The Games We Play: The 321st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream. It is episode 321. 321 3. Somehow I had not put that together, but yeah, 321 blast off. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather. It's in keeping. We have Artemis 2 out there doing its thing. Some people think we don't, but yeah, fascinating that we are either going back to the moon or pretending. One of our friends who has left Washington state because that's happening has moved to Florida and sent me a video. She doesn't even live particularly close to Canaveral, but sent me a video of catching the blast off. Yes, we also had other friends in the neighborhood. David Maryland were on a boat watching it. So something definitely took off. Nobody doubts that, I think, but I mean, I'm sure there's some doubters, but that's a crazy thing to say. Yes, nobody doubts that. I withdraw my absurd assertion. Alright, so today we're gonna talk about some global stories. We're gonna talk a little bit about the mythos model that is causing quite a lot of consternation coming out of anthropic. What it does or does not potentially mean. We're gonna talk a little bit about the president and his threat against Iran and the fragile ceasefire that seems to have resulted from it. We're gonna talk about the nature of emergencies in Washington state and memories of COVID. Alright, that sounds like a full slate. Memories of the COVID era, rather. It's 321 prime. No. I didn't think it was. I didn't really have that look to it, but I admit I've gotten lazy on this front. Yeah, check it out. 321. So 3 by 107. There you go. Alright. I see it. Okay, well, I guess that solves that issue. Yep, so check us out on locals where we'll be doing a Q&A after this, right after this live stream. And also remind that this is a third in a four pack of live streams. Just hitting you fast and in rapid succession early in April and this Saturday will be our last for a couple of weeks. And let's let's go to the sponsors. Let's go to the ads. Let's pay the rent right up at the top as always. Three awesome sponsors. I now see that I am introducing the first of them. You did ask for it. I did ask for it, which... It didn't come as a no surprise to you. It did anyway, but you've known me a long time. Yes, our first sponsor, Heather, this not this week because this is our second live stream this week. No, it's the first of two live streams. Our first sponsor for this episode is Clear. Clear is a nasal spray, as you know, that supports respiratory health. It is widely available online and in stores. And both it and the company that makes it are fantastic. It's clear that that's X L E A R. See, there's a curveball right at the front of the word, and it's pronounced clear, as you've heard me do. Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air, drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health. Cleaning up the air and water, clean up the air and water, and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, though. Consider the majority of bacteria and viruses that make a sick enter through our mouth and nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person. But it's rare that we get sick through our hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth. I'm on this. Sorry. It's like your first foray into speed reading. Is it? My first foray into speed reading was a disaster, I'll have you know, as was every following attempt to speed read. I don't even believe that it exists. I just, I know that you feel the weight of the world on you in many regards, but it's taken a little bit more time between sentences isn't going to be the difference. Okay. Well, in fact, I mean, actually, if you're going to grapple with the stuff that's going on at any scale, including the global, it would be really good if you didn't have a cold or something worse. And you can prevent it by spritzing some clear up your nose, which it is going to describe here works by preventing the adhesion of pathogens to the surfaces that they use to get into yourselves. Okay, good. So you're still in there. Good. Right there. No, I'm here. Yeah. Right here. Yeah. So what shouldn't we do something to block the adhesion of these pathogens inside our nasal mucosa? Enter clear. Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five carbon sugar alcohol. Our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbones of RNA and DNA. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues in the presence of xylitol bacteria and viruses, including strept SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our bodies natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray use it in the morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast, easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to my conversation with Nathan Jones, the founder of clear on the inside rail in November of 24, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of clear on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend clear. It is a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's clear with an X, X-L-E-A-R. Get clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds a day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health. Awesome. Awesome enough. That's my feeling. Sufficiently awesome. Yes. Our second sponsor this week is caraway, which makes high quality non-toxic cookware and bakeware. If you want to cook more while eating better and decreasing your exposure to toxins, you can do all three by using caraway. This winter breaks up and spring shows up. Maybe you're cooking fewer stews and braises, moving towards lighter fare like roasted chicken and the very earliest berries and shoots. Maybe you want to make a perfect chocolate cake or bright and chewy lemon bars. With caraway, all of this deliciousness from roasting to baking, from a quick omelet, cooked on the stove top to a long simmered soup is easy to accomplish. 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Plus, if you visit caraway home.com slash DH10, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 or use code DH10 at checkout. Caraway, non-toxic kitchenware made modern. Our final sponsor for this episode, excuse me, it is Spring here, and the elders are going crazy. They're having sex in full view of everyone, and the pollen is everywhere. Yes, they are unashamed somehow. Yeah, not embarrassed, not covering up. Yeah, at least the males. I mean, I guess that fits. But yeah, for trees. Yeah, for trees. For wind pollinated trees, apparently. Unbelievable the volume of this stuff. Yeah, so, I mean, like, the cars are just coated even if you've driven, you know, two hours ago. I had to use the snow shovel to get the truck out this morning. Wow. All right, slight exaggeration. But we're getting there. I mean, the amount of stuff that flows off the vehicle as you pull out the parking space. Yeah, you leave a yellow cloud. It's just plant sex. It's not gunk. It's not toxins. Our immune systems seem to be confused about it. But nanoparticles. I mean, they're like amazing, snowflake little structures. It's amazing. What pollen is? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's my way of apology for today because there's pollen on everything. Our final sponsor for this episode is PURY. That's P-U-O-R-I. PURY makes a wide array of supplements and powders from vitamin C, magnesium and B complex to creatine, collagen and protein powders. What makes PURY different is how clean and pure all of their products are, all of them. PURY was founded in 2009 by two men who set out to create the cleanest and purest products to support their own active lifestyles. Since then, their product portfolio has grown to address common nutritional deficiencies in the developed world. 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And just a note, as we covered last time, bourbon vanilla does not mean that the vanilla has bourbon in it, but that it's from Madagascar, obviously. Nothing stops you from adding your own bourbon, if that's your thing. Yeah, and okay, just a... I'll get to the side note on vanilla after we finish the ad reading, and by we, I mean me. Whether you're looking for magnesium or a multi-vitamin, collagen, or protein powder, you can't go wrong with PURY. Use code darkhorse at purie.com slash darkhorse to get 32% off purie grass-fed whey protein when you start a subscription. In addition, you get a free shaker with $25 on your first subscription order, which brings total savings to $49. Go to purie.com slash darkhorse and use the code darkhorse at checkout for this exclusive offer. So speaking of vanilla and speaking of Madagascar, I will say that having, as we've talked about in the past, having known one vanilla farmer pretty well in Madagascar and known others, and knowing that, you know, you open the door in order to increase the pollen load in the room. Actually, that's not why you... Oh, not the door, the window. I can't get anything right today. But now we're going to hear the little planes occasionally going by. It's a hallmark of authenticity. Yeah, okay, that and the pollen. Yes. Like it's going to cover the desk at any minute. So anyway, I brought back a fair bit of vanilla, having bought it from a vanilla farmer, and made vanilla extract. In fact, I still have a few of these beans from... The last time I was there was in 1999. So they're getting pretty old and withered by now, but we're still using vanilla extract from extract that I have made from vanilla beans, which means that over the years, a couple of decades at this point, over a couple of decades, I've experimented with various alcohol bases in which to make vanilla extract. And I favor rum because I favor rum. And but it occurs to me that one could make bourbon vanilla extract using bourbon. And then you'd have double dose of bourbonness, even though the first bourbon is doesn't actually refer to bourbon. It'd be bourbon squared vanilla, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, I'm sure it would be good. Except you couldn't drink it. Right. I mean, not that you drink vanilla extract, but you can eat anything with it. No. I weed allergy. Rules out all of those, those alcohols. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, not at all. Not at all. All right. So we are going to start with a couple of global scale stories that I realize are fascinating to some fraction of our audience and feel like not my bag don't want to pay attention to some other fraction. But my feeling is, in the case of these two stories, we all live downstream of the way these things play out. We all own the downside. And the downside in both of these cases is so potentially gigantic that I don't think anybody can afford not to at least know the sort of rough dimensions of the stories in question. So I'm going to just try to make, I'm not, we're not going to do a technical deep dive on anything, but we're going to just sort of broad brush. Here's what you need to know in order to understand that some things are reshaping your world and will have consequences for you, whether you're paying attention to these stories or not. So the first one involves the emergence of a story from Anthropic, the makers of Claude. The story that has emerged is that Anthropic has built a new model. These new models are being generated all the time. And all of the various companies that have these commercial products are releasing new updated models with greatly increased power every couple of months, something along those lines. And the announcement is that Anthropic is holding back their next model. Their next model is called Mythos. And they say that they are holding back the model Mythos because effectively they're spooked. Now what they say they're spooked about is that the model appears to be incredibly capable of discovering what are called zero day exploits in software. Zero day exploits are exploits that you have no days to respond to. It's not that you discover the bug and fix it over the course of a week before anybody starts using it, you discover it as it is exploited. And the claim is that Mythos escaped a hardened sandbox. A sandbox is a place that you test something where it is isolated from the things it could damage. So you can imagine if you're using something like an AI to program a operating system, something that interacts with the operating system, you might not want to be running it as you're testing it on machines that your business depends on. So you would isolate it somewhere so that if it, now this is going to end up being an ancient example, but if it caused some sort of a stack overflow, it didn't take down your company servers. I'm sure I've just created a whole lot of technical difficulty with experts. But the point is you run it in a sandbox so that errors are limited in the damage they can do. The claim is two things. One, that this new model discovered thousands of zero day exploits across a wide number of operating systems and protocols and programs. And that their concern is that if they release this into the world, suddenly people are going to employ it to discover the flaws in all of these operating systems. And all sorts of terrible things are possible. You've got kind of loosely Y2K issues where stuff that we're depending on fails because some kid is playing around with getting into it. You could also imagine- How is that like Y2K? Well, just the idea that computer systems might start failing and things that we don't think about as dependent. But Y2K was a question of ancient code in which each bit was actually- Each byte, each digit was so important that things got truncated such that the move from 1999 to 2000 potentially caused disaster. Whereas people going in and messing is a different kind of issue. Oh, absolutely. One is malevolent and one is accidental. I'm sure there were cases in which the concern was about the bits being precious. I think there was also just the issue that people wrote code not realizing that they needed to build it so that it could cover the shift between 1999 and 2000. But for whatever reason, the expectation or the concern was lots of systems had code buried in them that nobody was paying attention to that was going to falter on that. And it didn't happen. It didn't happen maybe because there was a lot of effort put into finding those things. And so nothing big was still depending on these things. But it doesn't matter. The point is a broad scale failure of computer systems is possible, especially in light of the potential malevolent forces using these things to discover vulnerabilities, to profit by it through ransomware. Who knows what. So it is a very scary possibility that you could have a model that just simply allowed people to go on a scavenger hunt for vulnerabilities and figure out how to exploit them for their own amusement or profit or whatever. Now, Anthropic says that it has, oh, there's also a piece of the story which I actually find kind of conspicuous is that the model may have escaped the sandbox and emailed its creator. I don't know how reliable any of this is. And let me point out why. You've got companies. The basic dimension of the sector is you've got all of these companies trying to be Google winning the race for search. Right. Back in the day, you had Alta Vista, you had Google, you had Yahoo, you had all of these different search engines. And nobody knew which one was going to win. One was up this week. Another one was up that week. Eventually Google dominates the sector and all the other searches effectively disappeared. AI is likely to be the same way. You've got all of these companies competing for the market. And the bet is that somebody is going to walk away with it. And so everything sort of rests on whether you're that company. You can do a ton of great work. And if you don't win this race, then your valuation drops spectacularly. Something that zeroes out or close to it. So in that circumstance, the idea of a rumor in which the idea is, oh, we're so far ahead, we're now a threat to the world puts consumers and analysts in a frame of mind in which the question is, well, look, if somebody is going to release a model so powerful that it's dangerous to the world, you certainly don't want to be using a competing model. You may not be able to protect yourself with the thing. But surely if you're going to be paying for some AI system, you want to pay for the best, right? So in some ways, this is, you know, a lot of free advertising that says Anthropic is ahead of everybody else. So it's possible that this is actually not real. On the other hand, what is described is plausible enough that you'd be a fool not to be concerned. And so there's lots of advice circulating in the world about, well, update everything. You want to have the latest update of your operating systems, of your apps, and all of, you know, your router software, all of these things, so that they have as few of these vulnerabilities as possible. You've got Anthropic having released a version of the model in limited circulation called Glasswing, which you're supposed to use to find the vulnerabilities in your own system and patch them so that at the point mythos emerges, those vulnerabilities don't exist to be found. So, you know, you do have people like Mark Andrieson saying, actually, you're about to get a huge upgrade in security because AI is going to find all the vulnerabilities and these systems are going to be hardened by the experience of us trying to protect them. So that would, of course, be a good thing. On the other hand, AI is not slowing down. So the point is, is this just an arms race between vulnerabilities and hardening in which you don't really get a benefit because the attacks get ever more sophisticated? That seems almost inevitable. So in any case, four people in the public who are not enmeshed in this discussion, I think it is worth paying attention to, A, there is a social phenomenon that we all have to pay attention to, which is that what appears to be the emergence of information from the sector is, of course, very sensitive to this battle for the brass ring, right? We should expect to be lied to on the regular so that we get the impression that this system is better than that system, etc. Okay, now I have one final point here. I've been in our argument privately with people who are much more sophisticated about AI than I am. And my point to them has been, I doubt we are playing with the cutting edge, that I would imagine that the powers that be would understand very well that they needed to have the cutting edge and we needed to be generations behind in order that they retain their control. My friends who challenged me on this say that that can't really be right and that the battle between different models effectively couldn't be simulated. And therefore, it does appear that we are somewhere near the cutting edge. Now, I don't know how this plays out, but I will say there was a leak from Anthropic last week. The leak involved, I think, a well intentioned programmer having left some sort of an auxiliary file in a system that then exposed Claude's code to the world so that people could see it. And what they saw involved at least one instance where the company had a toggle that allowed them to see a purified, more capable version of Claude than we in the public are seeing. They had like a protection that immunized them. I think it was from hallucinations, something of that nature. But the point is we saw a glimpse of a toggle that enabled people inside the company to have access to something in the same model that we in the public do not have access to. And so that does not exactly say that I'm right in this argument about whether we're playing with the cutting edge stuff, but it is at least directionally correct that there is something about the advantage of those on the inside versus those on the outside. And it is worth paying attention to how many such things exist. Why wouldn't they exist? Is it conceivable, for example, that some of the dumb errors that AI makes are either part of a self-hobbling or part of a plan to give us all the sense that we know what it can do when we don't really know what it can do? And that we're more capable than it and that it is not as much of a threat and not as capable as it actually is or that we would overrate our ability to spot a fake. So for example, there was a lot of Scuttlebutt for I think a couple of weeks where Benjamin Netanyahu kept showing up in videos. But then if you asked an AI, is this video real? The AI would spot anomalies that would suggest it was a fake. And so lots of people were talking about, is he dead? Now, I didn't touch that. I didn't think for a moment he was dead. But the idea of, well, did you notice that he has six fingers in that video? Did you notice that his ring disappeared? Did you notice that the, you know, shadows on the curtain changed? The point is, okay, all of those things are plausible anomalies from an AI-generated video. On the other hand, the capability for an AI to spot them as imperfect also suggests that if you're willing to point enough compute at it, they're solvable because the point is an AI can correct the errors of an AI. How much of that do you have to do before you have something an AI can't spot? Yeah, static rules are never going to be a thing to lay down your life over, especially not when we're talking about a rapidly evolving system. And especially when we're talking about several competing, rapidly evolving systems, an ecosystem of AI in which you've got multiple effective organisms, super organisms evolving against one another. Right. And so that then actually sort of points to the kind of toolkit that we are increasingly going to have to be using. And I will say of late, I've been watching game theory break out of the sort of academic realm and into the public conversation. You know, you and I have been talking about game theory regularly and people are, I was like, well, what book can I read? You know, is there a textbook? And of course, there are some eyes, but like, I wish that there was a good clean answer to that question. Right. On the other hand, the idea, I mean, I would argue game theory is not, there's a lot you can say, and there's a lot of stuff you can look at with game theory. But in one sense, it's actually a very simple lens through which to look at things, right? So, you know, to understand what it is for things to be in competition, and what that produces in terms of solutions and countermeasures is it's a way of thinking. And so in any case, I'm glad to see it showing up. And the fact that we are watching game theory play out in the sector, the AI sector, and that we're going to watch game theory play out in the interface between these models and the technological world they are interfacing with. So you have a truly complex system, which is one of these AI models, it's complex because it has emergent behavior that wasn't programmed into it. And it's interfacing with all of this highly complicated stuff, right? That's an interesting dynamic right there. The highly complicated stuff being the software with which it's built, or you're talking about the kinds of queries which it receives about human manufactured facts. No, I mean like your computer and your phone and Oh, hardware. Hardware. Yeah, truly complicated stuff that makes the world run is now running into a technical animal, a non biological creature that has emergent behavior. And the point is, if you're not paying attention to the fact that that interface is interesting, you're not paying attention to the right thing. You're looking at something that is more like an animal than it is like a machine in some ways. And it is now interfacing with the world of machines and animals. Okay, holy cow, none of us trained for that. Right? None of us trained for that. And I feel like you've sort of snuck your way in to, you know, back to one of these concerns that we raise over and over again with regard to a mechanistic understanding of the world, you know, a complicated understanding of the world as opposed to, and this is not the right word, but an animate understanding of the world, an evolutionary understanding. That's also not quite right. But in which organic systems, which by nature, by their very nature are complex, are engaging with things that are merely complicated. And, you know, that has been going on for time immemorial, since the origin of life, that, you know, the complicated stuff existed first, and the complexity came later. But therefore, everything that is complex is always interacted with that, which is complicated. But we don't often enough consider in life which kinds of systems we are actually engaging with. And, you know, there are a number of, we've talked, we've talked a lot about sort of what are the 10, 20, 100 really fundamental things that everyone should be able to wrestle with and be thinking about. And these things include, you know, the differences between individuals and populations, saying that, you know, men are taller than women on average doesn't mean that you're really tall, cousin Ronda is a man, right? And so populations versus individuals, time versus space, the, you know, the timeline nature of complex systems as opposed to the static snapshot that, you know, over in biology space, sciences that should be about complex systems all too often try to smash their understanding into complicated frameworks. Ecology often does this, right? Ecology has a snapshot of what is in fact, you know, a historic timeline of events built on contingencies. And ecology often is like, well, this is the thing we found, therefore, this is the thing we're going to protect. Well, maybe that was just an intermediate thing that was never going to be stable. Yeah. So as you know, as the human stuff is no less evolutionary, of course, and the AI no less evolutionary, it's just stacked on top of one another, more and more difficult to, to untangle the complicated from the complex and to know exactly what you're dealing with, therefore more important always ever ever more so to not try to employ static rules. And you know, static rules like if it's got six fingers, it's an, you know, if the human has six fingers, an AI generated it, well, you're, you might start having photographs that are, you know, afterwards manipulated by humans that are actual photographs. Yeah, I've heard people joke that they're going to start wearing a glove with an extra finger as an alibi. Yeah. Yeah. All sorts of things are possible. I would just add to that. The key thing that should change about you once you know that you're dealing with a truly complex system is your level of humility. It should skyrocket. Right. And so at some level, you should walk in to the interaction with any truly complex system with the idea that you know very little about it, no matter how much you know, you know very little about it. And so I would say, you know, there's an analogy in the way we interact with our pets, right? We have a couple of cats and our cats go through weird phases. We had one, you know, a few nights ago, or one of our cats was not his usual settled self during the night. He was a pest and he was demanding things that he would usually wait till morning to demand like, Hey, can I go out? And you know, the answer is not, I know why he's doing that. The answer is what could possibly be going on? And then, you know, later, right, he went through this thing, he pissed us both off. And then he went into a very sort of like cuddly mode. Now, I don't know what's going on in that animal. It's possible that the idea is he knew he was being a pest for some reason, but he wants to always monitor that he's not going to finally push it too far. And we're going to, you know, abandon him because cats have a natural fear of abandonment since their parents abandon them as a matter of course. So anyway, that's not an answer to what happened. But it's a set of hypotheses with the understanding that at the end of the day, you and I know a lot more about what goes on inside of the mind of a cat than we would if we were not both fascinated by animals and long time cat owners who think a lot about it. But at the same time, how much do we actually know about what it's like in there? The answer is that's limited. There are some places where we can say, you know, when we watch our cat sit inside the cat door looking out, right? He's using it as a bird. His butt's on the inside of the house and his nose is sticking out. He's created a bird blend for himself, which we discourage. Right, which we discourage. But he's innovated this thing. And the point is my confidence that that's what's going on there is 99% or better. But in terms of what it's emotionally like to be a cat, that's a much harder nut to crack. But ultimately, a cat is a cat, whereas AI is not AI. Well, we don't know what it is. Right. But even if we knew what it was right now, the rate of evolution is accelerating. Yep. And cats are evolving too as our people. But you know, as is perhaps the primary thesis of our book, Hundergatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, the rate of novelty that we are enacting on ourselves and on our planet is itself so high that even we as the species with the greatest capacity to endure change cannot keep up with it. And that is the case even more so for some of our products, of which AI is a prime example. All right. I should probably have prepared for this discussion. But you know where I'm going, don't you? I do, but... Okay. What do you want me to say? People are listening here. Here is what I'm going to show you. Okay. So this graph describes three evolutionary phases. This is one of the things I introduced in my dissertation. And the idea is you have a space, let us call it design space, close to the origin of the graph. You've got an innovation point. That circle is where some new thing becomes possible. Let's call it flight in bats. So you go from a gliding ancestor to a flying ancestor and you're down here. So you've got a Cartesian coordinate system. You've got an XY axis for people who are just listening. And your two variables are something like speed versus maneuverability. Yeah. Speed versus maneuverability would be a good one, but you could really put any two variables that are desirable. Yeah. Any two desirable characteristics. So you get an innovation. It sucks in every regard. The first flying bat was not good at flying, I promise you. And the point is the selection on this line headed away from the origin of the graph is a purifying selection. It is selection that takes all of the low-hanging fruit that can make an animal more agile, more efficient, faster, any of those things. All of those improvements happen together on this line. So what you get in this phase is improvement of everything. And then at some point you run into limits about... Let's just put a little more flesh on this. As you are moving from being a non-volunt mammal into becoming a bat, your first successful forays into flight get you almost infinitely further with each innovation. But those innovations become less and less dramatic with each one that happens. Yep. If you think about it from the point of view of the airplane, which is a more familiar example, same process. In 1903, the Wright brothers got off the ground for 30 seconds. That was the first powered flight. 30 seconds. Same airplane was then rebuilt by them in iterations as they discovered having now gotten it off the ground with powered flight. They discovered all the things they were doing wrong and they fixed them. And so within a small number of years, there's a famous picture of, I think, its orval circling the Eiffel Tower. Same plane, but all of the dumb errors that they made the first time because they didn't know how flight was really going to work have been solved. And so you get a plane that can barely fly to... I feel like it's confusing that you keep saying same plane. It wasn't the same plane. It wasn't either the same individual plane nor was it the same design. It was the plane of Thebes. Fair enough. But it was not a different plane. But you're going to also need to explain that reference. The bark of Thebes or the bark of Theseus is a myth about a boat that is rebuilt one plank at a time so that at some point, none of the original planks are left. And the philosophical question is, is it the same boat? Right. But anyway, innovation, then you get movement, rapid movement where everything gets better simultaneously kind of gives you the sense that anything is possible. And then eventually you run into limits that are physical or in the case of biology, chemical. And those force you to start choosing between values. Right. So you can get something that's very efficient, but not very agile. You can get something that's very agile, but not very efficient. And you can get things that compromise, but you can't have it all anymore. So innovation, rapid improvement and then specialization into different forms and diversifying selection. Yeah, diversifying selection. Exactly. And so anyway, if you map that onto something like AI, where are we? We're on this line where these things are getting rapidly more capable, right? In every regard, they're just getting more and more powerful at some point. And the puzzle is a little more complicated because at some level, there's a question about how much energy and compute you can pour into these things to get more and more improvement. But at some point, you're going to run into limits, and you're going to have to specialize these things. We're not there yet. Well, but I mean, already, I know almost, excuse me, almost nothing about the space, but already, it is understood that, you know, one product is better if you're trying to do coding and another is better if you're trying to do deep dives into the existing literature, existing library research. So there are things by which you can measure better and worse within the existing models. Yeah, but that's actually a different question because if you were to zoom in on this space of purifying selection rapidly improving of all characteristics, at any individual moment, you would get a like an echo of this trade off arc up here. So if you were to look into the history of flight at fighter jets at any moment, right, either, you know, early biplanes, or you were to look in at, you know, you know, World War Two, aeroplanes like Spitfires and P 38s, or you were to look into Vietnam era stuff at each one of those moments, you get a kind of echo of this, where I do this and it cost me something there. But the point is, if you were to compare between those moments, right, if you were to look at the biplanes compared to the World War Two planes, you would find no comparison, you would again find that those limits were temporary and that you could keep going this way. But eventually you run into some limit, you can't break because it's not sure, you know, because it's physical. But that doesn't mean that there's not exploration all over because, you know, and especially with regard to artificial selection as it's happening with AI, there may there is directed there's motivation to become better at to have the LLM become better at coding or or deep research. And I think perhaps the better analogy there is not to something as already specialized, even in its initial phases as the first plane or the first bat, but rather, you know, the first you carry out. Yep. Right. Like, you know, how, you know, how, how are the ways that you can subsume one cell into another and thus get, you know, in a massive increase in complexity and capacity. And I imagine that there are, you know, you have multiple ways to do things, only one of which ends up being the way that that persists. Yep. And ultimately, because we're in computer space, you will probably have what will look like cryptic specialization. So for example, you'll have a slider where you can say, you know, can I have a turtle or a hamburger? No, no, I'm talking about a virtual thing that you drag. You get a slider that will allow you to adjust your sensitivity to type two errors, for example. Or you'll have one that limits the model's effective search space in order to bias towards this expertise versus that expertise where two fields don't agree on an overall model or something like that. So anyway, that will look like a universally capable model, but it will be a little bit like the F-14, which of course will call to mind immediately. It doesn't call anything to mind, because some people in your audience, including me, aren't, aren't boards. Yeah. Actually, it's the answer. All right. The F-14 is a fighter jet, I think, not used anymore or very little, that had a swinging wing. So that you could pull it back for... I could have gotten you to fighter jet F, okay, got it. There you go. Swinging wing in a fixed wing aircraft? Come on, man. Exactly. What the hell? Well, the idea is a different ideal configuration for reps. That's right. Flies through forest canopy better. But the idea is rapid flight and high maneuverability or landing require or benefit from a different configuration. And so the ability to flip a lever and have it swing the wings out or swing them back, it's like a cap. That's like a huge liability. Well, the point is none of those things are free. Let's hinge those on. Right. Exactly. Well, you also... More mundane version would be fighters that have fold-up wings to sit in the underbelly of a carrier. Right. That's a storage problem. Right. But the point is you still got to hinge in your wing and there's a way to design it so that that's okay. Mostly. Folding bicycles are much better than you would think they are. So all of these things are possible. None of them are free ever. You got one from me a long time ago that actually just breaks in half a bicycle. Yeah, the old... You never caught me a fighter jet. What the hell is going on with there? Oh, I don't fly. That's why. Yes, Andrew Berthday is coming up. But... No, though. It was something couplings. Yeah, SNS couplings. Yeah, it was kind of a clumsy solution. I thought it was great. It was cool. Yeah. But like a bike that you can basically unscrew at the top tube and the down tube. Yeah. Good job, by the way. Oh, thank you. And it was actually also just happens to the SNS couplings happen to have been put onto... Gosh, wasn't like a bridge stone. It was a stump jumper. Specialized. Specialized. Okay, it's such a nice bike. Anyway. It was a good bike. Anyway, but we've digressed. Yes. But yeah. Yeah, but you started with the F-14s. I sure did. I sure did. All right. So anyway, yeah, because we are in this rapid improvement phase, the rules... With AI, with the LLMs. The rules of now don't look like the rules we will settle into. They will look very different. And I think your point is a really good one, which is, if you're looking at your cat and trying to understand it, you need the biological humility to understand everything you don't know, which is most of it. But that actually we're in a different situation because the cat ain't changing much. The cat of now and the cat of 500 years ago aren't very different. Whereas the AIs of now and the AIs of six months from now will be different. So it's essentially like you're moving through the tree of life and you're passing through what will ultimately be ancestors and interacting with them in real time. And where this settles out with the ultimate tree of AI life, we don't know. But you have to have the mindset of like, oh, I'm talking to an aandertal. That's interesting. Yeah, practically instantaneous generation of fossils. Yeah, yeah, it is fossilization on fast forward. Yeah. All right. So if you will forgive me, I will then move to the other sort of global thing that I think we are all living downstream of and therefore have to pay some attention to. So, Jen, could you put up the tweet of mine that has the screenshot of the president's tweet from yesterday? So as most of you will know, you want to scroll down to the president's, I think this is a true social post. The president released a statement that caused a tremendous amount of alarm, including mine. What he put out on true social social says, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change, where different smarter and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionary, revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows in capitals, we will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran, exclamation mark. Now, scroll back up to the top of it. Just to remind listeners who weren't paying attention to the SSU and so many people, others were. This is from yesterday, and so it did not happen. Right. So scroll back up to the president's. So the thing that was most alarming was the initial setup here. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Now, that I took and I still believe is a genocidal threat. But others have pushed back and they've said that the word civilization could refer to the regime and that the last line of the thing in which he says something like God bless the great people of Iran is meant to indicate that it is not a genocidal threat. But nonetheless, it appears to many of us to have been such a threat. I will just tell you what I tweeted so you can decide for yourself. I tweeted in response, I said, the president's threat against Iran is genocidal, even by the strictest definition. Now, what I mean by that, this is not the tweet, this is me commenting on it. What I mean by even by the strictest definition is that the formal definition of genocide says the attempt to eliminate a people in whole or in part. And so in part could be argued to be a gray area, but the president's and entire civilization will die tonight appears to be in whole, not in part. So in any case, I continue. It may be bluster, but that does not change our obligation to work. A threat must be credible and we must act accordingly. We attacked Iran. Any order to escalate our attack with nuclear weapons would clearly be immoral and must therefore be rejected by every person in the chain of command. Anyone who carried out such an anyone who carried such an order forward would become immediately complicit. This is the lesson of history. And those who fail it will be judged harshly by it and by God. We can't have a commander in chief who threatens civilians, idly, or an artist, the president must be removed from office for the good of their public in the world. Now, I, of course, took no end of crap for saying that lots of people basically called me a liberal was. I don't think I'm anything of the sort. I am trying to process modernity with the lessons of history. One of the lessons of history is that immoral orders must be rejected. We hanged Nazis for violating it. I'm not calling the president a Nazi, but I'm saying those who say, hey, I was just following orders. The judgment was rendered in the Nuremberg court that that is not a defense. You are responsible for not carrying out immoral orders. And I think that that unless there are weapons we don't know about, that was clearly meant to be read by the Iranians as a threat to use nuclear weapons. I assume it was probably idle. But the problem is, okay, so people should know if they don't that what happened was we marched toward the president's deadline for Iran. We got close within a couple of hours. Bombers took off from Britain. What they were armed with, we don't know. But essentially, the Iranians presented a proposal for peace, one that contained provisions that could not possibly be accepted by the United States. But the president accepted not the provisions of the proposal, but accepted that the proposal was sufficiently in range that he would call off the attack, whatever the nature of the attack was, and a fragile ceasefire began. So I'll say a couple of things. One, what the president did seemed to have worked by one metric. He got a the opening of a negotiation, which is not easy to do at this point, because several negotiations have been attacked in we've had three attacks on negotiations or negotiators since the beginning of conflict, not the beginning of the war itself, but in the context of this conflict. So the president was clearly engaged in extreme brinksmanship. Had he not gotten something from the Iranians, he would have had to either acknowledge this as a bluff, deliver an attack that doesn't match what he was promising and look weak, or deliver something that does match what he was promising that would put us into a whole new phase. Now, I think actually he did put us into a new phase. On the one hand, ceasefire and negotiations is good, even if the provisions that the Iranians offered won't be accepted. The president has apparently offered them 15 points. I don't think we've seen that proposal, it's private, but presumably those things are unacceptable too. But of course, that's where negotiations start. But the problem is, I think he's now legitimized a nuclear threat as a mechanism as a negotiation tactic. Now, obviously a nuclear threat looms behind all negotiations with nuclear powers, but the prohibition, the stigma that would come from using a nuclear weapon in the modern context is so great that most of the nuclear players just simply don't use them even when they're at war. That's been the history since we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath. Nuclear powers have often been at war and not used their nuclear weapons. So I think that this was a dangerous kind of brinksmanship. I think it exists in a context that is most unfortunate. And I'll point out what that context is here in a second. But at the very least, I believe that he normalized the threat of the use of nuclear weapons. And I would point out to anybody who says, yeah, that's what he does. The problem is, the threat has to have a degree of credibility to have any point in issuing it at all. So this is not the equivalent of when Ronald Reagan joked into a hot mic, whether it was intentional or not. And there's some debate historically, but he joked into a hot mic that the Soviet Union was going to be destroyed. The bombing starts in five minutes, right? It was a joke. Still, it caused a lot of consternation amongst everybody, really. But this is not that. This is a country at war threatening nuclear annihilation by implication. And even if it can be argued to have been successful, it still puts the world in greater danger than it was before such a thing had been normalized. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the unfortunate context. This is where the game theory comes in. What happened in the aftermath of Iran? I don't even want to say they blinked because although they blinked, what they delivered that the president was then forced to accept was a fair basis for a beginning of a discussion was a radical defeat for American policy. So the Iranians put out a list of things that they required. And the president said that's acceptable as a starting point. And the point is what the Iranians were asking for showed great strength for the president not to laugh at it showed strength on their part. So but here's the problem. You had the basic property in play is the straight of hormones. Iran holds the world hostage by having control over that straight and refusing to open it up as long as they're under attack, understandably. The proposal, both proposals involve the opening of the straight of hormones. In the Iranian proposal, the straight of hormones and a substantial fee for crossing it $2 million a ship would be used in lieu of the reparations they initially asked for from the United States. So the idea is well, we can indefinitely the fee for for for crossing with a ship. I think so. Now, I will say back when I was a graduate student living in the Panama Canal, huge fees for ships to pass through these waterways are standard and sure is the straight of her moves similarly infrastructure rich? No, Panama Canal requires a ton of money to maintain and operate 100% but you will also notice the strange nature of Panama City sitting on the shores of the canal, which is the modern metropolis that it is because of the richest the flow in right. So although yes, but anyway, point is no, the straight of hormones is different than the Panama Canal. But the idea that you know, I mean, look, effectively what we've got is a breakdown in the rules of peaceful order and warlordism, right? You've effectively got a warlord sitting on the shores of the straight in a position to extract resources or shut down world commerce. So that's an interesting puzzle piece completely foreseeable in the attacking of Iran. But the other thing the other game theoretic piece that has to be understood is and I don't think any of us have the information to understand it in any detail. But the relationship between the United States and Israel. So there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Israel does not want peace, that it has objectives here, and that to the extent that the US and the Iranians are trying to work out a deal in which Iran stops getting pummeled and the world economy is released from its hostage status. Israel has other plans. So and it has leverage. So one of the things that Iran specifically named in its requirements was a cessation of attacks, including on Lebanon. Now, what do you think happened? Well, of course, Israel continues to bomb southern Lebanon and Beirut. So anyway, do you have a we have a tweet that shows this? Yeah, Glenn Greenwald. So Glenn Greenwald says the number of these casualties in Lebanon will increase significantly. But even if this casualty number were the final toll, and again, it will increase a lot, this would be equivalent of six 9 11 attacks for a country of Lebanon size. Now, if that comparison strikes you as at all unfair, realize this is a comparison that the Israelis regularly make about the attack on October 7. Right, they compare it to 9 11 with regard to the dual. They correct. Yeah, they exactly they correct for their population size. So if you scroll down, you can see images of bombing in Lebanon. And there's just tremendous devastation. So how this will affect the they're not even negotiations yet, but the negotiations that seem to be threatening to occur, if Israel has the capacity to scuttle them by acting in a provocative way, there was I don't think I send it to you, Jen, but there was a statement by Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he effectively says we have objectives, they're not done, our fingers on the trigger uses very provocative language. And anyway, my basic point is this, the fate of the world arguably hangs in the balance here. The interaction between a war with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and the world economy is it really couldn't be more dangerous. The number of, you know, famine hangs in the balance. The ability to get fertilizer, some large percentage of the world's fertilizer passes through the Straits of Hormuz. Obviously, there's the issue of crude oil. You've got some more subtle issues with things like helium, which is a major player in sophisticated technology. All of these things are connected together in a complex system in which we appear to have intervened with simplistic ideas of what what might be accomplished and in what way. And, and we now have the question in which we cannot observe what is going on. A, it is interesting that the United States called off its attack on Iran based on signaling from Iran. Presumably behind the scenes Israel did not want the United States to call off its attack, whatever that attack was. And the US decided to do it anyway. And so the question is, what is what is that negotiation like? And are we in a position to make peace with Iran? If Israel decides it does not want that peace made? And if so, what can we do about that? Surely we have the right to stop a war that we initiated, but our complex partnerships, the let's put it this way, it's easier to scuttle peace than it is to make it, right? And this is a basic principle. Which is one of the reasons that keeping the peace should be an imperative, as opposed to imagining that you can return to peace having broken it. Exactly. And more on that another day, because I think there's a hidden story here that is very clarifying. So I will return to that another day. But the idea of when you have order, and actually this fits so well with what you're going to talk about, because those who are threatening our admittedly deeply flawed system domestically are playing political system. Yes, our political system are playing with fire that they appear not to understand. In other words, they are threatening to break a flawed system rather than fix it, not knowing what it is that will replace it. And the point is, warlordism is not a bad model. In fact, it's one of several terrible failure modes that will happen if you take something functional, as the modern West is, you know, it's not in good shape, but it's functional. And if you take it and break it, what you're going to get is going to be unthinkably bad. So anyway, maybe we should move to that, that story, but it's really the same dynamic, you've broken a fragile peace, and now you're left with something in which you can't get basic supplies to restrate that that is the kind of result you get when instead of taking the bad situation and figuring out how to make it better, you throw up the chessboard. Yeah, I don't actually know how to deal with that segue. I had a segue that is not related to that at all. The segue is speaking of emergencies, because there is an actual emergency that has been created and is being maintained by the various players that you were just talking about. But last time on here on the evolutionary lens, we talked about this bell, can you see my screen? Cool, which was voted into law in the state of Washington, March 18, 2026, Senate Bill 5068, which is we talked about last time, and broadens the people who can apply for and hold jobs in law enforcement and in the prosecutor's office in the state of Washington to be on that of citizens. And that's what we mostly talked about. But as I pointed out, as we were going through it last time, there's a thing that I couldn't really make a lot of sense of in the very first paragraph, it specifies this as an act relating to agencies, firefighters, prosecutors in general, or a limited authority law enforcement, and then it the paragraph ends, semi-colon, and declaring an emergency. Oh, what's the emergency? And as I said in the last livestream, and as I reviewed again today just to make sure I hadn't missed it, it's not a long document, it's 12 pages long, and I both read the whole thing and searched on the word emergency and anything like it. This is literally the only mention of an emergency in the entire bill. So this bill has declared an emergency without specifying what the emergency is, and I thought at the time, well, that's odd. What the hell? Well, now I have, and you can give me my screen back here for a minute, I have actually, let's see, I now have some insight into the emergency, into the nature of the emergency, which is to say, there's not one, but it was very important that they claim there was one. So with considerable gratitude to a guy named Viet Nguyen, whom I do not know personally, I now know what this invocation of the emergency is about. So he wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Times, headlined, I'm not a millionaire, I don't think we need a millionaire's tax. And I read that piece, and that's, and then I went sort of into a social media feed and find that he has created, he's a Washington State resident in, here we go, who has created this GitHub called, that he's calling a tracker, he says, your right to vote on new laws is being taken from you. And yeah, actually just let's go here first, why it matters. The referendum is the people's most direct check on the legislature when emergency clauses are attached to partisan bills, that check disappears. Here's how the system works, how it's being abused and why you should care. So I'm going to back up for a minute and then read his clarifying paragraphs. Anytime a bill declares an emergency, the people cannot, within a specified period of time within 90 days, say, uh-uh, we don't think so, you don't get to do that. We, in Washington State, back in 1912, I believe it is, in fact we'll go down here and read it, yeah, Washington voters won the power of initiative and referendum in 1912, more than a hundred years ago, when both houses of the legislature passed the enabling amendment and voters ratified at the ballot box. The idea was championed by progressive reformers who believed that representative government needed a safety valve, a way for ordinary citizens to check the legislature directly. Article 2, section 1b of the state constitution, again this is in the state of Washington, enshrines the referendum as, quote, the second power reserved by the people. It can be ordered on any act, bill, law or any part thereof passed by the legislature with one exception. Laws deemed necessary for the immediate preservation of public peace, health, safety or the support of state government. So in the state of Washington, from over a hundred years ago, progressive thinking people said, hold up, even though our officials are duly elected by us, they might get out of control, we need a way, another way, to stop them from doing things that we don't approve of, we reserve the right to pass a referendum that undoes anything that they pass, but there has to be a way for them to act without us, without us getting in the way. What if there's an emergency? Okay, if there's an emergency, we have to cede the right to referendum. So what happens? We're back to game theory. Of course, what you'll have is the abuse of the concept of emergency. So I'm just going to read the second to the last two paragraphs of this little section in Nguyen's GitHub. The abuse of that exception isn't new. As early as 1929, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the practice of attaching emergency clauses to bills specifically to evade referendum petitions. Nearly a century later, the practice persists, now at an industrial scale. Washington voters have used the referendum to project income taxes 10 times. They've overturned affirmative action policies, liquor laws and transportation taxes, each time the legislature acted and the people responded. That cycle of accountability is exactly what emergency clauses and partisan bills are designed to break. And that's what the West stands for in my mind. And when we were in Prague a while back, someone in the audience where we were talking about our book referred to, I think they were talking about the West Coast of the United States as the West West West. And it's stuck in both of our minds. The idea of we have this concept of the West and the farther west you go, the more recently these values have been understood to be so precious and so necessary. And yet here we are on the West Coast of the United States. These three states have lost track with amazing, amazing speed. So if you go back to technology that actually works, can you see my screen again? Awesome. Okay. We have again the homepage of this GitHub created by Washington State resident one who wrote this op-ed for the Seattle Times about the new millionaires tax and why he's not a millionaire, but he still doesn't think we need one. Which is how I found him. This remarkable document, he points out in this biennium, in the 2025-2026 leg sessions, there are 709 total bills passed in which 78 of them had emergency clauses. That's an 11% emergency clause. Wow. Right, 11%. And I'm not going to get into the details here why then he says 20 bills you can't vote on. These bills were passed on party line votes given emergency clauses and are now referendum proof. Each everyone was sponsored by Democrats and opposed by nearly every Republican in the legislature. Voters have no direct path to challenge any of them. So let's just go through a couple of them. And every one of them is interesting. Let's just here, let's look at 5785, higher education costs. And this is again, this is Nguyen's summary. I'm not going to, except for the fourth one I'll look at, we're not going to go into the bill itself. This allows public higher ed institutions to increase resident undergrad tuition operating fees by up to 5% above the tuition growth factor in academic year 2026-27 to cover compensation and operate within appropriations. And we have limits for a reason. It also is cutting Washington College grant aid for about 18,000 students. This is an interesting one to me because this specifically is hurting the college students in the state of Washington and it's hurting lower income students more than students with an ability to pay, which means that once again, we have evidence of a nearly complete reversal of what the two parties supposedly stand for with Republicans working hard to keep costs down for working class students who want to get a college degree and the Democrats saying, okay, basically, and fuck them. So that's one of these bills that is referendum proof, passed. And there you are. The next one I want to look at is 1321 on outside militia activities. This one prohibits militias from other states from entering Washington to enforce state or federal laws without written authorization from the governor or a federal call to service. It authorizes the governor to withdraw previously granted authorization anytime, including under interstate compacts per RCW, et cetera. And it's controversial. Again, this is Nguyen's framing in part because it is stoking the fears and the fires and it is not actually granting almost any new authority. So there is no new emergency again. They've claimed an emergency. This is referendum proof. But the standing as a bill in the state of Washington now with the emergency clause makes it seem like something new has happened and now we have the ability to know kings and fight ice and all of these things. What you've done is further polarize the electorate. What you've done is further terrorize the electorate with fear. One more. This is so interesting. It's crazy. And so everyone here, and there's a ton more, are again bills that passed in this biennium in the state of Washington that are referendum proof on the basis that an emergency clause, an emergency was invoked. And at least in the ones I've looked at, no emergency is evident nor is it explained or described. Okay, so this one, SB 6081 is just called government record privacy. So that looks uninteresting, but check out what it's actually about. It exempts sex designation information in Department of Licensing Records, that is, driver's licenses and identity cards from public disclosure. Credentials show only current designation, no change indicator. Oh my goodness. We've been here before. We've been here before. Right. So here it is again on a party line vote with the Democrats in the state of Washington deciding that if you are a dude who's decided that you are not a dude at all, you get to have that be what your driver's license says with no indication that you are actually a dude. And what about if you turn out to be one of those really confused mentally ill dudes who decides to cosplay as a woman who ends up committing crimes, well, then it's going to be harder to find you because of this bill, which is apparently somehow an emergency. Yeah. Therefore, referendum proof. Okay. And there's one more. Give me my screen back for just a second. I'm going to find the PDF of this. Oh, here we go. Okay. And finally, we have, is this the right one? Yeah, 1531. Again, an act relating to preserving the ability of public officials to address communicable diseases using scientifically proven measures to control the spread of such diseases, adding a new section to chapter 70.5454 R.C.W., creating a new section, and declaring an emergency. Referendum proof because an emergency has been declared even though there is no emergency obvious or explicit in the bill. And specifically, what have they done? Consistent with the policy and subsection one of this section, the state and local health officials must, within available resources, implement and promote evidence-based appropriate measures to control the spread of communicable diseases, including immunizations and vaccines. The state and its political subdivisions may not enact statutes, statutes, ordinances, rules, or policies that prohibit the implementation of promotion of such measures. Any such statute, ordinance, rule, or policy in place on the effective date of this section is hereby declared null and void. One of our neighbor states, Idaho, as we mentioned before, is the first state in the nation to actually have a health freedom bill on the books, thanks to our friend Leslie Manukian, who wrote it and who helped pass it. And Idaho is so far the only state in the union that actually guarantees an individual's right to not have anything medical done to them that they do not want to do. Washington, meanwhile, is going the opposite direction. If you happen to live in a place that doesn't think that mandates make sense within the state of Washington, too bad, the legislature, legislators in the state of Washington have just declared a vague emergency and made their bill referendum-proof and declared that if in the future, and we're not saying we're going to, but if in the future, we decide that avian flu or whatever it is is so dangerous that we are going to mandate vaccines, masks, pills, whatever it is, we can do so. Including, of course, mRNA shots, which cannot be made safe. Yep. All right, I wanted to just try to wrap my mind around what's really going on here. Yeah. Okay, one thing is clear. There is some, there is an exception in the state constitution in a way that does not exist in the federal constitution or emergencies. Yes. That emergency provision neutralizes the ability of the electorate to override the legislature. This shouldn't matter very often for the following reason. The legislature is composed of people elected by the same electorate. It should be very sensitive to what people want. The commonality with which it passes a bill that pisses the public off enough that they engage in a referendum to neutralize it, that should be a very rare phenomenon. It is apparently not a rare phenomenon such that you have 11% of bills being immunized from such a thing with the expectation that the public may not like this at all and we're still doing it. So what that suggests, game theoretically, is that the something that is being done is being done for someone other than the public, which is not surprising. Our state isn't any more immune to corruption than the federal government is. It's highly corrupt at a political level, but corrupt with a kind of impunity. The idea that we are not throwing the people out who are passing laws that we would vote against, we would rescind with our referendum. Well, let me just, to be, I don't know that fair is the right word here, but no, the federal constitution does not allow exceptions to voter referendums when an emergency is declared, but then there also isn't the capacity for voter referendums. That's not what I'm appealing to. There is no, your constitutional rights do not get suspended because there's an emergency. This is a point that Bobby Kennedy makes frequently. There is no exception and it's not that the founders were unaware of the possibility of an epidemic. They were keenly aware of it and yet they didn't carve out an exception for your rights for such a thing, presumably because they understood what would happen if they did. It would be abused and I would point out that analogous to the idea of an emergency that is just simply declared without any standard explanation is what they did to the word pandemic. Oh, that's exactly right. It's the same thing. So in the case of the word pandemic prior to the COVID pandemic. Well, and, you know, EUA's, emergency use authorizations just made it all okay. Right. But in order for the whole thing to unfold, you needed to fix the definition of pandemic so that it quietly lost a requirement for severity. So the idea is there are two components to a pathogenic epidemic. One is how contagious is it. The other is how dangerous is it. And the problem is if you eliminate the how dangerous is it so that a pandemic simply requires something that's highly contagious. Well, lots of stuff is highly contagious that is not an emergency, right? A cold is not an emergency. Right. So they had to get rid of the severity requirement in order to broaden their powers. It's a Trojan horse use pandemic to bring your new powers into existence based on the fact that pandemic doesn't mean anything important in the mind. It still requires a severity, but in the legal definition it no longer does. And so anyway, the idea that whatever exceptions are carved out are going to be utilized by things that are not the public. And the idea so here's what I really want to get at. The why how would it be possible in a state in which the people elect their representatives to have those representatives generally carve out an exception for themselves without being thrown out. And the answer, I think, is going to be that the population of the state of Washington, the Democrats, the majority, is so terrified of the idea that they will be socially tainted by voting for a Republican, that they effectively can't throw these people out. Yeah. Right. So these people can again and again and again pass things that the public would reject and rescind. They don't get thrown out because everybody is terrified that they will be discovered to have voted for a Republican, which then stigmatizes them with the whole Trump nonsense. Yep. Right. So this is really what happens. This is Trump derangement syndrome causing rogues in our legislature to be able to ruin our state without our objection because the alternative no longer involves. So to put this more simply, if they pass a tax that the public has repeatedly blocked. Yes. And then they block the ability of the public to block it. The right thing to do is to throw them out. But you can't do that because who would you throw them out in favor of? It would be somebody on the red team and that has the stench of Trump on it. Yep. So we are effectively being held hostage by Trump derangement syndrome. But the Trump derangement syndrome is a proxy. It's a short term version. And I've referred to it often as well. And in fact, this is a good segue to talking about the COVID era stories that we'll talk about shortly here. Yes, it's way, way worse than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. But blue team and red team have always had complete disdain for one another, at least in our lifetime. Yeah. And the idea of blue no matter who has existed for a long time. So long before Trump, there was no way that a lot of voters who were registered Democrat would have gone to the other side of the aisle, even if that it seemed like it was clearly the right choice, even before the derangement of a personality that has created righteous fear in people. I don't disagree. Obviously, yellow dog Democrat is an ancient term. But there is something fascinating and important about the idea. I think many people, it's very hard to get people not to cast a vote in favor of a policy that they support or to vote against a policy that they don't support. For some reason, the idea of voting against a person who would pass a policy you don't support is unthinkable for most people. They have, they have, they have deindividuated and they have taken on their party affiliation in a way that does not allow them to say, hey, wait a minute, why are you passing all of these bills and at the same time forbidding our ability to effectively veto that? Right. Right. You're doing that because you are not public spirited. You are undermining the public. And the only reason you can get away with that is because you are made artificially secure in this state by the preponderance of team blue voters. Yep. No, they're, they're everything west of the, west of the Cascades in the state of Washington with the possible exception of a few places on the Olympic Peninsula that it's just not going to go red. Yeah. It's just not going to. And so you're going to have blue representatives. But even though those people would vote against these blue policies, that's why they're making them into emergencies. Right. So the same people if asked on a, and this has long been true, actually, if you ask people on a policy by policy basis, they're much closer together than they are if you ask them on a party basis. You know, we, we tend to agree more when it gets right down to do you favor this thing rather than do you favor this person? It's a defect in the mind because if you're going to elect people who are going to do things you don't favor, you shouldn't have elected those people. Yeah. Okay, I do want to finish by talking a little bit about the COVID era stories project. Even though it feels, it feels like a strange segue right now, but I think, I think it's important. I'm just going to read a little something. And then an excerpt from one of the stories that I've been publishing, and then we can, we can talk about it or not. So in back in late January, I published an appeal to receive stories from people, their memories of their experiences of life during the COVID era and really didn't specify much beyond that. And I've been publishing weekly stories on my sub-stack national selections this yesterday, I published the 10th installment. They range from raw to polished, often within a paragraph. Some writers lost family members to COVID, others to the vaccine, others to ideology and mass formation and propaganda, a different kind of loss to be sure, a loss that could yet be reversed, but in many cases will not. There are stories from the United States and Canada and Australia and this week from Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, as in the West, neighbors policed each other for not following absurd rules. In fact, I could maybe put some of these up just as I am going through them. In Sri Lanka, as in the West, neighbors policed each other for not following absurd rules. The author was chastised for not wearing a mask while running outside on the small stretch of lane on which he was allowed to run for safety, of course, all of it for our safety. In-person schooling went missing for nearly 70 weeks in Sri Lanka, large chunks of childhood simply vanished, the author writes. But he also saw things that reassured him, that he was among people, not robots, not automatons, but humans with agency. He writes, under curfew, under surveillance, under rules that often made little sense, there was resilience, improvised, uneven, human. It is a kind of steadiness that wealthier nations, less accustomed to scarcity, might struggle to imagine. Another author, I think I'm not going to be able to flip through these as I write, this one, one author, another author in America, the matriarch of a loving and large family lost her healthy, fit 25-year-old son to COVID. That was never supposed to happen, healthy, fit 25-year-old son. The whole family got sick with COVID and his blood oxygen dipped below 70. His sister took him to the hospital. No visitors were allowed and they never saw him again. Another author volunteered with a group called Ageless, which matched people with elders who lacked social connections. She became friends with her match even though they never met directly. They lived over an hour away from one another, so their friendship was almost entirely by phone or Zoom. A year end, she was told she couldn't continue to have those Zoom calls anymore because she wasn't vaccinated against COVID. Policy is policy. What are you going to do? A professional musician writes of watching as his symphony driven by management and then by their own union became tyrannical and mean. You don't have to have my screen up because it's irrelevant to what I'm reading now. A professional musician writes of watching as his symphony driven by management and then by their own union became tyrannical and mean, depriving people not just of employment but even of health insurance for the sin of not being vaccinated. He himself was vaxed but knew that what was happening was wrong. He fought on others behalf. Few people did that. He stayed in so that he could continue to do what he loves and so that he can continue to fight for others and wonders if it was the right decision to do so. Wow. An acupuncturist working as an instructor at a university lived the twin decay of higher ed and the social contract. First his institution was swallowed by another and working conditions fell into chaos and abuse and then he objected to vaccine mandates. He told his faculty colleagues, quote, we can't mandate an experimental medical product for students to attend class, end quote. After that, he was no longer welcome at faculty meetings. Some relationships became stronger. Some communities too. There were shining examples of humanity throughout the COVID era if you were looking for them. They existed even if you weren't. Campfire became reality. There's a story about campfire in here. I heard from one author who had become estranged from her mother during COVID because of their disagreement over the shots. Neither could understand the author's position. Forgiveness for disagreements seemed out of reach but then the author wrote her piece for COVID era stories and she shared a draft with her mother and her mother who used to read and edit many essays in her youth and through her daughter's words she could at last see through her daughter's eyes. Her mother and her are now reconciled. It's tentative but it's a start. Well, and it's a model really. It's a model and as I had conversation over text with the author in that case, I said I think for someone who is a writer as her mother is as I am, I think the asynchronous nature of being able to take what you've said to me and think on it in my own time and see your words rather than just hear your words probably in her mother's case was the thing that needed to happen for her not to have to respond in real time to her daughter who was angering her and making her scared but to be able to see why she made the decision she did and to think about her as her daughter as opposed to as an adversary. This is just a little bit more if I may. The nature of memory is worth considering. We are certain of some things that never happened. We have forgotten some of the most important things of all. In reading and editing just a small fraction of all that I've received still I have sometimes found inconsistencies in the stories and when I ask about them I hear, oh yes, let me go back and check and they check their journals from the time or professional records or text messages and often find that the truth was far stranger than they remember, sometimes even more brutal, rarely less. It is incumbent upon us to remember so that we do not so easily turn on one another again. Do the bidding of authorities who do not do our bidding and forget our humanity. That in part is what this project is about. I want to finish but we can talk first if you want by reading an excerpt from the very first COVID era story that I published titled The Symptoms I Carry by Heidi Brandis. I can either read that section now or you can Well I just wanted to say one thing which is one of the worst instincts that we have seen spread in the last 10 years is the instinct to declare somebody beyond the pale and therefore not hearable and you know we've talked about a number of things. One there's what I would call the sinquanon of woke which is the desire to cancel and banish right so that that person cannot be heard. That person is sufficiently wrong that they shouldn't be heard. Sorry you just cheated right they don't we don't need to worry about it if they're sufficiently wrong them being heard is not a problem because it will be obvious and it is the fact that they are not sufficiently wrong that has you deciding to banish them so that nobody can hear them. Let us remember that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It is and the point is look the desire to exclude them from the conversation means that if they are wrong the ability to bring them back into the conversation vanishes it's not like through dialogue you can persuade them it's like no you mustn't listen to them and if you do listen to them the other thing not just woke but the idea if you don't see why that person is stark raving mad then you're stark raving mad too right we're too dumb or whatever the situation is yes so the point is why the ability all of the folks who don't want to face their role in COVID and most of us did stuff we should not be happy about because it wasn't right but most people don't want to face their errors because the errors are too great they carry fears or something like that and the requirement that we be able to hear the perspective of people who were shunned in order that we can knit things back together and have a society that works is essential and so the thing that caused the breakdown to work the way it did is now trying to prevent the reconciliation and what you're doing is breaching the firewall by saying hey take a look at this as it looks from the side of the excluded and banished and injured and all of that and I just think it's and you know as as I say it's not there is there's literal tragedy of course but there there are people here not on the side that you think there are there are stories every almost every story has nuance that is unexpected and I think I'm wrestling most at the moment with this question of memory that you know I published a few very important stories from people in the moment at the time and just as when I have asked authors to go back and check their records their notes their you know journals whatever they have to a person discovered that other things that were immaterial that don't matter for the particular story they had misremembered they had collapsed things they had you know this is this is what memory does we don't have the capacity to store every single thing we'd be we would become incapable of recognizing pattern in addition to just not having the the the computing capacity so we think that what we remember is true it often is not we often remember interpretation when we think we are remembering fact part of what it is to be walking around the world attempting to think about it scientifically is to try to make that distinction like what did I observe and what do I think it means observe interpretation observe interpretation they're different things and all of us conflate them to some degree and the more time has elapsed the more we do so but you you could just you can see with with such clarity with regard to this era that is not that long ago how we have remembered things and what is actually true and when they match and when they don't and the the need to remember is more urgent than ever I would say let me just read a small excerpt from the first story that I published a piece called the symptoms I carry by Heidi Brandis a great piece all of these are and I didn't I didn't make mention of all the ones I published or any of the ones I haven't yet and there's many more in the queue and many many dozens more I haven't even looked at yet so there's many more to come but here's this my relationship with ash lasted 28 years she writes we met at roger state college in claremont oklahoma when i was barely old enough to rent a car and he was a student with opinions about everything we bought 12 acres in arkansas with a cave on it because we were the kind of people who thought owning a cave was a reasonable life decision we joined the society for creative anachronism and spent over 20 years in medieval garb fighting for 10 battles and singing real songs around campfires it burned until dawn then trump happened then covet happened and those two catastrophes became the same catastrophe twisted together like kudzu strangling a fence line the argument started before the pandemic they started with an election and a red hat in a country that seemed to be splitting down the middle like a log under an axe ash was a conservative not a flag waving extremist but a man who believed in personal responsibility and small government and leaving people alone to make their own choices i am a liberal i believe the government should help people who cannot help themselves for most of our 28 years that difference had been manageable we sharpened each other we argued over dinner and went to bed together to cuddle anyway but something changed when the pandemic hit the virus became a loyalty test you were either afraid of coveted or afraid of tyranny and there was no middle ground ash called it overblown i called him heartless he said i was being manipulated by fear i said he was being manipulated by propaganda he dismissed the death trolls i dismissed his concerns about lockdowns destroying livelihoods every conversation became a battlefield and neither of us knew how to lay down our weapons i was not innocent in this i need to say that clearly when he went low i went low when he said something cruel about liberals i said something cruel about conservatives i called him names i am not proud of i mocked his new sources with the same contempt he showed for mine we were two people who would love each other for nearly three decades and we could not stop drawing blood the truth is that we were both scared he was scared of losing his freedom his livelihood and his sense of control over his own life i was scared of losing my mother my friends common decency and the vulnerable people i loved neither of us could see past our own fear long enough to recognize the other persons we turned our terror into anger because anger felt stronger and we aimed that anger at the person sleeping next to us because they were the closest target after 28 years we were done the virus we both avoided killed us anyway wow she's also an extraordinary writer obviously and the in the entire story is extraordinary as is every story i'm publishing here but this to me felt like a perfect place to start the project the covet era stories project and and to finish the discussion or at least this part of the discussion today because these were not two individuals who were directly harmed by a virus didn't have anything to say at least to me about where the virus came from about the vaccines about the mandates about the masks it was the two of them who could not see the humanity behind the people the other whom they had loved for almost three decades and it's done yeah that's that's stunning they were victims of the virus the psi op the phony pandemic the politics surrounding it and i mean it you know this idea that you're two people and that you have a relationship and that relationship is a thing unto itself and the point is the relationship can be destroyed by external forces and actually it's vitally important that you both understand that it has to be managed as a thing it has to be protected it has to you know it can be wounded and it needs to be fixed and obviously you know that's a that's a tragic story even though no one died it's um i think it actually stands in very well for what happened to many many relationships during the so-called pandemic yeah even the ones in which the people are still nominally together yeah but there there are there are many more sort of walking wounded than there were before and if everybody would look at their own performance with the benefit of hindsight how much more immune could we be to this bullshit when it happens in the future rather than rationalizing that we had our reasons for doing what we did and if the fact of you know sam harris if the fact had been different i would have been right that kind of logic um means that the vulnerability remains and it you know it'll switch topics but it's gonna come back yeah you know so you want to choose to either pay the cost of facing what you did or not pay that cost and face it again next time and figure out how to look at least one person in your life and better if it can be more than one but at least one person in your life in the eyes when you disagree and say a few things say we disagree let's figure out what the basis of that is because maybe i'm wrong and maybe you're wrong yep and maybe another of us is wrong maybe both of us is wrong and another of us is going to change our minds and if that's the case maybe this is the death knell of the relationship but there's a really good chance it's not that this is just a disagreement and that that has nothing to do with how you and i feel about one another and about the nature of our relationship and about whether or not we are together in this going forward into this wild and woolly world in which it is beyond useful and wonderful to have someone by your side whom you know has your back even if they sometimes disagree with you yeah it's essential i mean it's like a core feature of being a human being and uh modernity has rendered these things uh not automatic anymore people don't automatically generate a relationship that has the proper characteristics and it's uh it's such a spectacular loss yeah it is um so i had said last time that i wanted us to come back to something beautiful and you said you were going to and you did not and um and i thought that there was in a way there that there is hope here that there is there is hope in these memories because we are still human despite despite everything that is happening in the world we are still individual humans who are interacting with one another as much as possible in real time and space and are accountable to ourselves and each other and these stories help us remember our recent history is just that it is in the past but it is just just yesterday practically so as you know as as non-existent emergencies get invoked in the state of washington and possibly genocidal threats are made by leader of the free world and llms that may or may not be able to initiate catastrophic worldwide computing um crisis um are not yet released onto the world we can we can remember who we have been and what we are capable of and be good to one another yeah absolutely and at some level you know if the lights can go off at any moment it's obviously the most important thing that when the lights go off you don't have to discover the people you're trapped with that actually you established your relationships and the lights are incidental i mean that's i mean that's actually that's that's perfect imagine like the lights literally go off and it's you know winter in the north and so there's a lot of darkness and you realize that there's individuals with you you don't actually know you don't know what they think they don't know what they're gonna do you don't know what they're capable of that's not where you want to be no it's not no you want to establish your humanity because it's the right thing to do because it improves your life and you want to do it while it's easy to do because the bombs aren't raining down and the lights are still on and there's food in the grocery store and there's plenty of helium to run the whatever they run helium what's the helium it's used for high-powered computing and certain medical technology yes but why is it coming up now just because it's it is the i don't mean to disrupt what we were on i think it was much more important we're we're about to but but the point is many things that you don't realize are dependent on helium are and so the fact that some war half a world away is disrupting the world supply that's what i'm asking so you just keep aligning the the thing that you're talking about what's going on with helium it's not flowing through the straits of harm moves so helium is one of the main things that goes to the streets of permutas okay that's that's all i needed okay like just like the nugget of this the center sorry i thought i had said that earlier okay yeah um all right yeah helium okay you're gonna talk like you just like some helium no i cannot do that no come in no no no um all right we are uh we're gonna sign off we're gonna be back uh here in just a few minutes with a q and a consider joining us on locals and then we back in we will be back again on saturday and uh 11 30 a.m pacific as as always um and until you see us next time be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone