Bret and Heather 97th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Lift Off!

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast live stream number 97 it is am i correct about that dr heinen you are correct third time's a charm it wasn't that charmed but uh no it wasn't that was not our wonderful producer's fault actually we had asked him to turn off the audio so that we could talk beforehand but uh he's now saying it was his fault isn't that amazing 17 year old unbelievable yeah yeah we are not trading him out for anything nope you can't have him no no he's uh he's a good one he's a keeper as you say around here indeed all right uh here we are man a lot has happened much has happened a lot has happened in the world and a lot has happened in our world our book came out on tuesday and we're going to be talking about it throughout the show today and and some of some of how that feels and has landed and is going to continue to manifest but first we're going to start with a few other logistics three ads today and then we'll launch right into the main part of the show so um oh i guess i did want to say if you've gotten the book and you've read it please consider writing a review on amazon uh and the reviews help us with the algorithms and unfortunately we are all um in thrall to some degree to the algorithms resistance is futile that is not the message of the book resistance is not futile uh but um short term uh we would like to uh not game but accurately have the algorithms reflect what people are saying to us privately so if anyone has told you that resistance is futile pick up a copy of our book to see a well-reasoned counterpoint excellent um we're streaming on both odyssey and youtube try it out on honesty that's where the chat is happening uh we've got quest q a which will happen in the hour after this one we'll you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com we've got patreons which we encourage you to join as well right now on my patreon is the the 48 hour period during which you can ask questions uh that we will try to address as many as possible in the monthly private q a those that question asking period is open right now and um yeah maybe we'll maybe we'll stop there for now we will do three ads and then get right into it fair enough [Music] okay our first sponsor our first sponsor for this week is a new one to us it's md hearing aid while neither of us has used this product that's md hearing aid while neither of us has used this product we asked a friend with hearing loss to try it out and we'll share her testimony below but everyone can empathize with what it feels like to be left out of a conversation others are enjoying or to need to crank the volume up on a show beyond what other people need those with hearing loss suffer an invisible set of harms invisible quite literally to those of us without without it so md hearing aid is an fda registered rechargeable hearing aid that costs a fraction of what typical hearing aids cost the average price of hearing aid in america is 2 400 but their 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your first public goods order with no minimum purchase they are so confident that you will absolutely love their products and come back again and again that they're giving you 15 to spend on your first purchase go to publicgoods.com darkhorse use the code darkhorse at checkout that is spell it out he said saying the quiet part out loud publicgoods.com p u b l i c o dot com forward slash dark horse to receive 15 off your first order scared you didn't i no no that was good all right yeah i think we're beyond you scaring me with things like that yes indeed indeed there's there's much scarier things of foot in the world frankly right which actually um this brings me to something i was going to say this is now a perfect segue you have cautioned me sometimes when i have warned that winter is coming that maybe that's not the best thing to say to people that it's a bit uh dark and foreboding and i believe i have come up with a solution oh good um i think it is very important that people be warned but you're right that may be a little precipitous and so what i'm thinking is autumn is coming right because it is right and you know the it is the equinox is a frightening a frightening development and there's nothing we can do to stop it it's it's not a frightening development i've actually i've been thinking about the equinox i figured you had i've been thinking about the equinox and the fact that this year it comes right about at exactly a full moon as well which is which is um you know not meaningful in in most senses except it also happens to coincide with the day that i will be making my next post on natural selections my substance newsletter so i've been thinking about the ways in which the equinox is a deeply meaningful time of the year in terms of the days being equal length and changing very very rapidly much more rapidly day length that is photo period changes much more rapidly around the equinoxes than it does at either solstice but it would have been the actual equinox would have been very very difficult for the ancients to identify precisely right as opposed to the moon right so you know the the phase of the moon is a giant sky clock um in in many ways and you know to for sure it's a giant sky calendar and if you understand the ways that it processes um also also to some degree o'clock but the equinox while very important for things like um planting and harvest and such um is a is going to be much less precisely used by ancient people than than things like moon phases um because cloud cover not withstanding cloud cover will change this but in general you can see the moon's phases and it's very hard to get precise on the equinox it is difficult to get precise um there are of course these physical clocks installed by many cultures around the world that allow them to figure out where they are not by calculating but by the you know the sun sets in this notch in the building uh at uh the solstice or the equinox and so there's an amazing one of these at inga right beautiful one in fact uh maybe i'll dig up a photo and that can be our um our thumbnail for this episode but sorry inga perka being um ecuador's largest incan ruin the inca not having gotten that far north um until relatively late you know so they were only the inca were only in what's modern day ecuador for 80 years or something less than 100. and um the place that is now called incoperca was a place where the kenyari people lived and the inca kept trying to abolish you know obliterate them and they failed and so what often happens in these cases when one one population does not simply trounce the other is a royal marriage was arranged and this incoperca became for you know the 80 years or so before the spaniards came and changed everything um basically a combined kanyari and incan stronghold and city um which has one of these um these sun clocks physical clocks yeah um there's a primitive one of these in the uh in the midwest where the beauty of it i've forgotten exactly where it is but the beauty of it is that they tripped over how to calibrate the thing um and so they ended up having to keep re-digging it and adjusting it because it was off slightly and it would get worse and worse as the years progressed but anyway this this goes to this really interesting point which i don't know this yeah it's is this is pre-columbian people oh yes yeah yeah um but anyway i i've always sort of thought that the fact that the solar system does not work um as a function of integers that there are you know that a year is not an exact number of days for example which causes a calendar that's really close to right to get worse and worse over time that this is um about the best proof we've got that the universe was not constructed intentionally by a loving god it could have been constructed by a malevolent god or no god but a loving joke after god well a jokester god who wanted your harvest to get less and less effective over time as your clock revealed its imprecision but anyway yes these celestial events are really important and the number of cultures who've figured out the answer by not having to calculate it and therefore not having to deal with these fractional issues but empirically you know it settles in that notch and that's how we know we're back at that place in the calendar yeah um is is the right way to do it if you don't have um a really sophisticated model absolutely absolutely great um okay so yom kippur was this week and it is the highest holy day in the jewish calendar a time traditionally of atonement often associated with the fast and i don't have much more to say about that except by way of segway to saying hanukkah is not a high holy day in any way in the jewish calendar um but but we being from uh you know we are a secular household who come from different religious traditions and um and we you know we celebrated a secular level both christmas and hanukkah in our home and we have adopted a new tradition associated with hanukkah which makes up the epilogue of our book a one-page epilogue so while we are not going to continue to do excerpts from the book going forward we you know we were doing one a week per chapter um for the 13 weeks before the publication but the one page epilogue i think will make for fodder for discussion for a little while right so we have effectively felt some license to tinker with hanukkah it being a lesser holiday um and uh our household being a non-traditional one and so anyway what we've done is uh in a sense a prototype we have tried to make it meaningful in a way that uh grows with us as the years pass and anyway heather's about to introduce it to you yeah absolutely um so i'll read through them and then we'll just we'll talk a little bit about either each of them or whichever ones we feel like so epilogue to a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century tradition and how to tweak it in our home one of our annual rituals is to celebrate hanukkah the jewish festival of lights that occurs just before or around the northern winter solstice we light the menorah as is traditional and each night review an additional principle which is not our family's new hanukkah rules so again there are eight days of hanukkah if we haven't said that there are eight new hanukkah rules day one all human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible day two the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you day three only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world they four don't game honorable systems day five one should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom and engage novel problems consciously explicitly and with robust reasoning day six opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages day seven precautionary principle when the costs of an action are unknown proceed with caution before making change and day eight society has the right to require things of all people but it has natural obligations to them in return so should i go through one by one or or what do you what do you think here um whatever you think i mean uh i always like revisiting them i look forward to hanukkah and the um the celebration of these things and what we do you know we whatever dinner we're having that night we don't have you know special eight nights of hanukkah dinners but um we discussed that principle uh around the dinner table with our boys as well um so okay the first one all human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible and i think that that reversible word is the thing that is often missing from discussions of sustainability and um and is often missing in sort of more naive discussions of what it means to be a liberal versus a conservative you can you can be all in for progress but not be interested in making change if um that change is going to be permanent yeah and it really it's an attempt to fix the precautionary principle which anybody who has tried to to figure out a way to operationalize the precautionary principle realizes that it it's very difficult to do right because you know what um if you interpret it very strictly it can paralyze you and what we don't want is to paralyze us we want to be able to take advantage of you know reasonable risks but we very frequently find out that risks we thought were reasonable turn out not to have been and so the reason to talk about reversibility is that if you make a change based on a reasonable guess that the consequence of it will be safe and you you do something that cannot be undone if you turn out to be wrong you're actually taking a much bigger risk than if you've said well what we need to do is build up the capacity to undo this at the same scale that we have built the capacity to do it right so the point is you know at the first the first moment that you invent an automobile that uh burns fossil fuels and makes co2 you are altering the atmosphere but you're not obligated to do anything about it at that level it's such a tiny alteration that it's not significant but at the point you ratchet up the capacity to burn fossil fuels so that you do start changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere you're taking a risk that you'll change the heat trapping capacity and so therefore you need to build up in tandem the capacity to undo it if need be and if you haven't done that you find yourself where we are now which is we've got to change it is out of our control and it threatens to trigger a positive feedback in in the arctic with the frozen uh methane being released the so-called clathrate gun hypothesis but um if if we had recognized the need to be able to undo changes to the atmosphere at the same rate that we changed the atmosphere then the point is at whatever point we discovered that this had been a mistake we would already have on hand the solution absolutely um day two is the golden rule do unto others uh do unto others as you would have them do unto you uh you know classic of course not um not something that generally shows up um in a jewish holiday wow but uh you know modern you know modern judaism obviously in encompasses the golden rule as do all moderns and it has been invented multiple times including rabbi hillel has a prior version of what we now call the golden rule and so the point is societies that work have figured this out as a basic principle and it is really important that it be uh understood even you know again the devil is in the details with all of these things about operationalizing them but right and then and they're they're good they function as single sentence uh prescriptions in which you need to understand that uh you know conditions will vary and will affect to what degree you should uh attempt to make these real yeah uh so let's see um only number three only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world and i guess i would add to that day six opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages right the the idea that we should you know recognizing that we cannot actually achieve complete equality of opportunity um because because conditions vary but we should be seeking to maximize the quality of opportunity absolutely as much as possible for all human beings and part of the way that we will do that is to to to spread the opportunity across lineages and also to ensure that those who are profiting from um from doing ill in the world uh profit as little as possible yeah this the point you know throughout the book basically we're pointing to the fact that we live in an evolutionary system and in an evolutionary system where you profit by externalizing harm on to others that behavior will spread and be elaborated in a system where externalizing harm on to others is costly that uh behavior will dwindle which is exactly what you want and really the question is you've either built a system that involves in a direction that's positive or you've built one that evolves in a direction that's negative and you know how well you built it will adjust how quickly it moves in those directions but the real question is trajectory which which way do you want to go and i think i mean this is this is a good time probably to remind most of the audience hopefully but inform some of uh the idea that to identify something as an evolutionarily stable strategy to identify that something has uh has has been promoted by selection and is thus gaining ground is in no way to suggest that it is either a good thing or a moral thing or that all conditions would uh result in that being a stable strategy so there will for most for many things be multiple evolutionarily stable strategies and when conditions change either endogenous or exogenous um the suite of environmentally stable strategies will change as well and i'm reminded actually one of the um one of the podcasts we did this week about the book uh was the realignment and i think i think that's actually out now um a really nice conversation we had and um we ended up talking a little bit about the misapprehension that so much of modern academic social science has about what evolution actually is that especially i think sociology and anthropology have actually taken the sort of the social darwinist the eugenics uh version of what um evolutionary biology is and imagine that that's what all of us who are trying to explain the world to evolution are doing and it's it's absolutely a hundred percent wrong right so what what things like eugenics imagine um is that survival of the fittest is both a stable state in which whatever is most fit right now is most fit forever and ever and also that um things like wealth are good indicators of fitness and of course in markets where you have things like opportunity having concentrated and lineages the fact that you were born wealthy may have say absolutely nothing about your ability to accrue goodness in the world nor is wealth inherently a good indicator of that but more to the point is the idea that there is no stable survival of the fittest everything in evolution is context dependent and as the environment changes so too does what the what the appropriate measure of fitness might be so i want to refine one thing here wealth is not a good indicator of fitness in any meaningful sense it may lead to fitness in other words your wealth gives you power to you know protect your family and things like that but um it is not indicative of the fact that you have brought something special to the table but it should be right we should want markets that cause that effect where wealth actually is an indicator of having provided some real benefit rather than having externalized harm um so one you know we've been very deliberate in constructing these principles and so the phraseology is often precise for a reason and note that we say opportunity shouldn't be allowed to concentrate in lineages right that is not the same thing as saying wealth now obviously there's a degree to which wealth can accumulate within lineages that is very destructive in large measure because it leads to opportunity and so to the extent that the wealth is all concentrated and that means that people who might be able to do something useful which should be rewarded don't have the opportunity because either they don't get the educational benefits or they're too preoccupied sustaining themselves but that's a bad thing and this and this is the wise version this is the informed version of what um activists talk about when they talk about privilege right and and so the point is there is a there is a real critique in there one needs to be really careful i you know the more i think about it the less one wants a world in which the um the product of productivity in which our gains are evenly distributed that's a desperately unfair world and it doesn't do good things and um you know this is the the failure at the heart of communism but there is an enlightened version of well what do you want to equalize and the thing that i think separates these two things is if you if you're a believer in markets right as we are if you're a believer in markets then they work best when everybody has access to them right meaningful access not just theoretical access but when everybody has the tools to actually innovate and bring things into a market then the things that's just access at the consumer level right right it's that not just access at the consumer level which all americans have pretty much but access potentially at the producer level right that's the most important thing and so if you have a market that rewards things that are actually positive that actually create meaningful wealth rather than transfer wealth um then uh the reward uh arising because you've innovated the opportunity has to be spread most widely because then we get the maximum number of opportunities to evaluate and the good ones rising then results in a reward and that's how you get a system that evolves to meet the values that we claim to hold rather than one that is constantly uh running up against those values that's right let's see don't game honorable systems uh maybe we've done that already but well i would we have a game the honorable system no we don't maybe we've talked about yeah i will just say sometimes with customer service you have to be ruthless uh customer service there's really good chance customer service is not an honorable system that's why it's written that way yeah exactly um but i mean this is this is one of the things and we you know we have this in the epilogue not in the end of either the childhood or the parenting relationship chapter but um this is one of the messages that we were teaching our children very very early and you know all of all of these we were um giving to our children every year you know with hanukkah but um the idea that uh for instance uh we as their parents have rules that they may not understand but they are they are honorable they are intended to be good and sometimes we will make errors and when we make errors we are expected to figure it out and change them or to have or to respond to them when they figure it out and change them but the idea that they would game us and this is true for any um parent-childhood relationship um if the parent is a is a good parent is a good and loving parent as all parents should be but of course not quite all are um their systems their rules that they have in place no matter how good they are if they're honorable should be refinable over time and that is much much harder if the child is simply reacting to oh it's a rule um i don't like it and this is this is unfortunately a place where we have lost nuance in the modern in the modern world among especially um some on the on the sort of what i call the pseudo left the idea that if it's a rule if it's a law if it came from the before times whatever that means it must be bad is absurd and you know some of what we're being handed down right now is bad and is dishonorable and um and is not worthy of being protected things like customer service maybe in some cases but um but the idea that for instance the founding principles on which uh the united states were um were based um they're to some degree outdated they're not as up to the task as they should be anymore but they are deeply honorable and they have been deeply functional actually it strikes me um so in the book uh we talk about the precautionary principle and chesterton's fence which turn out to be inverse of each other and i'm thinking actually that there's another one of these about how one addresses um a dishonorable system a system built to do uh harm or to give control where it doesn't belong and that it's the flip side of what we say about immoral orders right you have an obligation not to follow immoral orders and you have no obligation to uh treat a dishonorable system as if it were an honorable one um and uh yeah this is good yeah civil disobedience and immoral orders are the flip sides of each other i guess uh yeah yeah or the response to immoral orders yeah exactly um day five one should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom and engage novel problems consciously explicitly and with robust reasoning so this is kind of this is a twofer really um it is it is both a um that which came before um has worked if it's been persistent and complex and long-lived persistent long-lived being um synonyms here um but that doesn't mean that it's up to today's challenges um but that also doesn't mean that you throw that out and just take whatever is new as an appropriate response yeah and so uh the second to last chapter of the book is really about this puzzle it's not that we don't like ancient wisdom we love ancient wisdom but the point is the more rapidly your situation is changing the less likely that wisdom is to apply and so the skepticism isn't like it's not cynicism about ancient wisdom it's a you have to evaluate each of these parameters and whether they fit our current circumstances because uh you know how do you apply you know the moral tenets of the bible to twitter right you know with bots and multiple anonymous accounts and de-boosting i mean you know yeah the good samaritan gets slaughtered right so we have we have to think about these things and you know very frequently the formulation that we arrive at is you've got a value which motivated a prescription from the past the prescription goes out of date the value doesn't and the question is well how can you do how can you protect that value in the present circumstance without obligating yourself to a prescription that's inadequate absolutely very good um okay we already did the next two so the final one is day eight society has the right society has the right to require things of all people but it has natural obligations to them in return this is um this is one about which people will disagree um i mean people may disagree with all of them but i think the idea that society actually has a right to require things of us uh is is something that many find anathema but it is true as long as the contract is a good one yeah let's put it this way it has to be true there are too many of us who can't all decide to go hunt and gather and say i i reject uh being part of civilization i'm going to go back and do what i was born to do if you if you do that right the the earth will not be able to sustain our population it'll crash so the point is we've actually signed you up um for civilization and you can't opt out of it right you can't go claim territory or whatever else you might have done in the past we pay taxes and we get licenses in order to drive and and such right however the point is that naturally comes with the obligation that the society that robbed you of your right to go do what you feel like doing has to protect you from certain things right it has to protect you from the predatory behavior of powerful entities you know for example well if it's an intact social contract it's not theft it's not having been robbed right right well the point is you didn't have a choice but to sign it you were born into a society and you're obligated to be part of it um but that comes with obligations and the problem for us moderns typically is the thing is in breach of contract right the systems that are supposed to protect us and are supposed to provide the opportunity that was the thing that we got in exchange for giving up our right to go hunt and gather right those that capture is now predatory and it takes advantage of us and so the problem is the society is in breach of contract and that changes our obligations to it that's right um you wanted if that wraps up that little section uh you wanted before before i had some more stuff to talk about you want to talk about pegasus spyware yes i do which i know nothing about i only knew enough to say it i'm going to tell you a little bit about it so pegasus spyware has been in the news you may have just had your apple iphone update itself pegasus spyware is apparently a uh a spyware program that was loaded onto my understanding is virtually every iphone ipad mac i watch in existence when well that's i'm gonna get there okay so this program was essentially a back door and it was a zero click exploit which means in the past you might have gotten an email that you would have to open an infected file in order for your computer to be infected so a person could be careful and not click things from people they didn't know or files that looked funny in this case that was not true the file could land in your computer or your iphone and the exploit could be delivered and this exploit which was created by an israeli company the nso group a very cryptic entity allowed access to your email your phone calls your text messages could apparently allow uh your camera and microphone to be turned on without your knowledge now i would just point out if your neighbor figured out how to do this to your phone or your computer right your neighbor was just curious about your life and they figured out how to use your computer in order to spy on you they looked through your email your text messages and all that stuff you would be beyond irate right this is such an incredible invasion of privacy to have a private entity set up the conditions for this and then apparently sell access to the data of individuals to their enemy enemies and competitors right they sold access to the devices of for example activists to the governments that opposed them right this is such an asymmetry right the activists would have had no mechanism for buying the same information about government officials this is just a completely asymmetrical mechanism for preventing change right so this exploit existed they got it onto the the majority of apple devices they then sold access to enemies of people i would point out the reason i wanted to raise this is that i think we have to start asking the question how much effect has this had on recent history how much effect does this have on what we think is true right how many of the people who might have been telling you some uncomfortable truth have been unable to do so because their enemies knew all sorts of things about them that prevented them from reaching the position they would otherwise have ended up in it's a very difficult question and we don't know the answer what we know is how how is the answer even knowable i don't think the answer is knowable the answer is not knowable right in fact we got a patch that just got delivered over the air that uh eliminated this malware but okay so we know maybe well maybe is one thing but also how many others are there so we know about pegasus are there other exploits like this that are lurking in our devices if you said well my goodness i can't believe that apple allowed this to happen uh i'm gonna get a different phone well okay now you're in google's universe right so there doesn't seem to be an escape right there are ways that you can do other things there are uh phones that have been de-googled and things how good a protection is that uh it's a little hard to say but we're stuck in this paradigm where the exact things that we know are necessary for progress the ability for people to talk with each other the things that are protected in our constitution for exactly this reason right they can't stop you from gathering with other people and talking to them and saying what needs to be said and it doesn't mean that what's said is necessarily good or right but we have to protect that right in order for history to work all right and so we are we're losing this and it's and it's barely noticed so what i discovered in researching pegasus in advance of this podcast that apparently pegasus isn't even new right malwarebytes reports you want to show the malware bytes link that i sent you malwarebytes which is uh an industry um group they sell anti-malware products says that this isn't even new that they've known about this since 2016. so i can't see the data on this article this this article is new and responsive to the current wave of the current wave which was triggered by a a privacy group having analyzed the phone of a dissident who had had his phone infected or not just infected because apparently they were all infected but exploited right and so how does a person come to know that their phone has been exploited well that's just the thing is apparently there's some group of 50 000 phone numbers that have had special access gained maybe 10 000 have been actively surveilled but we don't know what those numbers are and they're you know it isn't easy i i did encounter there's some mechanism that an infected phone there's a mechanism you could um back it up to a computer and then do some command line work with a tool to see if the files that would be generated in the functioning of this exploit are present right but that's first of all that's not a simple thing to do right so most people will just simply not know likely your phone got updated without you even knowing what was going on so the evidence may be gone but for god's sake this is just this is an incredible moment where we i mean for one thing look we all have this person in our life or we are this person who says if we're going to talk about important things maybe the phones shouldn't be in the room maybe we should put them in the fridge maybe we should go take a walk right we all have that person and we all think that's probably just it's got to be unnecessary right it's true we now know that that thing is there and if you're talking about stuff that doesn't change the world it probably doesn't matter and if you're talking about stuff that does change the world then you got to ask yourself the question is somebody going to listen in are they going to figure out what i do understand and what i don't understand are they going to figure out who i suspect and who i trust and play us off against each other like a fiddle i mean i think getting back to your point about the neighbor if a neighbor did this it would be clear to everyone why this is totally unacceptable and the idea that it's an anonymous company that may or may not be doing it should in fact give us no comfort i would say it's quite the opposite at least at least a neighbor is a real person who could be talked to whatever nefarious purposes they might be up to um but there's no there's no reasoning with an abstract entity that has uh made a move on it sounds like at least tens of thousands uh if not you know well more than that of people and their and their devices and um there's just there's there's no accountability and there is no to go back to our earlier point um reversibility in that once this thing has been breached as malwarebytes is saying has happened as has been true for a long time now that this capability exists it will continue to exist there's no going back to a world in which this capacity does not exist right you would have to you would have to build for it and you know yeah there's no question no one that's a possibility if you if you compare the neighbor having done this to you to some anonymous murky security corporation in some foreign state there's no question that the neighbor is a far better scenario as infuriating as that is right to have a an economic entity gain access to your phone and then be able to sell it to your enemies is just so troubling yeah well i mean at some level this is also consistent with a theme that we've heard ourselves talking about over and over and over again with regard to the benefit of engaging with physical reality and physical space over entirely social reality or in this case abstract reality where um i think it may not have ever been said by whoever it was attributed to but the idea that good fences make good neighbors you know somehow that's apocryphal but um good fences might make it it's not apocryphal but the the poem means the roughly the opposite of what people think about that's that's right yeah um but um the fact is that fences are a reality and fences can be built and if you do have a neighbor who is spying um you can actually erect physical things and you can't talk to the person whereas there is neither nothing to erect except with similar tools which most of us don't have access to nor is there anyone to talk to um in part you'll see your earlier point about customer service right you know that that itself is a dishonorable system even um largely in companies that are themselves trying to be honorable right look the first step to solving this problem is admitting that we have a need for a constitution-like entity that declares our right not to have this happen to us right and that we are therefore uh we are entitled to devices in which this is impossible and those who breach it are uh committing a crime and uh and you know obviously in some sense this needs to be global but so you know so by the way those who would say well this doesn't apply the constitution doesn't apply here so what are you complaining about well then we have discovered the reason the constitution or something like it needs to apply needs to be invented needs to be widely deployed immediately because we are clearly in need of it right which is why the principal uh our hanukkah principle says that you need skepticism of ancient wisdom because the point is our constitution is effectively ancient it did not envision the technological world we would live in it did not uh understand the the possibility of corporations that would uh be more powerful than nations incredibly forward thinking like such amazing predictive power and yet it's just too old to be fully up to the task of right now right the values are right but the prescription is it's not wrong but it's inadequate to the full scale of the problems i would also point out though that something i haven't really seen explored is for there to be a corporation that generated this very expensive and highly effective exploit which can be obliterated apparently in a single update of the uh the ios software there has to have been a market that is to say the kinds of people who have enemies apparently know that they can buy access to their phones enough that it happens either that or the nso group is approaching people and saying we have information on people who don't like you would you like it and here's the price somehow there's a world of people that is effectively trafficking in our private information and doing so on the basis of our political perspectives or our scientific viewpoint or who knows what it might be but it's a it's a very frightening world and and they once once they have the data they can parse it however they like right and the fact that this is not uh that this is a news story among many rather than a hey what effect is this having on what news i even know about right that's the level we need to think about this how has this affected the world that i live in what would the world look like absent this force to what extent has apple eliminated one such entity and there are others still playing this role yeah you know these are all important questions yeah okay um total change of topic unless you were you're not done well i just want to again emphasize that that autumn is coming sorry it's a day it sort of seems like it's here but we're actually getting summer back next week so i think the um the equinox may actually bring summer-like weather yes by the way if you are confused by what i just said you are probably in the southern hemisphere and this will make a lot more sense six months from now so we've been doing a lot of a lot of media nothing mainstream except uh you know four minutes on on dr carlson you were uh two nights ago i guess um but entirely podcast space really um and and have been you're having a lot of fun with just these highly variable conversations but with doing a lot of them and there were three in particular that we either did this week or came out this week all of which prompted some thoughts that i think are relevant to the kinds of things we talk about here which you know is to say it could be anything right um uh let's talk about michael shermer first okay uh so michael shermer is i kind of should have looked it up but um he's you know the founder of skeptic magazine and i think there's a skeptic foundation too as well and um the podcast is actually um the michael schumer podcast but it's all you know sort of of a type and um he is famously skeptical of um you know bad thinking in pseudoscience and such and we had a very nice conversation with him i think we actually had the conversation maybe a couple weeks ago but it came out day of publication maybe tuesday of this week and um and his just his announcement of it of our conversation which uh i think he even announced it before the conversation itself was out um so no one could even see what it was that we had talked about the number of people who came at him with how dare you talk to these two um they are um you know quacks scientifically illiterate doing damage you know all of these things all the usual tropes all the usual tropes um from that section of the internet that um seems to get off on hating us came after michael shermer for having had a conversation with us and it revealed in part go go on well i clearly want to say yeah i do um we are watching a phenomenon that we are so familiar with unfolding in a novel place right and so what this looks like from our perspective is cancel culture pure and simple and the tropes are the same right what they do is they inflict costs on people for certain crimes that decent people realize aren't really crimes right like talking to people that you don't agree with right so you will be stigmatized for what's called platforming for having a discussion with people about with whom you don't completely agree and frankly who do you completely agree with right or for going on someone's show whom you don't completely agree with right exactly so i think actually right now um glenn beck's show is actually is actually streaming we had that conversation in person with him a little over a week ago and i mean he begins the conversation with we wouldn't have been in the same room together 10 years ago right we thought we were complete opposites and the fact is that we can come together as human beings and see our shared humanity one another and how is that bad for anyone right it's necessary and smart people know that it's necessary and so we watch uh they just drive your costs you know they're trying to drive up michael shermer's cost for even talking to us and part of the point is to punish him so he won't do it again and part of the point is to warn others so they will see what happens to michael and think i don't want any part of that it's easier for me just not to talk to them right so this is this is about shaping the discussion it is the thing that creates the walls between these echo chambers and makes it impossible to solve problems because you really don't understand the thing on the other side you see it as a caricature so it is the thing that facilitates bad thinking and um it's obnoxious but i want to draw a distinction right so you mentioned our haters of which we have some very dedicated ones right um there are some you know uh people like michael shermer who's not a hater but he is an influencer and the haters have gone after him in order to shift the conversation so it doesn't contain uncomfortable truths that they cannot field and so that we cannot navigate our way to a better synthetic understanding and then there is this vast group of people who feed each other right and they are constantly posting things to each other and and uh i've begun to think of them as the wank and file um oh dear yep that's just how i i file them in my mind the wank and file um so they know who they are and we know who they are but anyway we need to pay attention because what's what's surprising about this moment from our side of the camera is the degree to which things that two years ago all sorts of smart people would have agreed were absolutely obnoxious and had no place in discourse the heterodox community of people understood that guilt by association was a dangerous trope that prevented the kinds of discussions we needed to have well some of those heterodox people are now engaging in this behavior and so anyway everybody who is needs to step back and think wait a second have i become that thing that i hate yeah basically if you are engaging in the cancel culture du jour it is no doubt because you are certain that you are on the right side of history but if you have previously decried the idea of cancel culture because it is clear that you can't ever know if you are on the right side of history well then you are acting hypocritically and you are probably stuck somehow in your own thinking you may be just dead wrong on exactly the topic and which you were claiming so loudly and you might not be but you are at the very least um not honoring um not honoring the very principles that you have in the past said that you would be standing by yeah um it is not safe to cancel in the middle of a pandemic i would point out that's just a dangerous thing to be engaged in and anyway many people ought to know better yeah um okay so i also wanted to say and i don't know that you will be able to say much about this because um you weren't part of the conversation but um a friend of yours for a long time jim rutt uh had had me on his show the gym rat show to talk about the book um because he likes to have one-on-one conversations and i know him a little bit um but not very well and you and he were really kind of you know along with uh jordan hall and jordan green hall and you know a few other people whose names uh might be familiar to some listening um were you know really present um to help form game b it was i mean it was an informal small group of people you know as a you know gosh i want to say 10 you 10-ish years ago now i think it was 2013. okay so eight eight years ago um and um so so you and he and you know indeed we um the very first i think the very first paragraph of the acknowledgements in the book we acknowledge gem um some of we acknowledge some of the many evolutionary biologists who stole whose shoulders we stand on and um and uh some of whom we work with directly and some of whom we just know um from their from their written work um but then we also talked specifically about um game b and jim rutt and that was really work that you did together and so he has me on his show to talk um about the things that are most interesting to him in the book and it's and it's of course right in his you know his wheelhouse is the theory and that's much more you know to the degree you know you and i are both evolutionary biologists this is our book these are our ideas um but to the degree that there are some that are you know that started one place rather than the other the theoretical stuff is more often likely to have started um with you and in the in the case of many of the things that jim brought up um in those conversations with him and so having um having me be the person um on the receiving end of these questions was fascinating and i admit that at first uh when it became clear that's where we were going i thought okay let's let you know let's see you know i you know i was i was we were writing it together and we were thinking it together but um it's not as native to me and it was wonderful i actually have listened to part of the conversation now and um i recommend it um highly we've got a lot of these out but i really recommend the conversation that i had with jim because it does go deeper in the theory than almost any of the other conversations we've had you know it doesn't go into any of the applied stuff it doesn't do sex and gender or sleep or food but the the reason i bring it up specifically is the benefit of flying solo sometimes you know we talk a lot about how necessary it is to have someone who you know will be honest with you no matter what with whom you can um develop ideas who will have your back all of that and it's also utterly necessary to step aside sometimes and say okay well i'm on my own you know no one's got my back here there's no there's no net underneath me and um let's see what i do and to emerge out the other side uh intact and um and saying oh yeah okay did it got it nailed it um mostly you know sometimes not sometimes yes uh is incredibly well it's kind of revelatory um and it's also empowering in a good way and i was reminded of actually the first field season that i did in madagascar that you weren't with me for and i did have a field assistant she was 10 years my junior and i was not you know i was in my 20s so she mean she was fabulous uh jessica but um she was not a peer in the way that you were and she you know i was teaching her evolution and we were you know learning about these the sex lives of these poisoned frogs together um but doing hypothesis generation and prediction and experimental design and uh formal observational design and um and figuring out you know how to do the actual field work all of that in you know on my own without a peer without that field season there might still be a piece of me that wondered could i you know could i do it without you know just being able to throw ideas back and forth well i can i did and uh i would say that everyone no matter how expert you are in your domain should look for those opportunities um to explore things um that you have typically done with someone else alone as well yeah uh it's a really important point and it also fits with what we discuss about the way ideas uh get passed between people and then parallel processed and that's really the whole point of the exercise in the first place yeah um it makes thinking better and it's really you know it's very cool to have you interacting with jim jim somebody i tremendously value uh it i think it took a little while for us to understand each other he sort of comes from a conservative uh background and uh actually i didn't say anything about who he is so he's yeah he's the former director of the santa fe institute right um and um didn't he invent the word snail mail snail mail that's jim um epinephrine it is unfortunately the thing for which he is most famous oh i should have said it then no no i was gonna say it myself okay um yeah he uh he invented the concept of snail mail um and well he invented the name obviously yes no the mail had existed for some time it was originally delivered on horseback it's just not that old right you're just not that old um but anyway jim is a jim is a great guy and he's somebody i uh i frequently go to to talk complex systems stuff um and continue to talk game b right i mean this we need something we need this right well you know what i what i sometimes say is that the thing about game b which was you know effectively a small group of people who met and then disbanded is that for many of us once we had seen the idea of game b and understood what it was and why it needed to exist then we never got over it there was no getting over it the point is it's game b until until we figure out how to do it or die trying right because the system isn't sustainable it's going to be fatal to us if we don't replace it and uh once you spot why a better world is not only possible but that there's a mechanism for getting there that doesn't involve wishing it into existence uh it you know the question is what version of it and so and you know it only has to be one version our version is described in here fourth frontier is the the view into it but everybody who is of a game b mindset has some version of it and only one of them needs to work um and so far as people i've met everyone who has an idea of what game you might look like recognizes that prescribing a blueprint won't work and so there are various routes and plans and ideas some of which will be inconsistent with one another but um i at least i haven't seen a bunch of you know maps of the territory to which we're going that are inconsistent with one another because the people who are thinking game b style are not mapping out the future they're trying to figure out how we can get on our way to a future that is you know sustainable and productive for all well i believe jim will tell me if i'm wrong about this he has a very good memory for these things but i believe that that was uh an insight i introduced into that discussion was that we need to give up on the idea of a blueprint it's impossible what we need to do is think in terms of prototyping and navigating because that's the only way to solve a puzzle like this and um anyway to the extent that that has caught on i think that's good it makes all of the efforts more likely to work yeah um but anyway yes uh tim's a great guy i'm really i have not heard listen to your conversation yet but i'm excited to hear it there's a lot there's so much going on no and really it's just um there were just a number of questions he asked me that if we had both been on camera we both would have just defaulted to you answering not because either of us think i couldn't um but because it's more natively the kinds of things that in your downtime that's what you think about and i you know i'm more likely to think about lizards right exactly i'm not against it there's not actually a lizard back here much to my chagrin but there's a book on lizards there's a couple books on legends yeah snakes tadpoles yeah brett made this pile um uh i was just saying some of the other things that brett has made this pile in order to exactly show the screen again for those listening there's a pile of books behind me and uh brett made the pile um but as usual put the books on bats on top yes i actually just took the pile of books that was sitting by my side of the bed good one light reading on tadpoles yeah yeah no you didn't know you probably did not know that there was an entire book dedicated to tadpoles but if you had known that you might have imagined that i would own it and in fact i do yeah i think my next book might be dedicated to tadpoles dedicated to towels but not on tadpoles right yeah no it's definitely not going to be i don't know that's what pulls the world future and past yeah i don't i don't know that much about i know a little bit about tadpoles but not enough for a book yeah i think we probably will not do a future episode dedicated to tadpoles although i i could feel an hour you probably could oh for sure yeah for sure um all right um and finally ish um in terms of things that i was prompted to think about from some of the other media we're doing about our book um yesterday we did a live conversation with the awesome guys at trigonometry uh constantin is it kissing kissing kissing and francis foster we've both talked with them before i had a great conversation with jordan peterson with them early in the summer and we went on to talk about the book and other things and i was struck at one point it was fabulous and i'm sure it's available now it wasn't just live and then disappeared no one does that we were talking about the state of higher ed higher education and we were talking about the state of the west and specifically the enlightenment and enlightenment values and there was a moment at which you said something that struck me as i get i get exactly why he's saying that but that may sound inconsistent to those um who are not as familiar with what we're talking about um which is to say um one moment you said we cannot fix excuse me we cannot fix the existing institutions of higher education we're going to need to reformulate something and then you said we must fix um the the west and by which you meant enlighten enlightenment values there is there is no burning enlightenment values to the ground um whereas institutions of higher ed um appear to be unsavable and um how is that not an inconsistency yes i said something more colorful about the academy effectively being like our cherished family dog that has caught rabies and there being only one reasonable thing to do in that case um you did yes i'd i'd blotted that from my head you had blocked that out too colorful um well so it's like this we don't have an alternative to the west we can upgrade it but we don't have an alternative and if you abandoned it you're creating a vacuum into which the alternatives to the west will flow in right if you think you're going to make uh racial equality uh flourish by destroying the west no you won't because what will flood in are things that are uh backwards with respect to racial equality and have not made the gains that we have very clearly made in the west right have we done perfectly no but we have done well and what's more we have understood the principle to which we must aspire right a colorblind society is the objective do we have a colorblind society no um are we a lot closer to a colorblind society than we were in 1950 yeah we've made great progress let me just add here and this is a clarification you made actually in the conversation on trigonometry uh when you say colorblind you don't mean pretending that race isn't real you aren't you don't mean pretending that people don't have different colors that they're reflecting on their skin and people don't treat them differently as a result right you're saying um that just as under the law men and women are equal under the law and in all of its instantiations um people of different races need to be entirely equal right and i don't understand why this is even a hard concept like how how did the woke manage to convince us that there was some problem with colorblindness right the color blindness is actually well i mean i think it is a i think it is a conflation of those two points honestly i think it's uh it is but it may be but it is a willful one right because it is effectively an allusion to this metaphor blind justice right she's not actually blind it's a blindfold right the point is it is a it is an object that keeps her from paying attention to these details that she must not pay attention to because they are not germane to the rights of the person being tried right yeah so the point is yes you want a colorblind society which doesn't mean we don't talk about think about notice race it means that it doesn't play a role in our decision-making process it doesn't count for you or against you that's the objective right so in any case i guess my point would be we know that the and i am not in any way okay with the failure of the academy but i guess the point that i made to uh to constantine and francis was you and i have been fighting that beast since the 90s literally since we were college students right yeah they didn't yeah we faced the post-modernist yep loons we faced in college or before we had graduated college people knew it was a problem but they didn't deal with it at the appropriate level they they coddled that insane world view and they gave it department after department and it finally took over the academy it's not the only problem with it you've also got markets having effectively wrecked the capacity of the research apparatus to to tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear now is that universal probably not probably it doesn't apply to you know radio astronomy or whatever but where there's money to be made the corruption has i have no faith that it's uh that anything is immune yeah i know i i don't mean good guess i'm like i don't know how that's gone haywire but i bet it happened but it probably has gone i mean if math is having trouble agreeing on what two plus two equals then probably radio astronomy is not immune but yeah um but the point is look the thing didn't get this way overnight if it did we could say well let's let's set it back to where it was three weeks ago and you know try not to make that error again but this has been going on for decades and the point is the system has not shown a capacity to immunize itself it has breached every department that we know of and so the thing that we do know and now it lives in hr which means it's um it's a it's a cancer that probably can't be cut out right it's the rabies now here's the point which no we don't think it's cancer just to be clear right i like rabies because i don't know because no you don't yeah no i like rabies as an analogy here because the point is the diagnosis you know it's not the case where your doctor is going to tell you a nice story about how we have lots of ways to treat this right um there is in the way once yeah once you start showing symptoms it's a death sentence you're done so right so all i'm going to get at is this we actually know what the problem is with the university system there is nothing that stops you from booting up a new university except for the obligation to plug it into the same thing that wrecked the university system that we've got right accreditation grants uh student student loan system so that system is the conduit through which the epidemic of stupid will flow into your new institution so you have to boot up an institution that doesn't have that conduit and then you're going to suffer the cost that conduit was built for a reason it was built to keep people from creating uh institutions that would threaten it's basically a i actually i don't know that i don't i don't i don't know it was originally yeah but it has become it has become that yes yeah and you know go back to our conversations on xero being a special number the point is it is the accreditation system and the grant system that means that you can't just say well everybody should want to send their kid to a university that isn't suffering from an epidemic of woke because those kids will come out more capable and therefore they will succeed in the job market and that's what i want for my child so where is that institution and you know if it doesn't exist surely the pressure to build it must be immense right so the thing that prevents that is the uh but you won't be able to you know avoid phds because you'd have to plug into this other system in order for those phds to be recognized and you won't be able to get money from nsf or from pell grants right from anything else and my point is that's a bad problem but it's not an unsolvable problem right at the very least in some sense the recognition that a phd has a meaning because it comes from an accredited institution that that agreement can break down when people realize hey the people i'm seeing with these phds don't actually know anything and maybe i want people with these other degrees that don't have familiar letters in them but when i talk to those people they're not crazy so yeah no i mean anecdote after anecdote flows into us and you know just you know yesterday i guess we had a very smart very successful uh scientifically minded entrepreneurs say that um he he is seeing applicants to his company with all of the relevant degrees from mit and such and is having a hard time wanting to hire many of them right because they do not have the ability to problem solve among other things and how could it have been otherwise right of course if you're going to load all of this ideological nonsense into the analytical content of curriculum you're going to come out with people who can't think straight even even in engineering at the elite institutions right maybe especially at the alien institutions but even in fields that where they should not have been able to encroach at all so in some sense the um answer to your question of why my two different positions are not inconsistent is that the things that are being compared or of a different nature right it's like saying you know if you uh if you were a hedonist and it turned out that it didn't make you happy right being a hedonist being a hedonist you could swap out your ideology for a different one the way we can swap out this academy for a next-gen academy okay right that's different than uh the west being a problem where if effectively the west is like your body right and the answer is you know i'm not happy being a human and it's like well you're stuck with that right there are some who would disagree they may disagree all they want and they may even disagree with fancy phds that don't mean anything because they came from institutions to talk them to think crazy but corrupt doctors who are willing to do surgery on them right but no but my point is we don't have a choice with the west right we can disagree over how functional or dysfunctional it is but the objectives that it lays out are more or less correct to the extent they are not correct they can be improved and to the extent that it doesn't achieve its objectives we can fix the underlying mechanisms but the alternative to it is going backward right it is going backward into a world that meets those objectives less well that doesn't honor those values and anyone who has seen the comparison i think would have a hard time preferring the alternative and so it is this naive desire to tear down the west because you think something better is going to emerge and it you know what it is it is exactly like the comparison between well the earth is in trouble but there's mars and we can terraform it right it is always going to be massively harder to to make mars habitable than it is to fix earth no matter how broken it is yeah so you know we have we have to fix the west and and address the problems but we also have to recognize how amazingly successful it has been not only in generating productivity but improving the quality of life even for people who are unfairly treated by in obliterating the bigotries of the past it has been amazingly successful and yeah it's not done but that's hardly an indictment of it absolutely all right um we wanted to say a little bit about um what this week has felt like um as our as our as our book launched it's been it's been amazing and so last week um we were still a few days out from launch but um but our episode with joe rogan had aired and so we'd already made it on to the amazon best seller charts we were at like number 15 16 something like that and we were neck and neck with that very very very hungry caterpillar um he remains insatiable i believe as far as i can tell um and i know i know you guys have been waiting for the update on how the caterpillar is doing um we've been in conversation uh with some of the caterpillar's people or actually it was we can't tell if it was the caterpillar's people or his butterflies uh they wouldn't go on i don't think caterpillars have people i think you think you probably i know but you know we they wouldn't go on on um video call with us so we don't know um but uh we're tentatively moving towards a de taunt with the caterpillar and we're even hoping for a collaboration in the future possibly and i was thinking um i mean we haven't actually talked about this but um something along the lines of maybe the caterpillar who feels like he's growing but isn't and that's better for everyone maybe or um chesterton's caterpillar why skipping the squishy phase and going straight to flight is an error yeah yeah that's all i got at the moment as possible collaboration uh hunter gatherers guide lessons for the hungry all right cool i'm gonna have to mull that over i had not actually thought oh maybe you weren't present on this those calls no no okay it wasn't it was just me trying to figure out those people your butterflies i'm talking to right okay um yeah no i'm done okay so uh here's the thing amazing stuff happened since last we spoke um the uh a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century on day of launch uh we don't have a screenshot of this it's on my phone actually but zach you want to show the screenshot of the present status of the book there it is number three on amazon's all-around bestseller list yesterday it's been almost the entire day at two as it did on day of launch now this is amazing i don't think that's true uh it reached number two late on day of briefly yes briefly and then spent uh all of yesterday or almost all of yesterday at number two in any case obviously the particular number doesn't matter very much what's really interesting though is that the book has done this well despite the fact that the mainstream outlets have not been interested in discussing it which tells us something it tells us something really important if we read those tea leaves correctly because what has driven this is podcast world right that's where this book has been talked about and it has been really uh interesting enough to people that they have ordered it in large numbers in fact amazon is out of them there are more coming they're sold out um but we know that there are more coming because because we have a relationship with our publisher our publisher is fabulous and they assure us that they're they're scrambling to get that second print run done and yeah it should be there soon but in any case something is afoot right that legacy world right the legacy world which is usually the place in which books have been discussed and in which books are made and broken and all of that stuff that world has in this case been bypassed by the unofficial podcast lower production values real conversations that are unscripted between people that can go on for hours and hours with much more time to you know make errors but also expand on ideas and give you a sense of what the thinking might be like in the book right right and so some episodes back we talked about the fog machine of war and the fog machine of war was about the fact that in order to prevent progress from being made it is important to keep you from knowing how well you're doing right in other words if you're succeeding in changing things but you don't know it you won't navigate very well and so in any case this is i think a demonstration that the podcast world which you know we joined sort of late um but anyway that world has incredible power relative to the mainstream world and you know there's a question uh i do wonder what will happen this book is clearly uh a bestseller there's a question about whether that will reflect in the official world and if it doesn't then that's clearly an indication that bestseller doesn't mean bestseller well let's let's hope that it does yeah we don't we don't know the answer to that we don't know but uh but it will be interesting to see but i mean it does i think you know there is a place for um highly scripted high production values uh media but there is clearly also a place and maybe just take the production values thing out of it because um you know some podcasts are extremely high production values but there is also a place where for that kind of media where there is time for unscripted conversation and yes it is certainly true that our lives now allow for you know many of our lives allow for us to listen to long conversations in a way that might not have been true 20 years ago or 50 years ago and so the technology has happened at the same time that lifestyles have allowed for for people to listen but it also absolutely reveals that there's a hunger that there's a hunger for uh to listen to people talking off script making errors you know saying you know as i just did but but thinking through real thorny problems in real time and not simply using talking points this is i mean this this i think is the big message people are just you know exhausted maybe fed up maybe but just done with being fed talking points all the time people are actually capable and smart and able to take in information that sometimes disagrees with one another that's what you're supposed to be getting in school right like multiple sources of information that don't aren't in agreement with one another and then you figure out what it means and how to make sense of it that's what critical thinking is that's you know that's what a liberal arts education is supposed to give you that's what a high school education is supposed to give you so the idea that we you know do and we don't do that in school much anymore but then to have the media say we know that you all are too dumb and not interested anyway in uh in thinking for yourselves so we're going to give you the idiocracy version well no most most people don't want that they don't and i think that's what's being revealed by um by the fact that the non-mainstream media is actually able to um draw in enough people that you know our book of which we are you know incredibly proud and we would love if the mainstream media would talk about it as well but is you know near the top of the charts on amazon after less than a week and and nearly no mainstream media mentioned yep um i think it's almost an exact analog to the point about the academy right because what happened and you know we know some of the early pioneers in the podcast space but what happened was people who were fed up with the garbage that was coming over their screens were bold enough and visionary enough to put something onto those screens that they knew couldn't compete and you know i'll say again it's the production values and even the high production value stuff that we see the discussions because they're free-flowing aren't scripted as you point out um shows up all the time people make errors they go back it's not like you know the evening news on the teleprompter right it's not like the you know the edited uh book review in the times it's a different kind of mechanism it's much more human and authentic almost by definition and you know what it is it's a bit closer to campfire it is campfire and uh you know it's not ex the point is it's it's new campfire right campfire was an actual physical thing around which people gathered right it had a glow this glow is different and the way we interact with each other is different and best not to fall asleep to it right um but you know i guess the point is a it's a little bit game b isn't it um and b it's a lot like what has to happen with the academy and it's a pity because the academy is so you know so many of the elements even still of the academy are top-notch the production values are great right they've got marvelous real estate it sends exactly the right message their libraries are full of books some of them even good right you know so the point is yeah it would be great if the academy would wake up but i'm not holding my breath on that one and what we have to do is the equivalent of what podcast world has done to legacy media world um with respect to education because frankly no one's coming to save us right we have we have to educate ourselves and what that means is we need a new academy yeah excellent well um is that it i think so all right um that that i think is it for the week uh we will be for those of you watching if you want to stick around for a little longer we'll be taking a break as close to 15 minutes as possible uh tech um whatever the tech will let us do um and then we'll be back with our live q a and you can ask questions at it's not up there is it um we should put that on the screen it's at darkhorsesubmissions.com uh and i guess maybe and and please like the channel um on both odyssey and youtube both this and the darkwas podcast clips channel and maybe instead of going through the rest of the stuff i usually go through here i would say um if you haven't uh please get yourself a copy of the book um we've heard that there are weights at libraries but um if if you can't or or don't want to buy it get a copy from the library and and read it and we are interested we're interested to start hearing and we have already begun hearing what people are thinking and that's you know that's that's what we want we want these ideas out in the world um more than more than anything so all right before you get to our sign off yes i will say autumn is coming make sure your leaf blower is in good condition you do not want to be caught off guard even if you live in an eighth floor walk up especially because even a few leaves can mess that up for sure be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone you

Channel: Bret Weinstein

Views: 46,369

Rating: 4.8821855 out of 5

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Id: FyvdASZE-4c

Length: 85min 32sec (5132 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021