#203 Cause of Death (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 203rd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode we once again discuss college presidents, in light of what is happening at Harvard and other elite schools. We talk about historical and bureaucratic constraint, Evergreen, consulting firms, and plagiarism, and, in a related story, how someone acting on behalf of the Mayor of Boston mistakenly invited all 13...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 203.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You, if I'm not mistaken, are Dr. Heather Hying.
I am, last I checked.
Yeah, I mean, what do any of us really know?
But as far as we can tell, all these things are true, at least so far.
Yeah, indeed.
203, not prime, semi-prime.
I mean, everybody knows that's not prime.
Semi-prime, 7x29.
I like a good semi-prime.
Yeah, I mean, again, who doesn't?
Yeah.
Zach doesn't, apparently.
Zach, our son and producer, is here to tell us that that is not a thing.
That is not a thing.
Well, so we know how far we can trust him at this point.
Yes.
Come join us on Rumble if you're watching elsewhere.
If you're just listening, continue listening, wherever you're listening, and subscribe to our channel here on Rumble.
Join the watch party on Locals.
Yeah, if you're looking to heckle, Locals is the place to say snide things or to fight back against those who do.
I feel like it's not heckling because we don't see what's happening during the Watch Party.
No, it's the perfect heckling.
For us, not for them.
Yes, right.
Ideally, for us, the heckling is not audible.
Yeah, okay.
Well, so today we're going to return to the topic of college presidents, as we spoke about some last week.
We are going to talk about I've already forgotten.
Morbid Curiosity and Predator Inspection, and we may talk about Hanukkah a little bit as well.
But until then, check out darkhorsestore.org where you can get lots of cool stuff.
We'll show some of those things at the end of this episode.
We're going to do a Q&A after this live stream.
Immediately following, you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
All the questions you've been Eager to ask.
We're going to tell you more things, more places to go at the end of this podcast.
But for now, we are going to start with our three sponsors, as always, at the top of the show.
Three products, or in this case, all products rather than services that we actually and truly vouch for.
Here we go!
I take it I'm first, because it's awfully quiet.
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Yeah, we met another person this week, actually a documentarian, hello Garfield, who was wearing Vivos and appreciates them very much, and it happens a lot.
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Such an elegant design.
It really is.
Obvious in retrospect, but a fine improvement on normal probiotics.
Yeah, and this point about being able to travel with it is actually huge.
Even if you don't feel that you need probiotics on a daily basis, if you are traveling especially to a number of places and going to be moving around a lot where your gut flora may not have time to get used to the local stuff, Having probiotics with you that you just take every day can be a gut changer.
Yeah, and it's way better than trying to sneak a quart of yogurt through TSA.
You speak from experience.
I ran a thought experiment, which again is going to drive Alex Marinos crazy hearing that, but yes, I ran the thought experiment and it wasn't worth it.
I see.
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I am very glad that none of our sponsors this week are the manufacturers of irons, because I would be in a very awkward situation.
I've just looked at the monitor and discovered how wrinkled my shirt is.
So anyway, if there are any iron manufacturers out there who wish to sponsor the podcast, I actually do know how to iron pretty well, and I would be willing to demonstrate the value of an excellent iron should someone find their way to us.
Yeah, no, I will say that for reasons that I somewhat understand and somewhat don't, I detest ironing, and I won't do it, and I basically choose my clothes based on whether or not they will have to be ironed, and if they will, I won't buy them.
And you are then left to iron your own stuff when it needs to be done, and you occasionally have even ironed things for the boys.
Sure, so this is actually one of the funny ironies of being a man who travels to give talks sometimes in formal-ish clothing, or at least clothing that doesn't look super rumpled, which is that traveling inherently wrinkles everything.
So, being able to unwrinkle your own stuff is important.
Why do people care about wrinkles?
Well, presumably because it implies something about your station in life.
Because if your clothes are really unwrinkled, it probably implies that you have, I don't know, access to servants or the money to pay people to do this sort of thing.
So there are lots of men ironing their own stuff to leave the impression that they have servants that they don't have.
Based on our historical using of this as a proxy for your position in the universe.
Or a steam cabinet.
I've tried to figure out which part of that.
Yes, the steam cabinet.
Servants or a steam cabinet.
Servants, a steam cabinet.
Or historically, honestly, a wife.
A wife.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I do have one, but she don't iron.
No.
She don't iron.
So I do my own ironing and I've gotten fairly good at it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Except today.
Today, I didn't get to it.
Yeah.
No, it's not that you failed at ironing.
You failed to iron.
I failed to iron.
The non-irony of that is stunning.
I know.
So if there are any iron manufacturers out there, consider getting in touch with him.
Right.
Yes, do reach out, but allow it to cool first.
Indeed.
Yes.
Yeah.
And you prefer the plug-in type, right?
Not the types that you have to put into the coals and then pull out and clean off?
Yeah, I'm not big on those.
Yeah, in fact, You and I have, at times, when traveling into the field, it's not that we wanted our clothes ironed, but there are many parts of the world where... You iron to dry.
You iron to get the stuff dry, and so if you offload your clothes to somebody to get them cleaned, which is often inexpensive enough to do it... Yeah, that's the way to do it in many parts of the world, yeah.
So you go into the forest looking spectacular.
It's true, for about two minutes.
Two minutes, and then you're saturated in your own sweat, which then collects in your boots.
But still well-ironed.
Yes.
Except for the boots.
I've never had anyone iron my boots.
It would be worth hiring somebody to take pictures as you enter the forest looking dashing.
Indeed.
All right, so last week we talked about what was then less than a day old, I think, this testimony by the presidents from Harvard and MIT, and at the time the president at Penn, who has since resigned, Before Congress talking about whether or not the Student Codes of Conduct would protect speech calling for Jewish genocide.
We talked about this at some length, and there has continued to be a story this week.
Of course, President Gay at Harvard has not been asked to resign, not been encouraged to resign, so far as we know.
And whatever it is, the board, I guess, at Harvard has given her a very light suggestion that maybe some of the Borrowed parts of her thesis shouldn't have been borrowed, things like that.
They have inquired as to whether she might be willing to slap herself on the wrist.
Word has not come back from Dr. Gay.
Oh, I think she's not.
Probably not.
I don't see why she would.
But this prompted me to go back to a piece that I, in 2018, a year after Evergreen had blown up, I was approached by the journal Academic Questions, which is the journal of the National Association of Scholars, In which I was asked, they said, we've got an upcoming issue on college presidents and are wondering if you would be interested in writing about college presidents and specifically George Bridges.
And I recall laughing out loud at receiving this email and then saying, well, yes, of course, I would absolutely be interested in writing about this.
So that piece was published in 2019, and yesterday I republished it with the facilitation of the journal, Academic Questions.
On my substack, and I wanted to just read a few paragraphs from it today, because it is apropos.
Evergreen was a canary in a coal mine, and there were things that happened before that, and it just doesn't seem that the world is learning the lessons.
No, in fact, part of what we talked about last time was that it may be learning the wrong lessons.
Very much so.
And in fact, as you pointed out on Twitter, a number of folks picked up on the same theme that we talked about, which is The idea is not how can we regulate speech so people don't say awful things.
The idea is how can we leave speech free and not exert a double standard in which, you know, Jewish genocide is a tolerable topic, but genocides of other people aren't, which is where we find ourselves.
Exactly.
Yes.
So, you know, the excellent, always excellent Robbie George.
And also Heather MacDonald, at least.
Those two, I think others too, have been using this language of the double standard as well.
I think I saw Jonathan Haidt as well.
Okay, which of course we did last week in this very place.
So let me just, I'm going to read three paragraphs in the middle of this piece on college presidents, and you can show my screen if you like, Zach, here.
In biology, there is a concept known as historical constraint.
It provides one answer to the question of why organisms are riddled with so many imperfections.
In brief, historical constraint refers to the fact that once a structure, such as an eye, is established, selection cannot act on it to make it better, if the first necessary steps in the process would make it worse.
The vertebrate eye could be improved, for example, by reversing the orientation of the photoreceptors, as is the case in octopus and squid, but the improvement is left unmade by natural selection because of the blindness that would accompany the intermediate steps.
An analogy can be made between historical constraint and biology, and bureaucratic constraint in institutions.
Once systems are in place, especially if there are personnel involved, it is difficult to get rid of them even as they become outdated or redundant.
We see calcification of once nimble and forward-thinking systems into ever more rigid and archaic ones.
This is, in part, what underpinned Thomas Jefferson's observation that, even in a democracy, rebellion need happen with some regularity.
Even the best systems will become rigid over time and need an overhaul, and sometimes that overhaul will not be doable in increments.
Bureaucratic constraint is real and difficult to manage, but what is happening on many college campuses in the last few decades is, like an infection, quicker to do damage.
The move to increase administration effectively guarantees a difficult-to-maneuver ship, even at institutions such as Evergreen, where there was once pride in being lean and nimble.
In 1997, the anonymous authors of The Real Faculty Handbook at Evergreen wrote that academic administration consists of, quote, a vice president, provost, with three staff, and five academic deans.
That's it.
The growth of administration, especially diversity officers and offices, who in the current climate will be particularly difficult to downsize or fire, creates bureaucratic constraint out of which some colleges will not be able to maneuver.
The infection, if left untreated, is likely to be fatal.
And this is what we are seeing.
I mean, Harvard is blowing itself up.
I don't know what is going to happen as a result of Penn's president stepping down and just returning to the faculty, I guess the law faculty.
And I haven't heard what's happening at MIT, but really the fact that we're talking about these three is only because they were the three who were hauled before Congress.
This is a problem absolutely everywhere.
And you can actually see that that's the case because what each of these three individuals said was virtually identical.
Yes.
It was clearly coordinated.
And three people left to defend the same disgusting speech would likely have come up with different defenses if this had not been centralized.
So there is some central force deciding what is and isn't tolerable and who will and will not be chased with pitchforks and torches and That centralizing force is an indicator that this isn't about what it's ostensibly about, right?
The subject that you're focused on is what you're being told to focus on.
It's not the move that is being made behind the scenes about power, inevitably.
That's right.
And there are a number of other points I make in this piece.
One of them is that we see in an ongoing survey, sort of sporadic, it's not exactly It's not exactly every eight or ten years, but it's approximately every eight or ten years there's this ongoing survey of college presidents that's been done.
At the time of that writing, the most recent one was in 2017, and a few of the things that were notable in that survey were, one, there was an increase in the number of searches for college presidents, and I believe this is true at the level of the VPs, including the provost as well, that are done
By consulting firms, as opposed to people from the institution, like academic staff and faculty from the institutions that are actually hiring the people, has increased dramatically.
And, of course, this will have a number of effects.
One of them is a homogenization, right?
That if you are a consulting firm who has become, you know, expert in one of the few consulting firms that is called when it is time to hire a college president, And you've done this one this year, and then you do a second, and a third, and maybe 10 this year, and 20 the next.
Your searches will come to resemble one another.
You will come to be seeking the same kind of people.
You will come to be interested in the same kinds of buzzwords.
And in keeping with that, what college presidents are saying in 2017, in a way that they didn't used to, is that what we really need is a focus on diversity.
This is exactly the moment that we actually have increasing diversity in these offices, but instead the tone in the 2017 report, as opposed to the tone in previous reports, where there was sort of increasing diversity and there was an encouraging tone about that.
By 2017, we have simultaneously greater diversity in these offices and this hand-wringing around why we haven't reached equity yet and what exactly would equity mean with regard to, you know, the presidency across elite institutions.
Well, I was going to say one can hardly imagine, but what it does mean is whatever they want it to mean at the time, they're going to take whatever source population they want to compare it to, and they're going to only call it done when they reach that goal.
And of course, they won't even call it done then, because they'll create some other goal.
Because the point, in part, is it will never be done.
The work will never be done.
We will never be done, and that is what keeps us employed.
So there's a cascading aspect of this.
These institutions are supposed to be different from each other and in theory they should be in a friendly competition to advance the ball of human knowledge and rise to the top of the hierarchy of colleges and be more in demand as a place to send your kids and all of that.
But what this does is the same what has been called by many who have looked at the huge number of people inside of Google and other platforms who do nothing for a living apparently, who must just prove this by firing a bunch of them at Twitter and it coming along better than it has been even before that, that same blight will accumulate inside these consulting firms
Effectively, they will go through the motions of a search in which they scrutinize the needs of the particular college and all of this.
But what they're really going to do is take whatever it is that their search algorithm has found and feed the conclusions that, you know, they're not going to take the top tier person and feed them to the 20th tier university.
But they'll have some way of figuring out how to just take what it is they already think they found and plug it in.
And of course, the number of people who will be pretending to be busy figuring out what the individual college needs There will be many, so the blight will accumulate inside the consultancy.
It will then flow into the administration of these colleges, which will then hire faculty which are pleasing to them, and you'll get blight on the faculty, people who appear to be busy studying this and that, who actually aren't contributing anything and don't know how to sort truth from fiction.
And lo and behold, your student who arrives there isn't going to end up leaving any smarter than they were.
In fact, they'll be lucky if they leave as smart as they walked through the door, if it doesn't actually infect their minds.
With nonsense.
So that cascade of blight through the entire system from consultancy above the university through the students flowing through the university is inevitable with that structure.
Yes.
The other thing that's inevitable is risk aversion.
Yes.
A consultancy that looks at a college or university that has a unique structure and that maybe has unique people applying for the job Isn't going to say, hey, you know what?
This person is a gamble.
They don't look like the top person for anywhere.
But in this case, it's worth this college taking a shot because it is a long-term problem that has to be solved, for example.
And this is the only person with the vision who can do it.
What they're going to do is they're going to resort to whatever the college president version of nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right?
Most of our listeners are probably too young to remember that.
But the idea was it wasn't that IBM made the best stuff for your business.
In fact, it very well might not have.
But it was a totally safe choice.
If you were in charge of figuring out what computer system to get, if you bought IBM, it wasn't going to cost you your job because it was a mistake.
So that kind of unimaginative infusion of bureaucratic safety into these institutions then explains, I mean exactly as you're pointing out, why you would haul three very different looking college presidents in front of the Congress and they would say virtually the identical thing about this absurd turn of history.
Yeah, that's right.
You just you prompted me to just the paragraph before what I read has these two sentences I think in it.
Orthodoxy spreads through the proliferation of in-house bureaucrats, but also through the removal of discretion from the faculty, staff, and administrators who know systems the best, and outsourcing the dirty work to anonymous others who at best have generic interests in mind and may also have perverse incentives.
Consultants, for example, are unlikely to be persuaded by candidates who are skeptical of the value of consultants.
Right? - Perfect.
- Right? - And in fact, this may be in your piece, it's been quite some time since I read it, but there was something funny about George Bridges and the consultancy that drove him to the head of that search.
Yeah, it's not in here.
It's not yet, but as I recall, it was the second time that consultancy had driven him to the top.
I don't know if that's correct, but I remember there being some oddity, like the same consultancy had resulted in him being hired at Whitman, where those who've been watching us for a long time will remember a discussion in which we talked about the fact that after Evergreen had hired George Bridges, some of us got contacted by faculty at Whitman to send their condolences.
Because he was the just-leaving president of Whitman, and they were like, finally, we're free of him!
They knew!
They'd been trying to pawn him off on somebody, and we were that lucky somebody, so... Anyway, it's a long-forgotten chapter, I guess, but... Not for some of us.
Well, I had something, a place, I wasn't thinking of going here, but what you're saying prompts me to deploy a kind of piece of analytical toolkit that comes from biology but has a high relevance here and to other important topics we've been talking about.
Great, let's do it.
Let's try it out.
Our listeners should give me a bit of leash here.
I'm going to start out somewhere that seems totally unrelated.
I just went to Historical Constraint, man.
Yeah, alright.
Hell yeah.
This is totally expected.
If you're paying attention, you should see this one coming.
Yeah, and give us the leash back.
Yeah.
In the same condition we gave it to you, hopefully.
The point is about lions and other predators that occasionally take humans.
There is a tradition in virtually any culture that lives among such creatures that when a creature has killed a person, that it is the obligation of the people, the kin of the person who was killed, to kill the animal in question.
And there's often an explanation for this, something like, that animal has developed a taste for human flesh and now must be killed for the good of all.
The individual in question who killed the human, not the "we gotta go sacrifice a lion." Right, and I'm gonna argue that this is in all likelihood a metaphorically true belief.
That it is not that the lion itself has developed a taste for human flesh based on its one delicious encounter, but that there is a very good evolutionary reason for this belief to arise in every population that has this as an important danger.
And that the literal explanation for this is something that nobody who doesn't have an evolutionary understanding could phrase.
So you would expect, just as the germ theory of disease shows up in the Old Testament as, you know, God's desire not to have you allow filth in camp, right?
That's a belief that if you believe there's somebody looking down, It causes you to behave differently, as if you understand the term theory of disease.
This belief that animals acquire a taste for human flesh and therefore must individually be hunted and killed, even at great expense and risk to the people doing the hunting and killing.
serves a function and the function I would argue is to cause any animal that has a predisposition to this behavior and I would point out irrespective of whether that predisposition is the change in some one or a few genes that cause it to view humans more likely as a successful prey item or it's a cultural fact and on lions it could easily be a cultural fact because lions Uh, have extensive contact with their elders.
They learn how to hunt from their elders.
And so therefore, a lion that decided, actually, you know what?
Those humans, they resist less than you would expect for an animal that size.
Um, and there sure are a lot of them.
And they stand up tall so you can see them from far away while you're still in the grass.
Let's try hunting humans.
I'm imagining a lion at a whiteboard explaining this to his little pumpkin.
Yes, that is your developmental distortion from having seen so many Far Side cartoons as a young person.
True.
It's true.
Back when the university used to teach science, the science departments were all plastered in far side cartoons.
Everybody's door had them.
I included them in my PowerPoints.
Of course you did.
Many of the most important lessons were teachable that way.
But no more, I'm sure.
They're forbidden.
But in any case, the idea, the hypothesis here is that humans develop this belief because if they do hunt down and kill at some relatively frequent rate, sometimes they'll mistake which animal did it.
They might kill the wrong animal and it might look like a perfectly preposterous kind of retribution in a place where retribution can't really have any Meaning, but if they more often than not find the individual who did the killing and kill it, then whatever predisposition it is that would cause an animal to explore hunting humans will be stamped out because the cost is so much higher than the value of the meal that it got.
And what this also means is that down the road, The animal will have a quote-unquote irrational fear of humans.
That because... Other animals of the same... from the same population.
The entire lineage will acquire a... Because the animal that's now dead is not going to have an irrational fear of humans.
No, it will have a very rational fear of humans.
It has no fear of humans.
Briefly.
As the spear is landing in its skull.
Yeah.
But the others that are of the same lineage, the lineage will acquire a predisposition to not considering humans as prey if this is done effectively.
So we can debate whether or not that resistance is seen.
I can say you and I have both experienced swimming with crocodiles that are perfectly well capable of taking a human being in the Panama Canal where except in the odd circumstance that you get between a crocodile and its babies or a nest that it's protecting, the animals treat you as very dangerous.
swimming with crocodiles that are perfectly well capable of taking a human being in the Panama Canal, where except in the odd circumstance that you get between a crocodile and its babies or a nest that it's protecting, the animals treat you as very dangerous, even though on that the animals treat you as very dangerous, even though on that playing field you're no danger to them and they're every danger to So that's presumably the result of human hunting having caused this fear of people.
Even though on that playing field, you're no danger to them and they're every danger to you.
So that's presumably the result of human hunting having caused this fear of people.
Which when we were there wasn't allowed in the Canal Zone.
It was forbidden.
And there was no one to do it.
People were excluded from the Canal Zone.
So anyway, point is, lions and other potential human predators often trigger in people what seems like an irrational desire to take vengeance on the individual who has killed a person.
I take this to be an evolutionary adaptation for the reasons I've just explained.
Now here's my point.
There are many political traditions in which an embarrassing episode, even an embarrassing episode that is arguably not the responsibility of the person in charge, results in that person stepping down or being removed from power.
And this can seem paradoxical, right?
To the extent that the person just suffered terrible luck and happened to govern over some ungovernable moment.
Then eliminating them may be preposterous.
It may even be bad.
You may take a good leader and remove them because of circumstances beyond their control.
But a rational application of the principle that if you preside over a disaster, especially one that was preventable, then you must be removed from power.
We don't apply this anymore.
Now, in some places they do.
In Britain, you know, there are votes of no confidence, for example, that result in leaders stepping down, and it seems antiquated in some ways.
We have an increasing exploration of how to endure virtually any catastrophe As a leader, right?
Peter Daszak now has a large grant to study what happens when you infect Asian bats with aggressive virulent human pathogens, okay?
How does Peter Daszak... Peter Daszak should have trouble getting work at the local gas station.
Why he's in charge of gain-of-function research And this work is due to be done in Colorado, am I right?
No.
almost impossible to explain.
And this work is due to be done in Colorado, am I right?
Yes.
Well, of course, Colorado.
And that's very central to certain things that were something to get out, which really can't happen because of magic.
Yeah.
No, it's a marvelously central location.
But, you know, also Anthony Fauci.
Anthony Fauci presided over not only the offshoring of the work to Wuhan that seems to have resulted in the pandemic, but also the catastrophic public health response that was then globalized, that didn't manage to control the virus.
Every error a person could make, the man made.
Yet he stepped down voluntarily as the, you know, he was the the most highly paid federal employee.
Now he has stepped down in good standing. - He's beloved. - Right, so another preposterous error.
And I would point out something, I don't think it was the origin of this ability to withstand disgrace, but do you remember Bill Clinton?
Yeah.
Bill Clinton, I know this sounds strange, but was at one time president.
And he suffered a terribly embarrassing scandal, the result of his own juvenile sexual behavior in the Oval Office.
And at the time, it seemed that no president could possibly withstand the disgrace of this.
I mean, just even the personal details of what was discussed as a result of us exploring what he did and didn't do was shocking.
But what Bill Clinton did, I think as a result of personal defects of character, was decide how to endure this by just simply waiting for the thoughts that were so shocking at first to become commonplace for them to be less shocking.
I'm going to object to this as being on your list.
I think one of these things is not like the other.
So I am no fan of Bill Clinton.
I voted for him in 92.
I did not vote for him in 96, as you know.
But at the time, even though I was disappointed and then deeply dismayed by what we were learning about what his administration was doing and what he himself seemed to stand for, the The Monica Lewinsky blue dress bullshit seemed Unrelated.
Irrelevant.
To his work as president.
Yep.
Now, you know, does what he was doing in the Oval Office literally say something about his character that is, as it turns out, almost certainly true more globally?
Yes.
Yep.
But the idea that he should have stepped down for personal improprieties, I did not believe then, nor do I believe now.
Okay, now I did believe it then, and I said it.
You thought he should step down?
Absolutely, 100%.
Even though I thought it was a bum rap, for exactly the reason you're pointing to.
So I was very angry at the Republicans for turning this into a significant matter, but My point was, actually, Bill, you don't have the right to put the country through this.
And you absolutely had an obligation not to create this danger.
And the fact that you didn't protect us from this, the fact that you engaged in this behavior that would come to dominate our national focus, means that you were not up to the job of being president, which he wasn't.
But would you say the same thing about Kennedy, about JFK?
Well, it depends.
Far more of this sort of behavior.
Yeah, I agree, and I think that's a fair challenge.
My sense is that the likelihood that the political environment in which this happened did not put the country in the same danger.
So, you know, that's not a difference in the significance of the transgression, right?
It's, you know, arguably worse in Kennedy's case.
But the danger to the country that Bill put us to, I think, was Substantial and easily avoided for anybody who had any sort of self-control.
So anyway, that was my position at the time.
At some level it sounds like you were talking about how he had evidenced his character.
Yes.
And, you know, the proxy is look at what you're putting the country through, but what you're actually objecting to is If you could not keep yourself in control enough, even in the highest, literally in the highest office in the land, then you have no business working on all of our behalf.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And even if the answer, you know, if Bill Clinton was a decent guy, which I don't think he is, but if Bill Clinton was a decent guy, then I think what he should have done is he should have given a hell of a speech on the way out.
And he should have said, look, This didn't have to happen.
I made my mistakes.
But this is politically orchestrated and I'm stepping down not because this is a political fact.
It's not.
It's personally humiliating.
But I'm stepping down for the good of the country because I'm a patriot and because I do not want to put us through what happens if I stick by my guns.
So, I guess you're like two game-theoretic moves out, and I am thinking one game-theoretic move out, but I'm still not certain it's wrong.
Wow.
So, he made an error that even though the Republicans jumped on it, he needs to be responsible for, is your argument.
And my position, I think, still is yes, but rewarding those who jump on errors, then have an interest in not only finding all the errors, but also potentially in fabricating errors and trying to collapse people's careers on the basis of errors that may or may not even be true.
100% agree with this and so the point is this has to have backfired on those who chose to exploit a Sexual defect to get rid of a president who was powerful because he was popular.
Yeah.
So anyway, yes, game theoretic.
Now we're talking about some advanced chess here because really the point is Bill Clinton should have delivered a powerful blow on the way out in order that this could not become a strategy by those who employed it.
It had to cost those who turned it into a scandal more than they gained, and it had to leave the country in a better position.
And I think- And he also couldn't do that while remaining in office.
Right.
He couldn't deliver a blow like that.
He couldn't.
He could win a personal victory by remaining in office at tremendous cost to the rest of us, which goes to the central failure here of Bill Clinton, which is he's not alone in this.
But Bill Clinton, I do not believe, was a patriot.
The idea that anyone who's not a patriot should ever ascend to that office is frightening.
Patriots should be, you know, table stakes.
But he wasn't one, and his character allowed us to see that.
And then we went through some personal drama over this at tremendous cost to the country and the values he pretended to hold and all of that.
But anyway, back to my point about lions and other predators.
The, you have to engage in a policy that results in your system evolving in the direction of better navigation towards the goals that you hold.
So there's an evolutionary question.
And the fact that we have lost track of the idea that if you preside, if we just simply said, look, if you preside over an avoidable catastrophe, you gotta go.
Even though it might be that you were not in a position to avoid the catastrophe.
The catastrophe was avoidable, but you didn't have the power.
But if we just simply said, look, preside over an avoidable catastrophe, and you gotta go, then the point is, A, that incentivizes people to do everything in their power to avoid the catastrophe, and if they fail, so be it.
They tried.
But it also means that any tendency of the system to evolve towards this corruption where people are embarrassed but then they survive it will be removed.
It is potentially a selective force to changing the system such that those who need to have power to avoid avoidable catastrophes do in fact have that power.
Right, which brings me back to George Bridges.
Okay, now George Bridges was More than anyone else, the cause of the collapse of the Evergreen State College.
That should have been enough to toss him out on his ear the instant that was obvious.
He was not the right guy to try to clean it up, and he couldn't clean it up, and he wouldn't clean it up, he didn't even try, okay?
The idea that they did not make an example of him by, you know, they didn't have the ability to punish him in any, you know, human way, but they could have removed his job.
His job was not a right of his.
It was not a personal attribute that he needed to be, you know, given his day in court to deny him.
It was a job that he was given because the college needed a job done.
And the fact that he did the inverse of the job should have been reason enough to get rid of him.
And, you know, had they done that, they might have been able to hire an ex-president, which long-term viewers of the podcast will remember they couldn't do.
They had three people who got to the top of their search all withdraw because none of them wanted the job because it would mean managing an insane faculty that, you know, couldn't be governed.
Just a little more detail on that.
At the point that the presidential search finally did happen, because Bridges said, my work here is done, the academic search was, A, no doubt done by a consultancy and, you know, with faculty sort of on the committee but without much power.
They did the search, they had a long list, they whittled it to a short list, and then as is what happens in academic searches, The three finalists, sometimes it's more, but usually it's three finalists, who are on the shortlist, come to campus individually for two or three days each of interviews and presentations and such.
And these were the three shortlisted finalists, all of whom I believe, if memory serves, who were long gone by then, Not worth it, even though I forget how many hundred thousand dollars went to the president per year in that case.
Yeah, no, thank you.
Right.
And, you know, any one of those at that point who had said, yeah, I'll take the job would have been an instant college president and really could have stayed for a year.
And then that's on their CV and they could have leapfrogged to something else.
But all of them said, no way, no how.
Not worth it, even though I forget how many hundred thousand dollars went to the president per year in that case.
Certainly was paid better than any of the other positions.
Yeah, it was not a bad job.
And you got to live in a beautiful place and they gave you a house.
And, you know, it was a sweet deal.
Except for the fact that you would have to deal with a faculty full of people as mad as a hatter.
Trolls hiding under bridges, as I said.
Trolls hiding under bridges, as you famously said then, and yeah, it's worth reviving now.
Yeah.
All right.
So.
So, okay.
So apropos all of this a bit and specifically the nastiness at Evergreen in 2016 and 2017, which became so famous on May 23rd of 2017, Harvard is keeping its president for now.
But also in Boston, Harvard being in Cambridge, which is adjacent, the Boston Herald, excuse me, has reported that Boston mayor Michelle Wu, who is herself a Harvard grad, had one of her staff mistakenly.
So it's a staff error, not her error that this went out into the world, but it was presumably her decision or she signed off on the decision.
A holiday party invite was sent to all 13 members of the City Council instead of only the six who are of color, and specifically this is a holiday party for, quote, electeds of color.
Okay, so the holiday party for electeds of color As reported by the Boston Herald, here's the article.
I just have a few paragraphs to read from it.
First, this is Michelle Wu, Harvard grad, Boston mayor.
A Wu administration official on behalf of the mayor mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for electeds of color, prompting an apology and mixed reactions.
Denise Dos Santos, the Mayor's Director of City Council Relations, told the body's honourable members that, on behalf of Mayor Michelle Wu, she was cordially inviting each of them and a guest to the Electeds of Colour holiday party on Wednesday, December 13th at 5.30pm at the Parkman House, 33 Beacon Street.
I include that because the Boston Herald did, and that's today.
So.
There you are.
This article is remarkable, and here are just four more short paragraphs from within it.
In an email to Dos Santos and her colleagues, Counselor Tanya Fernandez-Anderson, who describes herself as an African immigrant and Muslim-American woman, was more candid, saying that there is no need for apologies at all.
Your email should not offend anyone and there is absolutely no confusion, Fernandez-Anderson wrote.
Just like there are groups that meet based on shared interests or cultural backgrounds, it's completely natural for elected officials of color to gather for a holiday celebration.
She added, many groups celebrate and come together in various ways, and it's not about excluding anyone.
Instead, it's about creating spaces for like-minded individuals to connect and support each other.
Further, Fernandez-Anderson described the Wu administration's effort to organize a holiday celebration specific to elected officials of color as, quote, commendable.
So there's a number of things there, one of which is the fact that she has identified electeds of color as being like-minded individuals, as if your mutable characteristics inherently make you of like mind.
And this, of course, does relate to the fact that people of color, which is a ridiculous configuration, a linguistic configuration, but okay, we'll go with it for now, The people of color who don't agree with this nonsense, this DEI insanity, are often called epithets like Uncle Tom, because it would appear that those who buy into this hook, line, and sinker
Think that if you disagree, you are therefore sort of handing in your Of Color card as well.
That somehow a belief can change the immutable characteristic as opposed to, actually, the immutable characteristic is just another fact about me, and I'm allowed to think what I want.
But no, not here.
No, not here.
I would just point out an interesting connection to the meltdown at Evergreen.
Right.
Which is, we're talking about elected officials.
That is decidedly different than holding a cocktail party and inviting a group of people who happens to have skin with higher melanin content than folks from Europe.
Yes.
But this The degree to which a public college inviting white people not to show up on one day is offensive in a way that a group that you have assembled maybe because they are like-minded and happen to have a skin color that is darker than the average for the population or whatever it is Those are opposite things.
A public institution, or people who have been elected by a public that is presumably not of color, but is of every hue, including those who are deemed not to be colorful, right?
There's a responsibility in that, right?
Just as when you ascend to the presidency, it is incumbent on you, and most of them are now just liars, but It is incumbent on you to say, actually, I'm not the president of the people who elected me, but I'm the president of all of the folks, you know, of the nation, right?
The point is the obligation, the moral obligation to be inclusive in your thinking as an elective representative and not to think in terms of us against them, especially we're color.
is the central fact, right, is clear.
And it doesn't make this illegal.
But what it means is the fact that they do not think twice about this, right?
Obviously, any white person who decided to hold a holiday party for white people who have been elected to high office or whatever it is, right, would recognize the insanity of that idea.
But if Wu wanted to just hang out with the six counselors of color and not with the seven counselors of non-color, shall we?
She She could do that.
But her administration official sent out an official holiday invite.
Right.
Official.
Right.
This is somebody receiving public money to send emails that obviously are divisive.
Right.
um about something which if it is defensible at all it is defensible as a private matter of a private party that you are holding and your choice of guest list is what it is and presumably shouldn't be scrutinized by the rest of us but to to make it a matter of um an invite that has any contact with anything public right is obscene it's obscene and
And so in response to the Boston Herald's tweet about this article, you can show my screen here, someone calling herself Queen of Hearts SF said, what language is this?
Electeds of color?
Serious question.
To which Mike Questions writes, electeds is standard, though bureaucratic.
Often used at the local level if many levels of government are involved.
For example, councilman, representative, DA.
Of color?
That means no crackers or cracker adjacency.
Yeah.
So, I think we have people of color and people of crackers or cracker-adjacent.
Cracker-adjacent, yeah.
Hit the nail on the head there.
I don't know who Mike Questions is, but kudos.
That's brilliant.
It's good stuff.
It's good stuff, yes.
I feel that it is good stuff as somebody who is undoubtedly cracker-adjacent.
Yeah, you're a spicy cracker or something.
Spicy, yeah, and everything cracker.
Oh my god, this moment!
And the people who are defending the right of public institutions to exclude people based on immutable characteristics are claiming to be the liberals!
Wow!
So what do you say to people like this?
It should be something like, you know, I'll bet at some point in your life you knew better than this.
Because as the power of the thing grows and spreads, the loss of contact with that which was common sense is just unmistakable.
Yeah, I agree.
All right.
All right.
That's what I got on College Presidents for the... Move on from cracker adjacency on to other topics.
Yes, yes.
Which may also involve crackers and cracker adjacents, but who knows?
You know, actually, if you are incapable of eating wheat, as I am, you will find that there are many tortilla chips that function as a stand-in for crackers, and that actually, economically speaking, they are quite a bargain.
Our cracker son would like to say something.
I don't know if it's worth saying, but we could make shirts that said Cracker Adjacent.
Cracker Adjacent!
I don't know that we want to get into official Cracker Adjacency, but I hear you talking.
All right, ready to switch gears?
Okay, so I wanted to talk about A comparison between phenomena.
So I have been doing what we all now do, which is moving between real life and online life.
And obviously there's a question of the ratio and too much online life is obviously bad for you.
But one of the things that online life gives you Is the ability to see a slice of many different lives integrating.
And I guess I'm overcomplicating the fact that I have noticed in recent months and years a decidedly high number of reports of people's deaths that are surprising.
Now, obviously, there's nothing new about this, and I have used the example of John Ritter, the comedian, who died suddenly on the set of his sitcom of an aortic dissection.
I've forgotten how many years ago that was, but it was long before there was anything like COVID in the world, certainly long before there was anything vaccine-like.
And so I use this- - mRNA vaccine-like. - Yeah, right, exactly.
mRNA vaccine or mRNA vaccine, as the case may be.
I use that because I know that if John Ritter had died in 2022, it would have been very difficult for people to accept He's a Hollywood guy.
He will have gotten COVID vaccinated.
You know, aortic dissection.
He was a healthy guy.
Yada, yada, yada.
People would have concluded that it had been the result of that technology.
And it wouldn't have been because obviously he died before that technology had ever been deployed.
So there's obviously lots of deaths, which if they happen in a particular context, people will see them as the result of some new process.
But because they happened before the processes were there, we can be certain that we have, we have a baseline of these things and lots of people just simply die.
But then there's a question of, okay, you see a number of deaths of people.
And the question is, at what point does the number in your circle imply that some force is present that you should be thinking about?
And this has now become a problem because there are many of us who have focused on The hazard of the so-called COVID vaccines and the phenomenon apparently of sudden deaths that seem to be downstream of these shots.
But we don't want to have a confirmation bias where we view every death as this because we weren't doing a good job of paying attention to the baseline or because we're now doing a better job of paying attention to people who have died as a result of whatever cause.
We are now tracking these things in a way that we didn't track them before we worried about this.
And so anyway, I wanted to provide some toolkit for how to think about these things.
And Zach, you want to show This just these are some things that showed up.
We were up here in the San Juan Islands You know just show those couple that I sent you this these were just things that showed up on a Facebook group here is a local herbalist who died Ryan Drum.
I'll show the other one.
Here's somebody I think I had encountered a couple of times, but I didn't really know him.
He was a local nature photographer.
People were very sad about his death.
The implication was that it was unexpected.
Now, neither of these are young men.
They were clearly Here's something that crossed my feed.
This is David Icke's daughter, apparently died at 48.
Now, the question is, what does one do with all of this?
Maybe we're seeing more death because people are posting it more.
Maybe we see more death because the circle that we are paying attention to is larger.
I know that this is true in many of our cases.
Just by virtue of the way the internet works and the fact that we accumulate a larger circle of people that we follow.
We tend to follow more people than we remove from our followed list.
So there are lots of processes that could cause you to encounter more deaths.
So you would have the impression that people are dying unexpectedly at a greater rate.
So one thing that I want to point out At the top is that there is a what I consider to be an absolutely maddening tendency not to include the cause of death in reports.
And I wanted to sort this with some pieces of the puzzle that I think many people will see as unrelated until we draw the connection.
There is a process in nature where an animal that is being attacked by a predator, let's say, and is screeching, presumably it is screeching in part to try to scare the predator or distract it so that the predator lets loose its grip and the animal can escape.
That has obviously happened innumerable times where a predator has gotten distracted and that has occurred.
Maybe the idea is that if you're being preyed on by a predator and you emit a screeching noise that a larger predator might come along and if the smaller predator suddenly has to deal with a larger predator then they're gonna let you go or the larger predator might succeed in catching the smaller predator and the prey item might escape or it could even be as a result of this last thing which is something called predator inspection.
You If you have a screeching animal, then sometimes what happens is other animals of the same type show up.
Now this is especially clear if you're working, as I did, with bats.
If you have an animal, if you put up a mist net, a mist net is an invisible net that you would hang across a trail or other flightway, across a river, and as bats are flying along, bats are economizing on echolocation calls, because echolocation calls are expensive, and so they tend, when they're flying in a familiar place, to emit many fewer calls, which is basically like turning down the headlights on the car, because you don't really need them.
Now this is obviously something you can't do in a car, but If you were trying to save energy, if your headlights were battery-operated and you were trying to conserve energy, you might turn them down when you didn't really need them and turn them up when there was something to see.
It's like navigating your house that you know well in the dark and not being aware that someone has closed the door.
Walking into the door, right?
That did happen to me the other day.
But yeah, and you can navigate with a tiny number of photons in general.
Yes.
If the door doesn't happen to interfere, then you don't detect it.
But anyway, so bats flying across a familiar path will have their echolocation calls turned down to save energy.
That means you can put up a net in that path and the net not being perfectly invisible is invisible enough and a bat will fly in.
But very often what you'll have is you'll sit there for a half hour or an hour with no traffic, a bat will fly in, screech because it feels like it's just been caught by a predator, and then you'll suddenly get a bunch of bats.
And that can be a problem if you're working with bats, because extracting them from the net is something you have to be very careful to do so you don't harm them, and you can go from having no bats for an hour to having 20 bats all of a sudden.
And the interpretation of this is that the screeching calls the animals.
Why would bats want to go watch some bat being preyed upon?
Well, because there's a tremendous amount of information in that.
That bats, who hear that sound and follow it and come and notice what's happening, have information on what is preying on them and in what context is happening.
So, for example, if there was a particular place on the river where some animal was leaping out of a Den, right, and it was currently killing its prey, well then you might know that this is actually a part of the river that you want to be careful.
You want to turn your echolocation calls up as you fly by this location.
So, basic point, predator inspection makes sense.
It's an evolutionary adaptation designed, or as if designed, to provide information that is useful to animals that have not been captured at staying not captured.
Okay, now I'm going to connect that to something else, which is something familiar to people who think about humans, which is called morbid curiosity.
Now, morbid curiosity is typically said as if it's a characterological defect that we all have to one degree or another, but there's some shame in it, right?
The fact that when somebody has been killed or is in the process of being killed, we have trouble looking away.
And we don't connect this.
As far as I'm aware, nobody connects this to predator inspection.
Right?
And so, what I think I'm seeing, in terms of reports of people's death, is the idea that you shouldn't be interested in why they died.
The fact that you are interested in why they died is on you.
And I'm not going to feed your character defect by telling you, right?
And to the extent that you find your curiosity irresistible, that's for you to sort out with your shrink.
I don't think so.
My feeling is, there's information in it.
And to the extent that people are dying at a normal rate, and they are dying of things that are not unusual, then your ability to track, oh, yes, this person died of whatever the cause was, and yes, it's a little, they were a little young for that thing to have taken them, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
Here's a person, you know, here's a child who died of a stroke.
Holy mackerel.
That shouldn't be happening.
Yeah.
Right?
So what I want to say is a there's nothing wrong and in fact the reason that you have morbid curiosity is adaptive and the fact that you are being denied information is gaslighting.
That is a mechanism for preventing you from being able to assess whether or not something is or is not a pattern worth noting for your own protection and for the protection of your family.
We have the right to know.
And I even see journalistic outlets reporting that somebody has died and refusing to say what of.
Or what the circumstances in which they were discovered suggest about what of.
If they're found floating face down in a pool, they can be presumed to have drowned even before their autopsy.
Maybe their autopsy reveals that that's not what happened.
Maybe it was a drug overdose and they fell in after they had already overdosed or something.
But you have a right to know.
And absent that, Right to know.
Then we all privately harbor our suspicions.
We do a terrible job of collective sense-making about whether, you know, whether or not a death... Look, if somebody has been struggling against a cancer for three or four years, right?
Then that's presumably not downstream of either COVID or a COVID remedy.
It may be exacerbated by a lockdown that prevented them from going to medical care that they would otherwise have gotten.
But nonetheless, you can categorize it differently, and you can say, ah, that one is not a contributor to the evidence for this pattern.
But even some of the language in obituaries that seems to be about adding detail is actually obscuring.
Things like, a long battle with cancer.
I've seen things written into obituaries, a long battle with cancer, and then later on it'll say, you know, it was 18 months.
Like, wow, 18 months I didn't think meant long battle.
Right?
So, long could mean all sorts of things which lead you to different conclusions.
Right.
In fact, I think your point is well taken.
This is no place for euphemisms.
This is a place for precision.
And that precision is not about characterological defects.
And, you know, obviously, I mean, maybe the reason that we have this erroneous sense that morbid curiosity is somehow fameful is that morbid curiosity is exploited in the market in order to get us to watch particular movies or television shows or to read particular books or whatever, right?
We can't look away.
And so to the extent that these things play an important role, They cause your mind to be very interested in the phenomena around such a death.
But in a world where we are now dealing with a huge array of hazards, we need to be able to track whether or not something is happening that is causing a pattern of note that implies a danger that we do not have a good handle on.
And If I can just borrow from another story of late, one that does not involve a death, but that I think makes the point very clearly.
My dad is in his late 80s.
He still lives in Los Angeles, where you and I grew up, and he had an incident some weeks back.
The incident, as it was reported to us, is that he was walking down the street, I think maybe from a doctor's appointment or something, and my parents are both in quite good health for people their age, And he was walking down the street and there was some sort of a homeless encampment and there was a pair of shoes, one of which was next to somebody's tent and the other of which was in the middle of the sidewalk and my dad picked up
He just nudged it with his foot.
Maybe he nudged it with his foot and pushed it back over with its mate.
He then walked to the corner, was apparently waiting for the signal, and was attacked from behind.
Physically hit.
He said he felt like he was hit with something, but he now thinks that he was just the person physically attacked him.
Knocked him to the ground.
And the story was reported to us with some bemusement that this was obviously odd that somebody should be so disturbed at the tidying up of their shoe that had gotten into the path.
Now, my feeling is, you know, I grew up in L.A.
An 80, a person in their 80s attacked on the street for nothing.
Is decidedly not the world we grew up in.
I'm not saying it never happened, but that would have been a shocking event in 1978.
And now it is apparently in keeping enough with the world we now live in that it is somehow a funny story.
Well, I mean, to be fair, your father did get medical help, and then the police were called, and the guy was taken into custody, actually, right?
So this was not a nothing incident.
That said, the larger context of the conversation was in light of us talking about how remarkable Prague had seemed to us with regard to the ability for us to stand anywhere that we were in Prague and watch people and see absolutely no drama.
And what your parents were responding to at first was saying, well, but you know, that's all the cities are fine, really, right?
And like, oh, actually, this thing did happen.
Like, in the context of them assuring us that, actually, American cities are fine, too, and the West Coast cities are fine, this story comes up, which, to me, is what struck me as the jarring disconnect.
It's like, how could that have just happened, and you have the sense that the cities are just fine?
But, you know, maybe that was the only time that has happened.
Yeah, it could be a one-off, but it wasn't, of course.
And, you know, The degree to which, in the 70s, New York famously had a problem with muggings.
Now, muggings did not typically involve anybody getting hurt.
They involved somebody being confronted with a threat and giving up their money and their watch or whatever.
That was dire.
This is well beyond that.
A person in their 80s Being attacked to the point that they can't remain on their feet.
That's serious under any circumstance.
And the fact that it is in some way not surprising, and I don't see how it could be surprising, you know,
You have a lot of people for whom the match between the opportunities in civilization and their capacity is such that they are on the street surviving by whatever means, most of them presumably addicted to substances that have unknown effects on their perception, their ability to modulate their moods, whatever it might be.
So anyway, my feeling is, if you teleported that story back to 1978, then the point is, oh my god, is that a one-off event, or does that imply something about this city that isn't factored into my calculation about whether or not it's safe to live here?
Right?
The fact that it is not that now has to do with a slowly boiling frog issue, which is that as the cities have collapsed Extraordinary stories are ever more common and people have gotten used to them and that in effect If it is, you know
If it is turned into, well, it's impolite to talk about the attack on, you know, your dad because do you know about the terrible circumstances that the person who attacked him went through that caused them to be this way, right?
If excuse-making is what is deployed every time you try to say, hey, you can't run a store if people are allowed to walk out without paying for goods, Um, you can't have a city in which people can walk down the street and be attacked, uh, by a monster, um, you know, because they've moved his shoe, right?
We have a right to make, to monitor these patterns and not Bend over backwards to figure out, you know, in what way could the attack on your father have been justified by his behavior, right?
You know, maybe this person was traumatized such that the shoe remaining in the middle of the street was necessary to, you know, keep his PTSD under control.
And my father, you know, whatever excuse making you're going to go through, the point is, no, actually, guess what?
Cities have gotten really dangerous.
That was the job of the people who govern them to prevent it.
And the fact that they haven't prevented it means those people are incompetent.
Those people need to be removed from power and somebody who doesn't make excuses for these behaviors needs to be elected into those positions.
Those people are incompetent and this...
But think about what the person who aggressed against you or your father or the city or whatever it is went through and then give them a free pass.
And the, and then give them a free pass part is usually not vocalized in those terms, but that is exactly what is being expected and asked for.
And it's wrong, and it's across the board.
But that person thinks they're a woman when they're not, or was offended by the movement of the shoe out of the sidewalk.
Or is angered by your presence because you look like a cracker, right?
Like, whatever it is!
Or because you look like a black person, right?
Like, we actually not only are not obligated to accept these kinds of excuses, we are obligated to do the opposite.
We do not accept the, but that person who has clearly done wrong has some excuse for it, and therefore We are beholden to facilitate them continuing to do wrong?
No, the opposite.
We do not facilitate the doing of wrong.
In fact, this is a case where The left and the right, the conflict over personal responsibility is completely maddening and counterproductive.
The fact is, we used to study questions about why there was so much violence in the 70s, which I think pales in comparison to the violence of the present.
Nonetheless, we used to ask that question.
In fact, there's some very disturbing answers that have been proposed and studied.
One being that the lead that was added to gasoline, tetraethyl lead, resulted in neurological defects as a result of the fact that, you know, lead is an element and it was being, it was pouring out of every tailpipe.
And that resulted in people who lived where that lead was concentrating having suffered unknown harms.
That's one possibility.
Another possibility was the change in reproductive rights resulted in people who would have been Born not being born and that resulted in a decrease in Violence after it.
I don't know whether later.
Yeah, but but the point is these you we can ask the question What explains this and the fact let's say it was led Okay, so you have a lot of people who committed violence because they were damaged by lead.
Does that mean that anybody who can plausibly argue that they were damaged by lead should have been let out of prison?
Well, I can tell you what will happen if you do that.
You will have a whole lot of violence and a lot of people who didn't do anything to deserve it will be victims of it.
So, it may not be a marvelous solution, you may not be able to cure people, in fact you can't cure people of developmental damage from something like lead, but you can say, look, here are the stakes.
If you behave that way, it's going to cost you far more than you could profit by doing it, so don't.
Right?
Whether you feel it or not, whether you think it's a cool idea or not, don't.
Personal responsibility, don't.
And it, you know, it goes back to the issue of the lions, for example, that we were talking about earlier.
The point is you need to set up a structure where people or creatures that explore a behavior that you do not want explored come out behind so you don't see more of it by whatever mechanism.
Whether they wake up every day and grumble about the fact that they're not allowed to attack people, Or not.
They may never get over it emotionally, but you need them not to participate in the behavior.
That's the objective.
That's the way we all get to be free and not walk down the street wondering if somebody who is defective for whatever reason is going to leap out of wherever and attack us.
Right.
That's... That's exactly right.
Yeah, I don't know what else to add.
It just seems... it seems so obvious.
It seems so obvious.
And yet, certainly the cities of the West Coast, and I think many of the cities of the East Coast, many of the cities, in fact, across the country, are falling to this ideology.
And this, you know, a holiday party for, you know, electeds of color seems like it's not part of the same problem, but it is exactly part of the same problem.
It is exactly part of the same ideology that has decided that whatever you are and whatever you feel is fine, and it's everyone else's responsibility to deal with how they respond to the fact that you attack them or...
Call them names or spit on you or like whatever it is.
And no, actually, you are first and foremost responsible for your own behavior.
You just are.
And there may be reasons that you have a harder time controlling your behavior than other people do.
That will be the case.
In fact, all of us have somewhat different abilities to control our behavior than everyone else on the planet.
There are not, you know, three categories of behavior control and all of us slot into one of them.
We are all individuals.
I'm not.
Right.
But the idea that it's been offered up as a gift to people to engage in reprehensible behavior and our elected officials and also the media and the people in higher ed and many People in C-suites across corporate land have said, oh, okay, well then, I guess that's the world we live in now.
It's like, no, it isn't, and we get to define the world we live in, and let's just stop this!
Yeah.
Now, I wanted to go one further step, which is, let's say you've got a pattern like, it seems to me that people are dying unexpectedly at a higher rate than I am used to, and that that seems to match a change in our behavior, the public health response to COVID for example.
Okay, the problem is if I'm stuck with my anecdotal encounter with the world and this pattern...
We can do the same thing for the pattern of violence in our cities.
Then I have no way of decisively answering the question.
The only thing I can do is say, does the pattern continue to match, does the pattern continue to anecdotally match the predictions of the model I have that there is something new and dangerous at loose in the world?
Right.
Did I say at-loose?
There's no at-looses there.
It's loose in the world.
Yeah.
All right.
If I had to do over, I would just say loose in the world.
Noted.
Awesome.
I feel we're making progress.
So what I wanted to do now is show what you do if you actually want to take that anecdotal pattern and the hypothesis that results from it and get rigorous.
And if you would show, there was a excellent talk at the COVID Summit in Romania.
I'm not going to show you the talk.
It's worth the 25 minutes or so to watch it.
But this is Dennis Rancourt.
That's what it looked like in the auditorium.
And Dennis Rancourt is a physicist who has gone and analyzed the all-cause mortality data from around the world.
He's looked at countries, different countries.
He's looked at very different time scales.
And so here, take a look.
This is the pattern of all-cause mortality by month over a hundred years. 70.
Okay, yep.
What you'll see is a pattern of spikes and troughs that your mind will correctly register as highly regular.
Now what that highly regular pattern is, is an oscillation of seasons, and for reasons that Rancourt correctly points out are not fully understood, there is an increasing All cause mortality, that means we don't care what you died of, the question is we just count deaths and we look at the pattern.
People tend to die in the winter, and they tend to die much less in the summer, and the exact reason for that is not perfectly understood.
Now, I would argue that the likely explanation for this is somewhere in the neighborhood of We all have some proximity to death at every moment.
A force with which the grave pulls at us.
That force is quite strong in the first year of life.
It decreases radically over that year.
If you survive to one year of age, that force pulling you towards the grave tends to be flat until you reach the age of sexual maturity, at which point it begins to very gradually, and then with an accelerating pattern, increase until it's quite precipitous.
Late in life, and then there is arguably a plateau, largely due to what is likely a decrease in your risk of cancer if you live through the period in which cancer has skyrocketed.
But in any case, interesting that the data, if you plot it out, ...reveal this highly regular pattern and, as predicted, this is Northern Hemisphere, this is France data you're looking at here.
Very interesting and, of course, necessary that it be this way.
If we look at the Southern Hemisphere, where the pattern of seasons is inverted, then the pattern of spikes and troughs is inverted, as it would have to be.
Otherwise, the explanation would be falsified by it.
So anyway, that's what the general pattern looks like.
Can you show the next graph?
Okay, so maybe I didn't capture the other graph.
You want to show his bulleted list then?
So here is the upshot from this extremely carefully done research, and I want to call your attention to especially number five, number four on this list.
17 million vaccine deaths worldwide to the present, plus or minus half a million.
That is an incredibly high number.
Now, of course, the number of inoculations given was staggering.
You know, obviously, we're not just talking about billions of people who were inoculated, but many of them inoculated multiple times.
Elsewhere in this talk, and again, I encourage you to go look at it, he points out that the risk goes up rather precipitously with the number of doses you've had.
Becoming quite high at the fourth dose.
Interesting.
I wasn't there.
I haven't seen the talk.
But the fifth point on this list, fatal toxicity is exponential with age, with the risk of death doubling every four to five years of age.
That is not counter to, but is the opposite direction of what we have talked about anecdotally, what it seems to be the case, not with regard to fatality, but adverse events wherein in 2022,
When we were talking about the insanity of giving these vaccines to young people, the point was that COVID is simultaneously a disease that does not affect the young very much, and these vaccines seem to produce a greater number of adverse events in the young.
Now, we never said that it tends to kill the young more, but the myocarditis and pericarditis, specifically in young men, and potentially menstrual and pregnancy issues in young women, just because that's a young woman's situation, but is more of an issue in youth, whereas he's finding fatal toxicity increasing with age.
So I wanted to actually navigate that a little bit.
I'm drawing from the research that I did back when I was doing the telomere work and deeply embedded in the evidence surrounding senescence.
Now senescence, which begins at the age of first reproduction, or average age of first reproduction for your species, and continues to accelerate through life with additional years.
That process is the empirical description of the vulnerability that I was just describing.
The force that is pulling you towards the grave.
Now, on your 20th birthday, the force that is pulling you towards the grave is so weak Now, if you're a male, you may be inclined to risky behaviors, and we can argue about what that pattern is, but from the point of view of the failure of your biological systems at a critical level that would cause you to die, the force is extremely weak at 20, especially in the prior world before all of the novel influences.
You know, you might now be a 20 year old with a metabolic disease that would make you much more vulnerable.
But historically speaking, you would have had a very low degree of decrepitude at 20, right?
Maybe only a few years and accelerating at a very low rate.
And, as you get older, the degree to which your systems are compromised by this goes up and up and up.
And so, if you imagine, as Dr. Rancourt points out in his talk, if you imagine that the mRNA vaccines function as a toxin, and I'm not sure that's exactly the right description.
They are toxic, but they are more than that because of the way they interact with the immune system.
But... Yeah, they're not inert.
Yeah, they are a complex toxin.
The toxin that keeps on giving.
Indeed.
But anyway, the point is, if you imagine that every person that you encounter If you could look above their heads and there was a number that indicated the degree to which the grave was pulling on them, then you would say, well, if you were to administer a toxin broadly across all of them, some of them that number at which the grave is pulling towards them is so high that it won't take very much.
Right?
Now that's the same thing that we likely see in the seasonal pattern.
Right?
If you're very, very close to death, then, you know, the insults that come along with winter, right, might be enough to do it.
If you're very healthy and young, then it's not going to.
And so, in any case, I think in part we are, um, we are We're hampered in our ability to understand what's going on because death is such a focus and the problem is death is a binary thing.
Whereas damage is not, right?
So to the extent that something damaging has been released on the public and that that is measurable in the death of people who were close enough in proximity to the grave that it pushed them over the edge, right?
And it will very rarely get somebody who's perfectly healthy and it will very frequently get people who were headed that direction anyway.
And, um, you know, so we need, we need a better toolkit to think about these things, but My larger point is, if you anecdotally think that you're seeing a pattern, you're being denied information on what that pattern is, you're not allowed to know what these people died of.
Therefore, if you start saying, oh, it's another died suddenly, and somebody says, aha, this person was sick for seven years, it's not a died suddenly as a result of these inoculations, because they were sick long before these inoculations had ever been given to anybody.
Okay, you win.
But if you were interested in figuring out, okay, To what degree were these things causing that harm?
Is the fact that I seem to be seeing not only anomalies in the number of people who seem to be dying, but also, tragically, The number of people who seem to be reporting serious disruptions of pregnancy.
Yeah.
Right?
So, you know, again, do they happen under normal circumstances?
Of course.
Probably some of that normally happening during normal circumstances is actually the result of other novel phenomena, toxins in the environment and who knows, you know, metabolic diseases, whatever the novel influences are.
And then there would be, in an ancestral environment that was free of all those novel influences, presumably a very tiny rate of those things.
Why?
In large measure because the body is built to not invest in projects that are fatally compromised.
And so there's a very high rate of Spontaneous abortion which presumably is a result of the fact that the body is Looking at a pregnancy that's underway and deciding whether it's a good enough bet to continue to invest in it So anyway, there are elegant systems in the body.
They're disrupted by novelty the fact that the public health campaign appears to have created a Huge quantity of excess death, something like 17 million people globally, and that's not even the cost of the public health campaign.
That is the apparent vaccine-induced deaths to date.
So think about, in light of the model we've just put forward, think about what that actually implies.
If damage was done by these inoculations to a large fraction of the people who received them, and some small fraction of those people were being pulled towards the grave at a strong enough level that they disappeared and they ended up in our statistics, Then the question is, how many years of life are people actually being robbed of?
What's the net effect?
And what is the total number of excess deaths that will ultimately be attributable to this public health campaign?
So, all of those things are interesting in addition to the deaths that were the result of other interventions that were mandated, you know.
Ventilators.
Ventilators.
And then there's the question, the even more difficult question, this one I don't exactly know how you study it, but there's the question of given the treatments that turn out to work that were denied to people.
Yeah.
In order, presumably, to get them to accept these inoculations, what would the number of excess deaths have been?
How much lower would the excess mortality rate be had drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine been administered more freely?
Absolutely, which is affected by something that Rancourt says in the beginning of his talk, which is that you actually do not see a spike of excess deaths that are related to COVID, that they seem to be related to the measures that were mandated in the aftermath of its announcement.
Right, and this, I mean, Where did they get that vaccine to us very, very fast?
And had they been able to put together a story in which the vaccine arrived exactly coincident with the virus, then we would not have the control group.
Then we could not say, this is excess mortality from COVID, which is to say, oops, 2020, basically nothing.
And this is excess mortality after the mRNA technology was deployed.
If those two things had shown up at the same moment, we couldn't compare, and all of this would be attributed to the disease.
Yep.
Alright, now there's further road we can go down, but I think this is maybe a good place to put this on pause for now, with the understanding that what we have done is we have taken the anecdotal experience of a person who doesn't know how to think about this,
We have talked about from that formulating a hypothesis that then is in need of a test, and then the fact that that test can actually come in the form of large data sets that capture unambiguous events like death and show us that in fact whether or not the specific deaths that caused us to formulate that hypothesis were caused by this exact thing,
That they are completely consistent with the idea that there is a new force, that it is a hazard, that we are justified in focusing our attention on these deaths.
Our morbid curiosity in this case is a survival instinct.
That's it.
It's a survival instinct.
and that to deny you the information that allows that survival instinct to gather appropriate information is a crime in and of itself.
Excellent.
I'm I just want to revisit, which I think we have on at least one or two occasions since we've been doing these live streams, our Hanukkah tradition.
Tonight is the seventh night of Hanukkah for 2023, and as we have talked about before and as we put into, it's not the epilogue, it is the epilogue of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, In our home, one of our annual rituals is to celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that occurs just before or around the northern winter solstice.
We light the menorah, as is traditional.
We sing, sometimes badly, sometimes better than that, and each night review an additional principle, which is not traditional.
I will say that last night we did an abominable job, and then you pointed out that we had like reverted to some dirge-like singing, and you started us up again, we did much better.
Yes, much better.
Recovered.
Yeah, that was good.
I don't know what happened exactly.
I blame me, I'm not sure exactly why, but I think it was my fault.
That's interesting.
No, you didn't until I said that.
No.
You know, nice try being an asshole, you just don't do it very well.
No, thank you.
So our family's new Hanukkah rules, and I have notes from 2012, these basically as written here, so I don't know how much before that we were doing this, but this is at least a more than 10-year tradition.
On day one, so basically on each night of Hanukkah, we go over the previous night's or day's rules and add the final one, and there being eight nights of Hanukkah.
I'll just read the eight here.
I don't know if this is sacrilegious or not.
We have done this to honor this tradition in a way that we have obviously modernized in a personal sense.
And, you know, this isn't the high holidays, right?
This is Hanukkah, which is a holiday that's been It's been upranked because of its proximity to Christmas.
Yeah, and the solstice, which is probably why Christmas is where it is, and all of that.
So anyway, it's a holiday we feel somewhat more at liberty to play with than we would Gabor, for example.
So here it is.
Day 1.
All human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
Day 2.
The Golden Rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Day 3.
Only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world.
Day 4.
Don't game honorable systems.
Day 5.
One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom and engage novel problems consciously, explicitly, and with robust reasoning.
Day 6.
Opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages.
Day 7.
The precautionary principle.
When the costs of an action are unknown, proceed with caution before making change.
Day 8.
Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.
That's mostly your work.
It's a great list.
And each year we do it and we ask our boys to remember each day.
In advance of us reading them, and they increasingly do.
Yep.
They have risen to the challenge.
And, uh, yeah, there's still, there's one little place I would rephrase something, but, um, but nonetheless, I think it is, uh, useful to think about what principles really rise above all others in the governance of populations, uh, or things that aren't included in the governance of populations that we'd be better off if they were.
Very good.
All right.
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I think we're going to have to disclose something.
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