In this 169th 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 sports bras, Twitter, AI, electric unicycles, and AIDS. Sports bras are a useful item of clothing for women engaged in certain kinds of sports; they are not a fashion accessory, but are being used as such, and as a weapon in the culture wars. Then: Substack announced a new product that will be com...
- Hey folks, welcome to the 7,314th Dark Horse livestream podcast.
It is Saturday here.
It's actually the 169th podcast, is that correct?
It is.
Nonetheless, either way, I'm still Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and we are going to chat about some of... chat is no longer a term that we are ever going to use.
We are going to discuss some of the The circumstances of the era, and events of the day, and all those sorts of things.
Alright, I tripped myself up, I said chat, my blood pressure leapt about four times, and I'm back.
I feel, I'm calm again.
So, there's that.
All right.
We have a lot to talk about.
We're going to be relatively rapid here today.
We are not going to be doing a Q&A today, and we are not going to be back here next week, so you will see us next two weeks from now.
Um, but we do have, uh, a number of interesting things to talk about today.
Twitter and sports bras.
Wow.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Okay.
Not the natural triumvirate you would expect.
No, no, no.
The big three, I guess.
Three.
Four.
I mean, depending on how you count sports bras.
Why would you count them as two except for the obvious reason that it can't be that?
Okay.
We aren't digressing because this is what we're doing.
This is what we do.
We digress for a living.
I hope that's not true.
Okay, so join us now and then two weeks from now.
And we will have stories to tell, I think.
Yes.
By then.
So this week on Natural Selections, which is where I write weekly on my sub stack, I wrote about my father who died 10 years ago this week.
And I'm going to show you a tiny bit of that once we start talking in the main part of the podcast.
But I encourage you to go there and truly appreciate subscribers.
They're both free and paying subscribers.
We have at our store, which I still failed to put the URL in here, Zach, and I'm trying to get your attention.
The URL for the store is... store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Thank you.
store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
We have pins, for instance, Dark Horse pins, which you can put on yourself and use as a bat signal to others that they are... You can also use them to deflate Chinese spy balloons.
I feel like you'd have to get really, really close, at which point there might be a better approach to dealing with Chinese spy balloons.
No, that was totally implied, that you would have to get really close, but... Okay, I'm derailing conversations right and left, so that's about par for the course.
Yes.
We are supported by you when you subscribe to Natural Selections, when you read our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and when you subscribe to our YouTube channel, our Odyssey channels, our Dark Horse Podcast clips channels on both YouTube and Odyssey.
Like, share what we do with other people.
Right now I saw today's clip that just got put out was our discussion of of the madness that happened to Kelly J Keane in, gosh I'm not forgetting, it was both Australia and New Zealand where the madness happened.
We talked about that a couple weeks ago so there's a clip out now on that and sometimes those clips are easier to share for people.
You can also join our Patreons where in two weeks we will be Having our monthly private Q&A right now.
You can ask questions at mine and also join our Discord server where people are having fantastic conversations, virtual happy hours, karaoke, all that.
And of course we have sponsors whom we choose carefully and whom we truly appreciate.
We start with the... - Oh no.
If you're gonna start reading my notes to myself, this is gonna become a very confusing podcast space.
So the vast majority of our audience, as far as we can tell, don't watch.
They only listen.
And so that just dead air will be utterly meaningless to the vast majority of the audience.
You were writing something I looked over, as I sometimes do, and I had two simultaneous reactions, both of which stopped me short.
They were, that's legible.
When did that start?
And secondly, but it's not English!
So, what does it mean?
I can read that and can't interpret it.
That's not the usual order of things, so I'm sure we will hear about whatever that means.
I think you've written yourself an acronym reminder of some sort here, so it's just a series of letters without the language associated with it.
Yeah, hopefully it's enough that when we get there I will still remember what they mean, which is not always the case.
Sure, sure, but at least it's legible.
I can tell you what the letters are.
If I struggle with them, I will ask.
Yeah, amazing.
Congratulations on the newfound legibility.
Well, thank you.
You are welcome.
Okay, our sponsors this week are House of Macadamias, MD Hearing Aid, and Vivo Barefoot.
So without further ado, let us launch into those.
House of Macadamias is our first sponsor this week.
Treenuts are delicious and nutritious.
They're generally high in fat and low in carbohydrates.
Unlike what various food pyramids and government agencies might have led you to believe, high-fat, low-carb foods are increasingly understood to be both satiating and good for you.
But each species of nut is different, and for many of us, macadamias are the best.
They take a very long time to grow, however, and because they are both rare and highly sought after, they have the dubious distinction of being the world's most expensive nut.
Between the taste and the health benefits, they're worth it.
They have even fewer carbohydrates than most other nuts, for instance, half of what cashews or pistachios have and two-thirds of what almonds have, which makes them the perfect snack for breaking a daily fast and controlling blood glucose.
They're also uniquely rich in omega-7s, including especially palmitoleic acid, an unsaturated fat that has been linked to natural collagen production, fat loss, and heart health.
I almost read fat health and heart loss, which would not be useful, but I can assure you that there are no cases, at least in the scientific literature to date, of macadamia nuts causing fat.
Instead, it's correlated with alien abduction, heart loss.
It's not a common medical condition.
No, it really isn't.
Mostly cows.
Especially prompted by a dietary intake.
Yes, that'd be a hell of a diet.
It would.
And House of Macadamias is intent on making this amazing food accessible to everyone.
They have partnered with more than 90 farmers in Africa and now make one-of-a-kind vegan, keto, and paleo snacks.
These include their dark chocolate-dipped macadamias and a delicious assortment of bars made with 45% macadamia nuts and flavors including salted caramel and chocolate coconut.
But our favorite product of theirs is the simple salted macadamias made with Namibian sea salt.
They're amazing.
We love them and think that you will too.
And House of Macadamias also makes a delicious macadamia nut oil, which is 100% cold-pressed, rich in monounsaturated fatty acids, and has a higher smoke point than olive oil, so is well-suited to high-heat cooking and baking.
It's also delicious.
Our House of Academias highly recommends House of Macadamias for all of your macadamic needs.
Go to www.houseofmacadamias.com and use code Dark Horse for a 20% discount on every order.
Plus, Dark Horse listeners will receive a complimentary four-ounce bag of macadamias when they order three or more boxes of any macadamia product.
Once again, that's www.houseofmacadamias.com.
Use code Dark Horse for 20% off every order.
You won't be sorry.
Our second sponsor this week is MD Hearing Aid.
MD Hearing Aid makes high-quality, simple, and effective hearing aids for a tiny fraction of what most hearing aids cost, helping bring audio clarity and capacity to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it.
While we don't have need for hearing aids ourselves, we have a friend who does, and we asked her to assess this product carefully and honestly.
She did, and her testimonial is at the end of this ad.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone could afford.
He kept the price low by simplifying the product, removing several rarely needed components.
And he made a product that aims to fit so well, no one will know you're wearing it.
Other features include rechargeable batteries that last up to 30 hours, water resistance in up to 3 feet of water in their Volt Plus model, and you don't need a prescription to get one.
MDHearingAid has cut out the middleman, so you buy your hearing aid directly from the source where audiologists and licensed hearing specialists are available 7 days a week.
Everyone can empathize with what it feels like to be left out of a conversation that others are enjoying.
Here's a testimonial from that friend of ours who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
We asked her to try this product, and this is what she said.
With my particular type of hearing loss, a deep male voice in a noisy room is the hardest situation for me to hear and understand.
I wore the MD hearing aid to have a conversation with a deep-voiced man in a room with a lot of white noise.
The MD hearing aid passed the test, as my conversation partner's voice was clear and understandable.
At a price point of well under $1,000, I was amazed at how effective they are.
M.D.
Hearing Aid is bringing affordable hearing to hundreds of thousands of people, people who might not otherwise be able to afford high quality hearing aids.
And M.D.
Hearing Aid recently cut their price in half.
So if you want M.D.
Hearing Aid's smallest hearing aid yet, go to mdhearingaid.com and use promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy one get one deal.
A pair of hearing aids cost just $149.99 plus Dark Horse listeners receive a free extra charging case $100 value.
So, head to mdhearingaid.com and use promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy one get one deal, a pair of hearing aids for only $149.99.
All right, our final sponsor this week is Vivo Barefoot, shoes made for feet.
Everybody should try these shoes.
Most shoes are made for someone's idea of feet, but not Vivo's.
Vivo's are made by people with feet who know how to use them.
Are we sure they all have feet?
Actually, you know, in this era, we might want to check, but I believe, we have seen no reason to suspect they don't, and they certainly, there are enough people in the company who have feet, know how to use them, that they design a hell of a great shoe.
That we know.
Very good.
Alright, so, all those caveats have now been taken care of, I feel somewhat relieved.
All right, and word is spreading.
We have been asked by strangers if the shoes we are wearing are as good as they have heard.
Yep, they are.
They really, really are.
Here at Dark Horse, we love these shoes.
They are beyond comfortable.
The tactile feedback from the surfaces you're walking on is amazing, and they cause no pain at all because there are no pressure points forcing your feet into odd positions.
They are fantastic.
Our feet are the product of millions of years of evolution.
Humans evolved to walk, move, and run barefoot.
Modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to a health crisis.
People move less than they might, in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
Enter Vivo Barefoot.
Vivo Barefoot shoes are designed wide to provide natural stability, thin to enable you to feel more, and flexible to help you build your natural strength from the ground up.
Foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them.
The number of people wearing Vivo Barefoot is growing.
Once people start wearing these shoes, they don't seem to stop.
Vivo Barefoot has a great range of footwear for kids and adults and for every activity from hiking to training and everyday wear.
They're a certified B Corp that is pioneering regenerative business principles and their footwear is produced using sustainably sourced natural and recycled materials with the aim to protect the natural world so you can run wild on it.
Go to vivobarefoot.com and use the code DarkHorse15 to get an exclusive offer, 15% off.
Additionally, all new customers get a 100-day free trial so you can see if you love them as much as we do.
That's v-i-v-o-b-a-r-e-f-o-o-t dot com and use the code DarkHorse15 at checkout.
We have, uh, three broad topics today.
Would you like to start or should I?
Why don't you start?
Okay.
Um.
Hmm.
Instagram influencer.
Trans woman, Dylan Mulvaney, whom I think we have mentioned here before, and I have written about on my sub stack in Natural Selections a little bit as just a sort of a sidebar, is you came to prominence with His 365, or Girls of Dayhood, I think is what it was called.
No, really not.
Days of Girlhood, I think is what the sort of project was called.
The movie will be called Girls of Day, which is a pretty good time.
I don't know what it means, but you know.
I really feel like I should just give up now.
It's not going to be a clear day.
It's not going to be an easy day.
And that's on me.
So, has had the amazingly acronymed FFS, Facial Feminization Surgery, and says that he's on cross-sex hormones, although some have suggested that, you know, why is there no shape change in his body and why is there still five o'clock shadow and all of this stuff?
And there's been no other surgery other than the FFS, the Facial Feminization Surgery.
Which happened just before 365 Days of Girlhood.
And, you know, this was someone who was already in his 20s and is a very skilled entertainer, actually.
Incredibly skilled entertainer.
And if you go back to before he began his Days of Girlhood thing, Uh, you have him trying out being like a safari tour leader on Instagram and, uh, you know, he looks fabulous.
And, uh, I don't know that he knows anything about animals at all, but, um, you know, he's, he's, and he's a singer and a dancer.
Um, although to that point, um, the most recent, the reason that we're talking about him right now, um, would suggest that he's never done anything athletic in his life, but, um,
He's extraordinarily polarizing because the world has decided, half of the world it seems, it seems like half the world, although I really still can't believe that half of the world, actually looks at this, well, twink, you know.
He's a very thin, very slim, attractive Slight gay man, um, who's dressing up in accoutrement and, uh, and sort of making cultural choices that look traditionally feminine.
And half of the weird world seems to be going like, you go girl, like you're a woman now.
And he's not.
He's just not.
Including invitation to the White House on the basis of his bravery.
So he's been getting a lot of sponsorships from various organizations.
Bud Light is sponsoring him and he shows up in a bubble bath and this just outraged the Bud Light drinking part of the Western world.
And when that happened, I thought, and then afterwards he put out an Instagram video in like a jeweled thing, drinking Bud Light, claiming not to know what March Madness stood for.
And I watched that and thought, man, he's good.
He's a really good troll.
He's really good.
And again, not untalented, like an actually talented, talented guy.
But then, after the Bud Light fiasco, kerfuffle, you know, lots of people getting irate about it, Nike put him in a sports bra and is using him to advertise sports bras.
And, you know, there's been a lot, this happened, I don't know, a couple few days ago, and there's been a lot of hue and cry, of course.
And, you know, the point largely is, dude doesn't have breasts, no reason for a bra there, right?
But I think it's, it's even worse than that, to use your framing, right?
Wow.
It's even worse than that, which is, dude doesn't have sports, right?
Like bras, can be a fashion choice right for for many women not doing um hard or heavy or bouncy work, especially if they're small-breasted.
A bra may be a choice that is culturally expected, that makes them feel better about how they look, but it really it can be primarily about fashion, especially if you're small-breasted, especially if you're not engaging in a lot of athletic activity.
But a sports bra is specifically something that was created to help women not damage their breast tissue when they are, for instance, running.
And so I just did a Google Scholar search on the term Sports bras, biomechanical analysis.
And so if you're not aware of Google Scholar, Google Scholar is not as good as some of the search engines, the academic indexing search engines that are behind paywalls that you usually have to be an academic to find, but it's quite good.
And here, actually, you can just show my screen.
Uh, so sports bras biomechanical analysis without any, I didn't use any Boolean operators.
I wasn't trying to be specific in any way.
Um, you know, there's like 20 over 22,000 results.
Wow.
Right.
Right.
That's so, so, and I don't know, I didn't, I didn't go down until, you know, 5,000, 10,000.
I don't know what happens down there.
Right.
But there's, there's a lot of people writing about what is it that sports bras should be doing, could be doing, are doing, how could they be better?
What actually is the support that's needed?
And even if you divide those results by those that refer to the left side and those that defer to the right side, it's still a huge number of studies.
It's still a lot.
Or whatever they are.
Exactly.
So here's just one.
OK.
And I just I went into a few of them.
And here's just one.
This is published in the journal Ergonomics in 2021.
It's got four authors.
It's called How the Characteristics of Sports Bras Affect Their Performance.
And, you know, it's It's a decent piece of research, right?
The final sentence of the abstract is, "...encapsulation style, padded cups, nylon, adjustable underband, and high neck drop accounted for 37.1% of breast movement reduction variance.
Findings facilitate high-performance sports bar development and inform consumer choice." Okay.
So, you know, we have people in this case who understand that sports bras are an item that shows up to solve a particular problem.
Can I have my screen back here for a second?
And there, you know, there are some papers that are In that same search that reveals more than 22,000.
A little sillier.
This one is only silly because the authors are clearly not native English language speakers.
So I'm just going to read the beginning of this abstract, which was a conference proceeding, published as a conference proceeding in 2009.
It's called Studies of Sports Bra based on biomorphic analyses of females' breasts.
And you can see the authors appear to be Chinese.
Um, sports bars are specifically designed to offer appropriate amount of support and protection for breasts during moderate to intense physical activities.
So far, so good.
They are the most important instruments for athletes, both from the excising satisfaction point and comfortable aspect.
It's well-proofed that the more rigorous the exercises that athletes take, the serious the breasts injuries could be caused without the assistance of outside support, especially for the plump ones.
There it is.
So that's just that's amusing.
But like still, the English isn't right.
And if I were to try to write something in Chinese, it would be far, far worse.
So I'm not attacking these guys.
I don't even know if they're guys.
I'm just saying that, you know, the research on the biomechanical advantages and aspects of sports bras is being done throughout the world.
Especially the plump ones.
Especially the plump ones, sure.
A couple points.
One, that abstract will stand as a kind of time capsule, what, you know, international science looked like before GPT, right?
Because of course, GPT could rewrite that abstract and you'd never know.
You'd never know.
You'd never know.
And you'd lose out on especially the plump one.
Right, exactly.
That really needs to be there.
Drives the point home.
It does.
But the other thing is, look, sports bra is actually kind of an interesting category because in some ways bras...
I don't know, but I'm assuming that bras are never having worn even one, even half of one.
Never having been so inspired.
Never once.
I can say that we've not talked about this, but I know it to be true.
You can be certain.
But in any case, the point is bras presumably originate at least heavily biased in the direction of augmenting this native advertisement of...
Uplift.
Right.
Highlight.
Shaping, yes.
Shaping, right, all of that.
And it is the liberation of women that causes the need for a bra that is optimized around something else, which is the capacity of women to do vigorous things in which bouncing breasts are not a good thing, right?
So anyway, the whole idea that these things are the opposite of an ornament.
These are something that you do to take something, an ornament that natural selection has stuck women with and in some ways hobbled them, right?
And to... I don't see you tracking a big tail around, do I?
No, exactly.
Right, no.
I've always wondered if nice rack was a reference to antlers.
I don't know.
I think it must be.
It's very clever if so, but But it does have that analogy.
In any case, there's something interesting about the idea that sports bras are themselves about de-ornamentation and increasing capacity, and yet here we find ourselves in a place where through some, I think, new level of incoherence, we have a person who doesn't need this thing because he wasn't stuck with this ornament, who is now becoming an iconic Okay, but we'll get back there.
Actually, to exactly the point that you just made, though, I have a section here from Runner's World from an article published in 2017, which you can show my screen here.
A Brief History of the Sports Bra.
So this is not a piece of science.
This is just a review, again, published in 2017.
Forty years ago, an ordinary runner invented what she couldn't find in stores.
What happened since then is a story of women supporting women.
And just scroll down and find this one paragraph here.
Almost without exception, again written in Runner's World in 2017, almost without exception, the women of the first running boom were small-breasted because they had to be.
Even the famous Runner's High couldn't anesthetize the pain of swirling D-cups.
And although jog bras opened the door to a whole wave of would-be runners, the stretchy pullovers didn't deliver enough support for bigger sizes.
So, this is exactly the point you were just making, and there's, for instance, there's a company, Title IX.
Of course, Title IX has now become, you know, the original 1970s legislation has now become weaponized.
Yes, the Trojan Horse, through which all kinds of nonsense... But originally, I still believe that it did something very honorable and important for female athletes, especially, you know, girls being able to have access to competitive sports.
And in that vein, the company Title IX, which makes basically athletic wear for women, has a remarkable diversity of and detail about the different kinds of sports bras for not just what size you are, what level of fitness you are in, what size your breasts are, but also what is the activity you're going to be engaging in.
Because if you're, you know, it always has great pictures of women doing awesome things, you know, surfing and bicycling and, you know, being outside doing sports.
And, you know, the fact is that if you're jogging and you have large breasts, you need different kind of support than if you are surfing or bicycling, right?
So, All that said, and I'm not actually going to go ahead and show Dylan Mulvaney doing his little sports bra dance for Nike, but it's ridiculous.
Like, he looks ridiculous, and it's not athletic.
And, um, yes, everyone has already said, like, everyone who's commented on this basically has been like, oh, doesn't have breasts, why does he need it?
But my point here is this additional one, which is, you're not engaging in anything athletic in any way, and you are acting a caricature.
You are acting the part of a caricature of a woman who thinks it would be cool to be sporty, but doesn't actually know what that means.
So this is, this is, and you know I have increasingly been using this word and I didn't used to see it very many places, but this is misogyny.
This, this is a belittling and a caricature of what a woman is.
To put a guy in a sports bra and have him do like fake stretches, like kind of yoga-ish things, And suggest that that's what sports bras are for and that that's what women doing athletic activities looks like.
So, the way you ultimately phrased that, I agree with you.
It is the putting of Dylan Mulvaney in the sports bra that is the offensive thing here.
I still am... effectively what this is, is exactly like a paper mask being required to prevent COVID, right?
The point is, this is About failty.
Are you going to call this out?
Really?
Are you going to call this out, implying that you think that that's a man and not a woman?
Because if you think that that's a man and not a woman, then you know what you are.
You are a transphobe, right?
So there is that, and this corporation wishes to avail itself of that little tool, because at this moment it sees that tool as advancing its cause, presumably its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.
But, from the point of view, and I wanted to ask you about this, from the point of view of Dylan Mulvaney himself, he is clearly trolling us.
Troubling?
Trolling.
Yeah.
Yes.
Which I'm not sure is bad.
In other words, it's very hard to make this point.
And to the extent, I mean, it may be that he's just found a niche and that he is exploiting it, but it is also possible that he is making a point.
You know, increasingly.
Like, he is fascinating.
And I started paying attention, I don't know, 120 days ago of his girlhood.
And I was some combination of I felt repulsed, honestly.
You know, how dare you?
But if you will admit that this is cosplay, you know, what is it that's happening here?
And then the FFS, so good, the facial feminization surgery, out of which he emerged, you know, made up and all of this, and looked really briefly like, okay, yes, you did have your face sculpted and your throat sculpted so that you look a more compelling version.
of a woman-ish.
No changes to the body at all.
He just looks like a slim and not ripped in any way dude.
But in these last couple of weeks, the Bud Light campaign and the Nike campaign, it's very odd.
There's 5 o'clock shadow visible.
And this made me start to wonder, like, does he know?
Is he in on this?
Oh, of course he knows.
Well... There's no way somebody... But like, why would you be showing that?
Well... Because, you know, it was perfectly possible for him to be totally clean-shaven earlier, and presumably he's been on these cross-sex hormones for longer now.
He should be able to be doing a more compelling job now.
Right.
But instead, he's just rubbing it in everyone's faces.
Well, let's talk about various possibilities of what he might be.
Imagine that he's obviously, as you have emphasized from the beginning, a very talented person.
The role he's playing, he's doing a great job and skyrocketing to fame.
In no small part because he is doing this well, right?
He could be doing it well out of pure self-interest, right?
This could be this is how I become famous and influential and rich and it's working and haha, right?
It could be that which given the stint as among other things a fake safari leader in videos like he was he was looking for the thing that would hit and Right.
He was looking for the thing and he found a thing and it's not his fault that there's a stupid niche, right?
He's found it and he's figured out how to exploit it.
Well, look, my hope would be that he is actually trying to demonstrate how insane civilization has gone and that there is a reveal at the end of this, right?
Where he goes back to being a gay man and he points out how dumb people have been along the way.
That would be amazing.
It'd be epic.
That would be epic.
And that would, sure, alienate some of your most vociferous followers, Dylan Mulvaney, but that would bring a whole lot of people into your sphere of influence who at the moment feel simply attacked and insulted and worse by these shenanigans.
Yep.
And now, I don't want him to do it cynically, but if he's been doing this whole thing as an elaborate ploy, then the point is, oh, that would be a very interesting reveal.
And yeah, I would shift exactly who embraces this.
You know, the quality of people that he hangs out with would be...
would jump instantly, right?
Interestingly, actually, he has now a somewhat long-standing feud with Caitlyn Jenner, who's like, stop it, quit it.
Now, Caitlyn Jenner is, you know, their own situation, and perhaps kind of confused and all of that, but Caitlyn Jenner is responding to some of the things that are happening over in Dylan Mulvaney's world, going, nope, nope, not what you say you are, that's not actually how it works.
Right.
And Mulvaney is responding with, you know, crocodile tears and, you know, girl-seeming anger or something.
You know, the whole thing is a costume.
Well, I mean, that's sort of, we talked about this last week, it is time, it is a long pastime for People who are struggling with whatever it is to be trans and the difficulty of those things, earnestly, to join those of us who are alarmed at trans activism and, you know, something masquerading
in this space and you know there are people who do Buck Angel I've pointed to Blair White have both been very good on this issue Caitlyn Jenner has been more of a mixed bag but she is also you know advocated that trans women not be allowed in women's sports for example so anyway No, yeah, she ought to know exactly But I mean, apparently she does.
So, all to the good.
And to the extent that Dylan Mulvaney turns out to be an elaborate ruse that reveals the insanity of all these people and the moral bankruptcy of corporations utilizing transness to sell products to an audience that's in the middle of being bamboozled, right?
All of that would be beautifully revealed by such a thing.
And you can imagine that a little bit of 5 o'clock shadow might, you know, telegraph to those who were wondering, you know, what is this person that this is knowing?
So I could see that.
But am I right that you would welcome the revelation that this whole thing had been a ruse from Dylan Mulvaney and that it leaves open the possibility that That this was well-intentioned, that it took advantage of… I think so, yeah.
I mean, I have to think about all the caveats there, but I think… I think he's done a lot of damage.
He was, for the most part, exploiting an empty niche.
Yeah.
And, you know, had been someone looking for niches.
You know, had been someone with talent looking for niches, tried one, tried the next, tried the next, found one, it hit, he's there.
I do not I don't like the analysis that goes, well, I don't like that the niche exists, but given that it exists, I'd be stupid not to take it.
I understand that that can maybe be the case over in tax law, right?
It's my obligation to use the legal loopholes that have been left open, even while I think they shouldn't have been left open.
It's your obligation to play the game up to the limit of the law.
But if I really think that it's wrong, I can also be working to change the law, but it's not hypocritical to take advantage of the law as it stands.
In fact, it would be foolish to do anything else.
Right, this is different.
This is different from that.
This is different from that, yeah, I agree.
Yes, of, you know, to the extent that there are two possible truths here, and there's probably a lot of gray area, but to the extent that there are two possible truths here, would I welcome that he has been trolling us the whole time, as opposed to that he is what he appears to be or what he believes to be?
Yeah, of course.
Okay.
Good, yeah.
Interesting.
All right, well, do you have further you want to go down this road?
I mean, we could talk about it forever, but we got a couple other big topics to go, so... Yeah, so let me just say, in closing, a little A-B testing here.
Oh, good.
You remember last week when you sprung that story, sprung that story, of the armadillos?
Big, hairy armadillos.
Big, hairy armadillos with their nocturnal erections, right?
Big, maybe hairy penises.
Right, and my sense of like, well, okay, but why, I don't really get why people would study such a thing.
I understand that it's studyable and there's nothing wrong with studying it, but it's hard for me to imagine how you find yourself there.
I mean, have you seen the size of their penises?
No, I haven't.
But the people who are studying them have.
Exactly.
Yes.
But anyway, the point is, all right, so that on the one hand, very hard for me to empathize with the person who finds themselves focused on this as a topic.
Sports bras?
I have no such difficulty.
I see why this is a big field, and there are lots of... So the fact that there are over 22,000 results is not surprising to you at all?
Not surprising to me at all.
No, no, that makes perfect sense.
Wait, I'm allowed to study that?
Okay.
Yeah, something like that, exactly.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Done.
I don't have segues this week at all, really.
So do you want to go next, or do you want me to go into a totally different topic next?
I guess I could do what I had planned next.
So I have been away this week.
I was in Austin for a conference of political independence, which was fascinating.
There were all sorts of people there.
As you might imagine, there was a tremendous amount of conversation about AI and where we find ourselves and that sort of thing.
And I wanted to talk about a couple things.
One, I've now had a number of conversations with some folks who are both directly and indirectly involved in AI work.
And I've been talking to them about my Biologist's perspective on what is unfolding.
More or less with the expectation that whether or not my perspective makes sense or it doesn't, that I would be, you know, probably treated as, you know, not comprehending the problem because I'm a biologist and it would take some time for me to demonstrate that actually there was a reason to look at it this way.
It's not what happened at all.
That's cute, son.
This isn't Armadillos anymore.
Right, yeah.
It's not Kansas, and I ain't Armadillos.
So, in any case, I've had a number of very interesting conversations, and by and large, the folks I have spoken to have had the sense of, yes, actually the degree to which you understand the underlying code is of limited value, right?
It's in the same way that understanding ion channels doesn't tell you a whole lot about how the brain It processes information, right?
Yes, it doesn't do it without the ion channels functioning, but really the point is you're dealing layers up.
Or, you know, somebody, I think it might have been Peter Wang, said that, you know, you could imagine that you should study computer science by, you know, looking at soldering, you know.
No, it doesn't help you, right?
So anyway, the biological approach seems to be one that people who are in this area realize is actually absent from a lot of their thinking and likely to be highly relevant.
So, okay, that's reassuring.
And I've been thinking in the context of this conference where AI played an uncomfortable role, frankly.
I was on a couple of different panels and in both cases the organizers of the conference saw fit to pose a question to GPTChat4, you know, and just sort of introduce it into the conversation as what does the AI I think of the topic under discussion.
Both times I had an allergic reaction and I left no doubt that I thought it was a terrible mistake to engage the AI in this way uncritically even if everything it said Was accurate, right?
For example, imagine that 500 times in a row it gave you a perfectly accurate, maybe even an insightful answer, and that causes you to trust its answer, and then some misalignment issue takes advantage of the trust it's built up and poisons the well.
Yeah, which people can do too.
Sure.
People can lose track, people can have a brain glitch, people can be suddenly deciding to game you because they've created trust for the first 500 interactions, whatever.
But yeah, in this case, the elephant in the room is the AI.
What does the AI think?
Oh, God.
Right.
Well, I'm comfortable with what does the AI think, but it should be done in the context of a deliberate experiment in which one does not process it as just another contributor to the conversation.
It is anything but that.
You do not know what it is doing or why, and it makes sense to not introduce it into a conversation in which you've just asked six people to offer an answer, right?
That's a mistake in my opinion.
Anyway, the AI was under discussion by many people, most of them not computer science folks or AI specialists or anything like that.
And I realized that there was some missing toolkit that I think is vital.
And I started doing it with myself.
What I realized was that because of the way, and I'm not saying that we have AGI, but I am saying that I think it's clear that we are about to if we do not already, because of the way that that is going to interact with people's cognition,
Anything that you think you know about the way people function, for example, the way a collective action problem causes coordination to break apart, to become unstable as you get towards an objective.
Anything you think you know about the way people function, you should now treat with extreme skepticism.
Right?
Because an AI could interface with that in any way.
It could short-circuit the breakdown in cooperation, it could cause cooperation to work where you wouldn't expect it to, or it could cause it to break down before you would intuit that.
Right?
All possibilities are on the table.
So, in any case, my sense, and what I told Folks at the conference was, I believe that you should at this point in history decide that you officially know nothing, right?
And then go back and check with all of the things that you thought you knew from the prior era and see if there is reason to think they still hold, right?
So basically a kind of, it's a Cartesian emergency, right?
Descartes became very suspicious of things that he couldn't establish himself personally and We could have a long conversation about that, but never mind.
At this moment, there is reason we have crossed an event horizon.
We are in an era in which nobody knows the rules, and if you want to know something, then start with the very first thing you should know, which is that you know nothing.
Right?
If you want to be ahead, the way to get ahead is, I know nothing, and you'll be ahead of all the people who still think they know something.
Then you need to rebuild a toolkit.
So that's one thing.
Second thing is, and I don't know what to do with this, but we have had a conversation on Dark Horse about what we have called the Time Traveling Money Printer, which is my admittedly clumsy label for the concept that you can generate the equivalent of inside information if you know what is coming down the pike and you can slow down public awareness of it.
Right, so we think that this almost certainly happened with respect to COVID, that it was circulating in September-October at the Wuhan military games, but the public only became aware of it when it was revealed in the very last days of 2019 in December.
And that that would have allowed people who had been on the shortlist, who got a phone call, who knew that there was about to be a pandemic that was going to spread around the world, it would have allowed them to position and effectively print money, right?
They could do a lot of other things, but at the very least, if you know what stocks are likely to go up and which ones are likely to go down, you can take a small pile of money and you can make it into a huge pile of money.
And it would be shocking, given the obvious moral bankruptcy of the people who would likely have had that information first.
It would be shocking if they didn't do it, and there's evidence to say there's a weird delay between September-October of 2019 and December.
That's a lot of time.
The last day of December.
Yeah, the last day of December, right.
So, okay, the time-traveling money printer is the equivalent of a time machine, given that time travel apparently doesn't exist, as far as we can tell.
Right?
It functions financially like a time machine.
Right.
I mean, time travel doesn't exist, so far as we can tell, in the same way that selection can't see into the future, but selection has figured out a way to see into the future.
It's the same, like metaphorically true, that time travel does exist, and selection does see into the future, but it does so via means that we don't think of as time travel or seeing into the future.
Right.
Now here's the big bummer.
Only one?
It's big enough that only one is no comfort.
Well, I'm sitting down.
Yes, you are.
Excellent.
Um, if you put on a helmet, I'd feel even better.
Um, I mean, you could fall out of your chair, but let's just agree.
I'm going to take the risk.
Try.
Okay.
Um, if you're going to fall into the dog, she's, she's soft enough.
So the question is this, Did we really get the cutting edge?
We know we didn't get the perfectly cutting edge.
Obviously they develop these things inside of OpenAI, for example, and then reveal them.
Did we get something like the cutting edge?
Do we know exactly where we are in the development of this?
Is it occurring to all of us simultaneously that we've crossed the event horizon?
Or did some of the folks who knew that we were going to cross the event horizon pull a time-traveling money printer on us?
And the reason that that's such a devastating question is not only would, you know, those assholes have effectively cheated financially again, but We don't know where we live in the era of AI.
If we're playing with GPT-4 and GPT-6 is already in some people's hands, then there's a question about what current events are being affected by forces that we are behind in coming to understand.
I'm not saying I know this to have happened.
I'm not saying I even think it has happened.
I'm saying we would be foolish not to wonder if it has happened.
Yes.
That said, I'm seeing all sorts of stuff I don't get, right?
Now, that was true throughout COVID.
So it may be that we are just living in an era where the algorithms, the non-intelligent algorithms and the change that is opaque to us in the way they feed us information is causing people to derange and behave oddly.
Right?
Or it could be that there's some degree of AGI that is swirling the pot in some fashion that we do not understand.
And I wanted to connect this potentially to something, a story that really just started emerging, I think it's today, maybe it's yesterday, which is the story of Twitter blocking substack links.
I have an example here.
You have an example?
Yeah.
You want to show it?
Yeah.
So this was yesterday, maybe the day before.
Maybe I should say obstructing substack links.
Show my screen.
Um, so this week as always, uh, I posted my substack at 8 a.m.
and, uh, and then within a half an hour or so I tweeted about it with a link.
Um, I wrote about my father, uh, who died again 10 years ago.
He didn't die again.
Who again died 10 years ago this week.
Actually, he did die again.
But that was 10 years ago and then 11 years ago.
Yes.
The reverse order.
Anyway.
Um I reprinted, I republished something I had written in the days after his death on a website that I created for him and here and here was a tweet and people people liked it and people went there but when and so this went out on Tuesday of this week and it was engaged with and it was you know liked and retweeted and all of that which was possible then
But which apparently is no longer possible that I am allowed to post something from my sub stack but no one now can like or retweet it and more egregiously when I click on this Well, that's good news.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, um, an hour ago when I clicked on that, what we got was a message that said, uh, this, this link, oh boy, I screenshot it somewhere, but I don't know where it was.
This link may be unsafe.
Uh, use caution.
Uh, and now it's actually clicking through.
So that changed in the last hour.
Very interesting.
Very positive.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let me just give a little bit of history.
I'm not going to be precise about this.
I don't think the precision matters.
And to be honest with you, there was so much debate over what exactly the details of this story, what the simple facts were that it was a little hard to follow.
But what happened was, Elon Musk apparently made the decision to obstruct the liking and the traversing of links to Substack.
The question of why he did that By his analysis was that Substack had behaved in an aggressive way.
He said that they had been downloading a, sounded like code, information from Twitter in some form or other in large quantities in order to effectively use it to bootstrap their own Twitter competitor.
In service of creating what they're calling notes.
What Substack is calling notes, which does appear to be that it is in line to be presented to the world as a competitor and as an alternative to Twitter.
Yep.
It does appear that there is a desire on Substack's part as a business to create something that would compete for the same users.
Yep.
Right?
And one can certainly imagine, you know, you and I are not big business people.
We've never been big business people.
But you can imagine that you have a property and it has capabilities and, you know, allowing somebody to simply create a competing thing, especially if they're going to borrow code or information, would be infuriating.
And, you know, to the extent that it is legal to obstruct their ability to do this, you could imagine the instinct to do it.
On the other hand, Musk has been very aggressive and many of us have spent considerable political capital defending him in light of the fact that he appeared committed to building a platform that was, at least in principle, a free speech public square kind of a place.
And the idea that the public square will have a corporate brand and that it doesn't exist across multiple platforms is obviously troubling.
What's more, going after Substack is troubling because there are very few properties out there that are really committed to free speech, right?
I can name effectively four big ones, right?
Yep.
Twitter, you've got Substack, you've got Locals, and you've got Rumble, which are now one thing.
Well, and Odyssey.
And Odyssey is, I don't know the details, but smaller.
Rumble and Locals are the same thing, that's why I was lumping that as one.
Yep, I see.
They're not the same.
But in any case, you've got... Rumble got Locals, and so they are now...
You've got a small number of rebel platforms that constitute a beachhead where free speech is now possible again after an era highlighted in the Twitter files of egregious meddling by everything from the Department of Homeland Security to Facebook to all of the other platforms.
So that's tremendously important and it's important.
I get that there's a business angle here, but it's important at a level that is profound for civilization.
And so whatever is going on would be great if it got navigated such that the business folks could do the business stuff they need to do without disrupting the possibility that a year and a half from now or two years down the road, there will still be a place for free speech to manifest, at least in principle. there will still be a place for free speech to So.
It's very alarming.
What's more alarming is that in the battling, so there was an initial alarm by many of us at what this blocking of Substack Links was, because Substack is such a vital player in terms of long-form content that runs against the narrative.
It hands agency back to writers.
It allows writers To be freelance and to actually make a living without needing to be in the good graces of an editor or an institution.
And Twitter is, for many of us, the way that we distribute our work to audiences that haven't yet found us.
Right.
So it is a shining beacon in a otherwise quite dark sea from the point of view of people looking for a long-form place, and Twitter is the obvious place where we exchange very short things, including, hey, take a look at my sub stack.
So what was most alarming here was that Elon Musk went after Matt Taibbi, who is obviously caught in this exact bind.
He has been releasing the Twitter files on Twitter in tweet threads, which are, to be honest, kind of clumsy because Twitter was never intended as a journalistic platform in that way.
And he has been exploring the same issues at length on his sub stack.
And so There was, um...
There was back and forth between Musk and Taibbi, and effectively Musk appeared to burn Taibbi in public, which is a shocking and disastrous development from the point of view of those of us who would like to know what the history we've just been through was about, right?
The Twitter files is the best evidence we have to date of what that was really about.
Taibbi has been steadfast And, uh, ruthlessly journalistic.
He has just, uh, suffered a, um, what would you call it?
A character assassination pseudo-interview, uh, in which... Yeah, so anyway, in other words, you know, we've been defending Musk in his creation of a free speech platform and equally defending Taibbi as one of the few shining lights in journalism.
And Taibbi, Caught straddling the gap between Twitter and Substack should be exactly the case that tells you actually you have to be very careful how you navigate whatever business conflict there is there because the world of people who matters is using both of these platforms.
And so anyway there's a lot of concern.
I have talked to many people Most or all of them supporters of Musk in his quest to liberate Twitter and make it a place where free speech, at least in principle, dominates.
And nobody understands why he would do this.
It's confusing.
Hard to know what to make of it.
I do worry that it has something to do But, you know, maybe reversed now.
Right.
I mean, I've tried it, as you've been talking, just tried a few ways in, not as me, different accounts, and they all seem, the links seem to be working now that I've tried, so.
Great.
if you go to uh musk's twitter does he um say anything about it i don't know it doesn't look like a what's the top tweet uh uh A meme you were arguing with strangers on Twitter here.
It's from nine hours ago.
Okay, so something has changed.
Unclear why.
Maybe cooler heads have prevailed.
That would be fantastic.
Let me just say, in closing this chunk out, that watching Substack And Twitter battling in this way as somebody who exists in this very tenuous beachhead with free speech as the most important tool at our disposal.
Yeah.
It was a little like Watching somebody meddle with history where on D-Day you've got the forces on Omaha Beach shelling the forces on Utah Beach, and D-Day doesn't work if this happens.
So it's really important that those... The activists can just sit back and be like, cool.
Go for it.
Right, exactly.
So really, I don't know.
Unfortunately, we are looking at a world that has been messed up by the fact that when you have business in conflict with other values, the other values collapse.
And we can't have that happen here.
The other values are too important.
We're really talking about the future of the West.
And the future of the West, I know because Musk has been very clear about this, the future of the West depends on our ability to discuss these things openly, which depends on having platforms in which that's possible.
So, uh, please, um, let's, uh, let's put those things out of the line of fire.
Indeed.
All right.
That's, you're good?
Yep.
All right.
Um, again, we're not good on segues this week.
Nobody's good on a segue.
Everybody looks like a dork.
Spelled differently.
It is?
Yeah, you know, that actually I didn't know until a long time after the Segway came and went, and it was supposed to have been this, you know, the new mode by which we all get along.
Ginger.
Around.
Ginger, exactly!
It was called Ginger in advance.
No one knew what it was.
Yeah.
And then it came out, and people were like, I don't, nah, that's a pass.
Well it took decades to re-emerge as the thing it always needed to be and now it exists but nobody knows because they spent so much time laughing at the segue on Arrested Development and elsewhere.
And the thing now is electric unicycles and other Yeah, other personal electric vehicles which have come a long way, and believe me, the scooter is not the end all and be all of that space.
Electric unicycle, strange as it may look, is a fantastically capable, tremendously fun device.
Back before we started doing these livestreams, but when Dark Horse already existed, you were talking about actually spending an episode or two or eight or something on electric vehicles, and specifically electric unicycles, because you and our two sons have become expert on them.
Boy, is it just language is not working for me today.
Expert on them.
We have we have a fleet.
My God.
And, you know, of all sizes and ranges and capacities, and I have also had a couple of other electric vehicles, but it's the electric unicycles that the three of you have, you know, you've, the boys have commuted to school and I used to commute to downtown Portland.
Back when we had an office in downtown Portland, it would be a long commute from here, now that we live on an island.
Indeed.
You'd need to recharge.
Yes.
And you might not want to take the i5 down.
No, definitely not.
But you should do that.
You should talk in more depth than what we're doing now, which frankly for most people is going to be like an electric what now?
You've probably seen them.
It's one wheel with two little platforms on either side.
Pull up a good one.
We keep talking.
But anyway, it's two pedals either side, and here's the thing, okay?
It looks weird, but it is very similar to downhill skiing.
Very similar to downhill skiing, except that it's powered, so you can go uphill.
And you can go fast, and don't fall off, but it's... And wear motorcycle gear, because falling off it is not like a bicycle.
There we go.
No.
Yeah, okay.
I am reminded though, and Zach probably will not want this to happen, but as we were leaving Olympia, which would have been when Zach was 13, I think, maybe, he made He produced a video of him, mostly him and his brother, on electric unicycles zipping around the Evergreen Campus and other places in Olympia.
I forgot about this.
And put it to... what was the song you put it to?
You got... Feels Like Summer by Weezer.
Feels Like Summer by Weezer.
It was fantastic, and you actually showed it to the people at the school that you were trying to get into, and they loved it.
I think it's still up.
We should link it.
Well, I don't know why we wouldn't link it.
It was great.
In fact, Weezer liked it.
That's right.
Anyway.
Anyway, here you have a guy ready to get started on what looks like an in motion...
V11.
This is one of the first of the electric unicycles with suspension.
I am not a big suspension guy on bicycles, but on electric unicycles it makes a huge positive difference.
Why?
Because you like your knees?
Because when you're riding a single wheel, you know, you can hit a bump and it can launch you.
You know, skill on a bicycle is enough Yeah, you're like, okay, I'm gonna stay on my pedals now, and I don't need the suspension, because I have the suspension built in, but you can't do that as much on one wheel.
You can, but it's harder.
You've got one point of connection to the ground.
I say, as someone who's biked a lot, mountain biked a lot, but has yet to try my hand at these objects.
Yeah, your hand is uninvolved.
Right.
But anyway, they're cool.
They're really cool.
I'm not saying they're safe, but they are cool.
Not at all.
All of you, when you ride them, wear full-face helmets.
And you do also wear, you know, motorcycle jackets and motorcycle gear.
And wrist guards.
Wrist guards and shin guards.
And you don't push the speed limit, because you can... The speed limit of the vehicle, not of the road.
Right.
The speed limit of the vehicle, actually, if you push it, you can cause a drain on the battery that the motor cannot sustain.
Really simply, you just fall off the front if you're going faster than it's going.
Yes, that's true.
I don't know.
You don't have to involve batteries.
Let's put it this way.
That sounds terrible.
There are two meaningful limits when it comes to electric unicycles.
One limit is how fast the machine is capable of going and how rapidly it can accelerate.
And then there's how fast a smart person would go and how Well that's just the wrong point.
would allow themselves to accelerate.
Those are different limits.
So anyway, live to electric guitar cycle another day.
Our almost 19-year-old has something to say here.
Well, that's just the wrong point.
It's not that you're saying anything exactly incorrect, but it's really, really simple that you can lean forward beyond the speed at which it can keep up to you, and you'll just fall off the front, and it'll kind of run you over, and you'll affect the gravity.
It's not...
Yeah, you really...
Well, then it'll drive off to the sunset.
Well, not exactly, but no, I don't know why you need any of the... to say there are multiple limits or anything.
It's just that if you are...
I'm trying to emphasize that a lot of the dangers can be taken care of by not being a dope.
Not all of them.
I think the biggest danger is that it's a black box and unlike anything with more than one wheel, if it fails you're completely relying on it.
Yes, it does not fail.
Safely.
Actually, it's not true.
There are some pills.
No, no, no, no, no.
If you exceed certain limits, a well-designed one, like the one you have on the screen, will force you to slow down and hop off rather than fail while you're writing.
I'm not going to argue about this, but I don't think that's the failure mode I was talking about.
To my initial point, there's 1, 2, 6, 8.
podcasts in the topic of electric vehicles and electric unicycles in particular, and one of those podcasts could be a conversation between you and one or both of your sons.
One of them is now shaking his head in some disgust at your blockheadedness, I think.
Blockheadedness, yes.
The word that he just mouthed to me.
No, he didn't, actually.
All right, fair enough.
No, I agree.
It's an interesting topic.
I have been meaning to do that podcast.
Yeah.
Or podcasts.
Could be.
Could be.
All right.
Finally today, Totally different, totally different topic.
I want to share a few excerpts from this book, Serious Adverse Events, An Uncensored History of AIDS by Celia Farber with a foreword by Mark Crispin Miller.
This was published in 2006 and it basically became impossible to find.
She also wrote, Celia Farber wrote an article in Oh god, now I've forgotten.
And I've closed down Acrobat.
I think it was Harper's.
It might have been Atlantic.
I think it was Harper's.
It's not coming open for me.
In 2006 as well, which is still available, which you can find, but what has happened now in last month is that the excellent publishing house Chelsea Green has republished this book and I encourage everyone to get it and to read it.
I am going to be Sort of reviewing it and publishing a little excerpt on my Substack this week, on Tuesday, on Natural Selections, and I wanted to share a few short excerpts here today.
Again, it is, you know, it is a, it's called Serious Adverse Events by Celia Farber, republished by Chelsea Green Publishers.
And she walks through the history of AIDS, which those of us who were, you know, we were young teenagers as AIDS came on the scene.
And my mother had a number of gay male friends in a couple of different domains in her life.
And so I remember being very, very struck by and affected by this sudden scourge that was mostly afflicting gay men in the United States.
A bit of color to that.
Yeah.
I remember most profoundly the era where the syndrome had been recognized.
It was clear that it was circulating amongst gay men, but there was no awareness of what might be causing it.
And I remember the searching for a plausible cause in light of the way that this thing spread across a population.
That was a very frightening era where nobody knew what it was that was causing it and they were looking for some explanation that, you know, there was an investigation of like sex toys and lubricants and things, some toxin.
So anyway, that was a very remarkable era to watch science try to wrap its mind around this disease.
Yeah, and one of the things in this book is the proposal by not one, not two, but several scientists, some of whom are Nobel Prize winners like Carey Mullis,
That the conclusion that was arrived at apparently after, you know, all of this research and, you know, extraordinarily well defended, which is that HIV is the single causal factor in AIDS, isn't true.
And those scientists who made these claims were then, and to a large degree remain now, unable to speak about it and lost their labs, lost their graduate students, lost their grants, lost their ability to publish, because you were not allowed to say this thing.
And as Kerry Mullis says, and I think this is in I don't have it on my screen here.
I think it's something I'm going to put in together for my natural selections.
He says, I just started asking people.
I said, you know, I'm writing about this.
Again, he won the Nobel Prize for the invention of PCR, of polymerase chain reaction, which also then was the tool used for tests for AIDS and now tests for COVID, which he did not think was the appropriate use of PCR.
Separate story.
He, in writing about AIDS, at conferences and such, would approach people and say, okay I'm writing about this and my, you know, opening sentence is what everyone knows, right, which is that HIV causes AIDS.
I just want a reference.
I just want a reference because what you do in science is you reference everything that isn't such long-established common knowledge That there can be no reference, right?
I think, honestly, things like, um, mammals are sexually reproducing species with two and only two sexes.
That is such commonly established knowledge that there isn't any primary reviewed literature that says that because we've known that for so long.
But anything that is newly discovered, even if everyone seems to believe it, or that there is any disagreement about whatsoever, you're supposed to reference.
You're supposed to have a citation so that other scientists and anyone else who wants to can go in and basically track the argument back and say, you know, I'm not sure I believe that, or, oh interesting, let me get to the base of that, let me see on what basis we know that, and go there.
And Cary Mullis reported, he is dead now, reported that when he was asking this of people in the 80s and 90s, can I just get the reference on that, any reference, there must be lots,
That no one ever came up with one and that to him and to all scientists should be enough to raise suspicions about on what basis it is that we have a conclusion that is so universally agreed upon when it is both new and there doesn't appear to be a single piece of research that establishes that it is true.
Couple things.
One, when I first heard that Carey Mullis was not a believer... HIV denialist!
Yeah, I misunderstood it.
I thought, oh, this is a chemist underappreciating the complexity of the problem.
There are reasons that you might have a syndrome that is generally caused by a virus that is not inherently caused by a virus because other things can interrupt the cascade of physiological pathways, etc.
I did not really understand the argument that he was making.
I would also point out, it's not just Carey Mullis, it's also Luc Montagnier, who is... Who actually discovered HIV.
Exactly, and believed it to be causal.
It wasn't Gallo who took credit for it and made the claim that HIV is the only causal factor in AIDS, although even he backed off from that briefly, but it was Luc Montagnier.
It was Luc Montagnier, and he is also now dead.
He was very old, unlike Cary Mullis, who died recently and was not so old.
But in any case, Luc Montagnier changed his position, even though that was at great personal expense.
A, it damaged his credibility, probably should not have, but damaged his credibility.
And B, his great achievement was the The contribution of the discovery of this, and so the recognition that it might not be as important as he had originally thought, suggested a very honorable scientist, somebody who would reverse his position even though it decreased the importance of his role in the history of science.
OK, a couple of short... One more thing.
I also wanted to point out why it is that we should be able to ask anything that is not common knowledge, you know, that is so longstanding that we can't find the original reference, that you should just always be able to have a reference.
And I want to point out that the telomere story, which many listeners of this podcast will be familiar with... And which is relevant here.
There's a whole lot in this book about drug safety and drug safety testing.
Drug safety testing and there's a whole lot about things like COVID that involves the degradation of tissues which will accelerate aging.
So anyway, this is a highly relevant topic, but the obstacle to figuring out that little puzzle was an erroneous result.
The result was what the people who had done the work said it was, but it didn't mean what they said it was.
You had to be able to go back and figure out that they had all gotten their mice from a related source in order to understand that actually that source was polluting our understanding of basically mouse telomeres.
We thought they were much longer than they actually are because it was laboratory mice that had had their telomeres elongated by a breeding program.
That, uh, selected for long telomeres.
So anyway, it's a perfect case where, you know, there was a two week period in which I was trying to figure out why this piece of information that everybody stated casually as if it was just, you know, so clearly right that, you know, it was, it was like bedrock.
How could it possibly not be right?
And the answer was, oh, they all ordered their mice from the same place.
Right?
So you have to be able to trace it back for that kind of reason.
Yes, yes, exactly.
So here's a short excerpt from, excuse me, the beginning of the book, page 29.
Today's scientists are wholly dependent for their survival upon the will of a conjoined financial megalopolis connecting government, academia, and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.
Again, this book was written in 2006.
If you talk to them, they almost all speak of fear, fear of losing their funding.
Minds attuned, consciously and unconsciously, to the roar of the industry, scientists writing grants that are designed to feed and fuel it, writing more and more grants in shorter and shorter intervals than ever before, says Richard Stroman.
You have to write a grant a year almost, and you have to write four to get one if you're any good.
I got out just in time.
Everybody who's still in there says the same thing.
It's going to hell in a handbasket.
Before the biotech boom, we never had this incessant urging to produce something useful, meaning profitable.
Under these circumstances, everybody is caught up in it.
Grants, millions of dollars flowing into laboratories, careers and stars being made.
The only way to be a successful scientist today is to follow consensus.
The academy has become the technology it invented.
It's lost its scientific edge and replaced it with a technology that follows the market.
The tension between the two is that science is primarily a generator of surprises, whereas technology is anything but surprises.
If you're going to produce something and put it on the market, you don't want any goddamn surprises.
You've got the next quarter to report and you don't want any bad news.
It's all about the short term now.
So that's part of the setup for what we then see with regard to how the rapid consensus around the single retroviral cause of AIDS was arrived at and also then the treatments, the nonsensical.
Now we know, largely not safe and not effective treatments that were pushed to market very fast, things like AZT and protease inhibitors for AIDS.
A couple more short excerpts, again from Serious Adverse Events by Celia Farber.
The figures we are always given for age, this is in a chapter called What About Africa?
The figures we are always given for HIV seroprevalence in Africa are based on sample studies taken at a few select prenatal clinics.
I cannot reproduce all of them here, because the figures are like billowing cloud formations.
Always very big, very round figures.
Always estimates, and always capped with a line like, experts say the real figure could be three times that high.
Which means that the numbers are arbitrarily arrived at in the first place.
I once spoke to a UN-AIDS official in a casual setting.
He was sitting at a bar and we struck up a conversation.
Not to insult you, I said, but the figures your organization puts out are pure fiction.
Pure fiction, he confirmed, leaning against the bar with his elbow.
Why then do you put them out?
Money, he said.
It's all about fundraising.
High figures bring in money.
When you get such officials face to face, caught off guard, they tend to tell you the truth.
In simple language.
One more.
So wait, wait, wait, wait.
So A, that brings to mind...
Project Veritas.
And it's a mechanism for discovering what's going on by, you know, having somebody go on a date with somebody and recording it.
You know, these people, they're not in the dark about what they're doing.
They're just in the dark when they think that they're on the record.
And, you know, it's unfortunate that one has to get them off the record in order to discover the reality.
I also wanted to point out that Consensus science reared its ugly head again this week, where Neil deGrasse Tyson was being interviewed by Del Bigtree and doubled down on the idea that it was all about, you know, that science is effectively synonymous with the consensus, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Everything in science is falsifiable.
I used to make this point when we were professors, when I was a professor.
I'd ask some question, and I'm not coming up with a good question right now.
I'd say, okay, how many people believe X?
Knowing that this was a question on which people would have an opinion because it sounded right, but it didn't turn out to be true as far as we understand it right now.
And I'd get more than half the people in the class to raise their hands.
And I'd say, well, luckily for us, science isn't a democracy.
Scientific truth isn't established by democratic vote.
It's not majority rule.
That's not how it works.
And I don't understand how I was able to make that point over and over and over again to undergraduates, many of whom had, you know, very little background at all in scientific thinking before I met them or you met them, and they got it.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't get it?
Well, I mean, I think I don't want to say it's inexcusable, though.
I think it probably is.
But the problem is that so few people.
have intimate contact with actual science as it takes place, right?
Even people who have formally gotten degrees in this thing.
You have to run an experiment and it has to be properly structured so that the philosophy of science is manifest in the structure of what you did in the lab or in the field.
Yeah.
And the idea that you can do every single other thing right, right?
There can be no way that anybody who walked into your work could detect that you weren't behaving scientifically.
And if you just screwed up, you know, the philosophy of science part, if, for example, you collected data not knowing what you were doing, you spotted a pattern in the data, and then you reported that pattern as if you had had the hypothesis going in, right?
If that's the only Perturbation on normal science.
You fucked it up.
You didn't do science.
You don't have a scientific conclusion.
You don't know anything.
And so the idea that something so concrete as science could be dependent on something so abstract as, well, did the hypothesis precede the data collection or not?
You know, or in the weird case that the data was already collected, but if you formulated the hypothesis, Insulated from information that's in data in the library.
And then you went to the library.
That's valid, right?
But... Just because the data pre-existed your hypothesis, if you weren't aware of it, you can still make a prediction.
Yeah, it's not postdiction if you are truly insulated from this, the evidence.
But anyway, these are very subtle things on which a process that mostly is quite concrete, that involves, you know, beakers or transects or, you know, actual physical things, right?
The only reason this process works is the underlying philosophy of science, which almost nobody who does the work has studied.
Right, and I guess my prediction would be that those scientists who work at scales that are inherently abstract to humans, or with an interface between what they are studying and themselves that is technological and therefore black boxy, are more likely to misunderstand this.
That being field scientists, as we have been and are, You go out and you are looking and working at exactly the scale that humans interact with.
And yes, there's plenty of theoretical underpinnings and you're hoping to see something empirical and small that you can then generalize, so you're doing hypothetical deduction, you're engaging in both induction and deduction.
But there is stuff that you are observing that is real and interpretable with your own senses at the scale that humans can understand it.
There is no inherent, or at least not always, a technological interface, and there is no inherent level of abstraction between you and what you are observing.
And that's not to say that there isn't bias.
There's always bias.
But that does, I think, make it easier to understand why the philosophy of science is so necessary, and also just to engage in it with integrity and go like, okay, I can tell when I'm not doing this.
Because all the other frills, all the technology, all the abstraction of, you know, doing astronomy, or, you know, doing molecular biology, if it's about inferring You know, what the genes are, requires that you have put some faith in the technology is giving me a rendition of the truth.
Well, there's also... Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of a tiny number of scientists whose job is to interface with the public.
It wasn't all along.
He's not a science communicator by training.
He was an astrophysicist who became primarily a science communicator.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But what I would point out is every scientist has some small portion of their job that is public-facing.
The scientist who is working on Economics, and then goes to a cocktail party with people who do other things in the world.
Journalists, lawyers, doctors, whatever.
That person sees themselves as having a role speaking for science, right?
They are in the interface between the science-trained folks and the non-trained folks.
And the point is they are presenting in their own minds You know, a simplified and intuitive version that allows somebody who doesn't have the training to look into what they do for a living.
And the point is, actually, this is a process that gets carried away.
You know, whereas you and I might be the skunk at the garden party where somebody is talking about The wonderful things that are going on in university science departments, and we might roll our eyes and say, do you have any idea how crazy these people are?
Right?
You're not supposed to say that.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson is the far end of this continuum, where his job is actually to promote a sort of beautified version of science.
And what would it sound like if a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson started to become alarmed, you know, let's say 10 years ago about P-hacking and the replication crisis, right?
If he got alarmed about that before it became public, right, people would not know what to make of it.
If somebody who was supposed to be portraying science as this marvelous process through which we come to understand was actually saying, actually, you know what we're doing?
You know, we're lying to ourselves.
It's like, come on man, have some gravitas.
Right.
Get serious.
You know, it is his obligation, if he understood that such a thing was taking place, to do that.
But I think the problem is this Sort of sense of, well, I have a private understanding of how high quality the science in my department is, and then I have an obligation to portray it as better than it is in public.
It's the same thing as like when a school, you know, if you are leading a tour of a college and you are portraying the place to prospective students, Your role is actually to advertise the place, which you shouldn't, right?
Your obligation to the people that you're giving the tour is actually to give an honest assessment of what the place is.
Yeah, it's your obligation to your employer or to the people who you're in front of right now.
That tension exists in many, many places, right?
That's it.
And so to just finish that off, you know, a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Del Bigtree, and in his mind, his obligation is to reveal that a guy like Del Bigtree is off the plot.
And in fact, no, it's the other way around.
Right.
Okay, one more excerpt from this important book, Serious Adverse Events and Uncensored History of AIDS, newly republished, originally published in 2006, newly republished by Chelsea Green Publishers, I want to say Publishers Publishing House, by Celia Farber.
From the same chapter, What About Africa?
She is in the Rakhine district of Uganda.
She reports, a man walked over to greet me, clasping my hand.
Because I am white, he, me, and this was in, sorry, what year was this?
This is early aughts.
I'm not finding it.
This is early aughts.
She's in Africa with a few other people.
A man walked over to greet me, clasping my hand.
Because I am white, he immediately assumed I was there on behalf of a Western AIDS group, and that I was going to preach the importance of condom use.
Holding my hand in his, he said imploringly, Madam, let me tell you something about us.
We must procreate.
The advice to use a condom every time in rural Uganda is clearly absurd, considering how many children they bear and how many die in infancy.
Embarrassed, I assured him I was not there to preach condom use, but to ask some questions about AIDS.
Terrible, he said, shaking his head.
I have had two brothers and one sister die of AIDS already.
I'm sorry, I said.
What did they die of?
Slim.
AIDS.
I mean, what was the cause of death?
Ah, well, my brother, for instance, he had malaria, and we couldn't afford to get him treatment, so he died.
So he died of untreated malaria, I said.
Yes, malaria.
Why did you say he died of AIDS?
He shrugged.
Slim.
AIDS.
It's a formula for everything here.
When somebody dies, we call it slim.
The WHO had allotted $6 million for AIDS for 1992 and 1993, around the time I was there.
This is earlier than I thought, sorry.
All other infectious diseases combined, barring tuberculosis, received only $57,000.
$6 million for AIDS, $57,000 for all other diseases combined, in a place with a lot of tropical diseases.
"Perhaps it is no wonder," Farber continues, "that healthcare workers there have learned to call everything AIDS." What I'm going to write about for my substack this week, and what should be obvious from the couple of excerpts that I've read here today, and what has been pointed out by others, including, for instance, and what has been pointed out by others, including, for instance, Robert F. Kennedy
in his endorsement of this book, are some of the similarities between how the AIDS epidemic and crisis progressed, and how consensus was apparently arrived at early and often, and with which there was no dissent that would be allowed, and of course COVID.
And it is It is a remarkable set of similarities to consider as we look forward, as we must, and think about what will come next.
Yeah, it's striking.
What you see is a game in which a player has become expert.
Yeah.
You see that there is a way of causing, in this case, a continent to react according to a narrative that is convenient to the incentivizer, right?
And the idea, you know, we saw this with COVID, of course, where the idea was everybody who died died of COVID, which made COVID seem that much more significant and therefore caused that much more alarm, which caused that much more power to flow to those who would cause the miscategorizing.
And then we saw, you know, hospitals complicit, effectively paid to categorize things as COVID.
And so, of course, their natural fiscal sensibility would cause them to participate in amplifying an incorrect understanding of how common this disease was and how much it was responsible for.
Again, to whom is their obligation?
Right.
Right?
Those patients are already dead.
Who loses?
Who loses it might seem to the hospital administrator if we call that and that and that a COVID death or an AIDS death.
If that will cause more funds to flow and isn't our job to do the good and honorable work of medicine which requires money and isn't it okay to tell this little white lie perhaps?
And maybe if you compel yourself that it isn't okay to tell yourself that little white lie First, do no harm to shareholder value.
it's not a little white lie.
It's a lie, but it's not a little white lie.
Then you come to engage in self-deception sufficiently that you believe your own press and you no longer understand that you are in fact lying.
First, do no harm to shareholder value.
Something like that.
Yeah, it's pretty upsetting in the degree to which the parallels from prior chapters that we didn't know anything about personally mirrors the horrors that we've just lived through and had to rediscover in real time. it's pretty upsetting in the degree to which the parallels Yep.
Indeed.
Okay, well, that was depressing.
And now we're leaving.
Yes, well, we'll give you something to think about.
Seriously, though, so I'm going to write a little bit more about this for Natural Selections this week, but get this book, Serious Adverse Events, An Uncensored History of AIDS.
It will blow your mind.
Yeah.
And I highly recommend it.
Okay.
Have we arrived?
We have arrived, and we are about to leave.
We've arrived and we are about to leave and, you know, check out our Patreons right now at mine.
As I said before, you can ask questions for the private monthly Q&A that'll happen in a couple weeks.
We're not going to be here next week.
We're not doing a Q&A this week.
But we'll be back in two weeks.
If you're looking for more content in the meantime, you can always go look at past episodes, or clips, or check out my writings on Natural Selections, which, again, if you go to Twitter, you can click through now.
Progress.
Progress.
Interesting.
Fantastic.
So, any other announcements before we sign off?
I don't think so.
I will undoubtedly remember what I should have announced shortly after we had closed this episode.
Yeah, probably so.
That happens.
That happens.
Okay.
Well, until we see you next time, guys, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
