Careful Thinking in Reckless Times: The 318th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream, number 6,000, three. What number is it actually? >> 13. >> I don't think it's for your 18. >> Can I make that up?

>> I don't know, somebody made it up. >> It's 318, it's 318, all right? Not wrong, very simple. >> It's going to be that kind of a day, huh? >> Despite your wrong, really?

>> Yeah, I'm not wrong, where did they come from? >> Man, it's just, it's crazy out there. I'm trying to keep my head above water, which is part of what we are going to be talking about today.

“How do you keep your head above water when everything is so confused?”

>> One thing to do is do what you're doing right now, which is just to remain on solid ground. >> Terra firma, I say it every time I get off the ferry or the airplane terra firma. So that's really what we're about terra firma, how do you get to cognitive terra firma in an environment

that is basically like intellectual quicksand across the board, across the board is probably

the wrong metaphor for quicksand, but so be it. >> Yep, so I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, your Dr. Heather Heing. >> Yeah. >> That's right. We need a fun Q&A last week, which you can find on locals, and we're not doing one after

the show. I'll be having one for two hours this Sunday at locals at 11 AM Pacific, join us, join us at locals now for the watch party, and what else, Brett? >> Yes, join us for a big party at our house, no, all right, that's not it. My miss, my freaking stuff thing.

“>> Maybe it's time to go right into our awesome sponsor.”

And while I read the first couple of ads, you can, I don't know, find some dry ground to

stand on and there we will be getting umbrella, yeah, no, it's, it's beginning to pour. All right, good, that sounds like a good plan. >> Okay, okay, our first sponsor this week is Van Man, here at Dark Horse, we love Van Man's products, and we're certain that you will too, absolutely everything we've had from them has been exceptional from their pearl eye cream, to their taloids and sunscreen,

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>> Literally no one in the audience, including me and I dare say, Jen has ever heard diaper bomb and thought shoe bomb. >> Well, I guarantee there are people in the audience who thought the same thing I did, and are now feeling quite a bit of relief that they are not alone, and you are not alone all three of you are alone, yeah, all right, back to the diaper bomb, where were we?

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This discussion is about a topic that sounds dry, dull, and boring, but is anything,

but if you know what we're getting at.

“It is about how to think carefully about confusing events, and I will say, "I am proud”

to have coined the term Cartesian crisis." It is accelerating before our eyes, AI has dumped gasoline on that fire. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what to believe on virtually any topic. Let's take several steps back.

The Cartesian crisis, which you named after Dick Hart, after his most famous maxim, suggests that it is very difficult, it is increasingly difficult within a Cartesian crisis to know what it's true, and it's most basic. Discovering what is true is, of course, what science is about, what the scientific method is formalizing with regard to how it is that you think you know something in the world and

then determine whether or not it might actually be true. The tools that we're going to be talking about today, with which to wade through the Cartesian crisis, that yes, is accelerating, and there's more things in the way of understanding what is true in the world now than there were two years ago, 20 years ago, 200 years ago, I don't know about 2000 years ago, but at a fundamental level, figuring out what you

think, figuring out the complete space of, yeah, I was going to say solution space, that doesn't quite for solution set, solution set, solution set of what might be true, and then and this is where we're going to go in some detail today, trying to put some probabilities

“on each of those things, and here's the thing where we're straight from sort of formal”

scientific thinking is being real clear with yourself about what you have thought in the past and when new stuff comes in, be it formal evidence or insight or someone told you something that you think might be true, modifying your thoughts about what you think is true, and keeping track of what you have thought, and that is how we become more and more honest with ourselves, and better and better at actually determining what is true in the world.

Right, and if I can revise that slightly or just look at it from a different perspective, if you're doing the job right at all, what you think is likely to be true changes over time. When something changes substantially over time, when a viewpoint that you once held slips on

“its head, understanding what it is that you might have seen ahead of time, so that if”

assuming that we get smarter over time, which hopefully we do, that the indicators that you missed the first time are available to you when you are facing a similar analysis. So just to take one example from our painful history, we at the beginning of the COVID vaccine campaign spotted the vaccines as dangerous from the get go.

There was never a minute when we didn't think the vaccines that were being offered

over dangerous. We did not immediately spot that the claims about their efficacy were likely fraudulent. From there, you and I ended up reinvestigating our understanding of the vaccines that we had authorized our own children to get that we had gotten and realized that there were actual vaccines, not the mRNA product, not the stuff that's called vaccines, but it's

really an mRNA-based gene therapy, but actual regular old vaccines for which we had been a strong champions turned out not to be nearly as safe as we had imagined, because and here's the lesson is what did I miss? I missed that work that I would have told you I was essentially certain had been done,

because never done, the test against the placebo, the test on all cause mortality and

disease in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children was not what the recommendation from doctors was based on, not in the slightest and where that evidence did exist. It told a different story. So what did I miss? I was too credulous about claim, about the implication that work that seems like it should

have been done must have been, right?

why it's natural to assume we have an FDA everything that's coming from a doctor, presumably

“with safety tested, I have reason to be concerned about the safety test, but I never had”

reason to be concerned that they weren't done because of course they were, and then that turns out that assumption isn't right.

Yeah, I finally went looking explicitly, I guess it's probably two, two and a half, three

years ago at this point, and published it on my sub-stack, because by then we were here and from so many people looking to it, the vaccines and the childhood vaccines schedule have not, in fact, been tested against actual placebo and by actual placebo, I mean placebo. So not only, you know, for many, many, many years we've been running into this, you know, bait and switch, where they use a word that has a meaning and they take it and they change

“its meaning, but they leave the word the same, and you think you're talking about a placebo”

and you're not, but I would say also that there are understanding of the so-called traditional vaccines.

Again, we're not, no longer talking about the mRNA gene therapy products that were tried

out and called vaccines in response to COVID, not only, are they not safe as we had been led to believe by virtue of the fact that it seemed like they must have been tested against placebo, but their claims of efficacy are also, I want to say, suspect to be sort of nice, but suspect is wrong as well, because when you actually see the, you know, the changes in, well, you know, relative to the, that we just read for clear, you know, changes in

“air quality and water quality, precede the, the breakout, the release of vaccines for”

many diseases and it is between those two moments after air and water quality have been

improved and before the vaccines are released, that the declines and the diseases take

a sharp decline, which, you know, right there is a substantial piece of evidence, but so, you change your mind as you learn new things, that is what it is to be human, that is what it is to be a functioning individual in a world and it is more and more difficult to do as what we imagine is eyewitness, especially on screens, is not actually eyewitness where we are seeing things that are already curated that may be fabricated that may not be

come from humans at all, but it is even if we are actually seeing things, we have been so confused by the, you know, the nature of our very existence, the complexity and complicated nature of our very existence, that is harder and harder to trust ourselves to do our analysis. And so, in part in service of that, you have sort of formalized a way of thinking about intuition and logic and the relationship between them. Yeah, and I want to pick one

more thing from that conversation before we launch into the demonstration of the method, such as it is. Back when you and I were enthusiasts of the vaccines that came from doctors, we were not naive, well, turned out we were naive relative to what was actually going on, but we were not naive about the likelihood that there was a real danger with these things, which actually caused us to accept the idea that there were people, anti-vaxxers, who were actually motivated

by an instinct to cheat now. In this case, it would have been an instinct to cheat on behalf of their children, which is understandable. But the idea is, there's a game theory reason that given a vaccine that has to be given to a wide number of people in order to halt the spread of a disease, that an individual who doesn't administer that vaccine gets the advantage of other people having taken a tiny risk without taking that tiny risk themselves. So, there is a free-loader

problem in theory when it comes to the idea of vaccines. If you had good vaccines with very low risks that game theory problem would be real. It happens that the risks are much greater than represented, and the game theory is not what's motivating most of these people who have been wrongly called anti-vaxxers. Most of them, I would say, from now having met probably thousands, let's know, I doubt it, but certainly hundreds. It's a lot. It's a lot. But anyway, most of them are motivated

by having a close encounter with injury, either themselves, or their children, or somebody's

of them got there through being too credulous about the safety of these things, and then

“having bad luck with respect to what happened. Well, and so this isn't exactly about where we're”

going here, but if your child began to progress within a week of getting a vaccine and you

sought with your own eyes, and your child is not like we're accessible to you and may never be again.

No amount of being called names is going to change your mind. That's not a position that you can be talked out of through social coercion and shaming techniques. In a way, the group of people in particular, you know, the parents whose children have been vaccine injured, of which there are certainly, you know, many tens of thousands, perhaps. I don't know how many, but I'm not claiming to have met most of these people, but many are staunch and unflinching in the face of scorn, because they know

what they saw, and they know what their lives are, and they know what they've experienced.

When the stakes are lower or more nuanced, or it's not really clear what you might do

why you're on this side of the issue, and sure that's true, but wouldn't it be easier for you if you were over here? A lot of people take the easier path. I know what, yeah, I know, I know it's true. I know A is true, but if I stand up, I'm going to get shot. I just, it's not worth it. So I'm going to be silent, or I'm going to actually be really cowardly and craving and speak a truth, to speak something that I know not to be true, and thus keep my job, or keep my social standing,

or keep my bowling group, or whatever it is. And, you know, those are the people who we have been speaking to a lot since evergreen, right, where like, oh my God, how did you stand up to the crowd? It's like, well, what else was I going to do? And not only what else was I going to do, but once you're

“on the other side of it, once you have to use the phrase that we have been using since then,”

gone through the looking glass or on the other side, like, huh? Well, that was actually kind of easy to survive, actually, and isn't it nice to be able to sleep well at night? And to wake up in the morning and say, well, I continue to seek truth, and I'm going to be wrong sometimes, and I'm going to make some mistakes, and I'm going to own them, and I'm going to speak about them, too, and, you know, hopefully we are just collecting people on a journey interested in discovering truth,

and beauty in the world. And, you know, that is what we are trying to do, and, but, you know, most people, with, you know, with a few exceptions, like, if you've literally seen your child, you know, regress after getting a medical intervention, and you're being told that wasn't that, you're like, I'm sorry, it was. So then, that most people will not continue to stand up for what they understand to be true. No, the particular detail that causes you, you know, the curtain gets pulled back

at the point that you witnessed this extraordinary thing that nobody warned you as a possibility, and then the doctor tells you it didn't happen, right? So the point, oh, what did I just learn

about doctors, you know, too late to help my own child, right? That is an amazing, it's the ultimate

red pill. So to set us in motion, let's just say a big part of the motivation for what we're about to do is that people are very bad at separating the social phenomenon involved in sensemaking and collectively deciding what is actually taking place

“from the analytical. And I think one strength that we have is we know that those things have no relationship.”

You can literally be the only person on earth who believes something is true. Everyone can be screaming at you that it's not true. And it says nothing one way or the other about whether or not you're right. And, you know, the pointy headed folks will come back at you and say, well, you're dismissing quite a few experts and the point is, yeah, but I've also seen what happens to experts and the fact is the economic milieu of experts and the social coercion that they face.

It doesn't mean that expertise is impossible, but it means that actually the places that you would expect it to exist. It has often been poisoned by a kind of coercion that you're just not able to see because you're not present. So the coercion that causes doctors to embrace dangerous therapies, the coercion that causes, you know, the Congress to immunize vaccine manufacturing companies,

that you can't see or easily even infer unless somebody takes you on a tour.

So question is, how when very frequently, especially if there's anything at stake, you are being pressured into accepting an analytical conclusion for social reasons or out of fear.

“Right? How do you deal with the analytic part to separate it from the social phenomena?”

What it occurs to me here in Utah, that one of the reasons I keep on insisting in our private conversations and here as well, I'm sort of dragging it back to like, remember we're talking about science. This is what science is. I think in school, when people are taught science,

this is the process that they should be being taught. Not what the Krebs cycle is, not what PCR is,

like whatever, whatever the particulars are, that's great. Those are the products of science. That's not the science itself. Everyone has the capacity to and frankly, the obligation to themselves and society, but especially to themselves to be able to think scientifically. And those of us who actually understood that we were training ourselves in formal scientific analysis are more able to take that analysis out into the world that is social. And say, well, okay,

“if you claim this and this person claims this, how would I know? How would I make the determination?”

I'm going to use the same tools I'm used to using and the tools that I'm used to using, I honed over in a totally unsocial, apolitical space where, you know, it was poison frogs a Madagascar or it was tent making bats in Panama. Where they're very little at stake. And right, the bats care, the frogs care, but they don't care about our answers regardless. Right, our answers make sense or are important in terms of, you know, whether or not what we

know to be true is true, but there is no greater, greater stakes. And so when we, would we take that analytical stuff into the social world, it seems to some people like it's unemotional, this is what scientists have our reputation for being. Like, well, everyone should be able to move the emotional valence, the social valence out of a space where they try to make decisions

“and say, how would I know? That is the question. How would I know? What do I think? Why do I”

think it? And what would have to be true in order to change my mind? Yep. And if you think about your own history as a viewer, you will recognize that there are many topics in which you probably now believe something that you would at one time have thought crazy. And so what that tells you is that you maybe told your crazy right now for things that one day you will take to be self-evident. So knowing that that pattern is there, arming yourself with a explicit tool kit for sorting out

these various things and not being persuaded by a chorus of people telling you you're crazy is important. So in light of this, I decided to run an experiment this week. I have heard a lot about how excellent AI tools are at coding. I have a minimal history of coding. I took a college course in the 90s on C++. I've done a little Arduino programming, but the idea of being able to tell an AI that you want something and have it produce that something

seemed frankly pretty unlikely to work. I didn't know what was going to happen. So I said about trying to create a replacement for a program, UNI once had, but not exactly. It's a program I've reached for many times and didn't said that I didn't have it because it would allow you to draw something that I could for example show here and it would be useful. So anyway, I used Claude AI to produce a tool for graphing various things. Primary on my list of motivations was a tool for

making a Bayesian analysis. Bayesian analysis, arriving from Bayesian theorem, is a system of thinking in which you monitor your assumptions and the strength of your conclusion changes as you're belief in those assumptions. So called priors is altered. So, genuine show the tool. This is a work in progress,

but this is the second version of Dark Horse Draw 2 and what it is is a tool that allows you to

probability of this test branch according to our current understanding is 70% and voila you get probability 0.7 on this branch. So you get the basic idea and you can we not leave the probability at 1.2. Yeah, can we change order? Can. Now what Heather is pointing to is that the sum total of probabilities at any given level of this should equal 1 if you have a complete solution set and

there are reasons you might do this without 1, but it can never be over 1. Yeah. So what we do is we just say

0.3 here and voila, now they equal 1 and I will just also say for those of you who are watching this, that there's also a table function in which the values are checked at a particular level of the hierarchy in order to see if they equal 1 to alert you that you may have done some logic wrong, if if they don't. Okay. So what I wanted to do is illustrate how on some controversial issues, this tool can be used to help you understand your own thinking. Why do I

believe this? Why and in particular, I want you to keep your eye out for the following thing. There are many circumstances in which something seems unlikely, maybe even to you,

“and you will get social pressure to agree that it is not true. Some part of you should be resisting”

the urge to close down anything that is possible just because you regard it as highly improbable. So my claim is going to be you will be socially pressured into surrendering a belief in a possibility.

And then later on down the line, you will not understand why you're confused. And the answer is

because back when the evidence suggested something was very unlikely, you made the mistake of going from very unlikely to, I'll just regard that as impossible because it makes my job of thinking simpler. So for me, this doesn't remind me of a fellowge in it all because it doesn't make any sense for a dichot of a branch to have different probabilities like any other branch to it, didn't it? It's a one or zero, not each is 0.5. So I actually, my part time just looking at it will hide

“this problem. But I think better, though, than hiding the probabilities because what you're at,”

and we've talked about this. There's two different things that you could be trying to accomplish here.

And I don't think that making tree diagrams is where it's at, yeah, it just doesn't look like for a legend. This is better as sort of path analysis and thinking about and putting a visual to the probabilities that you have, this is only a tool. And it's not the kind of tool that, this is a kind of tool that very much speaks to the way your brain works. And as we were discussing this morning, my brain says, well, but I know that if I've got three things,

all of which have to be true for something to be true, I just multiply this probabilities. But having a process show that to you can be useful to reveal to other people. So I just, the use of the word "species" and "clay" and "root" here makes this feel like it's pertain to be a phylogeny. But really what it is is a discussion of possibilities in logic space. Yes. And in fact, I should say, because the tool that I wanted to reach for would have been me borrowing

from a clodistic tool that we used to have, I decided to make this so that it could work for phylogeny and it, the graphics aren't good enough yet to do it. But put that aside. It was not, it was intended to be a multi-use tool. So let me show you an example and forgive the fact that this ends up small. I've learned a lot about what programmers actually go through in order to get a program to actually work. And what I want to show you is the path analysis part of this program.

“What we have here is I think that we are having a very insane discussion in public about the”

assassination of Charlie Kirk. One of the things that is insane about it is that people seem to think if you are discussing the possibility that something larger was at work in the assassination

is ridiculous because there's so much evidence against Tyler Robinson. To me, that's a non-secretor.

“This is the point here, right? The nested sets nature of logic, which branching diagrams”

can reveal in a different way than if you just nested the sets within parentheses or something, can show you that it could be Tyler Robinson and still not have him be some loan gun nut, which is exactly what you have established here. But again, you've used a tool to visualize a logical understanding that you can't, like the logical understanding is the human scientific part of this, that is absolutely necessary to making meaning in the world.

So let's just walk through this and then I'll show you how the path analysis part works,

which is really where this is helpful. So the question is who killed Charlie Kirk? Nobody doubts

“it's somebody killed Charlie Kirk. I won't say nobody, but let's just say, assuming someone”

killed Charlie Kirk, which I do, this is a complete solution set right here. Either it was one gunman or it was a larger conspiracy, okay? So it happens that I have set the probability that it was a loan gunman at 15%. And again, you're not pretending that that number is true. You're saying this is, this is a visualization of your estimation of what the probabilities are

as of now, based on what you know now. So that in part, you can go back and check your own thinking

later. Right. And one thing I'm going to add to this program is the ability to record why you set a probability the way you did. And in this case, I will say, I have ignored

“most of the analysis around the assassination, because I don't feel like I'm in a position to”

evaluate it. But what throws me is the blistic that are claimed versus what we all saw. This does not add up to me, and therefore suggests to me something else was a foot. That said, weird stuff happens. And these probabilities could change. I could invert my position based on new evidence or based on some epiphany that I might have, but in any case, complete solution set, 15%, it was a loan gunman, 85%, it was some kind of larger conspiracy with no

specificity as to what that might be. From each of those to branches, on the loan gunman branch, there's one possibility that the loan gunman was Tyler Robinson. I've set that at 98%. There's a lot of evidence against Tyler Robinson. If the loan gunman was somebody else, well, I don't think the evidence would look like what it does. So I've set that at 2%, and again, that adds to that adds to 100%. And again, you're not claiming that those numbers

are true. You are using what you currently expect to be true in a model that you can then check later and is changeable. Yes, this is a map of my understanding, which can definitely be wrong, but I want to understand what my understanding is now, and I want to be able to check what it is six months from now. I want to see it evolve, and I want to know why it evolved, what change went. Okay, so there's another branch. The one I have set at 85%, which is that there was a larger

conspiracy involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'm no, Charlie Kirk. On this, again, you have two possibilities. I would say Tyler Robinson is either a patsy in a scenario where there was a larger conspiracy, or he was uninvolved. Now, if it was a larger conspiracy, it's a patsy itself. A lot of different words. A lot of different words. A lot of different words. Right, exactly. So my point would be, the whole discussion, you can't have a discussion,

was it Tyler Robinson or do you believe in a larger conspiracy because that leaves off the table an obvious likely scenario, which is that a conspiracy would use a patsy to hide its behavior. So what this means now is that if we put this in path mode, oops, there, let's fit to screen. Okay, if you put this in path mode, we can highlight the two paths in which Tyler Robinson is part of the crime. And we get that is 98% of the potential on the map of my own understanding of the events.

he's alone gunman in the other. He's a patsy. And between the two, you have what I think is a 98% of potential. So what this reveals about your thinking about the probabilities. So your assignment of probabilities is based on your understanding. The possible cases shouldn't be recognizable by everyone here. Everyone will put different probabilities to each of these six moments.

“But the, was it a lone gunman versus was there a larger conspiracy? I believe that everyone should”

should grant that and maybe someone would say, isn't there a third possibility? Well, I don't know what it is.

But okay, say there's possibility three and give it a 1% chance and drop larger conspiracy to, I can't re-read your numbers here to 84 or whatever. And we just zoom out so I can see. So, you know, is, are there other possibilities between, if it's a lone gunman between Tyler Robinson and someone else, no, you've defined a complete solution set inherently defective. Right. And Tyler Robinson is a patsy versus he was uninvolved. You know, could you freeze that

in a way that maybe you want to add a third thing, maybe, maybe. But really, the possibilities

that you've described describe everything possible, it's the probabilities that you've assigned to them

that people may take issue with, that you yourself in the future might disagree with. But having this

“and having the ability to look and say, okay, what, you know, what if lone gunman then what?”

What if someone else then? Right. It allows you to track your logic and to keep an eye on your own intuitions and how they change his evidence mounts? Yep. And let's just say, the discussion is liable to be vastly better if the point is, can we all agree that this is the diagram? And can we then discuss why your percentage chance that it's a lone gunman is set to low? I'd like to make the argument

to you, Brett, that you've set the lone gunman possibility to low, and it's because you don't really

understand something about a 386 or something like that. Right. That's a discussion. I am absolutely ready to have as long as we're doing it on a diagram that has patchy properly categorized as a real possibility. Not saying it happened. It could easily be eliminated. But the fact that you're telling me, you know, his fingerprints were on the gun. It's like, well, wouldn't you want them to be if you wanted a patch? Can we agree that there are people who would benefit from having a patchy to

cover their tracks for an assassination? Of course. So wouldn't is the fact that his prints are on the gun and that he appears to have been on the roof, is that evidence that there was no larger conspiracy? Not if you understand what a patchy is. So there's going to be many, many words for this kind of logical contingency thinking across many, many domains. I'm thinking in terms of nested sets and contingencies and presumably economics and game theory and rationality space. All

of the different traditions are going to have different words for exactly what this is. What you've

“done, I think, that is useful that I haven't really seen before, is the visual path. As you say,”

it's path analysis, but the visual path in which you can, you know, by which anyone can look at and say you're missing a possibility. Okay, let's talk. As opposed to that probability is wrong. Well, that's the probability I assigned to it. I didn't say it was correct, but that's my instinctier why do you think it's wrong. Those are two really different kinds of objections, right? And I think honing in on what is the objection that the person who's yelling at you at the

moment about something that they're sure you have wrong is, is it a, you don't understand something about the gun that was used. Okay, teach me, educate me, or you're an idiot. His fingerprints are on the gun. Okay, you're an idiot because you're not understanding what the causality of evidence actually looks like. Yep. And in fact, you can spot because there are two levels in this analysis. You can spot that somebody who is certain that it was a lone gunman because

they believe it was Tyler Robinson based on the evidence is involved in a non-sequitor, Tyler

to not have some weirdo argument where you're saying things and you assume that the natural

consequence of them is obvious to everybody. It's like wouldn't it be better if you had that argument in a room without on the board where you can just simply point to which of these four possibilities

“you're describing at any moment. It would be, it would be clarifying, which is I think in part”

why this is not happening. That you know, there are those of us who are seeking clarity and there are others who are trying to shut it down. Well, no, I mean, it's not happening for a lot of reasons. Some of it is because some people don't want clarity. Some systems, some people don't want clarity. But this, you know, this is the 20 questions exercise that I used to do at the beginning of just about every class and that we did together sometimes that we were first introduced to

the force of Costa Rica. Is this kind of lesson, right? So what it is is based on an exercise of the organization for tropical studies does with its graduate students and courses for people learning how to be tropical biologists. As we were when we were first introduced to it, you take people out someplace in nature where they are not going to be in visual distance even better if not in your shot of anyone else with nothing but a notebook and a pencil or pen and really like nothing else

“if they can manage it and you say, look, put you down here. Don't move unless you have to.”

And if you're swarmed by bees or bear comes along, you can escape. And I'll come back into

hours. I swear, well, I used to say to students, I've never lost anyone. And just sit and be

and observe. And for a while, what you're going to observe probably, except for those who are sort of the most Buddhist and meditative already, will be the stuff in their head. Go, what is this? This is stupid. Why'd you do this to me? What is going on? Like, I don't want to be here. I'm hungry. What am I doing tonight? Like all of that? All the internal stuff. Like, you can write those things that come into your head down if you want. I, the professor,

your peers, when you share this with them later on, that's not the stuff I want you share. I, maybe useful to you, the, the, you know, logging of your internal dialogue. That's not what we're doing here. This is an exercise in learning how to actually observe

the outside world. And, and coming to recognize that you cannot observe without your sensory biases,

because you observe through your senses and they have biases and those are yours. And there was nothing to be done about it. But what you come to recognize, and I'm jumping ahead here, a bit, is at the point that you have reported that you saw a thing. And then someone else is over there and they're like, oh, I saw that thing too. And then someone else is over there at a different moment in time and say, oh, but over there, I saw the same thing. It was just slightly different. But

it was the same kind of thing. As you start to accumulate, very similar eyewitness, earwitness,

“whatever accounts of a thing, you go, ah, I think, I think we have a pattern. And so that's the”

being of pattern recognition, which is the beginning of truth-making, of truth-seeing and revealing and understanding of the universe. So, as your brain quiets down and you stop worrying about the fact that you out of candy and you don't have a date for the night, and you know, whatever it is, you start seeing, you know, bird fly by and you wonder, where's it going? Maybe that's your question, or you think I wonder if it has a mate, or what does it eat, or maybe even something as mundane

and actually socially constructed as what is it called? What is it called? It doesn't know what it's called, because what it's called is what we call it. That doesn't actually tell you anything about it, but once you know what a particular species is called, you can use some of the, you know, massive understanding that humans have already accumulated to learn something else. It's not as a rich or kind of understanding as watching yourself and coming to know, but so you write down,

you know, you aim for 20 questions in those two hours that you have about what you actually are observing in the natural world, and to our later, come pick you up, save, free to go. I'll see you this afternoon or tomorrow morning, depending on when we're doing the thing. And then the class of depending 25 or 50 people comes in with their questions and you know, break them into groups and say, okay, you know, in each group of four, everyone choose one of their own favorite questions,

and one question from the person sitting to your right that you like if there's best, and then work up from those eight as many as possible in the next hour or whatever. You know, how, how would you figure out the answer? What are the hypotheses that could, that could begin to address the observation that you had that prompted the question? What are the predictions that emerge from those hypotheses? And then, you know, if you can get this far, what are the experimental tests,

you know, in the next part of the exercise we come together and, and everyone presents what they've

done to the whole class, and why do people feel fiercely about some of the hypotheses that they have generated about observations that they had just hours earlier, or a day earlier, things about which they didn't even know anything 24 hours earlier, much less have an opinion about it, but suddenly, not only did they have an opinion, they feel fiercely, and they are ready to fight you if you disagree. And this in part reveals the social, social dynamic that emerges, once you have

put some effort into belief, and it also reveals, okay, but how would we know?

I get that you feel strongly about this, but how would we know? This is where we use the science,

and the whole process has been the science, but this is how we begin to figure it out. And that's sort of teasing a part of like, okay, what's the logical causal set of things that we would need to know? Need to do to figure out what is true? And, oh boy, do you see how fiercely you

“care now about something that actually didn't even know existed 24 hours ago? That's what you see”

on social media, every single day. Yeah, and actually, I think if the formalized exercise involved something like this, as you're debating, what is the complete set of possible explanations

for the behavior we saw? If you had them all here, and you could even take a poll of the room

in order to figure out what the room's instinct was on these things. And then you debate out these things, you rule out several hypotheses because you have an evidence that makes them almost certain to be false. Whatever the point is, watching the, watching the probability collapse to one of the branches without the tree collapsing to anything smaller than it was, that's a very useful exercise. This is one of the key points that we wanted to get to,

right? That, in this particular example you've given, you just have two options at each.

“But, well, I don't know if you want to use the example that we were using earlier in talking”

you were talking about the existence of God. Yep. Oh, that's coming up soon. Okay. Well, so the point is, I don't know how you want to get to it, but the point is that you don't ever say, ah, I am so certain that that's not a possibility, even though I can't ever have concrete proof, that I'm going to reduce the probability to zero, or increase the probability to one, and thus eradicate all the other branches, that keeping them all alive as distinctly remote possibilities

allows you to resurrect them if new evidence comes to light. Yep. And that keeps the, the logical brain open to possibility and relishing of uncertainty in a way that modern life and specifically life on life online does not seem to like. Life online wants you to be 100% certain, all the time, I know this isn't true, I know this is true, how could you believe anything else you're an idiot? And actually, the, you know, the point here is really uncertainty is not just your

“friend, it's absolutely necessary. You need to retain certainty on almost every topic and that”

does not mean that you need to be wishy-washy, that does not mean that you need to think there's a 50/50 chance of everything. Uncertainty can mean, yeah, I really don't think there's a God personally, but that doesn't mean that I have decided that there's absolutely zero chance. Yep. Now there is, as you will see in the next diagram, there's something that I decided not to put on the diagram in part just to make it readable. But what is implied here is this diagram assumes

the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and there is a hidden possibility which you will see in the next case. So, you know, if I were to make this diagram more complete, I would add here a branch, and it would say, I know you're at the wrong place. Oh, yeah, delete that here. Why did it, oh, it added because I'm an ad mug. Wow. It's, it's a new app. Yeah, it's a new app. It's a little, uh, need some refining. Okay. So, go back to select mode. You say,

I know,

comes in a couple of different flavors, but what would you do with the probability? Well, I would say,

guess I'm not sure why what, what that adds. I don't know why that's useful here. Because I feel like, because I'm not really Kirk, whatever the question is, you can just opt out. You can be like, I'm not weighing in on this. I don't have an opinion. Oh, no, no, this is about something else. The diagram as I presented it assumes that there was an assassination of Charlie Kirk. What I'm

trying to do is in still a kind of mental discipline. The same way when our children were very certain of things that were impossible to be perfectly certain of, I would say, how sure are you, and they would say a hundred percent, and I would say try again. I want, I want to know what your degree of uncertainty is. And if you say, well, there are certain things that are just certain,

the answer is actually even those things aren't. This is exactly why Dick Hart struggled to even

prove to himself that he existed. Is it nothing is that certain, right? So, if that you said, Dick Hart, Dick Hart, are we talking about now? Gary Hart's uncle. But anyway, the point is the idea that there should always be looming in your mind, the possibility that you are in a coma and imagining all of this or that some malevolent for your brain and a jar and you think you're a person and you're being fed data to see what you are going to do with it, right? Those things

aren't significant possibilities. But the idea that you leave them open because that means that you are actually completely open to the discovery that something you didn't have on your map should be

“is a key part of epistemic humility. Yeah, I don't, I think that that putting that on this”

makes this less useful. Maybe, but my point is when you exclude it, know that you're excluding it,

right? There are reasons to exclude it. For example, it makes the diagram harder to read, but in any case, here is another diagram in which we can use path analysis to understand what's going on. Now, this was motivated. Just so you know, very hard to read. Oh, of course, impossible to read, and I will zoom in. I do not wish to drag this into social space. I don't wish to drag anyone else into it. But I was challenged by somebody that I know and like over a claim that somebody I've just

met believes that the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated is suggestive, is symbolic, and it is suggestive of a darker meaning. So here's the diagrams. That's the venue in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated. But the line, so there's, I see three colors painted onto a photograph. Yes, you see three colors painted onto a satellite image of the, can we see the satellite image without the colors painted on them? No, we can't. Because that pentagon is loose at best. Yeah, okay. So

this is the image that is used to describe why the inscribing of the pentagon. I mean, of the pentagram pentagram is being suggested as something meaningful. And I was challenged by somebody as to whether or not the fact that somebody that I had spoken to, I had reposted something he said, what he said was not about symbolism or anything. It was about his friend Charlie Kirk. This was somebody who knew Charlie better than I did by quite a bit apparently. And so what I posted

“was, you should take his claims about what Charlie Kirk said and thought and what Eric Kirk said”

and thought seriously, because he apparently vacationed with them and what to dinner with them. And so anyway, it's evidence. But anyway, somebody challenged me and said, well, do you take this seriously and showed the images of the pentagram and blah, blah, blah. Now, so you're not using names intentionally. Yeah. Okay. So, but a guy wrote something you found compelling and you directed people to it. He also posted something about the symbolism at the venue

that you haven't yet said what you think of it. And someone said, yeah, but that's the same guy who said this thing. Do you take that seriously? Right. You know, if you if you do, then you're that kind of crazy. And if you don't, then how could you possibly be vouching for this other thing that he thinks?

“Is that the biggest escape? Yes. And I mean, I showed his tweet. So I think there's no reason not to”

reveal that this is John Mappin who reached out to me after my discussions with Tucker to tell me things I didn't know about Charlie. Okay. So what do I do? Why can I not say to my friend who

that was in some way intentional. Do you take that seriously? And my point is the pressure to say,

no, I don't take that seriously is immense. I am not going to say, I don't take it seriously because of the analysis that we've been building you, the style of analysis in which you have various possibilities. And so I want to show you what I do with a question like that that will cause me not to answer it declaratively, but to answer it. So not to hit the pressure release valve with most normal people would do and say, no, of course, I don't take that seriously. Right.

“So instead, you create, this is the venue, what are the three possible possibilities about the venue?”

Right. What are the three possibilities about the venue? And I see I have failed

to input a value which I will try. Wow. Okay. So I'm in select mode. I should be able to select that and add the value, but I can't. There's some reason. So this is just that air wall people are on listening. So all right. So then we're just going to forgive me for my failure of tech here. This is a new program. I said at the point out. Okay. Yeah. I mean, literally just created it. Okay. So in the space of possibilities,

where we are asking the question as to whether or not the Utah Valley University venue is significant. The shape of it is significant in the assassination of Charlie Kirk as John Mappen asserts. I would argue that we are in a possibility space. On the bottom branch here, I have the possibility that I can't interpret the universe I live in at all. I know nothing and the possibility is for why I might know nothing come in two flavors.

“My world is somehow false or I'm crazy. Now, do I think those things have any significant”

possibility of being true? Not really. I've set the probability at 100,000. Okay. So it's low.

And I thought about setting it at a million. But okay. So 100,000 is not worth worrying about here.

So the point is what's happening in this space is on this other part of the tree. And in fact, I should be able to just delete this branch so we cannot focus on it. Stuff doesn't work as it should. But okay. So the other two branches of the tree divide between a branch in which there is a supernatural creator and another branch in which the universe is strictly natural. But your p value is way too low. Yeah. That while I was trying to

fix that, just a second ago. That's exactly the problem. So, okay. Yeah. So anyway, I would say that the chances that the universe is strictly natural are 99%. The chances that there is a supernatural creator are 1%. And we can argue about whether or not I've set those things correctly. But you get the balance of it. Almost all of the action as far as I'm concerned is on the strictly natural universe branch. And obviously other people would reverse those. Those probabilities.

Yes. Many other people would reverse those probabilities. What do you have downstream of strictly natural universe in terms of if strictly natural universe? If this is hurt with the so-called evidence of the venue being evidence of demonic ritual or something. If this is a strictly natural universe, then the question of whether or not the structure of the venue is meaningful and symbolic depends on whether the criminals who were involved. And criminals you're just using mafia as a

“generic, whatever, whatever conspiracy might have been involved. Right. Remember when in one of the”

Godfather movies, a bulletproof vest is delivered with a fish in it. And somebody says, "What is this mean?" And somebody responds, "It means Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes." Right? The point is symbolism, okay? So in a world where criminals use symbolism, the possibility that the venue is symbolic in an important way exists. But I would regard it as very low probability. Why?

of Charlie Kirk? Either it would have had to be built with that in mind, knowing that either this assassination was going to happen there or that some other thing was going to happen there. So it would

“have had to be the planning involved just doesn't make any sense to me. So I think even a 2% chance”

that if this was just the criminal enterprise that the venue means anything is incredibly, I think that's generous. Yeah, it is generous. It is generous. And I should probably bump it down to less than 1%. If we live in a purely natural universe, it's also possible that criminal organizations of the sort that might have been involved in this are don't care about symbolism. Yeah, in which case the chances that the venue means nothing are extremely high and the

chances that it means something are extremely low. If on the other hand, there is a supernatural creator who has essentially unlimited powers and insight in the construction of things. Well then, the chances that God employs symbolism are extremely high in my book. I mean, it's one of the languages of God in there. I won't leave any tradition. Sure. And so the chances then assuming a supernatural creator, which I have set at 1%. But again, many people would reverse that.

Would reverse that. Yeah. But if there is a God, the chances that God issues symbolism are very low. I have it at 5%. Probably way too high. And that God uses symbolism. I have it 95% which is probably too low. But the point is, then the chances that the venue means something go up. I have them at 95%

“and I have the chances that the venue means nothing at 5%. Okay. But I feel like, I think this is,”

I think this is useful in terms of tracking what's contingent on what. But there's a critical

piece missing in this analysis, which is that that evidence of symbol was to my, you know, first time seeing it as extraordinarily weak. I didn't really look like a pedagon. It looked like it had been drawn onto something and kind of like fit into place. And so, you know, I, I like the analysis in so far as, if entirely natural universe, this is very unlikely to mean anything. It all, if a God created universe with a God who uses symbolism, then the chances get higher.

But there still has to be some evidence that there's symbol. And you know, that, that you've sort of assumed here. You've assumed that the sort of painting on to a picture in a, what looks to me, because sort of like a half-assed way is meaningful. And so I feel like that's missing. Yep. That's missing. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't know how to begin to put a probability on that pentagram definitely looks like that venue. Right. Because to me, it looks like I just

“doesn't, but I don't know. Well, in, in fact, I think you can say even more strongly that the”

existence of the pentagon implies that you could inscribe a pentagram. And so, right, but that,

but as I said, when I first looked at the pentagon itself, looks, it's not there. Like, it looks

like that picture, which you can't see without, like, if you can't see the picture without the paint, it's impossible to know what it would look like with that paint. Okay. But it does, it looks like, it's just a little bit better now. So the right thing to do then would be, but yes, if pentagon then pentagram, but that's, that's, that's not a coincidence. That's just de facto geometry. Right. So the thing to do, that we have now done in real time exactly the thing that the diagrams are supposed

to prompt, which is you have compelled me that I have overrated the chances of this being a symbol, even if my other probabilities were defensible and that would change the whole architecture. And that, in fact, that is, that is where I think this is useful. So, you know, you and I had some arguments about this, right? Or I'm, or I'm going like, yeah, okay, it's a tool. The tool could be useful for some people. I think it won't, you know, I don't think this kind of thing

would be useful for people whose brains work a particular way, even if they are highly analytical.

I think I am perhaps one of those people. But people will always mistake the tool for the work.

And so your hand people at tool, and they assume, well, now I can do the work. And, you know, you can do the work, right? So you've created a tool to help you do the work to help you keep track of your own logical and intuitive understandings of system so that you can go back and

and look at what you may think in the future. But, you know what I mean? You will retain the knowledge

that this is a tool that exists at your request for your use and cannot do your thinking for you. But, almost everyone using tools at some point forgets that the tools are only as good as the inputs and the people using the tools. All right, which points to in the world of phylogeny, which was the diagram inspiration for writing things out this way. We have two different kinds of tools. We have analytical tools where you feed in a data set and it tells you what the most

parsimonious way to arrange the species on the tree is based on the data you have given it. It's an analytical tool. And then we have graphical tools in which you can put any two species next to each other and you can propose that this is actually how I think these things evolved rather than that way. And so what you're pointing to, which I 100% agree with, is that this tool is a tool for you to make your own thinking more complete and for to force you to put explicit

probabilities on things. Nothing says that your intuition is any good. Not that thing here.

“It is a visualization tool. An important distinction though and I think this is part of why”

I mean this is inside baseball here. But, I think part of the reason why I object to comparing this to a phylogenic visualization program like McLeod, which we used, is that when you are drawing a possible set of relationships between species, a so called phylogenetic tree,

you'll never presume or claim that you have included everything. There is no complete tree of life.

It just never has existed. It's too much. And so you always know that you're excluding some things. And you're therefore making no claims about those relationships. They just aren't on there. If you say, look, on this tree of life, cats and dogs are more closely related to each other than either are to mice. You're like, what about hyenas? Like, what about hyenas? If I add hyenas and cats on hyenas are more closely related to each other than dogs, I didn't make a claim about hyenas.

Therefore, their absence from the hypothesis of relationship that is the tree is not information. Right? Whereas on this sort of path analysis tool that you have created, you are attempting,

“and I think in most cases that you have shared today, have succeeded in describing”

the complete solution set, the scope of possibilities. And it is actually necessary for the meaning to be made. Because if you simply exclude something from what is possible, and then you put, you know, then your probability is up to one. There's a, there's a lie there somewhere. There's, there's a falsehood. Right. There's where there's at least an assumption that's unstated. And I agree with you. And I must say, I've lost my diagram because the ability of the program

has not preserved the state in the tab. But anyway, I will fix that down the road here. I will, I will just say that I cautioned you. So you've just created this two days ago. It's too early to share this. It is too early to share it. But anyway, I think the discussion so far has been good. There's a couple of things I wanted to highlight, the one of which we've already hinted at, that the danger of being socially pressured into falsely closing off a possibility.

The difference between setting a possibility at 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 versus closing it off, and forgetting it ever existed is profound. And it is also, you know, as you and I talked about

“earlier today, the, in normal life, you have to just close off possibilities. It's part of”

being functional. And so we have the circuit in us, which is like yet, I already decided, you know, at the point that you've picked the thing you're going to eat off the menu, keeping alive. All of the things that you might have ordered. The major shows up, "Hey, we got a new special. Like, I don't care. I don't care anymore." I don't care. What's more, I'd rather not remember the thing I decided not to order, because I don't want to be disappointed in the thing I got. So,

you know, so anyway, the point is more and more. This is what brand loyalty is about, too. It's not like, that's the best. Like, the decision is made. Right. The decision is made, or the decision is made. I'm going to Costco. We'll see which two things they have and choose between them. But I'm not, you know, I'm not going to Amazon, right? We're everything is available. So, anyway, the tendency for normal people in order to function, to close off possibilities and walk away

from them and try not to think about them again is powerful and completely understandable. In fact,

you probably are more functional in normal life if you're good at just printing things from the tree

when things are contentious, when there is vast pressure to, well, you know, you admit that the

vaccines are safe. Sorry, I can't admit that because I know too much, right? The point is you've got a world of possibilities that are ugly, that are frightening, that are sometimes falsely introduced, you know, we can somebody pollute your tree by flooding the zone with garbage possibilities, sure. So, trying to figure out how to do this in an elegant enough way that you can remember what you thought, why you thought it, and why you now think something different is a truly important

skill. So, falsely closing, falsely setting something that has a low probability to zero in order

“to simplify your thinking life is a bad habit and yeah. And so, I would say,”

if we talked about future iterations of this, this would appear building, say you have

something for which there are, you know, five possible outcomes. And three of them you've decided really the possibilities are vanishingly small. You don't reduce them to zero and get rid of them entirely, and thus lose track of them ever having been possibilities. Because it's rare that you actually know for sure, that's a zero. Zero's and ones are very hard to come by in probability space. Zero, you know, point, you tend to the negative six as you put and one of those. Yeah, but that's

different from zero. Yeah. It's different from zero. And so, you know, I would love to see a beautiful sort of visually useful version of this in which the probability scales is on a gray scale. So, something that's very unlikely is closer to white on white and the closer to one it is, is the quote, is black on white and it's just much more visible so that, you know, from any kind of a distance, you can see, okay, what at this moment in time, the probability is I'm assigning

to this. What do I think is most true? Okay, I can see it. But what is also still possible, even though I don't think it's true right now. You can still see the things, but they're not what draw your eye. And that is, in fact, how our brains work when they're working best. I can still see the whole possibility space. But this is where I think it's going to be. This, this is the line

“that I think the truth is going to be on. So, I'm going to go there, even though these are still”

out there. I know they are, but I don't need to focus there right now because I know they'll be there if I ever need to come back. Yep. I would also argue that if you had two groups of people, you had one group of people that was committed to doing that maintaining an awareness of what they once thought possible. And one group that prunes the tree down to what they now think is likely, what you're describing actually happened in biology classes, as people who became

committed to their interpretation rather than remaining open to the full solution set, even if they now believe this thing is likely. Of what topic we're talking about? We're describing what the 20 questions exercise were people become very committed to one interpretation. It's not central, but the point is, I would like to have discussions only with people who implicitly or explicitly enter with the awareness that they are perfectly certain of nothing.

“And I think you can just say that. Am I perfectly certain that I exist? No, I'd put it at one”

in 100,000, one in a million, maybe less that I don't exist and I'm not just perceiving the universe in the way I think I am, but you can't rule out the possibility that some kind of insanity would feel like this. But that also doesn't mean that maintaining that as an extremely low probability possibility warrants any of your attention. Well, no, no, I would argue. Like it can be in, I think a utility of this sort of app that you're building is that you can have it on the

visual and be like, yep, great. I don't need to, I just don't need to worry about it. Okay, but then the point is, I'm a big fan of rules of the door. Rules of the door for an analytical discussion

is perfect certainty is never warranted. Perfect certainty is never warranted, right? You can act

based on the fact that this is the right way, this is the best bet. But if you have perfect certainty in your mind of anything including your own identity, you've started off on the wrong foot. So anyway, yeah, it doesn't belong in every diagram. In fact, it belongs on no diagrams. It belongs as an assumption of the fact that you're sitting down to diagram probabilities. Okay, all right, the other thing I wanted to add was in thinking about these sorts of issues, I believe in our

quadrant. There is a very live debate about what the essence of woke is. There's obviously a

major accusation about the woke right and claims about what it means that they are woke and things

“like that. And I think in talking about the pressure to close off possibilities prematurely or”

close them off without a proper evidentiary basis that they are truly impossible that the reality of what the essence of woke is became clear. Something I had thought loosely had became very concrete. And the idea is in a social environment, let's say it's medicine or the academy. There is a set of beliefs. Let's say it's medicine and the beliefs are vaccines are very safe. And then evidence causes a subset of the people in that milieu to doubt. Something happens.

Enough doctors see a patient regress and they say, yeah, that's not related to the vaccine, but then it happens again. Enough people begin to get the sense of something is not right. The pressure to get those people to either reverse course and reverse what they now know or to be perfectly silent about what they know. In order to maintain the consensus is extremely

powerful. And so what I'm going to claim, what I've said, what I said to James Lindsay and my

intervention with him was that the essence of woke is insulation and that I don't

“think that term applies to anybody who's not trying to shut down the voice of others, but I think”

it's two pieces. There's banish. We're not going to platform you because you've lost your mind and there's coercion. We're going to get you back on board with the consensus and those two things are basically a choice either you get back on board with the consensus or you're out. I would

argue that those two things are the essential core of wokeness and that it is the artificial

closing off of live possibilities that is the uniting feature. We're either going to frighten you into saying, say, the words vaccines are safe, right? Or if you don't say that, I'm sorry, he used to be a pretty good doctor until he became an anti-vaxxer, right? Something like that. So it is, it is that thing closed down that possibility or else and the or else involves ejecting you. We're not going to platform you. You're not going to talk to you.

Maybe we'll come after you and the courts will accuse you of fraud, whatever we're going to do. So it is that social phenomenon which is totally non-analytic. We saw it over and over and over again, explicitly at Evergreen in the meltdown almost nine years ago. You saw a couple of very explicit personal examples in which young people who you did not know tried to speak to you. You were interested in talking to anyone who would talk as opposed to yell on scream and just shout

about that's accusations. And several as I remember of the young people who wanted to speak to you came away from those conversations thinking, well, wait a minute, that's not what I was told that was going to be. He treated me away with respect and doesn't even do your races, there's no big a tree and it's odd. And then you saw them reeducated when they refused to when they refused to continue to shout the maxims of the revolution that was happening in front of us.

“So I think your encapsulation of what woke is is born a very particular set of extreme circumstances”

that really did encapsulate what it is that they do. What it is the main weaponry of the woke, it's recollect or exercise. Yeah, we're going to intimidate you into rejoining the

things. One woke is an ideology which is only applicable in that the one case of the woke revolution

“and it's various beliefs about race and about trance and about those things. And then there's woke,”

the tool kit and the tool kit is wielded by others. We certainly saw it work during COVID and in fact at the time I called some people medically woke because their idea was those beliefs of yours are intolerable and nobody should be talking to you, right? That's woke. That's the tool kit woke. And well there's a reason that it's it's it's mellows china. It's you know it's it's communism wherever it has shown up when we are aware of what the strategies are. It looks like this more

less over and over and over again. Yeah because the tool kit is a product of game theory. This is a way to it's a way to wield power that is not derived from the fact that you are correct. It is derived from the fact that you are in a position to coerce and to exile. Yeah. I guess then there may just be a disagreement. I don't really care. So not between you and me but about what people mean when they say woke. So that may be the heart of some of the disagreements

that that you are having with people that because woke with a strategy exists outside of the new moment of woke the ideology and has existed wherever communism is existed. The set of strategies is going to be called you know communist or Maoist or something and then it's the ideology that gets the name that that may be the the heart of some of the disagreement that you have with some

“people. Well the disagreement I think stems from the following thing. The alternative claim. You've got”

my claim about the woke tool kit involving coercion and cancellation threats coercion and cancellation in order to keep you within a set of belief parameters. The alternative perspective which James Lindsey has articulated as well as anyone has is that the key aspect of woke is effectively the belief that there is an epiphany and that those who have had it can see. Now I don't disagree that that

does tend to show up but if you think about what the idea is like the problem is there are a lot of

garbage epiphanys but everything good starts as one. So the idea that there might be some epiphany that you have about you know whether vaccines are safe enough to be used on children. The point is ah you're woke you claim to have woken up to something and it's like you want to demonize the idea of waking up to something because we wake up to lots of stuff and there's lots of stuff that I've woken up to that I would not go back to sleep over and it's because it's right and I am safer

and healthier and happier to know about it. So the point is which is the more essential feature of the woke tool kit is it epiphany and does that distinguish it from anything else or is it the tool kit used to prevent people from straying from and enforced consensus and I would claim it's obviously the latter thing. Yep struggle sessions yeah struggle sessions not to put too final point on it um gosh I feel like there was uh more places here but maybe maybe that's it yeah

for now um and maybe what time is that what time does it think it is depends what it is

“depends with the definition of it. Yeah I think we're going to hold off on sharks honestly because”

I kind of just don't want to um introduce actual phylogenies on a day when there were sort of tree diagrams being shown totally uh this will also give sharks a little more time to evolve. Uh man they've been so slow. No actually one of the so I mentioned the shark thing last week

I'll just keep on like dragging it on and probably we'll never get to it but um apparently they had

very rapid evolution and diversification but it was so long ago that it feels like they've just been you know changing a little bit for a very long time and they kind of just looked like they did all their changing all at once and then they've they're just like we did it got there. They've been resting on their cartilaginous laurels for a good many long before laurels ever these years. Oh yeah Andrew sperms man they are late comers. Late bloomers. Wow I know yeah. That was a really good

pun that the people are going to get. Yeah um okay but we did you insisted actually. Yeah um I

There are two so we live in this county uh in the state of Washington uh San Juan County

“which has four fairies served islands and another several few handfuls of inhabited islands”

and it's kind of even look it up I don't know how many people live on the in the county. I don't know several tens of thousands fish something um and uh there are two weekly newspapers one that

comes out of San Juan when it comes out of Borcus every week and every week they both report basically

the um the sheriff's log police blotter. Yeah the police blotter they call the sheriff's log here um and I usually I read it every week because it's it's it's yeah it's quaint it's just from like literally there's no street light on the island that we live on and um and we're in the county seat

“right so I don't think there's a street light in the county. Yeah I think there must not be”

yeah because if there's none here there's yeah there's none anywhere um but you know still that you know

there's some real things and so this is from um March 18th this is last weeks um this is the

most recent one it will be a new one coming out today um but you know we have things like a low peasant deputy stop to vehicle near the intersection of mud bay road and vister road the driver was subsequently issued an infraction for speeding 50 miles per hour and opposed to 35 mile per hour zone additional warnings were issued and you know I'll say like this is the entire log for the week for the entire county like it's just there's not much going on here uh and

you know a low peasant resident reported fraud that resulted in significant loss of funds both in cash and gift cards purchased at a local business uh more traffic stops uh there's a occasional you know drunk driving um occasional domestic incidents um but it's uh you know it's pretty rare there's anything all that serious however i feel like uh the sheriff's log in the our county out did itself uh this week with the following again from the sheriff's log

from our 2225 the following entry the deputy received report of found property a $1 bill was located in the sheriff's office and the owner was unknown the money was booked into evidence as found property not many counties where somebody would book a dollar in the evidence booked into evidence

yeah it was a slow day even here yep yeah all right it's an amazing story yeah yeah so you

“insisted i know i know it's good i read that to you when you're like you have to be sure you gotta share”

yeah um so from the county where a occasional dollar bills are booked into evidence it's a you know it's a beautiful place to live it's um it's a little insane for those of you have been paying attention to Washington state um it's it's it's even further losing it's grip on reality in some ways at least lawmakers are but um it is a beautiful beautiful state and the county is quite enough to occasionally book one dollar bills into evidence of loss property

and i got a piece so let's uh well i didn't think we were done okay no we can we can we can we can do that um so we'll be back on a Sunday with a Q&A on on locals at 11 AM Pacific and next week with our next live stream and until you see us next because the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone