Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, live stream number 259. I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Hying. We are here in our... new studio still working out the uh the various kinks and idiosyncrasies but um anyway obviously a lot going on in the world uh we will always this week we're going to talk about fires and free speech Fires and free speech. Various kinds of fires. Yeah, the neighborhood that I grew up in and almost everything that I knew as a child is burning in L.A.
And it's quite something. Yeah, it's really a remarkable moment to see how many iconic places are, in many cases, just simply gone. Yeah, many. In any case, it's just simply gone, as you say. And then, of course, Zuckerberg came out with a big announcement about Facebook meta with regard to changing policies for censorship and fact-checking and content.
moderation uh so we'll talk about those two big things there are a number of other things going on that i had thought we might talk about but that's gonna that's gonna cover us for today uh we will follow it up with a q a live q a available only on locals watch parties going on locals right now please join us there
In the Q&A this week, we'll be looking at questions as they come in. And we'll probably be preferentially addressing those that are responsive to what we're talking about now. So fires and free speech. Fires and free speech. And I will just say... You know, I had planned this long before we knew what topics we'd be talking about today, but our longtime viewers will notice that I am wearing a quarter zip and I'm doing that.
in order to attempt to start a backlash against the backlash against quarter zips. What is the backlash against quarter zips? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but there is a... You just made it up. No, a massive upwilling of hostility against the quarter zip. No, look it up. I feel like this is your responsibility to demonstrate that what you've just claimed is true. All right. Not my job to falsify your fabulous claims. Let us put it this way. Yeah.
for the partisans in our audience, either for or against the quarters that they know that there's a battle raging. over uh the topic and so they can uh they can decide whether they embrace my backlash against the backlash or whether they support the original backlash yeah all right um okay so as always we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour uh companies who make products or provide services about which we truly vouch i don't know if that was english
I think that worked, but none of the words seem to be coming naturally, as I said, the previous word. And yeah, I think my my struggles with the ad reads are contagious. I think your struggle with the quarter zip is contagious. It's possible. Well, you can join my. Backlash against the backlash next week. No, stop. I like a quarter set. Me too. That's why I'm starting a backlash against the backlash. Except that you made up the backlash. I really don't think it is.
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One reminder, CrowdHealth is not insurance. Learn more at joincrowdhealth.com. That's joincrowdhealth.com. Use code DARKERS at checkout. McCaw. Make crowds healthy again. I think unless you have a W at the end, you have to pronounce that, Macca. Whoa. No, I'm going to pronounce it. I thought I was going to be like Parrotlet. when you said macaw right no i mean if it's not the game we're playing game where we name different kinds of birds
No, different kinds of parrots, dude. Not just different kinds of birds. I mean, this is professional level. I agree. Get with the clade. All right. Yeah. I would agree with you, but I do think it's macaw. Macaw. it's cooler if it's macaw can you just add like a what to the end or something yeah so what's the c uh crowds make crowds healthy again oh it's okay there's not even a
Man, see, you gotta, your, your poetic license has expired and you need to, you need to re-up it. Well, your spelling license never existed. No, on the contrary. I'm, I'm licensed to spell in a very, I'm like double O license. to kill through spelling. Negative zero. That's not a thing. Negative licensed. Yeah. All right.
Second sponsor this week, where is our dog? My goodness, this is her favorite sponsor. Our second sponsor this week is one of our longest continuous sponsors, one of our favorites and Maddie's all-time favorites. It's Sundays. Sundays makes extraordinary dog food. You love your dogs, you want to make them happy, and you want to keep them nourished and healthy. Sundays helps you do all these things. Sundays makes dry dog food, but this is not like any dog food you've seen before or tasted before.
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All of Sunday's ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat. It's far better for your dog than standard dried dog food, and apparently it's delicious. Even Fairfax, our epic tabby, likes it. And Brett claims it's not bad either. Not terrible. Three years ago, when we were first introduced... Sundays, Brett decided to try it for himself. Not dead yet. Made for dogs. Tested by cats and husbands. True, true. I think you had a good week after that, actually.
I did have a good week and I felt, I felt honorable. I was testing it on behalf of our audience so that our vouching would mean something. I was trying to figure out if you were testing on behalf of our audience or on behalf of our audience's dogs. Now, we did used to receive some comments from people suggesting that both they and their dogs watch Dark Horse, which is cool. But were you testing it for the people or the dogs? Here it is. See.
the dog food market is mediated through humans and mediated it is mediated mediated oh it's mediated through humans good point humans That's how the animals refer to the peoples. Because they can't do the Y sound. Somehow, it's just how they... So that's how you know when they're talking, yes. Right, exactly. And so anyway...
I was testing it so that our audience of humans wouldn't have to ultimately on behalf of their animals, but approximately on behalf of our audience. So I feel good about it both ways, really. You know, I did the animals a solid and I did the people a dry. Also solid. Yes, also solid. Yep. So made for dogs, tested by cats and husbands.
At least husband and cat. Tested by cat and husband. I bet there are other husbands. Oh, I think so. And surely other cats. Of course. Sunday is an amazing way to feed your dog. There's no fridge, no prep, no cleanup, no wet dog food smells. It's a total pleasure for the human interacting with it, which is a bonus.
I'm reading this and it's the humans who are likely going to be buying it unless you've given your dog a credit card, which how did you get a credit card company to do that for you? And was that a good idea? Actually, I wouldn't mind giving it. a dog a credit card with a low limit just to see you'd learn a lot about what their preferences actually are your revealed preferences in economic dogland a case of leashes you know Oh, way to keep the door open always. Yeah, that's a point. Yeah. Yeah.
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That is an inanimate object. And in theory, there are people on the other side of it. But at some level, it's more natural for me to talk to you. You think we're speaking into an abyss? Nothing, nothing. I'm saying it feels, it would be the same. Were there an abyss on the other end of our connection, we'd have no way of knowing. Okay. Our final sponsor is Peaks Nandaka. An adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao, tea, and mushrooms.
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how to begin. The Palisades Fire is one of many raging in Los Angeles right now. It is the first of the fires that started. uh in january of this year um this is a weird moment for fires this is a really strange moment for fires in los angeles and
Even stranger, it seems to me, given how wet it has been, given how many storms there have been on the West Coast and how much rain they have gotten. Often you will hear that... A lot of rain early in the season makes a worse fire season later on once it's dried out because as the Golden State becomes golden, because California is called the Golden State because of the chaparral.
the grasslands that turn from green to gold as the water stops coming from the sky in March, April, May, and by July, August, September, October, things are so dry that they've turned golden. That makes for really bad fire conditions. Add to that the fact that eucalyptus were introduced from Australia some number of years ago, and they thrive in fire. They propagate with the help of fire.
uh fires come through eucalyptus stands they tend to make particularly um fires get particularly bad hot devastating hot devastating oily um explosive people will remember the oakland fire of wow i can't remember how many years ago that was but that oakland fire that was so devastating was fueled by several species of eucalyptus that just wiped out entire neighborhoods yeah
And there is eucalyptus planted in a lot of places in California. I don't know if it goes much north of the Bay Area, but certainly from SoCal, from Southern California, where we both grew up, up through the Bay Area, which East Bay is. where Oakland is. There's eucalyptus in a lot of the places, and indeed the street where I grew up in the alphabet streets of Pacific Palisades, which may be gone. It's hard to know for sure, although many places within blocks of where I grew up are...
are gone uh the street where i grew up and i think most of the alphabet streets of the pacific palisades were lined with eucalyptus there's eucalyptus tree in front of our house in front of our neighbor's house in front of the house beyond that um and you know You walk around barefoot and you pick up sharp things in your feet and they leave these oily splotches on the sidewalk. So all of those conditions make...
Los Angeles. Oh, and LA is a very unusual city in terms of its layout. In part, it didn't go up because of the earthquake risk. So it went out. So it's sprawly. uh and it's also stick built mostly it's not built with bricks because bricks fall down in earthquakes you could have done reinforced masonry of some sort but it's mostly stick built which means built with lumber
which is obviously flammable. But it's also, you know, being a city of the West, of the West Coast, has a lot of beautiful nature that has been retained. And so... Certainly the edge to the, you know, ultimately to the west is the Pacific Ocean. But there's also a lot of hills. And so that's Santa Monica Mountains.
which are above and, you know, around on two sides Pacific Palisades, where I grew up, is... is preserved nature areas and it's again it's sort of chaparral some low-lying oak and such all of which are highly flammable and susceptible to fires but
I've never, I don't remember fires in January. So this is highly unusual. One more thing just about the... like set up for like how why why is la so susceptible to fires uh is that these winds called the santa anas come out of the east and the northeast um usually again in the fall usually i remember the santa anna um i remember
fire season being september october when it had been a long time since the rains and so all of the all of the plants especially in the santa monica mountains and the other nature areas were dry good tinder. And then these fierce winds would come out of the east and the northeast, whereas usually the prevailing winds are coming off the ocean, which are cooler and wetter. And so these winds are fierce and dry.
And that is what has happened. There are winds apparently hitting 100 miles per hour in LA right now. So a couple of points. One, I've been thinking about the puzzle of it. California having been so wet in recent weeks, and yet this, I think, what is going to turn out to be a fire like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes in L.A., why those two things fit together. And I suspect that what's going on is that this is not the growing season for anything.
So the wetness of the weather is likely to have run off and not been incorporated into the foliage. I don't think that's true, actually. Just because it's L.A., because it's Mediterranean climate.
you know i didn't think a lot about growing season when i was growing up although i did um watch my mother plant things and such in our garden but i'm remembering um interviewing at pitzer college college we could have you know we we could have been down there right uh which is in the inland empire one of the claremont colleges and um like a view to um to baldy mount bald
is that right yeah mount baldy um in the shadow of the angelus national forest so it's uh considerably a little bit south and considerably east of the palisades um but i interviewed there in january uh back in 2002 and i got a tour of their botanical garden and there was there was a lot flowering at that point there but you know these were cactus these were you know arid adapted desert adapted plants yeah but non-native mostly i would think
Not entirely. Well, anyway, I guess this is just an empirical question. Is the anomaly of this coming on the heels of so much rain really about the fact that the rain doesn't persist very long?
uh in the ground and the plants are either you know they dry out relatively quickly if they're not incorporating uh the moisture into their to their leaves it's also true that i think basically the entire la basin um has very sandy soils um and so it does not that the water just runs through you don't you don't you don't get a water table this is why um
California in general, but SoCal in particular, Southern California in particular, is so susceptible to drought and often has water restrictions, certainly on landscaping, but even of use in your home. There's very few ways to keep water in the ground because of the sanding. Yeah, we will return to this. I don't know very much about the the wildland fire management policy around L.A., but I do know from.
other parts of the west that the management policy has been insane and has exacerbated these hazards in forested habitats what happens is there's the sense that fire bad and so all fire is suppressed which causes fuel to build up instead of burning off at some regular rate and the fact is this is classic welcome to complex systems stuff because a
habitat a forest habitat that burns regularly many of the creatures are adapted to survive it in ways that you wouldn't expect them to be able to so even a tree that gets charred and in fact the most impressive long oldest stands of trees in California California, you do see these heavily charred trees that are still very much alive, you know, 100 years after a fire that scorched their bases. So anyway, it takes out the understory and the trees.
often, not always by any means, but survive. Right. So anyway, absolute fire suppression results in much worse fires when they finally get out of control. So I don't know what's happened in LA. It's a very different habitat because it's not really trees for the most part. It's not really trees, and the trees that are there are often these introduced eucalyptus, which do provoke firestorms when they catch fire. So I agree, I don't know.
Definitely, the fire mitigation strategy in California at large has been insane, but I don't know. what, if anything, has been done, can be done in LA proper, absent making sure to clear brush around your house. But clearing brush around your house is not going to protect your house, whereas winds are racing over the hills at...
you know, close to a hundred miles per hour and there's already been a spark. And, um, and so let me, I have a few videos I want to show and, um, I have a number of things I want to do here, but maybe we, um,
Maybe the first video we'll show Jen is the one from Zeke Lunder. I think I'm pronouncing his name right. He's got a YouTube channel called The Lookout. This is his... uh video he made just a piece from a video he made at 8 30 a.m today um all from publicly sourced info i'd never heard of him before this morning um but he reports that he's been doing detailed fire mapping since about the year 2000 and he and his team are based out of chino so
Let's just show 30 seconds out of his video here. This is a map of the Palisades fire. This is showing heat satellites from... Two in the morning and then the purple is kind of my guess at where the fire is right now based on the webcams. So basically the fire is burned from about San Vincente. Boulevard in Santa Monica, all the way to Malibu. It appears to be all the way down to the ocean, all the way through there.
so if you don't know la that may not mean much to you of course um and actually let me show if you can show my screen here Here's a screenshot from that same video, that same Zeke Lunder video on the lookout.
in which which zooms out a bit and it still doesn't show all of la although it shows a lot of it and in the lower left you have the palisades fire it's the first of the current fires it's by far the largest then you have to the northeast uh the uh eaton fire uh which is closer to where i was just talking about near um near claramite outside of pasadena northeast of pasadena uh under basically in the shadow of the angeles national forum
whereas the Palisades Fire is in the Santa Monica Mountains. And then you have another few fires, one to the north near Silmar, and then I think at this point there are even a few more. But most of L.A. is not on fire, of course, just like Most of Portland wasn't suffering riots during the summer of 2020, but that doesn't mean that it's safe to be there or that the entire city isn't devastated. And I could show you hours and hours and hours of very...
various footage of what it's like to be in various places far, far south of the Palisades Fire, and the sun is just blocked out from the smoke and all of this. But this gives you... a little bit of a sense of the scale and actually one other thing i'll come back to um so many of you I'll come back to the Getty, but many of you will have heard of the Getty, both because Getty Images is famous photographically, and then the Getty Museum is largely understood to be here.
And that's basically at the intersection of the 405 and Sunset Boulevard, famous Sunset Boulevard, which goes from basically here, winds through, goes through like Brentwood. crosses the 405, goes through UCLA, Beverly Hills, on and on. That is actually the third Getty Museum. The first Getty Museum hasn't existed for a long time, and the second Getty Museum is...
I hope not burning. They apparently have saved it, but it's right in the heart of the Palisades Fire, and it's a place I spent a lot of time growing up with my mom. We went there to draw.
so i'm going to show some pictures from from the getty but one of the things that i think is confusing for people who aren't in la is i don't get the you know i don't get the i don't get the map and even like i grew up in the heart of the palisades fire and you didn't grow up anywhere near there and when you and i talk about like when you and i drive in la together um and in fact
You and I did drive in L.A. together in June of this year. We and our kids were there for your parents' anniversary and your dad's birthday celebration, and I drove our kids through the Palisades. I'm so glad I did. And I was driving because it's my old haunts. And, you know, I took a turn up Chautauqua and you're like, oh, I wouldn't have known to do that. I would have gone up Temeskola or Sunset. And all three of those areas are now devastated.
Whereas when you talk about uh you know the around area around the tar pits a miracle mile i like i can navigate but i don't i don't have any intuition for it i don't know exactly what goes on between la brea and la cienega for instance which is oh boy a lot right and what goes on between Chautauqua and Temescal and Sunset at this point is a lot of fire. Just a lot, a lot of fire. And PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, which is what the one, Highway 1 is called as it goes through.
That part of LA, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades and Malibu has burned. The houses on a big piece of PCH are gone. Those are the businesses. So I would just add that... One of the important fire suppression methods involves fighting fires from the air. And there are a number of different kind of aircraft. There are some adapted jets that...
do incredible things, dropping, um, retardant and water on, uh, on fires. And there are helicopters that can drop a bucket into somebody's pool, frankly, and pick up water and, and. Part of the problem here is that the very Santa Ana winds, which are incredibly high, Santa Ana winds is anytime the wind blows out of the east, but the Santa Ana winds in this case are also incredibly fast.
And let's just, I said this earlier, I know you're going somewhere, but the Santa Ana winds coming, any wind in LA coming out of the east will be a dry wind because that's coming off the desert. Whereas any wind coming from the west will tend to be a wetter wind because it's coming off the ocean.
A wind coming from the east will make fires more likely, even absent the wind part. And you correct me if I'm wrong, but the winds out of the east... this part i'm certain of are incredibly rare it almost never happens the wind is reliably blowing off the ocean yeah prevailing winds are from the pacific here's the part i'm not sure about i If I think back to my childhood in L.A., my sense is that there are years in which the Santa Ana's never happened. It's so reliable that it blows off the...
the ocean. Now, maybe that it happens once or twice a year, but it's certainly, you know, pick a day and it's almost certain to be prevailing winds off the ocean. Pick a day for sure. I think that, and I did not go back and look, but off the top of my head. I think that there were some Santa Ana days every year. I think they tended to be in September and October in the 70s and 80s anyway. And some years they didn't have any effects at all.
Were you going somewhere else there? Well, I just wanted to say that the problem is that the winds in this case, the Santa Anas, are so high that they've grounded the firefighting aircraft. And you can imagine what the predicament is if you're trying to fight.
fires like this in neighborhoods, even the triaging of what's unsalvageable and therefore you let it burn because taking people away from here, you know, to put them there means somebody else's house that might be saved is going to be burned. You know, it's a nightmare, especially if you don't have one of the major tools in the toolkit, which is aircraft. Aircraft, largely scooping water from the ocean and flying in and dropping it.
And yeah, they just, and they were certainly grounded at night. And I think they're still grounded, at least most of them, because it's just too high. I actually wanted to share next something I wrote in my first book, An Antipode. And you can show my screen or not as you like. So I've been publishing Antipode chapter by chapter on natural selections. I've taken a break recently, but here's just a little bit from the first chapter, which is a book I wrote in 2002 about my research in Madagascar.
The Great Pacific was just a mile from our house when I was a child, and when I needed to be reminded of my own insignificance, I would head down to the beach to stare across the vast ocean. In the spring, my father would drive us out of Los Angeles and into the desert where my brother and I ran through endless fields of erupting wildflowers.
the golden orange california poppies so garish and delicate were my favorite other than those few weeks each year when sporadic rain caused flowers to actually grow wild little grew without tending in la i grew up daughter of an iowa farm boy turned computer engineer believing that things don't grow unless people make them do so my mother made our garden grow carefully doling out water and nutrients and if she stopped everything died
behind under between her plants animals from the hills scurried reveling in this unexpected bounty my fierce loyal cat brought me alligator lizards she would bite off their tails on my bed where she would leave the tail twitching for me to find it was a clue that somewhere in my bedroom a lizard with a bloody stump was hiding terrified this was our game hers and mine
every fall scorching santa anna winds would come in from the east pummeling our already parched city if the winds coincide with a spark in the hills brush fires erupted sweeping across chaparral and houses with similar abandon i remember one fire coming over the mountains towards our house now four maybe five blocks away i stood on the roof with my father a little girl with all the neighborhood fathers on their roofs hoses in hand wetting down the tinder of our lives
the fire which we could not yet see kissed our faces with raw heat finally my father ordered me down back to the room where my mother had put my little brother and our two cats we were ready to escape to a car packed with family photos as soon as my father yelled go i fell asleep curled on a pile of blankets the next morning i woke confused sweating my sinuses filled with ash the winds had turned and the danger was past
my parents were haunted by our closest call yet while the children and animals clamored for breakfast actually one more paragraph here days later i walked through those hills while the ground was still hot chasing lizards and snakes left uncharred
gone were the scrubby desert plants the only natives left in la most gardens remained though filled with foreign plants like agapanthus and bougainvillea and night-blooming jasmine and with yet more exotic plants from places i could only imagine from brazil and from madagascar We think, because I don't have a date on this for me, that this is the same fire that you observed starting from your classroom at the Merman School.
um the one year that you were there which was in the hills a little bit to the east but the same hills yeah i should fill in the details of that so it is kind of remarkable if the story connects you and me many many years before we even knew each other um but maybe the first you know i've had a weird life some interesting events the first really interesting event uh
that was larger than just an event in my life was i was in class one day at this school that i i was a terrible student so an experiment sent me to this school and it lasted for me one year but anyway i was in the hills on mulholland and in school and the santa anas were blowing one day and i was sitting in class
As the story goes, I was not really paying attention to the lesson because that was kind of my specialty. And there was something flashing outside the window. And despite the lesson going on in the classroom, I stood up. walked over to the window and i watched these giant what looked like balls of lightning erupting on the power lines where they were blowing back and forth in the wind and next thing i knew on a hill maybe a hundred meters from the power lines there was a fire
And that fire developed into what was called the Mandeville Canyon fire. So this would have been fourth grade for me. But anyway, the Mandeville Canyon fire broke out, burned down a huge number of homes. But I came home from school. Our school was evacuated. And I came home and I was talking to my brother. And I said, you know. i think i saw this fire start and he said no you didn't and i said yeah i think i did and i described to him what i'd seen and frankly he took it seriously and
He said, well, you've got to tell somebody. And so anyway, we ended up calling a radio station and they put me on and I described what I had seen. And that resulted in my being called as... I think the star witness in the... case in which the insurance companies sued the department of water and power for all of the losses that they had paid out because the department of water and power was responsible for putting up power lines
in a way that they wouldn't bank together in the winds. And they sent a crew out. looked who inspected the power lines where i had said i had seen this thing and they found them melted so anyway the whole thing and it did result in them winning that suit so weird story from uh my upbringing and uh You, the love of my life, may well have been downstream of that fire.
ready to evacuate. So you lived in a part of LA where the fires never threatened you. You were in the middle of miles and miles of flatlands in development. fancy, fancy neighborhood, but had no access to the mountains right there, the hills, right? As much as the Santa Ana's came out, of the east every year i think and um and there were some fires that story that i just that i report that i read from that i wrote about in antipode in 2002 um is the only one that i remember being close
the only one and you know my father being my father and me being me you know i was the only little girl on the roof helping you know helping hose down the you know we a lot of us had cedar shake roofs at that point um These fires are not like those fires that, you know, we could have easily and many people did lose their homes back then and whatever that would have been 1978 or nine or something. Right. But. But no one was on their roofs hosing down their homes.
in the palisades here i saw i saw some videos of people on the ground with hoses trying to do something but um there's been mandatory evacuation for a giant swath of area including i think the entire palisades which is you know, sort of four broad regions. I think the Riviera part of the Palisades is the only one that has been maybe, maybe not
burned down at this point, but it's really hard to tell, and this is one of the confusing things. Since I became aware of the fires yesterday, midday-ish, I have been, um... ingesting information as much as I can. From Twitter, from YouTube, from the various mainstream media, from my brother, who's not there anymore, thankfully, from my dearest friend, Diane, who is not there.
thankfully anymore uh her and she she also grew up in the palisades um and nor are her family members um from my sister and her kids who are there but not not they're there um not in the path of the fire And it's really hard to tell what is actually true because official maps say things like there's about 2,500 acres that are burned and it's... it's stopped at sunset, and then you get reports. Well let's show the Jacob Soberoff video.
from instagram this is a man who well he'll he'll he'll say it he grew up there and then this also got replayed on i think the today show Hey, this is a message for my Palisades people. It's a really tough situation out here. I'm on Pampas Ricas where Sunset meets Chautauqua. I drove into the village earlier. Most of the houses on Sunset between...
Chautauqua and the village have burned down on both sides of the street. The firefighters are trying to save the fire station. Ralph's has burned down, Gelson's has burned down. The car wash, the library, the whole area where the park is in the Huntington. Many of the streets are on fire. Alphabet streets. Just hope everybody got out okay and everybody's looking after one another. Just want to set my love. So I am surprised at how emotional this is making me.
It has been a very long time since I lived there, many decades. And my parents sold the house that my brother and I grew up in. while I was still in college or shortly, as we were heading to grad school, so in the early 90s. But I know all of those places that he was just talking about. And in fact... I almost posted on Natural Selections this week a piece I had written back in June when we were in LA, and I spent half a day walking alone through the Palisades, through the park.
Through the library, I took you guys into the library, and much of it was very different. My parents were not wealthy when they bought the house in the Palisades in 1973, I think it was. And by the time they sold it, it was definitely a neighborhood that was quite wealthy. And the house that I grew up in has had many remodels that have made it unrecognizable.
know the house that i grew up in hasn't existed for a long time unless you do a kind of bark of thebes analysis um you know the the ship of theseus analysis on it and say well it was it's still got the same bones because it has the same memories The place is there. The village that he refers to, Palisades Village, was just like three blocks from my house. My first job, my first official job, I had other jobs helping.
Helping my tennis teacher run tennis tournaments for kids in Santa Monica. I used to help run those because I was an organized and efficient person of 12 or 13. tennis parents were less likely to yell at a 13 year old than an adult who was who was assigning courts but um my first job where i was getting um like W-2 salary, I guess, not salary. I was making minimum wage. It was $3.35 an hour back then. I remember those days. Yeah, $3.35 an hour. I was at the Baskin-Robbins.
on Swarthmore, I guess it was, across from Mort's Deli. Mort's is long since gone. That whole part of the village has been transformed into something kind of unrecognizable, but that's... That's where the Erewhon is now. There was, of course, no Erewhon back then. My second job after I left Baskin-Robbins was at a video store on Monument. I was the assistant manager in high school at the video store.
So of course there are no video stores anymore, but that's also been transformed into a very high-end little tiny shopping area with clothes that I couldn't afford now. And none of that was there. So the Palisades was always this beautiful... idyllic enclave with like a small town feel but but in la like it's not it's it's not an incorporated city santa monica you'll hear about is actually its own incorporated city surrounded by the city of la and pacific palisades is just a is
uh you know the alphabet streets and the huntington and the highlands and the riviera and the village all together part of la but also its own thing its own feel and it's and it's it appears to be gone um One more video. One more video here. The video from, I think this was Fox News report this morning, from outside the library, where I took you and the boys in June of this year. In front of another home that has just gone up.
This is so difficult to watch. Let me get out of the way. You are looking at the Palisades branch of the public library here. It appears to be a total loss. One can only imagine the treasure stored inside the books, the material. the community library, a center of the community. It appears to be a total loss. If photographer Tony Butita can pan a little bit over to the right. You can see the rest of what was the structures here and that continues and we continue to hear.
just a minute, but you can see. the devastation now over where you see those flames and a little further to the right. That is where the Ralph's grocery store. We're trying to make our way there, but we just keep running into these fires into the devastation, the destruction. That's Berkshire. a real estate firm that looks like a total loss and all these building buildings. We believe this might be Palisades Village right now. It's so hard. Cell phone connection is very, very spotty. It's very
I want to go over. This is we believe again, part of Corpus Christi school. The school's principal called us. I'm told asked me to please come and check on the school on the church. This building is still standing, but there is very thick black smoke coming from behind it. We believe this is the building between on the other side of the building is where the church is. We saw at least one of the large church structures
a total loss. All you could see was the metal outline of the Corpus Christi Church. You just heard Maria Quibbon celebrated so many important family moments at that church, a church, a library. the center of the community, and they are basically burning to the ground. There are no firefighters here right now. They're trying to save homes. They're trying to save structures, and basically it they just can't keep up the Santa Ana winds continue to
You might be able to make out the American flag still blowing in all its glory up there, showing you how hard the wind continues to blow. Those embers continue to fly, cause new fires, cause spot fires. The loss is imminent. here, and we continue to hear explosions. We just heard a very loud explosion from the Corpus Christi Church. Something just exploded back there. The church at least one major building. We don't know if it was the sanctuary. to the ground and so many homes continue to
firefighters on many blocks telling us they have no water. They're pulling water from swimming pools, trying to save structures. They have no water. They don't know why they're talking about possible broken pipes. So, let's see, where did I want to go next? I want to show a few pictures from non-destruction. from the Getty Villa. So like I said, people will be familiar with the name Getty. He's J. Paul Getty.
was just a little history here, was born in 1892 in Minneapolis, and he went to school, I think, at USC in Berkeley, although he didn't graduate from either of those places, and by 1957 was, according to Fortune magazine, the world's richest person. from an inherited oil fortune, from hotels, restaurants, and real estate that was his contribution to his family's vast wealth.
He was fascinated with art and with antiquities, and he began collecting and opened his collections to the public in Malibu at the original Getty, which I didn't know existed until today, at his Malibu ranch in 1954. And then... He oversaw the building of what became known as the Getty Villa in the Palisades, just above PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, in 1974, which was one year after my family moved to the Palisades, and it was very close.
not walking distance, but very close to the house where I grew up. I was five years old when Ligeti Villa will have opened, and as I said, my mother used to take me there a lot. For all I know, maybe it was five times, but it feels like...
30 in my memory i had no idea it opened that late yeah i didn't either it was there long before you and i were born i i me too so this is history that i that i learned today from the getty site so i'm trusting it and i'll post that um i'll post that in the show notes and i happened to be back at the getty villa in february of 2020 in la right before right before covet hit um
Actually, it was on that trip that I got COVID and brought it back to Zach and got us both incredibly sick. Before we had any idea it was COVID. And we were just saying, wow, like never been this sick before. How, what happened? How is this possible? But I was not. sick yet at the getty villa and you can just show my screen and just walk through i think i think i think the getty villa is okay
I don't know. I can't tell. It's closed, of course. They say that because they cleared chaparral and brush around it, that it is... hopefully protected, and certainly the collections inside, which is not what I have pictures of, will probably have been in fire-safe rooms. But this is just... Oh, and also Getty never saw this.
getty was living in the uk i think um for the last few years of his life and he died in the mid late 70s and he planned this but he never saw the getty villa wow um and in 1997 the getty museum that is more famous that's on the above the 405 and Sunset opened. And this, the Getty Villa, closed for renovations for almost 10 years. And it's been open again for close to 20. But it's just, you know, these were all part of Getty's personal collection.
um that not but you know view um from the from the grounds which are a big part of how beautiful it was and it was it was outside in the grounds that i remember my mother and i sitting with usually pencil and paper or charcoal occasionally drawing and i think that's the last picture i have here
um certainly it doesn't look like that anymore certainly it does not look like that anymore the getty um then you can you can clear my screen here um So there is a question in the case of a lot of structures, but the Getty makes the point well, about the context. that they will exist in after this, even if the Getty is essentially untouched, which will have been no doubt because they were careful ahead of time and because it will have been a priority in firefighting.
if it's basically an island of a surviving structure in what will look like a hellscape until it is transformed which my guess is that will actually happen rapidly given that this is in la this is prime real estate in every regard as much as as much as those who don't know la will say why why you've got earthquakes you've got wildfires you've got risk of tsunami like you know like how could you possibly um but
the rest of la continues to exist and this is um this is prime real estate uh one of the things that didn't get said in the clips that i showed is that the schools are gone so the elementary school that i went to is gone uh the little um the public school palisades elementary which has since become a charter but um the the little private school i went to um for two years after Proposition 13 was passed in California in 1970-something, which basically...
capped property taxes at the cost of the public schools. And so California went from having maybe the best public school system in the country to having one of the worst. My parents stuck it out. I went to public school in fourth grade. was bussed for half a year into Baldwin Hills. The kids from Baldwin Hills were bussed for half a year into Palisades Elementary. But then the education was so poor. It was so awful that I went to Palisades Village School. I believe that.
has burned. It had been transformed. It had become a big, fancy private school in the Palisades, which it wasn't when I was there. And Pali High, which is now Palisades Charter High School, but Pali High is also gone um that's not where i went i went to crossroads again because of the downstream effects of prop 13 which devastated public education in california um but devastated it i would just point out that the tax revolt resulted in
the predictable collapse of the schools which resulted in all of the people who could afford to get out of the schools leaving which then made it possible to gut what remained because the people who were in that system were now politically powerless. So anyway, how do you, how do you go from having maybe the best public school system to one of the worst? That's how you do it. That's how you do it.
Maybe just to finish off here, I've seen intimations. I've mostly tried not to be paying attention to the conversations about this online because I don't think it's mostly... Healthy for me, and maybe not for anyone. But there's a certain amount of, who cares, it's just rich people. It's just liberals from LA. I have a couple of points in response to that. First off, what is wrong with you?
Actually. Even. Even if it were true that the only people affected here were rich LA liberals. And even if the only people... who were affected here were rich la liberals who are contributing to the woke mind virus that's coming out of hollywood and making all of our worlds less actually um democratic and to use their language inclusive And equal, if not equitable. They're still human beings. Like, this is... These are still human beings.
who may have lives that look so inconceivable to you that you cannot imagine them, but they are human beings. And furthermore, it's not true, right? There is certainly, the Palisades has become... um a very very wealthy enclave um from the mostly upper middle class enclave that it was when when i grew up there and i used to joke
back when these places existed, that yes, I grew up in the Palisades, but I grew up in the bad part of the Palisades. And of course, there was no bad part of the Palisades, but the alphabet streets of the four main neighborhoods in the Palisades were the ones with the most affordable houses, and they were still probably affordable for most people but nothing has been affordable in the palisades for a very long time but there are many places that are affected here and this is going to
This is going to devastate communities outside of the people who have lost their fancy homes. I guess one thing... Maybe this is a non sequitur, but one thing that we both saw yesterday when we were looking into this was people began to flee because there were evacuation orders in place for everything. I think it was like west of San Vicente.
I can't remember which way San Vicente runs, because as you may have seen from the map earlier, the coastline there is weird. It doesn't run north-south, it runs east-west, and so the ocean's to the south. So I feel like west of San Vicente, but... towards the fire of San Vicente and up into the hills has been in mandatory evacuation since yesterday. And it continues to spread. And people were trying to get out when the mandatory evacuation orders came.
came down and there were a lot of very fancy cars trying to get out and they got blocked either by fire or by just traffic and people abandoned their cars in the street and took their keys which they shouldn't have done And so in order to get fire trucks into the areas, bulldozers had to be sent in first to bulldoze these cars that had been abandoned in the streets because the people couldn't escape and had to escape on foot.
This is apocalyptic. It's truly, truly extraordinary. All right, I have a few last things to add to the question of the fire. one there's a couple of things that strike me as could have been done better we know almost for sure they could have been done better you and i have been pointing to the hazard of eucalyptus for a very long time and it's it's a dual hazard the problem with eucalyptus is that it's so ferociously successful as a competitor that it's very tempting to plant it
Actually, it makes a good wood. It has no pests. It grows under horrendous conditions very effectively. So if you want mature trees quickly, it's a very enticing prospect, but it does create Thank you.
terrible problems because of the oiliness and the fact that it is very well adapted to fire even if the trees themselves burn they sprout back from the stumps and you can imagine a very hot fire burns everything else out and then sprouts back from the stumps evolutionarily that's a win but you really don't want to around people, frankly, it doesn't have any place in the Americas. We should exterminate eucalyptus.
And we've commented before that it's all over the Andes as well, which is terrible. Yeah. So this is yet another, in addition to the fire suppression that makes fires worse in forested habitats and may well in Chaparral, I don't know. But... Eucalyptus is another intervention in a complex system that results in catastrophes that don't need to happen. Second thing is you can tell from my story from childhood that the wires are an issue. And frankly, wires are bad for people.
They're bad at a number of different levels. Burying them is expensive, which is why utilities don't do it. But in this case, you had energized wires remaining. In the case of the fire that you observed from your childhood. We don't know that that is what has happened here. No, we do know that in some of the places that were burning...
people on the ground were finding energized wires. And I think it was just chaos that, you know, as you point out, you can't even, as a lay person who has access to the publicly available fire map, the fire map is obviously not accurate. guess is that represents confusion and a breakdown in systems because there's you know because the entire system is overwhelmed but the point is wires underground
is better aesthetically. It is better from a point of view of, uh, electromagnetic waves which may or may not have a consequence for human health it's better from the point of view of fire suppression it's better it keeps them on in storm conditions it may be contraindicated in earthquake country
I don't, I just, I don't want to steal my, I don't know. For one thing, you'll remember Berkeley put all their wires underground. That's true. And it became much more beautiful. Right. And you don't even realize, I remember, uh, our crumb is somebody I don't.
quite understand very well but i remember hearing him interviewed and him describing his compulsion to draw to sketch scenes and to make a point of including the wires which are these yeah terrifying ugly you know life uh negating structures so anyway um
Wires underground, eucalyptus extermination would be wise, and intelligent fire policy is a must. But the last thing I wanted to say, actually two more things. One is... hold on before you do if you just want to show my screen here i just did a quick search on our crumb and wires and this isn't the most wiry of any of his uh drawings but here's one from 1980.
Yeah, so this is the cartoonist. There's a very strange documentary about him and his... very odd family but anyway he's the guy who made the famous uh keep on trucking with the guy with his giant foot sticking forward um but anyway i think the wire point This is a kludge that was appended to society when we went electric. And the fact is, it's time for us to update this so that we are not suffering psychologically from having to look at these terrible things and that we get the benefit.
of a robust system that is uh shielded by the earth if i may make things more complicated sure um i wonder how the wires underground affect the electrical field, magnetic... I think it improves it because I think the Earth is a better block. Oh, but you're saying close proximity? Yeah. I don't think you're going to be... I don't think if you are grounding, if you...
Feel benefits from being barefoot on the earth where you are and feel that it enforces your localness. And I do. And I think any human who would... been raised where i was raised i'm watching this would be affected right now but i think i am particularly focused on place i always want to know when i'm talking to someone remotely where are you like where are you in the world right now but
i think grounding specifically gives your body information about where you are and and information that we have not yet been able to decipher about um therefore about what is to come and i wonder if uh putting the wires on the ground would affect that. I don't know. Well, let's just put it this way. To the extent that electromagnetic radiation is a problem...
There's a question about where is it least problematic and going overhead is not marvelous. I would also suggest I'm now out of my depth, but. likely, if you were going to put it underground, you could put it in a way that was shielded. So anyway, there's an empirical question there that you and I are not expert enough to talk about. I did want to point out that one of the... glaring facts of
recent disasters is and we don't yet know how this disaster will be treated but i think we can have a pretty good guess based on the fact that it's in la and la is what it is Intolerable thing is that the treatment of Americans who lose everything in a disaster is so highly variable. And that effectively what you want, ideally if you want a system that works, you want people not to suffer from bad luck. Bad decisions you should suffer.
If you do that, we evolve towards making wiser decisions. But bad luck is something that we should hedge out by making a risk pool. And insurance is supposed to do this, but private insurance does not. Because private insurance, for-profit insurance, inevitably discovers that uninsuring people who need insurance most is profitable. And I believe that shows up in the story. I've seen hints of it already. Hints that no one was insured for fire.
in the places where the fire has hit because insurance companies had long since ceased to give fire policies in near the hills right and so this is just something where terrified by what government will do will it abuse the power but this is something where government, which does not have a profit motive, must not have a profit motive, can create a risk pool in which we decide these areas...
maybe are off limits or you're on your own because it's too dangerous to put a house there but if you're going to have a house if we've declared this safe that we can um you know People in Appalachia should not be struggling for either resources to endure and escape a disaster or rebuild afterwards. They're Americans like everybody else. And so the uneven treatment of different parts of the world, especially with the hint that it's political, is absolutely intolerable and needs a remedy.
But the last thing is, Jen, could you show the fire chief video that I happened across here? This is the L.A. fire chief. I am super inspired. She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future, one that includes a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity. People ask me, well, what number are you looking for? I said, I'm not looking.
for number is never enough. Out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 are women right now. She's already looking at ways to change that. She's quick to point out that doing so has a greater purpose, attracting the best and brightest. for the job they feel included they feel valued and they feel part of a cohesive team the chief also checks another box when it comes to inclusivity and diversity at this department she's a proud member of the lgbtq community
That just kind of opens the door of people that thought, wow, I didn't even know that that was an opportunity for me. When is that from? How long has she been the fire chief? I don't know. Okay. This again. so so let's talk i have let me start by saying um i know she's in portland and i lost touch with her but I know a woman who was a Wildlands firefighter. Actually a lesbian. I think, never having seen her in the situation, that she was awesome. She report at it, at the job.
i don't know she reported to me she did not um want affirmative action on her behalf she did not want handouts she did not want any dei decisions made on her behalf she was drawn to it um for for reasons of you know personal personal reasons trying to be as as uh effective and powerful as possible and she was a strong uh
strong, fierce, skillful woman who says she was almost always the only woman on the team and that's as she would have expected it and that most teams would have had no women. This is a lesbian in Portland. She was she was actually not firefighting up in the western states, but who understood well. what evolution has handed us with regard to expectations around what men and women on average are going to be doing.
The idea that every job is inherently equally open to every human being, regardless of either immutable characteristic or skill, is insane. It is tearing apart functional systems in basically every domain. I want to highlight a couple things here because I think the problem with this is it's a trap. Okay. And the trap is, oh, you're against women in firefighting. Well.
I'm against women in firefighting to the extent that they are disadvantaged in doing the job by biology. But I'm certainly not against any woman who is well endowed for the job and skilled at the job. I'm not against anybody.
trans gay i don't care but that is irrelevant to the discussion that you just heard her engaged in because what she says she says a couple things one she says no amount of diversity is enough now here's the problem long time viewers will know that the analysis goes like this anytime you exclude any population from eligibility, you are going to reduce the potential quality. If the group is small, The degree to which you are likely to exclude the best people is small also.
to the extent that the group that you are that you are discriminating against is large the effect on competence and capacity is going to be large to bias and to say no amount of diversity is enough is to say we are going to select as much as we can from a tiny population.
Even if that population is exactly equally competent, and I don't think they will be, but even if they are exactly equally competent, what you are deciding is you are going to have a less competent firefighting force by making that decision. What's more, You hear her talking in there and she says, it makes everybody feel included. And people look at me as a lesbian, as the chief of police. And they think I didn't even know that I could do such a thing. An obsession with how people feel.
is disqualifying for a job like this. This job is about accomplishing something that... It's great that you are a compassionate human being, that you have those skills in your toolkit, but you need to be... absolutely focused on doing the job and not overwhelmed by considerations of how people feel as structures are burning down around you and people are trapped and all of this. So the insanity.
just as with boeing and all of the other examples where we've seen that diversity was our strength results in shocking failures of engineering right the failure to detect that bolts were missing from a that was going to be pressurized on the inside. You get there. Yes, those kinds of things might happen in a world where you prioritized hiring the very best, but they will happen a lot less regularly.
And we have just turned civilization on its head, prioritizing people's feelings and the pretense that everybody is equally qualified. You know, this is not a video game. This is real life. Firefighting is about people who understand. understand the job that they are doing, have the courage and capacity to do it without overthinking the job, without obsessing about emotions or anything like that.
If you don't know that, you do not belong in a position of command, pure and simple. Yeah, that's right. I saw a video that I haven't showed here today of... A man who had made it out and his house would turn out to be a total loss. And he's standing, watching. And the firemen are doing what they can on neighboring houses, but his house is gone, clearly.
And one of the firemen comes over to the barricade that they've erected that the man whose house is lost can't pass. And he hands him his cat and he's alive. And this man just breaks down and he's so... he's happier beyond words because what you know the cat cannot be replaced and you know cat haters fuck off at some level but you know cat haters can be replaced um no but
Obviously there are things, there are inanimate objects, especially in older times, which cannot be replaced. But they are still things. And it is the life that matters. And this is... This fire feels devastating to me, even though I don't know anyone close. I don't have anyone very close to me who is being directly affected. But it feels, I actually, I feel homeless, which is very strange.
but watching this man watching his house go down and being gifted as if from the ashes is his cat with whom he shared the house and seeing that that is what matters is a reminder can be a reminder to us all i think yeah i i relate to it all too easily yeah and i also uh it's a much smaller event but i remember when the camp that eric and i went to as kids was threatened very directly by a fire which our boys went to for a few years yeah it was threatened by a fire just across the river
that did not jump but easily could have. I remember feeling like that homelessness is not a bad analogy. Again, not a rational feeling. but it's yeah i mean i guess i guess i guess that's right it's not rational and that demonstrates that rationality is not all there is yeah just as um this what you were saying about compassion demonstrates that compassion is not all there is so we have these errors on both sides and i don't i don't like the both sides
reflection here because i don't think those are the things in opposition to one another um but there are like stereotypical versions of those two things which can which can be invoked as you know rationality is like a male way of going through the world and compassion and inclusivity as a female way of going through the world. And while that is very broad brush and very imprecise and there are plenty of exceptions, there is some truth there.
And rationality is absolutely the thing that you want under some circumstances. And any plea to include other people in the conversation or listen to their concerns because they don't feel good right now should be shut right down. And there are other situations. in which actually what we're doing now is...
I don't know, building community or healing from a loss. And maybe that is the time to not have the analytical types bring in their graphs and show them because some number of people are going to find that not just impossible. to interpret but actually destructive of the ability to heal. So both of those things can be true.
are true under different circumstances and we live in this crazy un-nuanced world of which one is it which do you want and uh in you know the last several years of crazy in society and higher ed and politics has, as I and we have said before, been One way to understand it is that we have had an embrace of a toxic form of female typical behavior. And it's not that there aren't plenty of toxic forms of male typical behavior, but what you never want is...
one form of toxic behavior, excluding all other forms of behavior. And that does seem to be part of what we're living through. Yeah. I will just add one thing that I'm going to feel bad if I didn't mention it before. Whatever happened in Maui, in Lahaina, it is very much like what happened in Appalachia with... the storms where the official response made no sense so like in the aftermath of hurricane helene yeah yeah um and this is
I just want to say it's simply intolerable and I was going to feel bad. I have Lahaina written down here, but I think I forgot to say it. So anyway, I just wanted to make sure. that it was not a glaring omission because it would certainly be a glaring omission if we're talking about our responsibilities to each other we somehow fell down drastically on our responsibility to the people of maui and uh
It has to be remedied. Has to be remedied. And those two events and this one all feel very, very odd. Yeah, they do feel odd. All right. So rather drastic change of topics. And I admit there's a clip that is necessary for everyone to have seen. in order for us to have the next discussion. It's a little bit long. It's like four minutes. But I'm going to have Jen play the clip.
all the way through and then we're going to talk about its implications relative to things that we have discussed here on dark horse and other events that are taking place in the world so jen hey everyone i want to talk about something important today
because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. Second. We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive
has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas and it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms. We're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're gonna catch less bad stuff. but will also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California.
and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, We're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect.
There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes.
simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon. Alright. Sounds like a different man. Uh... it sounds like the same man in a different phase and on the one hand it is hard not to be tremendously relieved at the idea that he is declaring a new era on the other hand there's a lot to be disturbed about here too and there's a third piece which i just have to say
This feels actually weirdly responsive to at least the issues that we've been raising. There's a lot of language in common, too. Yeah, he's talking about complex systems. resulting in errors i would call them unintended consequences he's talking about trade-offs which people will remember was the subject of my dissertation what he does not say is zero is a special number but it's quite clear that he is responding to x in fact he even mentions x and acknowledges to his credit that
Instead of naming it something else and pretending that they came up with it, that they're going to employ something that he calls community notes. And he says it's like what is done on X. On the one hand, I think we just have to realize we absolutely predicted this. The point of the phrase zero is a special number is that if you have zero platforms that allow freedom of speech,
then that's a potentially stable system. If you have even one platform, in this case it would be X, which leans in the direction of free speech, then it means that every other platform is suddenly under intense competition to broaden its range of speech because everybody wants to be in a place where they can say whatever it is that they feel like discussing.
Nobody wants to be treated like a child. And so if X maintains a defense of free speech, it's going to cause the other platforms to follow suit. And in this case, it's not just Facebook because Facebook is also...
uh instagram uh and whatsapp and various other things so so this is huge and it does demonstrate the principle zero is a special number and X has driven a major change that is to the benefit of the citizenry of the United States first, and then ultimately likely to the rest of the world as well. There's a lot that's just off about this announcement, too. And I want to go back and just remind people if they heard it before and if not, to alert them to it.
I deployed a hypothesis. I can't remember how far back in Dark Horse, but the hypothesis was about apologies and why they work. And the idea was it's strange that an apology has a meaning to us humans, right? Somebody harms you and then they say some words and somehow that's better. How do words help you if you've been, you know, harmed in some material way? How do words remedy that?
And the hypothesis was that apologies function as a debt, an IOU. And so that's one of their two functions. The other function, a good apology isn't just, you know, in fact, it's a sucky apology if somebody says. I'm sorry you feel that way, or I'm sorry, you know, you were hurt, right?
if some if the apology is real they tell you what they did that was wrong and in so doing that greatly increases the debt that will flow to you if they do the same thing again because they've let you know i know exactly what it is i did therefore if you do it again that's because you're not paying close enough attention or you don't really care or something like that. So the idea is an apology has value for a reason.
It's completely absent from this statement. There's no apology. There's no apology. So what does that mean? Well, he says a lot of stuff. Like, it feels like a cultural tipping point. Oh, does it? And what happens the next time it feels like a cultural tipping point back in the direction of some powerful group of assholes who wants to censor the rest of us? Are you just going to culturally tip the other direction? You know, either he has come to the realization.
that the constitution is what it is for a reason and that facebook was wrong to do what it did for a reason and therefore we and the public can expect him not to do it again if the winds of change blow back in the other direction He doesn't get it. And the point is, well, you know, business wise, it feels like a cultural tipping point moment. And so we're definitely going to do the thing that people seem to want at this point. You know, who could have predicted that? So anyway, that was a.
terrible attempt to sound apologetic where there's no apology in there at all. I listened very carefully to it multiple times. It's not in there. You're right. You're absolutely right. He also contradicts himself. in here he makes the strong case that what has happened are mistakes that are the result of complex systems and i will point out his use of complex systems raises a question
Is he misapplying that label to complicated systems? I actually don't think so. I think he's talking about AI, in which case he is dealing with a complex system, especially as it interacts dynamically with what's going on.
and facebook this is truly you know it's early but it's at the beginning stages of dealing with complex systems and they will make mistakes On the other hand, he acknowledges later on that there was pressure to police misinformation without, he says, becoming the arbiter of truth. You became the arbiter of truth. You appointed yourself. You know, that's what you did. So PolitiFact was Facebook's fact-checking arm. Yeah.
And PolitiFact, which came after you and us, specifically had as its worst offender status on its rating meter, whatever it was called, pants on fire. And they gave you a pants on fire rating for talking about ivermectin, I believe it was. I can go back and look. You can go back and look. My memory was that that was about the...
Because I wrote about it. I can find it. Cytotoxicity. Trying to remember. But anyway, Heather will find it. But yeah, so they say they're firing their fact checkers, which thank goodness. And I hope those people... a struggle to find work i don't really like wishing that on anybody but these people have created
so much havoc in civilization and they have interrupted such an important process that they probably need a little alone time to think about the harm they've done so that they can, you know, find their humanity and not do such things again. apology, which I'm not expecting to hear. So in any case, my overarching point is this can't be a this feels like a moment thing.
this has to be a it is wrong to censor there's a reason yes they have an obligation to prevent certain kinds of extreme and illegal content but from the point of view of expressing opinions right wrong or otherwise that is how we discover what is true in discussion and the idea that they were in a position to police content because they were somehow in the know was nonsense from the get-go obviously they were notably deaf as we tried to point out thousands of times
how this was implausible on its face where do they have an oracle from which they receive the wisdom on what's true and they can therefore apply that to us little people and discover it how does anybody at facebook outrank us in terms of trying to navigate the reality of a pandemic and various medical treatments you know the fact is
revolutionary biologists it's relevant to medicine it's relative relevant to epidemiology it's relevant to vaccinology it's relevant to public health it's a relevant discipline and even if we weren't officially schooled in it, our right to talk about it and be in that conversation. And frankly, to best the experts, if that's what we're doing, or to fail in the attempt, that is all part of being human. And it's never their right to do this to us.
um yeah in fact i find a sentence in my very first natural selections post which is where i wrote about this Are we to believe that PolitiFact has a supply of magical, omniscient experts who are both freed from the usual rules of scientific conduct, leaving all hypotheses on the table, sharing what they know, assessing the hypotheses in a fair and measured manner, and utterly infallible? apparently we are supposed to believe that uh so what i wrote about the
The claim that they gave pants on fire was something we talked about, but we didn't get specifically flagged for it, was lab leak, which they then backed off of themselves in May of 2021. And they then claimed that it was... more widely disputed. And the one that they specifically nailed you for was in your conversation with Robert Malone, which they did not give a Pants on Fire rating to, but a false rating, one step up from Pants on Fire. And it was, as you remember,
the idea that the spike protein was toxic or cytotoxic. And what PolitiFact says was vaccine experts say there is no evidence that the spike protein is toxic or cytotoxic. Yeah. Well, there you have it. So. Obviously, Zuckerberg is responding to market forces and the political wins, and he is very late to the party on free speech, but. uh glad to hear him moving in this direction but i would point out it's not too late mark
you could deliver us the apology that you owe us. And that would tell us a lot about this being something other than a business decision. But let's point now to, oh, there's one of the things I wanted to say about. facebook now meta facebook studied the question of its power to shift political dynamics algorithmically it's done this a number of times but 2020 is one of the years
actually in response, I believe, to the 2020 election. It studied its own power and has discovered and published that it in fact has immense power to shape civilization. It's an unelected entity. And because of where it sits in our discussion with each other, it has this immense power. And it is aware of that because it is systematically studied. I thought we knew that they knew that it was doing that in the 2016 election.
Yes, there's a whole history, actually, of studies. But the 2020 election actually spawned a second tier. I think Science Magazine is one of the places that this stuff was published. Anyway, okay, so now I want to switch gears and point out, okay, zero is a special number. We were right about that. That should be obvious to anybody listening to Zuckerberg's statement and coming to understand. what it means because in fact zero as a special number is not about free speech it's about the fact that
game theoretically, one party embracing free speech forces the others to embrace it for business competitive reasons. And that's unfortunately what comes through in Zuckerberg's ham-fisted statement. But here's what I did not see coming. Musk, I believe this week, actually announced a change on x that goes in the other direction. Oh, good. And this, to me, is shocking. Jen, do you want to put up his tweet? Hold on, I have a copy. I can't read it there. Okay, so he tweets.
Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational, entertaining content. We will publish the changes on at XENG, presumably meaning engineering. Our goal is to maximize unregretted user seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time. Okay. I understand the words. I can imagine a naive person deploying this sentiment, thinking that it was positive. Yes, you own a platform. You would like your users not to regret time there.
hopefully correlated with the platform not being parasitic, that it is actually in some way enhancing life. That's laudable. However... The idea that you are going to attempt to evaluate what is negative and worse, that you are going to apply something algorithmic to it. There's lots of negative stuff in the world. Commenting on negative stuff makes you a positive force. You don't have a tool that is capable of doing away with negativity for its own sake.
And in fact, what you have is a mirror of the same problem with the fact checkers. So the fact checkers, all they can do... at best and look the fact checkers suck way worse than they need to but if you had actual fact checkers attempting not to do political work but to actually check facts they would still have a problem which is Anybody who sees things sufficiently far ahead will look like they are against the facts.
And you do not want to create a system, even if such people are very rare. The fact that they will end up in the milieu amongst other people who are actually wrong. You do not want to say, well, look, 99% of the time we end up spotting. things that aren't facts and labeling them. If you're labeling the 1% of the time that somebody's way, way, way ahead than what you're doing...
You are arresting the process by which civilization gets smarter. And you're not allowed to do that, even if you have a 99 to 1 ratio. So this here is the same issue. Ideally. Would it be better if we, I mean, I'm not even, it's not even clear to me that eliminating negativity makes unregretted user moments. Well, because my brain is on the Palisades fire.
I am thinking about my experience trying to figure out what was going on by using a variety of sources. And it felt to me like, you know, every historical event is an historical event that is therefore singular. So you can't really do a good comparison, but it felt like it was harder to find information on Twitter this time around than it has been with past dramatic events.
I don't have the same level of bias here. I'm much more biased. I'm much more emotionally invested than I was with the Maui fires, with Hurricane Helene, with any number of the recent things. But it feels like it's getting harder to actually... figure out what is true and um you know
buyers destroying places in los angeles is negative is that like is is that the only rubric here negative because uh bad things happen in the world and you know if what you're looking for is happy then you know are we going to go back to the land
ssris and pretend that uh just having like flat affect all the time is the goal for all human beings this doesn't it doesn't seem wise and maybe that's not fair because it's just a tweet right like we don't we don't know what the nuances are but i agree that it sounds um potentially top down. We know what's best. Let us handle it for you guys. Don't worry, nothing to see here. We got you covered.
kind of thinking which uh i don't like to hear that from anyone yeah and in fact it's also to my way of thinking a good bit hypocritical because elon is very negative when he feels that it is appropriate um and you know oftentimes when he feels that it's appropriate i agree with him but if you're now going to deploy an algorithm against
the rest of us what you're effectively saying is that we are not in a position to judge when we need to curse if you know what i mean right we yes lots of people will will abuse negativity to to create engagement sure but there's some analogy here it's counterintuitive that you shouldn't use an algorithm to tamp down behavior that you think sours people who are engaging on your platform. It's counterintuitive why you shouldn't, but it's not very counterintuitive, frankly.
Right. This is like free speech itself. You know, the fact that speech is free, does that make the speech good? No. Most things that people say are at the very least worthless. A lot of things that people say are counterproductive. Why do we have to protect free speech then? Why can't we say only speech that is neutral or better? Because you don't have a goddamn algorithm. That's why.
So we protect speech. And because the world isn't static. You don't have an algorithm and you're not going to have an algorithm. Yeah. Well, an algorithm is impossible. An algorithm to solve this problem is an impossibility. It's an impossibility even at the level, if you imagine a hyper-intelligent AI that's better at this than a person, it's still not good enough, right? The fact is, you do not want...
anybody empowered to shut down other people on the basis that they know whether or not what those other people are saying is productive. It's not a conceivable thing because you will necessarily not be able. to deal with the outliers who are way ahead of their time. Those are the last people you want to shut down. So the real mystery here, Elon's a smart guy.
He's really got an engineering mind. And when you hear him talk about engineering, it's strange that he would make this error. It's hard to imagine, especially given, you know, he's the let that sink in guy. Right? When he took over Twitter. Oh.
Right? Let that sink in. He carried a sink. He carried a sink in. Brilliant. Lovely. But the point is, let that sink in. You know what? This is going to be a place where people are actually free to say stuff. Get used to it. Right? Yeah. Why would he be backtracking on that now?
Especially, here's the mind-bending thing for me, which suggests there must be something I don't understand. Okay. He has taken great risks. And... weathered many slanders to get where he is to get to the point where he is now forcing facebook to admit that it's copying x
Right. That's a hell of an accomplishment. He's gambled on Trump and been vindicated by an election that has now made President Trump the president elect. OK. why on earth would you surrender your lead which just forced facebook to embrace x-like community notes policies why would you abandon that lead Why are you cannibalizing your own business? And I have to tell you, there's an echo here. So many places we've seen, especially in relation to fact checking, you've seen.
platforms that ought to be indifferent within the law to what people do on their platform as long as people are doing it right they should they want to increase engagement we all understand that so why is youtube throwing off popular channels why would it do that Right. Why are people cannibalizing their own business for some political objective? That's weird. That suggests some economy or some market that we can't see.
And at the exact moment that Facebook is at least making noises of coming to its senses, X is now making noises about losing its sensibility? something so off about that, right? You never, you, you win a lead like that. You take a victory lap. You don't backtrack. Why would you backtrack? So I don't get it. I think there's a mystery there. You know, I will say. And the timing is too.
It's almost, you know, if the two things were separated by three weeks, it would make more sense. But you, the Facebook, the Zuckerberg announcement and the Musk announcement. Yeah. But also the timing relative to. uh the inauguration given that as you say musk was so like musk was at least partially responsible for trump getting elected yep i agree and it so much presumably will change
Why make a major change to your major platform in advance of seeing what changes on the outside might reveal? Yeah. Now I will say. musk took a lot of pushback on this which i was heartened to see people spotted immediately that this was terribly onerous um by the way i want to come back to another change that he is announced, which I also find onerous. So you've got a lot of pushback. Musk is an unusual person, and it's possible that the pushback, given that it is
perfectly predictable is anticipated and desired for some reason. In other words, you could get your user base to force you to embrace maybe, you know, maybe it's protection against, I don't know.
I guess it wouldn't be shareholders in this case. I don't have anything. So I don't know. There's something very strange about it. But I will say, in Musk's defense, his... he gambles big he makes errors he fixes errors right and that's really one of the keys to the magic is that he's not afraid he's not paralyzed by fear of making an error and he's very willing to
take something that he got wrong and say yeah i did that wrong now i'm going to do it right so i hope that he does that in this case because you know zero is a special number that means you force by going to one you force the dominoes to fall if you backtrack and you leave it at one with facebook being the home of free speech yeah i guess we all move but um
But it would be much better if you had, you know, not all of the free speech eggs in one basket and it having a blue color scheme. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it, you know. as you say zuckerberg hasn't apologized here nor has he indicated a fundamental sea change in how he views the world so this appears to be a political or a fashion choice more than it is a deep-seated belief in um against censorship and for free speech which is what many of us thought was true for Musk, but maybe not.
Second point is that even in this video, put aside the fact that he doesn't apologize, Zuckerberg says we're going to, I mean, some of it's super vague, but my notes as we were listening to this, he was going to dial back the filters and tune them. and bring back civic content, which I guess I think is related. It means letting back in some stuff and move the trust and safety teams out of California into Texas.
interesting um he does say get rid of the fact checkers but the other stuff remove most content moderation so almost every all of the suggested changes are not absolute other than getting rid of the fact checkers they're like we're gonna do less of that bad thing we've been doing um or we're gonna you know we're gonna move these people that are doing the stuff that's uh political into a place that maybe is is less biased but um it
There are almost no claims here of actually we're going to let you do you and see what happens. Well, I will make one defensive. They have to have content moderation because there's. truly evil, illegal stuff. Right, but he lays it out in many ways. Yeah, I agree. It's kind of moderation, it's filters, it's... The way he says it, he leaves himself every room to backslide. And...
So the way to think about this is assuming that Elon was motivated by an actual commitment to the free exchange of ideas as protected by our First Amendment, which he has said, then... surrendering the free speech territory, which, you know, X never got to a totally free speech platform. Certainly not. And it's made some serious backsliding in recent weeks to months.
To the extent that he's going to cede that territory and leave it in the hands of Zuckerberg, Facebook, Meta, that's a lot less secure because, as you point out, everything about the way he phrases this leaves him... uh full leeway to make a different announcement six months from now and to have the worst of it come back and you know they both all of them whoever they are always have full leeway but if it is clearly a
management or a business decision only, as opposed to a philosophical position, it is much more likely to fluctuate with the winds of how everyone is feeling or what the election said. What you want is some evidence of a philosophical revelation and a position that is deeply felt. Yeah. And then there's, of course, the ghost in the machine, which is fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
meta does have yes meta does have and so it may be that this is a hostage video and that zuckerberg is attempting to navigate the difficult job some would say the unlikely impossible job of navigating shareholder responsibility in a market you know that at some level one has to interpret the public corporations that have cannibalized their own business in favor of something else yes it may be that they've
there's hidden pressure and that they're under threat and that they're actually doing their shareholders bidding by protecting their company from, uh, a federal incursion of some kind and we can't see that and so we're angry as users but they're between a rock and a hard place we certainly saw a lot of that in the aftermath of 9-11 with companies
creating back doors for the federal government that they didn't want to create or seemingly did not want to create but it could be that his that zuckerberg can't say yeah free speech is great we screwed up And we're not going to do that again because he doesn't want to tie his own hands. But frankly, that's something we have to navigate because shareholders cannot hold the keys to free speech. It's just not how.
It works. No, no, it's not. Purse springs, purse springs, that's not it. Purse strings and free speech aren't going to go together too well. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Is that it? I think that's it. That's it. Yeah. But we will be back in a bit with a Q&A on Locals.
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