#152: Free Speech: The Kanye Case (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 152nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss the free exchange of ideas, in light of Matt Taibbi’s revelations about how the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop was censored inside Twitter, and Kanye West going explicitly antisemitic on InfoWars. Why should Kanye be heard, given that what he is saying is awful? We also discuss chemist Anna Krylo...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number one.
Three.
Is it 153?
We did a gift episode last week that was unusually placed.
Unusually.
This is 152 by the official numbering scheme, I am thinking.
Nope.
Well, we're going to have to talk to the officials, and we are they.
It is live streamed.
Technically, it's 1.52.
We're professionals here.
Yes, nothing unprofessional about this.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
These are some of our companion animals who have no advanced degrees whatsoever, but nonetheless, we're not going to use them as trusted sources unless they are qualified to speak of things like kibble, for example.
Their interest in deer and otters.
Yes, absolutely.
Maddy discovered an intense interest in otters this week.
Yes.
Our Labrador.
Yes, it's easy to relate to.
Otters are fascinating creatures.
She seemed to want to place otter in mouth.
Oh, well, yes.
I do not have that instinct, but I can appreciate that a wolf derivative such as this might feel that way.
Indeed.
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It is technically true that we will not be seeing them next week.
We might see some of them.
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Yes, I think that's right.
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Alright.
Some things happened this week.
Wow, so many things.
Yeah, I've got a few things to add in, but you've got two main topics that you want to spend our time this week talking about, and why don't you begin?
Yeah, and in some sense I'm not sure it's two topics.
There is an overarching topic that is very much in motion, in large measure, I think demonstrating the principle that we have advanced here that zero is a special number, which is to say interesting things are afoot with respect to
I don't know whether I should say free speech, because free speech is narrowly a First Amendment issue, and I believe the issue that is actually in play is free expression of ideas, which is protected by our free speech rights here in the U.S., our First Amendment.
But nonetheless, whichever way you put it, free expression is something that is now in motion.
That is to say, we are in motion from An environment that existed a month ago to some new environment, hopefully, that will be very different as a result of the fact that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, which has put it under his control, and is changing its policy.
And the reason that that matters so much, Twitter is relatively small compared to other social media sites.
Like Facebook, but it is a place where influential people have conversations, and to the extent that it is not open to all perspectives, that leaves us in a realm where there is nowhere to go to have those conversations broadly, and to the extent that he opens it up and stabilizes it in some form where it is hospitable to these conversations,
It then changes the environment for all the rest of those platforms, because after all, who is going to go to Facebook or Instagram if you can only have an adult conversation about serious stuff on Twitter, right?
Those places are going to look ridiculous.
And that's a phrase that no one expected to happen.
Right.
Yes.
No.
Not something you could have predicted, but that actually demonstrates another principle that we talk about.
Welcome to complex systems.
You couldn't have predicted this.
But we do find a lot of influential people on Twitter attempting to have conversations, and you and I know, as well as anyone, that those conversations have been
Heavily influenced, and not for the better, by a moderation policy or something that masquerades as a moderation policy, which has been not even arbitrary, just has simply been so partisan that it has created a kind of a Disneyland environment inside of Twitter, which is not to anyone's benefit.
And that raises the other thing, which happened only yesterday on Twitter.
I don't know how much you followed it, but Twitter released, through Matt Taibbi, the first in an installment of What would it be?
Self-exposes, revelations about what took place inside of Twitter that resulted in Twitter obscuring the Hunter Biden laptop story and suspending the New York Post, which had published the story.
Because it said that the story was the result that effectively the laptop was some kind of sophisticated disinformation campaign by the Russians and that therefore it was not going to be party to spreading these lies in advance of the election.
Now, of course, the release through Taibbi illustrates that they very quickly figured out inside of Twitter that this was not Russian disinformation.
That, in fact, the story, as far as anyone knew, did not justify Twitter by any established policy preventing people from posting it.
But they did it anyway.
They continued to do it.
And, you know, so anyway, that is an interesting revelation, potentially Extremely consequential, because this happened right before an election.
It involved Joe Biden indirectly, but it involved Joe Biden who was implicated by some of the things that Hunter Biden had said, right?
Effectively, Hunter Biden involved in Ukraine, of all places, involved in energy policy in Ukraine, a place where he had no expertise making A bunch of money seeming to indicate that his father's influence was for sale, which of course is apparent enough to those of us who follow politics.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party both peddle influence and it should be extremely frightening to us citizens that we are in the process of potentially electing somebody who might be peddling influence that could start a war, could start a war with Russia of all countries, a nuclear armed nation.
So, discovering that the Hunter laptop was in fact legitimate was important, but that discovery was delayed by largely Twitter's actions in suspending this, and Elon Musk has now revealed that through one of the few remaining excellent journalists on earth, Matt Taibbi, which is all very interesting.
Next chapter though, if you looked at today's New York Times or Washington Post, Now mind you, I don't have the electronic rendering of the paper versions of those things.
I think you need to be a subscriber at the New York Times in order to see what they put out on paper.
I don't have time to do it now, but we can always do that.
We can always do that.
I was hoping we could.
Zach, do you have the screenshot of the New York Times site that I sent you from this morning?
I mean, maybe it's because we do this at this point.
That's my excuse.
We are subscribers to both.
I sent you a screenshot from the New York Times.
And what it will show is that there is nothing here about the major revelations that So what this is, for those just listening, the New York Times site in which the search is for Twitter.
For today, December 3rd.
Is that right?
So I also, I believe, sent Zach the front page, which shows no indication.
And if I search for Twitter to see if they wrote the story but buried it, it does not show up.
And this remains the case if you switch that from a relevance search.
I think you're now looking at the Washington Post.
If you switch it from a most recent search to a relevant search, it doesn't change it.
They apparently did not write the story about what happened on Twitter yesterday, where this major news event, the internal communications that surrounded... Well, I mean, it was Friday night.
They probably were all busy.
You know, there was a time when newspapers reported news, and even be it Friday night, Would have gotten such a story.
So something funny is up, right?
You don't say.
It has been apparent.
You want to show that Washington Post one?
The same thing is true if we go to the Washington Post.
They didn't write the story either.
I would argue that's completely predictable.
Sure.
So, okay.
It's absent from these two major papers.
You want to go to the New York Post now?
The New York Post, which as you recently...
Show me the front page.
Which as you recently said was the outfit easily laughed at until recently that was the one that broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in the first place and got itself kicked off Twitter as a result.
But the New York Post has something to say.
So the New York Post has the headline right here up front and actually the New York Post is So this is an opinion piece.
Actually, this is not their front page, but this is the... That's fine.
Don't worry about it.
So in their opinion piece, they write that what was released on Twitter yesterday was incomplete in that it excluded The FBI's influence.
The FBI having spread the false story that this appeared to be Russian disinformation, which was ostensibly the basis for the exclusion of the story from Twitter, which then the emails that were released by Taibbi yesterday reveal they immediately knew inside didn't fly and that they had no reason to exclude this story and yet decided to continue to do it, which matches a pattern also revealed by Matt Taibbi yesterday, where
It turned out, this is surprising, that influential people on both sides of the aisle were able to Make contact inside of Twitter and suggest that certain tweets be moderated.
But that this was heavily biased in favor of the blue team's influence by virtue of the fact that the people inside of Twitter are heavily biased in favor of the blue team.
So anyway, it's an extremely important story from the point of view of seeing how the machine works.
And the fact that even today, you've got Twitter revealing this thing, and the New York Times and the Washington Post don't feel forced to write the story, no matter how important it is.
Maybe especially because it's so important.
All right, so that's sort of the immediate context.
Free speech is now revealing another property that we've talked about here.
Certain stories diagnose the system.
The story of Hunter Biden's laptop diagnoses the system.
We can now see what Twitter did inside.
We can see what the New York Times and the Washington Post still do with it.
We can see that there is this nebulous interface with the federal government where the FBI is seeding information on which a A platform might erroneously exert its influence.
And it's all quite ominous and explains in large measure how we ended up in such a terrible divided situation in this country.
All right.
And in that context, if we go back slightly farther, what we have is an incident earlier in the week when Kanye West on Alex Jones' program on Infowars showed up after, I guess we should go back even further, he showed up initially with Nick Fuentes, a very troubling character, white nationalist, certainly by implication if not by his own admission.
...showed up on Tim Poole's podcast, and Tim Poole pushed back on some of the absurd things that West said about Jews, and West stormed out after something like 15 minutes.
So after that incident happened, he then shows up on InfoWars.
Now the important thing here is that Alex Jones has been thrown off of Twitter and has not been brought back.
So InfoWars lives on presumably its own site.
They had an interview with Kanye West in person.
Nick Fuentes, who's traveling with Kanye West, is there as well.
And Alex Jones, in this context, is the voice of reason.
Now... I barely followed this.
I was... Let me just say that one of the things that this situation reminds me of is that we are living in an era that celebrates the mentally ill.
That puts them front and center and either And either admires them and tells them how amazing they are and their delusions, or leaves them open for the mockery that will surely come.
And it's disrespectful.
It's mean.
It's dangerous.
It's bad for the individuals, for sure, but it's dangerous for society.
And I know that's not the main place that you're going here, but my overwhelming sense, and I, you know, I'm experiencing sadness as an emotion this week for other reasons.
So maybe I'm just more prone to be feeling sad about this, but my overwhelming sense of this and of some of the children who are claiming they are trans and being just manipulated and destroyed, my overwhelming sense at the moment is not.
Anger, or surprise, or any of the number of things that a person could feel.
It's just sadness.
I really know almost nothing about Kanye West, but isn't there anyone out there who loves him enough to protect him from himself?
Honestly.
Look, this is one of the places that we need to go here.
Now, I don't know if what we're seeing is the result of mental illness.
That's certainly a plausible way to connect these dots.
I have to say, the greater tragedy is what is being done to us by the elimination of our ability to have a rational conversation about any of this, where should you manage to create a rational conversation, it is immediately dismissed as right-wing or something like that, right?
So, the problem is, we have to have the conversation about how to treat each other well, how to be nations, how to exist as whatever the West is.
Not exactly a nation, right?
But it is clearly, in some sense, an emergent culture that has to defend itself.
We've got to be able to have a conversation about how you do that.
And instead, people have gamed every system of conversation so that none of those things can take place.
So that if you succeed, then you are dismissed.
If you fail, then it is considered evidence that it wasn't possible to begin with, right?
The whole thing, the conversation environment, has been thoroughly rigged.
And so, let me just finish describing what took place.
Kanye West shows up, I think without explanation, on Alex Jones program wearing it's not even a face mask.
It is something that covers his entire face including his eyes.
Presumably he can see through the material but it's a very bizarre thing for him to do especially in light of the fact that it I think clearly was him.
Any voice analysis should be able to tell you if it wasn't.
And so anyway he shows up somehow disguising himself Hand on a Bible, sitting on the table in front of him, and of course he says all kinds of preposterous things, which Jones attempts to back him into some form of reasonability, and he's having none of it.
So he definitely says that, you know, he thinks all human beings bring redeeming things to the table, you know, including Hitler.
Okay, well, you know, No doubt one could come up with some pedantic defense of that statement.
Jones pushes back and he's like, no, I actually like Hitler.
Doesn't he say especially Hitler?
He does say especially Hitler.
He makes it very plain that his perspective, at least in his current state of mind, is that he has affection for Hitler and the Nazis.
I believe in his interview with Tim Pool, he said that the Holocaust didn't happen that way or something, so it's like all the worst stuff, right?
It's Holocaust denial, it's affection for Hitler, and the question is, what are we to make of this?
And I have not done a tremendous amount of digging on people's arguments here, but there is one in what I looked at, and I looked at enough stuff, That I don't see anywhere, which I think ought to be front and center.
My feeling is, on thinking about this tragic, bizarre spectacle, the kind of train wreck you can't look away from, that the real answer is that actually, if you stand in the right place, it makes maybe the strongest possible case for free speech on our platforms in the sense that the founders meant it.
Even this bizarre spectacle, which, you know, I'm not a believer in the category of hate speech.
Obviously, much speech is motivated by hate, but it's obviously not a legal category.
It is protected by the First Amendment, like everything else.
Even this obvious case of hate speech, the embrace of a genocidal maniac, That not only does the principle of free speech require us to defend this, but it actually demonstrates why we must.
And so I wanted to make that case, just so that it's on the table at the very least.
And the way I see it is this.
Kanye West is exceedingly popular.
At least he was last week.
I think it's been a little while.
He is exceedingly popular.
I don't think that could possibly be an exaggeration.
Even if he's lost half his audience, he's exceedingly popular.
In fact, the thing you point to The pathology that has no name, where somebody becomes so famous and so wealthy that no one can tell them no, right?
The thing that I believe killed Prince, that killed Michael Jackson, right?
The idea that these people are so elevated that they will be injected with drugs that will kill them because basically they can have whatever they want.
I will just say I was making a broader point than that.
This wasn't about is he too famous for anyone who loves him to help him.
This was I think a more important and far broader point that as a society we are embracing mental illness and most of the people who are having their mental illness embraced have no fame at all.
In fact many of them have narcissistic tendencies and are seeking fame.
Yep.
And the response is not I'm sorry you're going through that.
Let's see if we can treat that and return you to some semblance of normalcy in the best sense of the term.
But rather, oh yes, you are in fact a lizard and we're going to make sure that anyone who says that you're not is roundly disciplined.
No, look, I think you're making an excellent point.
I do think that there is something that is almost inscribed in the new rules, in which we are forced to not dismiss certain kinds of assertions as crazy, even though they transparently are.
And that's clearly going on here.
But anyway, even, I mean, let's just Play my game here for a second.
He is exceedingly popular.
I don't know how many million followers he has, but it's a very large number.
He has also got political aspirations.
He's run for president once very, well, you roll your eyes, but when somebody with as much reach as this person has, decides that they want to do something like this, the idea that it is preposterous is obviously wrong.
Okay?
And Donald Trump proves this.
Right?
Donald Trump managed to get himself elected president.
So, my point is Kanye West is the kind of person who brings together certain things that could conceivably put him in the presidency.
Right?
A nuclear armed presidency.
And so, the idea that we might take utterances of his that are beyond the pale and shield them, thereby protecting us from the understanding, even if, and I do think one interpretation here, is that this person is having a bipolar, a manic episode, that they don't really believe these things, that we're hearing things from their darkest fantasies,
and not their actual understanding of the world, and that therefore it would be ungenerous for us to imagine that this is what Kanye West thinks.
I don't know.
I don't follow him under normal circumstances, so I don't know how out of character this is, if he's just finally admitting things that he believes, or if these are things he doesn't really believe, and two months from now he'll say, look, that wasn't really me.
I don't know.
But what I do know is that anybody who would say these things is not fit for office.
And so my point is, no matter what the meaning of this episode, it is vitally important that we be able to see it.
Vitally important.
And to make that point even a little bit stronger, notice where we did see it.
Right?
We saw it on Alex Jones' program, who has himself been banished to the fringe of civilization.
Right?
So the point is, you know, okay, we can now take video from this channel, which the, you know, elite world would clearly like to disappear, right?
But this channel is responsible for us being able to see something important that actually might be, at some point, relevant to the governance of the country and the fate of the world.
You know, it seems to me like it couldn't really be a stronger case for, you know what?
Let us, you know, not be snowflakes, and let us not pretend that the fact that somebody has said something terrible means that we are all going to be persuaded of something, or we are going to be so injured.
I mean, look, I'm Jewish.
I have as much right to be injured by somebody denying the Holocaust or saying Hitler was a cool guy as anybody, but you know what?
It doesn't bug me.
I think I'm looking at somebody who's either involved in performance art, or it's a mental illness, or it's both, or I don't know what.
But the point is, yeah, I think it's pretty important that we all heard him say it.
Absolutely.
I actually think that that segues neatly into talking a little bit about Anna Kryloff's newest piece, if we can.
So Anna Kryloff, regular listeners will remember, I read from her piece called On the Perils of Politicizing Science back in Livestream 84 in June of 2021.
Which was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, not a place where you might expect a piece called On the Perils of Politicizing Science to show up.
She is herself a chemist at USC, born in the Soviet Union, and so knows wherever she speaks.
And I've since had the opportunity to meet her.
She's a wonderful person, as wonderful in person as in writing.
And she made a speech at Duke a year ago that is now published on Dorian Abbott's Substack.
Dorian Abbott himself is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago who writes on Substack.
I haven't written it down here.
Heterodox Stem is the name of his Substack.
And he himself ran into trouble with woke culture when he co-authored an op-ed in Newsweek Summer of 2021, in which he claimed that DEI, that is diversity, equity, inclusion, violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.
Quote, it entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.
It requires being willing to tell an applicant, I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so.
It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistics over the individuality of a human being." For writing that, his talk at MIT was canceled because the mob made all the usual claims about being hurt and injured by this kind of argument.
So that's Dorian Abbott, the geophysicist at University of Chicago, who has just republished Anna Kryloff's speech to do just this week.
And so Anna Kryloff's piece, which is called Just a minute.
Once I scroll to the top, Zach, you can show my screen here if you like.
This is just a PDF of the piece.
I'll link to that substack in the show notes.
From Russia with love, science and ideology then and now.
And again, she is born Soviet Union, now has been in the United States for a very long time, a chemist at USC.
And I wanted to say that she has organized her remarks in this piece, which I recommend you read the whole thing, into a discussion of the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship, which is related to what you've just been talking about, the omnipresence of ideology, with examples from science, the intolerance of dissenting opinions, suppression of ideas and people, censorship, and newspeak, to use Orwell's term,
And it's really easy to go to, you know, using social engineering to... The problem with using social engineering to solve imagined problems is a double whammy that no, does not make it a good thing.
It makes it even worse.
But let me read a little bit here from her piece.
Let's begin, writes Dr. Kryloff, with the pervasive fear of speaking up.
First, some definitions.
Self-censorship is the refusal to produce, distribute, circulate, or express something for fear of punishment.
Self-censorship is different from discretion.
When I choose not to talk about my views on religion at the dinner table in order not to upset my mother-in-law, that is discretion.
But when I choose not to say in a faculty meeting that considering only diversity candidates for a faculty search is discriminatory because I am afraid of being ostracized or worse, that is self-censorship.
The flip side of self-censorship is compelled speech.
That is when people express opinions that are not their own for fear of punishment.
Again, there is a difference between telling little white lies in order to please someone and saying something you do not believe in for fear of repercussions.
Saying, oh, you look exactly like you did 30 years ago to your high school sweetheart is not compelled speech.
Compelled speech is when your institution issues a pledge to fight systemic racism and you are afraid to ask, is there any evidence of systemic racism in our university?
Instead, you stand up at the faculty meeting and pledge to apply yourself fully to dismantling systemic racism.
We've met some of those people.
Self-censorship is a reaction to oppressive environments.
It is a symptom of fear.
It is an indicator of cancel culture.
And just one more.
A couple more things here.
Newspeak is invading, this again from Orwell's 1984, Newspeak is invading the English language in a truly Orwellian fashion.
A few examples illustrate this.
The journal Nature published a letter calling for the replacement of the accepted technical term quantum supremacy by quantum advantage.
The authors regard the English word supremacy as violent and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism.
They also warn us about the damage inflicted by using such terms as conquest.
Professional societies, including the Association for Computing Machinery, and tech companies, including Google, and IBM joined the suit.
Last spring I attended a meeting on quantum information science.
It was a sad spectacle to watch grown-up scientists stumbling, trying to avoid the offensive word.
About 90% conformed to this idiocy.
So this is important because science has been trotted out so much in the last almost three years, right?
As, well, you know you can't trust yourself, and you know you don't know enough to really understand what's going on, but we're going to bring out some lab coat-wearing scientists.
It's really hard to stay serious with a really completely charming epic tabby on your chest like that.
Apologies to those.
Sorry about that.
Back to the horror.
Oh my goodness, it makes things okay.
That and the fact of excellent peaches in August helps make things okay.
We have, most of the public who are not scientists, have been sold a bill of goods, have been assured, and have believed that The scientists, when they speak, are correct.
They know what they're doing because science.
Because you've all heard something about self-correcting, yada yada yada, and hypothesis maybe, and lots of math, and therefore must be true.
And what we see here in an anecdote, in an article filled with stories that are mostly not anecdotes, but this happens to be an anecdote, is about 90% of the scientists
At a professional society, the Association for Computing Machinery, um, oh no no, just, she doesn't specify, it's a meeting on quantum information science, about 90% of the attendees, all of whom are identified as scientists, tied themselves in knots trying to conform to the journal nature's insane conclusion that the term quantum supremacy is violent and colonial.
Okay?
So if 90% of scientists will do that, For a non-issue?
How can we assume that any scientist standing up and saying, follow the science, isn't long since gone, if they ever had any ability to think scientifically at all?
Well, there's a whole bunch on that thread that I want to follow.
Go for it.
The key thing, I think you make an excellent point, you're watching scientists bend over backwards over a trivial thing, and we actually pointed to the speech in Catch-22, I can't remember how long ago, but we pointed, there's a point at which the Great Loyalty Oath campaign has gotten to a point of absurdity, and I think it's
Colonel Cathcart comes into the mess hall and kills it off by demanding that he give me eats without signing a loyalty oath and then as he walks away with his food, having intimidated them into serving him, everybody's hoping that he'll break the campaign and he says give everybody eats and the Great Loyalty Oath campaign comes to a crashing end.
But it requires a benevolent dictator in the moment, doesn't it?
Power.
And the point is, absent that, the willingness of scientists to bend over backwards over a total non-issue when the real answer is, yeah, I'm not going to do that because it's stupid.
The fact that nobody says that tells you how powerful this is and how unlikely it is that scientists will stand up over something difficult.
It just so happens that this links back to what we were talking about that led you here, and I don't know whether we should pursue that thread or you finish out your Kryloff piece.
Okay, we'll come back to it though.
Brandeis University has a website dedicated to newspeak.
They recommend replacing trigger warning by content notice.
And offer DEI approved suggestions for replacements for, she doesn't provide Brandeis' recommended replacements, but they offer DEI approved suggestions for replacements for, take a stab at it, you are killing it, walk-in appointment, an abusive relationship.
Now, I don't know what their problem with abusive relationship is.
I can understand what their problem with abusive relationships might be, but the idea that the term abusive relationship needs to be replaced by a DEI-sanctioned term such that you can guarantee that no one will know what you're talking about.
But I'm betting that walk-in appointment is offensive because some people can't walk.
That's my guess.
I don't know.
That's all I got.
This is what we have to do.
We have to laugh at these people.
Right.
We have to laugh at these people.
We have to not comply, and not affirm, and not say, yes sir, and say, you're insane, and you're laughable, and come on along with me, see how foolish you were being, and you know, let's talk, okay?
So, a slightly longer section, one more excerpt here.
Her fourth theme in the piece is social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.
Writes Krylov, in the USSR everything was managed top-down.
So again, this is where she grew up.
Social engineering was the main tool for building a supposedly better world.
Let me share just one example.
Our institutions were obsessed with demographics, which were controlled by quotas.
For example, for Jewish kids it was nearly impossible to get into top physics or mathematics programs.
Why?
Because Jews were overrepresented.
And having too many Jewish faces among mathematicians did not represent the demographic makeup of our great nation.
That doesn't add up.
I learned about the existence of Jewish quotas on my first day at university.
Before that, I believed the official narrative, that everyone has fair access to education and everyone can pursue their dreams.
My dream was to study chemistry, so I applied to the chemistry department at Moscow State University.
I passed the entrance exam, so I was duly admitted.
But then it happened that I learned from a high school friend that the chemistry department had a special track for theoretically oriented students, and that it is very hard and very advanced.
I had no idea what a theoretically oriented curriculum was about, but I signed up for it more or less on a dare because my friend told me that it is not suitable for girls.
So, Anna, being a girl at the time, now a woman, so I am there on the first day of classes, meeting my classmates for the first time.
There are about 30 kids enrolled.
The first surprise, there are only six girls.
Second surprise, most of the kids were Jewish.
And they were in the program because it was as close as they could get to what they really wanted to study, math and physics.
It was a backdoor via the less visible chemistry program.
I remember telling my classmates how excited I was about chemistry and how I could not wait to get into a chemistry lab.
In response, another girl, who later became my best friend, told her story.
I hate chemistry!
I want to study mathematics, but look at me, she said.
I am obviously Jewish, and my family name is Jewish, so I have zero chance of getting into a physics or math department.
That was the USSR.
Yeah.
In, I think, the 80s, near the end of its reign.
The 80s, wow.
Yeah.
The last words in her piece, which again was from a speech delivered at Duke about a year ago.
What can be done?
Here are some ideas.
First, speak up.
Do not submit to bullies.
Refuse to speak newspeak.
If you see that the king is naked, say the king is naked.
Second, organize.
There is safety in numbers.
Organizations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and the Heterodox Academy can provide a platform for action and protection against repercussions.
Do your share in defending humanism, democracy, and the liberal enlightenment.
Hear, hear.
Yeah.
All right, so let me return back to a test case here.
Go for it.
I think it is on the screenshot of the New York Times that I sent you that you showed there, the Twitter search.
The New York Times and others are promoting a story in the aftermath of Musk's takeover and altering of the environment in which hate speech has skyrocketed on Twitter in the aftermath.
Is that there on that screenshot?
I don't see it.
Okay.
So anyway, here's my point.
A, this is a nonsense story as far as anybody can tell, right?
I have been on Twitter plenty in recent days.
I have not seen any hate speech.
It's not showing up.
And one obvious interpretation is that if in fact they are reporting anything real at all, that they are reporting something like the number of tweets, which would be an easily gamed metric, and they are not reporting what people are actually seeing, that is to say,
impressions of these things and those two things are liable to have diverged radically given what Musk did with certifications where a huge number of people found themselves able to get certification quickly and now have access to filters that allow them to look at the content posted by other certified accounts.
So were you to have an army of bots posting hate speech either because They can, or because the idea is to make Twitter look like a hellscape at the moment.
Then the New York Times and other such establishments could report that hate speech has taken off in the aftermath of this change, when in fact, from the point of view of actual users, the opposite has likely happened.
Well, I mean, there are certainly a number of people who have those blue checks now and they can filter, but the vast majority of people still don't.
But I would say that the bodies are likely to be buried, with regard to this New York Times article that you're talking about, that I have not seen, in the definition of hate speech.
You know, what it is that they are classifying as hate speech is likely to be something about which reasonable people could disagree.
Well, that is certainly true.
It is also true that all eyes are on Twitter because zero is a special number and therefore the amount that is resting on them being able to kill off Musk's experiment is much greater than we would think from a business perspective or size of Twitter perspective.
But the real point I want to make is this.
One of the things that will emerge if we are able to have a free and open conversation about all topics, including difficult ones, is that this whole idea, the whole woke revolution is founded on the idea that if we can police what you can say, that that will make people better.
Right?
Yep.
No way.
Now, I have advanced a very difficult idea, one that people do not like, which is that there is a predictable reason that anti-Semitism in particular rises at certain moments in history, and it has to do with transfer frontiers, which you and I describe in our book.
And the idea is, look, this is a matter of economic contraction causing two things.
One, people's natural tendency to break into lineages and fight each other and the cynical use of that instinct on people's part by elites who do not want to be targeted.
Elites who may have concentrated wealth and power in their own That's a challenging argument.
and who are redirecting that anger at other people to whom we are evolutionarily biased to be suspicious.
That's a challenging argument.
Now, that argument needs to be on the table, right?
Of course lots of people will tell you that that argument is somehow justifying racism or something like this.
They make the naturalistic fallacy.
So in a world where petty people who know very little are empowered to police what is allowed to be discussed, an idea like that likely will not be discussed.
Now if you look at what's taking place, we are watching, any Jew knows that we are watching an immense rise in anti-Semitism in the last several years, but in particular in the last few months.
My claim is That is a natural consequence of something which is being amplified by something else and we better pay attention to what's causing that.
It's not the freedom to talk this way that is causing people to do that.
The freedom to talk that way is allowing us to see that they are doing that which is vitally important that we know.
shield ourselves from what people are actually saying and thinking, then we are liable to be caught off guard, which is the worst possible thing that can happen in these cases.
The key to understanding what to do and preparing properly for it is knowing that it's occurring.
And so, again, the argument here couldn't be stronger.
If you understand it at a deep level, the fact that you are seeing antisemitism means that we have to be alert to it and we have to be able to detect it rather than Having some nanny decide that you're going to be emotionally harmed by hearing this and therefore you won't be allowed to even if you want to tune in, right?
And the things that are being disappeared run the gamut from truly horrible things that people believed At some points, to things within the range of normal for a time that is now past, to made-up things like getting rid of the word supremacy and quantum supremacy because apparently that's violent and colonial.
And so it's not even.
I could try to steel man the idea of censoring the past by saying, if you see that something has been censored, you know that that will have been a very bad thing.
I think it's a stupid argument, but it doesn't hold up because the variety of things that they're censoring is so remarkable.
They're trying to take out Everyone, you know, everyone who isn't living in a bubble right now, and most of language.
And, you know, it's part of why I find, you know, Kryloff standing up as a scientist, as an academic scientist, and saying no, and no one else should be agreeing with this.
Particularly strong because, because she saw, and we talked a lot in the first year or so of Dark Horse, a lot more than we have of late,
About having noticed that many people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain or in Soviet Russia, who have been in the US or been in the West for most of their adult lives, or all of their adult lives, seem particularly likely to be able to see the stirrings and the intimations and sometimes the very obvious stuff that is happening with regard to censorship.
And worse.
And, you know, why should that be?
Well, why should it be?
Because these are people who can do pattern recognition, and they saw this once before, and they're seeing it now.
And if you think it can't happen here, you got another thing coming.
I would also point out one other thing.
On the list of tools that we need in order to navigate dangerous shit like this, top of the list is humor.
And the problem is, if you think you are going to police bad thought out of existence by detecting it when it is uttered and getting rid of it, Well, what the hell do you do with the comedy that is necessary to ridicule bad ideas out of existence?
Right?
That is an essential tool.
And this goes back actually to the hot water that Dave Chappelle got into a few weeks back for pointing out the special power of the phrase, the Jews.
Now it was actually, I mean, I think he was wrong.
I thought it was funny.
I don't know anything about this.
He did this on Saturday Night Live and he was basically saying that there is a rule, an unwritten rule, that in fact these are two words you can't put together.
The Jews, right?
And the point was that there's something to discuss about the Jews.
And anyway, I did think it was funny.
I did think it was wrong.
But I also thought... Wait, you did or you did not?
I thought it was both funny and wrong.
I know he has a point, right?
I don't think the point is the one that he made, but I also thought, I mean, A, as you know, I love David Chappelle.
And I love Dave Chappelle, especially on issues of race.
He's quite excellent.
He has a way, it's not like he doesn't have a perspective, he does, but he also has a way of understanding what's on the other side of that, which makes his humor just devastating.
But anyway, it was the invitation to a conversation that needs to be had, not a very comfortable one.
But one that I wish we would have rather than try to, you know, bar such things at the door, which is only going to result in them, you know, festering and then erupting in some much more troubling way.
I mean, you know, in fact, I will point out that the Jews who got caught off guard in Europe Were Jews who were telling themselves, you know what, it sucks, it's terrible, but it will blow over, right?
They underestimated the danger.
Now how much greater is the chance of underestimating a danger if somebody has protected you from hearing it being discussed, right?
That's a very bad idea.
Yes, and in fact, I remember exactly this sentiment at The FIRE Conference, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, I think is what FIRE stands for.
You were invited to speak at, and we went to, the FIRE Conference in 2017 in Dallas, and one of the higher-ups at FIRE, I don't remember exactly who, I'm afraid, said precisely this, and I don't remember who the sort of Yahoo White Nationalist du Jour was then, so I'm not going to come up with a name.
But there was someone making the news, and there was all sorts of brouhaha about, like, you cannot let this man speak.
And this guy, so to speak, with fire says, please let him speak.
Like, the best thing in the world for all of us who abhor the ideas and tenets of white nationalism is to let them talk and let them, you know, dig their own graves.
Let's do this right.
I agree with this sentiment.
I've said a similar thing, that I want to hear these people.
I want to know what they are saying.
It does not mean That what they are saying does not catch on because people hear it.
The problem is there's this deeper layer.
Why does it catch on?
If you're not dealing with the thing that supports racism, anti-semitism in particular, and I say in particular because the diaspora of Jews lends itself to being attacked when you have an economic contraction, but the point is There is a downside.
It's not that no anti-Semite or other racist is going to persuade anybody by speaking.
They will.
But the point is, why are they vulnerable to being persuaded?
That has to do with the stuff we really should be addressing, right?
These things go away, they go away when times look a certain way, and then they come back when those conditions reverse.
And understanding that pattern is the key to addressing this.
You cannot, you cannot address it by policing speech.
And so, even trying is absurd.
And, one other thing I wanted to add, the list of terms that we are supposed to swap out for other terms, the tell in that one is trigger warning.
Because trigger warning isn't actually bad.
It's one of the things that you could borrow from the woke revolution and say, actually, you know what, that has a place.
Right?
Because what it does is it reduces the downside of speech.
Right?
If I say, look, I mean, in fact, I was in this situation, I gave trigger warnings.
Not very regularly, I didn't feel required to give them, but I felt morally required sometimes.
For example, evolutionary biology, there are cases in the animal kingdom, there are cases in Human populations, there are cases in discussing human history where we have to talk about rape, where it is an important force, right?
Doesn't mean justifying it, but we've got to talk about it.
If you're going to talk about it, and you're going to talk about it to a room of women, some of whom will have had this experience, giving them a trigger warning is a compassionate thing to do, right?
And so the point is, trigger warning Of all of the things that the woke revolution has asserted and promoted, right, that's one of the ones I would say, actually, you know what?
I don't like what you've done with it.
I don't like your absurd assertion about, you know, the fact that somebody's guilty of something because they didn't utter one.
But I do believe that it has a place, and that place is part of protecting speech rights.
Right?
And so the whole idea, well, maybe that's the problem with trigger warning, is that too many people thought, actually, yeah, okay.
Too many people who would be on the other side of that have actually said, yeah, I'm going to give you a trigger warning because it's a reasonable thing to do.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
I never did.
But in a day that was going to include three hours of interactive lecture, the kinds of topics that we would be talking about would be known in advance.
So it was kind of already built in.
I am positive that I never uttered the words, trigger warning.
Here's a trigger warning.
Our epic tabby has just broken into the liquor cabinet.
Oh my goodness.
Off screen.
So our producer is going to go.
Rescue the cat and close that up.
So, I hadn't heard that explanation from you for why a trigger warning might be valuable, and I think maybe what it amounts to is because you didn't leave a written trace.
You didn't have a syllabus wherein they could say, oh, these are the things that we're going to be talking about today.
You had to do that in order to give them some I think until you said it that way, I felt like I think many people who object to the overreach and in constant inconsistencies and diabolical nature of most of the diversity, equity, equity and inclusion movement thought that it was babying people, right?
Like, you know, no.
Grow up.
This is like, you're not going to get trigger warnings in life, so I'm not going to give you a trigger warning either.
That said, okay, yes, we're talking about sexual selection, evolution of sex, evolution of sex roles.
We're talking about all of these things.
And so, you know, you can and should expect that difficult topics will come up around that.
And if you don't, given what you know, all of the things that we're talking about are, well, then that is on you.
Yeah, although I would say, I mean, and I don't think a trigger warning necessarily has to be called a trigger warning.
It sounds like there was one and it was sort of global, right?
There are difficult topics in here.
They will come up, right?
So, you know.
In any case, it's clearly a valid form, right?
It's clearly, as long as it is treated properly, it is clearly a valid form and it is being abused, as so many things are.
I mean the term woke itself being an example of a valid concept that has been abused to the point of foolishness.
So, you can see the time.
We have about 20 minutes left, and I know there's at least one more big thing that you want to talk about, and I have some things to add to it.
Unless you had more on that topic.
No, I think we've covered it.
The next topic is related, as people will see.
So something came across my radar a couple days ago, and the funny thing is, I don't know if the source was odd, but I chased it down and it's for real.
The source was a publication that I don't think I've run across called the National Desk.
Do you want to put that screenshot up, Zach?
Well, let's try one.
No, this is the Well, this'll do.
This'll do.
You know what?
Take that off.
Let me show first, because I've got an October article that introduces this.
Oh, great.
That will be better, I think.
So, actually, Zach, you can show my screen.
So this is on a site that I'd never heard of, HacksHackers.com, which is one of the organizations that has just won, this is them announcing that they've, along with two other organizations, won a $5 million grant from NSF, from the National Science Foundation.
And what they claim to be doing, I'm going to start lower and then read, well, actually, Yeah, I'm going to start lower.
It says, Hacks Hackers, which is the name of the organization on whose website this is written, with a strange blinking cursor.
I've never seen that headline before, but there you go.
Hacks Hackers, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, and partner organizations, maybe it's more than three, have received a new $5 million award from the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator.
The award will support phase two development of the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust, Art, a suite of expert-informed resources that are intended to provide guidance and encouragement to individuals and communities as they address contentious or difficult topics online.
So, before you leave the screen, I have one more thing to read from this.
Okay, you can go off it for the moment.
Actually, let me just read it because I've now lost what I was going to say.
The Art Guide... Zach, will you put it back up, please?
That's it.
software tool presents for the first time a unique framework of possible responses for everyday conversations around tricky topics, all informed by online information analysis to help motivated citizens answer the question, what do I say and how do I say it?
That's it.
NSF, the National Science Foundation, the biggest source of science funding that isn't explicitly medical or otherwise applied, and a lot of the research that NSF funds is applied, that American scientists have access to.
It's given $5 million to help motivated citizens answer the question, what do I say?
And how do I say it?
When confronted with controversial topics.
That's extraordinary.
Well, it's extraordinary at a couple different levels.
One, it's NSF, right?
This is the federal government, okay?
So, A, free speech is central here, not only in its general meaning, but in its First Amendment meaning.
Yes.
Second thing is five million dollars This is very much like the award given to the TOGETHER trial after they had found that ivermectin didn't work according to them, which of course is nonsense because their method wasn't a proper test.
Well, this is a grant to do research, supposedly, as opposed to an award.
It's the magnitude I'm talking about.
Five million dollars for what sounds like a group of, you know, bright-eyed young people to sit around a conference table and spitball about what might be said in a contentious conversation.
Five million bucks?
How would you even spend five million bucks on this project?
Well, now I think the screenshot that Zach showed earlier, let's see what they found so far.
Right, so this is a progress report.
They're showing us that they've already made some progress, and here's the progress.
So this was in October of 24th.
They have just gotten this money, like five, six weeks ago, and now...
And now, the thing has gotten off the ground.
It says, in addition to the toolkit, Hacks and Hackers is also developing a rating scale for reliable Wikipedia sources according to a job posting online.
That project has already gotten off the ground.
Wow, that's good news.
So that $5 million is not being wasted.
Citing left-leaning sources like Vox, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and the Boston Globe as reliable, while citing conservative sources like Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, and biologist Brett Weinstein as unreliable.
Now, A, this is sexist.
How the hell have they attacked me and not you?
That is despicable.
I just exude reliability.
I guess that must be it.
But you and I agree on a lot of stuff, so I might just be reflecting reliable stuff, but it's still reliable.
In any case, A. I think this is insane.
It's insane.
So I guess everything is wrong with this, but just to take the last phrases on the page here.
Conservative sources like Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire.
Aren't Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire very, like, isn't The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro?
Daily Wire is Ben Shapiro dressed for work.
I see, okay.
And then Ben Shapiro is Ben Shapiro in casual clothes.
Ben Shapiro is conservative, for sure.
Yes.
But that's kind of one thing.
Right.
And then, let's see, biologist Brett Weinstein, is it Steen or Stein?
No, it's Stein.
Oh, it's Stein.
Okay, so biologist Brett Weinstein is not a conservative source.
And let me see, not unreliable.
I would argue that if you would compare my record to any of the sources they cite as reliable, I will beat the pants off all of them.
But anyway, so okay, this is maddening.
The federal government is paying these Hackers.
Hacks hackers.
To generate guidance for what people should say in difficult conversations.
And among the things that they've concluded early, because, you know, the more secure stuff at the foundation, is that conservatives like me and Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro are, in fact, unreliable.
Right?
Well, him apparently doubly so.
Right.
That's amazing.
But the thing is, this is also tied into Wikipedia.
Right?
If you click through, what you find is that you want to put up that.
So the point is, this list of reliable sources is actually a Wikimedia list, which it declares people good and bad behind the scenes so that this will cascade through the building of the Wikipedia site on all of the topics that are relevant.
So scroll down or hit COVID-19 and you'll get it.
COVID-19.
You scroll down here you will find, go to where you start seeing all of the warning there be dragon symbols.
I did an episode of Dark Horse in which we discussed with Norman Fenton the appalling breakdown of Wikipedia into a partisan, it's actually worse than partisan.
If it was simply partisan like the New York Times, you could roll your eyes at it.
But the problem is, it's still the best encyclopedia going if you want to know the volume of your favorite lake or you want to know What kind, you know, what sex determination in anglerfish looks like.
I don't know at this point that I would trust them on sex determination in anything, honestly.
I agree.
I take that one back.
The geographic distribution of anglerfish, probably they're still reliable on.
But the point is, Okay, the greatest encyclopedia of all time moonlights as a mechanism for slandering sources who say things inconvenient to the elite cabal dressed in blue, and that is extremely dangerous, right?
But, so, okay, the federal government is influencing this organization.
It is drowning them in money so that they can have, I'm sure, a really nice conference table.
I hope they can breathe.
Whatever they're doing, these people are now influencing Wikipedia, which we know to be extremely partisan and involved in slander.
And the point is, how many unwitting people are going to be influenced by the NSF, which has laundered its plan through this organization and through Wikipedia?
Okay, but here's the bright side.
Yep, good.
So we got hax hackers, whoever they are, joining with a school.
It was a school of like computer something-something at some university, presumably.
So there's got to be some people who really know what science is, doing the science, we presume, because they're making all the decisions about reliability of sources, talking about vaccines, right?
Well, they're sciencing.
Right, they're sciencing.
They're sciencing it up.
And Zach, if you would show my screen, Pfizer at least has our backs.
Okay, so Pfizer has tweeted recently, wouldn't it be great if a few internet searches could land you a PhD?
Thank goodness for real scientists!
So they, in like a nod to The Onion or Babylon Bee, incredible!
Ariaman now full-fledged scientists thanks to one internet search.
Which, I don't know, kind of sounds like the hack hackers people to me, I'm guessing.
So hold on, come back to my screen here for a second, Zach.
Because the very next screenshot I want to show you, which just is a tiny bit back in Pfizer's feed, though actually it's the top of their feed as of this morning, is we are proud, this is Pfizer, is proud to announce Pfizer's manufacturing division has won the most valuable collaboration award at the 2022 USA Reuters Pharma Awards.
The Reuters Pharma Awards, of course!
This is a testament to all our hard-working colleagues who continue to innovate and grow.
The USA Reuters Pharma awards.
Yeah.
Well, gee, I didn't know.
Is that a fact?
That a news agency, one of the largest, at least in the U.S., if not the world, was in the business of giving out awards to pharma companies.
But I guess you live, you learn.
And I did look a little bit at their site here.
Let's show the site here, Zach.
Reuters Events apparently does a number of things.
This isn't the only one, but here they're announcing the Pharma Awards for 2023, where pharma's true value gets true recognition, and they're going to show us the 2020 categories for their awards.
They're going to include the Driving Health Equity Award, Driving health equity.
And the Delivering Inclusive Trials Award.
Whoa!
So there's nothing in any of these about the actual veracity of what the claims of the pharmaceutical companies are making.
I see nothing in any of these lists.
Nothing.
And just one more thing.
Don't leave my screen yet here.
If you go to the facts, the frequently asked questions, it's not that interesting.
The entry process, the judges, it's all garbage.
But at the very bottom of every single page, can't wait to experience this together.
No question mark.
Can't wait to experience this together.
I can.
Says Reuters Pharma Awards.
Can't wait to experience this together.
I can too.
Alright.
I can too.
So I think there are two things that you have elided here that belong in discussion.
Excellent.
I looked at that tweet about Area Man on the basis of a single search.
This one?
Hold on.
This one?
Can you put it up, Zach?
Yes.
Maybe.
Yes, this one.
I looked at this one and of course I felt my eyes bulging and my temperature and blood pressure both going up simultaneously.
But why?
You've got a PhD.
Well, that's just the thing.
You and I have two PhDs together and we have been slandered and libeled clearly by things that are closely affiliated.
With this particular entity, and so the point is it dismissing people who have done searches that result in them finding information that matches what you and I have spent hundreds of hours discussing and explaining why we reached the conclusions we did and altering them when some new piece of information came up or when we learned that we had been wrong, right?
All of that counts for nothing.
They're gonna mock the guy who comes to a conclusion that makes sense because of course he doesn't have a PhD, which is credentialism in the stupidest sense, but Two things.
Yes.
One, I recalled, in fact you can find it on UnHerd's site, they discussed the research that showed that the acceptance of the vaccines had a U-shaped distribution, that there were two groups of people who were particularly hesitant about the vaccines.
The rejection has a U-shaped, the acceptance has an inverse U-shaped.
Depends whether the horseshoe is emptying luck over your door or... If you say U-shaped you just gotta... All right.
The rejection has a U-shaped distribution where people who have very little education have rejected the COVID vaccines and people who have PhDs also have rejected them in disproportionate numbers.
Those are the two educational demographics in which people have rejected them at higher levels than among the high school and college educated.
Correct.
And so the idea that they are going to use the fact that Area Man does not have a PhD and has searched the internet and found something as an indication, but, of course, they did not get a thousand responses that said that to their goddamn tweet.
Well, they did get a lot of quote tweets, and I didn't go through them.
Oh, quote tweets, but they turned off replies.
Right.
Exactly.
They prevented people from actually replying directly, but I'm sure they got a lot of mockery.
I mean, this is part of... We're not going to talk about this week the thing that I alluded to earlier about what has sort of been throwing me, but probably the next time we come, we'll talk about it a little bit, which is going to be in two weeks.
And I may post something about it in my natural selections this week, but I will say that one of the things that I've really been thinking about anew, having given this thought for decades, is how much everyone needs to be encouraged to do what most people do innately and have educated out of them, which is think scientifically.
Make observations.
See patterns.
Figure out what those patterns might mean.
That's your hypothesis.
Figure out if that hypothesis that you've made is true, what else would necessarily be true.
That's your prediction.
Figure out how you could assess whether or not that prediction that you've made that follows necessarily from that hypothesis is or is not true.
That would be your test.
Now, people don't need to then, you know, run the tests, right?
But in their daily lives, everyone inherently should be doing this, should be assessing the information that comes in, as opposed to having hacks, hackers, tell them what to say.
I mean, like, literally, they put that in their press release.
What do I say and how do I say it?
A motivated citizen needs to hack Hack hackers, who are the biggest hack jobs I've seen this week, who put you as a conservative providing misinformation about vaccines on their list, they are the people who want to tell you and us What to say and how to say it.
Well, no.
We are all supposed to decide.
All of us individually what to say and how to say it.
And we're supposed to figure out what to say and how to say it by figuring out what is true.
And we figure out what is true by observation.
And by figuring out where people are making sense and listening to them and engaging with them and engaging with other people who seem to be making sense and testing them and prodding them and saying, no, I don't agree with you.
Why do you think that when you don't agree with someone and you want to and you have access to them and you can say, why do you think that?
And not acquiescing and being one of the 90 percent of scientists who said, yeah, yeah, yeah, no quantum supremacy for me.
Like, no!
We're all supposed to be doing this as individuals because we all have agency and autonomy, and we're just losing it.
We're just losing the plot, collectively.
Yep, and just as it is true that if Ivermectin didn't work, the idea that you would need some giant fraud that was built to fail to prove it, of course you wouldn't.
If Ivermectin didn't work, you could just run a large-scale randomized controlled trial.
You could give it to people early.
You could give it to them in sufficient doses.
You could not hide the cap of the doses.
It would just demonstrate itself not to be very useful, right?
Yeah.
The fact that you find fraud tells you something.
And the fact that you and I are being, people are being told they should not pay attention to us.
Who are they being told they should not pay attention to?
Well, to biologists who say that predictive power is the way that you will know whether somebody knows what they're talking about.
Right.
How could we game our own system?
Either we have predictive power, or we don't, right?
And if we don't have predictive power, then people may listen to us, and then they will discover we don't know what we're talking about because we fail to predict stuff.
Maybe, I mean, maybe to go full circle, it's postmodernism again.
It is.
It's like, you know what?
You people may have predictive power, but you must be manipulating reality.
Like, you know, that's the only consistent thing that they could be believing, wherein two people who, yes, have the credentials that give us the respectability to be talking about the things that we do, because we both have PhDs in biology, but also are just employing the scientific method day in, day out, in front of you guys, not in front of you guys, all the time, to try to figure out what is true.
And sometimes what is true is surprising, and sometimes it's not, and sometimes it's ugly, and sometimes it's beautiful, and None of your emotional reaction to it changes whether or not it's true or not.
Well, you know, I think what's actually happening is that the elites who are exerting power to do this, the rent seekers, because of the time-traveling money printer idea, have, they think wisely, decided to blind the rest of us.
And it's like, yes, it's a dark age.
But the point is, oh, we're going to put blindfolds on you all, right?
We're going to make sure you can't see things.
And what they think they've done is they have privatized the information that allows them to live well and make money.
But they don't realize that actually, no, the scientific system is not going to work privately, right?
They are in fact blinding themselves too, and they just don't realize it.
And they are putting themselves in grave danger.
Yeah, there's that happening over there.
But in any case, I do feel like they have cultivated a dark age, thinking that they were clever for doing it, and they have no idea.
You know, it's Sorcerer's Apprentice, and it is... Yeah.
You know, it's Sorcerer's Apprentice, and it is... We've got all the broom drones coming now.
They do.
Yeah.
They do, and they just don't even know how to turn it off.
They don't even know that they need to turn it off, because they feel, you know, short term, it's giving them a positive signal.
All right, well, maybe he's telling us something.
I don't yet know what language he's speaking.
Nope.
But no, this is actually working pretty great.
Okay, that's perfect.
That's pretty charming.
Yeah, that's a new method.
So apologies for those just listening.
You should definitely come and just take a view of the last bit of our show today wherein the cat gets blanket in his mouth.
Okay.
Are we there?
We are there.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, the animals do make life tolerable in moments when it seems like the conversation, the official conversation, that has the imprimatur of all of the things, the science, the media, the everything, is getting stupider and stupider and stupider.
But here we go.
These guys are.
They're not getting stupider, they're getting covered in blanket fur, but that's different.
All right, so we will be back in two weeks.
Not next week, but we will also be back in 15 minutes.
So that's sooner.
Yes, quite a bit, actually.
Quite a bit sooner.
Yeah, I did the math on that.
And we're gonna come back.
You did the math.
Because you're not Jewish, that's not a problem.
Even though 15 is bigger than 2.
Whoa, I know.
OK.
Yeah, I was allowed to do really bad math because I'm not a Jew in Soviet or Russia.
OK.
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Read on Together's Guide to the 21st Century, where we did keep in a small section on pets, and I believe, I think it's still in there.
I'm pretty sure it's still in there.
There was so much we had to cut, but where you might learn something about what the heck is going on on camera right now.
I guarantee you, whatever remained in our book, there is nothing about pets appreciating art, which I think I am now observing for the first time.
Maybe he thinks the armadillo looks delicious.
Okay, until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
