All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 21, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:07:22
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Paul!
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby!
I love Danny Paul!
And there's another time, subscribe with me!
I love Danny Paul!
Welcome, welcome to The Deling Poet with me, James Deling Poet.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but as you can see, I really am.
I've got Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein here doing a double act on the podcast.
And before we go in to talk about your book, you've got a new book out.
Here it is.
Well, they'll see soon enough.
I want to talk for those of you who aren't familiar with your background about, if you're okay talking about this, about the incident.
Was it in 2017 where you became one of the early victims of cancel culture?
Yeah, it was roughly May 23rd 2017 at approximately 10 in the morning.
You don't remember the details, clearly.
No, it's still a little vague.
But yes, what people may be familiar with is that a group of 50 students that I had never met came to my classroom and started chanting and demanding my resignation or my firing.
And then some will know the backstory to that.
This was at the Evergreen State College.
Where Heather and I were both professors.
Heather was literally the college's most popular professor.
I wasn't too far behind.
But in any case, we had become alarmed.
The new president that the college had hired had initiated some diversity, equity, and inclusion measures.
He had empaneled a committee to look into the rampant white supremacy that was claimed to exist at the college but didn't And then they issued some broad proposals on how to restructure the college to fix the non-problem, and those proposals were a threat to the college's ability to continue to function.
They were antithetical to the liberal arts and would have destroyed any ability to continue to hire faculty in the liberal arts unless they had this particular ideological I mentioned we're a direct threat to the fiscal solvency of the college, and so it was our obligation as professors to challenge them.
Heather happened to be on sabbatical that year, but I started going to every single meeting where bombshells were dropped each time with no opportunity to ask questions, and I started asking questions anyway, which I knew was going to cause me to become public enemy number one, which it did.
But there was really no alternative.
Heather and I were Making use of the extraordinary educational environment at Evergreen, and we had a large community of very committed science students who loved our programs, and this was going to ruin the ability for anyone to do what we were doing or what they would do in other disciplines.
And it should be noted, it was it was never any of our students who were part of the mob, you know, this was this was a ginned up search for witches.
And there were a small number of activist faculty and staff who indoctrinated a rather larger but still relatively small number of students who then relied on and ended up getting the capitulation of a spineless administration.
So you, like a lot of a lot of a lot of Perfectly reasonable academics.
You just wanted to be getting on with the business of teaching your area, which is evolutionary biology.
No, I wouldn't say that.
I wouldn't say that because part of what we were doing, we were teaching evolutionary biology, but a large fraction of what we were doing was teaching at the interface of evolution and human behavior.
This is a very natural topic to teach on and it naturally interfaces with questions of Sex and gender and race and human history.
And so we were dealing with these questions head on in a very rigorous way that students found liberating.
And the idea of swapping in for the opportunity to confront these things with proper scientific tools, swapping in a nonsense story about how every single discrepancy that exists between two populations is inherently the result of oppression.
Right.
It is the inverse of education.
It was educational malpractice.
Let me just say that, I mean, in fact, the very program that you were teaching was in part about the evolution of social movements.
And you actually had your students investigating directly relevant questions just the week before this happened.
In fact, two days before these students that I'd not met previously showed up at my class and insisted I was a racist who needed to go, I had put on the board a model that I was working on of how witch hunting works, right?
And so anyway, we were actually discussing the very topic In analytical terms, at the point that it unfolded and in fact, the quarter descended into chaos for us, but we managed to hold our end of the quarter conferences.
I held them off campus because it wasn't safe for me to be on campus, but a number of my students We're so struck by the analogy between what they saw happen when the protesters who then became rioters showed up at the classroom to come after me and the model that I had put on the board that they actually asked, was there any chance that I had staged this to demonstrate the point?
And the answer was, of course, there's zero to that, as the students assumed.
But nonetheless, the parallel was that close.
Right.
Well, actually, out of interest, what is the evolutionary function of witch hunting?
I mean, is it every culture?
Do they have incidents of this?
I wouldn't say anything like that.
I would say, first, you should look into the work of Girard who does, it's not focused on evolution, but he has a very important and excellent model in which he discusses effectively the need of populations to scapegoat in order to gain cohesion.
And so what I would say is you can look at that story and you can that that's a thin slice within a population, one needs cohesion.
And one of the ways that this is generated is by scapegoating and sacrificing individuals in a more or less symbolic act.
But I would argue that there's also simply put coming together around a shared enemy.
And if you didn't have a shared enemy, then you create one.
Right, and so in any case, the model that I was working on was more or less the game theory that explains why the witch hunt unfolds the way that it does, right?
So this was of course on my mind because as I was fighting a battle with my faculty colleagues, I was recognizing that I was becoming the witch in their eyes.
Which was a preposterous thing.
Many of these people were my friends.
People I had known for a decade and a half who had, you know, broken bread with us.
And yet I was watching myself transformed into some character that they full well knew that I wasn't.
And it had me thinking about the dynamics of this.
And what I was noticing in particular Was that the when we look from the outside at a witch hunt, we see, you know, a lot of people rallying around some nonsense belief and hunting down usually an individual.
What we don't really see, but I was in a position to see from where I was, was that there were a tiny number of people who were interested in having a witch hunt.
There were a fairly large number of people who would go along with it, but never would have instigated it in the first place.
The largest group of people were those who knew better, but were silent.
And then there was a tiny number of people who opposed this.
And the key insight is that those are the witches.
Those who would oppose a witch hunt become the witches inherently.
If you need a scapegoat, the natural thing for this dynamic to shift power in the direction that it does is to target those who resist.
That is, you know, again, to put it from the perspective of someone who might be in the middle of such a thing, the witches aren't chosen randomly.
It's not, we're going to need a witch.
Let's find, let's, let's just pick from the population.
You find those who are non-compliant, who are resistors.
Right.
With actually, that segues rather neatly into a question I was going to ask you much, much later after we got through the preliminaries.
Let's just cut to the chase.
Like me, you two are have been resisting the vaccine tyranny.
You know, as I understand it, you haven't got jabbed.
I certainly haven't.
That you've stood up for ivermectin, which, as we know, is a very, very good prophylactic and curative for this thing they're calling COVID.
And people like us are being singled out and persecuted relentlessly.
I mean, by the mainstream media, by all sorts of... What's going on here?
I mean, why is this happening?
Well, you've more or less answered your own question.
It is the same dynamic and it is about power.
And so, of course, they are targeting those who are speaking to the obvious anomalies and discrepancies and lies and the very same dynamic is unfolding.
But one thing I would point out before Heather comes in here is
The most interesting thing to me is that many people who actually were on the correct side of history for the woke revolution, many people who stood by us as we were accused of being witches have now switched sides and they've become medically woke and they are now deplatforming and stigmatizing and virtue signaling and doing all of the behaviors that we saw
During the evergreen meltdown.
And it is very interesting.
What it suggests is that individuals who resist are not necessarily immune to the dynamics.
It may have to do in many cases with the subject matter in question, which will put them on exactly the other side of the witch hunt.
As opposed to more generally being what we call ash negative right people, people who in a room with Solomon ash, the psychologist from the mid 20th century who asked a group of people to say you know which line is shorter.
Which line is which line is shorter, and there's you know there's one person who's actually being asked and all of the rest are confederates confederates, and the vast majority of people will comply with a factually inaccurate answer if everyone else in the room says that it's true, and they don't know that there's a bunch of confederates in the room and, you know, very few people will comply 100% of the time.
But most people will comply some of the time with a simple statement of falsehood.
So that's one thing that, you know, generally ash negative people who will not comply with untruths, be they intentional or not, are more rare than you would think.
The one thing that I would say to what you said, Brett, about this, you know, what is happening with regard to public policy responses to COVID and with regard to, you know, Unacceptable, politically unacceptable statements like early in the pandemic, maybe it came from a lab.
And you know, we've done, we've had a lot of these but the ones on which we, you know, we and you are still on the hook, as it were, is about vaccine safety and efficacy, and then also the efficacy and indeed safety of other drugs like ivermectin.
Your model that you had Brett's model that you had produced in class that you know just a few days before May 23rd 2017 whenever green blew up had these four categories, and as you just described them you have the witch hunters, a tiny, a tiny minority.
A number of people who are effectively what's sometimes called the flying monkeys the people who are prepared to go along, but aren't necessarily at the forefront.
And then what you say is that the majority of people are actually can actually see what's happening and disagree with it but are silent and are kind of, and are willing, in many cases to be fence sitters to fall whichever way, the wind blows.
And then the small, the small number of people over at the other side, who are who will become the witches because they will not comply in this case.
I do not have a good sense of how relatively large those middle two categories are.
And this, I think, is what is allowing this argument to go on for as long as it is.
Because really, there are so many good analyses that do show that there are many, many adverse events from the vaccines.
And there's plenty of actually like peer-reviewed public research that shows that it loses efficacy, even if they're totally safe, they lose efficacy very quickly.
So given that, how is it that it would appear that the vast majority of people are happily vaccinated, will happily get vaccinated again, and have never run into any problems with it?
I therefore don't know, you know, the relative size of those two middle populations and whether or not it's different in this case than it was, say, with woke campus Well, I believe that part of what's going on actually is the result of the central theme of our book, which is hyper-novelty.
And what we're looking at is an environment in which people are not sharing information in a natural way because the dynamics of the modern internet have allowed them to be intimidated Allowed them to be fooled as to what a normal conversation looks like.
So although many people will know somebody, in many cases more than one somebody, who has had a vaccine injury, those who have had the injuries are reluctant to talk about it because, you know, I mean look at Eric Clapton, right?
Eric Clapton, the man who works with his hands famously, is injured by a vaccine and somehow he's not allowed to talk about it.
I mean, even if he was the only person on Earth who had been injured by these things, it would seem that he has a natural right as a human being to talk about his own experience of injury.
And yet he apparently does not.
He's a demon for doing so.
So in an environment like that, people don't talk about their own injuries.
They don't talk about the patterns that they've seen.
And when they don't talk about it, it makes it seem much rarer than it actually is.
Whereas a natural dynamic You know, we talked before there was evidence of harms.
The thing that alarmed us was that there was a claim that these things were safe when there couldn't possibly be knowledge that would tell you that because they were too new.
Nobody knew what the long-term impacts were.
So, my sense is we said, hey, there may be harms here we don't know about.
And then we're all now talking about myocarditis.
How was that not taken as a vindication of our concern?
Just simply wasn't because that's not allowed.
And the way it's not allowed has to do with the hyper novelty of the internet.
So we've just now totally screwed our chances of getting this video onto YouTube, because because they're banning this conversation, right, left and center.
But you're absolutely right that that the the degree of cognitive dissonance that is going on among the vaccinated, whereby people are having All manner of unpleasant side effects ranging from blood clots to abnormal periods in case of women to myocarditis and young people particularly.
And instead of going, hang on a second, we ought to put this on hold while we investigate further.
People are not making the connection between their their jabs and these side effects.
There's a sort of collective self-delusion going on.
So you reckon that it's it's possibly is it is it because the internet and social media is in the hands of institutions like Facebook and and Twitter which are Committed to the Big Pharma pro-vaccine narrative.
Is that what's going on?
That dissenting voices are being kicked off?
Or is something else going on?
Now, a brief message from our first ever sponsor, Getter.
People across the world are being banned and silenced on social media for expressing their right to free speech.
And for far too long, we've been helpless to do anything about it.
Until now.
Join Getter, the social media platform that supports free speech and opposes cancel culture.
On Getter, that's G-E-T-T-R, you can express your political beliefs without fear of our oppressive tech overlords coming after you.
Getter is the fastest growing social media platform in history, with nearly 3 million users.
And on December the 8th, it will be sponsoring London's first Counter Conference, a meeting of politicians, commentators and media stars from across the world, all united around one purpose, to fight back against censorship and political correctness.
Nigel Farage, Lawrence Fox and Getter CEO Jason Miller will be leading discussions with hundreds of like-minded freedom fighters.
To buy your ticket for this December's Counter Conference, go to the O2's website, theo2.co.uk, that's an O, not a zero, and make sure you join the conversation at getter.com.
So let me just first say, that is part of it for sure and I think with regard to the individual level of response, you know, once, once again to go back to this you know most people aren't generally ash negative.
Most people also are not.
In the habit of I believe that almost everyone is capable of and this is what we're experiencing in our classroom and this is how it is that we wrote the book that we did most people are capable of actually having a model of the world wherein when new things come at them, they try to derive from first principles what is true.
I think most people are capable of that, and that's what we saw in our classrooms.
Most people are not dumb or lazy or incompetent, but most people are in the habit of acting as if they are dumb and lazy and incompetent, in part because of the complexity that is coming at them.
And I would just say, you know, one thing that is revealed here is the just blatant hypocrisy at all sorts of trivial levels.
And here's just an easy one.
In 2017, one of the things that we were hearing from the woke ideologues above all else was, you know, you can't use science, you can't use logic, you can't use the tools of the Enlightenment, because what is the one source of information above all else?
It's my lived experience.
Right.
And now, in 2021, we have exactly the opposite.
All of these people's lived experiences are not to be considered.
They aren't even allowed to talk about having had them.
So, this is just an obvious, simple, at one level trivial, but at one level completely revealing inconsistency and hypocrisy between the two ideologies.
Yeah, I think, I think you're exactly, exactly hitting the nail on the head.
And in some sense, I think we should look at ourselves as in a giant modern version of the Ash experiment, right?
The internet is like a large room in which the mainstream narrative is being blared at us.
These things are safe and effective.
People who claim otherwise are Um, somehow superstitious, or anti-scientific, or delusional, or grifters, or whatever any of these accusations might be.
And so the point is, most people in the ASH experiment heard others insist that the shorter line was in fact longer.
And this is the key evolutionary part.
What ASH does not say, Is that there is a reason of, in fact, a very good reason that human beings are terrified to be out of step with the mainstream consensus, and that is 5000 years ago, 10,000, 100,000 years ago, that was a very dangerous place to be.
And even if the mainstream was mistaken, one did not want to be The odd man out.
It's one thing to be the odd man out in a discussion of, you know, can you shoot the arrow as far as that tree?
It's another thing on matters of social belief, and in fact, steering of the collective in some direction.
So, I don't know why.
I assume, of course, based on the relentless coordinated response that comes back when you make certain claims.
But what I can say is in light of a chorus broadcasting a message, these things are safe and effective.
There is no alternative.
And this is the way out of the pandemic, even though all three of those statements are false.
Right.
If everybody is saying them, the pressure to simply accept that they must be true is immense.
And it is a tiny fraction of the population that in the face of a chorus saying these things would say, actually, that doesn't match what I see at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would imagine that, by the way, are you familiar with the concept of the weird sheep?
No, I fear that I am the weird sheep sometimes.
Well, you're about to discover that you are.
Okay, so I was talking to a shepherd about this, and he was telling me that every flock of sheep has a weird sheep in it.
Which doesn't do all the things that the other sheep do.
And the function of the weird sheep is in extreme and bizarre situations.
For example, say the whole of their field gets blanketed in snow and it disguises everything and they don't know where they are.
The weird sheep will maybe climb up onto a wall just poking up above the snow and give them a, you know, Take charge.
And in the same way, we need Weird Sheep, of which you both are, and I am, to guide the herd when it's doing crazy things, when it's lost its head, and to lead it into the paths of righteousness.
Well, that's the idea, but of course the danger is That the weird sheep gets executed or sacrificed or whatever because it doesn't fit in with the consensus.
And I would imagine that in terms of evolutionary biology, quite often that whatever gene it is that leads us to be weird gets cut out of the system through being murdered or executed or whatever else.
I mean, the price for being a weird sheep is quite high, isn't it?
It is.
And so I know you have a lot to say here, but this is very much like the model, never having heard of the weird sheep before, that we actually start the book with, but then expand on quite a lot in the penultimate chapter, I think, of culture versus consciousness.
The idea being that cultural things are those which have already passed the test of time and are easily handed off to other people.
And consciousness is the state you go into when you need to innovate and then exchange new ideas.
And there's an analogy to be made because those are somewhat different than standard uses of the terms culture and consciousness.
But there's an analogy to be made to orthodoxy and heterodoxy and also the sacred and the shamanistic.
The idea being that what we have now with, say, COVID response is a incredibly rapidly obtained orthodoxy.
And those of us who are on the outs, who are the weird sheep who've climbed the wall, are the heterodox voices.
And those voices will be necessary, even though, in general, heterodoxy, or shamans, to use the other analogy here, you know, orthodoxy is the sacred, heterodoxy is the shamanistic, there's going to be a much higher error rate, right?
If you are in the business of being weird all the time and climbing up on walls to see where you are, You're more likely to be wrong sometimes than those who simply follow the herd.
But there are conditions in which you are absolutely required and the herd would entirely perish if it got rid of all of the heterodoxy, all of the shamans, all of the weird sheep.
Yeah, I was heading the same place.
There's a day-to-day cost.
When things are going well, there's a day-to-day cost to the weird sheep, right?
It's not pulling in the same direction exactly.
But the point is that cost is paid back many times over by the fact that that is the individual that spots the thing when nobody else does, because they're going along with the convention.
And so, yes, this is exactly an evolutionary dynamic that you would see.
It fits.
We talk not about groups.
Groups is a fraught and broken concept in evolution, but we've replaced it with lineage, which is a responsible, robust, rigorous concept.
And the idea is that lineages are again and again saved by this rare individual that has this other characteristic.
Now, the fascinating thing is when you are a weird sheep, you end up being exiled, as it were, Now, this presumably does not happen in a true herd of sheep.
Of course I've heard of sheep.
Do you think I am an idiot?
Sorry, but the, you know, flock of sheep, presumably the, I think I'm stealing it from Laurel and Hardy of all things, but no, it's actually, it's Abbott and Costello.
In any case, most people will not, they're too young to have heard of them probably.
You were talking about sheep.
Yes, I was.
Sheep presumably tolerate this behavior because they don't have much of a choice.
In humans, the Girardian model where the weird sheep is targeted and driven out is all too likely to unfold.
And for those who wish to gain power, it may be necessary because the weird sheep is the one who's going to freak out when some bad change is being made.
But At this new scale that we're functioning at, this hyper-novel scale, what one finds is that you meet the other weird sheep, right?
It's not that there is one weird sheep, it's that every little flock has weird sheep and they're constantly being ejected, which then puts you in contact with some of the world's most interesting, independent thinkers.
Some of them well-known, some of them obscure, but fascinating group of people.
And, furthermore, that is the flip side of, you know, why is this able to derange us so globally right now?
It's because of the control that social media and a handful of companies have.
And yes, they're trying to exert their control, but here we are talking.
You know, what are the chances, absent social media and a global information world, that the three of us would be talking right now, next to zero?
Totally.
I mean, if anything good has come out of this horror that we're experiencing now, it is that people like us have met.
I mean, for example, look, you guys are self-described progressives, aren't you?
I would never have called myself progressive, or whatever the opposite of progressive is.
Reactionary, is it?
I don't know.
But I was definitely never progressive.
But we have a lot more in common, intellectually, than our differences.
And that's great.
The question is, because to continue this sheep analogy for a moment, I suspect that actually the people, the farmer who's looking after us, supposedly, actually has malign intent.
I suspect that we're all being led, I think we're all being led to the slaughter.
And I, as chief weird sheep in my flock, I don't want this to happen.
And you presumably don't want it to happen either.
So how are we going to win over The rest of the herd, sorry, the flock, which currently are thinking, hey, the farmer loves us and it's just going to be great.
And we're just going to be barring, you know, happily away for the rest of our long, long lives.
You know, we're not going to end up as mutton or lamb chops or whatever.
How do we how do we reach the rest of them?
Well, and again say something first and then let you go.
This one of the errors of looking back on times in history that were obviously deranged is that the modern mind always thinks it would have known.
And, you know, we're seeing this experience actually in one of our son's history classes where they're studying, they're literally studying, it's Hitler and Castro and other extraordinary figures from history who had what is being called a cult of personality.
And there is no connection being made between those historical times and the censorship and the cutting down of some voices and elevating of others without any evidence for why you should be doing so.
And the modern times, and it is that near impossibility of seeing where you are in the moment.
And you know what you what the question that you're asking which I'll let Brett answer more fully is, at what point within a flock within a herd within a population of people.
Is it time to switch from the orthodoxy to the heterodoxy to move from the supposed safety the historical safety of the sacred into the more chaotic but utterly necessary shamanistic, and that's you know that and and how do we do it right now is the question that I hear.
So, this brings us back, actually, to the conversation we were having at the top about what was going on in our classrooms before Evergreen so publicly melted down.
And the answer to your question, how do you wake the others to what is taking place, should be prediction.
Prediction is the coin of the realm.
To the extent that we have a model that says, actually, this public health response is not only Incompetent.
It actually goes beyond that.
It's the inverse of what you should do if you want to control COVID, as we do.
Right?
That predicts things about what you're going to find.
Now, we can fight about ivermectin and say there either is or isn't evidence that it's effective, and we can talk about what evidence trumps what other evidence and why, but The fact is, we should say, well, if the response to COVID is actually the inverse of what it should be, then that predicts something about what the public health response will say about vitamin D, which is absolutely nothing.
Right?
Vitamin D is the cheapest, safest, most useful intervention on the map in all likelihood.
And it's necessary for all sorts of other reasons.
Yeah.
And even if we were completely wrong about its utility with COVID, which is ever less likely, the collateral benefits that come from getting people in northern climes to supplement during the winter would be worth it on their own.
And yet... When was the last time you heard any public policy pronouncement advocating for vitamin D?
So, the point is, it's a prediction, okay?
In our case, are Brett and Heather crazy?
They said that these things weren't safe when all of the medical authorities were telling us they were, and Brett and Heather, what did they say?
They said, we don't know anything about the long-term effects, and that this is a case where we should exercise the precautionary principle.
Well, now we all know about myocarditis.
So at some level, yeah, it's possible that we're crazy and got lucky.
It's also possible that our track record of being right ahead of the public discussion is telling you something.
And the fact that we're saying something now that may sound preposterous and insane does not mean that we have finally lost our minds.
Yeah, it means that once again, you're behind the curve.
You can't see what's in front of you because you're paying too much attention to authorities who speak in very unambiguous terms about things like safety and efficacy.
When the evidence is, I mean, look, they told you these things were effective, right?
They told you that and now they're telling you six months later, they've lost almost complete effectiveness and you need a booster.
Right?
That fits better the model of skepticism of what they were telling us than it does fit the model of what they assured you six months ago.
So that's how we should wake people.
The problem is... By pointing out Risky predictions that were borne out and inviting people to continue to listen to those people who have a history of making risky predictions that were borne out.
Yeah.
And the fact is that's that's the instruction nugget there.
I mean, that's first of all, it's how a wise person should navigate when you know that authority is very frequently wrong.
The purpose of science is to tell us when our authoritative viewpoint is wrong.
That's effectively what it's for.
Science is not a matter of following experts.
It's a method for figuring out when the experts are incorrect.
And the problem, though, and The bitter pill that we have to swallow is, although that is the mechanism for waking people up, the historical precedent for a situation where you have a tyrannical authority spreading lies, demonizing people, in fact, demonizing an entire class of people.
The historical precedent for people waking up and stopping that slide is pretty hard to find.
And so what I keep saying to people is so far, I think landed on mostly deaf ears is look, the indications that we are somewhere on that list of historical atrocities were early, but that what we are doing now, for example, demonizing of the unvaccinated as if they are the source of disease.
That's a very clear indication that tyrants are going to scapegoat people and that those people could face dire consequences.
Yeah.
Right.
Another thing on the list is vaccinating young children.
Right.
Vaccinating children when there's absolutely no medical justification for doing it from the point of view of their well-being.
In fact, I can make a very strong argument that the inverse is obviously the right choice.
But okay, we don't really have a precedent for a population demonizing a minority as disease-ridden Right.
And then coming to its senses and going back to behaving in a decent way towards each other.
Maybe it exists, but I don't know what that precedent is.
So at some level, I think we need to be telling people with a certain amount of alarm.
We appear to be on the list of we are on the run up to some kind of an atrocity.
We don't want to be on that list.
History will look back and say, you should have avoided it.
You should have known.
But that message is now itself being demonized.
So what shall we do with this so that we can at least, in this case, staunch the bleeding and return to being decent to each other and return to the question of what is best for us to do with respect to this pandemic?
Yeah.
And I was really hoping you were going to Confound what I've been thinking, which is very much on your lines, and I've noticed I think nine months ago, I started reading the first articles in which, in different publications, these had clearly been placed to seed an idea, and they were seeding the idea that the unvaccinated were the problem, and that what measures can we take to deal with the unvaccinated?
It was already taken as a given that the unvaccinated were the problem.
I've seen this in newspapers, and it's been accelerating.
It is clearly that the trajectory is not good.
I don't see how it can end well.
And you're absolutely right that by making predictions which come true, I mean, it's a fact that the supposed conspiracy theorists are the ones who've been right every time.
But it seems that our being right ain't enough.
It doesn't seem to turn the oil tank around.
People are just So where do we go from here?
The problem is Cassandra at some level, right?
Cassandra's right, but she's not listened to.
And you would think, I mean, part of the irony here is that we've been handed the most beautiful tools, right?
We can say Cassandra to you and you know what we're talking about.
We have Orwell, right?
Are we experiencing Orwell?
Well, not exactly.
This is like a bit Orwell.
It's a bit Kafka.
It's a bit Huxley.
It's a bit Brazil, right?
Terry Gilliam.
It's all of these things.
It's got elements of them.
And the point is, do you really need it to match perfectly one narrative in order for you to spot the analogy?
Or can you simply notice, hey, why am I in this section of the library all of a sudden, right?
Why am I debating whether I'm facing Orwell or Kafka?
Isn't that a bad sign in and of itself?
Well, one thing that is true, and it's been a while, it's probably time to go back and actively read Brave New World in 1984 and at least watch Brazil, that takes less time.
But I believe, and Kafka, that in each of these cases, we are dropped into a system that is already gone.
Haywire.
Right.
And I don't know and you know please, please, I would love to hear examples if I'm unaware of them, of narrative because it does need to be narrative in order to convince people you can't just use numbers and graphs, and because especially the enumerate are more easily tricked by bad numbers and graphs.
I don't know of the narrative that describes the dissent, the move away from a system that appeared to be functional and had a number of sort of, you know, ash negative people wandering around or at least were able to become facultatively ash negative when presented with stuff that that slow move into The tyranny has been described historically with regard to, say, 1930s Germany, but what is it like on the ground for people?
What are they actually seeing?
And maybe the closest is, I recently read Elie Wiesel's Night, and early in that very slim tome, he describes in just a few pages what it felt like for Jews in, gosh, I can't remember where he was, Poland maybe, to start seeing the Germans come in.
It's just a couple of pages, but even those few words are so powerful to see the description of the cognitive dissonance, of the denial, of the inability to see it from the people who would be slaughtered, you know, less than a few years later.
So I think Kundera has some descriptions that would be useful.
I'm also thinking there's a film, I think it's called A Film Unfinished, which is in some sense, it's not exactly the right document because, of course, The Nazis are so iconic, and we all know something about them, so we can't be surprised in the same way.
But the film Unfinished is effectively a Nazi propaganda film that was unfinished, that was rediscovered in modern times.
And what the I've forgotten who the filmmaker is quite brilliant, but it is edited so that you see the filmmaking in process, right?
It's like you're backstage watching the Nazi propaganda be created in the Warsaw Ghetto.
And I think we need to start thinking in this mindset because for those of us who have paid the price of being the weird sheep in this situation.
It's not fooling us, and it's not even high enough quality to fool you, right?
Suddenly, every screen is blaring about a horse dewormer on the same afternoon, and it's like, okay, I know that there's some coordinated thing that decided, okay, we're going to go at them with the horse dewormer thing, right?
And suddenly, you know, it's all this chorus, right?
That's what it's like backstage as you see, you know, the lines being pulled to fly the person across the stage.
It's not good enough to fool you.
If you're not sitting in the place that you're expected to be, and I think we need to wake people up to the fact that look.
You think that this is a battle between two perspectives, and one of them is very clear, and the other one is preposterous, and it's cobbled together out of bailing wire and duct tape, right?
That's not how it is.
You're standing where they want you to stand in order to see a clear picture.
If you were standing anywhere else, you'd see a very different one.
Try it.
We dare you.
Take a peek behind the curtain.
Yeah.
Just move 20 feet to your left and see if you don't detect that you are being fed a story that doesn't add up.
Yeah, yeah.
Going back to that Nazi analogy, the rise of the Nazis is the most taught thing in history classes in English schools.
I don't know whether it's the same with America.
The two things you're taught now in history are The rise of the Communist Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Nazis.
And people know everything there is to know about the Nazis, apart from the most obvious fact about the Nazis, which is that they were not unique in history.
The idea that somehow there was this sort of aberration, this thing that happened in early 1930s Germany, which we're never going to repeat again, is completely the wrong lesson, because Similar things are happening now.
And yet, as you said, you mentioned earlier, people are not aware of what's going on now.
They can't seem to look at it objectively.
Right.
And in fact, we are in some sense at a disadvantage because the Nazis are the iconic example.
As a very clever student of mine pointed out, though, they did us the favor of wearing skulls on their hats.
Right.
Like they were cartoon villains.
And, you know, it doesn't reduce their villainy.
But what it means is it's harder to spot things that do this in a less Elaborate and exaggerated form, but even the Nazis did not intend to acknowledge what they had done, right?
This is something that surprised me when I started to study the Nazis for myself, rather than be fed what we were fed in school, which is that they fully intended to cover their crime.
And in fact, they, the Russians overwhelmed them and prevented that plan from unfolding, right?
It happened some places, it was in complete other places, but They didn't manage to do away with the evidence.
So, I would just finally say, it is very important to correct for the fact that when we distill history down and we say, here's what you need to know about the Nazis, right?
We are distilling it down to the most extreme stuff, right?
Which is also the most obvious stuff.
And so it leads you into a false sense of security.
And in some sense, I think for me, the most important things that I've learned about the Nazis were always when I decided to pursue my own understanding.
Right.
And it wasn't that I was pursuing an understanding because I needed more evidence of the villainy.
Right.
There's plenty of evidence of the villainy.
I just wanted to understand how it worked.
Right.
And so there are facts when you study the Nazis.
You know, the death camps, the ones that were not labor camps, right, were built so that the front edge looked like a train station.
And it, in fact, you know, had a clock that was supposed to indicate when your train was moving you on to the next station.
thing.
It was all stagecraft, right?
These pictures that emerged from somebody's attic of the Nazis at play, right?
There's a very famous picture that really struck me of Nazis near Auschwitz, I believe, Enjoying blueberries, right?
It's like men and women, young men and women, members of the Nazi party, having blueberries where, you know, over the hill people are being murdered by the thousands, right?
And it's these things that we need to broadcast because the point is, it's not going to look like what you saw in your history book.
It's of course going to look like something else, because if it looked like what you saw in your history book to the average person walking down the street, it would have unfolded very differently.
Right.
One of the things that was true of Brett and me when we were college professors is we almost never used textbooks.
And in the modern teaching of science usually textbooks are used and the reason we didn't is because science isn't its conclusions, and the way that the scientific process to the degree that it's
Represented at all in textbooks is represented as in this linear way, you know first this then this then this always in that order always this way and really what it is is that it's it's a process and if it has predictive power and if you can falsify possible hypotheses then you should go try to do so and the longer that you can you fail to falsify your hypotheses the more likely they are to be true the longer the that they have stood the test of time the more likely they are to be true.
So, this is the case for how it is that you create in people, in the case of us, our students, a model which relies not on accepting the voices that you see coming through your screens, but one in which you understand.
Also, you know, you don't fly to the other side and say you're going to question absolutely everything all the time, but develop a model wherein You can begin to assess what people are saying and what the evidence is, and you're going to want to come to trust some people some people are trustworthy but you don't start off by trusting anyone.
And you know this this indeed is, it's really the point of the whole book you know we are evolutionary biologists and Yes, it's all evolutionary, but it's about understanding ourselves well enough at everything from the individual to the population level so that you can make decisions that then can become easier.
It is a joyous effort, actually, to say, you know what?
I'm not just going to accept to go completely afield from what we've been talking about this hour, but I'm not going to accept in the 1980s that fat is bad for me.
Anymore that I'm going to simply accept whatever the dietary suggestions right now are, I'm going to think about what it is that I am as a human being, what it is that my ancestors have eaten and not just you're not just the hunter gatherers from the African savannah but also the agriculturalists, because almost all of us have been agriculturalists for 10 to 12,000 years so we've got we're adapted to that as well.
I'm going to think it through so that I can eat, I can know how to eat real food and keep myself healthy.
And I will then become more resistant to whatever the, you know, currently fashionable proclamations from, you know, Big Food are.
And then you can apply that to how do you become more resistant to the current proclamations from Big Pharma.
From, you know, from social media, from, you know, well, the moniker that we talk about in the book is we know about junk food, right?
We know that if we can train ourselves to love real food, it's actually more thrilling and enjoyable as well as better for us.
Now we need to work on the junk media and the junk sex and the junk Public health policy and everything else and become and become more enriched and more healthy, but also just more thrilled with life because we have a more complete model of what humans are and we have better relationships as well.
Yeah, actually, I think this is a this is a very close connection between these conversations that in a sense, there is a distinction between the world that one sees if one follows the evidence with a model that attempts to make the safest assumptions about what is likely to be true that it can make.
If you follow that evidence, you end up with one picture.
If you follow what the experts tell you the evidence says, you end up with a very different picture.
And so our book is, in some sense, an elaboration of what we were doing in the classroom, which was presenting a model for how it is that you find evidence, that you put it together, that you build a model, that you fix your model where your model is wrong.
That's what we were teaching people to do.
And the point is, this is kind of a weird sheep book because the odd fact is, if you do this thing, it will put you on the outs with the mainstream narrative, right?
And it will make you the weird sheep.
And the question is, and it's not a simple question, I don't pretend that it is.
Do you want to be the weird sheep?
It's really the matrix, right?
It's this question, the character cipher in the matrix decides, you know what?
Reality ain't all that grand.
I know this isn't a real steak, but it tastes like one.
I want to go back in.
Right.
And the fact is those people exist.
But do you want to be one?
That's the question.
Do you want to be the cypher character?
Or do you want to live a different life?
Because you're actually following evidence in the way that people that the best scientific minds have for thousands of years.
And by the way, it doesn't have to be bleak.
Right.
Well, for one thing, you meet all the other red sheep.
Well, the choice going down that road is not inherently one of dystopian hellscape that we are shown for those who resist in general in the narratives.
Yeah, I was just picking you up on one point.
You talk in your book about about dairy products and how, in a lot of cultures, there is lactose intolerance.
But if, historically, you come from a part of the world which has had dairy and sought ways of preserving milk to make it last longer, so yogurt, as you call it, or cheese, which I love,
And that knowledge, I suppose this is the first principles that you stress in the book, enables you to think beyond the current fashionable narrative, which is cheese is really bad, dairy is really bad, you don't eat it.
And you'll think to yourself, hang on a second, how come cheese is suddenly bad now when my people have been eating this stuff and thriving on it for millennia, probably, Hundreds of millennia even, I would guess.
Yes.
Now that's, excuse me, that's exactly right.
Cheese isn't bad for you.
If you're from some populations, if you're from some people, there's a good chance it doesn't agree with you and is therefore somewhat bad for you.
And all you have to do is be in touch with your own body enough to recognize if you're not one of the people who can eat cheese very effectively.
And probably part of what your body tells you is you don't like it.
You know, I don't like that thing is, excuse me again, I don't like that type of food is in at least a somewhat simpler environment, a very good proxy for that isn't good for me.
And there's not going to be a universal that isn't good for me.
Cheese is bad for all humans.
Of course, it's not.
Of course, it's not.
Just as you said, we've been making and eating cheese for thousands of years, at least.
So, first of all, one correction, it won't be hundreds of millennia, it will be less than 10 on cheese.
Okay, thanks for correcting.
Because it's a post-agricultural phenomenon.
But one of the lessons in the book is that we can infer from the very long history of both the eating of dairy products and the making of cheese and yogurt.
That these things, I am struggling to find an alternative, but the phrase won't leave me alone, that cheese is safe and effective, right?
That's what we can infer from that, because if it were bad for you, it would have been eliminated because those who were cheese skeptical... I think you should start writing ad campaigns for the cheese lobby.
It's past its phase three trial phase, definitely.
It has.
Yeah, exactly.
It has.
We could probably find some randomized control And it's so widespread that we can tell that an investment, you know, we talk in the book about why it's so valuable, right?
It's basically using microorganisms to spoil dairy products to preserve them over the long term because the beauty of dairy products is the flip side of it is that they're so fragile, right?
Because they're not designed to last.
They're designed to go directly from mammary gland to baby.
Right, they're not built in a durable form.
And so we make them durable by teaming up with microorganisms.
It's a very cool evolutionary story.
But the point is, evolution allows us, an evolutionary model allows us to look at certain things and say, you know what, I don't know why that works.
But I can tell that it must, at least for the populations that have a thousand year history of doing it, because if it didn't work, it would have been eliminated by selection.
And the fact is that logic does not allow you to go into the supermarket and say, hey, if it's here, it's safe, right?
What is the safety of the things in the supermarket depend on?
Well, in the US, it depends on the FDA having done their job right.
Did the FDA do its job right?
Well, that would depend on corruption being a very minor problem.
Is corruption a minor problem?
Actually, I see evidence that it's the opposite.
Maybe I should be a little cautious in the supermarket, right?
So, it's that question.
You know, you've got the evolutionary past, you've got the hyper-modern, the hyper-novel present, and knowing how the past worked empowers you in the present to understand where you need to be cautious and where you can let your guard down.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, normally I like to end my podcast on an optimistic note, but I think I'm going to go the other way this time, because it seems to me, look, one thing you must both have learned from studying different cultures and past civilizations and so on, is that We've established that A, the weird sheep person or the shaman, whatever, is an anomalous character.
They're an outlier.
They're not representative of the generality.
And generally, most people are geared towards saving their own skins, self-preservation.
And so does that not uh suggest that things aren't going to get better anytime soon because people are more interested in making themselves agreeable to the dominant stupidity of the times in order to save their skins than they are to say than they are to be the little boy who points out the emperor's wearing no clothes because then then he gets ostracized or worse i i i i can't see any any cause for optimism in what we're seeing now
Well, there is cause for optimism.
Again, I think it's not like, you know, I would love to say, hey, look, we've hit bottom.
Right.
Things are going to get better from here.
I don't know that that's going to happen.
Things could get quite dire.
But at some level, their story has gotten pretty ridiculous.
And the fact of it having gotten ridiculous, and the fact that many people do know somebody who's been injured, and the fact that people can detect that as bad a disease as COVID is, it's not a threat to certainly young, healthy people.
Most healthy people are not Deeply threatened and what's more a solution that protects the vast majority of those who would be vulnerable is available, you know, at your local supermarket in the form of vitamin D, right?
But the fact is there is an alternative story and the problem.
Your people are interested in saving their own hide.
We have that in us.
We also have a lineage orientation, right?
It does not make any sense evolutionarily to save your own hide if the population that you're part of goes extinct.
So we have the instinct also to behave on behalf of our lineage and that's being hijacked.
That's being used to get us to comply.
And the answer is, hey, those people who are telling you to comply, they're not your friends.
When they say the word evidence, it doesn't mean what that word is supposed to mean.
When they use the terms of science, they are in fact misleading you.
And that should be telling you, you need to, you need to tune into some other mechanism for making sense of the world.
That is a message that is catching on with more and more people.
So, um, I think that there is a very real possibility of a local corrective here.
But I am much more concerned that there will not be the reckoning that we need.
And what has been revealed is that too many people are all too willing to go along with what is patently insane.
And that that means that the next round will be worse.
The reason that I have sort of very local optimism at the moment is, and I don't, I actually am not, I'm not feeling optimistic these days.
Historically, I've been more optimistic than Brett about things.
And I think that that is, that is flipped at the moment.
But the one thing that looks at all, What's hopeful to me, just locally, is that, unfortunately, these vaccines proved to be a prototype that weren't up to the challenge.
Fabulous technological platform on which they were based with a lot of potential, I think, maybe, still, but these ones aren't doing it and they lose efficacy within two to three months.
And, you know, boosters, which Which are now in the, you know, people are beginning to get boosters are also not going to maintain their efficacy for more than, you know, six months or so, and at the point, you know what what does fully vaccinated mean anyway.
Right.
If you were vaccinated early in 2021.
Uh, to the degree that the vaccines are effective at all, you have very little of that value left at this point.
Many people who happily got vaccinated the first time will not get boosters.
We, we, you know, it's anecdotal at the level that we've heard it, but I believe that that is going to be the difference, that that is why we're not actually seeing mandated boosters.
And at the point that mandated boosters don't happen and it becomes more widely known that actually, therefore, if you were vaccinated more than six months ago, you're effectively not vaccinated.
That story falls apart, I think.
Now there are ways in which it couldn't, there are ways in which that could be obscured, but I think that falls apart because there's just no saving this particular treatment that has been pushed on everyone.
That said, even if I'm right, that falls apart, therefore, and that the vaccine story Disappears as the one treatment that we all need for COVID.
I fear that it will do so in a controlled fail way.
And that, like I said, we won't have the reckoning society-wide that we need.
We won't require of people that they, at the very least, go to a mirror and look in the mirror and say, what did I believe?
And what beliefs did I proclaim were necessary for other people to have?
And where was I wrong?
Where do I need to correct my own model so that I do not make this kind of mistake again?
I fear that that reckoning is not going to happen, in which case whatever is coming down the pike at us will just be worse.
Well, I just hope that somehow, when all this is over, people find this podcast and know that at least some people were warning about what's coming our way.
Because, yeah, you're right.
I wonder whether there will be that.
I think the entirety of our civilization is to play for here.
I think it's that bad.
Yeah, I agree.
And we are few.
And they are many.
We are not as few as you think.
That's true.
There's the optimism again.
There's a question about how many are saying what they see.
Those are few.
How many see but cannot figure out how to say it?
There are many.
And part of the thing that we have to figure out is how to make it safe for those who can see it.
But many have legitimate reasons to fear.
Many may not be able to continue to support their families if they speak up and say what they've seen.
So I think we have to be sympathetic to that hazard.
But in effect, We have to make it safe for people to speak.
This is why speech is in jeopardy here and why we are in danger of suspending normal rules that would protect the free exchange of ideas is that there are certain ideas that are a hazard to the public health narrative and whatever it is that it is acting in service of.
But there are many more of us than is obvious from a quick assessment.
Now, before you go, you must tell me, plug your book, tell me the title, tell me where people can buy it.
Yeah.
I was drinking dairy this morning, which mostly agrees with me.
And I'm dying, exactly.
Our book is A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.
It's a book we've been talking about writing for over 10 years.
And you can see from this conversation, the book has nothing to do with COVID.
Indeed, we submitted the first draft In March of 2020 just as people were beginning to get glimmers of early March of 2020 just as as code was beginning to take over the world.
We in it, provide an evolutionary model some of which is standard some of which is new.
And explore really all of the systems that humans engage in.
We have chapters on food and sleep and medicine and health, sex and gender, relationship, parenthood, childhood, school, lots of aspects of adulthood, as I mentioned earlier, culture and consciousness, and then society-wide discussions of how it is that we can move forward with, you know, massively equal opportunity for all as much as it's possible.
By the way, when I was reading your book, I was thinking I was a I was envying you your your the amazing places you've been together.
That must have been really great that that that key that you stayed on where you were snorkeling for three days with nobody else around and all this.
And, you know, you've been to Costa Rica.
I'd love to go and almost got killed by a flash flood.
But that's that's the hazard.
That's the risk you take.
But We're not going to be able to do this again, are we?
I mean, those of us who've traveled, we're very lucky because I don't reckon that the way the world's going, they're going to let us do this stuff again.
Well, here's the thing.
There are an awful lot of people who have gotten used to the benefits of Western civilization.
And I'm not arguing that there isn't a lot of room to continue and to fix what parts of the model didn't work.
But there are an awful lot of people who have tasted freedom, who understand that it is actually the magic ingredient that causes things to work, to become more prosperous, to become fairer over time.
And there is the question of how long we're going to put up with this.
So, it may be that although on paper they have the power to make us comply at such a level that there's nothing we can do, it is likely that the human spirit will reject that.
And at some point, they will be surprised to find that their magic pronouncements don't work on people anymore.
And I hope that's sooner rather than later.
I really hope he's right because travel is the way.
Yeah, travel is the way to expand your horizons.
I was gonna say, go human spirit.
You're right.
Yeah, go human spirit.
Good.
Well, Brett and Heather.
Thank you very much for being on The Delling Pod.
May I remind my beloved listeners and viewers that freedom isn't free, and please support me, if you can, on Subscribestar and on Patreon, or at my website, dellingpodworld.com, where you can buy a special friend badge and maybe give me some Bitcoin or something.
Thank you very much.
That was really, I'm sorry we couldn't talk longer.
I have to go make a curry now, as I mentioned earlier, and you've probably got, you've got your cats to look after.
I know.
I love the cats.
I wish I could have involved my cat in this podcast as well.
We could have had a cat in.
But there we are.
Cats don't do Zoom.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
That's been really fun.
Thanks a lot.
Bye-bye.
It's been great.
Bye now.
▲
Export Selection