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Dec. 6, 2023 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
02:09:50
#202: Social Justice Elevator Music (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
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Time Text
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
Hundred and second one of them.
202nd.
What the hell am I talking about?
It's the 202nd.
That felt wrong.
I was so confident.
Yeah, you were back mid-pandemic.
Oh, God.
Yes, well anyway, it is the 202nd live stream of the Dark Horse Podcast.
I'm of course Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and we have a... wow, I should have looked up the word panoply before this, but I'm just going to use it.
We have a panoply of things to discuss with you today, and if it's not a panoply, then I will deliver a correction next time.
Yeah, a panoply including, let's see, advocacy and genocide, Pfizer and diversity...
Exclusion, I was going to say.
Oh no.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Elon Musk and Disney, more penguin shenanigans, and maybe Key Deer.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Yeah.
Cool.
Lots of good stuff.
We would normally tell you to join our watch party on Locals, but apparently that's not working at the moment, so apologies.
I'll work for me if other people find it to work.
Yeah, you may well find it to work.
Who knows why?
Results may vary.
Check the link and we will talk to the folks at Locals if it's not working.
Yeah.
But in general, on our locals, which we encourage you to join, you get early release of guest episodes of Dark Horse, private monthly Q&A, AMAs, which we haven't done recently, but we will resume again soon, access to our Discord server, and of course, you have The Store, DarkhorseStore.org.
We are going to follow this livestream this week with a special gift episode, and we're going to come back and talk about some of the stuff in the store.
Before you scroll, though, we have a new one here, Cut That Shit Out.
That's all.
Just Cut That Shit Out.
Cut That Shit Out.
Yep.
With just the perfect font for that, I think.
And I would say... That was a request from a viewer after one of us, I don't remember, one of us said that.
That's a quote.
We were constantly thinking it for years.
For years.
Finally, it just came pouring out.
Yeah.
Yes, I would say the guest episode.
What the hell?
So I've just been traveling and my brain is scrambled.
Language on the East Coast.
Yes, well I discovered something on the East Coast, which is that for us West Coast folks, it's later than we think, by about three hours.
That's one way of thinking about it.
That is one way of thinking about it.
In any case, that is how I now think of it.
You won't for long.
That's probably right.
I'll go back into my West Coast complacency thinking that we still have plenty of time.
But in any case, the gift episode, I would just say if people are not looking for a gift episode, they still might want to tune in.
There's a certain amount of philosophical thinking about such things that will be included there.
And so anyway, it might not be what you're expecting.
Yeah.
Uh, so, uh, yes, we just talked about that.
We're going to move the rest of our various announcements and such to the end, except for our carefully chosen ads with, as usual, three sponsors at the top of the hour here.
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No single word for me?
The problem is I have used all of the words, all the adjectives.
I think superlatives are in order, but the fact is there's a limited supply, and so I need to switch languages.
Switching languages would be an excellent, excellent change for me at this point.
Unfortunately, I am unskilled in the process of switching languages.
Something I'm actually looking to change up.
I'll just add a word.
That's Malagasy.
That means administrative building.
Now that is an inside joke if ever I've heard one.
I mean, it's not that inside.
There are, I don't know how many million people in Madagascar who would know exactly what you're talking about.
Right.
But as far as the Dark Horse audience, probably only, you know, me.
I would think so, yes.
When doing work in Madagascar, one has to learn a few words.
It was hard language for me to even consider getting into, and actually French is widespread.
My French is terrible, but it's a lot better than my Malagasy.
And so I learned to say that there are and that there are not the things that I was most often in need of doing independent research in Madagascar, which turned out to be mostly frogs, administrative buildings, and beer.
Yeah, and the stuff that goes on in the Ficambanon is serious stuff.
It's not a hoop you can skip, because the stamp that adjusts what you are and are not allowed to do is housed in the Ficambanon.
And anyway, so yes, you have to be mindful of all of the workings of the interstices of the governmental structures that result in the stamp either being deployed or not being deployed on your behalf.
Or being present but in a room behind a locked door for which the key is no longer present.
It might as well not.
It's a philosophical puzzle, right?
It is.
If the stamp is not wielded, does it even effectively exist?
No.
Yes, that's about right.
That's the conclusion we often came to.
A simple philosophy puzzle.
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Probably are not noticed by other people, but they are very significant.
You and I have slightly different takes on elements of Vivo Barefoot and anyway, close watchers will notice them.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm curious.
Let's see.
Vivo Barefoot are made by people with feet who know how to use them.
A ZZ Top reference, which I think is really essential to the brand.
I don't know that they think so, but I think so.
And so that you may run wild upon it, right?
Oh, that I do notice.
Run wild in it, run wild on it.
Exactly.
You say on it, I say in it.
Right.
I see us as part of the world.
But I think it's actually... As opposed to stomping around on it.
It is significant that this brand of shoes is so flexible that it can accommodate these radically different worldviews.
Even us, who could have almost no less in common than we do.
Did I say that the correct way?
I don't think so.
Yeah.
Oh, you did.
Yeah.
OK.
I'm on board then, if you said it right.
I don't know.
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Yes.
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You tell me when it was, because I'm not good at that sort of thing, but anyway.
All right, where was I?
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There's a comma between Baja and Mexico.
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There's a comma between Baja and Mexico.
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Cool.
Shall we?
Take an unscheduled moment to discuss geography and grammar.
Yes.
Actually, what the hell is that?
Was that a straight comma, or have I misunderstood something?
Well, so Baja in that sentence is capitalized, indicating one of... I can't remember.
Zach might look it up.
I think there's two states in Mexico, two estados in Mexico that are actually part of Baja, California.
I think there's Baja Sur and Baja.
And so it's not, so Baja also means under in Spanish, so if it weren't capitalized, it might be like Southeast Alaska, Baja Mexico, right?
No, you're right.
Southern Mexico.
Los Angeles, California, the comma would be there.
Exactly.
So in this case, even though Baja also has like a directional meaning, being capitalized tells you it's a place name.
Yeah.
All right, so a comma, not an Oxford one.
That explains why we give a, you know, Yes, exactly.
Exactly, to quote a rather poignant song on the grammar in question.
Yes.
Well, it's also just like you would put a comma before your zip code after the rest of your address or something like that.
There are like three different commas that you can throw in an address.
I think it's like that.
We're about to get hit.
No, but the point was, Zach, that I think your dad was reading it as a geographical, a cardinal, like a cardinal direction-ish.
Yeah.
And instead it's a place name.
Yep.
Yeah.
You're right.
All right.
I'll be reeling from this for... Seconds at least.
Seconds from now.
Are you over it?
Good.
Almost.
Yeah.
Okay.
I thought we'd start with the video you showed me this morning from the university presidents being grilled by Congresswoman Stefanik, a Republican from New York.
Yeah.
Should we start there?
Should we show that and then we'll discuss its meaning?
Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
We've targeted individuals, not making public statements.
Yes or no?
Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?
I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.
But you've heard chance for intifada?
I've heard chants, which can be anti-Semitic, depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.
So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules?
That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe.
Ms.
McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct?
Yes or no?
If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.
Yes.
I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?
If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.
So the answer is yes.
It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.
It's a context-dependent decision.
That's your testimony today.
Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context.
That is not bullying or harassment.
This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms.
McGill.
So is your testimony that you will not answer yes?
Yes or no?
Yes or no.
If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes.
Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?
The speech is not harassment.
This is unacceptable, Ms.
McGill.
I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's Code of Conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
It can be harassment.
The answer is yes.
And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?
It can be, depending on the context.
What's the context?
Targeted at an individual.
It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals.
Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?
Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism?
I will ask you one more time.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action.
So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard Code of Conduct, correct?
Again, it depends on the context.
It does not depend on the context.
The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign.
These are unacceptable answers across the board.
All right.
Hey, so I don't know how many, what percentage of our audience will have seen that clip before, but it circulated like wildfire on social media.
And I must say, it put me in a bind that I did not like.
Because while I believe that the implication of the answers that these college presidents were giving is what it appears to be, I thought the way the whole thing went down actually failed to seal the deal.
That is, do you remember that you and I used to be college professors?
I do.
That rings a bell with you?
Okay, so I didn't imagine it then.
As a former college professor, a current professor in exile, There is a degree to which one does not want the obvious implication of this clip to turn into policy.
Because the question of what a proper college code of conduct ought to look like is not a simple one.
What does it mean, for example, to advocate for the genocide of Jews?
And do you want to build a college in which people cannot make absurd arguments in some context?
You really don't, because... I mean, among other problems, you'd wipe out whole disciplines.
Well, there is that.
Actually, those are disciplines we can do without.
But anyway, the point is this.
I believe that these institutions, because of their... I don't even want to call it a far-left bent, because you and I are on the left, and this has nothing to do with the actual honorable values of the left.
It's a far-confused bent.
The far confused bet.
So these institutions have become absurd.
They've become connected with a brand of self-defined liberalism that is thoroughly illiberal.
And it has a very aggressive strain of anti-Semitism riddled throughout.
You and I experienced this when we were college professors.
We have seen it in other contexts.
It's just simply there.
And so I believe the answers that these presidents delivered... Academia has an anti-Semitism problem and that's not new.
Right, it's not new, it's long-standing.
So the answers here are disturbing, but what I didn't hear was the questions that would tell you whether or not there was a commitment to free speech on these campuses, which there clearly isn't, that would explain the protection of abhorrent viewpoints in a general way.
In other words, what I really wanted to hear was, you know, Your policy that appears to allow for the advocacy of genocide against the Jews, does it also allow for the same advocacy against blacks?
Does it allow for that advocacy against transgender people?
In other words, is it a blind policy in which the college recognizes that it has to tolerate terrible things in order for exercises to take place?
That, you know, the same discovery that the founders of the country made Precisely.
our Constitution, that you are better off leaving people free to say terrible things than you are trying to tell them what they're not allowed to say.
Precisely.
And so the outrage that we hear from Representative Stefanik and that we're seeing in response online is both a real emotional response, but it should be responding to, in part, but it should be responding to, in part, the double standard that is revealed by, and you know, it's not in here, as you say, but like we actually know from the last several years what the response would be
but we actually know from the last several years what the response would be to mass protests advocating for genocide of black people.
Or mass protests advocating for genocide of trans people.
We know what the response would be.
The hammer would come down swiftly, and it just would.
And it will even come down in cases where there's nothing to be complaining about, right?
It will come down, for example, having nothing to do with genocide, but the simple, and I'm going to I don't want to violate my own rule here just because I don't want a focus on, you know, where it would obviously fall.
I'm going to use the term N-word rather than using the actual term in a perfectly legitimate way, which is to say discussing the academic status of that term.
Can we, you know, can we read Huck Finn in the original?
And, you know, not allied the actual use of that word.
Right.
Right.
So we're going to do it here in order to... I'm going to do it here so that we do not focus on the fact that, oh, no, I uttered forbidden syllables.
Yeah.
But the fact is, We have a problem, which is that this hearing was simultaneously an exploration of a real question, which is that same double standard that you're describing, right?
That somehow it is tolerable to say things about Jews that you couldn't say about any other group or any other minority.
But at the same time, The grandstanding, getting people to say absurd things like, yeah, on our campus, it would depend on context.
Well, the problem is that this hearing involved grandstanding that created a loophole that you could drive a truck through, which is if you were to set up a historical debate, If you were to, let's say you were teaching history, and what you did was you set up a historical debate amongst, you know, you had students play the role of historical people advocating for and against the preservation of slavery, right?
One of those Sets of people would be advocating in a formal sense for slavery, right?
That would be their assignment, and it is not an unforgivable assignment, right?
In order for students to understand the state of mind of that period in history, an advocacy for that period, for that abhorrent position that was historically accurate, would be a useful tool.
Do I, you know, relish the fact of hearing people speak in such ways?
No, but from the point of view of what is a valid college assignment, That's very different than somebody standing in the quad and demanding a return of slavery.
Both of them are technically advocacy.
Right.
And so I'm frustrated that we are once again, and in fact at this moment, the rise of this very aggressive strain of anti-Semitism which we are seeing, which viewers of Dark Horse will know that we've been talking about since long before October 7th.
That the ability to properly challenge that is being compromised by the desire to grandstand, right?
In the same way that the ADL damaged our ability to challenge anti-Semitism by abusing the claim.
The Anti-Defamation League.
Yeah, by abusing the claim and effectively crying wolf over it, now that we have a genuine wave of aggressive, serious anti-Semitism, the ability to make that claim and have people understand its meaning is largely gone because they've heard that claim so many times in so many contexts where it didn't matter that it's lost its punch.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, to your point about the educational value of advocacy, coming to inhabit a position that is not yours is absolutely, excuse me, being able to come to inhabit a position that is not yours is a mark of a mature mind, a wise mind, an educated mind, when education meant that it brought you closer to maturity and wisdom.
Like, this is exactly what we need to do.
The idea that education now is only supposed to expose you and allow you to communicate or convey beliefs Uh, that are within a very narrow band of tolerated thought.
You know, the Overton Window is the only thing, uh, you know, only those things within it are those things which you are allowed to speak, to know, to, um, refer to.
That's not education.
That's certainly not wisdom.
And, you know, if, if that's...
If that, which is what we see is happening, is what is going on in higher ed across the country and across the world, then we're generating college graduates who are less and less educated.
And so if these hearings were happening in a context, and you've already said this, but if these hearings were happening, if those exact words were said by those exact, you know, elite university presidents, MIT, Harvard, Penn, right, in a context in which There were insane people arguing for the genocide of black people and that was being tolerated, and there were insane people arguing for the genocide of trans people and that was being tolerated.
There would be something to discuss about how is it that these so many people are so confused across so many issues, but at least there would be a consistency around tolerating the speech of people that you find hateful.
Yeah.
The speech that you find hateful.
The problem for anybody who has never tried to write one of these rules is that it is very hard to do well, right?
Our First Amendment is about as good as you get.
And the point is, our First Amendment leaves us perpetually tripping over the fact that, wait a second, you mean you're really going to tolerate people seeing X or saying X?
You're really going to tolerate people saying Y?
And the answer is, yeah, because not tolerating it is way worse, right?
As soon as you say, okay, fine, you're right.
You've just described six things that are completely intolerable.
So let's just make a list of those six.
And it's like, seven?
Yeah.
Can we just go?
It's at eight.
Do I hear eight?
Right.
And so, you know, you could rerun it.
There's actually a next story we will discuss.
There's a wonderful deep fake that has been done.
But In this case, you can imagine this hearing being deepfaked, where the same people would be put in the same positions, and the congressperson would be demanding, you know, are you saying it's tolerable on Harvard's campus for someone to claim that vaccines aren't safe?
Well, that would depend on context.
Really?
That would depend on context?
For people to be advocating for the idea that vaccines are not safe in the middle of a dangerous pandemic?
You could imagine that unfolding.
And you could, you know, again, I don't think these college presidents are honorable or could be honorable.
Right, to rise through the ranks in such a corrupt system at this point without becoming famous for your courage in the face of the, you know, idiocies of the moment.
Right.
The fact that we find we discover these people at the moment that they're being questioned on this topic.
I have no doubt that this is The double standard that appears to be, and that these people are, you know, trying to thread a needle that is basically an economic needle of how not to piss off more donors than necessary, right?
This is a cynical game that's unfolding, but you can imagine that once you establish the rule that here are the seven things you're not allowed to say on Harvard or Penn or MIT's campus, that, of course, what's going to get added to that next?
It is going to be the ability to claim Something like a quote-unquote vaccine isn't safe, which means that, you know, it was bad enough.
It was almost impossible to say that on these campuses during the pandemic, and you know, lo and behold, not very much later, the evidence is overwhelming that that needed to be said louder, and that one of the greater failings of modernity is that all of these supposedly intelligent academics who had All of this knowledge that was supposed to allow them to see more clearly than everybody else that they were just signed up for a political program and a dangerous one at that.
At some level.
No, but, sorry.
No, you go ahead.
I just keep coming back to it.
It's the double standard.
It's like, you insist on nuance when someone has the pronouns they don't prefer used with them, but you're going to embrace nuance when it comes to genocide.
You've got a double standard problem, and if we're going to focus on only one of those things, we're not going to solve the problem.
We need the First Amendment back, and we need everyone to spend some time with it, and to actually consider what the implications are.
Um, yeah, and I would, I would add that there's a, yeah, you're looking at my notes.
That's not English.
No, I can, I got it.
I'll tell you what that's, you'll see that it's, the intent is there.
But, um, the, uh, we are, In this funny place where even the question of a double standard is something that we now trip over.
My claim is going to be, and I know you agree, that all of the tyranny that has gone down is basically built of double standards.
Yes.
Rules that are just unevenly applied.
And that's how the magic happens.
Justice for me and not for thee.
Right.
Now, the point is, what you want is, and we've said this, frankly we've said it, I don't know how long Coleman Hughes has been saying it, but Coleman Hughes got a huge bump in visibility recently by saying that we need a colorblind society.
We've been saying that forever, that colorblind is not a matter of you've lost your ability to detect that somebody is Black or Asian or whatever, but it's a matter of a formal structure that is necessary so as not to have a double standard.
Having noticed that noticing doesn't affect how you treat them going forward.
Right.
Everybody has equal standing in the eyes of the law and everywhere else.
But I would point out that one of the things that we are tripping over here is that There is a reason to describe antisemitism separately from other kinds of racism.
It is different, right?
It has a special status.
And, you know, you can tell that by how it has recurred through history, right?
The way in which targeting Jews keeps re-emerging at certain points in history and manifesting in pogroms and genocide and all of these things.
Tells you that it actually is of a special nature now I don't think it's the only racism that is of a special nature and people who have followed us for the last six plus years Will have heard me say many times that I think they're actually too There are populations in the U.S.
that experience a distinct version of racism, a structural one that is difficult to overcome.
They are American blacks, people of African descent, and American Indians.
And yes, American Indians do use that term.
I'm not making a faux pas by using it.
Those two groups experience something very different.
Their origin story is different than... But you're talking specifically with regard to the first group, those who were brought over against their will.
You're not talking about the modern children of immigrants, for instance, or people who come over freely from Africa.
Well, I would imagine that it is a mixed bag, because to the extent that there is a special version of racism that people who were brought over against their will face, that lots of people are not distinguishing between modern African immigrants and people who derive from that slave population.
And so my guess is, if you're a modern American immigrant from Africa, There are certain aspects of this that you don't face, and there are other aspects that you do just because people aren't discerning.
But nonetheless, the point is, look, there is a general bigotry.
People don't like folks who aren't like them, and that's something we largely got over as a nation, and we're now moving backwards.
And then there are special versions that have to do with unique origin stories or unique population structures.
The diaspora nature of Jews, I think, is the reason that Jews face repeated flare-ups of genocidal anti-semitism, which isn't the same thing as just garden variety anti-semitism.
Both things exist.
But in any case, There is reason to say, actually, do Indians, do American blacks, do Jews face something different than the general undercurrent of bigotry that has characterized history?
Yeah, in all three cases there's something to be talked about that's distinct.
From the point of view, though, of A structure like a university.
Should these things be treated differently?
No, they should not.
What you want is a university system that says, here are the exact rules that you will be held to, here is the panel that will be charged with evaluating things that seem to fall into a gray area, and there's no way to write these rules, so there's no gray area except for Anybody is free to do anything at all times, including demand the genocide of this, that or the other group in the quad, you know, while, you know, holding weapons or I don't know, whatever.
But so what we want is a system that's actually sophisticated about allowing honorable Explorations of any and all questions and is good at protecting students from
Being singled out for harassment and unfortunately this hearing, which could have gotten to the point that these universities are falling down on that exact commitment, failed to get there because what it did is it got a soundbite of three people saying something that sounds extremely troubling but that
You know, anybody who is both against antisemitism and aware of the hazard to free speech is caught in a bind between these things.
So I guess one additional wrinkle in all of this, in your language just now, you know, what should universities be trying to do?
You use the word honourable, and the devil's always going to be in the details, right?
How do you define honourable?
As you pointed out, it's extraordinarily difficult to make a code of conduct for a student, for faculty, for administration, for, you know, any group of people.
That is actually both general enough to be meaningful and precise enough to, well, general enough to not... I don't even know exactly where the risks are, but both general and specific enough to be effective without treading on toes that shouldn't be tread on.
But there's also the issue that this is...
Unfortunately, very often these are students being led astray by ideologically captured faculty who really ought to know better.
And this is, you know, this is what we've been saying for years and years and years.
But with regard to the students only, like the faculty need to know better, ought to know better.
And there are and should be different rules for faculty and students.
But students aren't expected to be wise yet.
That is part of what they're supposed to be doing in college is gaining wisdom.
And the idea that they need to already know all of the things that they will know later on in life is akin to saying, like, well, then why are you here?
Aren't you?
Haven't you already done what you need to do?
And why don't you go out into the world already?
And so, you know, we have to, we have to leave students with room to make errors.
And we have to leave all of us with room to make errors, but students in particular are young and, you know, as you said on May 23rd, 2017, when 50 students were sent by confused faculty.
Students we had never met.
Students we had never met were sent by ideologically captured faculty to, you know, storm your classroom, basically.
And people all over the world saw what happened because the students thought they were heroic and uploaded what they did to the internet.
People were impressed with how calm you were and how reasonable and how you engaged them like human beings.
Calm, reasonable, engaged them like human beings.
And as you said, To me, and then I think to the rest of the world, well, it's my job, isn't it, to engage confused college students?
Yeah, my job is to make them less confused.
That is literally what we understood our jobs as college professors to be for those 14-15 years, to engage with confused college students and to hopefully render them somewhat less confused.
That is the job description, and yes, there's other things involved as well, but that is the job description.
And so when confused, and yes, angry, and very, very deeply confused students show up on your door and they don't know you, continuing with the job that you're already doing is actually what you should be doing.
Yeah, I mean, I do think that this is exactly why you and I escaped the calamity that had been created to swallow us, is that simply Look who's brought curriculum!
because nothing was different.
The fact that class was declared over by these protesters, but they were on a topic that was perfectly viable as an exercise.
- Look who's brought curriculum.
It's the protesters. - Welcome.
Yeah, and the funny thing is, we always did allow people to sit in our classes People brought friends and things, and in some ways this was a bunch of, you know, this was a hostile takeover, but they still brought curriculum, as you say.
Now, I was actually reminded of something from that episode that I think fits perfectly in this discussion, which is that I remember I don't remember exactly where it happened.
It may be in that first video in the hallway.
But I remember saying that we needed to put phenotype aside.
My argument was, it was exactly this colorblind argument.
We need to put phenotype aside for the purposes of X, Y, and Z. And I remember a freak out over the fact that I had used the word phenotype.
Totally, yes!
Remember this?
Yeah.
He said phenotype!
Phenotype, right.
And I would point out, well, I mean, this is the exact problem, is that a discussion of different phenotypes is a discussion on which there are no guardrails, right?
In my opinion, as I've said many, many times, I do not believe that there are important cognitive differences that account for the different levels of success of the different populations in the West, in the U.S.
That doesn't have to be right.
It is possible, and in fact, I can prove that important cognitive differences in capacity must have existed historically or prehistorically in our lineage.
They must have existed in order for selection to augment the cognitive capacity of the creatures that we became, of Homo sapiens, right?
There had to have been differences, and creatures that had more capacity had to have out-competed creatures with less capacity in order for us to have ended up here.
So, that's the problem, is that you have to be able to have that discussion and say there's nothing about biology that prevents you from having cognitive differences between populations.
However, I don't believe that that's the explanation for the pattern of the distribution of opportunity that we currently see.
Right?
That is not a safe discussion.
And I could be wrong in my conclusion.
So the problem is if phenotype becomes the indicator that you are treading in territory that it cannot be allowed because you might be a vile racist or you might be a you know whatever they're going to think you are where you're going to end up putting some unthinkable but true fact on the table right you there's no guardrail and that's the nature of science that is the nature of of the exploration for truth so in effect what we're you know and it goes back to
The coddling of the American mind point that you can't have a university that is built to establish social justice at the same time that you have one that's built to find truth.
You have to choose between these objectives.
That's right.
We have to have the rules that allow any and all discussions, even though there are a lot of those discussions that aren't going to make decent people happy.
Right.
I guess normally this might seem like taking the easiest fruit first, the lowest hanging fruit, but to your point about phenotype, they gasp in alarm, oh my god, he said phenotype, I'm thinking of a story from some years earlier at Evergreen in which I lost an equally stupid battle over a word.
At the time, I saw it as the craziness that it was, and I'll tell the story here, but I think that having people start to clue in that when people say, Oh, could you just not use that word?
You know, let's use this word instead, because that word has a history, like sometimes there will be a word with a history that we don't want to use anymore.
But very often now, this is the like the first line of defense, this is like the cudgel.
It starts boxing you in and you're like, okay, now I'm actually not thinking as clearly because there's a list of how many words is it now?
It's not seven.
Oh, it's 7,000 words I'm not supposed to use.
And so I got to think in terms of what am I allowed to say as opposed to I want to just free associate and think through ideas here.
And free associate and think through ideas is what we're supposed to be able to do, right?
I was in, yeah, some number of years before Evergreen blew up in discussions to teach a program that had some anthropology and some music and some evolution, and it was going to be focused, you know, this isn't much of a focus, but around tropical regions of the world.
And, you know, around which there's, of course, a lot to say.
And one of the other people involved, one of the other faculty, was like, yeah, but we can't call it – you know, we're looking for a name because we've already been in discussions for it, we're looking for a name – we can't call it Tropics.
Like, why?
Why can't we?
Well, because there's been a lot that's been happening in the tropics that has been colonial and genocidal and rapey and dangerous.
Like, true, yes.
True, true that.
But it is also true that the tropics is literally defined, a region of the earth that is defined by the angle of the earth, you know, between 23.5 north and 23.5 south degrees latitude.
north and 23.5 south degrees latitude.
And that astronomical reality, if you will, actually doesn't change whether or not you use the word tropics, which is an actual delineation of astronomical fact or not.
But I lost.
We ended up calling this program equatorial studies, which is Stupid, because the equator presumably also has had a certain amount of ridiculousness.
And also, were we ever talking about the line that is the equator?
Probably not.
No, it's just a lie.
No, I think it's brilliant, because nothing bad has ever happened on the equator, because it can't.
It's a line of zero dimension.
Now, you could be on both sides of the equator simultaneously and do something terrible.
You could.
But yeah, I think the equator itself is safe.
Is safe, yeah.
By having zero dimensionality.
I'll bet.
I mean, Evergreen was weird because we did team teaching, and so that particular experience may not be replicated many, many places, but I'll bet anyone on faculty who has sat in on faculty meetings has been privy to discussions that are at least something like that.
And most of you, if you're listening to this, you have probably mostly rolled your eyes and just, you know, maybe been on your phone or, you know, just waited for it to end.
But, you know, within that small context, I fought back and still lost.
But the fighting back over some iterated conversations was useful because I was able to see, like, what is actually at base of this?
Like, what does he, the faculty member in question, think is being solved here?
And I think that when these things come up, trying to raise it to the level of, like, can you be explicit about what your concern is can actually reveal to them, maybe, but especially to you, what it is that we are actually defending against.
I think, interestingly, I don't think it's the only thing going on, but there's a hint here of the reversal of purpose of these institutions coming from the market has overwhelmed their truth-seeking nature, because while universities, especially these elite ones, are about a lot of stuff, including federal grants, which provide a huge fraction of their operating budget,
They are also highly sensitive to what their students want, because as much as the institution is supposed to be telling the students, hey, actually, here's what's good for you, here are the experiences that you should have that will make you more capable when you graduate, the fact is, you know, These students have gone from being understood to be in need of cognitive upgrade to the owners of the place.
They are in a position to dictate what they will be taught and to say what they must not be taught.
And that that is an absurdity, but because no university wants to be the place that students don't want to go because they're going to be forced to confront difficult possibilities that violate the notions that they came through the door with, the universities are now bending over backwards not to confront them with things they don't want to hear.
And I would point out, as I've mentioned other times, At Evergreen, it used to be said, it was a cliché in fact, that it was our job to make students uncomfortable.
Right.
And that literally stopped being said at some point.
And for the last couple of years that we were there, I didn't hear a single person say it, whereas it was a feature of almost every faculty meeting.
That somebody would mention that commitment before and so there was a point at which you know some silent coup took place and It was now incumbent on us not to offend people And you can't that's not what a university is.
Okay, so in any case I think I think we've made the point but College is a developmental experience.
That's right.
If you come in, if you leave thinking what you thought when you went through the door, it failed, right?
It needs to confront you with things you had not anticipated, and it needs to cause you to become not only smarter, but wiser.
And if it does neither, then it is quite literally a waste of your money and your time, more importantly.
Okay, excuse me.
I want to spend a couple minutes on another video.
Okay.
I, for reasons that have been lost to history from like three days ago, decided to search Pfizer on YouTube.
And the very first video it came up with was This well, what is the title?
Actually, I don't have the title in front of me.
The title of the video is here.
I can pull it up.
It's called Pfizer's 2023 Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit Inspires Colleagues to Accelerate Equity.
It's a four and a half minute video.
We're not going to show you the whole thing.
And literally the first thing that comes up when I Google, when I search in YouTube for Pfizer, just show the first 52 seconds, if you will.
A boss gives answers and a leader seeks solutions.
A boss counts value and a leader creates value.
A boss has employees, and a leader motivates, creates, and inspires more leaders.
You see, a leader remembers.
A leader remembers that even when the storm has tightened the chest of its people, they must plant themselves strong by the river.
That they must be witness and warrior to the moving mountains to the turn in time.
That they must remind the people to root themselves beside one another.
That in order for us to breathe with ease tomorrow, each and every one of you must remember that you are the evidence of every success.
So that was a professor of English at Rutgers.
Quite a little speech that she has given there.
I am just stunned by everything about it, but especially the complete and utter meaninglessness of what she has said.
So as not to force the whole four and a half minutes on everyone, I want to share a few other highlights from the video.
Says the Chief Global Diversity Equity Inclusion Officer at Pfizer, Ramses Jean-Louis, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, He says this is his third one of these events.
He says, every year is better than the previous year.
We're going to accelerate equity.
We're going to push the envelope.
I'm feeling excited about the passion energy.
There's just all of this corporate boardroom gobbledygook that means nothing, right?
He says, when we look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, not only do we look at it with a holistic approach, but we look at it with a global lens.
Wow.
He says, hashtag Pfizer proud.
We're super proud.
Everyone is owning their own DEI journey.
They've got, my notes here say random black woman and random white woman, so I'm just going to go with it.
They've got a random black woman saying, my biggest takeaway is that there's still a lot more that needs to be done.
There's still a lot more education that we need to continue to do.
Immediately follows a random white woman, My biggest takeaway is that there's so much more to do.
Well, they really seem like they're slam-dunking this stuff.
They just got so much to do.
And so back to that English professor from Rutgers, she says, you are here even when your titles do not shout it, but because you believe in it.
And finally, the very end, because we are.
We are hope.
We are power.
We are here.
Thank you.
I encourage you guys to watch the whole four and a half minutes, but this feels like there's this perfect confluence of DEI nuttiness and insanity with Big Pharma nuttiness and insanity, and who knew that they would put that out into the world so neatly packaged for us, demonstrating that they know I think literally nothing about anything.
We're not going to show it, but when that video finishes, the next up – this YouTube, of course, also always offers a next up – what they offer is Mission Possible, the Race for a Vaccine, a video from two years ago, the very first screen of which announces the following National Geographic Creative Works program's paid content for and in collaboration with Pfizer.
And before the one minute mark on this, you know, next up, now that you've watched how awesome Pfizer is on DEI, check us out on vaccines, they have Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, saying, science is driving everything.
And there were not many diseases, there was just one disease.
And our North Star remains our faith in science.
Like, these people are just saying whatever it is that they are told to say.
And it either means nothing, or it's just flat out the opposite of what they're actually doing.
Yeah, the game of Pharma that we have described here many times is at best a purely mercenary economic exercise in which the destruction of innocent people is neither here nor there.
The idea that they are going to be very concerned about diversity, equity, and inclusion, right?
That's the kind of place they are, you know, this is obvious nonsense.
If they were actually concerned about anything in the In the realm of values, they would be concerned about killing fewer people.
They would be concerned that, you know, they would be concerned about minimizing the harm of their products.
And to the extent that that number couldn't be zero, they would be concerned about taking care of those who got injured unavoidably.
And of course, it is concerned about none of these things.
It is concerned only about, you know, at best, some utterly diabolical bottom line in which people are not an important factor.
So what is even the purpose of these videos, of these exercises?
And you know, I'm caught in a maze of different possibilities.
One is the purpose of the videos is so that as people are trying to figure out What to think about Pfizer's so-called vaccines or whatever people who have a D.I.E.
Bent yeah either way works, but people who have that bent in googling and We'll find something that is the equivalent of, you know, social justice elevator music that causes them to feel that this is their kind of company, you know?
Oh, social justice elevator music.
That is perfect.
Social justice elevator music.
But another possibility, and I think certainty in fact, is that Pfizer is not going to be any better than any of these other megacorporations in the sense that it will be full of people who literally do nothing identifiable from the point of view, even for Pfizer's diabolical mission, right?
These people will just be dead weight.
There'll be nothing you can do about them.
There's not a single idea in that entire video.
Right.
There's nothing on offer.
There is nothing on offer, and that isn't surprising in this era.
Right.
And the speaker from Rutgers, who's not at Pfizer, this professor at Rutgers, who they clearly are showcasing.
It says she's a professor of English.
It's literally empty rhetoric.
She has this oratorical style, and she knows how to pause in the framing of spoken word poetry.
But you listen to the actual words?
A boss gives answers, and the leader seeks solutions.
A boss counts value and a leader creates value.
None of it means anything!
And you could replace the nouns with anything.
Everything could be replaced with other things and it would still be English and still equally meaningless.
Yeah, and you know, we are, if this is not already, and presumably it's not, but if this is not already effectively AI, you know, generating this stuff so that it will, you know, tug on the heartstrings of those who aren't quite paying attention, It will be soon, and it will be absolutely indifferent to topic.
It will be, you know, you're the kind of person who likes this sort of stirring speech, and so we've created this thing, and we're going to put it right where people who have your bias in this regard are going to stumble onto it and feel like, hey, yeah, that's the stuff.
Yeah.
Man, that really sounds good.
Zach had something to offer.
Yeah, it just strikes me that in the classroom everybody would feel a little bit ashamed if they add a little bit of fluff to their essay or speech or whatever.
Just a little bit to make it longer.
A few words that mean nothing at all.
And the people who apparently have no shame whatsoever have ended up...
In the highest positions and, you know, have put together just a string of words.
It's not like there's some idea that they've added a little bit around.
There's just nothing there from the beginning.
There's nothing there.
I mean, I know we played it for you, but...
You see, a leader remembers that even when a storm has tightened the chest of its people, they must plant themselves strong by the river, that they must be witness and warrior to the moving mountains, to the turn in time, that they must remind the people to root themselves besides one another, that in order for us to breathe with ease tomorrow, every one of you must remember that you are the evidence of every success.
Zieg Heil!
I mean, hell yeah!
It's insanity!
Yeah.
It's unbelievable!
But okay, back to the initial topic, right?
What this requires is a group of people who were supposed to be educated and weren't.
Yes.
Right?
If you had to go through some structure where a university decided to abdicate responsibility for making you smarter and wiser and instead embrace whatever you thought coming through the door better than the competing university, Mm-hmm.
Right?
This is what you get.
You get a world full of people who can't think, won't think, think they're doing the thing by showing up and, you know, rallying at the correct moment.
And presumably this reminds them exactly of college, because there's a college professor doing what college professors now do, and these are the people in the audience who are like the big wigs in DEI at Pfizer, going like, yes, yes ma'am, mm-hmm, yeah.
All right, so the whole thing is now sort of falling into place.
The job of a parent is actually to model the world that a child will become an adult in so that the child has good circuitry for knowing how to work in it.
That has fallen apart, right?
We now have some dumb notion that childhood is about innocence and we're supposed to protect our children from everything while they're growing up and then they're magically going to be able to manage risk when they get into the real world and they can't.
But the point is, this thing keeps extending, right?
Parents are supposed to model the world that the child is going to be an adult in.
At some point, formal education is not supposed to load in the facts of life.
It is supposed to...
Provide developmental exposure and experiences that continue to elaborate the capacity of that mind beyond what the parent in the home could have done, right?
Into realms the parent won't be able to access.
And it is supposed to produce people who stand up at meetings like this and say, actually that doesn't sound like anything at all to me.
Here's what I'm really concerned about with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Here's what I'm not concerned about, and it doesn't seem to me like we're even interested in what part of this is true, right?
So the point is that's not going to happen.
In fact, that person's going to get fired, right?
That person's not even going to get to the point of being fired, because they're going to be spotted on the way in, and they're going to be, you know, sent a form letter.
So, you know, we have a whole system that's built To suffuse itself with this, like, I don't even know what to call it.
It's like gap filling foam, right?
That looks corporate when it's supposed to and looks academic when it's supposed to.
It's social justice great stuff.
It's social justice, social justice great stuff.
And you'll realize what that means when you get it on your hands.
Great, great stuff.
You're going to have to define what great stuff is.
Great Stuff is actually... You said Social Justice Elevator Music.
It's both.
It's Social Justice Great Stuff and Social Justice Elevator Music.
So Great Stuff, I will tell you my encounter, my first encounter with Great Stuff when it was brand new.
It is a gap-filling foam that you buy at the hardware store.
In a can.
In a can.
It comes with a straw and you inject it into a gap that you want filled.
So it's like a can of WD-40, but yeah, there it is.
Now here's the thing you need to know about Great Stuff is you really need somebody to walk you through how it goes wrong in order for you to be able to use it in the ways that you should use it, because it really is fantastic.
When it's the product you need, it's exactly what you want.
But if you don't know anything about how this product works, your first mistake is going to be painful.
So my first mistake, I got this stuff and I filled the gap I was trying to fill.
I can't remember where it was.
And it started, you know, expanding in a way that's very surprising, even if you have read the can, which I did.
But yeah, it's the TARDIS of hardware products.
It expands like crazy.
And you have to not panic at that.
First of all, you have to put in only enough that the amount of expansion is tolerable.
And there's a way to deal with the part that expands out of the space that you were trying to fill.
Very elegant way of dealing with it, but you need to know that you're going to get that chance later when it's not wet anymore.
And if you start panicking at the way that it starts emerging from this crack, you're going to get it all over your hands and then you're going to discover That it is made of an epoxy that bonds brilliantly to your hands, and then you're going to try to get it off, and you're going to get all kinds of dirt into it, and you're going to be stuck with dirt epoxied to your hands.
And unlike if you left it in place, you can't take a blade to your hands as neatly as you can to the wood where the gap used to be, and is now filled with great stuff.
And I think my error the first time I used the stuff We were going somewhere out of character, as we were going somewhere relatively formal.
And so I had gotten it all over my hands and there was no getting it off in time.
So everyone who shook your hands was like, what is with that guy's skin?
I have eliminated those memories so I do not have to relive them.
But anyway, Great Stuff is a space-filling Well, so my analogy, I think social justice elevator music is brilliant.
Social justice great stuff has one weakness in the analogy at least, which is that with great stuff, if you put on too much, which you almost always will, The thing to do is to back away and not mess and let it settle and then come back later and clean it up.
And if we back away and do not mess and let it settle when it's the social justice stuff, well, that's what we're living now because too many people did that.
We're like, ah, not my problem.
I don't want to deal with that.
I got it.
It's not great stuff.
It's not great stuff.
It's tribbles.
Social Justice Tribbles.
Yes.
Okay, okay.
Zach does not know that reference.
Zach does not know that reference.
So he can't show us a picture of the social justice.
There is an episode of the original Star Trek called The Trouble with Tribbles.
And Tribbles were utterly adorable, furry, pet-like critters.
So cute.
That somehow in a way that contravenes any reasonable notion of physics and energetics.
And selection.
Yeah.
Comes to drown the enterprise.
It's a great picture of Captain Kirk.
Yeah, it's a good picture of Captain Kirk.
So anyway, yeah, social justice tribbles is what we got, and they are destroying every corporation, university, newspaper, social media platform.
Yeah, you could just hear the tribbles.
I mean, I don't think the tribbles talked, but the tribbles being like, we are hope.
We are power.
We are hope.
We are here.
We are standing by the river.
Thank you.
Yeah.
OK, maybe we're done with that.
I think we explored it.
I think so, too.
You wanted to talk about Elon Musk and Disney and that whole situation.
Yeah, I did.
And I will say that for a thorough explanation, I assume that most of our viewers will have seen video of Elon.
We're going to show it here in a second.
But we'll have seen video of Elon being interviewed.
about his approach to the advertising conundrum at Twitter.
For a fuller exploration of this topic, I would advise people to look at Paul D. Thacker's - You can show my screen here. - Which is called the Disinformation Chronicle in which he explores this in great depth.
Anyway, I quite like Paul, and I quite like the sub stack, so anyway, we will put the link in the description, but I would suggest for a deeper dive, go there.
Now Zach, do you want to show the video of Elon being interviewed?
What was that trip like?
And obviously you know that there's a public perception that, and you're clarifying this now, but there's a public perception that that was part of a apology tour, if you will.
That this had been said online, there was all of the criticism, there was advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Iger today.
I hope they stop.
You hope?
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising?
Blackmail me with money?
Go f*** yourself.
But... Go f*** yourself.
Is that clear?
All right.
So the reason to raise this is that I don't think we know where we are exactly, but it is potentially an important turning point.
And it's not the first one of these.
Musk staring down the ADL when they tried to shake him down earlier, and he's now telling Bob Iger of Disney to go F himself if he was going to try to muscle Musk using the threat to pull advertising and all of that.
is likely an indicator of a new chapter, and it's actually a chapter that follows from something that we've been saying very early on.
People will remember we have said zero is a special number.
Zero is a special number for those who are new to it.
means that there is a game theoretic requirement to shut down any and all challenges to certain structures.
If there is a single newspaper that is reporting accurately or attempting to report accurately on the The unfolding of history, then of course you'd be a fool to subscribe to any other newspaper.
Everybody's going to want that one newspaper.
So that means the number of such newspapers, if you're going to sell false stories, has to be zero.
One newspaper is enough to change the entire landscape.
Likewise, one university that didn't infantilize your kids when you sent them to college Would immediately be the best university in the country or in much of the Western world.
So there must be zero universities that do that job in order for your child to end up infantilized in exactly the desired ways by the power structure.
And this applies to social media platforms.
So my claim is that by purchasing Twitter, Musk opened the door to actually freeing the public square.
Even though Twitter is comparatively small in terms of its user base, a single platform in which we were free to talk about what might be true and explore it, as experts and people who are interested in these questions, is enough to game theoretically turn the tide on the entire puzzle.
And that is why he is being targeted very directly, which Um, Musk says, and he also, uh, Paul Thacker in his sub stack points to a tweet from, uh, 2022.
Um, yeah, if you'll scroll down, you'll see it.
There it is.
I think, um, in which Musk, uh, you want to put that, put that out?
He says, in the past I voted Democrat because they were mostly the Kindness Party, but they have become the party of division and hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.
That was Musk tweeting on May 18, 2022.
Right, so this is him anticipating that his move is not simply an economic move, that he has effectively declared war on a narrative control structure and the next move of that narrative control structure is absolutely guaranteed, that there will be a Dirty Tricks campaign designed to make him
Look crazy to make him Look racist to make him look all the things that would cause everyone who would otherwise associate with him or be willing to participate or be willing to stay on Twitter and see how things unfolded make them all feel that there's something too dangerous to To embrace and to back away right effectively an isolation campaign.
Yep and The idea, first of all, Musk, I haven't tracked whether he has remained the most wealthy person on Earth, but he was at least recently the wealthiest person on Earth, and I think he still remains that, and even if he's second, who cares?
If anybody has fuck you money, It would be Elon Musk.
And here he is literally embracing that posture and confronting an economic goliath, Disney, who is threatening his investment, right?
Musk has made a $44 billion investment in Twitter.
Why would you do that?
Because zero is a special number.
And so, you know, you can make an argument for that being a purely economic move.
In other words, Because zero is a special number, if you manage to create the exception, then business-wise it's going to draw a tremendous amount of audience.
And we saw a lot of back-and-forth people, you know, arranging an exodus from Twitter and all of that.
But the question really... It all seemed very performative.
It was very performative, and it was tactical.
I would love data that tells us how many people actually left without announcing it.
Like, what was the actual exodus in terms of the user base?
Not in terms of the employees, but the user base.
Right.
I think a couple of things are true.
We know this because Musk has said them.
One, he fired a large fraction of the workforce and Twitter did not collapse.
That's the employee base.
That's different.
That goes to the question of was Twitter full of a lot of dead weight that was not necessary to run it.
But also the various measures that suggest how healthy Twitter is, user base, hours that people spend on it, the breadth of the circulation, are all in a positive direction.
So it's not to say that there aren't things to complain about, and of course You know, I still feel the weight of some sort of cryptic deboosting.
I don't know if it's algorithmic or I don't know if there are moles inside the thing.
I guess I wonder, what you just said, I don't know the data you're talking about, the amount of time spent on the thing.
Presumably from Twitter's perspective, positive means more.
Yes.
But for the users, that's worse for mental health in general.
Yeah, I mean, Musk has been pretty clear about this, that he's not, obviously at a business level, he has a A conflict of interest, which is he wants Twitter to be healthy irrespective of its effect on its users, but he has been explicit about the fact that he wants the time that is spent there not to be time that is regrettable and regretted.
So, I mean, look, I don't know if Musk is for real.
As I keep saying, I will point out, again, at the moment, for whatever reason, Musk has me blocked, which, frankly, is very annoying because he does so much on the platform that then affects what people say.
I can't even see those conversations.
I don't know for sure that it's even him who's initiated these conversations.
I have to jump through lots of hoops even to see it.
You know, it's not that I don't have misgivings about him, and I do have one fear that I will just simply put on the table because somebody has to.
There are two ways to interpret the game theory around creating a social media platform in which speech is free.
One of them is that he is doing exactly what he says he's doing, which is what I think he is up to, which is he is trying to liberate it because it will be a good thing.
Not only would it be a good thing at the level of the health of his investment, but it will also be a good thing for planet Earth to have a place that we can talk openly about the important issues of the day.
The possibility that I think those of us who think game theoretically have to be open to is that it would also be an extremely shrewd move to level a credible threat of free speech and then monetize a retreat.
I don't think this is what he's doing.
A credible threat?
Yes.
I don't think I understand the framing of what you just said.
If Goliath wants to control narratives because Goliath has plans for us all that he does not want us to openly discuss, if you were to create the possibility of a newspaper or a university or a social media platform in which speech was going to be free, Goliath would wet himself.
So it's a threat to Goliath.
Right.
It's not a threat to the rest of us.
Right.
No, it is a service to the rest of us.
I just didn't understand the object.
But the point is, were Musk completely cynical?
And I don't think he is.
But were he completely cynical, then creating the possibility of a free speech environment, and then saying, presumably behind closed doors, what's it worth to you not to see that thing mature?
Right.
Right?
That would be... Certainly a possibility.
It is at least formally a possibility.
But what we see in that video where Musk basically, I love that he mocks the idea of using a monetary threat to muscle him because if one person has enough money to stare down such a threat it's musk which doesn't mean that they couldn't take him out of the position of world's wealthiest person and knock him down to 50th but the point is at what point does a guy like musk
actually um feel so impoverished that uh that it's it will in his mind have been a mistake And the answer is this is a weird person.
This is a person who actually, you know, A, he is far busier than almost anybody on earth.
Maybe he is the busiest person on earth, at least with respect to meaningful stuff.
OK, he if he wanted to relax and, you know, go hang out in cool places with awesome people, he could do that for the rest of his life without producing anything new.
So the point is, if this were a hedonist, he would be doing something very different.
Now, he does obviously like to win.
And this is an audacious play in which he could lose spectacularly by saying, you know, that his advertisers don't have control over him.
He could also win spectacularly.
And what the hope has to be for people like us who want a free internet where we can discuss important things, is that his desire to win and his desire to make the world better are in alignment.
There's not a conflict between those things that actually, you know, what motivates him works for both objectives.
Let's hope that that's what's going on.
But this is a good sign, I think.
A public confrontation that puts advertisers on notice that it is not true that your investment in economic power means that you can make some phone calls and get what you want in the case of an unusual person like Musk.
It doesn't mean that.
And a lot of us who are just simply not in a position to fight back in any meaningful way against a Goliath like Disney um are you know are on board for a reason right so this is a battle in which we have everything at stake and uh it appears that somebody is is fighting on our behalf so let's hope that's what it is Yeah, and I guess I would say that what is actually true at Disney is of course a question as well.
And given what we saw from that Pfizer video about what's going on with the DEI shenanigans at Pfizer, and what we know is going on at the institutions of IRED, of higher ed, and which is not revealed by the questioning by the representative from New York, but we know is a double standard being revealed by the answers by the presidents of Penn and MIT and Harvard, that something
At Disney is probably still alive and interested in creative exploration, and almost certainly that thing is not in charge.
And there's just, just like there was at Twitter, and there is in almost every organization of any size at all, There's presumably just a ton of personnel at Disney who are actually making some policy, but actually have nothing to offer the world.
And so, you know, why is it that Disney, you know, made this pronouncement in the first place and basically tried to move the needle against Musk?
Well, that was, as it turned out, probably certainly ill-advised, but probably came from some of these, you know, middling, you know, I almost said midwet, that's just not really a term I love, but these sort of, you know, middle manager, probably mostly recently graduated, or if they're not recently graduated from college, they're older and they're scared and they just want to hang on and not lose their jobs, people who aren't standing for anything anymore.
So like, could everyone please Like, look inside yourself and figure out what you actually stand for and whether or not whatever thing you're trying to preserve, be it your pension, your health insurance, your income, whatever it is, is it worth it to have given up everything else?
Like, do you stand for anything anymore?
Or are you willing to continue to spend your days listening to this crap?
And helping move it forward in the world and having, you know, Disney become nothing and, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are, you know, doing evil at one moment and then doing the work of what?
You know, DEI is like being allowed to run the world with its insipidity?
Can we do insipidity?
I'm going to have to look that up.
Well, it's insipidity.
Yeah, insipidity.
Yeah.
Anyway, I Well, I want to put it in a slightly different context.
Hearing you describe it this way, obviously will not be the first time anybody's invoked religion here.
Yeah.
But I feel like what we've seen is a blue, a left religion that has infused itself into many corporations, a left religion that has infused itself into many corporations, It's infused itself, you know, just like, you know, folks on the right gained a lot of power by getting themselves on school boards and things.
This is folks on the nominal... Back in the, like, the 80s, 90s.
Yeah.
This is folks having quietly taken over all of the institutions of a certain stripe, which is then allowing them to mint new members of their religion.
Because if you go through college, you'd have to be pretty clever to avoid getting dragged in on the nonsense.
And so now that, you know, if this was Scientology, if Scientology had infused itself into the institutions in such a way that it was now speaking through the CEOs of, you know, Exxon and Disney and Pfizer and the New York Times. Exxon and Disney and Pfizer and the New York Times.
Right.
And, you know, and the minions of these corporations were gathering in rooms hearing about the sacred doctrines of, you know, Xenu or whatever, right?
Then the rest of us normies could spot it, right?
It would be obvious what was going on and be like, I don't know exactly what to do about the fact that Scientology has just taken over all of these power structures.
I think the only reason that the rest of the people could spot it is because in the timeline that you've created, this would be happening after the world has already heard of and decided to publicly recognize that Scientology is worse than woo.
Everyone imagines they will see the thing.
We are now living through proof that most people can't see the thing when it happens, and in part it's because people actually believed their history classes.
Like, oh, what you do is you read about the thing in the book and it's all very clear-cut because the enemies wear masks and maybe they have capes behind them, and the superheroes have like things on their chests, and they fly, or they have amazing powers.
And so you know, and so you know what side of history you're on, and you know what to do, because, you know, so it is written.
And that's not actually what it is to live life.
Like, sometimes you run into something that does really look like things looked before.
You know, when the, you know, the white hooded idiots come walking down the street, you know what that is.
And There's a reason that's not mostly what it looks like now.
It doesn't work anymore because we can all see it.
The thing that we can all see is too easy to respond to, and so the fact that you're not responding is no evidence at all that there's nothing to respond to.
It may actually be the opposite.
Right, it's the opposite.
This is clearly a religious movement, and that religious movement
You know, what is the religious movement that unites an obscene blindness to pharmaceutical hazards with a commitment to the idea that racism is suffused through every institution and is aggressively shaping society
that connects that to a willingness to tolerate contemplation of genocide against Jews.
What is that religion?
Coupled with a belief that there is some sacred essence inside of children that allows them to declare themselves the opposite gender from their morphology, And therefore that we must sacrifice their reproductive capacity and sexual health in order to aid them to look like the thing that they may or may not have suggested they have some affinity for.
Right?
The point is, that's a whole bunch of religious doctrine.
And it's religious doctrine of a religion that doesn't acknowledge that it is a religion, which makes it especially dangerous.
And the point is, what has it got?
Oh my God, has it got a huge amount of power and wealth and access to, frankly, all of our emails, all of our, you know, phone conversations.
It has access at will to the communications and thought processes of its enemies.
And its enemies are the people who believe in the values of the West, the values that that religion has just pulled a huge population away from.
So I do think that that's where we are.
And the problem is we're not allowed to the extent that we say that this is religious, you know, that the belief that men can become women is a religious belief.
Or the adherence to the idea that the COVID so-called vaccines were safe is a kind of a religious faith.
Mm-hmm.
The point is, we think we're speaking by loose analogy.
And increasingly, I think we are talking about something that is literally a religion in every respect but one.
And it doesn't call itself that.
Yeah, that's it.
The only thing that's not standard fair is the... and actually I'll say one other thing, just to be consistent with the epistemology we've put forward here many times.
You can't start a new religion.
You can start a cult and then selection can decide whether your cult has any value at all and if it does it can shape it into a religion through selection.
This is a cult.
Well I wonder if it's not If we're talking about origins, there's something shared between all of the things that you've talked about.
And just to pick the two most recent ones that you've talked about, the idea of a gender essence within each child, and the idea that the COVID so-called vaccines were safe and effective, those don't appear to have emerged from the same people.
They don't appear to have emerged from the same epistemological confusions, but they use exactly the same tools to get people to buy into them.
And so I wonder if it's not actually that we have multiple cults, all of which are converging on these same tools, and then the cults basically are aggregating, and they are acting together as one religion.
And it is true that people who believe in gender essence are... I think it's extremely likely to be true that people who believe in gender essence are more likely to have said yes, not only to shots one and two, but to shots three and four during COVID than people who are like, gender essence?
What?
No, I don't think so.
Who are more likely to be skeptical of at least the boosters, if not the vaccines in the first place.
So, you know, the different cults have similar affinities in some way, but I'm not, I don't think, it doesn't emerge as a single thing.
And so it's not exactly a religion.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think, yes, the fine details of how this happened.
How what I'm saying is a broad cult with various sets of beliefs on different topics obviously didn't emerge in the same way that, you know, let's take Scientology as a competing example.
I don't know really anything about it.
Well, you have a founder, you have L. Ron Hubbard, who spells out a bunch of stuff and it becomes, you know, there is a single inception point and everything Scientological comes from that.
This obviously is different than that, but I would say the fault in question is You know, why are there pharmaceutical beliefs coupled with gender essence beliefs?
Well, actually, there's one obvious reason that there would be, because this is tremendously lucrative for pharma, as you've pointed out many times, and you're the first person to point it out in my awareness.
But, you know, why would that be connected to A renewed belief in an aggressive form of racism pervading all institutions.
Well, because the New York Times, and I don't want to blame the New York Times uniquely because obviously the LA Times is on the same page as is the Chicago Tribune and all the others, but effectively the New York Times is like the Daily Encyclical.
Right?
The Daily Encyclical puts out the present status of beliefs for the cult, and occasionally there's a major admission.
Occasionally the New York Times is forced to acknowledge, you know, just the same way that the Catholic Church was forced to acknowledge First, that the Earth went around the Sun, and then later, and actually not much later in history, from the point of view of the Acknowledgement, to acknowledge that the theory of natural selection was, I believe their language was, not just a theory, but
More than a theory, but in fact to acknowledge that there is deep reality there.
Yeah, the point is in cyclicals one of the things they do is backpedal.
Former errors.
And so the New York Times can be forced to acknowledge that they've made errors on things like LabLeak, but nonetheless, that's really its purpose, is to tell the faithful, here is the present status of beliefs, and you should, you know, your God will be very upset with you if you violate these things, which is why you don't find people There are some.
subscribed to part, but not the whole of the set of doctrines.
If you're constantly having...
There are some.
There are a few.
No, I think there's...
I think, you know, COVID broke people's minds.
Well, COVID now, because people's personal health was put in jeopardy and many, many people were injured in ways that are unignorable, it has woken people up in part.
But I think in general, the willingness to accept this was fed through that same channel in the same way.
And it was reality that woke people up.
I'm talking about the other direction.
It's not just the famously confused people.
I know there are a lot of people who are awake to gender essence is bullshit, and no, not all white people are racist, and DEI everywhere is actually getting in the way of a meritocracy who actually are mostly buying into the standard COVID line still.
And, you know, but, you know, without probably taking boosters anymore.
Yeah, that's the thing, I don't think they are.
But it's just kind of quiet, like, no, no, no, it's fine.
Yeah, they never formally revised their position, which is frustrating, and in fact, while I was away, it occurred to me, there are a couple things that work this way, and it suggests a characterological defect that I want to call out.
I don't know what its name should be, but That folks who went after their friends and family and neighbors over COVID orthodoxy, who have now stopped getting their boosters quietly without acknowledging that they reversed position, strike me as very much like folks of the left who
Destroyed good governance in the Western states and then moved to Texas, right?
I get it that you moved to Texas, but you owe us an acknowledgement that you screwed up and that what you did was you, you know, you poisoned your home well, and now you've bought into somebody else's well.
But it's the same thing, right?
The failure to acknowledge that you've reversed course is galling and it needs to be called out.
Yeah.
Just one more point on this since we're talking about cults and religions, and just a shout out to Zach, if you would show my screen, the newest Robert Galbraith novel, which is Robert Galbraith is J.K.
Rowling's Nom de Plume.
I can't believe you've outed J.K.
Rowling.
I think she only wrote one of these under the pseudonym before it was known, but anyway, it's 10 years ago now.
So you've outed her, but you're not alone.
No, I have not outed her.
She outed herself, I believe.
Actually, I don't remember.
I wasn't reading them back then.
I didn't know about these books.
I just discovered these books last year, and the seventh one has just come out in September of this year.
It's fantastic, as everything that she writes is.
And this is a detective series in which the two main characters are, we find them throughout, and in each one they're taking on some giant case.
And this one has at the center of its story a cult-slash-religion that draws people in, and I suspect it's at least loosely after Scientology because there's a famous novelist who's part of it, and there's a famous actress that's part of it, and what happens to the normies who get pulled in and aren't
Their families can't find them anymore, their trust funds are spent down, they entirely change what they look like and, of course, what they think.
It is an extraordinary investigation.
It's beautifully written, it's fiction, so if that's all you need, read it anyway.
But it's a very deep analysis of the thinking inside cults.
Which it doesn't really surprise me that she would be excellent at that.
But if anyone is looking for such a thing, I highly recommend this book.
It's called The Running Grave, the seventh.
Yeah, actually, that's interesting.
I obviously haven't read it.
But the There's a lot about JK Rowling that... Yeah, I may be mispronouncing that.
Is it Rowling?
I think it'd be Rowling.
And I started it, like, you're pronouncing it how I did.
Yeah, I'm just following suit, man.
But yeah, whoever she is.
Yeah, there's a lot about the Harry Potter series that stood to be potentially extremely important in disempowering the cult that we are hypothesizing here.
Absolutely.
And so the cult went after her on the basis of supposed transphobia, which is, of course, fictional.
Right.
But the, you know, the Death Eaters are a cult.
And yes, it's done in a way that a child can understand it.
But it certainly there's a reason that a lot of adults liked that series, too.
And it's because actually a lot of these Processes and coalitions that are made fanciful in the Harry Potter series map very well onto real structures and behaviors.
And so anyway, it's no, let's put it this way.
It would be difficult to pull off what they are pulling off if they had not figured out a way to compromise J.K.
Rowling.
Well, it's got to be just about I mean, there's so many ways that what is happening to her is awful.
And, you know, she's not as hurt as Elon Musk, but she's got an extraordinary amount of power and wealth.
And so, and she has, she has not told Disney to fuck off, but she has told some number of people who would cancel her to, you know, that they know where they can put their complaints.
She...
What was I just going to...
I totally lost track of what I was going to say about her...
I was saying it was necessary to get rid of, it was necessary to compromise her legacy in order for the… Yeah.
So, you know, you've got like the actors from the films and these just legions of fans who go to Potter conferences and whatever, who are claiming that, you know, who are actually getting rid of her name.
Like, I think there's either a Harry Potter museum or a big exhibit at some massive museum where her name has actually been stricken from it.
Like, these people are nuts, right?
And that's got to be painful enough for a creator.
But I think actually more painful by far, is you completely misunderstood the books.
Like, this thing that you claim to have, you know, found your identity through and figured out your raison d'etre and, like, this is what's driving you, you clearly understood nothing.
And those were some of the biggest fans?
Like, no, I assure you there are plenty of us out here who got it, or got some of it.
There's so much in her books, right?
Who got some of it, enough of it, and can see that what is happening was practically predicted, right?
Once again, Monty Python has anticipated this.
How's that?
You don't need to follow anyone.
You're all individuals.
We're all individuals.
I'm not.
Yep.
Okay, can we talk about penguins briefly?
Let's do that.
Yeah, let's talk about penguins briefly.
So last week, we talked about penguins.
Of course.
Obviously.
And I don't think this is going to become a trend because, frankly, how much can you say about penguins?
I'm going to alienate all of the penguin lovers in the audience, including my mother, which is terrible.
No, there's actually a lot to say about penguins.
No, we have seen them in Galapagos, but that's the only species we've seen.
We don't know a ton about them.
It's kind of a low-rent penguin.
Galapagos?
I know.
That's the penguin I'd want to be if I got to choose.
I agree.
Let's put it this way.
The Galapagos penguin has a great personality.
I feel like the real estate in Antarctica has got to be cheaper.
I agree.
Well, that's true.
I mean, you literally said low rent.
Well, but history of the Galapagos, right?
Remember that until Darwinism made the Galapagos marvelous, nobody wanted it, so it is kind of... Yes, but Antarctica was not even under discussion.
Right, that's true.
There's a couple flags been planted, and at this point some buildings, but... Yeah, it wasn't even on Zillow, right?
It wasn't worth posting it.
Really not.
Yeah, really not.
But from the point of view of looks, the Galapagos penguin does have a marvelous personality.
I think he's charming.
He's charming, but he's kind of a dirty-looking penguin.
He's not brilliant white and black, you know?
That's true.
Okay, fair enough.
Fair enough.
So last week we talked about, I can't even remember which penguin it was, some species of penguin that could tell individuals apart on the basis of their ventral markings, their chest markings, their dots and dashes, as you said.
And, um, this week, um, in science, uh, I run into a piece called, um, well actually, yeah, the original research is in science and it's also reported on in Science News.
Uh, nesting... here, hold on, I gotta open up the right thing.
Here we go.
Uh, nesting chin... you can open up my screen here.
Nesting chinstrap penguins accrue large quantities of sleep through seconds-long micro-sleeps.
Let me read the abstract.
Microsleeps, the seconds-long interruptions of wakefulness by eye closure and sleep-related brain activity, are dangerous when driving.
Wait, how much driving do these penguins do?
That's exactly my question, thank you!
And what are they driving at?
I don't know, probably just to get the kind of Antarctica I would think.
These ones are in Antarctica.
These are chinstrap penguins in Antarctica.
Are dangerous when driving and might be too short to provide the restorative functions of sleep.
Certainly if you're driving, it's not very restorative.
If microsleeps do fulfill sleep functions, then animals faced with a continuous need for vigilance might resort to this sleep strategy.
We investigated electroencephalo... Wow, that went longer than I was expecting.
We investigated electroencephalographically defined sleep in wild chinstrap penguins at sea and while nesting in Antarctica, constantly exposed to an egg predator and aggression from other penguins.
The skua is the egg predator, another bird, the skua.
The penguins nodded off more than 10,000 times per day.
Individual!
That's not like the whole colony.
Individual penguins nodded off more than 10,000 times per day, engaging in bouts of bi-hemispheric and unihemispheric slow-wave sleep lasting, on average, only four seconds.
On average, only four seconds, but resulting in the accumulation of more than 11 hours of sleep for each hemisphere per day.
The investment in microsleeps by successfully breeding penguins suggests that the benefits of sleep can accrue incrementally.
Now, you said that they are gaining the benefits of sleep in both hemispheres.
They're not even in the Northern Hemisphere.
Sorry.
Again, though, I'm going to direct you to the LA.
I didn't write that.
You did not.
I'm just a messenger here.
Yeah.
No, they're not even in the Northern Hemisphere.
So, yes.
I mean, questions raised are, of course, what do penguins drive?
Yes.
Why do they drive?
There's bound to be a funny answer to that.
Probably is.
So let me just, you know, limitations.
And here's just something about methods, which also reveals a main limitation, which is, and you can show my screen if you want, but you don't have to.
Again, from the main paper, we examine sleep, we examine sleep in 14 penguins.
So it's not a huge N. It's a small sample size.
We examined sleep in 14 penguins incubating eggs in a colony during early December 2019.
Using data loggers, we measured sleep-related EEG activity from both cerebral hemispheres, the electromyogram from the neck muscles, body movements and posture with accelerometry, location with GPS, and diving with a pressure sensor.
So part of what they're saying there is we were trying to find, we were trying to use a bunch of measures of sleep, and at some level what this research raises, the question it raises for me, is are we defining sleep correctly, right?
So, you know, are these measures, these basically these EEG activity measures, which are, again, on average four seconds long in these chinstrap penguins.
But when you add those up over the course of 10,000 of these events in a day on average to more than 11 hours of this so-called sleep in a day, That's still a lot of sleep.
But one of the interesting things about this research is that, of course, vigilance is raised as a reason for sleep to be disrupted and for individuals or individuals across an entire species to perhaps sleep in smaller bouts rather than extended bouts like we tend to.
But, this research suggests that they do these big colony nesting things, and as you would expect, the skuas, the predator birds, they're there, they're there all the time, and the attacks tend to come at the edges of the colony, because why would you go into the middle when you could go to the edge?
But, they actually find deeper, longer sleep in the penguins at the edges of the colony.
than in the middle of the colony.
The penguins in the middle of the colony have more shorter bouts of sleep than the penguins at the edge of the colony, suggesting that either we've totally missed something they have to be vigilant about, or it's not vigilance that is driving the micro sleeps.
Hmm.
Okay.
The reason for that, I can't even think of one.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't have it either.
It's the one thing I ran into in this was like, that's exactly counter what the hypothesis of vigilance is driving this would suggest.
So what are we left with in terms of what might be driving it?
So if I resort to what we discuss in our book, The Laboratory of the Self, I believe that actually
I obviously didn't do any measurements that would suggest that the sleep was effective, but my own experience with sleep when sleep is not, when the conditions are not ideal, does suggest that very short bouts of sleep, interrupted by brief vigilance over whatever, actually do have a cumulative input.
I might expect that the answer is if you're only sleeping for a few seconds at a time, That effectively you're knocked back to zero, whatever the, you know.
Right.
First of all, there's no obvious reason, and I'm sure initially it was not the case, that sleep is necessary to do something.
Some process has to unfold and it can only happen when you are asleep.
Initially, sleep was bound to be a matter of dormancy when you were going to be counterproductive being active.
But once you have that period of dormancy, selection can build stuff that is best done during sleep and then requires sleep.
And we know that human beings require doesn't even really begin to get to it.
You can actually die from lack of sleep.
You will die from lack of sleep if you simply remain perpetually awake much quicker than you would imagine.
There are processes that need to be reset in the brain and we're not fully aware of what they even are.
From the point of view of there being necessary processes that require sleep, first of all, we've all had the experience of the 20-minute power nap, right?
There's one thing to a night's sleep, a full night's sleep, that sleep deprivation, if you can't go to sleep for some reason, or you don't manage to sleep, that you can end up getting to a place where you're just not really functional.
But that 20 minutes of sleep can do you a world of good.
If you need to get through an hour presentation, right, 20 minutes of sleep on no sleep will actually get you back into a state where you feel rejuvenated, albeit not for the whole day.
True, although at risk of pointing out the obvious, we're talking about four seconds, which is one three hundredth the amount of time of a 20 minute Right, but if I again go laboratory of the self, I don't know how long, you know, I've been in the situation where I'm dozing off briefly and I keep coming back to wakefulness and the point is there is a place where I believe I get to that
You've had 20 minutes and you've got a temporary burst of cognitive proficiency that's come from somewhere.
I infer to me that whatever that process is that works over 20 minutes actually works in small bouts that add up to something like 20 minutes.
And you know, I think people will have had this experience too, where I mean, the thing that is so dangerous about driving is that it does not, whereas walking around, your body has a feedback that says, don't fucking fall asleep now, right?
That would be a bad idea, right?
Narcoleptics are rare.
You don't see people falling asleep walking around because the proper evolutionary feedbacks keep you from doing it.
I saw a professor do it at the chalkboard once.
Anybody I know?
Yeah, but I'm not going to say it out here.
Okay, alright.
He was old.
But somebody we like.
Yeah.
You didn't know him well.
Okay.
Well, alright.
So, the point is, you have the proper feedbacks when you're walking around that prevent you from ever falling asleep.
You'd probably live your whole life and never fall asleep while walking around.
Driving, we've all had the experience, because driving doesn't produce those feedbacks.
You're sitting in a comfortable Maybe you've got the environment nice and warm, you're listening to music you like, whatever it is.
And the point is, no, you're hurtling along at 65 miles an hour and this is a bad time to allow that drowsy feeling to overtake you.
So we've all been there, but we've also therefore all, I hate to admit it, but I believe that every driver will have had this experience where There is no obvious place to pull off.
Or you're not that far from home and it's like, just stay awake.
And you know, my grandfather used to chew gum to stay awake.
That's actually a pretty good trick.
Window open is also.
Window open is good.
But where, you know, you are like barely dozing off and Yeah, you start giving yourself one eye at a time.
Right.
Then the point is that, yeah, one eye at a time.
It's terrible.
Terrible.
Never again will I allow that to happen.
But the point is, there is a point at which it goes away.
Where it's not that it just gets worse and worse and worse.
And it's not because you're dead.
Correct.
So far, that has not been my experience.
But there is a point at which that little micro-dosing thing actually does cause something to turn over.
And so again, I think that it's probably why it's strangely in the abstract of that paper.
It's driving us not along.
So anyway, my laboratory of the self experiences of suboptimal periods of sleep suggests that this is not, it's not a crazy idea that four seconds at a time would get you somewhere.
So here we go.
This is, so I don't believe in gender essence, but there are behaviors that are more or less likely to be affiliated with one sex or the other.
And I did some amount of long distance driving when I was young.
Not very much.
You did a fair amount.
We did some together.
We would spell each other.
But you did a lot.
I'm not great at spelling, but in that case I was good.
In that case you were excellent at it.
And following in your footsteps, our eldest son here has done a lot of driving and I think had something to say here.
It's not very helpful.
I just find there are a lot of things you can do that work sort of.
You can pull over and do jumping jacks and caffeine can help.
The only thing that really works great.
I know what you're going to say.
Putting a staple through your toe.
That doesn't work great.
Hold on.
You wouldn't have fallen asleep.
Well, you were learning to drive while you're still at the limit of your driving ability.
And so the only thing that really works is drive at the limit of your ability, speed up like three times.
Oh God.
Yes.
Just for the record, he's kidding.
Yeah.
No, go with the staple through the toe.
Much more recommended.
You can barely make it around the corner and stay on the road.
Sorry.
Nope.
- Nope, sorry. - Nope.
All right. - Terrible.
What have we done?
Well, I don't know.
Are we done with penguins?
Yes.
Okay, so speaking of driving.
Okay.
As you know, because you have access to my calendar and much else, I was in Florida.
I think I would have put together that even without access to your calendar.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just saying, at a bare minimum, the calendar rated obvious.
I guess.
Yes.
So anyway, I was... Sometimes I am pretty sure that I have better access to your calendar than you do.
I do not doubt that for one second.
I don't want it to be that way.
I'm not great with calendars, or clocks, or lots of other stuff.
But cars, and many other things.
Many other things.
I was just trying to segue back to you.
Yeah, right.
But anyway, I was in Florida.
I was actually back and forth across Florida, and I ended up in... Wait, you only went forth or back.
You didn't go back and forth.
You are technically correct.
I was fourth in Florida.
I don't know who first, second, and third were, but hats off to them.
Spelled different.
You would raise that at this moment.
This has gotten awkward.
So anyway, I was in Florida, and I I found myself in Miami with a day to kill, and I decided, looking at the map, that the Florida Keys were in range for a day trip, which is a little surprising to me that I could get both directions in a day, but it turned out it's only three hours from where I was staying in Miami.
to Key West, the farthest you can go.
And so I decided to just do it.
And I know I feel a little bad about this because you've wanted to get there forever and you just didn't happen to be on this trip.
But anyway, so I decided I'm going to go to Key West.
I'm going to see Key West and I'm going to get back.
You're going to see the cats.
Yeah, see Hemingway's cats.
And as I was driving through the Keys, I encountered indications of something that somehow, though I am a trained mammologist, I did not know existed.
Or if I did know, I've forgotten well enough that I find no trace of it in my mind, which is the existence of something called a Key Deer.
Now, e-deer is a, they say, a subspecies.
The deer say?
No, no, good catch.
Thank you.
Yes, no, the mammologists say that the deer, e-deer, is a subspecies of white-tailed deer.
White-tailed deer being the common East Coast deer.
Now, this interested me in a number of ways.
I guess I'm not really surprised that there was a special deer in the Keys.
I am a little surprised that it still exists, because the Keys are pretty well developed.
Deer is pretty delicious.
There's hundreds of years of history of sailors coming through, and oftentimes sailors have decimated turtles and tortoises and the local stuff, and I would have thought that Yeah, although I don't know how recent the bridges are, and so sailors aren't going to tend to go far inland.
Some of those keys are pretty big, and some of the habitat is squishy and brambly, and so it's possible that it just wasn't real efficient to hunt them in this way.
So despite the fact that they were hunted, they're still there.
They are So anyway, at the point that I discovered that they were still there, based on there's one section of the keys where there's just signs everywhere, you know, flashing red lights with a picture of a deer and mentions of key deer and be careful and all of this, you know, apparently... Be careful dangerous?
No, they get hit a lot.
But anyway, I thought, wow, that's marvelous.
I'd love to see this animal.
And I, you know, pulled into some nature area kinds of places, hoping I would encounter it, and I didn't encounter it.
And then finally on my way back, sun is setting, I saw them in a little spot.
I hesitate to admit that it was near the highway, but it was near enough that I could detect that they were there.
I pulled into a church and had a nice conversation with the folks selling Christmas trees, and then they were cool with me going to chase the deer, and so I did.
And anyway, I wanted to just show, I did get a couple nice photos, and I sent one of them here to Zach.
Zach, do you want to, yeah, you want to show this animal?
So there is a, these are quite tiny.
He's gorgeous.
Yeah, he's a gorgeous creature.
So what is he?
How tall is he at the shoulder?
Oh, he's probably a foot and a half at the shoulder.
Yeah, it's a very little animal.
And this is an adult.
The face looks adult-ish, although it's hard to tell a little bit.
Yeah, I believe it's an adult.
Anyway, he was And those little antlers?
They are little antlers.
I looked it up.
Both individuals that I saw had antlers, so I thought maybe this was an exception to the males-only rule.
Turns out it's not the key deer.
Only the males have antlers, and only during rutting season.
And is that what they look like at the end, or is that just new antlers?
I think they grow.
The problem is that what I read suggests that this was not the moment on the calendar where they should have them.
So I don't know what's going on.
My expectation is that those are young new buds, but I don't know.
And this guy raised his tail at me and I was about as alarmed as he got.
Yeah.
But anyway, he's gorgeous.
It caused me to think a number of things.
One, deer are interesting in that both the white tail and the mule deer of the West have this pattern of creating subspecies that are identifiably different.
And I started to wonder about why that would be.
And my thought was, there's something interesting here where the platform, the deer platform, is Generically useful, right?
There's lots of habitat across both the east and the west and the center of the country that has the basic stuff that you would want, but then there's stuff that might be modified, like the height of the foliage, right?
A tiny deer in the Keys where there's nothing tall growing at all, right?
There are very few trees, there are some, but everything's pretty low.
That, you know, a deer that was capable of maneuvering would have an advantage over a deer that was standard height and, you know, unable to do that job.
And so the question really, which this raised for me, is when does selection produce a new species?
When does it produce a subspecies?
And what's going on in that gap?
We have, here on the West Coast, we have Mule deer, um, which gave rise to a subset black tail deer.
Um, and then there's another subset, which I'm forgetting.
I can't remember what it is.
Might be Eastern Washington somewhere, but there, there's like a triple nested set, uh, amongst the mule deer.
There's also some weird morphs here on the islands, or not on this island, but on Orcas Island.
Oh, the piebald deer.
Yes, actually, Selection seems to have modified the deer there, suddenly.
But, anyway, I don't have a ton to say about it, except that I thought it was interesting that there's this diminutive little whitetail deer in the Keys, that it still exists.
And it's in many of the Keys.
No, it's actually... I mean, at this point, they're connected, but I wonder... That's the other interesting thing.
At this point, the keys are connected.
It is limited.
I think it's... forgive me if I've got the name wrong.
Is it Pine something?
Pine Key?
It's now limited to a couple of different keys.
Adjacent to one another.
Yep.
But the historical pattern, at least, and I think it's still somewhat evident, these deer are great swimmers.
That is not terribly surprising.
Most mammals actually do a better job of swimming than you think.
Even bats?
Even bats can pull it off.
And things like sloths.
And anyway, being able to swim is actually near universal.
Is it giraffes that are the big exception?
And they just don't have to walk on the bottom.
Well, but I, I think there's like one major exception and I, maybe it's not giraffe, giraffes.
Um, but I feel like it's just like, it's too, there's too much above the water and they fall over.
Yeah.
I can't, I can't.
They only would need to keep their head above the water.
Yeah.
But if they're swimming in the kinds of habitats where giraffes would have to, like, they have to be in super deep water and they wouldn't be able to like get in and swim in shallow water because Yeah, I agree.
It raises questions.
Also, there's a question about the reinforcement, you know.
So in giraffes, there is a structural issue, which is that the head is so far from the body that messages that need to get from the head to the body actually take a long time.
And so there's certain things that have to be wired into the body And you can imagine that the opportunities for giraffes to swim are few and far between.
So it may be that the building of a swimming program into the body that did not require the head to participate directly in every motion never got reinforced until they can.
So anyway, that's at least a plausible story if they are in fact the exception.
Anyway, swimming.
These deer can swim.
These deer can swim.
They have traditionally spread out farther through the Keys.
They're now limited to places with intact habitat.
But the really cool thing I learned is that they swim to Keys that do not have a Can you put the picture back up, Zach?
in the wet season.
They need fresh water.
And so in the wet season, when it falls out of the sky and collects in various places, they will go to these other keys.
And then in the dry season, they retreat to the keys in which they have a source of water.
Can you put the picture back up, Zach?
I was actually going to ask you.
It looks like the plant behind this deer is a bromeliad.
No.
That is a palm.
I agree with you.
But still, palms have axils as well that collect water.
Yes, they do.
So you're going to have basically phytotelmata, you know, water collecting in living plants that are used by, yes, poison frogs, but also anyone who wants to come by and get a drink and doesn't mind sticking their tongue into a plant.
Totally.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's about the story of it, but I was just super excited to run into especially a, you know, yes, it's a tiny deer, but it's a pretty large mammal that I've never heard of.
Yeah, it's gorgeous.
And that it was possible to encounter it just by being a little vigilant, and that was cool.
That is awesome.
All right.
I think we've done it.
Yep.
I think we're going to take a bit of a break and then come back after 15 minutes or so with our special holiday gift episode.
It won't be that long, but it should be fun, and Brett's got some unexpected stuff for all y'alls.
Until we see you next time, though, we'll be back next week, same time, same place.
Please consider joining us on Locals, where we've got all sorts of great benefits, and also go to the store.
We'll be talking again more about that in the gift episode, darkhorsestore.org.
Check out my writing at Natural Selections, naturalselections.substack.com.
We've got, boy, we still have our Patreons open and you're still doing your monthly conversations.
I did one from the keys.
Yeah, great.
Yeah, you drove a little hot.
Yeah, you did outside in the Keys?
Nice, nice, nice.
And yeah, so reminder, our sponsors this week were, I've forgotten already, it was Vivo Barefoot and Mindbloom and Un-Cruise.
Indeed.
All awesome.
And we will have links to everything we talked about here in the show notes.
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