Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. I am Brett Weinstein. Many of you who have been watching the Dark Horse Podcast know that our live streams have included Heather Hying who will not be joining us today. Unfortunately, she has lost her voice.

Rumors are not true. This is not from her participating in the writing. She was in fact here. I am her alibi.

We have a lot going on here. This live stream has been postponed for the SpaceX Dragon launch that just took place. I must say I had forgotten that it was taking place because we had writing here in Portland last night.

Zach and I went down to see the damage ourselves this morning. By the time I got back, it slipped my mind that they were going to launch. But in catching up on that launch, I was reminded that this moment in history has many odd echoes to approximately the year of Heather and my birth.

We were both born in 1969. That is of course the year that men first landed on the moon. It is also the year of the summer of love. And the juxtaposition, I think, suggests a great many things that are worth investigating.

There was a tremendous amount of unrest at that time surrounding the Vietnam War among other things. There was obviously a great deal of racial tension. There was hopefulness that arose out of the ability of human beings to get to the moon and back safely.

I also realized moments before going on the air that 1968 was the year of the Hong Kong flu, a serious flu pandemic. There were many echoes of our current situation back then.

I will say on the one hand that is hopeful because we got through that. On the other hand, I think this time we might be in quite a bit deeper. There are things that haunt our landscape that did not exist in 1968 and 1969.

We were not all in the sway of algorithms that we cannot check and that have unknown influence over our thinking and the way that we interact. And I am quite concerned that even given similar ingredients that we are in a great deal more danger this time around.

Our election looming also adds a certain amount of pressure to the mix that could end very badly.

So I had several things I wanted to discuss today. To be honest, they interact in so many different ways that I'm not exactly sure where to begin.

Obviously, the riots that have followed the death of George Floyd, which happened very dramatically on videotape, which presumably everyone has seen those riots now having spread across the country, including here to Portland, are a major phenomenon.

What kind of phenomenon they are is I think up for debate. And in some sense, the feeling I am getting having seen the damage today and seeing what has come across my Twitter feed tells me that they may actually be several different phenomena interacting.

I don't think they're going to interact in a positive way. And I'm hoping that we by thinking carefully about what we are seeing can disentangle the threads in time to save ourselves from a noisy nightmare.

All right, so let us talk about what has taken place George Floyd has been apparently killed on videotape by a white police officer.

George Floyd, of course, was black. He was killed by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes as he said he couldn't breathe and then apparently stopped breathing.

That on the one hand seems to be a very simple story. I think it is transparent to anybody who looked at the video that something very wrong occurred in that moment.

On the other hand, it is very difficult to know what it is that occurred. And one of the concerns that I have is that these protests, which have now morphed into riots, are effectively predicated on the fact that we know what the story was.

And if it turns out that we don't know exactly what the story was and there are lots of ways that that could be true.

Then we have been moved far down a road under some kind of false pretenses. Now again, I'm not saying that this is the case. It could be that that video is exactly what it appears to be that this is a cop who had a race problem.

But that race problem resulted in his complete indifference to the fact that he was suffocating a man to death who died in front of many witnesses and other cops and the other cops did nothing.

But we also live in America and in America, this cop is due a fair trial. In fact, if his punishment is to mean anything, it has to follow a fair trial.

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