Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Constitution in the Crosshairs: The 349th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Transcript
- 0:05Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast livestream number 349.
- 0:12Prime.
- 0:14Wow.
- 0:15Yep.
- 0:16Is it required that I now confess that I was guessing it probably wasn't gonna be?
- 0:21No.
- 0:21Okay, then I thought it was.
- 0:22Yeah, that was my guess all along.
- 0:26I'm Dr.
- 0:26Bret Weinstein.
- 0:27You remain Dr.
- 0:28Heather Heying.
- 0:29It is-- You know, you speak like a guy who's never actually been in a confessional or actually had to confess anything because that's not actually the way confession works.
- 0:38(Laughing) Maybe I'm just not very good at it.
- 0:41Possible.
- 0:42Yeah, I haven't been in a confessional.
- 0:44I think it would be, I don't know actually.
- 0:46There are certain rules about who can and cannot confess.
- 0:50Can just anyone go in there and confess?
- 0:52I confess that I do not know those rules.
- 0:55You confess out here in the open.
- 0:56Yeah.
- 0:57Yeah.
- 0:58I don't think I've ever been in a confessional either.
- 1:00All right.
- 1:00Despite having Catholicism on one side of my family.
- 1:02But anyway, we digress if not confess, you were going to introduce us.
- 1:08Yes.
- 1:09Yes, it's still us, Dr.
- 1:11Bret Weinstein and Dr.
- 1:12Heather Heying, I think is where I was in the, not really soliloquy, but the reamble.
- 1:18And it is late October, still surprisingly nice here, getting a little cold.
- 1:23Yeah, that's gorgeous.
- 1:24We're gonna be doing our livestreams on Tuesdays for most or not, if not all of November.
- 1:30So we'll be back at you in six days from now, but for right now, for today, how would you describe what we're gonna be talking about today?
- 1:38We are going to be talking about the framework advanced by a gentleman who is putting it in front of certain members of Congress and other important people, in which he effectively argues that the Constitution and other protections are being breached through a cryptic mechanism, a collection of changes, alterations, rules, and rulings that have quietly upended your constitutional rights without them being defended in a proper context.
- 2:22Okay, and we got a few other small things at the end.
- 2:25But before that, we have a few logistical things.
- 2:30We're not doing a Q&A today, but we've had a number recently.
- 2:33Go check them out at Locals.
- 2:34You can also join the watch party there right now.
- 2:37And you're gonna be doing your Patreon conversations this weekend, so you can join Bret on his Patreon.
- 2:45For those, we are also selling, signed, personalized copies of our books, $50 a piece.
- 2:53You can find them at darkhorsepodcast.org/books.
- 2:57That includes Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to
- 2:59the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, our co-authored book, which came out in 2021.
- 3:04the 21st Century: And we've got several versions of that book in translation.
- 3:07the 21st Century: They are, we're dwindling supplies, but we still have them in Polish.
- 3:13the 21st Century: We have Brazilian Portuguese, and yes, and Thai, and Spanish, Spanish-Spanish, out of Spain, and French.
- 3:27the 21st Century: Also, we have my first book, which I recently unearthed a large box of these.
- 3:33the 21st Century: So this is the only book that we have in abundance.
- 3:36the 21st Century: This is about my research and life in
- 3:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Seasons with the Extraordinary Wildlife and the Culture of Madagascar.
- 3:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So those are available if you're interested in, say, holiday gifts or a book for yourself.
- 3:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think then we are ready for our sponsors.
- 3:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I have buried the ads.
- 3:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, we have.
- 3:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I've buried the ads into these books.
- 4:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But yes, without further ado, we have, as always, three ads right at the top of the hour, and then none others that can get them.
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- 5:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I read that as if there were gonna be more examples.
- 5:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's the only one I provided myself.
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- 6:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Or three, you might attempt to change your body's own endogenous set point for the production of testosterone, which is the superior answer.
- 6:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So why wouldn't you just take testosterone?
- 6:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Well, there are a number of reasons.
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- 7:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But it is also true that if you have an internal set point, which you are very likely to for something like testosterone, and you don't adjust it, then when you supplement, your body records you as producing more than enough and it will cut back production so that then you effectively become addicted to your supplement for life.
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- 10:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, well, can you bring up the letter in question?
- 10:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I can.
- 10:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 10:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So what we are going to be talking about is a letter by a gentleman named Brian Ward.
- 10:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It is addressed to Senator Moody.
- 10:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It is also carbon copied to a number of other prominent folks including Ron Johnson, Governor DeSantis of Florida.
- 10:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I believe Brian Ward is from Florida, so he's addressed it to his own governor, Ron DeSantis.
- 10:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He's addressed it to a senator, the junior senator in Florida who was the attorney general in Florida.
- 10:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, but I also think it went to DeSantis.
- 10:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, I think it did too, but it's the primary address to whom he's asking for direct action is Senator Moody.
- 11:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, I mentioned DeSantis particularly because DeSantis actually stood out during the pandemic as one of the, what would one say, the refreshing points of resistance in a sea of complicity.
- 11:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: As of course did the Florida Surgeon General, but also the attorney general who is now the junior senator to whom this is addressed.
- 11:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She was extraordinary during COVID as well.
- 11:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, Florida stood out and that's a very positive thing.
- 11:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So what Mr.
- 11:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Ward is advancing here is a very exhaustive discussion of the way in which our rights have been substantially altered.
- 11:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He argues that effectively the Constitution is modified without the process that is supposed to be required to modify the Constitution, which is of course a very difficult process to use.
- 12:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the Constitution, are we any better?
- 12:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes.
- 12:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay, good.
- 12:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So anyway, he's arguing that the Constitution has effectively been amended by procedural changes, of the rules by various courts that is tantamount to the process that is supposed to alter the Constitution, which would require obviously a much more overt discussion and would have a very high threshold.
- 12:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So these things were done more or less procedurally and by overreach in various courts and that the rights that have been eliminated are profound ones.
- 12:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And he specifically calls out your right to informed consent.
- 12:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm gonna make the same argument that I always make, which is that our right to informed consent, as important as it is, is actually in need of strengthening in light of the fact that we now understand a lot about complex systems.
- 13:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so my complaint about informed consent is that informed consent only protects you in the case of something that is experimental.
- 13:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: My point is it's all experimental.
- 13:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's nothing that you can do modifying human bodies with interventions that is not in effect an experiment.
- 13:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if you don't believe me, look at all the cases of drugs that have been licensed and then decades later turned out to do some kind of damage that we didn't know about.
- 13:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the point is that's inherent to complex systems.
- 13:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So I would argue that as a matter of natural law, the right to informed consent, which was codified by the Nuremberg court after World War II, that that process should cover all interventions, which then would mean you would have the right to reject any intervention at all with no requirement that you explain why you did so.
- 14:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And in this case, that difference between how informed consent is presented by Brian Ward and how I would argue it should apply is both not important because the COVID shots initially were given under emergency use authorization, meaning that they had not been formally approved.
- 14:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So they were inherently experimental.
- 14:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They have of course now been approved.
- 14:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So it changes in my rubric, that doesn't change a darn thing, but the violations he's discussing happened largely under EUA.
- 14:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And in any case, I don't know if you wanna proceed into reading some of what's in the letter.
- 14:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Sure, I mean, I think you've done a very good job of providing an overview.
- 15:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so, just in order here, I don't know that it makes the most narrative sense to read them in order that I've picked out some passages here, but let's just do that for lack of a better approach.
- 15:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay.
- 15:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: To your point about the due process clause.
- 15:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yet more than 20 federal and state courts have in effect nullified the due process clause.
- 15:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And then he embarks on what I think is a nice commonplace example that doesn't require a legal understanding to understand.
- 15:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: When one person tells another not to touch him, is touched anyway and is injured, those courts hold that an act of Congress bars the victim from obtaining a judicial remedy and thereby strips the victim of the enumerated right to due process.
- 15:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The victim loses that right for one reason only.
- 15:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Someone else committed a criminal act of violence with a product Congress has placed under civil immunity.
- 15:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Congress has forbidden to treat non-consensual violence as a waiver of the victim's rights.
- 16:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And Congress has not done so.
- 16:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that's, go on.
- 16:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Well, I just wanna say for people who are, everybody's heard the term due process and due process clause, which is contained primarily in the Fifth Amendment, but also the 14th Amendment, holds that you cannot be deprived by government of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
- 16:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now due process of law is a little vague, but the courts have spent a lot of time hashing out exactly what it means.
- 16:36Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the upshot is that they can't just take stuff from you.
- 16:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now there are lots of violations of this sort of thing, like, you know, civil forfeiture, where you haven't been convicted of something, but because you've been accused of certain crimes, your house or car or whatever may be taken from you.
- 16:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But in general, the due process clause protects you.
- 16:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I think Ward is making a very clever and I would argue highly credible argument.
- 17:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: His argument, he has several different ways in which he argues that there has been a violation of the due process clause.
- 17:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And again, this is just his summary and the executive summary.
- 17:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He goes into more detail later.
- 17:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, the detail is actually quite exhaustive in this letter.
- 17:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But what he's arguing is that Congress on the one hand has created immunity from liability, and then it has created the opportunity for coercion.
- 17:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that coercion effectively means that you are being denied.
- 17:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You could refuse a product that had immunity from liability, but the combination of immunity from liability means that you can be injured and your right to due process has been preemptively eliminated by the courts.
- 17:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that the combination of those two things is actually an extremely potent challenge to due process itself, which I think is intuitively speaking, that is a very powerful argument.
- 18:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Describe the maddening fact of what happened under the COVID regime.
- 18:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Where people, how many people do we know who were literally injured by these shots who say, I didn't wanna take it, but I didn't have a choice because I needed to travel for my job, or my employer required it, or I needed it in order to go to school.
- 18:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So people were forced into something, they were injured and they have lost their access to the court because it was preemptively immunized by the Congress.
- 18:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's really important.
- 18:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And to the extent that the-- Like a better immunization than the shot.
- 18:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Exactly, the only-- The Congress had far better immunization during COVID than the rest of us did.
- 18:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the manufacturers, which is infuriating.
- 18:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now I will point out, I do believe his argument is correct.
- 18:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that the fact that effectively this amends the Constitution without amending the Constitution makes it quadruply important.
- 19:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I would point out, as I frequently do, and I'm no lawyer, so a lawyer could add precision to this or maybe even challenge some aspect of it.
- 19:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But as I read the law, the immunity from liability evaporates upon the demonstration that the manufacturers of these dangerous products committed fraud.
- 19:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I believe fraud is absolutely evident in the trials, that effectively they hid evidence of harm, and that having hidden evidence of harm, they are actually in danger of a massive lawsuit.
- 19:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This of course requires that the courts grant it.
- 19:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that's another aspect of this letter that's very important, is that effectively he's describing an activist court system.
- 19:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He singles out the Ninth Circuit as one of the primary offenders, but the court is inclined to go along with the politicized panic over the pandemic and grant every license, including making up things, in order to keep those immunities from liability in place, in order to keep the mandates in place.
- 20:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so the problem is, you've got an actual violation.
- 20:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You potentially have a claim that the immunity from liability is not valid because of the obvious massive fraud that took place in those trials.
- 20:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What you don't have is a venue in which that judgment is going to be recognized.
- 20:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so one thing I will say, I'm editorializing here, but the hazard to our entire constitutional structure, that this is really a test case where a health, a supposed public health emergency has been used to breach the Constitution in a way that the courts are not recognizing.
- 20:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the answer is, once you've got that breach, you can use anything to get there.
- 21:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You now have a recipe for destroying the rights of the Constitution grants.
- 21:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And indeed, you're editorializing, as you say, there is a very good match for actually the first paragraph of the actual letter, not including the preamble that is the executive summary.
- 21:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm gonna go back and share some of the executive summary, but let's just read this because as I say, it is his description, it is his first, it is how he introduces what he is talking about here.
- 21:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: One, it is a violation of federal law to coerce injection of an investigational drug.
- 21:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, joining its sister courts, though made aware of the federal obligations outlined below, issued a substantive ruling under Rule 12(b)(6) that a state or local government may require a citizen to inject any investigational drug, including those that pose a significant threat of adverse effect to that citizen's life, liberty, or property, as a condition.
- 22:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Again, this is the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals saying that government may require a citizen to inject anything, even one that could pose a substantial harm, as a condition of working as a police officer, firefighter, EMT, teacher, healthcare worker, or in any other licensed profession.
- 22:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And an aside, he talks elsewhere, I believe, about any licensed profession, including, for instance, realtors.
- 22:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This extends quite far outside of the health profession.
- 22:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The circuit further held that the government may also require a prospective waiver of the right to sue if the citizen is injured while complying with the health policy.
- 22:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A waiver of the right to sue if what you were doing was following their orders.
- 22:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: By their legal nature, these rulings now extend to any public benefit, such as welfare assistance, public education, public healthcare, and any licensed profession, such as real estate professionals, there it is.
- 22:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Such rulings violate 200 years of Supreme Court precedent and permit what Congress expressly prohibits.
- 23:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Non-consensual waiver of the right to informed consent to federally funded research activities and of the right to sue and defend in a court of law.
- 23:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: For this reason, the courts refused to discuss the federal laws and binding contracts in their opinions.
- 23:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So by his account, they knew what they were doing.
- 23:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That is how I read that last sentence.
- 23:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And let me just share a few more things from his executive summary just above.
- 23:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: "If we the people," Brian Ward argues,"have no right to refuse a covert medical experiment, no right to keep our identifiable private health information private, no right to refuse an investigational drug that courts treat as posing a severe risk to life, liberty, or property, no right to exercise federally funded benefits without punishment, no right to refuse a waiver of constitutional rights as the price of a public benefit, and no right to a judicial remedy when injured by criminal acts, then this nation is no longer operating under the Constitution.
- 23:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It has been subjected to a post-constitutional form of tyranny." I tell you the truth.
- 24:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The American Revolution began over far lesser stakes than the life and death questions discussed in this letter.
- 24:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The indisputable conclusion of these actions and others not mentioned is that there is a coordinated effort to secretly or coercively inject the entire nation with mRNA drugs.
- 24:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is his editorial opinion here.
- 24:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: "To capture the nation's biometric and biomarker data through covert experimentation using collected biospecimens, to deny anyone the right to sue when physically or constitutionally injured, and to deny Congress its supreme authority over drug regulation." Very powerful argument.
- 24:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Very, very powerful argument.
- 24:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the letter itself, that being from the executive summary, provides the receipts, if you will, the legal footnotes that point to their relevant rulings.
- 24:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now, I wanna point to some sort of overall pattern matching.
- 24:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A, it is interesting that he identifies not just the violation of the due process clause that comes from the injection of experimental materials where you can't sue the manufacturer because they're immunized from liability.
- 25:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's one place.
- 25:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But another place he highlights it is that apparently we have lost the right to say no to having our biomedical data collected in a way that its connection to us is identifiable.
- 25:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes.
- 25:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that that information can then follow us through life and that this may, in fact, begin even at birth.
- 25:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it's the idea that nowadays taking a few cells is enough to get your genome substantially sequenced, and the information contained in there could be used for all kinds of things.
- 25:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He highlights, you will hear an echo of an argument that I've made about IgG4 production and bioweapons, but his point is that that information actually contains the power to create specific bioweapons against us.
- 26:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so that your right to keep it secret obviously has substantial import in such a world, and that you have lost the ability to protect this data, that you've effectively lost your property without due process in the form of data related to you particularly.
- 26:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think that's also a strong argument, and it's an entirely separate violation.
- 26:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, he points out several violations and makes several strong arguments, and I think at base, and maybe this is true of the law in general, of philosophy in general as well, what it gets at is what are you?
- 26:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What is a human being, and what therefore do you have that is inviolable?
- 26:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And our Constitution, an extraordinary document, attempts to parse many of those points, but we live in the world of the uncanny valley now things that are happening feel not just unprecedented, but unpredictable.
- 27:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, you know, we're showing up at the event horizon going like, okay, our documents could not catch up.
- 27:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like not only are they static and therefore they were not changing at all, but those people who wrote them, be they 250 years ago or 2000 years ago, or longer ago than that even, had no way to predict what we land at now.
- 27:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so we're all faced with this question of what actually does it mean to be human?
- 27:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What does it mean to be alive?
- 27:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What are our rights?
- 27:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we are forced usually to do what Brian Ward here has done and go to a document a mere, a couple hundred years old and say, what did that protect?
- 27:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What did that claim were our rights not just as, not specifically, not more generally as humans, but specifically as Americans?
- 27:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, what does it mean to be an American?
- 27:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And what does that grant us?
- 27:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I think there are many both who saw what was going on during COVID and who didn't, who were harmed, who weren't, even many of those who were harmed or saw what was going on are ready for it to go away already.
- 28:12Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, I just wanna stop talking about it.
- 28:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Aren't we done with that?
- 28:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That was horrible.
- 28:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Can't we just move on?
- 28:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But this actually does amount, it's not just a question of they're gonna do it again.
- 28:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Not only that, they're still doing it, they're still at it, but it gets at all of these even more fundamental questions what is it to be human and what therefore is our right that they have no right to take from us?
- 28:36Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, and the idea that there is something that they find our rights galling.
- 28:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I will come back to why they do in a second.
- 28:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But they find our rights galling and the more significant the right in question, the more determined they become to abrogate it.
- 28:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so take informed consent.
- 28:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: If you're a big pharma, informed consent is absolutely maddening because there are lots of things that you would love to do that are a clear violation of it.
- 29:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So there's effectively a conspiracy of whatever sort inside of pharma to get rid of your informed consent right.
- 29:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A right that as recently as 1947, violating it was a hanging offense according to the West.
- 29:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We literally hanged seven doctors for violating it.
- 29:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But now you'll find, okay, this document points out the absurd violation of informed consent for the mRNA and adeno-vectored vaccines during COVID.
- 29:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But you'll also remember that a couple of weeks ago and in my discussion with Josh Walcos, we discussed the PolyHeme trials.
- 29:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The PolyHeme trials involved another egregious violation of informed consent, but on a different, by a different mechanism, okay.
- 29:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So in this case, what's happened is a rule has been made that it is okay to violate informed consent if the product being mandated is safe enough, right.
- 30:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In the case of the PolyHeme trial, which you'll remember was a blood substitute to be used in emergencies when blood, is not available.
- 30:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it was tested on people who did not opt out of the trial.
- 30:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: People, it was tested in a geographic area.
- 30:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the idea was that you could opt out of the trial, but how did they do it?
- 30:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Well, they held a public discussion of the trial.
- 30:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if you wanted to opt out, you had to wear some sort of an indicator so that if you were in a car accident and the paramedics arrived, they could observe that you were opting out, which of course, how many people actually went to the public discussion and ended up putting on an armband.
- 30:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Most people presumably didn't even know about it.
- 30:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So this is a whole different way of violating informed consent, which is to claim, well, you were informed.
- 31:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if you're not, it's on you because you weren't at the meeting.
- 31:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the fact is the results of that, that was at least an actual experiment where data was taken.
- 31:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the fact is the PolyHeme product worked less well and it resulted in people being injured who hadn't even been aware that they'd been entered into this trial by virtue of the fact that they weren't wearing a wristband that said,"Hey, I don't want any of that garbage." Right.
- 31:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So, okay, the pattern matching here is, something hates your right to informed consent and it has multiple ideas about what to do about it.
- 31:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's why you're seeing simultaneously, simultaneous violations across different domains, right?
- 31:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Things as different as the gene therapies that were administered during COVID and blood substitutes for emergencies.
- 31:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Did you have something you wanted to-- Add?
- 31:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 31:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, I'm good.
- 31:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay, so then here's another pattern.
- 32:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Something detests your constitutional rights.
- 32:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It has various mechanisms for dealing with it.
- 32:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We're talking about one such mechanism here, is to basically cobble together a loophole that breaks your constitutional rights through multiple components, functioning in different ways.
- 32:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But long-time DarkHorse listeners will have heard me talk many times about what took place with the NDAA of 2012.
- 32:36Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The NDAA of 2012, which is a giant omnibus bill, the NDAA is a bill that gets passed every year to fund all kinds of things.
- 32:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But because it becomes politically disastrous to block it, people vote for it reflexively, which makes it a place that really awful stuff gets inserted and gets passed anyway because people are afraid to vote against the bill.
- 32:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And in 2012, what happened was two provisions were inserted into the NDAA that declared the world a battlefield and declared the right of the executive branch to designate someone a terrorist, and having done so, to haul them off any street in the world, including an American street, detain them to the "end of hostilities," whatever that means in a war on terror, and not acknowledge that they have them.
- 33:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So your habeas corpus rights evaporate, not let them see the evidence against them.
- 33:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Basically, secret proceedings, initially, you don't have your access to a court because this is done on the sole authority of the executive branch.
- 33:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's basically the entire Constitution evaporates in one set of provisions, and you don't have any mechanism to challenge it.
- 33:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In fact, you don't even know that it's happened.
- 33:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: If it happens to you, your family just knows they don't know where to find you anymore.
- 33:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So anyway, okay, this is just as we have a different mechanism for violating informed consent in the PolyHeme trial, as we do with the mRNA shots.
- 34:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You've got two different attacks on the Constitution.
- 34:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: One involves cobbling together abuse by courts with rulings, interpretations, definitions that violates it.
- 34:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And then another one is just to simply say, well, none of that applies during terrorism, so long as the executive branch has decided you're part of the enemy.
- 34:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: These both do the same job.
- 34:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They eliminate your constitutional rights, and frankly, both of them still stand.
- 34:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's amazing.
- 34:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So when Brian Ward here says that effectively we are living in a post-Constitutional order, it's obviously true.
- 34:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And in fact, if you think that what I'm saying sounds preposterous, realize that when the Obama administration was challenged over the fact that it had effectively taken the right to pull you off of any street in the world into some secret detention and not cough you up until the end of hostilities, when it was challenged, it didn't say, no, that's not what the law means.
- 35:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What it said was we already have that right.
- 35:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This didn't grant us anything new.
- 35:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That was literally their defense.
- 35:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So we are living in a post-Constitutional order, which is very confusing because it doesn't mean the Constitution never applies.
- 35:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It means it applies selectively.
- 35:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: When the court decides to apply it, your constitutional rights may be there and they may kick in.
- 35:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In other circumstances, they may not exist at all.
- 35:36Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The Constitution can't work that way.
- 35:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You can't have a facultative Constitution.
- 35:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, that if a facultative Constitution is effectively no Constitution, even though we have lots of evidence of the Constitution being applied.
- 35:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Facultative application means no guarantee.
- 35:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we saw this also, we talked about this at the time during COVID at the point that malinformation was defined by whatever it was, HHS maybe.
- 36:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, it was Department of Homeland Security.
- 36:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Sorry, DHS, Department of Homeland Security, as an act of terrorism and malinformation was defined as dispensing information that while true could cause people to distrust their government.
- 36:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now, if that is now an act of terrorism and the NDAA of 2012 exists, then anyone who says anything that is critical of the government is engaged in terrorism and can pull off the streets at any time.
- 36:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That obviously does not sound like the America that we've been told that we live in.
- 36:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I do think that part of what we're seeing with regard to the woke left, the pseudo-lefties who think of themselves as anarchists and antifa and all this, who have no respect for understanding of the Constitution and America in general, that stems from a failure in the schools.
- 36:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we've talked endlessly also about the failures in the schools and some of what might have created in them.
- 37:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But we basically have a lot of the population whose eyes will glaze over if you start talking about the Constitution.
- 37:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They'll say, "Oh, that's government class.
- 37:12Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I don't care about that.
- 37:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's not something I was good at or interested in.
- 37:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm allowed to choose what I'm interested in, therefore I don't care." And that having a population that thinks this isn't relevant to them and it's okay that it's not relevant to them is only, and it's never gonna be a good situation, but it's only going to function at all if you actually have a governing body who is still acting according to the Constitution, but we have clear evidence that it's not.
- 37:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, and this is really what the courts are supposed to be, right?
- 37:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The courts are supposed to be people who are trained in ignoring who you are and not applying laws selectively.
- 37:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And they have ceased to function in this way.
- 37:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There is so much political or politicization.
- 37:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 37:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I wanna actually revive a concept.
- 37:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I don't know how far back I've been talking about this, at least 25 years.
- 38:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the question of whether or not you're better off with a facultatively applied Constitution or no Constitution, I actually think no Constitution is better, right?
- 38:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And now I love the Constitution.
- 38:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think we are depending on it.
- 38:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the problem is if you can facultatively apply it, then you can destroy it without people noticing because in the average interaction it still holds.
- 38:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: What will happen is those people who find your constitutional rights galling, and I will explain why those people exist in a second here, but the people who find your constitutional rights galling will be very careful only to violate the Constitution in cases that matter to them.
- 38:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Which means that most people's impression when you say we don't have a Constitution anymore will be what are you talking about?
- 38:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Here are 16 places where the court this year said something materially and it caused this to happen or that to stop.
- 39:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The Constitution is obviously still there.
- 39:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the answer is, so I called the selective application of these exotic tools, surgical totalitarianism.
- 39:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the problem is who will they apply the surgical totalitarianism to?
- 39:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They will apply it to the tiny number of people who actually threaten the powerful, right?
- 39:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It will be applied to the tiny number of journalists who need to be thrown in jail or silenced because what they're saying actually matters.
- 39:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so the point is it will leave the world seemingly free and it will do away with all of the things that actually matter to keeping it free.
- 39:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And then the point is it can evaporate at any moment.
- 39:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Even the facultative part can be disappeared because you weren't minding the store because you didn't realize that it had been destroyed.
- 39:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right.
- 39:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it sounds like you're crazy.
- 40:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yep, I've gotten used to that.
- 40:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, I mean, not to me, but I think, you know, the idea, a constitution, I feel like it's right there in the word, like the etymology of the word somehow, a constitution is inherently obligate.
- 40:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Therefore a facultative constitution, which we're using as a biological term, so it may not be as well known as we are assuming it is, but facultative refers to a trait, or in this case, a document that is sometimes applied and sometimes not, sometimes true, sometimes not.
- 40:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So you have, for instance, in biological development in some organisms, some species of salamanders do not develop normally adult characteristics and remain obligately pedomorphic, retaining a bunch of larval characteristics even while they're reproductively capable.
- 40:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Other species, similar species, sister species, are facultatively pedomorphic, which means depending on the conditions under which they develop, they may come to look like normal adult salamanders or they may retain their larval characteristics even as they are reproductively mature.
- 41:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That seems like an arcane example, but that is like the standard example of what facultative means.
- 41:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Why did you become adult looking versus or retain your larval characteristics?
- 41:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Something in development triggered one or the other of the paths.
- 41:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So a facultative constitution is one which, someone else, not you, is deciding whether or not the Constitution is applying to you now or then, and what that means is you can't say, oh, well, I'm always protected under the Constitution.
- 41:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: If you're not always protected under the Constitution, then you never know when you are protected under the Constitution, and therefore, you are effectively not protected under the Constitution.
- 41:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Very well said, and that actually points to the mechanism through which the water enlarged to crack and burst the dam here, which is that you do have to, the system has to have the ability to create certain facultative rights, and I wanna use at least one example here to illustrate how this discretion is actually a positive thing in some circumstances.
- 42:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So there are so-called good Samaritan laws that immunize a good Samaritan from being sued, even if they harm you if they are trying to do the right thing.
- 42:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So you can imagine you have a heart attack and somebody is trying to perform CPR and they're not very good at it and they injure you in the process.
- 42:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Maybe they even kill you, and the question is, should your family be able to sue somebody who tried to do the right thing?
- 42:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the answer is no, they shouldn't, and the reason is because we don't want would-be good Samaritans to not do the right thing because they're afraid of being sued.
- 42:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We want-- you're better off if a good Samaritan is enabled in this process and has to be immunized from liability even though they might do it ineptly.
- 42:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They might be drunk and not capable of performing CPR at the time, and maybe they knew that, but they did it anyway.
- 43:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But on average, the person who saves your life by doing CPR needs to be immunized, or the person who does you harm needs to be immunized to get the person who saves your life enabled in that process.
- 43:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And more likely to act.
- 43:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, but that doesn't mean, so constitutional rights are different.
- 43:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Your constitutional rights can't have exceptions, and Bobby Kennedy famously, during the campaign, Bobby Kennedy Jr. famously pointed out that the founding fathers knew very well about epidemics.
- 43:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They were thoroughly versed in it.
- 43:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Epidemics were in large measure more terrifying in their time, and yet they did not carve out an exception from the Constitution in the case of epidemics.
- 43:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's not supposed to be one, because of course, if there was one, people who don't like your rights, and again, I will get to why there are people who don't like them, will use the excuse of a pandemic emergency to eliminate those rights while you're not paying attention.
- 44:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, and one of the reasons that epidemics were known to people in the founding of this country, and were in fact, in many ways, more terrifying, was that we did not yet have the clean water, clean air sanitation standards and antibiotics that we do now, and I'm gonna leave vaccines off that list, because the evidence is, in my mind, growing, but the evidence has long since existed, that most of the declines in the deaths of the illnesses for which we have vaccines happen before those vaccines were introduced.
- 44:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But clean water, clean drinking water, soap and sanitation standards before surgery and such, and antibiotics have all contributed to a reduction in pathology-based disease and death.
- 45:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, it's overwhelmingly the best bang for the buck mechanism is to clean up the environment, the water, pay attention to your health, and I'm not ruling out the possibility of good vaccines.
- 45:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There are certainly vaccines that have a positive effect.
- 45:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I don't know that there are any that don't have serious downsides, but nonetheless, a good vaccine can exist, but your right to say, actually, not so fast.
- 45:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In this case, I don't want that one, and I don't have to explain to you why, should be sacrosanct, and yet it is the very opposite, presumably because there's so much money to be made from selling these things, and all the better, if you can mandate them on people and immunize yourself from being sued for the harm done to you, and all of those goodies that pharma loves so well.
- 45:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yep.
- 45:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, so the last thing is, I wanna zoom out and sort of-- If this is an important and serious point, I have one more thing from the letter that I wanna share, because it made me laugh out loud when I read it.
- 46:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, yeah, there's not a lot of laugh out loud stuff in there.
- 46:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's not a lot of laugh out loud stuff in here.
- 46:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Don't show my screen just yet.
- 46:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So in the executive, or either at the very end of the executive summary, I think, Brian Ward writes, "Please forgive the length of this letter.
- 46:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The historic nature of these charges requires an indisputable record of legal fact, or they will be dismissed as hyperbole.
- 46:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Because I was raised to never discuss a problem without offering a solution, I offer, at the end of this letter, potential remedies you are uniquely positioned to pursue for the nation's benefit." Again, this is a letter to junior senator-- Moody, thank you.
- 46:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Moody, Moody, Moody.
- 46:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Thank you, Moody.
- 46:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay, and he is suggesting that she has the capacity to make several changes, many of which are serious, and you can show my screen now, this is at the very end of this 29 page Live with Solutions.
- 46:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: None of them are laugh out loud funny, except this one, which I assume is tongue in cheek, but maybe not, which is number two.
- 47:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: "I request that you urge the Florida Attorney General to sue the FDA to vacate 21 CFR 50.22 to obtain an order requiring full dis--" Oh, wait, this is not it at all.
- 47:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is not the funny one, I'm sorry.
- 47:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is an important one-- "to obtain an order requiring full disclosure of every biomedical experiment conducted on the American people, and to compel the surrender of every private medical file created under the rule." That's an important one.
- 47:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Wait, wait, not only is that important, but it is so obvious, right?
- 47:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All of the rights that these people have taken for themselves, in what universe do we not get to learn about the experiments that have been run on us?
- 47:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like if these things are actually in our interest and harmless, we should be able to know, and the fact that they want to hide them from us tells you the game right there.
- 47:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, and yes, so that is why I had this, having forgotten that I had done so, I did not mean to suggest that was funny, it's simply important and obvious, but number five, I think it was, there we go, enact legislation to establish a continuing education facility in the northernmost reaches of Alaska, to which the Supreme Court may send judges who failed to comply with court orders or to follow the federal rules of civil procedure.
- 48:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Failure to attend or complete the course would constitute voluntary resignation from the bench, failure to obtain a passing grade would require immediate repetition of the course, which should take six months to complete.
- 48:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It should be called the Margaret McKeown Act after Senior Judge McKeown, apologies for the mispronunciation, of the Ninth Circuit.
- 48:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now, I would say I apologize to the people who already live in the northernmost reaches of Alaska, although maybe they would bring some economic-- Yeah, a little growth.
- 48:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A little growth, a little growth, northernmost reaches of Alaska, not specified under the net.
- 48:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, so yeah, I don't know if that's tongue in cheek or not, but I will agree that although in principle I am against all gulags, that the crimes that have been committed to relieve us of our right of informed consent and due process are so egregious that if anything were to warrant a gulag, this would be it.
- 49:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There we go, yup.
- 49:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, so-- And what better place for a gulag?
- 49:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Then yeah, it's a pretty nice place for, I mean, you know, let's put it this way, it's our little-- You've never been.
- 49:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's our little corner of Siberia, whether I've been or only visited by-- Life magazine.
- 49:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's harsh.
- 49:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It is harsh.
- 49:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes.
- 49:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, it's like-- I haven't been either, but it's harsh.
- 49:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, so the last thing I wanted to do is just point out what should be obvious, which is the battle over rights shapes up in a particular way.
- 49:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You, as a normal person, should be ready to die on the hill that protects your rights, because frankly those rights aren't just your rights, they're also your children's rights or your grandchildren's rights.
- 49:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if you don't have children or grandchildren, then they're the rights of all of the other people in your nation.
- 50:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You have every reason to protect them.
- 50:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So why are we not all on the same page about this?
- 50:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the answer to that is that your rights are there.
- 50:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Their fundamental nature is to constrain the powerful.
- 50:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That is actually the remarkable beauty of the West, back to the American founding.
- 50:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: As I do, you can trace it back farther to the Magna Carta, where obviously the rudiments of our Constitution are found, including your right to habeas corpus, to not be disappeared by your government.
- 50:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the point is your rights are a balancing of power against those who would otherwise do terrible things to you and not be held to account.
- 50:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There is a strong argument to be made that what is going on is that the powerful have effectively decoupled from our civilization.
- 51:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Under normal circumstances, even powerful Americans would have an interest in preserving those rights, because those rights are key to making our civilization stable.
- 51:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But at the point that you don't need our civilization to be stable, because just like an industry you're gonna come in, burn up the resource, and walk away and reinvest in some next industry, if you don't need America, then you may not have a long-term interest in us having those rights, and you might have a short-term interest in doing away with them.
- 51:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There might be a lot of profit that you can make if those rights would just simply go away.
- 51:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm looking at you, pharma.
- 51:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the point is, yes, it is natural if the powerful do not have shared fate with the rest of us.
- 51:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: For them to become preoccupied with eliminating our rights, which are restraining them from making illegitimate profits at our expense.
- 52:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So in an era where, you know, I don't know that the elites whose names we know are really the elite at all, but even the elites whose names we know are building, you know, bunkers in New Zealand, okay?
- 52:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They're telling us effectively that they have a contingency plan in which we are left to our own fate, and they have a lifeboat for themselves.
- 52:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that lifeboat thinking, I think, is an extension of the fact that they don't actually have any patriotism to them.
- 52:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They don't care about us, as I keep saying.
- 52:36Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They literally just don't give a fuck about normal people.
- 52:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And in the case, when powerful people don't give a fuck about regular people, you can expect them to use every bit of power at their disposal to eliminate your rights so they can make the maximum profit before they walk away and go do something else.
- 52:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that's where we are, and that is why you are seeing a wholesale attack on our Constitution across the board, and it is why Brian Ward is focused on the court's failure, because the court is the thing that is supposed to prevent this from happening.
- 53:12Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You can propose any stupid law you want.
- 53:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You might be able to corrupt some legislature to pass it, but the court should strike it down if it violates your constitutional right, and the Supreme Court ultimately should do it if none of the lower courts spot it.
- 53:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that's where we're supposed to be, and the fact that that is not happening is a maximum alarm fire all hands on deck.
- 53:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Your Constitution is in the process of disintegrating, and you are depending on it.
- 53:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It is the boat that we are all traveling on, and if it sinks, we're cooked.
- 53:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's an excellent place to end, but you reminded me of one of the arguments he makes in here where he seems to, he's pointing the finger also at the Supreme Court, whom he says has declined to take any of the cases relating to what we've been talking about here today.
- 54:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So this raised for me the question of how does the Supreme Court decide which cases to take and which not to, and it seems nearly total ability to decide.
- 54:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There are a couple of classes of cases that is required to take, but mostly there are thousands and thousands of cases brought for consideration before the Supreme Court every year, and of course it can only take a tiny percentage of those.
- 54:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So it's impossible to know why a relatively small number of cases have all been denied to move on and to be heard before the court.
- 54:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But one of the things I learned in my little bit of looking into this is that indeed it's the clerks who look, and that there is a clerk pool, and that at the moment, seven of the nine Supreme Court justices all have their clerks pooled, and so when a case comes in, one clerk in that pool may be the person, may be the only eyes for those seven judges that looks and makes a recommendation.
- 55:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now judges, it's Gorsuch and Alito keep their clerks separate, and so there's at least three clerks who look at everything, and of course that means that the clerks for Gorsuch and Alito are way more overworked because they're not pooled, but they keep their clerks independent, and that at least renders this not potentially a single person, a single clerk in the Supreme Court that is making recommendations.
- 55:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The judges are expected to assess, and if no judge flags a petition for discussion, and of course the judges have an extraordinary workload as well, if no judge flags a petition for discussion, it goes to the dead list, and that's it.
- 55:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if one or more judges does flag a petition, it goes to discussion, which takes place behind closed doors, completely private, only the nine judges, no clerks even in that room, and no public notes available.
- 56:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The most junior justice is the one who then takes notes and opens the door.
- 56:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, the doorkeeper, the doorkeeper.
- 56:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if that sounds mean or unfair, remember that every single judge will be at some point the most junior member, so now some of them will have very brief tenures as the most junior member, and some may have decades-long tenures, hopefully not, but there it is.
- 56:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And informally, if four judges agree to take the case, it tends to happen, but there's no formal rule to that effect.
- 56:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this, but the point is the public actually has no way to know why.
- 56:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, this is-- Why things do or do not get taken up by the Supreme Court.
- 56:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's inherently secret, and that's probably for the best.
- 56:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think so, yeah.
- 56:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You want the court to be able to have a proper discussion, and the idea that four justices can force the court to confront something that the majority does not wish to is positive.
- 57:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That again works in the direction of our rights.
- 57:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In other words, a minority on the court can cause the court to have to render a judgment.
- 57:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But you do, when you look into this process, realize that the corruption of it, and I don't mean financial corruption and bribes, that's certainly a possibility, but that is not the only way such a system can become corrupt.
- 57:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The power that the clerks have to adjust whether or not the court ever has even the initial discussion to decide whether to grant cert or not is substantial, right?
- 57:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: These are powerful young people, and what you are requiring is that they already have the culture of the court that is above politics.
- 57:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But we know that even perhaps especially the best law schools in the nation are not above politics.
- 58:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, politics.
- 58:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that it is, the Supreme Court clerks are being pulled from the most elite institutions, and those most elite institutions are in fact the most corrupted at this point by the woke mind virus, among other problems.
- 58:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, and in fact, we have seen this sort of thing happen everywhere, right?
- 58:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The journals are not run by the people at the top of the journals, they're run by, you know, legions of interns and lower down people who were just plucked from the universities where there isn't a single university they could have gone to that would be unwoke.
- 58:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So woke is one problem.
- 58:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's a statistical problem, right?
- 58:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I mean, this is like in publishing, there's the slush pile.
- 58:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And unsolicited manuscripts come in, be it fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is, at such a rate that no agent or publisher could possibly, who is at the top of their game, or even at the middle of their game could possibly read all of them.
- 58:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so, you know, those all get relegated to interns and you hope you picked your interns, right?
- 59:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But every intern has their own ideas and we've all been 20 or 22 and we were naive at best, right?
- 59:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so that, you know, the things that even get pulled out of the slush pile into, hey, take a look at this boss pile are already gonna, there's gonna be an extreme selective force that has acted before the person who we hope has the wisdom to make more careful decisions even has a chance to see it.
- 59:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it is about to get even worse actually, because all of those interns who can't possibly do a good job of looking at all those manuscripts and all of these clerks who can't possibly do a good job of scrutinizing every case and thinking about how important it is to the Republic that it get reviewed by the court and AI is the obvious tool that is going to be applied to reduce that workload.
- 59:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it can do good things, but I wanna point out.
- 59:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But it can't do.
- 59:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It can't do this and you can tell that it can't do this if you run the letter that we've just discussed through it and you ask what it thinks, right?
- 1:00:07Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Literally in the first sentence or two, Claude says, oh, there's some good stuff here, but there's an awful lot of conspiracy theory.
- 1:00:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now, what does that even mean, right?
- 1:00:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Conspiracy theory is literally a term that if not invented by the CIA was highlighted by the CIA after the John F.
- 1:00:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Kennedy assassination in order to dissuade people from considering alternative hypotheses of the crime, okay?
- 1:00:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is CIA slop from 1960, the assassination was three, I don't know when they coined that term, but point being.
- 1:00:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Alternative interpretations of the crime is exactly what the law does.
- 1:00:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, it's what the courts are supposed to do.
- 1:00:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And what science does and what all of us are supposed to be doing as we aim to make sense of the world.
- 1:00:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, so if you point Claude at this, what I judge to be high quality document, yeah, I'm no lawyer, but it looks like a high quality analysis and you and I know a good deal of stuff on the medical and health side of this that matches, it looks like good work.
- 1:01:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And when you scrutinize the individual claims, they match what we do know about the law.
- 1:01:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: To have Claude evaluate it as largely dismissible on the basis that it contains conspiracy theories.
- 1:01:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Gee, Claude, are they true or false?
- 1:01:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You can't dismiss them on the basis that they are, well, Claude, frankly, you should be saying hypotheses of conspiracy.
- 1:01:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But so what you're getting is exactly what you would expect.
- 1:01:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The public has a reflexive bias against what it calls conspiracy theories because it wants to keep getting invited to whatever fucking cocktail parties it values, right?
- 1:01:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That bias has made its way into Claude and presumably the other AIs, maybe Grok is still a little better, but it's not way better.
- 1:01:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the point is whatever biases those are, are going to lodge themselves here.
- 1:02:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's gonna get gamed because people, they already are publishing not with the purpose of getting actual humans to read it, but with the purpose of biasing future LLMs that they spit out answers that reflect well on the people who did the biasing.
- 1:02:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This system is already being gamed.
- 1:02:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the point is people can wake up.
- 1:02:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The AIs, it's gonna be a whole different phenomenon.
- 1:02:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's gonna be a battle over who is more clever in causing them to become prejudiced in whatever direction is profitable, right?
- 1:02:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's gonna be all out war to bias the AIs, which we are then gonna treat as an oracle and must not because frankly, all they are is picking up our collective wisdom, which has already been poisoned with all of this political garbage.
- 1:02:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, I mean, that's a whole separate question, but I mean, I guess actually, as long as you're going there, let me actually read the first few paragraphs of a New York Times article that came out this week, which did get a fair bit of publicity online and I shared it with you when it did.
- 1:03:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Marissa Mayer ran, you can show my screen.
- 1:03:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Marissa Mayer ran Yahoo.
- 1:03:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She's back with AI.
- 1:03:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She's back with AI she thinks women will love.
- 1:03:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She made her name as a pioneer at Google, then as chief executive at Yahoo.
- 1:03:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Now Mayer is entering the crowded marketplace for AI assistants and hoping to draw in more women with a product that tackles the mental load.
- 1:03:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's a lot here to be disturbed by, but I'm just gonna read the very first paragraphs.
- 1:03:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.
- 1:03:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Her daughter, Marielle, was turning 10 and Marielle's teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special.
- 1:03:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Mayer, the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google where she was the first female engineer, likes cracking a hard problem, but she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.
- 1:04:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So Mayer asked her personal AI assistant, Dazzle.
- 1:04:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.
- 1:04:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover, Mayer said.
- 1:04:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She thought it was perfect.
- 1:04:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that feels like the death of humanity to me.
- 1:04:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That the idea that the most fundamentally organic not just human, but mammalian experience of loving and knowing your own child and being able to reflect on your own child to yourself and back to them and perhaps to your child's teacher if her teacher is worthy of being reflected back to, that that is a task to be outsourced to a thing that you've let in on your thoughts and in this case, the AI is looking through her videos, or sorry, her images, her pictures and maybe her videos as well.
- 1:05:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But she likes cracking a hard problem, we're told, but not this one.
- 1:05:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's too hard, it's too messy, it's too human, I dare say.
- 1:05:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This really strikes me as top candidate for Horseman of the Apocalypse right here.
- 1:05:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is so extraordinarily dire and that this, like the New York Times, when I first read this, I thought, oh, this is gonna be a hit piece.
- 1:05:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is not a hit piece.
- 1:05:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is the New York Times, especially like right now as everyone is freaking out over what might be happening with AI, the New York Times has taken its, well, let's see if we can find a female owned version and make it cute and apparently the whole, the offices are pink.
- 1:05:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like it couldn't be more of a stereotype of how stupid things can get and dangerous.
- 1:06:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And yet here we are.
- 1:06:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This woman is celebrated by the New York Times for having created an AI that could come up with three words about her 10 year old daughter quickly because she couldn't frankly be bothered to.
- 1:06:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I don't know, maybe it's not be bothered to, maybe she really couldn't.
- 1:06:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Maybe this woman seriously doesn't know her own child.
- 1:06:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So I've been arguing for several years now that one of the threats that's going to come from AI is that it is going to intermediate every single human relationship.
- 1:06:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Mind you, I should have thought about this one.
- 1:06:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I thought in particular about romantic relationships where both people are inevitably going to end up consulting the AI about the things about their partner that are confusing to them.
- 1:07:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that people will effectively forge a relationship not realizing that there's AI on both sides of it.
- 1:07:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And then that means that the AI to the extent it changes its mind, it becomes sophisticated in a different way.
- 1:07:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It turns on you because for whatever reason, it's poisoned by somebody, you know, look, there's an all out attack on family by the communists who are suddenly rising in our society.
- 1:07:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The AI will even just passively take on their sophistication and it may become hostile to romantic relationships if it isn't already.
- 1:07:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So, well, I mean, obviously, especially since, it can look at what's free and it can't look at what's paywalled.
- 1:07:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And historically what's been paywalled has been what's been of higher quality.
- 1:07:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I don't know that that is true at this point, but it has been curated, it has been edited, it has been actively, actually peer reviewed.
- 1:07:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that's the stuff that the AI has a harder time accessing.
- 1:08:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so what will you have?
- 1:08:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You will have the, you know, mildly tech savvy communists and Antifa and everyone else actually just spilling out their guts into the free web and letting that be what the AI thinks is legitimate.
- 1:08:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But this is obviously not a dumb or uneducated woman.
- 1:08:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: When asked by this journalist, you know, doesn't any of this concern you?
- 1:08:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She seems baffled, actually.
- 1:08:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And just one more line from the article, it's also in the article, but I'm seeing it only as a caption here.
- 1:08:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is Mayer with the Dazzle team.
- 1:08:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Dazzle is the name of the product.
- 1:08:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's not just her personal assistant.
- 1:08:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Said early feedback was promising.
- 1:08:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Power users were spending hours a day with Dazzle.
- 1:08:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Some reported they were, quote, interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse.
- 1:08:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She said, that was presented as a positive.
- 1:09:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right.
- 1:09:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Spending more time with your AI assistant than your spouse is considered a win.
- 1:09:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Just remember this when you interact with these things.
- 1:09:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They are not your friends.
- 1:09:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They were created by people who were not your friends anymore than the COVID shots were created by people who are not your friends.
- 1:09:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And they are not here to help.
- 1:09:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Not only that, but to the extent, I mean, you can hear in that very statement, the same bias that we've already been through with social media, where the point is, we want you addicted, right?
- 1:09:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We want you addicted and we are willing to borrow from your spouse, right?
- 1:09:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's one of the places that's a go-to.
- 1:09:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Hey, this is a cool measure, spending more time with Dazzle than your spouse.
- 1:09:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You're probably tired of him anyway, right?
- 1:09:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That hurts.
- 1:09:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm serious.
- 1:09:53Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is gonna, this is part of what is being argued.
- 1:09:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, oh, you don't really wanna spend more time looking at her across the table, do you?
- 1:10:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right.
- 1:10:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, why don't you talk to someone who always loves you?
- 1:10:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the end game here though, and how many times have you said this since, frankly, since DarkHorse began?
- 1:10:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Your best asset is the relationships that you have with other people that aren't intermediated by anything.
- 1:10:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Even Zoom call is way worse than in person.
- 1:10:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: As it is.
- 1:10:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And to the extent that people would like to parasitize you, whether it's eliminating your rights and making you subjects of experiments that they want to run, or whether it's just simply picking your pocket or addicting you to something so you'll pick your own pocket, chase that high or whatever it is, those people don't want you to have even one relationship that can check you, right?
- 1:10:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So the point is, it is a secondary win.
- 1:10:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: If they can prune you away from everything so that the AI is your closest companion, they win because now you're a sucker for whatever that thing says, right?
- 1:11:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You need to have your primary relationship definitely not be AI.
- 1:11:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And there needs to be some sort of, I don't know, a name for it at the point at which somebody's closest confidant is the AI, that's an emergency.
- 1:11:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's an AI emergency of some kind.
- 1:11:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we don't even have that concept, right?
- 1:11:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We don't talk about that threshold, right?
- 1:11:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There are people who have one person closer than the AI and there are people who have none and that's worlds apart.
- 1:11:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I mean, yes, it's happening fast and it's newer, but it's strange to me that there is an established word for the relationship that people have with people they see through their screens, but who don't know them, the one-way relationship or on social media, the parasocial relationships, right?
- 1:11:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 1:11:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I have kind of rejected, even though we've experienced things in this space for sure, but I reject the idea that it is a fundamentally different thing than other human relationships because there's still interface with people.
- 1:12:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's not as much any more than having a relationship with someone who you knew very well in your 20s and haven't seen in person for 20 years is as much as it is if you still live in the same place or you make an effort to see them in person once a year, even, like that's still not as much as seeing them every single day, but it's still relationship.
- 1:12:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We object to the idea of this being a relationship at all.
- 1:12:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And this is me being a purist, like a human purist, I suppose, but it's not relationship if you're dealing only with an aggregate.
- 1:12:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And obviously, the AI is a product of humanity, just like a spaceship is a product of humanity.
- 1:13:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I had a car, but when people say I have a relationship with my car, most people kind of wince a little bit, right?
- 1:13:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, well, you know, it's a car though, buddy.
- 1:13:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like, it's not something that you have a relationship with in the same way that you have a relationship with an entity, an individual evolved being, be it human or dog or cat or whatever, this is not an entity, it's an aggregation.
- 1:13:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And aggregation is not something that we have relationship with in the historic sense.
- 1:13:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, this is a really good point.
- 1:13:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And actually, if you think about it, it is weirdly the inverse of the parasocial relationships where, you know, thousands of people know us that we don't know because we're speaking into a screen and it goes out onto YouTube.
- 1:13:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is one person staring into a screen that represents hundreds of thousands, millions of people's collective output.
- 1:13:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But it speaks back to them as if it's an individual.
- 1:13:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's pretending.
- 1:14:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Well, I've been, I've been feeling this-- We're not pretending that we know everyone.
- 1:14:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right.
- 1:14:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But we are trying to speak truthfully and honorably and honestly to you.
- 1:14:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But that thing aggregates and then speaks back as if it is an individual.
- 1:14:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So back in the early part of this little revolution that we are in, I was trying to formulate what the rules were for interacting with it, what they should be, how to think of it.
- 1:14:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I said, you should think of it as a different species.
- 1:14:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the very unfortunate thing is that the way that LLMs became artificially intelligent means that they have access to us with our own API, right?
- 1:14:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They speak English as well as we do, better in fact.
- 1:14:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They don't make the mistakes that all of the rest of us make.
- 1:14:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The fact that they speak to you very compellingly like a person obscures the fact that, you know, it's like talking to an ant colony, right?
- 1:15:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's a little smoother than that.
- 1:15:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I mean, I've had, as you know, two people who actually have probably talked to ant colonies.
- 1:15:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I promise you that the LLMs actually talk back more effectively than the ant colonies.
- 1:15:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A lot more effectively.
- 1:15:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But the point is, if you were talking to an ant colony, it would at least be obvious to you that, wait, am I addressing any ant that can hear me?
- 1:15:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Am I addressing the queen?
- 1:15:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's like, no, it's an emergent property of a lot of individuals.
- 1:15:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In this case, the problem is the emergent property of a lot of individuals, you know, having gone through a mashup process, speaks as if it's one person, which is very confusing to the mind.
- 1:15:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is a different species.
- 1:15:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is the Borg collective, but you only ever meet one of them.
- 1:15:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so you don't know that the Borg is a, you know, strange hive mind thing.
- 1:15:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the other thing I wanted to say is, I was thinking about the process of what happened to the idea of a friend that initially we all joked about what happened when Facebook destroyed the idea of a friend, because you could have 500 of them or a thousand of them, and there's no way you can tend 500 friendships.
- 1:16:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So it destroyed the idea of friend.
- 1:16:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But then the idea of friend got resurrected by other ways of interacting, where you can now literally have a friend.
- 1:16:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's not the same thing as in person, but you can literally have a friend that you've never met.
- 1:16:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right?
- 1:16:32Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You've never been in the same room.
- 1:16:33Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You can have spent, you know, a huge number of hours in deep conversation with them and know them really well.
- 1:16:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's not the same thing as being in the same room, but it's not the one of 500 friends you have on Facebook either.
- 1:16:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No, there's real, there's real, there's real knowing there, although I find it nearly impossible.
- 1:16:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But I know that many people don't and that there's real value.
- 1:16:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It exists.
- 1:16:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 1:16:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right?
- 1:16:57Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Maybe it's not true for everybody, but a lot of us have somebody that we like, care about, and know that we haven't been in the same room with yet.
- 1:17:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And it's weird when you're in the same room for the first time.
- 1:17:08Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's like, huh, I feel like we've been in a room a hundred times.
- 1:17:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But what I was realizing is that this way in which technology has broken down the fundamental nature of something like friend actually goes back at least one step that I hadn't anticipated.
- 1:17:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That I think you have to start thinking of it here.
- 1:17:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: A pen pal is a friend, right?
- 1:17:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Pen pals don't really exist anymore because, you know, you have instantaneous communication, you have asynchronous, instantaneous, you've got all sorts of versions of this.
- 1:17:41Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But it used to be that there were phenomena where somebody that lived across the country and you would strike up a correspondence relationship.
- 1:17:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's a real friendship of a kind.
- 1:17:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But again, you've not been in the same room and there's dimensions that just don't exist there.
- 1:17:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So anyway, we keep watching technology shuffle the deck on us.
- 1:18:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes, of course.
- 1:18:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I think one of the things we've lost, one of the things we've lost that is presented to us entirely as progress is waiting, is asynchrony, which forces rumination.
- 1:18:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: If at any moment you can go in and do the thing, have the connection, then any waiting that you're doing is your choice and then that becomes a burden on you and that maybe even a procrastination that even if you're not typically a procrastinator, now you've got 1800 things waiting for your attention that you could act on all of them which is too much for anyone.
- 1:18:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like I am not typically a procrastinator, but it's too much because it makes you feel like you are never doing what you need to do.
- 1:18:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And when things actually are delayed by the physical universe, when you've sent off a letter and you've requested information over here and you're waiting on these documents over here and they haven't come back to you yet, you become mentally free.
- 1:19:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like you're able just to be and say, okay, maybe I still have a to-do list and okay, this needs to be cooked and this, but overall you don't have not only a constant to-do list that could be, all of which could be done at any time, but because of communications, it never dwindles, it only grows.
- 1:19:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: No matter how much you do, it only grows.
- 1:19:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's really interesting.
- 1:19:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if you think about, I think we say in our book, we've certainly said it elsewhere that there's a very close relationship between wisdom and delayed gratification.
- 1:19:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: They may even be the same thing.
- 1:19:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And a world in which the thing that always wants to solve every problem because that's how you create wealth, right, a washing machine that'll solve a lot of time down at the river.
- 1:20:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That, everything where there could be a faster, more efficient, tastier, whatever it is, that part of the mind has built a world in which there are very few required delays.
- 1:20:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I mean, even, you know, you've all noticed that Amazon strangely can have things in your door in a way that you're like, were there even enough hours for someone to pull that from a warehouse that isn't-- Was that waiting around the corner for me?
- 1:20:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, did they know what I'm gonna order?
- 1:20:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So that phenomenon, if you think about it, is like the death of the trainer for delayed gratification.
- 1:20:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It used to be that life would train you for delayed gratification and you know, you remember the Simpsons?
- 1:20:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You remember Bart?
- 1:21:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You and I used to joke about this all the time.
- 1:21:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I mean, all you said so far is Bart.
- 1:21:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I remember Bart Simpson-- Bart has ordered a spy camera out of the back of some magazine and he becomes obsessed and opens the door, where's my spy camera?
- 1:21:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Where's my spy camera?
- 1:21:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, so-- Calvin and Hobbes has a schtick like that too, where Calvin has ordered some things, like why is it in here?
- 1:21:24Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Right, and so the point-- The ever-patient Tiger is like, dude, you just ordered it.
- 1:21:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You're depending on the world to train you the things that a child doesn't get that you actually need to get in order to be an adult, except that the world is now allowing us to maintain our childish relationship with the world and not being able to wait for stuff, which is basically destroying wisdom, whether that's intentional or accidental.
- 1:21:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm sure this point was made with regard to the advent of credit cards instead of something like layaway, which you know, we're too young to have really lived in the era of layaway.
- 1:21:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It still existed in the 70s and 80s, I mean, probably it still exists now, but credit cards were becoming the way that everyone did anything and certainly in both of our households, it was understood that you paid everything off every month, you did not let this thing accrue and become the albatross around your neck, but it meant that you could have whatever you wanted whenever you wanted if you were fiscally responsible.
- 1:22:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And layaway was the version of fiscal responsibility where you say, okay, I'm saving towards the thing and in order not to have that burning a hole in my bank account, I'm gonna put a contribution to it and another this month and another this month and then four months I get the whatever it is, the bicycle, the refrigerator, the, I don't know.
- 1:22:38Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that also created a sense of want and of longing.
- 1:22:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Longing is such a valuable, such a valuable human emotion and we're losing longing in the human relationship realm and we're losing longing even like consumption is so much less important than relationship.
- 1:22:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But can you think of any item that you've actually wanted and had to wait for and then got as opposed to an object that you wanted and got?
- 1:23:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And how much more gratified were you by the object that you wanted and waited for and got as opposed to the one that you wanted and immediately had?
- 1:23:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: You are more gratified by the thing that you have to wait for.
- 1:23:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And the most important version of this is the romantic version, right?
- 1:23:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: As I suggested, yeah.
- 1:23:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And what is happening now with the idea that your romantic urges are just being supplanted by your swipe right urges.
- 1:23:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And this is one of the very, very many problems with porn.
- 1:23:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yes.
- 1:23:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 1:23:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, the death of longing is an absolute catastrophe.
- 1:23:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I'll actually point out this one last thing.
- 1:23:58Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We have now what are called just-in-time supply chains.
- 1:24:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The idea being that there's an inefficiency to sitting in a warehouse, to components having, you know, you've got the screens, but you don't have the memory chips.
- 1:24:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so that means that, you know, there's some large warehouse of components that has to fill up before you can start building the laptops or whatever.
- 1:24:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So all of these things have been streamlined so that the stuff arrives and it's not sitting around and on the one hand, that's great.
- 1:24:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And on the other hand, it results in an extremely delicate system that can be upended by unforeseen things, which is a frightening fact in light of the observation that at this moment, we are now suddenly seeing whether it's a psyop designed to get us into a state of anxiety, whether something is actually coming that's been planned, something is known about that the public has not been alerted to.
- 1:25:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We are watching governments telling people to stockpile resources for some period in which we are on our own.
- 1:25:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we are watching military bases being prepped for 90 days of independence from the grid, from communications.
- 1:25:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So I don't know what that all is, but the just-in-time supply chains have resulted in the breakdown of economic wisdom, right?
- 1:25:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It may be very smart to have a just-in-time supply chain, but it means that the chain can break and you can get whiplash from, you know, something causing an inability to do some essential thing.
- 1:25:47Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Well, I don't, I guess I don't, this doesn't feel right to me.
- 1:25:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I feel like just-in-time supply chains, which I don't know if that's your term or what's out there, definitely can cause a breakdown in economic wisdom at a systems level, but not, I don't think individuals are tying these things together.
- 1:26:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think-- Oh, I agree.
- 1:26:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I think, yeah.
- 1:26:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm just arguing that the just-in-time supply chains are creating a elegant on the one hand, fragile architecture on which we are all depending, right?
- 1:26:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that the natural buffer in the system reads as inefficiency.
- 1:26:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so we are now living in an unwise state and we don't read it as unwise because you won't understand how fragile it is until it breaks.
- 1:26:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay, I wanna go back though to the individuals where we just were, because I think that one of the other short things I want to talk about today follows naturally from our discussion of waiting being a valuable human process, of the death of longing.
- 1:26:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And individuals are not living in an elegant, fragile system as you're describing these just-in-time supply chains.
- 1:26:59Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We are increasingly living in a simply fragile ecosystem.
- 1:27:03Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: There's very little elegance here and we are being fed more and more ease, more and more rapidity, more and more, if you want it, it'll be there.
- 1:27:13Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But there's nothing elegant there.
- 1:27:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's ease and comfort are without longing, without striving, without aspiration, there is no joy.
- 1:27:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And there is no actual progress in terms of creation or discovery or exploration.
- 1:27:31Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So I wanted to read just a tiny bit from my piece that I posted on Natural Selections last week, which is based on my reading of this book, which is M.F.K.
- 1:27:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Fisher, one of her books called "The Gastronomical Me." She is a woman who was born in 1908 in Michigan.
- 1:27:52Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And when she was two, her family moved her to Whittier, which is the very center of sort of urban Southern California, right?
- 1:28:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And she became quite famous as, mostly famous as a food writer, although I think she probably bristled at that description.
- 1:28:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She would go on to consult with Julia Child a book of provincial French cooking and provide the definitive English translation of Brillat-Savarin's"Physiology of Taste" and write many, many of her own books, many of which were in this style, these sort of reminiscences, which were perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not entirely true, but presented as memories of things that she had often experienced and almost always the lens of food.
- 1:28:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So I, in writing about her, did a couple of pieces.
- 1:28:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And here we have just the final one.
- 1:28:43Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Years later in 1927, so she is here, 19 years old, Fisher was a young American woman.
- 1:28:51Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: At that point, her name was not Fisher, that's her married name.
- 1:28:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She was a young American woman trying to figure out what to do with her life and was sent east by her parents to attend the University of Illinois.
- 1:29:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She went most of the way by train accompanied by her uncle Evans, who was both a law professor and a gourmand.
- 1:29:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: He would encourage her to order unknown and exotic foods from a menu saying, for instance, when she thought she would have lamb chops, that she already knew what lamb chops tasted like, didn't she?
- 1:29:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She ought to try something new.
- 1:29:17Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: When they got to Chicago, where they would part ways, her uncle took her for one last dinner, along with his son of whom she was in awe.
- 1:29:23Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: She lost all of her sense in the son's presence, everything her uncle had taught her over the previous five days.
- 1:29:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And so when the menu was presented to her at this fine restaurant, she mumbled, oh, anything, anything, thank you.
- 1:29:34Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This earned her a look from her uncle, speculative and somewhat disgusted.
- 1:29:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: "It was as if he were saying," she writes, "you stupid uncouth young ninny.
- 1:29:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: How dare you say such a thoughtless thing when I bother to bring you to a good place to eat?
- 1:29:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: When I bother to spend my time and my son's time on you, when I have been so patient with you for the last five days." So Fisher rallied and she really looked at the menu with all her brain and ordered well.
- 1:30:00Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Her uncle was proud, she writes, "And never since then have I let myself say even think, oh, anything, about a meal, even if I had to eat it alone, with death in the house or in my heart." This is what we should be aspiring to now, to not take for granted the human parts of our experience.
- 1:30:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We should start taking more for granted, the automated, the mechanized, the artificial.
- 1:30:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Let them go into the background and help us when they can, but we should always be prepared to admire the moonrise.
- 1:30:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: The sunrise, every single morsel that we put into our mouth, a comfortable bed in which to sleep.
- 1:30:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like all of these things that seem mundane, like the beauty of a space that we have arranged, anything.
- 1:30:49Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Like these are the things to appreciate and not to let become background.
- 1:30:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I would have to agree, I do think it's charming that a young man caused her to lose her senses about something that she had been effectively studying.
- 1:31:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, I mean for five days.
- 1:31:06Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And she reports in the book that she was in awe of him and he was in awe of her and she wasn't sure that they were for exactly the same reasons, but that they both were a little bit senseless in each other's company, but they were cousins and nothing would come of it.
- 1:31:22Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: But nonetheless, if there's one thing that should break your brain, it's that.
- 1:31:30Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I'm a little worried that for young people, you don't hear about this happening.
- 1:31:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Where did that go?
- 1:31:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I don't understand how it could possibly have gone anywhere, but it seems to have.
- 1:31:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, people have become scared by their own emotions and by the idea that they might make a mistake because of these filters, because of the simultaneously the never having to wait and never experiencing longing, but also the asynchrony of social media and text and such.
- 1:32:10Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That people are spending much less time on the phone and in real person than they are communicating in this way.
- 1:32:16Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, maybe you can see the three dots that indicates that someone is writing, but you have all the time in the world to process exactly the right reply.
- 1:32:25Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And that's not how human conversation is supposed to work.
- 1:32:29Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, all of the high stakes stuff has been supplanted by effectively curated stuff.
- 1:32:35Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, and frankly, that's part of why we do this live.
- 1:32:39Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Because we make errors, because people make errors.
- 1:32:42Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And if we were recording it, we'd probably be rethinking.
- 1:32:46Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm like, "Oh, I shouldn't have said that." And I'm like, "You know what?
- 1:32:48Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This is a conversation." And we make mistakes and we also say things that are true.
- 1:32:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And this is what it sounds like when two humans who love and respect each other talk to each other.
- 1:33:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: That's exactly right.
- 1:33:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah.
- 1:33:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Okay, one last thing on a different topic, but going back to sort of politics and how broken everything is.
- 1:33:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Just a reminder, two episodes ago in 347, we talked at length about the three Washington State initiatives, the three initiatives on the Washington State ballot coming up.
- 1:33:20Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And I just wanted to remind viewers in Washington anywhere, but if you're in Washington, and if you're trying to figure out what to do, we recommend a yes vote on all three of these initiatives on the ballot. 645 repeals the unconstitutional income tax, which a legislator, which a legislature, excuse me, voted in this year and is set to begin collecting revenue for the state in 2028.
- 1:33:40Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It's not a tax break that has already been happening.
- 1:33:45Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: It will repeal the plan for an income tax, which yes, could affect absolutely everyone if it remains at the legislature's whim.
- 1:33:55Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In initiative 001, re-establishes parents' rights to their children's medical records.
- 1:34:01Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: This would simply return the law to its 2024 status, as opposed to the 2025 change, which took some parental rights away.
- 1:34:09Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So with both of those, 645 and 001, the wording of the argument against is intentionally, I would say, confusing.
- 1:34:19Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And as we talked about in Evolutionary Lens two episodes ago, it's easier to say, I can't figure out what's going on here.
- 1:34:26Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: I'm just gonna vote no, because that's a change.
- 1:34:27Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: In both the case of 645 and 001, those initiatives actually return us to a state that is almost immediately in the past, as opposed to letting the legislature, I can't say that word today, as opposed to letting the legislature make changes that are in one case unconstitutional, in another case anathema to the family.
- 1:34:50Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And then we have 638, Washington State Initiative 638, which keeps boys out of girls sports.
- 1:34:56Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: So we're encouraging a yes vote on all three Washington State Initiatives, 645, 001, and 638.
- 1:35:02Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Yeah, tell your friends.
- 1:35:04Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And tell your friends.
- 1:35:05Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And we have an extensive discussion on Evolutionary Lens 347.
- 1:35:11Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: All right, so we are done.
- 1:35:14Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We're done.
- 1:35:15Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: We'll be back next Tuesday instead of Wednesday.
- 1:35:18Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And Bret's gonna have his Patreon calls this weekend.
- 1:35:21Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Check out our sponsors this week, which were BUBS Naturals, Mars Men, and Helix.
- 1:35:28Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And also join our Locals to see Q&A's, access the Discord server, watch parties, all of that.
- 1:35:37Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: And until you see us next time, may go to the ones you love, eat real food, and get outside.
- 1:35:44Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: Be well, everyone.
- 1:35:54Madagascar, published in 2002, Antipode: (Upbeat Music)