is there anyone I can talk to or listen to who is speaking in a different language than I speak, who are coming to conclusions that match the gut instinct that I have.
But when I try to act on my gut instinct, my wife, my doctor, my boss is saying, no, you have to do the thing.
And I think that is something that we provide and continue to provide.
Yep.
One more thing that occurs to me as we're discussing this is it's relatively late that we became involved.
We've now been to a number of events.
I'm a fellow at the Brownstone Institute.
But I have to say Brownstone is doing a remarkable job of continuing to focus on what happened during COVID.
And not only do I want to thank them for their support and for their vigilance on this topic, but I want to explain exactly why they and we are still focused here.
We've talked a little bit about this in other contexts, but the desire to move on from COVID, even for those of us who feel that we were vindicated by what ultimately emerged, there's still a sense of like, oh my God, that was such a nightmare.
Can we talk about other stuff?
The problem is COVID revealed the dysfunction across all of our institutions.
It revealed how the system works and does harm to people by assuring them that, you know, this is what the science is saying.
And for many of us, it has become clear that this is the best shot we're ever going to get at understanding the dysfunction of our system, at seeing the magnitude of the harms that it can cause, and figuring out how to either rescue institutions, if they are rescuable, or in many cases, how to replace them with something that is not vulnerable to the same mechanisms of capture.
So for Brownstone and for us, we're not going to let this go.
And it's not because we want to keep going back and talking about COVID.
It's because the process that allowed the catastrophe of COVID to unfold and to do all of the various kinds of harms that it did from turbo cancers to developmental delays in children to a massive redistribution of wealth.
Reproductive failures.
Reproductive failures.
All of those harms.
Those harms are part of a mechanism that is still alive and it will continue to function if we, for example, empower the middle grounders to scold the heretics and the establishment.
And that will allow the establishment to continue to live to fight another day.
We have to get to the bottom of COVID because that's the only route to actually fixing our system.
COVID is the story that diagnoses the system that allows you to see.
You know, it's effectively the moment at which the curtain was pulled back, as in the Wizard of Oz.
The curtain is pulled back and you see what's really going on.
So we can't let it go.
We have to get to the bottom of it.
I mean, I also think that, and this is like at the individual level rather than the population level, but that people who just want to move on, I mean, like we all just want to, we all want to move on.
We all want to be able to look forward and do new things and not be entirely stuck at a particularly dire moment in the past.
But many of those who as individuals just like don't want to spend time there were among the people making the most egregious decisions against their loved ones, for instance, you know, not letting them come to family dinners and ceremonies and celebrations and doing really,
I'm not going to say evil, but doing very bad things to people whom they claim to love and who aren't even asking for forgiveness.
They just want to forget.
They just want what they did to be forgotten.
And those who were wronged may even have a sense of, oh my God, okay, can we just, can we go, can we move forward then?
But that also is the wrong impulse at some level, because if the people who did that to you before are so eager to have it forgotten what they did, they will be the first to forget.
They will be the first to forget how they acted.
And they therefore are very likely to act in similar ways when another thing happens and will be wearing different clothes and will come with different details.
And so no one will recognize at first that it is the same thing, except for those who are once again at the wrong end of the shaming authoritarians who somehow are controlling so much of the social capital in the United States and the rest of the world at the moment.
Yeah.
So we have to continue to monitor this.
And I would encourage people not to think of it as about COVID.
It's about the system that allowed COVID to unfold and the number of ways in which this still jeopardizes us.
I mean, just to name a few, we still have a cryptic weapons program seeking to make pathogens dangerous to people.
We still have a pharma industry that is going to derail safe and effective treatments that are out of patent in favor of dangerous, novel treatments.
We have many different so-called vaccines being reformulated on the mRNA platform, including the so-called replicons, which are self-replicating vaccines, the dangers.
Oh, I haven't heard that before.
Replicons.
Yeah, it's a rough one.
And, you know, technically, technically, they're not supposed to spread between people.
Oh, well, I'm sure that's true then.
Once you've built a platform in which the thing replicates itself literally, then you're depending on an awful lot of your assumptions being right in order to be certain.
And no failures in your system ever.
Right.
And of course, the history of this is terrible.
You know, live attenuated vaccines aren't supposed to cause serious disease or spread between people.
And of course, these things happen too.
So they're not done with you.
If you want to fend them off, what we need to do is empower the people who not only just got it right.
Again, we got some stuff wrong, but in the end, I think we got things very right.
But it's the people who have demonstrated the capacity to figure out what's going on when there's garbage in the evidence, when the system is complex.
you've got to empower those people and we have some of those people who have now been drafted into the highest echelons of of government so that's an important piece of progress um but we also have to figure out how to stare down the tyrants who want to control the conversation because just think about where we would be if they had been you know 20 more successful right they overwhelmingly got most people to not speak about these things in the places
where they could be heard a tiny number of people continued on and figured out how to talk about these things in spite of the massive coercive pressure that was applied to us so you know you really want to play that game again you want to find out you know once they've learned the lesson how they will exert control the next time will it be through a central bank digital currency where suddenly you're debanked because you're talking about ivermectin i mean all of these things are readily conceivable yes they are
readily conceivable and uh if you haven't checked out my uh inside rail episode with twyla braise on real id i didn't see this one uh clearly until she explained it to me but here's another control mechanism that's just quietly being installed oh you want to fly you're going to need a real id oh well then then what is that well it's a it's a federal identification system that governs travel between states as if
it were international right it abuses that metaphor of passport once again so anyway there's still great danger we made real gains during covid it's time to capitalize on them and not let that thing go so that we can use that example to figure out what's wrong with our system and to repair it absolutely here here here here here um i'm not feeling entirely myself i wanted i want to go next and
just do the somewhat abbreviated version of what i was uh what i wanted to talk about today um and you doing all right though yeah all right enough yeah okay yeah no i'm i'm i'm i'm good um i got i got the clear from a a very nice young doctor uh that was there with me in the er yep we went through that thing where um they asked questions to try to figure out if
the injury could possibly be the result of spousal abuse and i think they satisfied themselves that it was not you know the what the one piece of the interaction for the whatever it was too i mean so a benefit of living in a small place um if you are lucky enough to have had a recent uh influx of enough resources you've got a nice facility which we really do is that um you know we literally this happened at 11 30 as i was coming in to do the podcast and by you know and
we drove right to the er and by 140 we were back back home like amazing amazing eight hours a cat scan and x-ray and stitches and you know so much stuff right um but uh during intake during triage the triage nurse said with you present okay there are a couple questions we have to ask uh do you feel safe at home and in all of your relationships i'm like i mean i do and it's like totally but how can you possibly ask me that with the guy with whom i live sitting well you could have responded in piglet
so that was that was like the one like somehow they had already assessed they're like they knew that that was going to be a no but well my guess is if you had shown
any hesitation or strangeness in your answer that they would have found a way or they might would have asked you about it when they took your cat scan yeah like that um but yeah i mean i i get it it's always uncomfortable when you know they're trying to ascertain that because you can imagine that they do encounter lots of situation i mean probably not here but yeah you know yes fell onto concrete really yeah yes actually yes i did
um all
right so um actual tragedy this week in the world uh in texas with the floods and or um you know still many people missing um there there will end up being many people uh confirmed dead in the end uh and um this put me in mind of a few things one of which was our own experience with a flash flood which we actually opened hunter gatherers guide with and i thought i'd start um by just
sharing sharing the story um as we wrote about it um there so this is um
you know from hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century evolution and the challenges of modern life our book which came out in september of 2021 so right you know a couple months after that whole chaos with youtube and or demonetized but um and you know and then then amazon pretended not to have copies of the book for two weeks and uh they may well not have had copies or a publisher assured us that they had copies yeah
um i there there was all sorts of messing going on 2021 with us however um the tragedy in texas this week put me in mind of flash floods in our own experience with one and here's what we wrote about in the beginning of hunter gatherers guide in 1994 we spent our first summer in graduate school at a tiny field station in the satope key region of costa rica heather was studying dark poison frogs brett homed in on tent making bats every morning we did
field work in the rainforest where it was green and lush and dark we remember a particular afternoon in july a pair of macaws flew overhead sluered against the sky the river was cool and clear and trees full of orchids crowded the bank it was a perfect antidote to the sweat and heat of the day on beautiful afternoons like this one we would walk we would walk across
the paved road that went all the way to the capital onto a smaller dirt road and cross a steel bridge that spanned the rio sarapiqui to take a swim at the beach below we paused on the bridge to admire the view the river wending its way between walls of forest a toucan flying between trees, the distant calls of howler monkeys.
A local man whom we did not know approached and began talking to us.
You were going to swim?
he asked, pointing at the sandy bank where we were headed.
Yes.
Today there was rain in the mountains, he said, pointing to the south.
The river's source was in those mountains, in the Cordillera.
We nodded.
Earlier we had seen the thunderclouds above the mountains from the field station.
Today there was rain in the mountains, he said again.
But no rain here, one of us said, laughing lightly, not knowing how to make small talk in a language we weren't fluent in while standing on a bridge eager to swim.
Today there was rain in the mountains, he said a third time, more emphatically.
We looked at each other.
Perhaps it was time to take our leave, to walk down to the river and get in the water.
The sun was now directly on us.
It was desperately hot.
Okay, see you later, we said, waving, moving on.
We were barely fifty feet from getting in the water.
But the river, the man said to us, now with some urgency.
Yes?
We asked him, confused.
Look at the river, he said, pointing.
We looked down.
It looked like the river always did, running fast and clean, smooth and...
Is that a whirlpool?
That wasn't there before.
We looked at the man again, questions in our eyes.
He pointed again to the south.
Today there was a lot of rain in the mountains.
He moved his focus back to the river.
Look at the water now.
In the moments we had been looking away, the water had come up visibly.
It was moving chaotically, roiling.
It had changed color, too.
From dark and calm, it had become pale and filled with silt.
In short order, it was filled with more than that.
The three of us stood transfixed as the river rose spectacularly, many feet in just a few minutes.
The beach disappeared under a huge volume of rushing water.
Anyone on it would have been swept away.
Debris, including several logs, began to hurtle past.
Anything that hit that new whirlpool disappeared, then shot back up beyond the bridge.
The man turned around and began to walk off the way that he had come.
He was a campesino, a farmer, but we didn't know where he was from or how he knew that we were there, about to descend to what could easily have been our deaths.
Wait, Brett called, then realized that we had nothing to offer him but gratitude.
We literally had nothing on us but our clothes.
Thank you, we said.
Thank you so much.
And Brett took off his shirt and gave it to the man.
Really?
The man asked, as Brett held out his shirt.
Really, Brett confirmed.
Thank you, he said, accepting the shirt.
Good luck.
And remember to think about the rain in the mountains.
And with that, he left.
So, flash floods happen.
And what I could read more here, but the really relevant thing is that we'd been living there for a month already.
And we'd been going down to that river to swim most days.
And we thought we knew it.
But we weren't locals.
We kind of felt like locals.
We were more local than tourists who had just been there for a couple days.
Not that there were really tourists there, but we were more local than most people, most gringos who show up somewhere in Costa Rica and end up in a river.
And we were training to be biologists.
We were already scientists, and we were thinking about the ecosystems and the ways that the water flew through.
The water flowed.
Flowed, thank you.
Flew.
Water doesn't fly usually.
And we knew that the Cordillera was the source of the river.
And we knew it had been raining.
Like, we had all the pieces.
And we grew up in Southern California.
But we hadn't put the pieces together in the way that we needed to have in order to have come to the right decision on our own.
We were about to make a quite possibly fatal decision without the kindness of a stranger.
So the tragedy that took place in Texas this week was quickly politicized.
And what happened in the mainstream media was we were assured that this was due, that what happened was due to climate change, anthropogenic climate change.
It's possible, but it's certainly not the only possibility.
Nor could we possibly know that that's what was going on here.
And I have a New York Times article that I was going to read some from in which exactly that claim is made by some experts.
And I don't think I'm going to go there today.
I don't feel like navigating my computer and such.
But I'm reminded of a framing that I actually introduced on exactly the episode of Dark Horse that got taken down by YouTube four years ago.
It's just been put back up.
And the framing, the framing that I introduced then in episode 82 was this.
And I've talked about it many times since then.
But the framing then was, I was asking, what's the name for this thing where you have a recognition of a real problem, like a virus, right?
And a solution is proposed, when the real problem might be racism, too.
So you have a recognition of a real problem, pandemic, racism.
You have a solution that is proposed, vaccines, Black Lives Matter, the movement.
And then those who resist the solution that has been proposed by the authorities are accused of denying that there was a problem in the first place.
When in fact, there were a lot of us, there are a lot of us who saw that SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a real virus causing real problems, if not exactly the kinds of problems that we were being told it was causing.
And from almost the beginning said, and your solution, in part because we could tell that you're lying about it, you can't possibly know that it's safe, and in part because you are denying the possibility of other solutions like repurposed drugs, your solution is not the solution for us.
And we were told, as were many others, then you don't believe in the virus.
That is a crazy logical fallacy, and I still don't know exactly what the name for it might be.
I feel like the thing that's happening with the tragedy of the floods in Texas and with many such natural disasters that are happening with perhaps greater frequency now is kind of a tweak on that, a variation, which is, okay, extreme events are becoming more common, or that was an extreme event.
Okay, maybe so.
That was definitely an extreme event.
The reason for the extreme event is, in this case, atmospheric carbon due to anthropogenic climate change.
That's the thing that is being said.
And it's not the only thing that's being said, but many in the mainstream media are saying that.
And on this point, many of us do not inherently agree.
That's, you know, maybe that's part of what contributed to it.
But you certainly have no evidence that that is the thing that caused this.
And then we are told that third point where they try to get your aha, you know, they get you, is, ah, but if you disagree that these events were caused by the thing that we say they were caused by, then you are both monsters who don't care about the tragedy that happened and you are unscientific troglodytes who don't believe in evidence and analysis.
And sorry, wrong on both counts, again.
There's a logical fallacy being built in to the emotional argument here that is being trotted out by all the usual suspects, the New York Times and presumably MSNBC and NPR.
I don't listen to them anymore.
But that is exactly going to be helpful to them that want it to be helpful in creating a passive audience that believes everything that they say.
I'm sorry, you guys who think you're following the science have just demonstrated that you don't know what science is.
Again.
All right.
There are several pieces that flow from the fallacy you're pointing to, and I also don't know what the technical name for it would be.
But there are two discussions that have to be had in all such cases.
One discussion is what is taking place?
What are the facts of what is taking place and what do they imply?
And the other is what should we do policy-wise?
And the problem is that the policy-wise discussion has an analog to first-pass-the-post.
The thing that wrecks our political system is that first-pass-the-post voting causes us to default into two teams, right?
Both teams become incoherent at the point that you're either on one team or you're on the other team, right?
That is not a reasonable way to go about things.
But politically, if you do anything other than that, you are hobbling the policies that you want to advocate for.
You're hobbling your values if you don't join up with one of the teams.
So you get these amalgams that don't make any sense.
And the problem is the language that we use to discuss policy is always disguised as if it were pure analysis.
Right?
And so the point is the analytical discussion should be very nuanced by virtue of the fact that different people have seen different aspects of the puzzle and have become convinced of different things and hashing out their perspectives is the way you figure out what's going on, as we saw with COVID, as should be taking place with climate change.
But we get the same defect each time, where some group of people becomes so convinced.
Well, we know the analysis.
You know, anthropogenic climate change is going to take out humanity.
And it's happening incredibly fast.
Like it's already very nearly too late to.
Don't you see how many bad things are happening?
Right.
Yes, I do see how many bad things are happening.
You have not established a relationship between those two things.
But in some room, they have, right?
There's some room of 40 climate scientists in which they're so convinced that they know the answer that they then make the following illegal move from the point of view of the analysis.
And the move is, now that we know what's happening, the only things that we should be discussing are things that cause the public to understand the severity of the issue.
In other words, we have to save them from themselves.
Don't make them think too hard.
They're probably not that bright anyway.
We all agree that there will be nuance.
This is not the place for it.
The scientific reality is so clear.
The consensus in this room of 40 people is so thoroughly well supported that we have the right to not share the nuance in public in order to get everybody on board with the thing that's going to save our children.
Once they start making that move and they start thinking that their lies are inherently noble, then the point is then you've got an analytical discussion.
Let's talk to the scientists and see what they think about climate change, et cetera.
And the scientists are all now uniform because there is a behind the scenes coercion program so that any nuance at all is driven out of the discussion.
And so the point is, what you get is first past the post-science, which is a non-sequitur.
Yeah.
You get this team dynamic.
And that's where the thing that you're talking about comes from, where, you know, if you don't think the shots are a good idea, then you don't think COVID is a serious problem.
And it's like, wait a second, those are independent questions, right?
I can believe COVID is a very serious problem.
And I can think the shots aren't worthwhile.
The risks involved in them are way too big and their demonstrated capacity to help is way too small.
You know, what are you talking about?
Well, but your team.
I don't have a team.
I'm on team, what the hell is going on?
On the team, what the hell is going on?
But that is, I mean, it's also a failure of theory of mind, which I don't usually like to invoke particular people, but Sam Harris was one of the people who made this error over and over and over again, most explicitly against us on this particular point.
And he was acting as if I'm on a team, I know the definitions of my team, which was team blue.
Therefore, anyone not on my team is you.
I've defined your team.
It's like, you know what?
The fact that you're on a team and you only play for a team now instead of thinking independently, that's on you, buddy.
In between you and your non-existent God, right?
But that doesn't mean that all the rest of us are playing that way.
Like we are trying to actually discover truth.
And whether or not you ever were, you're not now, you're acting like reality is a team sport and it's not.
And this gets right to the censorship question.
Because the point is YouTube is connected to a team because YouTube has to be connected to a team to get its bidding done in policy circles.
But the point is that team now has a slate of beliefs, and those beliefs aren't even really beliefs.
They are portrayals that masquerade as beliefs.
And the little people aren't supposed to hear a discussion in which these things are hashed out, which was exactly the problem that you and I created for YouTube.
You and I are obviously not zealots.
We have biology degrees that's highly relevant to the origin of the virus, the utility of a repurposed drug, the danger of a novel mRNA-based technology, right?
The point is, oh, actually, how about we have a discussion about the wisdom of these various remedies, et cetera?
And you can't have that, right?
The team people have decided that has to be stamped out.
And so that's the battle.
You're trying to drive that nuance out of the discussion.
The people who think they are the nuance people were like, well, we already did the nuance part privately.
You weren't there.
Yeah, we've taken care of that for you.
We've taken care of that.
Don't you worry.
You're pretty little heads.
Exactly.
And some of their heads aren't even that pretty.
Boy, you're telling me.
But the problem, of course, is that then that results in a positive feedback, right?
You start purging the scientists who aren't in lockstep.
The scientists who are near to lockstep become in lockstep because they want to preserve their jobs.
Suddenly you have a consensus and you say, well, you'd have to be anti-science to depart from the consensus.
And we end up in hell.
This also, at the exact moment when the complicated systems thinkers think that they are the masters of complex systems and they take their hubris into those complex systems and lead us all into terrible danger,
this is the point at which you have to realize, you know, look, anthropogenic climate change is actually mostly independent from the question of whether or not this disaster was the result of cloud seeding, for which there is a surprising amount of evidence.
Okay.
So the point is, if I tell you I've looked at the evidence that there was cloud seeding and that it appears to have been close enough in time and in the right spots to have contributed to this catastrophe, I haven't told you what I think about climate change.
Right.
You also, I mean, that would be anthropogenic.
It just wouldn't be due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Right.
But cloud seeding is independent from whether or not I think the climate is rapidly shifting, which is independent from whether or not I think it's humans that are the cause.
Which is also independent from whether or not you think that the burning of fossil fuels is contributing any negative things to the planet, regardless of whether or not you think that that is a major reason for changes that you have still remained agnostic about, whether or not you think they're happening.
Right.
Okay.
So here's what I'm going to propose then.
In a normal universe in which this forced dichotomizing of all things by the first past the post dynamic, the game theory underneath, in a world where that did not exist, right?
If we were lost at sea on a large ship with a thousand people, right?
You wouldn't have to.
Half some of us know how to fish.
Fair point.
But the point is you would expect, A, we're all on the same team.
We're all jeopardized by the same force.
We have an interest in figuring out how the ship works, how not to sink it, how to navigate it, all that stuff.
And so the point is there's no teams.
I'm on team.
Let's figure out how the ship works.
And if my understanding of how it works is wrong, I want to lose the argument, not win it.
Right?
That is the difference, as you pointed out on May 23rd, 2017, between a debate and a dialectic.
It is exactly that.
Do you want a disagreement to surface the truth, or do you want to win the debate whether or not what you say is true?
And this makes all the difference in the world.
But here's the key point.
If you sit down with another human being and you find that you agree across the board, something's wrong with you.
Because that should almost never happen if you cover enough topics.
Right?
When you sit down with somebody else who had Right.
And that you have accepted whatever they're putting out as if it were analysis.
And maybe you're repeating it as if it's an analysis that you understand.
But really what you're doing is you're parroting it.
You know, the term parrot's a pretty good one.
Right.
The parrot presumably doesn't know what it's saying most of the time.
And so anyway, the point is, I would expect, and everything in my experience actually tells me this is true, in a room, a good faith room where you're not all signing up for the same team and trying to sell that perspective, you know, in a room where you're actually trying to figure out what's true, there's a tremendous amount of disagreement.
And it's not personal and it doesn't devolve into anger, right?
But the point is, well, actually, I don't agree with you on that point, you know, and here's why.
No, here's what you've missed.
There's back and forth.
And so the point is, you would expect two people, just by virtue of the fact that the problems we're discussing are difficult to arrive at different conclusions.
And I wonder, I mean, the way you just framed it, you know, like some people imagine in advance, well, I know I don't like being wrong.
It doesn't feel good.
Therefore, that's going to be an uncomfortable situation and I'm going to have to learn to appreciate it.
But if you frame it, as I feel like you kind of just did, as a process of discovery, like why aren't, why isn't everyone enthusiastic about this?
Like, oh, I'm going to get to figure out something more than I know now and build the model that I already have in my head out in a way that is more accurate and therefore allows me to do even more exploration down the road.
How exciting.
How amazing.
Right.
So I actually do think that this comes down to somebody early in the education of most people has given them the wrong impression of what the objective of the exercise is.
And I see a couple of different errors.
One is, well, I don't want to be wrong, right?
Well, if your point is, I don't want to be wrong, and you think that what that means is not, I better get really good at figuring out what's true, right?
If you think I don't want to be wrong means I don't want to discover that I'm wrong because it's awkward, then what you're going to end up doing, of course, is finding people who agree with you so that you don't have to hear about the disagreement and so that you can make jokes about the people who do disagree with you as if they're obviously wrong themselves.
So that now you've sabotaged the process by which you might figure out what's going on by basically just surrounding yourself with people that you agree with.
And so I said I wasn't going to go to this New York Times article, but there's just a couple paragraphs right in the middle, and I'm not going to scroll back up to show you the beginning, but I'll put it in the show notes.
Just these three paragraphs as exactly what you're talking about, but see how it's flipped on its head and the opposite claim is made.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the energy department had hired the three scientists.
The three scientists in question are three scientists who aren't in lockstep with anthropogenic climate change consensus.
What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning, the consequences of which we've seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S., Dr. Mann wrote in an email.
Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of actual government science experts and replaced them with a small number of reliable foot soldiers.
The scientists who are not going along with a consensus on any particular topic are the opposite of foot soldiers.
They are not the ones who are simply following along on a script.
They are the ones who are, and maybe they're wrong.
I don't think so, but maybe they're wrong.
Maybe on many topics, the consensus will be right.
And those who disagree will be wrong.
Wrong or right, the people who are disagreeing are not the foot soldiers.
That is the opposite framing of what is true.
But here's someone who's a consensus scientist who's using language to dissuade people from listening to anyone who disagrees with consensus.
I am strangely reminded of the bias that many people seem to have in favor of food from a chain.
Yeah, like a McDonald's or a RB or whatever.
The thing about chain food is the standardization.
Right?
You walk into a McDonald's anywhere, and with maybe a few exceptions, the menu is identical to the one 500 miles to the east.
The preparation method is agreed upon, the sourcing of the beef patties, all of that stuff results in the restaurant being duplicated in many places.
And so you have an experience that is reassuring if you seek not to be surprised by your food.
Yes.
Right.
And if you don't seek that, if you're cool with being surprised by your food, sometimes you're surprised in the negative.
That definitely happens.
So the point is there's a mindset in which the variance being taken out of food is understood to be a positive thing.
And I understand it because it does hedge out the, I don't know what I just ate.
That wasn't so good.
Right.
Yep.
But here's my point.
That very same comfort comes from the New York Times.
Yeah, it does.
You know exactly what you're going to get.
If you want the perspective on the emergency in Texas that reassures you that this is the result of human badness.
And therefore I know what to do, and I know what we all need to do, and I know what opinion to hold, and I know who to feel mad at.
Yes, I know who the bad people are.
I know what we're supposed to be doing.
This is supposed to, this is, this is nature's way of telling you that the New York Times consensus is even more important than you knew before you picked up the New York Times.
Can you imagine if the New York Times dropped into an article like this on the consensus on climate change, something about the shifting pole or the geomagnetic weakening of the of the of Earth's geomagnetic field?
Yeah.
Can you imagine?
Right.
So so, okay, so there's some part that doesn't want to be surprised by the news.
It wants to be confirmed.
Yeah.
Right.
New York Times, that's your source.
But then here's the other thing.
Okay.
So it's McDonald's.
Yeah.
It's the New York Times and it's the fucking universities.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
You don't get variation because you went to the biology department at Baylor versus the biology department at Berkeley.
You get the very same story about biology.
That's not normal.
Biology is difficult.
I mean, and that is true.
And that might be a somewhat subtle point to make to people, except that we have the stupidest, most obvious version of this story right now, which is a point you have made many times, which is that literally not a single department of biology that we are aware of in the Western world has stood up and said, hey, oh, male is male, female is female, and in humans, you can't change between the two.
Not a single department.
So if there is consensus on a conclusion that is so patently false to anyone who has taken like high school biology, then why are we trusting the consensus on anything else?
Right.
It's a consumer good that has been packaged to make you feel like the biology is being done properly.
But the truth is, in a normal universe where people were actually trying to figure out what was true, and you woke up one day, if half the biology departments in the country agreed that you could switch sexes, be like, what's happening to the universities?
Half the departments are crazy.
And it's like, no, actually all the departments are crazy.
That's why you don't get any variation on this point.
They're all wrong, right?
The synchrony.
They're all scared Into not doing science.
Yes.
Into doing anti-scientific thinking and dressing it up as if it's science.
And once you know that that's true in one department, the question is, well, is it one field?
Or is the process that did that to that one field, does it apply universally to all the fields?
In which case, what should we do?
You know, if you can't trust the biology department, if you can pick a university at random and know that you can't trust the biology department, well, what does that say about the physics department or the history department or any other department?
And then you've got a question of like, well, all right, we have a civilization in which we are supposed to be navigating questions of policy based on an analysis that's as good as we can do about what is actually factually true about the system, about rational extrapolation.
Well, if that system is capable of being completely upside down and wrong on nutrition, sex and gender, is it not capable of being upside down and wrong on climate?
I think it must be.
You know, I'm not a climate expert, but everything I see tells me that the same forces are in play over in that domain, which is why we have to get to the bottom of COVID, because that's the place you're going to figure out how it works.
Absolutely.
All right.
All right.
I'm out.
Okay.
You're out.
Okay.
One last topic, and I'm just going to lead you through this topic.
I know it's not one that you've been paying attention to, especially this week.
We've talked about it a little bit before, but I want to talk about the strange fact of the FBI and DOJ having assured us this week that they now have carefully reviewed the Epstein files.
And it turns out, let's see if I have this right, that he did kill himself, that there is no evidence that he was blackmailing anybody, and there's no connection to intelligence agencies.
Right.
Okay.
Now, that obviously is nonsense, right?
I find it strange that it's being said, but there's some reason that it is.
It certainly can't be that they're expecting the public to accept that.
It's especially weird in light of the fact that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, told us that she had the file and that she was going to make sure that we were going to see important people who were implicated by their own bad behavior.
So in light of her having said that, now to be assured that actually there's nothing to see raises obvious questions.
And what I wanted to do is compare two hypotheses about what's going on and talk about the implications of what it will mean if it's one versus the other.
So can we start with Scott Adams' interesting riff on these revelations very soon?
So I'm not suggesting that Israel was involved in any way.
What I'm saying is, if that were the reason that you're not seeing the truth, it would make perfect sense for the good of the country.
So I would agree, and again, this is purely speculative.
I have no insider information on this at all.
But if it's true that Israel was deeply involved with Epstein, this would be exactly the time not to bring that up.
You know what I mean?
And if I someday learned that Trump knew exactly what was being withheld and he decided to just tell everybody to lie about it, and if he went to Cash Patel and Dan Bongino and Bondi and said, here's the deal.
If you tell the truth about this, again, this is just speculation.
This is not real.
We'll lose the biggest chance for Middle East peace we've ever had.
So I'm going to give you an order that this is such top secret that you just have to lie.
You're just going to have to lie.
And I know he hate it, but we've got to protect this deal.
It's just too big a deal.
Would you then, if that were true, and again, I have no evidence to suggest it is, if that were true, would you tell yourself that Trump had screwed the country or maybe took a chance with his own legacy to do the thing that would be good for the country and good for the world?
Okay.
So that is interesting.
I'm not saying that Scott believes this is the likely explanation, but he advances it as a possibility.
And I would say, formally speaking, that is a hypothesis of what has taken place behind the scenes that could possibly account for Tambondi reversing course and now being on board with the idea that there's nothing to see in the Epstein case.
I want to put forward an alternative hypothesis.
Let's call it the obvious hypothesis, and I will just put it in terms that I think are not the ones we frequently talk in, but that are appropriate.
The alternative hypothesis is that the pattern of behavior where you have an obvious criminal having engaged in the most egregious violations of the law and social norms, where nothing flows from his interactions.
Yes, he's dead.
There's no point in putting him on trial from the point of view of putting him in jail.
But the point is, this is a guy who appears to have trafficked children to other people, and those other people are still unnamed, unprosecuted, right?
So you have criminal behavior, substantial evidence of criminal behavior, and a complete failure of the legal system to do what you would expect it to do in light of the fact that these are the most awful conceivable crimes.
They are exactly the thing that you would expect to be focused on both because they're the most important crimes to prevent and because they are such a focus of public attention.
You would expect the law to work here better than anywhere else and it's not working at all.
What does that mean when that happens?
When that happens, what it typically means is that you have a mafia-style organized crime preventing the system from working.
And I want us to think a little bit about why the mafia is effective.
The mafia is effective because the system is not built to deal with the organized aspect of crime.
When you have criminals who are independent, who are violating laws, you don't catch them all, but you can catch enough of them that actually it's very dangerous to engage in those crimes, and it's not a good bet.
The problem is when you have a conspiracy to prevent the law from functioning, you can overcome that disincentive.
And so imagine for a second that you have an entity that is willing to murder judges who prosecute offenders, okay?
That is willing to strong-arm and murder, if necessary, witnesses in a given case, that they're willing to take out jurors who appear independent-minded.
It doesn't take very much of that kind of behavior before it's very hard to get a conviction, right?
You don't have judges who want to take the case.
If the judge takes the case, they don't want it to result in a conviction that causes them to lose their life.
A witness understands they have very little to gain and everything to lose in portraying the case to the court, etc.
So the point is, it's relatively easy for a brazen conspiracy of a sufficient size to upend the capacity of the law to function.
So in this case, what you've got is a conspicuous failure of the law to function in the obvious ways that you would expect it to.
And I think that a reasonable hypothesis to put on the table is that that's because these crimes are connected to an organized criminal conspiracy that is capable of marshaling enough force to prevent the law from functioning.
Does that explain why Cash Patel and Dan Bontino look like deers in the headlights as they tell us that actually they've looked at the file and there's nothing to see?
It would be consistent with that at the very least.
So, all right, now we've got two hypotheses.
One is that actually there's a greater good that is causing Donald Trump to force his people to lie in an effort to accomplish something that is admittedly very difficult and would be tremendously good for Earth.
Peace in the Middle East.
That would take a lot of jeopardy out of the system for us and everybody else.
First thing I want to do before I get to parsing between these things is I want to revive a conversation that we had either in the last or the stream before last, where we talked about utilitarianism.
Because I think increasingly this question of utilitarianism is haunting more and more issues.
And I don't think it's a simple one.
As I said, well, actually, why don't we just play the clip of me talking about utilitarianism and see how much is captured there?
These things.
So, I mean, in its own way, adjuvants are a transhumanist solution.
Right?
We'll make you better.
Just use aluminum to cause your immune system to feel like it's sick so that it will respond to the antigen we just gave you.
Sounds great on paper, right?
But, you know, of course, once you include the rest of the system, it's not going to work.
So anyway, I guess I have become very concerned that people do not understand the danger of utilitarianism because at some level, rule of thumb, utilitarianism is kind of the right thing to do, right?
In general, a system that does the greatest good for the greatest number does a lot of really good things at usually small cost, right?
On average.
Greatest good for the greatest number, not terrible.
But the point is, wow, you can get to a lot of places once you commit yourself to utilitarianism as the North Star, right?
You can get to slavery easily, right?
You know, imposition on a small number of people does a lot of good for a bunch of other people.
You know, maybe slavery is okay, right?
You probably even get to genocide that way, right?
In the right circumstance.
So the point is that is a slippery slope you don't want to step on.
Right.
So my point here is that Scott Adams' hypothesis is really one of utilitarianism, that there might be a calculus whereby there was something so important that we would have to hold our nose and look past whatever's going on with the Epstein case and the various people to whom he trafficked minors.
I don't think that could possibly be right.
And if it was, I think it raises all kinds of other questions because we are talking about a person, at the very least, who was willing to traffic minors to other people for the purposes of sex.
This is the worst kind of violation imaginable.
So if the idea is, well, we can't talk about that now because it is so closely connected to something that we are negotiating with in order to get peace in the Middle East for the good of humanity, the question is, well, what are the chances that something that is willing to sex traffic minors can be negotiated with in good faith, right?
In other words, are you telling me that something that is as diabolical as that is actually capable of bringing about peace in the Middle East as a result of some negotiation where you think you've got enough leverage?
I don't buy it.
That thing sounds like it's so dangerous that if you're depending on it to be allowing peace in the Middle East, that is very unlikely to work.
It's always going to be on its terms at the very least.
Right.
And so my feeling is, actually, when it comes to people who traffic minors for sex, you have to go after those people no matter what else you think might be going on.
For one thing, you do not want to give those who would do that an incentive to, you know, play games and, you know, be on the playing field in multiple places.
That's effectively the logic of indulgences, where, you know, people are going to get the right to sex traffic children because, you know, they can hold the Middle East hostage.
No, thank you.
Those people have to be in jail immediately.
But the...
I had another point that I wanted to make about.
Right.
There's also a perverse incentive, though, here.
So the idea is that somehow peace in the Middle East might be achievable if we allow Benjamin Netanyahu as the premier of Israel, if we allowed him to marshal this negotiation to get peace.
But the question is, first of all, this guy just forced us into attacking a sovereign country.
So I don't like our odds if this is our best hope for peace is playing his game, because I don't think peace is his game.
But even more to the point, Benjamin Netanyahu is a guy who is not popular at home.
In fact, he's in tremendous trouble in Israel.
And what is saving Benjamin Netanyahu from facing an extremely serious criminal trial is the fear of the Israeli population of their neighbors, a fear that I believe is understandable.
But does this guy have an incentive to allow peace in the Middle East?
Because I think, you know, and I've said this before, his behavior suggests to me that he is not a patriot who is breaking the rules in an effort to make Israel more secure.
I see this guy breaking rules in ways that make Israel less secure by, I think, any reasonable measure.
But as soon as Israel becomes secure, this guy is again in jeopardy of his own corruption.
So I think he has an incentive to make it appear that peace might be just out of reach.
And if we can only bend the rules this way and that way, we can get there.
But he doesn't really have a reason to want peace.
He needs a perpetual state of jeopardy in order to keep the Israeli people from going after him.
And so what we are frequently told is that we in the U.S. must do whatever is necessary, whatever the Israeli regime wants us to do because they're our greatest ally.
They're the only true democracy in the Middle East.
But the question is, are they a true democracy?
I don't think they're behaving like it.
I think were they a true democracy, the citizens of Israel would have to exercise that force to get rid of this guy who is putting them and the rest of us in so much jeopardy.
And their failure to do it calls into question whether or not there's enough democratic force left in their system to treat it as one.
And I would just point out, we in the U.S. have just been through this.
We had a phony regime with a senile president who was ruling through Autopen that was being governed by who knows whom.
And then at the point that that became an untenable situation during the election cycle, he was swapped out for a total empty shirt, somebody who had not won an election and had no business being at the head of the ticket.
So what we had was a failure of our democracy.
And what we proved was that actually there was enough democracy left in our system to throw those people out.
And we can be pretty sure that at the very least, Donald Trump was not, you know, somebody's diabolical plan to keep us mesmerized with another person who works for them because they spent so much effort trying to prevent him from getting to that office that it appears that he is in fact not their choice.
So there's enough democracy left in our system.
If there's enough democracy left in the Israeli system, I would hope that the Israelis themselves would use it to free themselves of Benjamin Netanyahu.
And then maybe we can talk about peace in the Middle East.
But it can't come in the form of us looking past those who would traffic children, whoever those people are.
If they're in an Israeli intelligence service, they got to go.
If they're in an American intelligence service, they've got to go.
I don't care whose intelligence service they're in.
Anybody who would do that in the interest of controlling foreign powers or whatever they're doing is not a decent human being and can't be trusted to navigate in anybody's interest but their own.
And so anyway, the comparison of those two hypotheses, I think, points in the direction of a mafia-style conspiracy preventing justice from happening.
And that's an intolerable situation that we have to overcome.
Agreed.
Anything to add?
All right.
Well, it's been a long adventure.
Today?
Yes, today has been a long adventure.
Today has been a long adventure.
We'll be back next week.
We are not going to do the Q ⁇ A today since we got such a late start today and head injuries and all.
I'm hoping for no new head injuries before next week.
And we will do a Q ⁇ A beginning with the questions that have already come in for today and next week.
Same time, same place.
Wednesdays at 11.30 a.m.
Pacific.
Just to repeat from what we were talking about early in today's podcast with regard to our demonetization four years ago and our apparent remonetization by YouTube now.
What matters to us is that we are able to speak reality and truth as we understand it and correct our errors when we discover that we have made them to you without being interfered with.
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It might stick now.
On YouTube, yeah.
If you have been unsubscribed on YouTube, resubscribe.
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