 Okay, let's cross over to Tucker Carlson tonight. Welcome to a special edition of Tucker Carlson tonight. When was the last time you heard a democratic politician propose a solution to a problem, no matter what the problem is, that didn't make the Democratic Party more powerful? Ponder that for a moment. Let's say, for example, that you really believe global warming was an existential threat to humanity and that rising carbon dioxide levels were causing global warming. What would you do to fix it? Well, you might think back to 10th grade biology class, CO2, CO2, hmmm. Don't trees consume huge amounts of CO2 for photosynthesis? Quick Google check, why yes they do. So how about we plant a whole lot more trees all across the country and across the world? That seems like a natural solution with lots of upsides, trees are beautiful. It might help fight global warming. Oh, but no, there's a problem with that idea. Planting more trees might help solve climate change, but it definitely will not enrich your donors. Trees are cheap, it's hard to make money from trees. And worse than that, trees are impossible to regulate. Once you plant trees, they grow by themselves, they do not need federal help. Trees definitely will not make you more powerful. So instead, here's an idea. Let's invest trillions of dollars of other people's money in batteries and wind farms and electric school buses. That way, democratic politicians get fingertip control over the entire US economy and all of their friends get rich. Sounds perfect, let's go with that idea. That's how democratic politicians think, every one of them. So it probably should not surprise you that Elizabeth Warren has a brand new plan for rising gas prices, and naturally it goes without saying. That plan would give Elizabeth Warren a lot more control over you and over the United States. Well, hold on a minute, you may be wondering. Why should Elizabeth Warren have control over anything? Elizabeth Warren isn't very bright. She's never created anything. In fact, she's a proven liar. This is a person who exploited the suffering of American Indians to get a job promotion. The Trail of Tears means I need tenure, okay. So in every possible way, Elizabeth Warren is mediocre. Yet, and here's the catch, she's also a US senator and that means she has power. Warren's latest plan to make herself more powerful is called the Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022. This bill would allow Elizabeth Warren to decide what things cost in the United States. So let's say you're paying six bucks a gallon for gas and you may be. The obvious solution to that, in fact, the only solution to that is to make more gasoline because if there is more of something, it will cost less. That's not just basic economics though it is, it's also a law of nature. It never changes. But Elizabeth Warren wants the opposite, she does not want more gas. In fact, she's worked hard to prevent the United States from producing more gasoline, and that's the main reason it's so expensive. What Elizabeth Warren wants instead is control over gasoline and over everything else, and this bill will give it to her. See how this works? And this is why the Biden administration has shut down oil and gas leases in the middle of an energy crisis. And not just that, they're crushing refineries. According to one analysis by Hot Air, quote, seven American refineries, which formerly processed 806,000 barrels of oil per day, have gone offline. Some simply shut down, while others were being converted to biofuels like ethanol to meet the demands of the environmental lobby. These losses have left the United States with 124 operating oil refineries. That is 10% fewer refineries for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel than we had in 2016, even as demand has continued to increase. End quote. So you see this is going, no more oil or gas for you. And that's why you can't afford to fill your tank. Instead, the Biden administration is demanding that states build wind turbines that sound good, but unfortunately don't actually work. Last we went to Texas to see this firsthand, here's a clip from our documentary on the tragic buffoonery of wind power. With no chance of being approved near Malibu or Greenwich or in the mountains of Aspen, the development invariably happens in poorer parts of the country. The number one place for wind farms is Texas. But the question is, what happens when the turbines stop spinning? We're in the middle of nowhere in Texas. We're trying to find a place just to sleep tonight. Everything is sold out. There's nothing available. It's now expected to be the largest insurance claim event in Texas history. This winter storm totally overwhelmed the power system in Texas. And I can tell you this morning, nearly 4.2 million Texans still have no electricity. Texas has the most wind power capacity in the United States. But the Texas turbines, which are not winterized, iced up during a cold weather event in February of 2021. Electricity output collapsed. Texas regulators ordered rolling blackouts Monday as an Arctic blasts frozen wind turbines. There's no water in the hotel. The Texas grid, like the California grid, is becoming increasingly unreliable and difficult to maintain, difficult to keep that power in a steady basis. This 20-year-old turbine is leaking oil. Doesn't look too green to me. So the point of an energy grid is to produce and transmit energy. It has only one purpose. And that purpose is being sabotaged on purpose by the Biden administration and by Wall Street in favor of green energy, in favor of windmills that don't actually work. And as a result of that, we're facing the prospect of more blackouts this summer. We don't have electricity anymore. It's a first-world country. But Elizabeth Warren has a fix for that quote. It shall be unlawful for a person to sell or offer for sale a good or services at an unconscionably excessive price during an exceptional market shock regardless of the person's position in the supply chain or distribution network. So the argument here, this Elizabeth Warren's argument, the economy has been in a period of exceptional market shock since the pandemic began. Therefore, prices set by every industry across the country would fall under the regulatory authority of who Elizabeth Warren. Most of the price gouging bills are limited to specific areas during natural disasters, but this one is not. It's economy-wide and it's forever. Now, the question is, how exactly does Elizabeth Warren define quote, unconscionably excessive prices because they're not defined in the legislation? So it turns out the definition is up to, can you guess, Elizabeth Warren. Any business with gross annual revenues over 100 grand a year, that means pretty much everybody in the country must now obey Elizabeth Warren. That means Elizabeth Warren read the power to set the price of, say, diesel fuel. That's what we use to fuel trucks that transport virtually everything that you buy or consume. The entire US economy depends on diesel. As CBS reported recently, diesel prices are getting close to the point where truckers can't work anymore. Watch. Disaster-dassing fuel prices like $6.39 a gallon. Imagine paying that for a fill-up of more than 100 gallons. A regular fill-up would have been, just say, six months ago, about $700. Now it's about $1,000. It's what truckers are facing across the country for diesel. And you're paying the price, according to oil analyst Tom Clusa. If you're ordering anything that moves by freight across the country, it comes via fuel surcharges. Probably not the worst of the diesel surcharges. That'll come next month. I just don't think there's any magic bullet at the moment. It's going to be tough. It's going to be a tough summer. So most projections suggest that this, and by this we mean the price of energy is going to get worse. And that's exactly, of course, what Elizabeth Warren is counting on, your suffering. She hopes Americans get so desperate that they go to her to set the price of diesel along with everything else that's bought or sold in the United States economy. And when that happens, what happens? Interesting question. So at this point, a lot of money is floating around the US economy, and that's because of government spending. Federal Reserve prints money, it goes to the banks, and then it filters down to Wall Street. And they buy bigger houses. And yet at the same time, supplies of essential goods are very limited. So when you impose price controls in that kind of environment, anyone, anyone, bidding wars start, and prices go up even higher. As the economist Alan Cole put it recently, you'll inevitably get a scalper's paradise. Government-imposed prices will be low, so they'll sell out fast, of course, then you get a black market. We don't have to guess, because this has happened in every controlled economy in history. The Bolsheviks learned this early when they imposed price controls. So what do you do next if you're the government imposing these controls? Well, you crack down on scalpers. And that's what Elizabeth Warren's bill would do. So you get a lot more law enforcement activity. A lot of people go into jail. But you also get what the economist Gregory Grossman calls the second economy. So people do anything they can to get the government-approved lower price. The Soviets traded favors and established protection rackets. They called the system blot, which translated from the Polish meant someone who provides cover. What you get is corruption. Corruption is the inevitable result of price controls. Even the Soviets learned this after almost 70 years. That's why Gorbachev abandoned price controls in the 1990s. Nicholas Maduro, though a pretty rigorous Marxist, also abandoned price controls in Venezuela. He did that three years ago. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon also realized, can you imagine? Price controls don't work, but only after he froze all prices and wages in the United States. And that eventually led to a massive spike in demand and double digit inflation. So people who don't understand basic economic principles probably shouldn't fool around with the economy. But they can never control themselves. And that's why some of the biggest figures in the Democratic Party right now want to repeat mistakes we have seen countless times, such as Elizabeth Warren. It's the supposedly moderate Bob Casey and Sheldon Whitehouse is not very bright. And Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and Tammy Duckworth and Diane Feinstein, they're all on board with this bill. And then the House, you've got Jerry Nadler, David Cicilini of Rhode Island, the former mob lawyer, Katie Porter of California, Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley, Bobby Rush of Chicago. They've all co-sponsored the legislation. So they're hoping is they do that you won't open Wikipedia to find out what happened when every other country in history tried this. They definitely don't want you looking into the history of the Soviet Union. And that's why that history is no longer taught in schools. Instead, they want you to watch reports like this and in fear, give them total control over your economy. The shifting and shrinking school lunch menu, supply chain disruptions and the spiraling cost of key ingredients has forced school districts to pull back or make substitutions. At some schools, no more hamburgers or chicken patty sandwiches due to problems and the price of buying buns and ketchup. A new survey of school districts nationwide reveals 97% of meal programs reported challenges with higher costs, while 98% acknowledged problems getting some menu items, the supplies and the ingredients. Costs are poised to rise again for U.S. schools July 1st when an emergency measure enacted at the start of the pandemic expires. So we're not shilling for big business here. We don't work for Joe Biden. We don't have to. In fact, we're often nightly critical of big business. But let's be honest for a second. Does any serious person actually believe that hamburger and chicken patty manufacturers are holding back supplies of their products because they're greedy? That's not what's happening. We wish it were what's happening because you could probably fix that. But that's what they're telling you is happening. And they're telling you that so you'll believe it. They want you to believe that the baby formula shortage isn't about supply. It's about pricing. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Here's NBC with the latest figures on the shortage. The FDA telling NBC News it is concerned not having certain formulas available on shelves could pose life-threatening risks for infants. Mom Sydney Galvin says she's been grappling with the shortage for two months after their formula was recalled. How are you dealing? I'm just really taking a day by day, to be honest. Unable to find her formula on shelves, she had no choice but to suddenly switch brands. Texas has been hit particularly hard. The formula out-of-stock rate here is now 50%. Oh, so the key line was the last line. The out-of-stock rate is now 50%. So they just don't have the product because companies, generally, if they have the product, are eager to sell the product because they're in the business of selling products to make money. But unfortunately, if you have no grounding in economics at all, not even theoretical but practical, like if your whole life is consisted of lying to large crowds to get elected to print more money to pay yourself, give yourself the most generous retirement in the United States, you probably don't know how anything works. And that would describe most leaders in the Democratic Party. So their solution, not surprisingly, is the Soviet solution. It will make the problem worse, but it will make them more powerful. Oh, do you not like that? Oh, we're sorry. We'd love to hear your complaints, but we're not available at the moment. We've flown private to a global warming conference. OK, so what Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats talking about is the politics of expertise. And that just so happens to be the book that I've been reading for the last couple of weeks. It's not a quick read. Came out in 2013 by Professor Stephen Turner as a philosopher of the social sciences. And he talks about the rise of rationalism in politics. So that was a well-known essay, 1947, by Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics. And so the role is these enthusiasts of rationalism and expertise portrayed it that the goal is to replace politics with planning. Rationalism depended on a theory of politics that it sought to supplant. But it never articulated this theory that it was going to supplant democracy. So in the 1930s, economic depression and the inability of party politicians of the British parliament to agree on how to deal with the economic situation, provide all these negative examples of politics standing in the way of action in a sharp contrast with the state activism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Man, they really took action. So in the post-World War II period, the planners had their chance. The modern British welfare state was born. And what this state did was apply the ideas of Fabian socialism, which presented itself as objective, rational, and expert, which is just what Elizabeth Warren is doing here. So the welfare state had no need of the ideology of planning. The discussion of what was really going on here started to fade. But in its original form, planning was an attempt to replace politics. What Elizabeth Warren is proposing is to replace politics with planning with her experts. Politics is irrational. Planning with experts is rational. Now this ideology died, but the whole importance of expertise, of technology, of technical decisions, and of science has become ever more important in the realm of politics. So we need to supplant the role of discussion with expertise. With planning. So there are two basic patterns of political response to the ever-growing status and power of the experts. So one approach is to manage the experts with legislative bodies. And then the other approach means popular protests against the decisions and initiatives that arise primarily from experts, particularly in state bureaucracies. So high politics is the politics of leaders. So it means leaders make tough decisions in the face of inadequate information. Now this is different from politics in the sense of politics of representation, democratic representation, which is the politics supposedly of discussion. So complaints about the intrusion of politics and the policy making refer to the intrusion of this kind of democratic politics of factional representation. That when people complain about the intrusion of politics into the realm of making decisions which should really be held by the experts, they're complaining about factional politics. Now third kind of politics is bureaucratic. So this is the bureaucratic discretion usually by unknown state officials who have power, they have their own turf, they serve the interests of some parts of their constituency, they encourage cooperation among stakeholders, they protect themselves from popular protests, political interference and judicial interference. And then a fourth kind of politics is protest often by more informal non-governmental organizations focused on a single issue or decision. So high politics is the place where the familiar language of the political is least prone to obliteration. It's a setting that places the particular and most extraordinary demands, however, on knowledge because leaders will be acting in situations of uncertainty, incomplete information filled with conflict and the intentions of their enemies and the reality of the situation are largely unknown. There is some relevant information, there's some secret information which is really open to those who have power but there are many questions about its reliability. So leaders in high politics must rely on their assessments of what is true and right, who has veracity, competence and inadequacy of the understanding of the situation. So high politics is about situations of conflict and severe consequences in which the participants have neither the leisure nor the capacity to wait before acting. So you have to make judgments about the quality of the knowledge at hand. So high politics is not just about war and diplomatic strategy, but it's a good place to begin. Now experts have not generally played a starring role in high politics, nor have they been treated as adversaries because there are interesting exceptions. They are not themselves rivals to power and they don't possess the means of altering the situation faced by the leader. So to paraphrase Napoleon's famous remark on the Pope, the experts have no battalions. So experts traditionally play an opposite and less dramatic role. So the reliance on experts by politicians is designed to reduce uncertainty and to answer questions about what possibilities are open to adversaries and to the political figure, but they supposedly leave the decision-making to the leaders themselves. So this invisibility on the part of the experts is continued on the side of the writings on expertise itself. So when you get writings on experts, when you get narratives about experts, you get stories to the effect that the correct advice of the expert, usually it was not taken. So expert stories, the history is usually written by losers, by people who believe that outcomes would have been better if past decisions had been made differently. So we've had a whole lot of books about COVID, generally speaking along the lines of, if only the expert advice was taken, we'd be in a much better position. So these narratives of experts who are far-seeing, experts who are brave, experts who know what's really going on, they tend to be narratives of losers. They're not a triumphalist in character and they usually are consistent with the pose of expertise that it's merely offering the facts and it's not engaged in manipulation or any kind of struggle with rivals over power, they just want to tell the truth. So the expert story is usually presented as a struggle to speak truth to power through the fog of politics, through the fog of committees of bureaucratic resistance, and over the voices of expert rivals who are motivated by erroneous views, by hobby horses, by professional jealousy. So writing about high politics is normally writing with the expertise left out. While writing about the effects of expertise on politics is usually writing about failures to be listened to. So the successful influence of expertise on politics, but those cases where expert opinion actually alters the decision, but these writings are basically invisible because they are treated as part of the normal activity of politicians seeking to determine the truth before making decisions. So what type of person gets to advise those with great power? Like what type of people get to positions like Anthony Fauci has been in for what, 40 years now? Well, unpredictable people generally do not rise to high levels of responsibility or to high advisory roles. People who lose touch with the consensus generally do not rise to high levels of responsibility or to high advisory roles. Only someone who's a savvy political power, savvy political player can't rise to the position of an Anthony Fauci. So even if Anthony Fauci wasn't there, someone very like him or worse would be in that position. So people who have very strong opinions but don't mend those opinions in the face of like an adverse political response, they don't tend to rise to positions of power. So competing for power usually consists in competing for the power to advise, to define the framework of a decision and to have control of the sources of expert information presented. So Donald Trump's chiefs of staff frequently wanted to limit what kind of information he was getting. They did want him getting information from Breitbart. They wanted him getting information from the New York Times. So when it came to making a decision about dropping nuclear bombs on Japan during World War II, the people making that decision, they had a very strong concern to justify the huge cost of the Manhattan Project. They anticipated that serious questions would be raised about this huge expenditure if the atomic bombs were not used. And then this would lead to further serious questions because the first responsibility of a liberal democracy is towards the lives and the wellbeing of its own citizens. So every penny that went for the atomic bomb was a penny not spent on some other weapon that might have saved the lives of Americans. Now, the scientists, they wanted the power, scientists who developed the nuclear bomb, they wanted the power to decide how to use it. They had no sense of political responsibility to the population. The population had already paid for the bomb, right? They'd paid for the bomb in casualties that would have been prevented, had the money and effort been spent on other weapons. So that the civilian committee chose differently from the scientists is a recognition of their political responsibilities. They knew what they were. And they calculated correctly the problem of a congressional inquiry. The success of the bomb in ending the war precluded the questions that failure would have produced. This was the dark that didn't bark, but it's very much part of the story. So if the bomb hadn't been used and Americans would have died invading Japan, then a large and highly motivated group of families of those troops who would have perished in the invasion would have asked whether decision makers had the blood of these soldiers and Marines on their hands and the risk of very high casualties was impossible to rule out. Now, the families of the dead were told the decision to be made because a group of scientists involved in the development of the bomb were squeamish about its use, that they were just willing to use it against Hitler, but not against Japan. Well, the political consequences would have been enormous. And the question who lost China, that poison political debate for generation was a large part of Lyndon Baines Johnson's motivation for the Vietnam War to avoid a similar question. Well, the political consequences of not using an atomic bomb on Japan would have been enormous. So those who made the decision to drop the bomb knew the fallout that they would have received from their own citizens. So they decided to drop the bomb on people who were not their citizens. Now, the decision to drop the bomb resulted in the fourth kind of politics, the scientist movement, which includes the creation of a variety of organizations that attempt to influence policy and claim special expertise about atomic matters or to serve as a forum for discussions of weapons and weapon policy and science policy. So you had all these left-wing scientists forming anti-nuke organizations. And yet people such as Robert Oppenheimer, who was suspected they subordinated their scientific advice to political purposes and they were removed as a result from positions of influence. So politicians became quite alert to the anti-democratic potential of the scientist movements, especially when scientists were in a position to use their claim to special expertise to bring about policy results that suited their ideology. Let's have a look at the chart here. So I'm working out my GOLFAS elbow. So I'm doing the exercises recommended for GOLFAS elbow. Jason Goodman's channel's crowdsource the truth that being terminated on YouTube and Twitter accounts suspended. He's the guy who busted the truth minister, the Department of Homeland Security, the photo data in 2014 placed her in Ukraine working on the Zelensky election campaign. Okay, let's go back to this fascinating Stephen Turner book, The Politics of Expertise. So the politicians serve to assure that scientific claims would get special scrutiny. All right, scientists claimed expertise. They were expert, yes, in creating the atomic bomb, not so expert in whether or not to use it, right? There's nothing about being a scientist that gives you expertise about whether or not to drop a bomb. So scientists claimed power, right? They wanted the power to decide whether or not to, and how to use these weapons they created, but other people outmaneuvered them for power and the scientists were marginalized. And many Navy officers were sent for training in nuclear physics and the scientist movement just peed it out. Now, according to the Conventional Wisdom of International Relations thinkers today, the scientists were wrong at every important count. Right, the possession of even a small number of nuclear weapons by a country proves to be a successful deterrent, not only to nuclear war as such, but to any kind of warfare between states with nuclear weapons. So Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Ukrainians led nuclear weapons. So the results of nuclear weaponry have been unambiguously specific. They produced about a 70 year peace among the major powers that stands in sharp contrast to the first 45 nuclear free years of the 20th century, which great power conflict was the norm. So nuclear weapons and the threat of deterrence, right, backed by force rather than threats has given us peace in our time among the major powers. So there's a Scandinavian scholar of expertise and he wrote a book that has been compared to the prince. Right, Bent Fjordborg. He published a book in 1994, a study of a city planning effort in the Danish regional center of Arborg. The book's been praised as the equivalent to the writings of Machiavelli as depictions of contemporary politics. But the book is mainly interesting as an example of a particular kind of expert politics because he is all on board with rational planning very opposed to the chamber of commerce and the people getting to have a voice in how the town plants. So he begins with a series of Nietzschean aphorisms. Now he concludes his book with these Nietzschean aphorisms. Power defines reality. Rationality is context-dependent. Context of rationality is power. Power blows the dividing line between rationality and rationalization. Rationalization presented as rationality is a principal strategy in the exercise of power, the greater the power, the less the rationality. Stable power relations are more typical of politics, administration, and planning than antagonistic confrontation. Power relations are constantly being produced, reproduced. Rationality of power has deeper historical roots than the power of rationality. In open confrontation, rationality yields to power. Rationality of power relations more characteristic of a stable power relation than of confrontations. And the power of rationality is embedded in stable power relations rather than in confrontation. So these are maxims about the weakness of rationality in the face of power. So for Bent-Fühlberg, this weakness is a threat to democracy that can only become by more expertise power in public decision-making. So Bent-Fühlberg identifies reason with the collective reason or the social reason represented by the town planners and private reason, the reason of the merchants with unreason. So when the bureaucrats fail to live up to the high calling of rationality, that's sad. But the merchants, they're just greedy naves. So is there a better way to make decision than through politics? Maybe we need a new form of consultation with advisory committees and tribunals through which the ordinary person can let us know where the plant shoe pinches. So in these tribunals, of course, the bureaucrats hold all the cards. They have the expertise. They take the advice they deem it rational to take. So whether the ideology behind the bureaucrats is the elaborated one of planning or just the ordinary retail rationalism of expertise. The ordinary representative politics is not sufficiently expert to produce or even intelligently supervise planning. So why did the dog, in the case of the elective representatives, not Bach, wouldn't have been made more sense if this town plan had been contested politically from the outset? Why didn't the real politicians ensure this happened? Wouldn't this have been a real political participation? Well, these are all American questions, right? This assumes the normal place for making decisions of town planning is in elected bodies, not in bureaucracies. And the differences point to deep differences in the way that European politics work, right? These differences reflect different conceptions of politics and different institutions. So the American view of liberal democracy is through factions competing politically the game of legislation, right? That's how things get done, get political horse trading. Truly a crude market test reveals what one stakes are, how strongly one believes what one believes, thousands of participants to learn the stakes, the theories and theories of others about who benefits and who desires. So it's an epistemic level. Everyone needs to make their case to the same audience of representatives whose actions are in turn scrutinized by the press and the voters and everyone has something at stake. So good test of whether a politician actually believes in the pronouncements that are being made about say energy policy or global warming is the extent to which the politician will sacrifice other goals for them. So the appearance of an action is usually the result of unvoiced skepticism. So thus what the epistemic market decides as it operates in the context of horse trading and representative democracy will usually be at variance with the pronouncements both of experts and of political representatives. Now, Europeans tend to be appalled by this process because they like the idea of rational planning, turning more and more power over to bureaucrats and experts because bureaucracies in Europe are simply an extension of royal monarchical power. So rationalism planning promised to overcome the ills of the political marketplace that it produced its own nemesis in the form of protest politics. So the attainment of rationality planning by experts occurs under the shadow of the possibility of protest. These popular manifestations of hostility which are frequently seen as irrational. They usually involve suspicion, negation and the kind of political irresponsibility available only to those who know the consequences of their actions currently indirectly related to what policy will be implemented. So to protest is not to choose to accept the consequences of a choice but to protest the choice. So these are the moral pleasures of political impotence. So the long history of these pleasures on the left and the right and the fear that those who indulge them will actually one day have power defines this type of protest politics. The rationalist dream, the planning dream the experts dream has always been to abolish politics in favor of expertise but the result of this has been the birth of a new politics. Now let's take monetary policy. So in most countries this is delegated to specialists who are supposedly neutral. These are the governors or reserve banks they're selected because of their expertise but the tasks they perform are not scientific economic tasks. They may well act on the basis of economic principles but their task is still essentially a political one. It's one granted because the task cannot be trusted to the ordinary legislative representative politics same as with judges. So bureaucracies are similarly forms of delegation. They are forms that are traditionally being a very poor fit with democracy because of their historic origins as delegations of royal powers and as an executive extension of the monarch. So in the US people have many negative experiences with bureaucracies with the federal government local government federal agencies which they tend to perceive as arrogant irrational punitive and self-serving. So just like different countries produce very different forms of pornography different countries produce very different forms of emotions with regard to bureaucrats. So if people perceive the government as arrogant irrational punitive and self-serving they're not going to regard the scientists employed by the government any differently. Now there's very different expert distrust in European countries which reflects the distinctive experiences of citizens in those countries with their own civil service bureaucrats, politicians and regulators. So in Britain you've got a special civil service dominated by generalists. In Germany you've got a bureaucracy dominated by secrecy and hidden discretion. So each bureaucratic form creates its own distinctive suspicions. So in the US the suspicion government agencies are attempting to make work for themselves tends to undermine their credibility. Also the fact that people experience the arbitrariness of government bureaucrats enforcing unintelligible regulations in an irrational way. Now ordinary citizens don't grasp the finer details of how bureaucracies work but they get a general impression about the variety of motivation of bureaucrats and they act accordingly. So this holds true in continental meaning European and British context even though the distribution of power is quite different in the forms that that distrust then takes it's also quite different. So we can look at the responses of the public as rational responses to the kind of information that they acquire in ordinary context about these institutions and the designated experts. So we see a learning process by which citizens change their views the utterances of bureaucrats. So what we're looking at here in Europe is traditionally being a bureaucrats of being the delegation from the monarch and military powers are kind of the paradigm of this the kings were warriors like their vassals. And in the late 19th, early 20th century Bismarck the leader of Germany could tell Mocha his military head that the king has a great military mind, you. Right so the idea that the king as a supreme legal authority died slowly carried on in legal theory as a fiction that law represented the will of the sovereign. As in the case of the science the illusion could not survive the first moments the scientific revolution that the king was the greatest of scientists was always seen as absurd. Now for the democratic liberal successes to royal power the problem became acute and the claim that the public was the great scientist the ultimate arbiter of scientific truth well Hobbes tried to make the case for that but it's absurd. So even in the age of kings there was a special form of delegation that recognized a special character of scientific knowledge and created appropriate forms for it. You had royal academies and prizes such as the Nobel Prize which is awarded by a royal it's not awarded by a parliamentary body. So the persistence of these monarchical forms reveals the tension between the democratic and the scientific it's not going away. Now what happens when the experts keep telling us things that just are not true? Think about the massive increase in juvenile crime that's kind of undermined the credibility of the expert juvenile crime specialists who administer the juvenile criminal justice system and was reformed in the early 20th century on the basis of expert claims by various judges and reformers. So the task of the juvenile detention halls is now being handed over to groups operating military style boot camps and in other cases to groups attempting to teach Aristotelian ethics juvenile prisoners. There are alternatives to professionalization and the public perfectly capable of exerting pressure on political institutions to employ these alternatives. So powerful bureaucracies, I think Anthony Fauci embodying this they always tend to be conformist with the respect to the expert opinions that they developed bureaucracies are not debating societies they operate efficiently only when commands are followed according to rules in accordance with limited discretionary power and in which career advancement depends on conformity the whole culture of the bureaucracy. Now science in contrast to bureaucracies science is a debating society but even debating societies need to be governed and need to make decisions. So I remember my father got into theological trouble with the Seventh-day Adventist Church and there's a big meeting that was presided over by a very Kenny political player, Neil Wilson his son runs the church today and Neil Wilson made the point early on in my dad's week long trial that there's no freedom of speech in the Seventh-day Adventist Church obviously you're gonna be a minister in the Seventh-day Adventist Church you have to represent its doctrines. So consider the licensing of doctors, right? Physicians are usually subject to at least three major forms of governance. Attaining a medical qualification is done through procedures controlled by other doctors and then further qualifications are subject to state control. State regulates the granting of degrees and the national government either controls the accreditation of universities or of degrees or of accrediting agencies. And then the state also directly licenses physicians and the state traditionally exercises among its police powers, powers over public health particularly in the face of epidemic disease like COVID and employs physicians as experts in the involuntary commitment proceedings for the mentally ill. And that is as far as I've gotten in this terrific book by Stephen Turner the Politics of Expertise. Let's turn it over to Kevin Michael Griggs. With a year-long unpaid suspension he was. He told me I should leave him then and there. I went for a walk and then I came back. Well. So this is a story about Joshua Katz the classicist professor who was fired by Princeton. He read an essay against Black Lives Matter but 15 years earlier he'd had a consensual sexual relationship with a student. University professors have been sleeping with their female students since well from the time that female students were admitted to university. Now we're all supposed to pretend, oh my God, this is so outrageous, is it? Is it really outrageous that women, young women would fall for accomplished authoritative older men? Oh, this is wrong because the power disparity. Oh, really? The power disparity. Let's talk about that. Let's assume say a 45 year old, let's say balding and tubby professor who gets involved with a good looking 20 year old woman who really holds the power in that relationship. So, but then Joshua Katz did, he made a big mistake. When hundreds of his colleagues in July 2020 signed a letter with demands in the name of anti-racism, he penned a response in Quillette. He agreed with some of their demands, the expansion of an undergraduate fellowship program. Some are moving in allowances for new assistant professors, but found others to be deeply immoral and discriminatory, including extra pay and perks for faculty of color and the formation of a committee to investigate and discipline so-called racist scholarship. He also described a long defunct student group, the Black Justice League, as quote, a small local terrorist organization to encourage students to take ancient languages other than Latin and Greek. And Joshua was the only member of his department qualified to teach multiple such language, Egyptians, Sanskrit, Taucharian, Syriac, Akkadian, Old Norse, Old Irish, et cetera. Indeed, Joshua's earliest academic publications concerned Native American language. His work was the least Eurocentric in the department. She ends, the truth is that I have an abiding love for Princeton as an institution. It isn't the place I once knew, maybe it will be again. Thankfully, my husband is exactly who I always knew him to be. And one is really impressed by this woman's loyalty to her husband. As always in such disputes, I do an image search of the woman involved and this woman, Solveig Luchia Gold, is a very attractive woman, which has in my opinion, a great deal to do with everything that fell on her head and her husband's head. Yes, we seem to have a very wholesome relationship between a man and wife who love each other and it's just not, we don't like that kind of stuff anymore. We simply don't like that stuff anymore. Katz was fired from Princeton University Monday. The university studies on willingness to cooperate with a sexual miscarriage. Okay, Kenneth Brown has done a video friendship as power. Ken Brown confesses that he's passive aggressive. Through different narratives, the right has a narrative that the white Christian man is being bullied, he's being marginalized in his own country and he's being victimized and ostracized. All the other groups in society have similar narratives of victimhood and unfortunately these can all be true. These are not actually mutually exclusive even though they might believe they are but multiple groups can be marginalized at the same time. And in fact, groups can marginalize each other. That's simply conflict but there is no winner. We can have white supremacy at the same time and even have white privilege but at the same time on top of that we can also have white demographic replacement. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Which I think most people, well, people will admit it if you break down these words away from their rhetorical, moralizing, when we use these terms, these terms are implicitly, we understand that when I use a term like white privilege there is an imperative behind that, that if I use these two magic words white privilege implicitly we understand that I am trying to undermine and attack a certain group of people mostly middle class and working class white people. When I use the term white privilege I'm not talking about attacking Goldman Sachs or the Koch brothers or Jeff Bezos or something like that. So we understand there's a certain racial and class warfare going on when I use the words white privilege. But if we broke it down and simply stated it for the objective facts related to the concept which is just a statistical observation regarding racial inequality in America, every honest person will agree that racial inequality exists. And they can disagree as to the origins of it but we would agree that in that sense the central objective premise of white privilege is correct and we would similarly agree that if we define white supremacy simply to mean that a majority of billionaires in this country are white or Jewish and that's how we wanted to find white supremacy then we would agree that white supremacy is real but we'd also have to agree that white demographic replacement is objectively happening at least for lower class working class and middle class white people. So all of these things can be true at the same time. And so everyone can be simultaneously marginalized. I guess I suppose except for those who are rich, those who are in the know, those who are in the special clubs and there are many of those special clubs and that's why I use this term minoritarianism because I think the only way that we're going to access friendship, power, a sense of belonging, a sense of identity isn't by just swimming with the masses and with the majority of the people. I think it's only going to come when we give up on that goal because I think that is a Sisyphian task. It is rolling a boulder up the hill that's just going to come sliding down. You can push all you want, you can pretend to make progress but you're never going to accomplish that. Those are the ways in which I can see of friendship, power, minoritarianism that are all born out of my own subjective experience. I can't separate my position in the world vis-a-vis these internet sub-dultures. I can't disentangle that. I can't help but feel hurt when people reject me. I can't help but feel hurt when people belittle me, dehumanize me, make fun of me. I can try to set back from that objectively and in the third person understand that these people are acting perhaps in what they think is their rational self-interest that they're acting tribalistically, that they're no different than any other group of people that in some ways I'm no better or I'm no different than they are in that I have the same instincts maybe I'm... Okay, so when you get hurt because someone criticizes your ideas or criticizes your presentation, you have a choice. You can reflect on are they right? And if they're right, then you're made better. You're improved. Like my show is a constant struggle session with my chat because I'm here to poke holes in the arguments of my chat. My chat's largely here to poke holes in the logic and facts of my arguments. So when someone corrects my facts or corrects my logic or points out a frailty in my presentation, like I'm better off for it. Like accurate criticism makes me better. Now, when do you get hurt when someone criticizes you? When it amplifies an insecurity that you already have? When it brings to the forefront of your consciousness things that you don't wanna think about, right? So let's say there's some delusion that I'm walking through life with that it's A-okay for me to be a 55 year old man who turns 56 tomorrow and I'm not married and I don't have children. All right, that's a delusion as an orthodox Jew. That's definitely not the way to live a life. And so if there are like periodic reminders that, hey, I'm living a life that's not really a good fit for orthodox Judaism and it's not really a good way to go through life as a bachelor. It tends to promote selfishness. Then I'm having delusions challenged and removed. So I think all of us go through life with all sorts of delusions but the more we interact with other people the more those delusions will tend to be removed if we listen to what other people have to say. Now, someone takes you down a few notches or someone points out some really serious problems with your thinking or your presentation of your ideas then it'd be normal, natural and healthy to feel down about that for a few hours, even a day or two. But if you're still heard about it a week, two weeks, three weeks later when someone's simply critiquing the logic or the facts of what you're saying or making an observation about you, then that's only gonna happen if they're amplifying some doubts that you have inside, some doubts about yourself that you don't wanna face. If someone is bringing up reality and reality is painful, they're doing you a huge favor. Now, people can do that nicely or they can do it grossly, right? But anyone who brings along a dose of reality, someone who corrects errors in your facts or your logic, all right? Someone who removes some of your delusions, someone who amplifies your hidden doubts so that it's less easy for you to live with all these delusions, they're doing you a big favor. So the book of Proverbs says, never reprove a fool that he will hate you but when you reprove the wise man, he will love you for it. So do you wanna be a fool or do you wanna be wise? I'm exercising them more conscientiously but nonetheless, they're there and they can be activated and not to say that we are all blank slates but that if I grew up in a cult or some kind of, something other than secular liberalism, right? If I grew up in a very strong church setting, then I would look at people outside the church through this tribalistic lens, perhaps. I don't think I'm beyond that or above that. And so I try not to morally condemn people even as they attack me and project demonism onto me, you know? I don't know, who projects demonism onto Kenneth Brown? That just seems absurd to me. Is it possible for someone to disagree with Kenneth and that's not an attack? Is it possible to point out, say, an error in his logic without going on the attack? I know, I have one friend who I've said, look, you should grow up and do things for yourself instead of asking other people constantly to do things for you that you are perfectly capable of doing on your own. So I say to this to a man in his 40s and he takes it as a tremendous hostile attack. So is there a way that you can tell someone to grow up without it being some kind of hostile attack? Is that possible? Or is it just inherently whenever anyone tells you to grow up? Well, you're mounting a hostile attack. Like I am a, I'm not just like an animal, right? The way that people describe me within this dynamic, I'm not like a dog, I'm not like a rat, but I am like Satan himself. I am clever, I'm manipulative, I'm narcissistic and prideful. I have all the seven deadly. Who on earth would regard Kenneth Brown as satanic and just so particularly clever and manipulative? That's absurd. Since, and I am just scheming to destroy Western civilization and the white race and so on. Why do you attract that? I'll tell you why you attract that because you wouldn't get any views if you were just making videos on what you profess to be deeply interested in metaphysics and right and wrong, right? If that was the overwhelming focus of your channel, you wouldn't get any views. So you roll around in the dirt and make some pretty funny, sometimes some pretty trenchant, sometimes some wise critiques of the dissident right. And that's where you get your viewership. Now there's a downside to doing that, right? You attract a lot of unsavory characters because it's primarily marginalized people who are attracted to marginalized movements. So you wouldn't have these problems, Kenneth, if you solely did videos on metaphysics and ethics. On the other hand, you would have to deal with having an audience that's about 1% of the size of your current audience. So choose, choose, man. You chose this. You choose to roll around in the soar of the alt-right and don't criticize you for it, but that comes with a price. I have done the same thing. That comes with a price. You meet and encounter a lot of unsavory people when you do that. And yeah, there's a part of me that instinctively is hurt. And then from that hurt and from that sense of loss, I can be sad or I can be angry. There's another part of me that tries to understand it objectively. There's another part that wishes I could rise above the emotional reaction, which I think, again, is natural. And I can say I'm holding myself to too high of a standard, but I'd like to be able to just not even see it, to not even recognize it, to not even register it. You'll never get to that point, nor is that point desirable. If you get to a point where the words and comments and criticisms of other people have no effect on you whatsoever, then you become a sociopath. I mean, you've checked out. So the nature of reality is to encounter people with very different rules about how the world works than you have. And when you share ideas and share stories and share yourself and share your soul online, then people are gonna take bits of your soul and they're gonna attack you and they're gonna criticize you. And it'd be weird if you had no reaction to it. On the other hand, if you're still doing about something weeks and weeks later, that indicates that they're amplifying something in you that's a hidden concern. So let's say someone in the chat right now says, 40, you are stupid. All right, that would momentarily knock me back. It's like, why on earth would, let's say a regular in the chat, someone who's watched dozens of hours of the show comes into the chat says, 40, you are stupid. That would momentarily knock me back. Let's say Leponius came in, half Galician came in, or Elliot Blatt came in, or Ricardo came in and said, 40, you're a moron, you are stupid. That would momentarily knock me back. You would have no lasting effect because I know it's not true. To the extent that it had any effect, if they were meaning it literally, that something was going on with them that would cause them to lash out. Now, on the other hand, there are things that I'm insecure about. And so if someone brings one of those up and criticizes me and just starts drilling on my insecurity, then yeah, I'll probably think about it a lot more because they're amplifying my own hidden doubts. But my pain really has very little to do with what someone else has said. It's only because they're amplifying my own hidden insecurities and doubts and delusions. It's funny because I can put myself in other people's shoes and I can try to understand people. And I think that does make me an empathetic person. And it does make me good at understanding people. Not that I'm perfect at it, but. Notice Kenneth Brown regards himself as an empathetic person. And I'm sure that's true. Ken, there are times that you're empathetic. There are also a lot of times that you're blind and unempathetic, right? No one can be empathic all the time to all people. It's simply not possible. We don't have the energy to be empathic. It often takes some effort. It requires some cognitive power and cognitive power is often very tiring. So we all have limited amounts of empathy. As you are a highly intelligent young man, you have more cognitive power than probably 90% of the population. So you have more empathy ability than 90% of the population simply because you are raised. No, simply because you have the genetics that enable strong cognitive power. It's not a virtue that you have much greater capacity for empathy than other people. It's not a virtue that I have an above average capacity for empathy. I was given the gift of intelligence that's above average, far short of genius above average. Kenneth Brown also given a gift of intelligence that is far above average, but very possibly short of genius. Wow, thank you so much, Arnie, for the happy Arab birthday $20 super chat. I really, really appreciate it. I wish what he would stop banging on this, Paul Saul, the kids of Messiah. I have my moments and I try. And I look at other people and I wonder if they have ever tried to put themselves in my shoes. I think that is a mark. I think that there is something particular in the West and at that core, which has become this tolerant liberal blue-haired, whatever, there is a tradition. Okay, so every time that we wonder if other people have ever put themselves in our shoes, I guarantee you, there are a lot of other people who have wondered if you have ever put yourself in their shoes, right? So when I say to my therapist many, many, many years ago, oh, I wonder if anyone at synagogue cares about me, my therapist had the very wise response would you care about anyone there? So if Ken here has a complaint that none of his critics seem to show any empathy for him, while he is just pumping out the empathy and he doesn't understand why other people can't give to him what he gives to them. Well, people don't pay us back exactly and people don't pay us back in just the same way that we give to them, right? One person will cook a meal, another person will give you a ride, another person will help fix your car. Different people have different gifts. Maybe you can say it comes from Platonism or something deeper. But there is this idea and there is this tradition of the universal cosmopolitan individual who can imagine himself anywhere at any time as anyone. This ability to craft stories and narratives to put yourself inside the mind of a particular character. The literary tradition, even the oral storytelling tradition. Okay, I ought to go to the subject topic. I just read this week. I subscribe to Apple News Plus for $10 a month. They give me selections from hundreds of different newspapers, get behind the paywall, and hundreds of different magazines. And my sister is FaceTiming me, but I'm doing a live show. So here, I'll accept it briefly. Hey big sister, how are you? Happy birthday to you too. So I'm just doing my shows. So will you be around in 20 minutes? Okay, I'll contact you about 20. Thank you so much. Thanks, bye. Okay, and talk to my sister in 20 minutes. Okay, so here's a terrific article I read on the Atlantic. How to fix Twitter and all of social media. The online debate pretends that we must choose between absolute freedom and centralized control. Let's try something else. I love this, right? How do you like this vision? Here's a third option, that we get to form groups through free association and then only post through those groups with the groups in Promata, all right? I like that, because we're essentially born into tribes. We're born into extended families. And when you belong to a group, you have to behave more responsibly, right? Because everyone else is gonna share in the good and bad consequences of the things that you're doing. So it enhances everyone behaving more responsibly. So maybe your group would be in the low hundreds or maybe it'd be two dozen people, but let's try it out. So each group would be self governing. Some will have a process in place for reviewing items before they are posted. Others will let members post as they see fit. Some groups will have strict membership requirements. Others might have looser standards. So people will build these institutions and they will deal with the trade-offs, but people will get to do this on their own terms. Now, if a bunch of horrible people decide to form a group, their collective speech will be as bad as their individual speech before, but they will be received in a better social cognitive environment, right? Nazi magazines existed before the internet, but they were labeled as such, and then therefore they were not confused. So we perceive the world through social cues. We rely on people around us to help detect a danger and to steer our attention. So we've got an extreme number of people who can post things now that can just overwhelm our ability to understand the context for the speech that floods around us. So when horrible speech just comes at us in a flood, the world feels horrible. But what if our online experiences can come in the form of branded sources? What if our online experiences can come in the form of recognizable groups, groups formed through free association, then we can compartmentalize what we want to see, right? Groups will restructure the experience of online society so that it is a closer match to the cognitive abilities of individuals. This will encourage better posting because when individuals post online, they are motivated to seek attention to or to seek relevance, but that requires constant posting and the more incendiary you post, the more attention you'll often get for it. But if you have a group you're accountable to, people will post less often, they'll spend more time thinking and they will be interested in seeing their groups brand succeed. When someone in the group starts getting cranky or weird, other members of the group will have a motivation to speak up, right? We all act like jerks online every now and again, but if you're in a group, our fellow members will pay a price for our bad behavior. So you'll have friends bugging you about how you're acting, right? It's probably the least annoying and least coercive plan for making online society less malicious. If you two get annoyed, you can leave that group and you can join another one or you can learn to self-regulate and self-moderate to stick with a highly regarded brand. And groups would be incentivized to make sure that their members are real and they would purge bots because the benefits of membership would be shared by all who joined. So there would be rewards for joining and there would be responsibilities for joining but each group will get to sort things out on their own terms, right? Whatever the reward, it'll be distributed among the members. Now many people don't wanna join groups but I think this is a great solution. Tech culture has created a wild west of real and simulated individuals. But what if we rearrange platforms such as Twitter into small self-governing groups leading to something better? Stories of the gods, the myth makers, the priest class. There's something unique here. And I feel that I have this ability to an extent to put myself in other people's shoes, to see things as they see things. Not that I always express it outwardly to everybody all the time, but... Okay, let's get to something that's important here. You may not realize this but I have the perfect approach to COVID. And if you are one little bit more restrictive in your approach to COVID than I am, then you're a drone, you're a weakling, you're scared to live life, you've surrendered your humanity, you're just sheep, you just do what the experts say, you don't think for yourself. Now, if you take one less precaution than I do with regard to COVID, you are recklessly slaughtering other people in your callousness. You're a mass murderer, either way, I'm better than you. So I was just reading an article in The Atlantic. You're going to get COVID again and again and again. Now, the danger may mount. Each time it may fade away, we... Well, eventually it will fade away, but we're two and a half years into this pandemic. Another article from The Atlantic and it looks like COVID is around to stay and there are two knee-joke responses to this, I think that are wrong. One is to lead a highly restricted life. You're a person of normal health, say under 60 years of age, but you severely restrict yourself to try to reduce your chances of getting infected. That seems like an overreaction. On the other hand, you can say, oh, because you're going to get COVID again and again and again, I'm just going to forget about all precautions. And so how about a middle road? I mean, we have to think probabilistically and I think, believe it or not, the CDC truly come up with a great idea. So the CDC has announced plans to send every US household a pamphlet on Bayesian statistics and probabilistic thinking. I mean, this is really going to help people out. This is just what we need, right? So stressing that the effort represented the best chance of ensuring Americans make responsible choices around the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday, planned to send every US household a pamphlet on probabilistic thinking and decision-making. What we're hoping to do is give every American a quick refresher on how to use statistical analysis to assess their priors and make Bayesian inferences, thereby ensuring they overcome their innate psychological biases. Simple stuff, but important nonetheless, says CDC director, Rachelle Orlansky. She estimated the pamphlets lessons on the baseline fallacy alone would save far more lives than mask wearing, hand washing, and the COVID-19 vaccine combined, right? So people just need to learn to use Bayesian inferences, right? Obviously, most everyone in the nation has already at least skimmed the seminal studies of psychologist, Daniel Kenerman, on the fallibility of human thinking. So the pamphlet will skip over some of the basic stuff, like the availability heuristic and head straight to prospect theory. Hopefully, none of this feels too patronizing. Orlansky added that if Americans took away one easy lesson from the pamphlet, she hoped it would be P parenthesis H backslash E, N parenthesis equals P parenthesis P, new parenthesis E, half division sign over H N parenthesis. What's that? The dot over the the asterisk P parenthesis H N parenthesis, second N parenthesis, division sign over P parenthesis E and parenthesis, period. So I love this. What a great article from The Onion. CDC announces plan to send every US household pamphlet on probabilistic thinking. Okay, so we're gonna get COVID over and over and over again. And there was one scientist, James Hamlin, said this in February, 2020, you're gonna get the coronavirus. And now most Americans have. You're not just likely to get the coronavirus, you're likely to get it again and again and again. And we've got one doctor here says, I know several individuals have had COVID in almost every single wave. So even a more sluggish rate of transmission will lead to a lot of comeback cases. So barring some intervention that really changes the landscape, we will all get COVID multiple times in our life. All right, this would be akin to what we experienced with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, that's often in adulthood. It's gonna match the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble us and cause common colds. So the colds, flus and stomach bugs routinely reinfect hasn't exactly shredded our social fabric. For most of us, this is just an inconvenience. So maybe COVID will just become the fifth cold causing coronavirus or maybe not. Cause the COVID virus is capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body can affect organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, gut. It's already claimed the lives of millions that saddled countless others with symptoms that linger for months or years. So any experts think that the typical COVID infection is likely to get less dangerous as population immunity builds and broadens, but less dangerous could still be terrible. It's not clear where we're heading, right? When it comes to reinfection, we just don't know very much. So every infection and every subsequent reinfection with COVID remains a toss of the dice. It's a gamble. So vaccination and infection induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away. Completely scientists don't yet know what happens to people who contract mild COVID over and over again. So bouts of illness may well be tempered over time, but multiple exposures could still re-up some of the same risks as before or even synergize to exact a cumulative toll. So it will reinfection be really bad or not a big deal, right? You can fall down at either side. There's still a lot of gray. I have this capacity and I think it is, I think of it as a deeply humanizing capacity. And that those who lack this capacity are in a sense more similar to animals because a wild animal has no capacity to put itself in the mind of prey or predator or what have you. It simply is what it is. It does not question its own identity. It does not examine itself in the third person. It has no reflexivity. It has no consciousness. It has no conscientiousness. It has no sympathy or empathy. It simply is what it is. It does what it does. There's a Nietzschean quality about the animal, but that reflexivity, that ability to imagine oneself as someone else, it could be dangerous. It could be toxic. We could call it pathologically altruistic. I mean, there are various arguments that could be made. I disagree with them. But I think there is a limit to this. I think there is a harm and there is a cost to putting yourself in other people's shoes. I do this a lot. I put myself in other people's shoes. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I say they are well-intentioned, but ill-advised. I say, everyone just needs to be given a chance. Everyone needs, maybe I could just present an argument in a certain way. Maybe I could seduce them into acting in their own interests because I've walked in their shoes or I've imagined what that would be like and I know what's best for them and I want to show them the way. And even when I'm fairly confident and you could say this is a very arrogant and presumptuous way to look at people. But I mean, everyone's looked at a child doing something silly or stupid or not in self-interest. Like let's say a child is throwing a temper tantrum and you look at the child and you can say, look, if you could just chill for a second, it would probably be more effective to get what you want than having a temper tantrum. So we've all had moments where we can look at another human being who's maybe less mature, less experienced, less grown and say, I know what's better for you. I actually do understand that if you listen to me, then things would be better for you. But sometimes people don't want to listen. They just want to engage in more cries for help. They just- Yeah, why weren't you guys listened to the wise man, Kenneth Brown? It's really bothering me. Oh no. I light up my air conditioner so insecure it just keeps falling off. And the bulbs for my light, they cost like 25, 30 bucks each. Just line that up. I gotta line it up just perfectly or when the air condition is going, it just falls right off and then it knocks all my supplements all over the floor, which seems very disrespectful. Now I'm trying to cut down on my supplements, but I figure like the prudent thing to do is just like consume all the supplements that I bought before I experienced the power of grass-fed beef organ capsules. So I'm just like going through my reserves, just like whittling down my reserves. So it's been a year experiencing the miracles of beef organ capsules. But what the heck? What did I do with my, where's my, even knocked my phone down. Didn't even know, missed the chat. Have a slightly drippy nose day, five weeks in. Sorry, blessings to Art Bell. I love talking about COVID. Yeah, my audience hates talking about COVID. I need Velcro. Oh, that's a good idea, right? Velcro, okay. So pretty good blog post I read by an economist, Chris Blatman, choose your own anti-science. And so he points out that opposition to genetically modified food is starting to reduce because we've been using it for years and years and years and it's obviously safe. So for the long-standing opposition to GMOs, it mostly came from the left and mostly came from Europeans. Now it's waning in the face of strong evidence. Now, Tyler Cowan and Bloomberg was commenting on Neil Young's withdrawal from Spotify over Joe Rogan's also misleading comments about the science of COVID vaccines. Tyler says, some see Neil Young as an intellectual hero for taking a stand, yet Neil Young's own record in this area is far from pristine for years he has spread scientific misinformation about GMO foods. So while experts have consistently judged GMO foods to be safe and useful, Neil Young refers to them as poison. So people in culture wars don't tend to think in a coherently and consistent manner with regard to science, right? So people hold coherently skeptical views towards science that they consistently mistrust certain kinds of power. So if you're on the left, you particularly mistrust corporate power. If you're on the right, you consistently mistrust more often say elite power, bureaucratic power, judicial power, right? The power that you distrust will depend on your ideology and on your identity group. So anti-GMO sentiment on the left is rooted in suspicion of private companies and unfettered research. And then vaccine and mask opposition is rooted in mistrust of a different kind of authority. It's a suspicion of elite opinion, paternalistic, governmental, bureaucratic and health prescriptions and compulsory state action. So this is also partly ideological and partly earned. So this economist worried from the beginning of the pandemic that health authorities and scientists didn't think that you, the general public could handle nuanced or complex messages. So you saw from the outset a reluctance to qualify advice or condone debate or give it a statistical context. So scientific reaction got magnified and distorted by everything else going on in American politics, putting the need for scientists to counter misinformation. But people only understand our arguments if we exaggerate and simplify them is pretty much a mantra in the academy, in social media, in politics, whatever the topic. And this leads to a lot of messaging of sensibly scientific research that is highly misleading. Now, Joe Rogan said something interesting a couple of weeks ago, many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, if you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID, you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now that's accepted as fact. If you said, I don't think cloth mask work, you'd be banned from social media. Now that is openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said, I think it's possible that COVID came from a lab, you'd be banned from any social media platforms. Now that's on the cover of Newsweek. All these theories that at one time were banned were openly discussed, right? Now they're dangerous misinformation or they're not dangerous misinformation. So sometimes people allow evidence to affect them. So there's one left-wing activist who realized that the evidence against GMOs was quite small while the evidence for the good, the genetic modified foods do is quite large. So he got tired of campaigning against GMOs. So the path to broader GMO and vaccine acceptance might begin from thinking about what measures would increase trust in each brand of authority. So we're all suspicious of certain kinds of authority. I just wanna keep throwing a tantrum. And that's one of the flaws of human beings is when we are sufficiently emotional, when we're sufficiently pushed over our limit, we become unconsolable and we revert to habits and patterns which are very stubborn and hard to change. We're not open to rationality. We're not open to what would be- Come on guys, get up into rationality. That's it.