Episode 355: The Archons 

In the last decade, we have seen an exponential change in the manipulation of basic human instincts through a technological and societal shift often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Everything we do, from sex, dating, and purchases to political affiliations and how we define ourselves is being manipulated and commoditized.

Money is the air of civilization, necessary for just about everything we do outside breathing, but many people still lack a basic understanding of what it is and how it is created.  How can we have a democracy if our most basic of necessities is almost universally misunderstood?

One would have thought, before 2020, that virology and epidemiology were inherently apolitical.  Incredibly, even one's views on antibody tests are highly correlated with voting preference and whether one prefers Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow.

By the time the now-infamous Stanford-led Santa Clara antibody tests came out, I could already predict how my blue checkmark list of Twitter experts was going to respond.

'I think the authors owe us all an apology… not just to us, but to Stanford,' wrote Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.

Dr. Gelman is a serious clock, and he was furious.  How could anyone from a reputable university even begin to suggest that we weren’t facing the greatest threat to humanity since the Black Death?  The first wave of antibody test results implied that the infection fatality rate (IFR) was lower than first reported and more carriers were asymptomatic as well. This was NOT good news for the clocks; it was pure heresy.