Ask Dr. Drew - In March 2020, This Cognitive Scientist Predicted COVID-19 Hysteria & Social Contagion. How Did Mark Changizi Know? – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 259

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Mark Changizi tried to warn us. “The moral of coronavirus19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than biological contagion,” the cognitive scientist wrote… on MARCH 17, 2020. Before the world was consumed by COVID-19 fears, lockdowns, mask mandates, or mRNA, how did Changizi know what was ahead – and can we reverse the damage? “Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear,” wrote Changizi on April 27, 2020. In May 2020, he continued to sound the alarm about the increasing panic, writing that “The COVID19 hysteria will not go away easily. A mistaken narrative got created, and will be VERY difficult to correct.” To this day, he continues to warn against the madness of crowds, especially when driven by fear instead of science. “Hysteria kills,” says Changizi. “The interventions didn’t slow transmission. And only had harms. Including excess deaths.” Mark Changizi is a Theoretical Cognitive Scientist & Founder of FreeX. He received degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Virginia, and his PhD in math from the University of Maryland. In 2002 he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech. He is the author of multiple books including Expressly Human: Decoding The Language Of Emotions, and appears regularly on TV shows including Discovery Channel’s Head Games and National Geographic’s Brain Games. He has more than three dozen scientific journal articles, covered in thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. Find more at https://changizi.com and https://youtube.com/c/markchangizi. Follow Mark Changizi at https://x.com/markchangizi 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • COZY EARTH - Say goodbye to hot, restless nights with soft, temperature-regulating bedding from Cozy Earth. Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW at checkout to save 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PRIMAL LIFE - Dr. Drew recommends Primal Life's 100% natural dental products to improve your mouth. Get a sparkling smile by using natural teeth whitener without harsh chemicals. For a limited time, get 60% off at https://drdrew.com/primal • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT the SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

those of you that were listening to that run-up that was harvey reish a year ago uh and things have only gotten more confusing we bring another scientist in today who is a cognitive scientist mark chankisi and uh he will help us elucidate why there are such distortions what happened to us caleb is particularly excited about today's show He's pulled a bunch of Mark's tweets from four years, three years ago, four years ago, where he was already ahead of the curve in terms of calling out what was going on at that time. Mark wrote in March of 2020, the moral of coronavirus 19 will be that social contagion via social networks is more dangerous than the biological contagion itself we'll explore that and more thoughts on what has happened to us after this our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre the psychopaths start

this right he was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction. Fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f***'s sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time.

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from whatever life throws at you next. Go to drdrew.com slash TWC. That is D-R-D-R-E-W dot com forward slash TWC to get 10% off today. Just click on that link. So as I said, my guest today is Mark Cianchese. Let's talk about that emergency kit. Oh, I talked about it yesterday. I really am excited about that kit. It's particularly if you're somebody traveling uh that this is exactly the i wish i thought of some of the things in the kit when i send people off on the road particularly if they're going uh to asia or africa this this is an excellent combination that covers just about

everything you could possibly need or if you can't get to a doctor on a weekend or a holiday it is an also if you go to drdrew.com slash twc you'll also land on the natokinase page if you need to update your natokinase. Got it. I wish I'd thought of that before, that kit, because if I thought of something that I would prepare my patients with, it would look exactly like that. Very exciting. Speaking of natokinase, I had another friend. I'm not going to say names just yet, but somebody, you know, Susan, another friend with a peripheral neuropathy because of the vaccine. And he has gone so far as going to Mayo Clinic and there they confirmed this is a vaccine injury,

but we can't talk about it. So with that in mind, let's bring Mark in here. Mark is a theoretical cognitive scientist. I'm going to read you his extraordinary pedigree uh science a founder of free x he received degrees in physics and mathematics from uva phd in math from university of maryland 2002 the sloan schwartz award in theoretical neurobiology at caltech author of multiple books including expressly human decoding the Language of Emotions, CM on Discovery Channel, Head Games, National Geographic's Brain Games, more than three dozen scientific journal articles covering thousands of newspaper and magazine articles as well.

Mark, welcome to the program. Great to be here. Mark, am I pronouncing, let's get this out of the way right away, am I pronouncing your last name correctly? Changizi. It's actually Changiz Khan. It's the word for Genghis Khan. It's Persian for Genghis Khan.

Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I won't go down that road to hear what that's all about, but so be it. No relation. So, you know, you heard me frame this conversation i i want to sort of maybe start out at a distance and come in to focus uh you know i was just before you came on i was reading a headline by miralou juiced do you know who that is maybe did i get to him through you he uh he was an early uh writer about these uh issues let me see it was a long time ago he wrote

the rape of the mind uh he's a psychoanalyst and uh his whole thing was about mass formation and brainwashing the rape of the mind. And he goes through so many of the, I mean, it looks to me like the first thorough run through of what we've just been through. What have we been through? What happened to us? What set us up for this? How did you know early and often that this was a problem? Yeah, I don't think there was necessarily something that set it set us up for, you know, Desmond is often talking about

that there are certain kinds of preconditions for mass formation, or, you know, mass hysteria. And I don't think that anything needs to be specifically wrong or some kind of state that has to be there. This is just a kind of viral virality. And all of us are familiar with virality in the sense that we're all on social media. And if you're on Twitter, you you know how it works. And it's very rare for your ideas to go viral. It happens very, very rarely, mostly you have, you know, stuff that doesn't go anywhere, but every once in a while, one out of a thousand might suddenly be, you know, a million

times more impressions than other times. And so all of the time in societies, there are ideas that are being batted about and PR companies and marketing companies are trying to be louder and pick the right idea that will spread through. But certain kinds of ideas are potentially more likely to spread through. And those are notions of infectiousness, anything that's fearful generally. But things that are infectious, we have a particular fear of that makes us want to react and shun other humans. And it becomes a very socially divisive. It's sort of I call it the nuclear bomb of societal destruction in some sense, because not only are you afraid. So, for example, if it was a bunch of locusts coming to the town and we all had to fight the locusts because they're going to eat our fields,

we would all band together and sort of kill the locusts. But when the threat is this invisible contagion that could be asymptomatically in him and her all around you, it's utterly divisive and it taps in to sort of cooties instincts that we all have. Cooties, for those that don't use that word anymore, cooties is the kind of thing that kids, when you're in elementary school,

they say, oh, Judy's got cooties. Run from her. She's going to give you cooties. That's a very ingrained notion that humans have. Something that's pussy on the ground, if you touch it and it gets into your mouth or nose or maybe your eyes, you're infected. have. Something that's pussy on the ground, if you touch it, and it gets into your mouth or nose, or maybe your eyes, you're infected. And once you're infected, it's potentially life

changing. And so a lot of the intuitions that people have about COVID, which which was a respiratory virus, and it floats in the air and like an aerosol. A lot of our intuitions for why we did what we did were driven by our instincts for goopy like cootie stuff, right? Masks work for goopy, cooties like stuff. Right. And so that's, and so that's the people's intuitions that has to

block that kind of thing, for example. And they, because they don't know about the engine the engineering of aerosols that's that's something invisible and that's something that plays at that that more primitive emotion right so we don't have any good intuitions instinctually with this idea that are these just floating aerosols this can hang in the room for a couple days um we don't have any instincts for that at all so people no, no matter how many times you explain to them, they feel as if putting something over their mouth and nose or being separated two meters, well, that's sensible. Goop pretty much isn't going to hit you if you're about two meters away. So I have this, you know,

in my Science Moments series at YouTube and at Green Rumble, I have this sort of 20-minute video where I walk through a, a couple dozen kinds of intuitive, crazy beliefs COVID cult has that all sort of follow from these kinds of intuitions, instinctual intuitions about goopy cooties like stuff, but don't in fact apply to the actual scenario with a respiratory virus. So I, I certainly get the instinct around infectivity and disgust those are extremely powerful really you've used you use three different words you said feeling intuition and emotion and those are i think three different things but they do kind of overlap in the sense

that it is a very primitive deep sort of a reactivity that's automated automatic comes out of our body we pull away we are disgusted we you know change our locomotion quite literally in response to things like infecting agents that makes sense to me however but it's well yeah and go ahead but i'll let you fall but the reason i was going to whenever they're uh righteous communities that for which outgroups of all, people that are not in on the community, they're against that community, they don't believe in it, or they're deniers or whatever it might be, invariably what the community selects for in terms of how to think about the outgroup is that infectious metaphors end up being selected for in that community. Those are the things that work in terms of making them further out, outing the out group even further, making sure that people don't even hang out with them. They further distance them. So if you're not wearing your headscarf, right, in Iran, you are treated as potentially infectious

to society. You are a whore and your kind of behavior is going to infect the men and the women and society is going to spiral downhill. If Jews in Nazi Germany were the metaphors about Jews were steeped in infectious and virus and bacterial kinds of talk. Right. right always dirty elected for all this kind of dirty unclean infectious gets selected for the middle class upper middle class educated people in the cultural revolution China the same way it always ends up in this case it happened to be a virus or perceived altogether novel disproportionately dangerous virus but that in some sense is it was irrelevant what was relevant was that there were some who stood up and said look I don't think this is altogether novel and disproportionately, you're a denier, right? You were suddenly a denier. And then the notion of who was in the out group changed over time. The anti-vaxxers or anybody argued against the mandates over time became those in the out group. But the in group would evolve certain kinds of notions

of how to think about them. And of course, infectiousness, of course, happens even when there's nothing infectious. So of course, it happens when there actually is potentially something infectious. Yeah. When I think about words like sin, they're just sort of these sort of large brushes to paint over somebody bad. But when you start talking about a denier, they are impure. They're not a believer. They're somehow adulterated.

Words like that come in very quickly. So, Caleb, put that up there, what you just wrote, what you just put up that Mark had written in a tweet three years ago. Lockdowns were not common sense. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. This is another word we're using now with hysteria. Is that something you want to defend? Or is that all the same thing? Well, what hysteria in this context is remains mass hysteria. It means group or collective irrationality. The

individuals in a mass hysteria are not hysterical. In a mass psychosis, collective psychosis, they're not psychotic. The whole point of putting the word mass or group or collective in front is that the hystericalness or the psychosis or the craziness comes at the level of the group. Individually, you can argue with any of these individuals all day long, and there's nothing wrong with their brains. They're super rational, they were arguing you in circles, right? They just forever, they're going to argue around and around, you're not going to get anywhere because

their brains are perfectly fine. The illness is at the level of the group. What happens when there are this is as a cognitive scientist, but my background is sort of emergent systems, complex phenomena. And as a cognitive scientist, but my background is sort of emergent systems, complex phenomena, and as a physicist mathematician, we get good at understanding selection processes as how large scale networks select for certain kinds of things or evolve to have certain kinds of structures over time.

And so, you know, that's the kind of way that I approach all of these sorts of things, but let me just pause there. Don't keep going. You brought up a large topic of emergent symptoms. So this was an emergent phenomenon, this mass formation, so to speak. Right. Yeah. There's a little bit of fear in the beginning, but it's not like they're

running around panicked, screaming the entire time. But what happens is that under normal circumstances, I sit in my network of social relations of various kinds. Some of my social relations in the relevant sense is Dr. Drew on TV, who I didn't used to know, and some of them are actual people that I know. And I kind of get independent judgments from those folks. And so 99.99% of what I believe, I believe on the basis of the higher reputation folks around me saying stuff, right? As a scientist, maybe I've got 15

things that I know, because I actually did the t tests or the statistical out the rest I know, just like everybody else, because I was told by high reputation folks, or by varieties of in seemingly independent, high reputation folks in my network. But when something like this occurs, and it becomes super viral, and suddenly I'm hearing something extremely strange, and it doesn't just happen at once, it happens slowly, well, this is super, well, I think it's all together, and it's all starts to beat as one and you

can suddenly hear something that's in the app, it were not that 400 of your high reputation contacts were saying it, you would never believe it. But now you seemingly have all of these independent judgments from high reputation people saying something utterly crazy. But you're going to believe it. And I would have believed that if I was sitting in the network, I've always sort of maintain a level of aloofness, because as a scientist and a theorist, I'm always wanting to remain aloof. So I'm not caught up in these

sorts of minor or major hysterias. So that was one potential reason why I think I was insulated. But I would definitely have believed just like everybody else believed that it was altogether novel. And every single thing that we always understood about respiratory viruses was thrown out the window. It was as if we had zero prior or a complete uniform baseline on all of the knowledge that we ever have in terms of seasonality.

What seasonality? No, COVID doesn't have any seasonality. It can hit you at any time. Does it harm pretty much all people? No, everybody is equally at risk. Every single thing that we knew about respiratory viruses, about flu, and coronaviruses was presumed to not be known anymore. And once you're in a situation like that, you will start to believe things that you wouldn't

otherwise believe, right? And it might take years and years to develop the same kind of confidence in hypotheses that you should have believed from the beginning. and yet that kind of thing continues until this day uh as well as a fear of anyone popping up and wanting to examine things it does not feel like the same thing as an emergent uh i'm thinking about fireflies that start to you know light up together you know these emergent properties that occur in nature right It doesn't feel like that. It has a weird artificial feel to it, as though there's some authority structure in it that these people have gotten caught up in and are the little army that act out on anyone who is impure, denier, sinful, whatever those words are.

Right. Well, I mean, they definitely do, but you don't need a centralized cabal to explain this. In social networks like this, narratives form over time. In some sense, if you imagine that you're, in fact, it's a lot like blockchain. Blockchain is a very technical sounding thing, but it's the way that cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, works. The whole point of Bitcoin is that there is no centralized ledger or list saying that, hey, Mark just gave Bitcoin to Dr. Drew. It's not in any centralized list. Instead, it's distributed

across the network so that I can't say, no, I never gave anything to Dr. Drew, but it's distributed in such a way in the minds or in the computers across the world. The same thing happens for social reputation. When people are struggling with this new kinds of idea, like COVID is altogether novel, disproportionately dangerous, these things, and all the time this is happening, not just in these mass hysterias. This week, amongst your friends, maybe Doug got into an argument with Judy and Doug was being a real douchebag. And then it'll spread around. Yeah, Doug was being a real douche. It turns out Judy was right. So what a jerk, you know, Doug was a real jerk, right? That'll get added. And then

it'll be sort of, and that's just like Doug, because Doug is only always doing that. And then it'll be added this piece of sort of new gossip to the existing history of gossip about how Doug and Judy typically behave in the environment. And so that record of Doug losing social reputation and potentially Judy raising social reputation because of that interaction is spread across the community in all of our heads because we are all keeping track of the gossip. So and in fact, it's really hard to change that history in the same ways that blockchain

is impossible to fake. And I won't get into the mathematical details, but it has a lot of the same properties for why you can't go back and create a new blockchain claiming that everybody gave me Bitcoin. You can't do that because one, it's in the heads of everybody, so it's distributed. And two, there's these mathematical properties that make it impossible to create a new story that explains all of the other stuff is computationally too hard. So once these narratives happen, they are almost impossible to displace. And on the one hand, that's good because you want the networks to keep track of who is high reputation and who's low. Otherwise, free expression wouldn't work. The way that free

expression works in terms of us slowly moving over time towards the truth, is that the network keeps track of who's typically saying smart things and who's typically saying dumb things. And that allows these different reputations to rise and fall, and it's distributed and decentralized. But the downside is that if it absorbs or creates a really suite of really irrational ideas, those irrational ideas will hang around potentially

until the next generation displaces them. The next generation. So are we stuck with some of these? Certainly that happens in science all the time, right? You're just waiting for the guys and gals to die before the revolution can happen. Yeah, that is true. Speaking of science, that always has been has been to me the other buffer against

these sorts of phenomenon right as you said you yourself try to stay above it use rational thought use scientific methodology uh looking at the numbers even if you have them and as you said everything got thrown out of the out the window all All priors got there. It's like a complete absence of any Bayesian thought process, complete absence from history and knowledge. And a large body of people that are engaging in this distributed reaction, I guess we would call it, that have no no ability that seem to not understand the scientific methodology of how that works. So they, they have deep faith in their biases and deep faith in this distributed information. Is that all accurate? Yeah, but it's not because they're suddenly reasoning differently. It really was the case that suddenly from March of 2020

to July, there was probably 100 observational studies that appeared out of nowhere, so to speak, saying that masks worked, right? Really crappy, poorly done observational studies everywhere popping up suddenly justifying why masks suddenly were the science, even though they weren't before. And the problem is that...

So in the normal sense, they're able to look at, hey, the studies show this, at least the observational studies show this, which is how we all typically argue things. But what's the deeper thing that's going on is that in March, in April, when almost nobody was wearing masks, right? It wasn't even advised by Team COVID. If you were a true sort of COVID zero sort of person, you might be masking, right? Virtue membership signals within a righteous community work when they're either some arbitrary weird thing that you can show or say or display. That's the arbitrary because you don't want other people to accidentally be doing it. Or it has to be a little bit irrational or annoying or something about it that otherwise

everybody would just do it if it was a good idea, right? So it served as a really good membership signal. Those that wore masks were displaying, I care. I care more than all the other people who aren't wearing it. Right? So, over time, it starts to be spreading as a good membership signal. I'm a good person. I'm a good person. But it doesn't typically stop there. Once you have a membership signals for a righteous community, people will start coming up with justifications for why those membership signals aren't just membership signals, but they themselves are good, virtuous, helpful. This happens even for simple things like simple groups in a city.

You might have the Lululemon ladies in one part of town that just wear Lululemons when they go out. They kind of are sort of slightly nicer than sweatpants kind of look. And then you've got other parts of town where they always dress up and they do their nails and they're always looking like they're going out. And each one has negative things to say about the other community. And they often, and at first, it just starts as a membership signal. Well, that's, you know, she's Lululemon, she lives in that neighborhood. But it never, and I, you know, we're the, and so the Lululemon girls, ladies will say, start to come up with just, the magazines will say, well, it's actually a lot better for your skin. You wear those because you can breathe more. And then suddenly there will be narratives that will include not just that it distinguishes these two groups,

but the things that distinguish them will be justified or selected for. Ideas that people come up with that justify why it's not a mere membership signal, but it's actually a sign of being good will get selected for and spread through the crowd and become believed. And there'll be good arguments typically, pretty good arguments, because otherwise they wouldn't spread very well. They'll be reasonably argued. They're not going to be terrible. That's what happened across the earth in terms of masks and how masks went from bunk to the science in just two months.

To understand all these processes, you really have to understand these kinds of psychosocial dynamics is my claim since the start. Do you make anything of this? You mentioned something that I've made note of too, this, the I care thing. I understand that it's a signal for I'm good, but this is the first time I've seen grandiose caring as, as a, something as a label that was constantly brought up about somebody who is in the in group i mean are you sure like we're pretty close in age our whole life you know i'm a libertarian my whole life was arguing to the extent that i engage in political arguments it was mostly with socialists and socialists are constantly saying how they're better than me how they care more than

me it's the standard um you know so we should be used to this right you know what so so it might be that we have we don't have not historically had a lot of socialists here and you're right we do have a lot now and that may be as simple as that, that it's some sort of epiphenomenon related to that movement, really. Well, I mean, I'm not I'm I'm fairly convinced that every righteous movement usually comes up with narratives that suggest that their behaviors and actions are such that the society, as they understand it, is better off. Pol Pot, as he was, you know, emptying the cities and sending them out to the villages and 2 million people died or whatever in just a very short period of time, believed he cared more.

He cared so much that he was going to do such extreme things to show how much he cared. I think all of these things are going to have notions and just justified on the basis of how much they care more than you. These things have been a recurring phenomenon through history. Have they not? Yeah, this is just another case, but the difference is we were connected to the internet one whole earth.

So it suddenly became spread everywhere would you be willing to take a couple calls if people are interested in asking you questions yeah all right let's do this i still have some more questions i i want to talk a little more on the the freedom front a little bit with you and i also want to uh dig into something you glossed over very quickly just if you can give us a little more on you. And I also want to dig into something you glossed over very quickly. Just if you can give us a little more on you were talking about emergent phenomenon and how it's computation.

No, you were talking about Bitcoin and how it's computationally too hard to describe why a new system can't emerge. I was just a little curious about that. If we can do a little sketch on that to help us understand that a little better. Does that sound okay? You're saying right now? Or are you going to say there's something that I get to ask a question later?

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the ones the sonic cares you know they get all full of it's got a smooth brush and it doesn't get all caked up that's what i love about it i have not also the brush is really cool i like made out of charcoal brushes yes it's lovely and i i would i wouldn't know about the getting caked up because somebody stole mine i never had a chance to find out if that's how it works i also like their tongue scraper before we uh bring mark back i want to remind people that are listening to twitter spaces that uh you you can raise your hand and I'll bring you up. I see some requests for questions there. And make sure you unmute the microphone in the lower left-hand corner of your screen.

But just raise your hand. You push the mic button there to be seen. Here's a little Caleb's cartoon about how this works. So Mark, before the break, we were talking about. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, there was something that you had mentioned earlier earlier, and I thought it might be more interesting to talk about the release dimension is that it's important that we stay evidence based and behave like scientists on this. And, you know, I've struggled with that. Of course, I've often argued against the supposed science on masks, saying they don't work, the lockdowns wouldn't work, that one of the things you

showed was this 15-tweet thread, and arguing against the science that was put forth. But here's the problem with that. The problem is that, suppose that suddenly next week they come up with a mask that actually works. Right? Then I've spent all of us have spent three years arguing that masks don't work and we were right. But then suddenly they come up with a mask that works and they go, okay, now what's your counter argument? Now we can still say, well, there's still all these downsides and you haven't done a

full cost benefit analysis. They go, aha, we have done a cost benefit analysis and it turns out, and they've just, they've dotted their T's and they've done everything. They've handled 25 possible downsides and they've handled it all. Now, what are you going to say then? The answer. I'm going to say, wear masks. I'm going to say, wear a mask.

That's right. And they said, well, I mean, I wouldn't say that. So my argument is like, no, I, I'm, I'm not going to wear a mask because you don't have the right to tell me to cover up my face. We have civil liberties and it is up for individuals. Just because you believe there's a perceived emergency doesn't justify you violating civil liberties in mass. And if you start down the path of just poking holes in their evidence,

then if suddenly they can actually get good evidence for these new draconian interventions justified by perceived emergencies, well, you've implicitly in some sense admitted that it would be okay. And my main driver that I've, I mean, in addition to arguing sort of the psychosocial phenomena is that, no, what matters? So back to Pol Pot, I could have argued at the time to Pol Pot who's emptying the cities and sending people out to villages, I could say, Pol Pot, I had a whole group of folks

and we did a cost benefit analysis about whether this is in fact good for society based on even your standards or our shared standards and in fact, it will actually be worse. There's going to be more whatever and it's going to be much, much, much worse. We did all of these careful RCTs to ensure that no, none of that matters, right? You don't have the right, Mr. Pot, to empty the cities for your ingenious scheme to save the world, right? You don't have the right, Mr. Pott, to empty the cities for your ingenious scheme to save the world, right? The same is true for all of these. And so, I often think the central point has to be that emergencies don't justify civil liberties violations. Civil liberties are for the emergencies. It's just like free speech. When people talk about free

speech, okay, you should have free speech except when people start saying things you don't like. No, that's exactly why we have free speech. We have civil liberties. We have the freedom to do certain kinds of things that we're all free to do. Not when no one gives a crap that I'm doing them. What matters is when suddenly someone has some claim that, oh, they're violating the good. That's when civil liberties matter. And that's when the card is brought out saying, oh, they're violating the good, that's when civil liberties matter. And that's when the card is brought out saying, no, I've got this civil liberties. Otherwise it doesn't matter

because no one's ever questioning my civil liberties. They're only questioning it when there are perceived emergencies. And so we have to take away this notion that emergencies justify civil liberties violations, because not only are they for the emergencies, our greatest emergencies are civil liberties violations, because not only are they for the emergencies, our greatest emergencies are civil liberties violations, right? There are no greater emergencies that have occurred throughout history than when governments claim that we have to violate civil liberties en masse.

That is quickly, a couple steps later, is how you get crimes against humanity and democides and genocides. And it's a positive feedback loop. Once they start violating civil liberties in mass, well, they invariably mess things up and cause emergencies, real emergencies, right? Which justifies violating civil liberties in mass. And so, you know, it's a positive feedback loop, right? And finally, just on this thing, you don't even have to talk to emergencies. Emergencies are always there.

There's always some bloke or some gal, some four blokes or gals that need your four healthy organs. Metaphorically, at all times, there are real emergencies. The government doesn't have to concoct one. They're always there in that sense. What's that, Caleb? Is that you? I have a question that's actually related to that I actually have a lot of questions if you have a chance for me to ask but it's related let me just

very quick and yeah I will give that to you in one second like it's just that we we have now I feel like we've gone to a different topic or landscape of topics which is essentially philosophical for which there may be evidence but it's sort of at its core philosophical which is that none of this matters if these core philosophical phenomenon are aren't respected or are violated and and you can justify that by looking at history but we're really aren't we now talking philosophy at this point? I mean, we are certainly one can still take the viewpoint that although the civil liberties violations wouldn't be justified. Once a government decides, here's the best thing that we can do. And what makes somebody smart if your public policy folks is not, hey, let's see if we

can mandate people to do this. Let's force them at gunpoint to do that. No, the question is what kinds of incentives or what kinds of structure or what kinds of things can we have people voluntarily do that will tend to lead to the kinds of processes? Those are the where clever people are needed, right? Not just saying, hey, let's force people to do this. Right. I mean, that's where we always were. I mean, I, I listen,

I was very active during the AIDS pandemic and we had a clear discipline about how to change these very difficult to change behaviors. Uh, we had a relatable source. We had, uh, cases, you know, people telling their story where they made the wrong choice, music, humor, narratives, relatable sources that change health behavior, particularly of young people. Difficult to change group, difficult behavior to change. That was one of the many things we threw out the window when we arrived at the coronavirus pandemic. Suddenly, coercion and mandate became the way you change people's behavior, which was shocking to any of us that have worked in changing health behaviors. Caleb, you want to ask a question?

Yes. Yeah. So this is kind of connected to the same topic that you guys are talking about right now. I was just thinking about one of the prevailing theories that's happening right now about the pandemic is that somehow the pandemic itself is connected to this belief in a like a cabal cult of global elites who know or at least assume that they know something about overpopulation's threat to humanity that they believe would be too terrifying to reveal to the rest of us and so the idea with this theory is that these people are so convinced that in order to save humankind that they must cull our numbers with these mass death events that wipe out the old and the sick and then upgrade the survivors with mrna to save the species right let's call this the let's call this the oy vey theory right

exactly is there it's it's it's growing because it's it's a way of explaining versions of this including i know and it's it's it's again it's paranoid but but the it's also heard there's a correlator to that people go well the mrna vaccine is a way of testing who is pliable who who we can you know who we actually will be able to get to comply with our wishes but go ahead mark you can right well so but but my question is that let's and i hate hypotheticals but like if we are assuming let's assume for a is that let's, and I hate hypotheticals, but like, if we are assuming, let's assume for a minute that that's true, would these people have any ethical standing at all to keep the rest of us in the dark about what's really happening?

If they're convinced this is the only way to save humanity, they, there's no way they're going to convince everybody lightly. So now they have to trick us basically. Why don't we just say the different, the different more. Go ahead. so now they have to trick us basically why are we asking the different more go ahead well yeah i mean you're asking suppose it's true which i don't at all think it's true i think it's totally not you're saying that then would we have what the ethical the are they ethically justified are you claiming or what was the right that's that's my question because it's hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of the details of this if everyone is like for the group of people that are convinced this was intentional this wasn't from nature that

there's an intentional thing happening the fastest and seems like the most efficient way of solving it is there's a group of people that know something bad is coming and they're doing this for a reason and about overpopulation they've been talking about that for decades this is mark this is goes right at your witch hunt phenomenon. So you know, he has a whole thing about this. Go ahead and describe where witches come from. Oh, I'm not sure. Just to be clear, what are you referring to? Because there's sort of there's that doesn't uniquely

determine where I'm Yeah, I've seen you I've seen you do videos where you talk about when people are scared people look around for something to explain what's happening, to control it. Okay, just to make sense of it. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And this is also even where I think the notion of a devil even itself

read as there's two kinds of evil in the world. And one is criminal level evil that we all sort of, you know, like, oh, I'd love to have more stuff. If I was to steal stuff, I'd have more stuff. And sort of we get that. Criminals do stuff that we kind of understand that they're just achieving, you know, gaining power or sex or money or whatever it is. Societal level evil isn't, in fact, like that. But what people want to do for societal level, and I mean the large scale events that lead to great crimes,

of course there's some smattering of criminal level behavior. Someone might be doing CYA or covering things up. But for the most part, it's not driven by that. It's driven by well-intentioned large groups who act in unison in various kinds of ways. And they're truly well-intentioned but people don't get that because they're not used to a normal life thinking about that way so when they

look for who could have done all of these things that seem to be that they're all coordinated right but the problem is that this kind of seeming coordination there's their natural reaction saying if it's seeming coordination there has has to be a coordinator. And these people are the criminals, they're like criminal level behavior that we all understand, they're doing it for more money, for more power, or for you know, greed kinds of reasons. That is not what's happening at these at these scales. What happened the reason that you have seeming coordination, the only way you can get seeming coordination at these scales is through emergent phenomena. You can't possibly get these kinds of coordinated activities from multiple, from dozens and dozens of government, millions, billions of folks all beating as one that we have to do

zero COVID. This doesn't happen by virtue of a centralized cabal. But the regular, normal human way of thinking, unless you've spent years thinking about emergent phenomena and evolutionary kinds of selection processes, these are not simple things that you have intuitions where instead you're saying oh there's a cabal that must have done this right so I'm constantly arguing in addition to arguing it's a lockdown errs in the authoritarian I'm trying to argue against my own side who in struggling using your normal intuitions for what the heck could have done this they're grasping at

these these kinds of theories, none of which are in fact real. Now, they're really there are lots of bad guys. They're all leveraging the situation. They're not bad guys in the sense that they're purposely doing evil, you know, and they're by their own intent, but they're utilizing the situation because they think that the world would be better if we had more centralized control. The world would be better if we censored, you know, censored misinformation. And they all think that that doing that would be better if we had more centralized control, the world would be better if we censored misinformation. They all think that that would make a better world and they're wrong, and they're evil for doing that because they're

violating certain principles that you have to follow to be a good person. These are the things that I'm often arguing against, but there is no centralized cabal that has had this plan for 20 years, and that's a deep human fallacy to think so. And so that's just, it's basically just our brains trying to form a construct of rationalizing what's happening and trying to blame it on one source when it's probably, you know, hundreds of different sources and everyone's taking advantage of a situation. That's right. And it's like a Ouija board.

Right. Or it's like Bitcoin. But like another thing, an intuition is Ouija board. Even with four people playing Ouija board, you've Or it's like Bitcoin. But another thing, an intuition is Ouija board. Even with four people playing Ouija board, you've got eight hands when you're playing Ouija board. It's a little spooky sometimes, especially getting that mood that you're communicating with some dead person.

But you often don't really have no... Sometimes maybe one person sort of takes, is a little bit bossy and they might make... But usually no one's being bossy when it works well. But imagine you've got a million hands of varying sizes. Some are pushier hands, it's like the WHO. And some are, you know, there's all different, but it's all happening at once. You're still just like when we play Ouija board, going to imagine that, oh, it was this, you know, it was this dead guy that he was actually moving it.

That's what you want to be able to say. There's some, but it wasn't right right right and so i'm guessing it's you know in a roundabout way the answer to that is that there is no they have no moral standing like even if that theory you know hypothetical that i i said earlier even in that case it's not right they it they we have civil liberties is that what you're saying there's no instance here sure because it's like, right. Well, let me ask it a little more globally. They're wrong.

Which is there's this new phenomenon I have seen and have been subjected to that sort of I sort of put under the title of you can't handle the truth. You know, you're not allowed you how dare you platform somebody how dare you speak to that person how dare you allow them to to give their opinion this this this is the craziest thing i've in my of my lifetime this is the number one crazy thing that i i've seen through covet which is this this feeling that because i don't agree with or like what somebody is saying they must be silenced anybody that speaks to them

should be silenced anybody that talks it's just the oddest thing in the world to me but it sort of goes under the the the intuition of people can't handle the truth what is that where'd that come from do you have any idea well i mean this isn't new, right? Even in college, I remember, you know, conservative speakers were coming and they were being shouted down. This is 1988, right? This is a long history. And of course, it ramped up, it got worse in the 2000s and 2000s. We've seen this for a long time. What people seem to think is that it's a privilege to let somebody speak. It isn't a privilege to speak. It is it is you're putting reputation at stake. It's it's it's you're you're potentially putting yourself at risk when

you speak. So for example, suppose that I don't like you. And we're playing poker and you come up and ask to play. I say No, I don't I don't want you to play. No, I might want to play because I want to take your money because I don't like you. And this is what happens in the debates and discussions in the public square when there are folks that I disagree with and I think I'm right and I think I can argue them under the table. I want them to come onto the playing field because I'm going to be able to show everybody how wrong they are. They will lose social reputation. Those chips will come over to me, I will take them, right? You it is a liability. So to have free

speech is a liability, you are risking social capital every time you speak. In fact, our emotional expressions evolved for this, the more that I'm confident, when I'm arguing with you, or the more that I'm disdainful of your, you know, of how confident you claim to be, I say, No, you're not. Both of those push more chips on the table. So that if it turns out that I'm wrong, I lose a lot more. If instead, I'm not very, you know, I show humility, I'm not really sure, Dr. Drew, or I

say, like, you're, you seem to be making a really good point. So maybe you're right, then if it turns out, you're right, I'm not gonna lose that much. All of our emotional expressions are all about modulating this kind of poker game that we're playing with social capital. So you don't want to stop people that you disagree with from speaking. You want to use this as an opportunity to humiliate them. Right. This is I just did a science moment last week, just two days ago. Cancellation versus humiliation.

It kind of feels like a similar kind of thing, but it's not. Cancellation is about taking someone's voice out of the public square. You're trying to prevent that voice or that idea from ever being discussed. Humiliation, suppose that I win an argument with you, I want that argument and my counter argument to be everywhere because the only way that he can really lose reputation and me gain it is that everybody across the network has to know. Otherwise, it's just some secret on DMs, right? Humiliation is consistent. In fact, it's part and parcel. It's part of the very functioning of free expression and how it moves towards the truth. We need these reputations to rise and fall in a functioning manner. That's how free expression works. And humiliation,

on the other side, glory of having won, been right, are key parts of that mechanism. So why would you want to stop your enemies from speaking? You want them to humiliate themselves. Humiliation does not feel as crowd-like, crowd-satisfying. Cancellation is more scapegoating,illotines silencing heads on spikes that's more crowd behavior humiliation feels a little more although it's humiliation before the crowd the humiliation has to be done by someone the humiliating argument humiliating so it's it's it's a little different and i feel like we've been in this thing

where the gratification of being part of these out of control mad crowds has been part of the story and so cancellation becomes more gratifying and certainly easier you just sweep into the crowd right I think you're right but don't underestimate the power of humiliation I agree it's not like usually it's not a crowd winning an argument against a single individual per se. It's usually more a mano a mano. But crowds love, this is what gossip is all about. The only reason you gossip with people is to figure out who raised and lowered in some very abstract sense, who raised and who lowered in reputation this week amongst your friends. And you're gossiping constantly about that because you're always trying to keep track.

Instinctually, you want to keep track of whose reputations went up and down. When there's a boxing match or a mixed martial arts match, they put the two fighters on stage and they each know we need to start trash talking in front of a crowd. We need to look like we hate each other. We don't want to say, oh, I'm going to have a fight and I really respect him. Oh, I'm going to fight and I really respect him. No, they want to to look like we hate each other. We know we don't want to say, Oh, I'm gonna have a fight. And I really respect him. Oh, I'm gonna find a really good No, they want to see that they trash talk each other. They either were overly confident or overly disdainful. So now you could

just all these chips just got piled up onto the table, right? And now people are excited. Oh, my God, someone's gonna lose all these chips are going to be so humiliated. That's why we watch. In fact, we're willing to even just listen to the radio, just because we want that moment we go, Oh, man, oh yeah, oh, that's so humiliating, right? Or embarrassing or oh man, that sucks, face or whatever the kinds of things we say. We relish in watching those chips get pushed off the table from one, off the table to one side. A couple of times you've glossed past the idea that the the the emergent system phenomenon is not a common intuition that

people have, and that it's to describe it as computationally difficult. Could you give us a little more so we can develop some intuition for that? Well, I mean, about which part in particular? I think I could talk a little bit more about why these social narratives are blockchain-like, but let me just give you a couple similarities. One way that blockchains work in some sense, so that you've got all this history of all transactions, and then there's some new transactions today, and it has to be decided way that blockchains work in some sense, so that you've got all this history of all transactions. And then there's some new transactions today. And it has to be decided which transactions are sort of correct, and then get added to the existing blockchain. And one way to ensure that

people are not being funny about it is that there's a voting kind of process and it's called proof of stake. Those who own more Bitcoin, say, have a greater vote in terms of whether this is a truthful new sequence of things or transactions that occurred this week. Well, proof of stake is just like being in a tribe and those who have higher reputation are the ones that you're more likely to believe in terms of what happened in terms of the last day, in terms of who raised and who lowered in social capital. You're more likely to trust them than the person that has no reputation. So they have a bigger vote in some sense about what really happened. You go, oh, okay, I trust them. So now I realize that Doug lowered in reputation.

Similar kinds of processes. There's another process that happens in blockchain is called proof of work. And in some sense, the group that wants to add the new sequence of transactions that occurred today or whatever, has to do a whole computationally difficult task before they're allowed to do it. It's really computationally difficult, but it's really easy to tell that they've done it. Well, this is the same thing. We have people in communities and tribes that are the gossip queens or kings.

They're just so good at creating stories that summarize not only what happened this week, but sort of connects it up to past things and makes it super explanatory. So like, oh, I get it. Yeah, that just, well, that's what he always does. Oh, that's because he once did like Susie. And so because of that, that totally explains, they come up with these sort of spin narratives that make it a lot easier to remember. And it's really hard to do coming up with highly elegant explanations that add the new gossip to the old gossip chain. But it's really easy to tell when it's done well because you go, oh, I get it.

All right. You can really tell how easy it is to do. So it has the same kinds of mathematical properties in this way as does proof of work. So this is just a couple examples as to how that leads to these social narratives that are highly stable, highly impervious to being mucked with. And that's good because you don't want people to be able to lie about their reputation, but it can also be bad when you have an ill narrative take shape. Caleb, I know you were very excited about Mark coming in today.

I wonder if you have other questions. Yes. Yeah, I actually do. I was just so impressed by going back on your tweets from 2020 and seeing that you've been saying this stuff from pretty much day one. I'm just trying to think of where to begin with my questions. I'm thinking about, so I grew up in a very religious household. Everything was black and white. It was good or evil, and that was it. There's nothing in between. But then when I got older and I left the farm and I started meeting more people, I found that what most people know, everything is a spectrum. And if we actually want to change things in humanity, literally left the farm, literally left the farm, literally moved from the farm to Los Angeles. And now I moved back south. So I spent, you know, 20 years in one, 10 years in the other. So I've seen both sides of this, but it's the thing that I've found is that if we want to make changes to humanity and instead of yelling all these talking points back and forth, then the vital thing is for us to step into the shoes of our

opposition and assume that their intentions are good and then try and fight their distorted worldviews by challenging them on the same ground. And so, uh, right now though, that just kind of feels impossible in a way, because everyone is just fighting from this place of constant anxiety and fear. Like I think about, you know, transgender people, they don't want to go back to being beaten in the streets. So they're not going to budge an inch about bathrooms. Immunocompromised people, they don't want to go back to being stuck indoors all the time. So they want society to keep masking. Conservatives think that if we allow abortions for rape victims today,

then tomorrow there'll be abortions at nine months, when the other side isn't even asking for any of those things, but everyone is acting like people are intentionally evil and must be stopped always at whatever cost. So how do we approach these really complicated minefield topics without the conversation just blowing up all the time? Yeah, I mean, a great question. I mean, I certainly try my best to do that.

The way that I feel like to the extent that I feel like I've done better than some that I see around me is that I've always tried to remain, again, aloof. I've tried not to... Sometimes where I see the greatest anger are the folks that have decided that they are on the right and they identify as on the right or they identify as a Trumper or as a DeSantis person. And right now on the right, they're constantly like basically throwing little Molotov cocktails at each other constantly. They like hate each other, right? Right. I've never gotten to the point where I'm on left or right, much less within the right, you know, and right now I'm more associated with the right because they happen to be on

the, you know, on the Liberty side on this COVID stuff. Right. So I just kind of having a level of aloofness. So I'm hated by the left because that's associated with the lockdowners, but now I'm hated by the right because, and I'm sure there's tons of people, oh, Mark, he's a total shill, because he doesn't think that and there's 12 different plan damn it kind of these crazy ideas. They're all different. But you know, they're all of these. He doesn't believe there's

a centralized cabal. He's controlled opposition, right? And so they hate me as well. And I you know, I'm more pro choice or like, I'm not really either. I think it's 10 or eight weeks somewhere around there. I don't know what the right it's a fuzzy. There's no way there's no right thing it ain't one day and it ain't eight and it ain't eight and a half months either and um so i'm not really either uh so trying to maintain yourself out from these righteous groups allows you i believe to keep a clear head and uh you then can be hated by everybody.

Right. But how do you have... True, true. Actually, there's some truth to this. It's true. I mean, I guess if you're going to be correct, you're going to be hated by half and half of both sides, the half extremes of both sides. So you're in somewhere in the middle. That seems to be the problem a lot with this show as well, is that Drew has very nuanced

views. Both sides don't like that. The extreme and loud people on both sides do not like that. And something that I've learned after my wife actually taught me this, I've learned some things after being with her for almost over a decade now. And it is that whenever somebody is needs to calm down, the worst thing you can tell them is to calm down because that's just going to even more. That's the worst possible thing you can do. And so I just think about all of these people that are in these groups here that they always it seems like they're so incensed, like they're just and I feel like it's an anxiety trigger where they're so afraid of going back to being beaten in the streets or having to go back in the closet or having to hide that they're

kind of ignoring elements in their own communities that they don't even want to be associated with but they just want to give up those rights because they're so afraid that someone's going to come and take them and i i can i can understand that but i also understand someone's personal freedom like i i have crohn's disease it would help me a lot if everyone in the world wore masks i'm not gonna i would never expect anyone to wear a mask because that's their right i take all the risk my own problem well yeah supposing they worked you know even if they did you know but it's that's where i start to think well how am i going to have these conversations with my friends because i i have i have friends who are very very rational

transgender friends of mine that i you know it's, I've known for many, many years that want to distance themselves from the current movement and what's happening now, because they think we are going to lose all of the rights that we fought for because everybody is giving the microphone to these, this small group of crazy people that just keep yelling really loud when most of them just want to be left alone. Like people just want to be left alone to be free to do what they want. And it's, it's difficult to have a conversation because if you bring up any nuance of a slight restriction or anything there, it almost seems like I can understand why they get so upset. Because if you voice taking one inch of a right away from someone that's fought for decades just to get there, they're going to be afraid of losing all of it. They're going to afraid the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down. So it's a, I don't even know where that's where I guess what I'm asking is like, how do you have these, this, these minefield conversations without blowing it all up? Yeah. I, yeah, I'm, I'm a little flat footed on that particular question. Although

in some sense I'm involved in this daily on Twitter, but I haven't really encapsulated a nice suite of principles, But I'll tell you one thing that is helpful as a classical libertarian, as opposed to utilitarian. Libertarianism is almost nothing, right? That central core, that kernel, it just says, don't violate other people's civil liberties, or just don't attack anybody unless you're being attacked. And I get how to flesh that out is all this complexity. You can argue for years about these sorts of things, but it's super small. Now, I also can be utilitarian subject to that libertarianism and say, I think you should, let's say, raise the utility subject to not violating civil liberties.

But when I just have that core, I don't really get into fights with most people, because the other stuff is a little bit secondary. But a lot of people who have a full utility, I think you should, you know, I've got this ingenious scheme, and I think the world should follow my ingenious scheme. And someone else will, I've got this other genius scheme, I think that would make a better world. We have different standards for what my schemes are, and different ways of implementing or the same standards, but different ways.

And so now, because utilitarianism has an opinion on every damn thing, right? By necessity, consequentialism or utilitarianism has an opinion on everything. Right. So you're going to be arguing about every single thing. You just can't be relaxed. So if you want to... Having a laissez-faire philosophy like classical liberalism allows you to be laissez-faire, that's great. Okay, you want to do that? I don't really get it, whatever. But fine, I don't care. Just care just do it I think that kind of staying aloof and then having a philosophy that's inherently justifiable in my opinion but

also just keeps you aloof and not giving a damn is the best way for people to get along right right well for sure the the the that's the evidence but I again I I keep seeing this strange grandiosity. The I care is a grandiose statement. To care at all about what you think or what you can tolerate. I mean, it's all very grandiose. And it's grandiose to want to tell people how to live their life. The most mysterious part to me is the people that want the authorities to tell them what to do. When people sort of are gratified by that, that's confusing to me. But there's something else. You've said there's no preconditions for any of this.

It's just in the human uh sort of system at least the cognitive system um but i don't know that this this feels like that this is a little different thing do you know what i'm talking about mark at all i i'm not convinced that it's that it's qualitatively different than uh all of the other sorts of things like this that have occurred i think there's always different icing in each of these, and people have trouble often seeing past the icing. In fact, I'm half Iranian, my wife is Iranian, my dad's Iranian, and the Iranian community in America has gone through this kind of thing. They went through the Islamic revolution where women in the 1970s were just in bikinis and walking around in Western attire. And then two or three years later,

suddenly this kind of new cultural norms and notions of righteousness and it being policed on the street by regular people. And of course, occasionally it's sort of the military, the secret police or whatever, but just the people on the street are after you constantly encouraging and enforcing these kinds of edicts, right? So you might say, oh, I've seen totalitarianism. I've seen a rise, a sudden rise of this new narrative of this new righteous thing and seeing suddenly everybody lose their rights. But when COVID happened, there was zero difference between this community and there's other communities you can point to around too that have experienced their own.

But when it was a new collective madness leading to a different kind of righteous notion, it was as if they had no learning curve from the one that they had already experienced. So I think it just ends up feeling different. The icing seems to hide it, especially if you are in it. They themselves fell in it they were all you know just you can't come to the party my wife got kicked out of a particular group because she refused to get vaccinated she was no you know she was persona non grata right this they were engaging in all the kinds of behaviors they would have uh they left iran for okay so i want to make

sure i want to hang a lantern on that and put a little light to it is that you're saying that you've seen the mass formation develop spontaneously as an emergent phenomenon in your country of origin and you came here as many iranians did having witnessed that and in spite of that you did once the cooties and the disgust and the fear was triggered, you lose that insight and suddenly it happens all over again. Would that be about it? Happens all over again. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And of course, they themselves probably didn't fall in the first one very strongly because they're the folks that left, but they fell fully in this one. And they're of course, unable to see the kinds of things that we're talking about at all in fact anyone who like who's like that watching was a lockdowner probably doesn't even understand what we're talking about right they just think it's gobbledygook they go what are you talking about is that is that cognitive dissonance is that some cognitive distortion is that how do we understand that i think you have this is cognitive dissonance is like a minor version of this, where I built

up my own personal narrative from Mark about why I did what I did. And I really did it for that, whatever. But in communities, it's like cognitive dissonance on crack, because it's not justified by just me coming up with my own justifications. It's done by potentially millions of people and much brighter people than me. And it doesn't even matter whether they're brighter, but selecting through all of these different kinds of ideas, suddenly some really cool idea pops up is selected for like the free market of ideas. And that really justifies all the things that we've been doing so far and says,

Yeah, the reason we did all these things was because in some really elegant, beautiful kind of argument that then gets added to the narrative and is much smarter and provides much better justification than what any individual could do alone. So it's sort of a collective decision. Do you imagine we're going to see some smart phenomenon or thoughts or ideas emerge that then become part of a new emergent process in the near term? I mean, they're constantly happening, right? This is an ongoing.

Once you are thinking about the way, you'll see it at small scales. Again, the Lululemon ladies in your city versus, let's say, the really fancy dressing up all the time. Horrors about the Lululemon ladies or whatever. All scales, small scales, large scales. You see these things all the time, and they're happening you see these time and they're happening on the right and they're happening on the left i feel like they're happening more on the left um but i think that could change you know over time so i don't think that there's the to the extent that there's qualitative uh uh cases that we notice is that they're disproportionately large right and disproportionately large ones are due to sort of really rare moments of virality where these new memes spread and bounce and become

added and that's super rare but at all scales you'll see them as you start to pay attention to them i'm going to ask the question though again though are you imagining that there will be some things that happen at scale that will move us in a better direction, perhaps, is what I'm asking? No, I don't think so. I would love to see that suddenly there's some meme that passes through that really creates almost a hysteria for civil liberties and freedom and pushing back on these kinds of irrational ideas in some sense this is things like that

or like a trillion dollar question is there ways of structuring society freely structuring society or doing things that can motivate or make more probable means that are going in the right direction in terms of freedom. So those are the kind of things that we think about at the Free Expression Group, Freex.group, is how to understand these kinds of phenomena at scale. And are there ways of potentially making tweaks here and there freely without any authoritarianism that could help encourage these sorts of mechanisms in the right way so that they're not prone to becoming ill like they were in March of 2020. And is it your experience in the Iranian revolution that made you a libertarian? Oh, no, I don't. I don't think so. But I do have to say that one of my first experiences with collective

hysteria was being an Iranian. 1979, I was 10 years old, and the revolution happened. And suddenly, it used to be Persian, Iranian rug stores, Iranian carpet stores, that was everywhere. The next day, they all became Persian because the thought was like Americans don't really know what Persian, and they don't realize that Persian is the same thing as Iranian. So a lot of them switched to Persian because they went with the word Persian, which was sort of different sounding. And my parents came to me and says, Mark, you're not Iranian anymore. You're Persian, if they ask. And every night on TV, everywhere that you would watch, Iran was the enemy of America.

And to this day, that narrative notice is still there. It hasn't budged. I mean, the mullahs have no credit for why it should have changed, but nevertheless, it is strongly there. No one even knew what Iran really was in 1978. Seriously, the average person would have had no idea what Iran was. Today, whether they know much about it, they know it's the enemy of the United States, right? And so I saw that behavior change, that sudden gestalt, Iran is now an enemy, and that's the enemy of the united states right and so i saw that behavior change that sudden just stop iran is now an enemy and it that's just part of the the social narrative of the west or at least the united states since then i remember back in those days we knew we knew the shah everyone knew the shah of iran yeah that's right which was no which was no picnic. Right, I'm sure.

Susan, any questions on your front? Has anybody told you you look like George Clooney? Oh, that's good. That's a nice compliment. If you're young, every guy that's sort of in his 50s or 60s and a little bit of white, they all look like the same guy. And if they get a little, if you're chubby at that age, you know, then you're, you're, you're Santa. So I think that just, it just shows that we all become the same person. That's hysterical. Caleb, I want to give you last chance to.

My, my other questions are very long, so we'll have to bring him back. I have a bunch of other yeah i just i was so impressed just clicking on there i'm like wow this it's on the record here you saying in march of 2020 predicting exactly what was going to happen and nobody listened and i wish they had you were spot on i think drew said the same thing who said the same thing i did yeah the same thing? I did? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. Spot on. Anybody who stood back.

I, though, I got a couple things wrong. It looked to me at the time like the press was trying to create the hysteria. They were driving it and they were insistent upon it. I mean, New York Times. We know that's true now. New York Times editorial board demanding lockdowns. Why do they even have a place at the table? When do they suddenly experts in non-pharmacological intervention medicine?

Why did anybody listen to them? And it was constant, constant, constant. There's no question. If I hear words again, like what were those words they used? Staggering, staggering numbers. Eight people sick, staggering, staggering. And then what was the other word? Yeah, but they're not counting all the people who are dying from the vaccine.

Mark, did you get canceled on Twitter? Back then. Oh, yeah. I was treated as sensitive content for, well, I was suspended for six or seven times. I was permanently suspended once, brought back in. And then I was sensitive content for well i was i was suspended for six or seven times i was permanently suspended once brought back in and then i was sensitive content all my tweets just said this is sensitive content you have to change your settings and then once you change your settings to allowing that then any porn or whatever it starts to be so most people were unwilling to do it so for a year and a half i was almost two years i was sensitive content and all my impressions

crashed to zero you know almost zero for that time. But yeah, the media has its role. But remember, these things are loops. The media frightens the people, which demand action by the politicians, which demand action, which the reporters are hyping, which scares the people. And these things just go in loops and loops. And if you go all the way to the back to the beginning it's just like an avalanche an avalanche you could throw one little micro dot that starts and hit something which hits something else which the dot that there's no cause there's no one cause the cause is that the mountain uh the conditions of the

friction of the mountain or the you know the density of the rocks these are the kinds of things you have to talk about to understand really what's going on. And it's inherently a holistic kind of description, not a billiard ball one. Let me get one quick question from the audience here on Twitter Spaces. Give David a chance to come up and unmute your mic there, David. Hi there. Thanks so much for giving us a chance to jump up. I just wanted to point out a couple of things, if that's all right. I'm a social scientist, I'm not radically left-leaning. I went back to university because I recognised there was something going on. chemical warfare training so covid was uh concerning for me but my whole family are either working the nhs or they're vulnerable um so i encouraged them to take it but i didn't take the

the jab myself uh just because um the british medical journal and the lancet uh obviously they produced those papers that said that anyone believe who believed in the wuhan origin theory was a far-right conspiracy theorist. And as soon as that happened, I knew something was up. These are the oldest journals in the world. They should not be getting involved in political discussions like that. Anyway, my own research was focusing on Marxism in relation to how that affects domestic violence literature at the time. And it's taken me down this horrible rabbit hole, but I won't go too far into that. But what I will

say is that Klaus Schwab, his second ever WEF conference, he had to sneak Paolo Freire in because it was still illegal for Marxists to talk to crowds in public in Europe at the time. So he had to sneak him in to be able to talk at the conference. And that obviously stands out massively, especially when we consider what's going on in the schools at the moment with the conscientization process, you know, turning our kids into the revolutionary guard. Now, the thing about COVID is it does worry me.

It is a supposedly world-ending technology. And we have just had this variant prop up recently that is highly mutational, which isn't unheard of. The flu mutates 25 times a year, standard flu, and COVID tends to mutate 15 times a year so it's not unusual but i'm still worried about whether this highly mutational version will cross over to the animal kingdom mutate with something over there and then come back over the the barrier that normally keeps us safe and then we're all screwed that's my fear um but going to what you were

saying there about what how everyone, being as there is this overlap with this Marxist ideology, it occurred to me that all that the wearing the masks thing ever did was separate people into two groups, into conformist and non-conformist. And the non-conformist intelligentsia are always the first to die in a cultural revolution, and now we're in a cultural revolution. So I wondered what you thought about that. Mark? Well, definitely the masks and a vaccine became sort of proofs of political purity tests to get into anywhere, right? They were membership signals

and eventually sort of evolved to be virtuous or good in themselves, but they also served as political purity tests. And so a lot of, you know, the idea that these things, I mean, it doesn't mean that the individuals enforcing them at the restaurants or wherever it might be, were thinking to themselves, oh, we're doing a purity test and this way it keeps the Trumpers or whatever out. But it's being selected for in part because it serves as a political purity test. And these are one of the many reasons, but especially strong one for why it gets selected for and encouraged within the communities. And so, yeah, all we're doing is keeping out, again, they're not, no one's saying this,

but the whole network is in some sense is saying this at the holistic level. It serves as a purity test to isolate and identify the unclean. And I think, though, and thank you, Dave, for the question that he was sort of making kind of a Maoist argument there that the nonconformist, the elite, the intelligent nonconformist are the ones that get taken out first. Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I would imagine that that sort of strategy is, you know, goes way back long before Maoism and communism is just sort of a smart sort of strategy. I'm, as an aside, I'm a lot of people keep calling the lockdowners communists and all this. To me, all of this has is a completely different icing. Of course, it has still some fundamental similarities as all of these kinds of righteous movements that want to implement their ingenious scheme to save the world. But there's lots of

different righteous movements that want to implement their ingenious scheme to save the world and they're not all communism right the flavor in the of what has been going on with lockdowns has completely different kinds of particulars that make it totally unlike communism nowhere in all of this have people ever said you know from each to his means to all anyone to you know as their their needs or whatever that phrase it's totally a different kind of argument. It's not about everybody should have equal income. It's just a completely different animal, right?

It's still underpinnings, which are still psychosocietally similar, but there's a, I mean, the right has battled socialism and communism for sort of 40 years and sort of can't stop saying communists when it's their righteous enemy, but it's not that in this case, right? can't stop saying communists when it's their righteous enemy, but it's not that in this case. In fact, at the start in March 10th or March 10th or so of 2020, the only people that I could find that agreed with me were capital C communists on Twitter. These were serious communists, but they said, you can't pause an economy. They're really worried about whether they're messing up an economy, because

they're constantly accused of never being able to run economy. And of course, they can't because they're trying to centrally organize it. But it's really on there, you know, thinking about, we don't want to suppose because we can barely even think about running, we're just gonna have cheese lines, etc. Right. So they got it, these, you know, communists. So there's a lot of communists and a lot of people that were on the left and historically would have been very strongly socialist,

identified with socialism their whole life and now they are anti-lockdowners because of what they saw and so i don't think that communism socialism is a way to think about this at all i'd like to leave this right here i particularly like the idea that it's the righteous schemes to save the world i i was saying, to me, this thing smacked of what I saw happen during the opioid crisis, which was there were these physicians who were on the righteous path to eliminate pain in America. There should never be pain. They literally described themselves as wearing a white hat. And they saw the drug companies as the perfect allies in this fight to righteousness and

then they enlisted all the regulatory organizations and the licensing organizations and the supervisory organizations and the va and the hospitals and that's how we got the opioid crisis that's how it happened and when i saw deborah burks running around the world like a Christian evangelist, she was not a religious evangelist. She was a medical evangelist. I thought, oh, my God, it's the same playbook. It's the same thing. And you're saying it's not so much a playbook is that these people are around all the time. Everyone has a righteous scheme to save the world.

And if the right, as you say, the right uh what do you call it a dot that triggers the avalanche develops they're off and running is that a fair way to to uh frame all this yeah and by they it can mean a whole community um creating feedback around itself and they all are started batting and bouncing and one and they believe that they're doing right yeah yeah they're that in God's work they're saving the world yeah but they're evil yeah it would be very evil it's good a lot of us say mark you're saying that they're well intentioned why are you defending I'm like no communities always evolve justifications for why what they do is ethically justified always it's like a tautology it is no defense to say of your opponent that they are well-intentioned that

almost it only happens in criminal level behavior it never doesn't happen in righteous communities they always believe they're well-intentioned it is no defense um so yeah and i i'd rather i think people won't push back as hard if perhaps you were to say that's how evil happens they may not be evil but they manage to do evil things in the in the in the course of this and uh what and what uh caleb what mark just said please put that on a clip and let's push that out on twitter on x whatever it is because that's i really feel like that's that's a core principle that i'm walking away with today that i will never forget mark thank you again thank you for coming back it's changi.com c-h-a-n-g-i-z-i uh expressly human is his latest book. Do you want to push people to the

YouTube and the X Society? Yeah, so just Mark Changizi, all one word at Twitter, and same for YouTube and Rumble. Oh, also I have Loofwired. I started a magazine. Yeah, Loofwired. Like, being aloof. A lot of this is about being aloof.

But just loof, L- aloof a lot of this is about being aloof but just loof l-o-o-f wired.com uh trying to take on siam and discover magazine and wired that have really failed us as as outlets great thank you my friend hopefully see you very soon well done and uh for the rest of you we will be back on tuesday at three o'clock uh i think dr victory is joining us is that correct there we are uh jeffrey tucker that's right and september 6th we're gonna be early with joseph frayman uh i do strongly urge you to listen that conversation he also has had several extraordinary insights that he brought us. And Candace Owens coming in on September 19th. We have more to fill in there for you.

But look forward to next Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday is 3 o'clock with Dr. Victory and Jeffrey Tucker. Next Wednesday is noon Pacific time with Joseph Freiman and also Kelly Victory. So until Tuesday, have a nice weekend, everybody. Have a nice Labor Day. And we'll see you on the other side. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

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