Tag: One Man’s Take

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Cannabis Conversation Reset, 2026

Sheed, mad about Weed

I’ve been grumbling about this on social media for long enough, and today is a “weed holiday” for many purposes, but also a professional holiday for yours truly, so I’m going to lay out some…nonsectarian and sincere gripes I have, as an informed expert, about US cannabis policy and regulation.

(Disclaimer: these are purely personal takes, none of these reflect the opinions of my employer or any political group that I may be affiliated with. This is crusty weed-wonk stuff, straight from my policy-nerd heart. It is likely upsetting to some interest or another, but comes from a place of wanting good policy for everyone. I have no stakes in an active or dead cannabis license, I do not handle plants in a licensed capacity, I have not written cannabis policy for a state or municipality, I am a senior regulatory analyst for the longest-running cannabis compliance platform in the biz. I draft and review audit checklists and standard operating procedures.)

Things in legal cannabis are bad, chat. Most any thing related to a “licensed operator” and “legal weed” is struggling, dying, or dead.

This comes as a surprise to some folks, who see headlines and think “oh wow, working in weed must be awesome,” or “look at those fatcats making money on a historically oppressed substance,” and let me tell you: there aren’t any cats who are fat these days. Big companies have become medium companies, and even some of the “strongest” companies in licensed cannabis are toting around nine-figure tax bills that will come due. Small companies have sold on, closed up, or found a small size that is somewhat sustainable (if you’re on a border with a prohibition state).

And while what I’m about to say could obviously be read in a conspiratorial or seething voice, I promise you I’m just saying this as a mundane fact: the groups that have unquestionably brought in revenue in the first decade plus of adult-use cannabis are the state governments, and sometimes the municipal governments. No one else has secured a steady revenue within the cannabis industry.

Which kinda brings me to my Gripe: we need a new conversation about cannabis policy, one that can get us past the gooey Early Days hype/concern/boom cycles of the 2010s and lower interest rates and national enthusiasm shoved into a handful of states’ markets. We need a conversation about cannabis that involves policymakers and regulators and politicians realizing that the first decade of cannabis was generally a failure for everyone but some customers and most governments. The pile of “failed cannabis businesses” dwarfs the pile of “sustainable or successful cannabis businesses”, and the pile of successes is dwindling, not growing.

We need resets to policies that were written as guesses, educated and otherwise. We need to be able to say that some of the guesses were quite wrong, and try completely new regulatory structures and processes.

This is not a comprehensive list of specific examples or complaints, but I want to demonstrate the comprehensive nature of the misses. A survey of takes:

Every state so far has gone through a predictable Boom/Bust cycle after launching adult-use cannabis in a serious manner. Early prices for adult-use weed are bold and pricey, but as the gray market and the additional licenses enter a state, the prices collapse to levels below what can be a profitable return on the early model. The long term burdens on every cannabis licensee have been (i) absence of basic business deductions for federal taxes, a significant anchor on accounting, and (ii) absence of normal business services in banking and finance. Without regular business banking, companies rely private financing that comes at much more intense rates.

Market saturation has effects on existing states. California and Colorado and Washington benefitted from having national customer bases funneled into state-sized markets. As more states legalize, the booms get smaller, and the early states shrink. There aren’t big, profitable weed businesses in Colorado, and that’s better than California, where many of the biggest names in cannabis have completely retreated!

Private interests have died, retreated, or moved on. Like I just mentioned above, the notions of “Big Weed” and dangers of their corporate control are very antiquated or nonsensical to anyone who’s been in legal cannabis in the 2020s, let alone the 2010s. The names that have lost money trying to be early Weed Business Tycoons (coughcough Jay Z) are long. Anyone who is serious about money has pulled way back on cannabis, and is waiting for federal legalization and integration with basic business accounting before returning.

“Regulate cannabis like alcohol” has failed. There’s a whole lot to be written about the ways that cannabis and booze are different, but: as a question of regulation, it’s just not similar to alcohol production or pharmaceutical production. Alcohol is produced through brewing or distilling, which involves inputs and infrastructure that…sits in one place, and people know about it. Cannabis did not get the name “weed” for arbitrary reasons– it can grow all over the place. Monitoring or controlling unlicensed production of cannabis is an expensive and exhausting prospect (that increasingly looks like the old War on Drugs), even in a state with legal weed. Just ask California.

No one knew. Pharma-vice was a guess. When citizens voted to legalize adult-use weed (never forget, voters faced bipartisan resistance for legalization), we forced state governments into truly foreign territories of policymaking. We tasked states with crafting regulations for the licensing, production, sales, testing, and handling of cannabis and cannabis goods. And (conservative guess) at least 85-90% of the people tasked with drafting the regulations and schemas were non-consumers of cannabis, and many with an overt suspicion and ignorance about how cannabis is made or commonly consumed. The regulations and rules defaulted to a strict and comprehensive ideal of controlling cannabis. We could track it from “seed to sale”, or so we promised each other. Instead of approaching cannabis like a botanical or a commodity crop, we gravitated to models like an extreme version of a brewery or a pharmacy– controls and taxes on retail and customers, but also stringent tracking and surveillance requirements for every step of the production process. This has generally served as onerous to operators, but ineffective at preventing “diversion” of product from licensed retailers to unlicensed markets. Put simply: tracking requirements are more often used for “stacking up penalties upon discovery by another method” rather than ” a source of detection of bad-faith actors by regulators”. (there’s all kinds of allegations and conspiracies about this fact, to put it lightly)

Truly have found the limits of federalism for an…outlaw…industry. It’s banking and taxes. As always. Cannabis in the US is a fascinating experiment in federalism– not many places have the dichotomy to allow one of our constituent states to declare a felony substance a recreational product within their boundaries. The system only arose with prosecutorial discretion, and at any point those policies could change. But it’s undeniable that American cannabis arose in a novel manner, in light rebellion of federal law and jurisprudence. But there’s still limits to federalism for a state-legal substance, and the biggest limit is “federally regulated banking systems”. Cash handling and security, extremely heavy interest rates on private loans, these kinds of impediments are a drag on any business, let alone a fledgling industry trying to fit in.

I don’t think there’s an industry that is more ruled by non-experts. I mention it above, but: even compared to my friends in LLMs or computing, or my friends in firearms or oil and gas or any other highly regulated division of the world– at least those places have some industry voices that are taken as authoritative that policymakers will account for. Cannabis is mostly regulated by liquor-cop style agencies, with rules written by squares (to put it bluntly). I’m not against regulating substances (more on that below!), but: alcohol rules are written mostly by people who are familiar with a drink or two, or at least presume to know what the effect of “one unit” is. Cannabis is still written and handled by policymakers who presume cannabis dangerous, and it is hard to convince people who’ve never consumed that their assumptions are overcooked. Cannabis is a relaxed parent drug, it’s not “highway to fucked up”, definitely not in this current landscape (gestures at dark web).

Cannabis is weird. Cannabis is a recreational substance, and a medical substance, and a botanical substance, and a commodity crop. It’s been treated as a narcotic for many decades, and now we’re trying to do something different. An earlier accommodation, the 2018 Farm Bill, tried to split the baby by deeming certain kinds of the plant “hemp” (and safe for Red States, outside of law enforcement) and the other kinds “cannabis” (Blue State stuff, left to die in US legislative hell). This, as we all know now, went very unexpectedly. But the fact of the matter is: any attempt to shove cannabis into one of these regulatory silos (liquor cops, ag cops, lab tech cops, retail cops, etc) is insufficient, and many of them unnecessary. What it will take is people being open to something different than the past decade. This will include a lot of private investors and operators who are similarly married to the model of previous regulatory schemes– they may have privately benefitted at some points, but the entire system is so miserable that we all have to be open to walking away from the status quo.

Overzealous protections do not come without serious costs. I understand the presumption that some might have– take it slow, take the industry-side squabbles as expected noise, but Just Be Safe, Make Sure No Kids Consume. But the slow and unnecessary costs aren’t just on unsympathetic cannabis operators, they’re impacting the environment writ large. Every state in the country has mandated “child-proof packaging” for all adult-use cannabis products, before any evidence or arguments were made. It’s just common sense, right? What has happened is the laws have mandated millions of pieces of plastic packaging, most that (by regulation or law) cannot be recycled. And to questionable effect! The vast majority of children-consuming cannabis events in our time are “kids eating unmarked edibles”. Children like gummies, they aren’t (or at least haven’t in big numbers) encountering joints and bags of cannabis flower and getting down to business behind their parents’ backs. We need protections for packages that look like candy, I can agree to that, but there’s millions of pounds of useless plastic (in the shape of those little tubes for joints, or forbidding any reusable containers for cannabis flower) that are doing nothing but soothing someone’s misplaced sentiments.

plastic tube packaging that does NOTHING to prevent children from consuming cannabis

We need agility and broader understanding that we’re learning as we go. Look, I have a LOT of complaints about cannabis policy, I can sound like I think I know everything good or bad about cannabis, and why everyone else is wrong and I’m correct. That’s not the case! I have great sympathy for the challenge of figuring out how to safely and reasonably regulate an interesting plant. What grinds the gears is (for work) watching state after state re-enact the structures and forms and assumptions of CA, CO, and WA regulatory systems and rules. The people pass a referendum for adult cannabis, and then state regulators look out there and riff off what someone else has done– it’s the most plausible deniability you can get, it’s the form of regulation most tolerable to legislators and sturdy enough to survive administrative challenges, there’s a reason why the inertia leads this way. But most people who write these rules then just put cannabis aside. It’s an accomplishment to tout, not a vital industry to monitor, respond to, or modify. “Legal weed” isn’t a promised land, it’s a new realm of attention.

We need to chill out. For all the problems of regulating weed, it has to be re-iterated, again and again in the face of clickbait and fretting– most of the problems of Rampant Weed have been light. We don’t need to do a big and exhausting fight about “harms of alcohol” among society and youth, vs “harms of cannabis”. That can be later, but I think, both in popular perception and in the granular details, cannabis’s impact on socially-deleterious behaviors is somewhere between 1/5th and 1/10th and 1/50th the burden of alcohol. And this is in an age with huge interstate markets for discount bootleg hemp-derived THC products! There are serious problems with preventing kids from accidentally consuming edibles, there are serious problems with ensuring some people with mental health conditions avoid THC , there are serious problems with people consuming cannabis while operating machinery like “trading desks” or “infrastructural computing work” or “DOGE crap”. But even the rates of “cannabis and driving”, when we get down to some kind of sturdy data, is way way lower than alcohol. We can take cannabis seriously, without handling it frantically or apocalyptically.

We need to figure out what the goals are. Is the goal to limit cannabis sales to the safest and most overseen manner? Is the goal to allow cannabis businesses to become regular participants in lawful commerce? Is the goal to ensure generational wealth for a limited few license holders? Is the goal to develop sturdy jobs and careers for as many people as possible? Whatever your priority is, we need more earnest and comprehensive discussions about it– how do we make that happen? Is Policy ____ in the interest of us, the enabling or in-power political party, and our political caucuses? There’s just so much Serious Talk to be had, and the intersection of cannabis with existing political struggles (like labor, environment, healthcare) is pretty easy to do…as long as you don’t just keep treating it like Booze Light.

Weed is here, we’re figuring it out, let’s try to be serious about it.

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Personal Thoughts Politics (ugh)

Some Thoughts As The End Arrives

Here on Labor Day (baloney pro-boss replacement version) 2025, I wanted to jot down some thoughts about the day and moment in the world. It feels like I will appreciate these later, but who can say? The general tone of these particular times is: expectant awaiting. Might as well try to put some of my expectant thoughts down.

In the mundane calendar in the US, we are heading back to classes after summer vacation, the first week of college football has concluded, and our economy and technological sector are caught in a massive “AI” bubble. But those can wait for another time.

The air right now, is full of anticipation — by all accounts and observations, Donald Trump is in his final days. He is barely making physical appearances over the past week, and there have been social media posts that very clearly do not come from the man himself or even timely photos. Even the RW circles have had “Trump Dead??” panic. I’ve made several jokes about it myself, on Bluesky.

Some other social checkpoints on my mind that point towards this actually being the end, and not some scrambling wish-coping: a month or so ago, Trump started talking about wanting to be sure he was going to heaven, a very odd twist for a man who has never seemed to think about the afterlife. There was a renewed push from some media stooges to see if Trump could receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The American press floated comments from JD Vance how, if a “tragedy” were to occur, he felt ready to take charge (haha, sure bud). More on that later. Trump’s body has looked terrible, worse than usual, and he has become even more incoherent and rambly. For those of us who’ve been trying to read the waters around the boat, we can tell when they’re finally circling the drain.

Meanwhile, this weekend also featured an attack from the Russian military on European Union leadership, jamming the signals of a plane with Ursula von der Leyden aboard. Was this a “make hay while the sun is shining?” moment for the Kremlin? Do the see their window of power with the White House closing?

But, back to the anticipation and giddy delight– we can just sense it, those of us who pay attention. We can sense this end coming, and think it soon be here. There could be a surprising temporary rally in his health, one must admit, but Trump is probably never seeing another Christmas, and definitely not another Super Bowl or Masters. We keep our phones around us for the first time in awhile, because we want to be there when the messages and phone calls and torrent of excitement comes, we want to be quick to share the joy with others, use all of our Too Online habits for good, after all these years of spreading miserable news. And when it does finally get confirmed…we are going to have ourselves a Wang Dang Doodle, all night long.

But I can already see that the celebrations are going to be tinged with bitterness, and have the tone of a loser’s final retort. Like Kissinger, Trump will not get the end in this world that he deserves. He will pass without facing worldly account. A grim prospect for those of us among the living, and those who dream of justice for evildoers.

No one knows what will come next, either– the prospect of Vance leading a right-wing coalition is laughable– there are far too many people just on his own side who think they can do better than JD, and there’s still not a shred of evidence that Vance can operate more than an arm’s reach from a rich puppetmaster’s hand.

Maybe the GOP holds on, and tries the formulas of the past. Maybe the Trump kids try and run the party. Maybe the administration can hold on until 2026 before the Democrats can build up an impeachment case for JD. Maybe the Supreme Court strikes down much of Trump’s policies, and the judges aligned with the Federalist Society decide to reject this White House’s executive orders. Who can say?

There are things, we do know– Trump had staff, and friends, and goons, and suckers, and foreign help. They are mostly still around. There should be efforts to preserve evidence, chase down operatives, secure data. Where and when these can happen, who can say?

When he dies, there will be so many answers yet to track down– his death will not stop the effort to stop his work and the forces Trump represents. But I’d anticipate that we are going to see a symphony of media, elected officials, and “nonpartisan” celebrities who will loudly tell everyone that, finally, things can return to normal, and that The Danger has passed. In a limited sense, I hope they are right– there are elements of the Trump coalition that can’t be held together by any known successor– but in another sense, I know the “return to normal” crowd couldn’t be more wrong.

The “normal” of bipartisan dealmaking is over. The era of claiming a return to stability, predictability, or friendliness is over. We have been raided by unrepentant enemies of democracy. The world and our country have been more than damaged by MAGA, the fundies, and Trump’s criminal empire. The head is gone, but we need to chop up the body, interrogate its friends and neighbors.

I think….I think we need to take a pelt, that’s the biggest takeaway. I don’t think any of Trump’s would-be successors can fill his boots, but as it currently stands– what part of Trump’s life and ending would serve as dissuading any future egotistical liar with a little charisma and racial animus from imitating Trump? What possible reason would they think our government or democracy has recovered itself?

No, until we take some pelts– put some living and able people into detention, for decades in the face of protest from peers and allies; take away fortunes illegally earned in the Trump era; put some loyal soldiers and goons into fear for their pasts… this death of Donald will only be the end of a chapter, the turning of the page, more still to come.

Until we learn to do more than we did to Donald, we will never be truly free of him.

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Cannabis Policy

No One Takes Cannabis Seriously

I don’t mean literally everyone, of course. There are some folks who are intrigued by what cannabis presents, and are interested in studying what cannabis is with an open mind.

In general, however, after a decade of legal recreational use of cannabis in dozens of states, almost no one takes cannabis seriously, in the government or in many cannabis businesses. Rather than see it as the peculiar plant that it is, with wide variety of uses and therapies, governments and business see it as New Booze or the New Medicine, and try to treat it as such.

We have industries and governments treating “cannabis” and “hemp” as if they are distinct plants. This is an unserious distinction, and the ensuing decade of hemp-based cannabinoid products has rendered the labels a mockery. The “two different plants” have even established political coalitions in legislatures, and battle lines have been drawn over a nonsensical concept.

We have operators who act like Consumer Product Good manufacturers, floating to wherever the regulations are weakest. Companies that used to work with licensed cannabis cultivators have left the adult-use states and set up shops in “hemp” jurisdictions. On an individual level, you can’t blame a business for seeking to get out of the red, but it comes at the cost of clarity about the cannabis plant, the products they sell, and the quality they promise.

We have policymakers across the country who do not know the first thing about cannabis, but who know (i) it can bring the local governments some revenue, and (ii) it should be treated like alcohol, and taxed like it. Most policymakers see the cannabis industry as a vice or luxury goods business, and have little patience for complaints about regulations– they see all of it as a privilege they, the policymakers, gave to the public.

Most policymakers also refuse to take seriously the idea that the “US Government is incapable of controlling cannabis production”, even though we spent decades and billions of dollars trying to do just that. They act as if the government has a capacity it never has had, and that the question is just one of the policymakers fiddling around with new privileges and punishments to bring the industry into line.

We will have over a decade of licensed cannabis markets, and almost all of them have withered every person who’s stayed in the game. The functional tax rates are exorbitant, and there is little serious interest in fixing them. There has been roughly 1000x more interest and movement in “fixing” cryptocurrency regulations over the past decade than there has been for fixing federal laws to allow state-compliant cannabis businesses access to standard business services and tax deductions. The policymakers take cryptocurrency far more seriously than cannabis.

And finally, plenty of consumers don’t take cannabis seriously either. They see it as an alternative to booze, and relentlessly search for THC numbers that have little to do with the high one receives. They slam down poor-regulated products with abandon, and think claims about quality or safety are not important. They’ll take cannabis in any form they can get.

I don’t know if the lack of seriousness will go away. I hope it does. Cannabis is a supremely interesting plant, and has loads of applications and opportunities. But until we take cannabis seriously— as a consumable, a commodity, a medicine, a flower, a textile — we will stay in these messes.

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Effective Advocacy Politics (ugh) Tech Criticism

Who You Gonna Trust?

Here in the US we’re all still picking our way out of the wreckage of the 2024 elections, and trying to collect enough shoulder blade bones to conduct a proper divination of the results, but Cooper Lund has already written a good piece on the dynamics of trust at play in the electorate, and I think he touched on several vital questions.

For those in the future who may read this, there a lot of theories and arguments on what drove Trump to a second victory (are young men to blame? inflation in the grocery cart? fear of trans athletes?) and I’m sure that many of them will be settled or proven by the time you read this. I don’t think it’s in dispute, however, that there is an increasing divide of trust, as Cooper describes it, and that it stretches across a variety of interrelated political issues and debates.

The media monoculture is dead, and it’s been replaced by a million talking heads that appear on your phone and tell you not to trust things. Not to trust your doctors, not to trust your teachers, not to trust the government. They appear on your phone no matter what you do because an algorithm has decided they’re the most likely thing to keep you watching so you can keep getting the ads. This constant buffeting of the psyche of each and every American by the winds of these forces has eroded them, and it’s taught us to no longer trust institutions, or each other. American minds are increasingly their own individual bedroom communities, paranoid and twisted, looking skeptically at the outside world.

…The Democratic Party is the party of institutions, the party of Good Governance. It’s the party of trusting other Americans to make good choices for you. There is very little that the Democrats can do to appeal to the Low-Trust voter, and you saw what that means for the future of our politics last night. I would go so far as to say that we’re seeing the effects of a realignment of what partisanship is. The GOP is the party of the perpetual outsider and the Low-Trust voter, the people calling for things to be torn down. The Democrats are the insiders, the institutionalists.

I’m a little more optimistic about reaching the Low-Trust people than Cooper is (more below!), but I have a couple scattered thoughts about the concept of “low-trust” people and movements, and a suggestion or two about how to operate in an environment when the consensus reality doesn’t hold the same sway as it may once have. Not that any of us have “bona fides” in this stuff, but I have a lot of experience with “Low Trust” people in a variety of contexts (my family, working in skeptical protest movements and spaces, roommates, etc). Hopefully my thoughts spark some ideas for you as well– this isn’t a “one guy’s solution” type of problem, we’re going to have to build out a sturdy communal practice for this kind of problem– it’s an “all of us” challenge.

  • Who I’m talking about: a non-comprehensive list. Low Trust people may doubt the consensus about any number of topics– climate change, nutrition, schooling, history, gender relations and gender roles, organizational management, psychology, family court, entertainment, biology. Many of these will have a charismatic influencer or two who spark interest in the topic, and then a community of people who float around in the FB group with a variety of comments. I think it’s actually kind of a fool’s errand to try find a common thread among the topics that a person departs from the mainline with, the answer is with the person themself (more on that in a bit)
  • Problem of technology. I think, as a grounding comment, it’s worth noting just how much of modern life is predicated on trust in the unseen, and how many products, processes, and events we enjoy that are the result of coordinated and unseen work. These are, to be clear, some of the great marvels of modernity, and very few of them are “hiding the ball” on how they are produced, but in their presentation and consumption, much of modernity appears as something to be taken on trust, and trust at a level that nears what some would call “faith.” It is into this kind of space that a lot of Low-Trust options can be presented to someone, and since the target person likely hasn’t much considered the issue, the Low-Trust option appears as a revelatory moment, and the target feels a swell of interest at getting “Behind the Curtain”.
    • A galaxy brain take I’ll throw here: wild theories arise around complex technologies and multi-agent processes, and have for awhile. For the longest time, the most complex technology was a state’s currency, which led to thousands of hare-brained ideas about how money “worked.”
  • A battle for authorities, rather than a battle for “reality”. While I think Cooper is correct to call this broad cohort of people ‘Low-Trust’, I think it a key point to underline: they actually have quite a bit of trust, it’s just in different places than our institutions– some trust their Scriptures the most, some trust a religious leader (almost always a man or men) the most, some trust “their own gut”, some trust an influencer they have a parasocial relationship with. What’s happened is that, on a subjective level, these people have opted out of putting academia/research/institutions on the throne of meaning, and retreated to another ruler.
  • Authority’s Not Here, Man. What I’m about to say may sound as a critique of the mainline liberal mindset, so I want to qualify this on the front end: I am your friend, and I’m on your side, and I’m not with the kooks. But in a world where institutions are losing the authority (for dumb/tech reasons), your claims that are based on said authority are going to suffer. Secular liberalism has a (benignly annoying) tendency to assume itself as being aligned with “reality”, and it assumes itself as self-evident in ways that are no longer going to maintain. Some of this assuming comes from good reasons– liberalism has opened itself up to adaptation and to further evidence as it proceeds through history, unlike orthodoxy. But part of what liberalism adapted to was the dominant institutions — to academia and education, to American empire and welfare capitalism– and each of those institutions’ names don’t ring quite as loudly in the Market/App Discourse Hellzone of the 2020s. So while you and I may be in accord with the findings of the global medical community, the CDC, your favorite academic science or economics poster, or any other traditional institution, those appeals are increasingly insufficient for people who can (and are encouraged to) just throw up a blanket form of doubt and say “nuh uh, I got someone on TikTok/Instagram who says otherwise!” to it. I’m not saying to give up asking “but what about reality?” or demanding evidence, but I’m suggesting that you stop expecting “reality” to hold the power you think it does, especially in audiences that don’t share your own rosy sense of trust in an institution.
  • There’s hope, though! I don’t think there’s any quick way to get a Low-Trust person back to an unquestioning acceptance of institutional consensus, but there are methods that some of us can adopt in our interactions with these people. The two parts I’ll suggest are: don’t allow the skeptic in your life to get off cheaply— they used a dime-store amount of skepticism to leave the mainline, demand that they interrogate their new authority (an influencer, a church, etc) too. Secondly: education and good-faith inquiry. I know that this sounds impossibly kumbaya, and naive, but I come to this position through years of experience– I don’t know any method that is more sturdy. Demanding them accept a mainline authority, or a new authority, is a bold ask, and one that won’t work if you don’t show the authority to be competent. If someone doubts vaccines, this might mean going on the journey of teaching a person the details of the science, and the methods used to establish what works. I fully understand how unfair, vexing, and tiring this suggestion can be– I wish it were different. In any case, I think one reason why these kinds of Low Trust communities persist is because many people who trust institutions get exasperated with skepticism and “give up” on the skeptic, and cede the person’s mind to whatever media sources they prefer. We have to be more persistent for these souls than their media influencers are, one way or the other.
  • Effective debunking. One of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes is “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true…” I think this angers or frustrates a lot of well-meaning people, but I don’t know that many would dispute its truth (hah!) in this age. This is because our interest in a proposition is the vital tether to the question, more than truthfulness (there’s all kinds of true facts out there that none of us care about). This fact of “interestingness” should guide how we approach bullshit– simply saying “not true!” won’t work as well as we think. The art of debunking comes from de-fanging the interestingness in alternative theories. Whitehead concludes the quote with: “But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one,” and in that, I believe, lies the answer. Yeah, it would be super interesting if the world was actually run by a cabal of lizards, and yeah it would be super interesting if eating an all-meat diet made you look jacked and toned, but….they don’t.
  • Don’t Fear the Skeptic. Another one of my favorite quotes comes from George Santanaya: “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.” I think getting over the sputtering indignation at someone being skeptical of well-proven and established authorities is a good idea. Someone being cheaply skeptical, or selfishly skeptical, or stubbornly skeptical, they aren’t enemies to progress, they are pre-formed members of our group, waiting to be persuaded in. Something that the Low-Trust influencers all practice is a near veneration of their audience’s skepticism to the modern proposition. See also: Joe Rogan’s whole deal. Those of us who trust institutions need to be better at honoring that instinct, rather than scold it. Especially considering that the facts are on our side. We’re not the side that needs to demand unthinking acceptance of bold claims, the Low-Trust people are. We don’t need to fear someone’s skepticism, it’s honestly a cool chance for empirical reality to strut it’s stuff. Someone wondering about chemtrails is a potential future fan of atmospheric science or flight.
  • Further reading. I can’t think of a better person in the English-speaking world for debunking than Mick West, and I can’t recommend his work any more highly. Mick has spent decades politely and persistently debunking conspiracies on the Internet, and his techniques/rhetoric are second-to-none. West runs the sites Metabunk and ContrailScience, among his many projects. His Escaping the Rabbit Hole is my bible for interacting with conspiracy theorists.

(Housekeeping: Probably gonna start doing more political-ish blog posts here, free from cannabis policy. Hell, I’m probably going to start using this site more in general as we move through the 2020s. Find me here and on Bluesky, that’s mostly gonna be it, I think.)