# Bret and Heather ## Enabling this event ``` Why is this happening?``` Bret: It's more or less the same dynamic, and it is about power, and of course they're targetting those who are speaking to the obvious anomalies and discrepancies and lies and the very same dynamic is unfolding, but one thing I will point out before Heather jumps in here is that the most interesting thing to me is that many people who actually were on the correct side of history for the woke revolution, ,many people who stood by us while we were being accused of being witches have now switched sides and they have become medically woke, and are now deplatforming and astygmatizing and virtue signaling and doing all of the behaviours that we saw during the Evergreen meltdown, and it is very interesting - what it suggests is that individuals who resist are not necessarily immune to the dynamics. It may have to do, in my many cases, with the subject matter in question, which will put them on the exactly the other side of the witch hunt. Heather: As opposed to being what we generally call Ash-Negative. People who in a room with Solomon Ash, the psychologist from the mid 20th century who asked a group of people to say which line is shorter - and there's one person who's actually being asked an dall of the rest are just confederates. The vast majority of people will cmoply with a factually inaccurate answer if everyone else in the room says that it's true. And they don't know that there's a bunch of confederates in the room. Very few people will comply 100% of the time, but most people will comply some of the time with a simple statement of falsehood. Generally ash-negative people, who will not comply with untruths, intentional or not, are more rare than you would think The one thing that I would say to what you said, Bret, with what is happening with regard to public policy responses to COVID and politically unacceptable statements early in the pandemic "maybe it came from a lab" and we've had a lot of these, but the ones on which we and you are still on the hook, as it were, is about vaccine safety and efficacy - and then also, the efficacy and indeed safety of other drugs, like Ivermectine. ## Witch Hunt Model Your model that you had (Brett's model) that you had produced in class, just a few days before Evergreen blew up, had 4 categories: - The witch-hunters - People who are prepared to go along with it (flying monkeys) - Silent (but disagree and aware - fence sitters also) - Witches (those who do not comply in the witch hunt) I do not have a sense of how relatievly large the two middle categories are, and this is what is allowing this argument to go on for as long as it is. Really, there are so many good analyses that do show that there are many many adverse events from the vaccines, and there's plenty of peer-reviewed public research that shows they lose efficacy really quickly. Given that, how is it that it would appear that the vast majority of people are happily vaccinated, will happily get vaccinated again, and have never run into problems with it. I do not know the relative size of those two middle populations and whether or not it's different in this case than say i was with woke campus. ## Hyper Novelty Brett: I believe that part of what's going on is the result of the central theme of our book which is Hyper-Novelty. Whta we're looking at is an environment in which people rae not sharing information in a natural way because the dynamics of the modern internet have allowed them to be intimidated, allowed them to be fooled as to what a nromal conversation looks like. Many people will know, in some cases, someone who has had a vaccine injury - those who have had teh injuries are reluctant to talk about it (Eric Clapton, Mountain Biker champ, etc). He doesn't have the right to talk abotu his own experience of injury, but is a demon for doing so. In an environment like that, people don't talk about their own injuries, they don't tlak about patterns they've seen, and when they don't tlak about it, it makes it seem much rarer than it actually is. Whereas a natural dynamic - we talked before there was evidence of harms, the thing that alarmed us was the claim that these things are safe when there couldn't possibly be knowledge that would tell you that, because they were too new. Nobody knew what the longterm impacts might be. So, my sense is we said "hey, there may be harms we don't know about" and we're all now talking about myocarditis? How is that not taken as a vindication of our concern? It just simply wasn't, because that's not allowed, and the way that's not allowed is through the hyper novelty of the internet. ## Cognitive dissonance ``` Cognitive dissonance among the vaccinated - people having all manner of unpleasant side effects, from blood clots to abnormal periods to myocarditis in young people - and instead of going "hang on a second, we ought to put this on hold while we investigate further", people are not making the connection between their jabs and these side effects. There's a sort of collective self-delusion going on. So you reckon that it's possibly - is it because the internet, and social media, is in the hands of institutions like Facebook and Twitter, which are committed to the Big Pharma pro-vaccine narrative? Is that what's going on? The dissenting voices are being kicked off, or is something else going on?``` Heather: That is part of it, for sure, and with regard to the individual level of response - most people aren't generally Ash-negative - most people also are not in the habit of (though they are capable of, and we're experiencing this in classrooms) most people are capable of the world wherein when new things come at them, they try to derive from First princples what is true? Most people are not dumb, lazy or incompetent, but most people are in the habit of acting as though they are these things, in part because of the complexity that is coming at them, and I would just say one thing that is revealed here: blatant hypocrisy at all sorts of trivial levels, here's an easy one: In 2017 the Woke Ideologues were saying "You can't use science, you can't use logic, you can't use the tools of the enlightenment, because what is the one source of information that sits above all else? My lived experience." Now we have exactly the opposite - all of these people's lived experiences are not to be considered - they're not even allowed to talk about having had them. So, this is just an obvious simple and trivial but even conopletely reveaing inconsistent and hypocrisy between the two ideologies. Brett: In some sense, we should look at ourselves as a giant, modern version of the Ash experiment. The internet is like a large room in which the mainstream narrative is being blared at us - these things are safe and effective. People who claim otherwise are somehow superstitious or antiscientific or delusional or grifters or whatever any of these accusations might be, and so the point is, most people, in the ash experiment, heard others insist that the shorter line was, in fact, longer, and this was th ekey evolutionary part - what Ash does not say, is that there is a reason, a very good reason that human beings are terrified to be out of step with the mainstream consensus, and that is 5000 years ago, 10,000 , etc.. that was a very place to be. And even if the mainstream was mistaken, one did not want to be the odd man out - it's one thing to be the odd man out in a discussion of something regular, but it's another thing on matters of social belief, and the steering of the collective in some direction. I don't know why, i assume based on the relentless coordinated response that comes back when you make certain claims - but what I can say is that in light of a chorus broadcasting a message "These things are safe and effective, there is no alternative, this is the way out of the pandemic" even though all 3 of those statements are false, if everyone is saying them, the pressure to simply accept that these things are true is immense, and it is a tiny fraction of the population that, in the face of a chorus saying these things, would say "actually, that doesn't match what I see at all". ## Weird sheep ``` I would imagine that - by the way, are you famliar with the concept of the weird sheep?``` I was talking to a shepherd about this, and he was telling me taht every flock of sheep has a weird sheep in it - which doesn't do all the things that the other sheep do. The function fo the weird sheep is in extreme and bizarre situations - for example, say the whole field gets blanketed in snow and it disguises everything and they odn'tk now where they are - the weird sheep will maybe climb up onto a wall, just poking up above the snow, and take charge - and in the same way, we need weird sheep, of which you both are and I am, to guide the herd when it's doing crazy things, when it's lost its head, to lead it into the paths of righteousness. Well, that's the idea, but the danger is that the weird sheep gets executed or sacrificed or whatever because it doesn't fit in with the consensus, and I would imagine that, interms of evolutionary biology, quite often, whatever gene it is that leads us to be weird, gets cut out of the system through being murdered or executed or whatever else. The price for being a weird sheep is quite high ``` Heather: This is very much like the model that we start the book with, but then expand on quite a lot in the later chapter in Culture vs Consciousness - Cultural things are those that have already passed the test of time that are easily handed off to other people, and consciousness is the place you go into when you need to innovate and exchange ideas - and there's an analogy to be made, because those are somewhat different than standard uses of the terms "culture and consciousness" - an analogy to orthodoxy and heterodoxy and the sacred and the shamanistic. What we have now with, say, COVID response is an incredibly, rapidly obtained orthodoxy, and those of us who are on the outs who are the weird sheep that climbed the wall, are the heterodox voices, and those voices will be necessary even though, in general, heterodoxy, or shamans, there's going to be a much higher error rate. If you are in the business of being weird all the time, and climbing up on walls to see where you are, you are more likely to be wrong sometims than those who simply follow the herd. But, there are conditions in which you are absolutely required, and the herd would entirely perish, if it got rid of all the heterodoxy, all the shamans, all the weird sheep, etc... Brett: There's a day to day cost, when things are going well, to the weird sheep. It's not pulling in the same direction, exactly. That cost is paid back many times over by the fact that that is the individual that spots the thing when nobody else, because they're going along with the convention. This is exactly an evolutionary dynamic that you would see. We talk, not about groups ( a frought and broken concept in evolution) we have replaced it with lineage, a responsible, robust, rigorous concetp - and the idea is taht lineages are, again and again, saved by this rare individual that has this other characfteristic. Now, fascinating thing is when you are a weird sheep, you end up being exhiled, as it were, sheep presumably tolerate this because they don't have much of a choice. In humans, the Girardian model where the weird sheep is targeted an driven out is all too likely to unfold and for those who wish to gain power, it may be necessary because the weird sheep is the one that's going to freak out when some bad change is being made. But, at this new scale that we're functioning at - this hyper novel scale - what one finds is that you meet the other weird sheep. It's not that there is one weird sheep, but that every flock has weird sheep and they're constantly being ejected, which then puts you in contact with some of the world's most interesting, independent thinkers - some of them well known, and some of them obscure, but fascinating group of people. Heather: Furthermore, that is the flip side - why is this able to derange us so globally right now? Because of the control that social media nad a handful of companies have and Yes they're trying to exert their control, but yet here we are talking. What are the chances, absent social media and a global information world, that the 3 of us would be talking right now? Next to zero. ## Warning others ``` Totally, if anything good has come out of this horror that we are experiencing now, it is that people like us have met - for example, look, you people are self-described progressives, I would never have called myself a progressive, or whatever the opposite of progressive is (reactionary?) - I was definitely never progressive. But we have a lot more in common, intellectually, than our differences. And that's great. But, the question is - because to continue this sheep analogy for a moment - I suspect that, actually, the farmer who's looking after us, supposedly, actually has malign intent. I think we're all being led to the slaughter. And I, as Chief WEird Sheep in my flock, don't want this to happen. So how are we going to win over the rest of the flock? Which currently are thinking "Hey, the farmer loves us, and things are going to be great - we're going to be bahhing away for the rest of our lives! How do we reach them? ``` Heather: One of the errors of looking back on times in history that were obviously deranged is that the modern mind always thinkins it would have known. And, we're seeing his experience in one of our sons' history classes. They're studying Hitler and Castro and other extraordinary figures from history, who had a cult of personality, and tehre is no connection being made between those historical times, and the censorship, and the cutting down of some voices and elevating others without any evidence for why you should be doing so, and the modern times. It is that near-impossibility of seeing where you are in the moment and the question you're asking, which Brett will answer more fully. "At what point within a flock, within a herd, within ap opulation of people, is it time to switch from the orthodoxy to the heterodoxy, to move from the supposed historical safety of the sacred into the more chaotic but utterly necessary shamanistic, and how do we do it right now is the question that I hear. Brett: This brings us back to the conversation we were having before, at the top, about what was going on in our classrooms before Evergreen so famously melted down - and the answer to your question "How do you wake the others to what is taking place" should be "prediction" To the extent that we have a model that says actually this public's health response is not only incompetent it actually goes beyond that. It's the inverse of what you should do if you want to control COVID, which we do. That predicts things about what you're going to find. We can fight about IVermectin and say there is or isn't evidence that it's effective, and what evidence trumps other evidence and why, but the fact is we should say "Well, if the respons eto COVID is actually the inverse of what it should be, then that predicts something about what the public health response will say about Vitamin D - which is absolutely nothing." Vitamin D is the cheapest, safest, most useful intervention on the map, in all likelihood, and it's necessary for all sorts of other reasons. Even if we're completely wrong about its utility with COVID, which is ever-less likely, the collateral benefits which come from getting people in Norther climates to supplement in the winter would be worth it on their own. When was the last time you heard ANY public policy pronouncement abdicating for Vitamin D? So, the point is, it's a prediction. Okay - in our case, are Brett and Heather CRAZY? They said that these things weren't safe when all of the medical authorities said they were safe. Brett and heather said "We don't know anything about the long-term effects, and this is a case where we should exercise the precautionary principle." Well, Now we all know about myocarditis. So it's possible we're crazy and got lucky, but it's also possible that our track record of being right ahead of the public discussion is telling you something, and the fact that we're saying something now that might sound preposterous and insane does not mean that we've finally lost our minds. It means that, once again, you're behind the curve. You can't see what's in front of you because you're paying too much attention to authorities who speak in very unambiguous terms about safety and efficacy when the evidence is: - They told you these things are effective - 6 months later they've lost effectiveness and you need a booster That fits the model of skepticism of what they were telling us than it does fit the model fo what they assured you six months ago. That's how you wake people. By pointing out risky predictions that were borne out and inviting people to continue to listen to those people who have a history of making risky predictions that were borne out. (Instruction!) That's a how a wise person should navigate when you know that authority is frequently wrong, and that the purpose of science is to tell us when our authoritative viewpoint is wrong - science is not a matter of following experts, it's a method for figuring out when the experts are incorrect. The bitter pill, however, is that though that is the mechanism for waking people up, the historical precedent for a situation where you have a tyrannical authority spreading lies, demonizing people, demonizing an entire class of people - the historical precedent for people waking up and stopping that slide is pretty hard to find. What I keep saying to people which has so far landed on deaf ears is: "Look, the indications that we are somewhere on that list of historical atrocities - that what we are doing now in terms of demonizing the unvaccinated as a source of disease - that's a clear indication that tyrannts are going to scape-goat people and those people could face dire consequences. Vaccinating children when there's absolutely no medical justification for doing it from the point of view from their well-being - in fact I could make an argument that the inverse is obviously the right choice - but, okay. We don't really have a precedent for a population demonizing a minority as disease-ridden and then coming to its senses and going back to behaving a decent way towards everyone. Maybe it exists, but I don't know what that precedent is - at some level we need to be telling people with a certain amount of alarm that we appear to be on the run-up to some kind of an atrocity. We don't want to be on that list - history will look back and say "you should have avoided it, you should have known" but that message is now being demonized. So what do we do with this so that we could at least, in this case, staunch the bleeding and return to being decent to each other, and return to the question of 'What is best to do with respect to this pandemic?'". ## Narrative ``` I remember about 10 months ago seeing articles in which, in different pubications, these had been placed to cede an idea. The idea that the unvaccinated were the problem, and what measures can we take to deal with the unvaccinated? It was already taken as a given that the unvaccinated were the problem. I've seen this in newspapers and it's been accelerating. It is clearly a trajectory that is not good - by making predictions which come true, it's a fact that the supposed conspiracy theorists are the ones who have been right every time, but it seems as our being right ain't enough. It doesn't seem to turn the old tank around.``` Brett: Cassandra is right, but she's not listened to. The irony here is that we've been handed the most beautiful tools - we can say Cassandra to you, and you know what we're talking about. We have Orwell. Are we experiencing Orwell? Well, not exactly - this is a bit Orwell, a bit Kafka, Huxley, Brazil, it's all of these things - it's got elements of them. The poitn is, do you really need it to match one narrative perfectly in order for you to spot the analogy? Or can you simply notice - hey, why Am I in this section of th elibrary? Why am I debating whether I'm facing Orwell or Kafka? Heather: It's probably time to go back and read Brave New World and 1984 - but I believe, and Kafka, that in each of these cases we are dropped into a system that has already gone haywire, right? And I don't know, and please, I would love to hear examples if I am unaware of them - of narrative. It takes narrative to convince people - you can't just use numbers and graphs. The enumerate are more easily tricked by numbers and graphs. I don't know of the narrative that describes the dissent. The move away from a system that appeared to be functional and had a number of Ash-negative peoplewandering around who were at least able to become facultatively ash-negative when presented with stuff. That slow move into the tyranny has been described historically with regard to 1930s Germany, but what is it on the ground for people, and what are they seeing? I recently read Eli Wiesel's "Night" - and early in that very slim tone he described in just a few pages what it felt like for Jews in Poland to start seeing the Germans come in. And it's just a couple of pages, but even those few words are so powerful to see the description of the cognitive dissonance - of the denial - of the inability to see it from the people who would slaughtered less than a few years later. Brett: I think Kundura has some descriptions that could be useful - Im' also thinking there's a film, I think it's called a Film Unfinished - which is in some sense, not exactly the right document, becaues of course the NAzis are so iconic and we all know something about them, so we can't be surprised in the same way, but the film unfinished is effectively a Nazi propaganda film that was unfinished, that was rediscovered in modern times and it's edited so you see the filmmaking in process. You're backstage watching the Nazi propaganda being created in the Warsaw ghetto. We need to start thinking in this mindset, because for those of us who've paid the price of being the Weird Sheep in this situation - it's not fooling us, and it's not even high enough quality to fool you. Suddenly every screen is blaring about a horse dewormer on the same afternoon, and it's like "Okay" I know there's some coordination to go after tehs epeople with the Horse Dewormer narrative. That's what it's like backstage as you see the lines being pulled to fly the person across the tage. It's not good enough to fool you, if you're not sitting in the place that you're expected to be. And I think that we need to wake people up to the fact that "You think this i a battle between two perspectives, and one of them is very clear and the other one is preposterous and it's cobbled together with bailing wire and duct tape. That's not how it is - you're standing where you need to stand in order to see a clear picture. If you were standing anywhere else, you'd see a very different one. Try it. We dare you. Take a peak behind the curtain. Move 20 feet to your left and see if you don't detect that you are being fed a story that doesn't add up." ## Learning History ```The two things you are taught in school about history are the rise of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Nazis. Apart from the most obvious fact about the NAzis, whic his that they were not unique in history. The idea that there was some sort of aberration - this thing that happened in 1930s Germany that will never repeat again - is completely the wrong lesson, because things can happen again, and people might not be aware of what's going on when those things begin to take form.``` Brett: Right, and in fact we are in some sense at a disadvantage because the Nazis are an iconic example - they did us the favour of wearing Skulls on their hats. They were cartoon villains and it doesn't reduce their villainy, but it means that it's harder to spot things that do this in a less elaborate and exaggerated form. ANd even teh NAzis did not intend to acknowledge what they had done. This was something that surprised me when I started to study the Nazis for myself. They fully intended to cover their crime, and in fact the Russians overwhelemd them and prevented that plan from unfolding. It happened some places, it was incomplete other places, but they didn't manage to do away with the evidence. So, I would just finally say: it is very important to correct fo rthe fact that when we distill history down and say "here's what you need to know about the Nazis" - we distill it down to the most extreme and obvious stuff, so ti leads you into a false sense of asecurity. In some sense I think , for me, the most important things that i've learned about hte Nazis were always when I decided to pursue my own understanding." It wasn't that I was pursuing more undrstanding because I needed evidence of Villainy. I just wanted to understand how it worked. There are facts hwen you study the Nazis like - the death camps, the ones that were not labour camps, were built so that the front edge looked like a train station. It had a clock that indicated when the train was moving onto the next tracks. These pictures that emerged from someone's attic of the Nazis at play - a famous picture that really struck me of Nazis near Auschwitz enjoying blueberries. It's like men and women, members of the Nazi party, having blueberries where, over the hill, people are being murdered by the thousands. And, it's these things that we need to broadcast because the point is it's not going to look like what you saw in your history book. It's, of course, going to look like something else, because if it looked like what you saw in the history books to the average person walking down the street, it would have unfolded very differently. Heather: One of the things that was true of both Brett and me when we were college professors was that we almost never used textbooks. The reason we didn't is because science isn't its conclusions, and to the degree that the scientific process is represented in textbooks, it's represented in a linear way. Always in this order, always this way. Really what it is is a process, and if it has predictive power and if you can falsify possible hypothesese, then you should go to try to do sso and the longer that you fail to falsify your hypothesze, the more likely they are to be true, the longer that they've stood the test of time, the more likely they are to be true. This is the case for how it is that you create in people, in the case of usour students, a movel that relies not on accepting the voices that you see going through your screens, and you don't fly to the otherside where you say QUESTION EVERYTHING, but develop a model wherein you can begin to assess what people are saying and what the evidence is. You'r egoint to want to trust some people, some people are trustworthy, but you don't start off trusting anyone. And, you know, this indeed is it's realy the point of the whole book we are evolutionary biologists, and so yes it's all evolutionary, but it's about understanding ouselves enough at everything from the individual to the population level, so that you can make decisions that then can become easier. It's a joyous effort to say "you know what, I'm not just going tp accept that in the 1980s fat is bad for me anymore that Im going to simply accept whatever the dietary suggestions right now are, I'm going to think about what it is to be a human being, what my ancestors have been eating, not just the hunter gatherers from the African Savannah, but alos the agriculturalists, because almost all of us have been agriculturalists for 10,000 yearrrs - I'm going to think it through so that I know how to eat food to keep ourselves healthy, and I will become more resistant to what the currently fashionable proclamations from Big Food are. How do you become more resistant against the proclamations of big Pharma, from Social Media". From the moniker that we talk about in the book is - we know about Junk Food - we know that if we can train ourselves to love rea food it's actually more thrilling and enjoyable as well as better for us - now we need to work on the Junk Media, the Junk Sex, the Junk Public Health policy and everything else and become more enriched and healthy but also more just thrille dwith life, because we have a mroe complete model of what humans are and we have better relationships. Brett: Actually, I think this is a very close connection between these conversations - that in a sense there is a distinction between the world that one sees if one follows the evidence with a model that attempts to make the safest assumptions about what is likely to be true that it can make -> if you follow that evidence, you end up with one picture, if you follow with what the experts tell you the evidence says, you end up with a very different picture. So, our book is, in a sense, an elaboration of what we were doing in the classroom, which was presenting a model for how it is that you find evidence, that you put it together, build a model and fix a model where the model is wrong - that's what we were teaching people to do, and the point is this is kind of a "weird sheep" book, because the odd fact is that if you do this thing, it will put you on the outs with the mainstream narrative, and it will make you the weird sheep. And the question is, and it's not a simple question, do you want to be the weird sheep? It's the Matrix, right? It's this question, the character Cipher in the Matrix says "Reality ain't all that great, I know this isn't a real steak, but it tastes like one, I want to go back in". And the fact is that those people do exist, but do you want to be one? Do you want to be the cipher character, or do you want to be living life because you're actually following evidence in the way that the best scientific minds have for thousands of years? Heather: It doesn't have to be bleak. The choice of going down that road is not one inherently of dystopian hellscape that we are shown, for those who resist in general in the narrative. ``` I was picking up on one point. You talk in your book about dairy products and about how in a lot of cultures there is lactose intolerance, but if you historically come from a part of the world which has had dairy and ways of preserving milk to make it longer, say, yoghourt or cheese, which I love, and that knowledge, I suppose this is the first principles that you stress in the book, enables you to think beyond the current fashionable narrative which is cheese is really bad, dairty is really bad, don't eat it. And you're thinking "Hang on a second, how come cheese is finally bad now, when my people have been eating this stuff and thriving on it for millenia? Probably hundreds of millenia, eve? I would guess?``` Heather: Cheese isn't bad for you, if you're from some populations it might not agree with you, but you have to be in touch with your body to detect if you're one of those people for whom cheese isn't good, and it will likely be that your body will tell you that you don't like it. I don't like that thing type of food is in at least a somewhat simpler environment, a very good proxy for "that isn't good for me". And there's not going to be a universal "that isn't good for me". Cheese isnt' bad for all humans, of course it's not. We've been making cheese for thousands of years, at least. Brett: It won't be hundreds of millenia, it will be less than 10 on cheese, because it's a post agricultural phenomenon, but one of the lessons in the book is that we can infer from the very long history of both the eating of dairy products and the making of cheese and yoghourt, that these things, I am struggling to find an alternative, but the phrase won't leave me alone: cheese is safe and effective. That's what we can infer from that, because if it were bad for you, it would have been eliminated because those who were cheese skeptical - it has passed Phase 3 trials. And it's so widespread that we can tell. It's basically using microorganisms to spoil dairy products to preserve them over the long term because the beauty of dairy products is the flipside of it is that they're so fragile, because they're not designed to last, they're designed to go directly from mammary gland to baby, not a durable form, so we make them durable by teaming up with microorganisms. Evolution allows us, an evolutionary model allows ust o look at certain things and say "you know what, I don't know why that works, but I can tell that it works, at least for the right population, because if it didn't work, it would have been eliminated by selection. That logic doesn't allow you to go into the supermarket and say "hey this is safe". What does the safety of things in the supermarket depend on? Well, the FDA doing their job right. Did they? Well that depends on corruption being a minor problem. Is it minor? Maybe I shoul be a little cautious at the supermarket. It's that qeustion - you've got the evolutionary past, the hyper-modern present, and knowing how the past worked empowers you in the present to understand where you need to be cautious and where you need to let your guard down. ```Normally I like to end my podcasts on an optimistic note, but I think I'm going to go the other way this time because - it seems to me, look: One thing you must both have learned from studying different cultures and past civilizations is that we've established that A. the weird sheep or shaman is an anomalous character, the outlier, not representative of the generality, and generally, most people are geared towards saving their own skin - self preservation - does that now suggest that things aren't going to get better anytime soon? People are more interested in making themselves agreeable to the dominant stupidity of the times than they are to be the little boy that points out the emperor is wearing no clothes, because he gets ostracized or worse. I can't see any cause for optimism in what we're seeing now.``` Brett: There is cause for optimism. I would love to say "Hey, we hit bottom, things are going to get better from here" Things could get dire, but at some level their story has gotten pretty ridiculous and the fact of it having gotten ridiculous and the fact that many people do know somebody who's been injured, and the fact that people can detect that as bad of a disease as COVID is it's not a threat to certainly most young healthy people, and what's more a solution that protects the vast majority of those who would be vulnerable is available at your local supermarket in the form of vitamin D. The fact is there is an alternative story, and the problem, your "people are interested in saving their own hide" we have that in us. We also have a lineage orientation - it does not make any sense evolutionarily to save your own hide if the population that you're part of extinct. So we have the instinct also to behave on behalf of our lineage, and that's being hijacked - that's being used to get us to comply, and the answer is "hey, those people who are telling you to comply, they're not your friends, when they say the word evidence it doesn't mean what that word is supposed to mean, when they use the terms of science, they are in fact misleading you and that should be telling you that you need to tune into some other mechanism for making sense of the world that is a message that is catching on with more and more people. Heather: So, I think that there is a very real possibility of a local corrective, here. But I am much more concerned that there will not be the reckoning that we need, nad what is going to reveal is taht too many people are all too willing to go along with what is patently insane, and that means that the next round will be worse. The reason that I have very local optimism at the moment, I'm not feeling optimistic these days, historically I've been more optimistic than Brett about things, and I think that has flipped at the moment, but the one thing that looks at all hopeful to me, just locally, is that unfortunately, unfortunately these vaccines proved to be a prototype that weren't up to the challenge. Fabulous technological platform on which they were based, with a lot of potential, I think maybe still? But these ones aren't doing it, and they lose efficacy within 2-3 months. Boosters which are now in the beginning stages of deployment, are also not going to maintain their efficacy for more than 6 months or so, and at the point - what does fully vaccinated mean, anyway? If you were vaccinated early in 2021 to the degree that the vaccines are effective at all, you have very little of that value left at this point. Many people who happily got vaccinated the first time will NOT get boosters. It's anecdotal at the level that we've heard it, but I believe that that is going to be the difference - that is why we're not actually seeing mandated boosters. And at the point that mandated boosters don't happen, and it becomes more widely known that actually, therefore, if you were vaccinated more than 6 months ago you're effectively not vaccinated - that story falls apart, I think. There are ways in which it couldn't, there are ways in which that could be obscured, but I think that falls apart because there's just no saving this particular treatment that has been pushed on everyone. That said, even if I am right, tha tfalls apart, and therefore that the vaccine story disappears as the one treatmenet that we all need for COVID, I fear that it will do so in a controlled-fail way, and we won't have the reckoning society-wide that we need. We won't require of people that they, at the very least, go to a mirro and look at the mirror and say "What did I believe? and what beliefs did I proclaim were necessary for other people to have? Where was I wrong? Where do i need to correct my model so I don't make this mistake again?". I fear that that reckoning is not going to happen, in which case whatever's coming down the pipe at us will just be worse. ``` Well I just hope that somehow when all this is over, people find this podcast and know that at least some people were warning about what's coming our way. Because, you're right, I wonder if there will be that - I think the entirety of our civilization is to play for, here. I think it's that bad. And, we are few, and they are many.``` Brett: We are not as few as you think. There's a question about how many are saying what they see, those are few. How many see but cannot figure out how to say it? There are MANY. And part of the thing that we have to figure out is how to make it safe for those who can see it, but many have legitimtae reasons to fear - many may not be able to continue to support their families if they speak up and say what they've seen - so I think we have to be sympathetic to that hazard - but in effect, we have to make it safe for people to speak. This is why speech in jeopardy here, and why we are in danger of suspending normal rules that would protect the free exchange of ideas, is that there are a certain amount of ideas that are a hazard to the public health narrative, and whatever it is that it's in acting in service of. But, there are many more of us than is obvious from a quick assessment. ```Before you go, you must plug your book``` Heather: It's a Hunter-Gatherer's guide to the 21st century. Evolution and the challenges of modern life. It's a book we've been talking about writing for over 10 years, and you can see from the conversation the book has nothing to do with COVID - indeed we submitted the first draft in March of 2020, just as people were beginning to get glimmers of COVID taking over the world - we, in it, provide an evolutionary model, some of which is standard, som eof which is new, and explore really all of the systems that humans engage in - sleep, food, medicine, health, sex, gender, relationship, parenthood, childhood, lots of aspects of adulthood, culture and consciousness, and society-wide discussions of how it is that we can move forward with, you know, massively equal opportunity for all, as much as it's possible. ```When reading your book, I was envying you, the amazing places you've been together - that must have been very great - that key that you stayed on while snorkeling for 3 days with nobody else around - Costa Rica, and almost killed by a flash flood. We're not going to be able to do this again, are we? Those of us who have traveled, we're very lucky - I don't reckon that the way the world is going, they're giong to let us do that stuff again.``` Brett: There are an awful lot of people who have gotten used to th ebenefits of western civilization. I'm not arguing that there isn't a lot of room to continue and fix what parts of the model didn't work, but there are an often lot of people who've tasted freedom and understand that it is the magic ingredient that causes things to work, to become more prosperous, to become fairer over time. And there is a question of how long we're going to put up with this. So, it may be that although, on paper, they have the power to make us comply at such a level that there's nothing we can do, it is likely that the human spirit will reject that, and at some point they will be surprised to find that their magic pronouncements don't work on people anymore. I hope that's sooner rather than later. Heather: Travel is the way to expand your horizons. GO HUMAN SPIRIT.