In this 206th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss new year’s resolutions. The Oregon Health Authority has requested, using data kind of but not really from the CDC, that we resolve to get vaccinated! Then: a short reading from Natural Selections. And: What happened to Claudine Gay, the now-resigned president of Harvard, and why is anyone surp...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 206.
It's the first one of the year 2024, if I'm not mistaken.
I think I really can't be.
Please tell me 2020-24.
That's a lot of 20s.
2024 is not going to be cadenced the way you were just talking.
Wow, what did I say?
You were just taking a lot of breaks in your sentences, almost like a stuttering, stammering kind of Captain Kirk, maybe.
I think we're going to have to behave very carefully in 2024, just because of all the peril.
Here we are.
It's Dark Horse.
You are Brett Weinstein, Doctor.
Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I am Heather Hying.
Doctor.
And here we are.
Please join us on Rumble, and we're having a watch party on Locals.
You can join us there.
We're not going to do a Q&A today.
We're going to reduce those to once a month, I think.
Do the second episode of the month, so there'll be one Next weekend we had our private Q&A, which we've been doing since, gosh, almost the beginning of our live streams on the last Sunday of the month this last weekend, and they're always great.
So join us at Locals to get access to those.
And what else?
Mostly we're going to be spending the time at the end telling you about more ways to find us and find merch and such, but we do start with our three sponsors at the top of the hour.
Every time, and we will be doing that as well right now.
Okay, so we have, as always, three sponsors.
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Which is not usually what you want in a product, but in a mattress it is.
In a mattress, it's kind of what you're shooting for.
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And you don't want to be shooting for anything in a mattress.
No, no.
Right.
Yeah.
It's tough if we're going to insist on using only metaphors and adjectives that are appropriate to the product.
Actually, we should do a year of speaking entirely metaphorically.
No, we shouldn't.
No?
Not this year.
You go ahead and try.
Maybe next year.
It's okay, you can start late.
I'll give you the first two days free.
The first two days of semi-literalism, and then I go completely metaphorical.
No, I thought it was the opposite.
No, no.
I'm hoping to do a year, but I don't think it's going to be this one, speaking entirely metaphorically.
Oh, I did not understand that that's what you were arguing for.
Now that's actually, you're closer than you think.
It's remarkable how much metaphor is in our language in places that we just do not understand it to be.
It's the water we swim in.
But that's the obvious stuff.
You know, why are higher temperatures higher?
That's a metaphor.
Yep, I guess you're right about that.
Yeah, that's just an obvious one, but it's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
Yeah.
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So here we are.
Yes.
You wanted to start off with some resolutions.
Some resolutions, yes.
Not everyone is this way, but for me, I find that resolutions are more likely to be effective if I have shared them and therefore feel a certain amount of pressure to live up to them.
And I am quite the opposite.
Quite the opposite.
So I'm not going to share mine.
I have, depending on how you count, three resolutions that I would like to share.
Are we also in the year of new math?
You'll see at the end of this why it's not 100% clear that it's three rather than four.
I see.
Okay.
My first resolution, I think we need to start with the basics.
My first resolution for 2024 is to make it to 2025, which in a normal year might seem like a low bar, but 2024 being what it is, I think it's a fairly reasonable place to start.
I mean, good.
Right.
I'm glad for it.
I very much hope you succeed.
You're disappointed.
I don't know that that counts.
Let's put it this way.
If it was my only resolution, I think it wouldn't count.
But given that it's one of a more substantial list, it's just, you know, where to start.
I see.
Okay.
Second resolution, perhaps more concrete than the first, is that this year I am finally going to learn to spell necessarily and fascism.
You can't spell fascism?
Necessarily, I kind of get it.
I mean, I can spell it, but it's got a lot of C's and S's and R's and L's in there, and you never know what's doubled, what's tripled, what doesn't show up at all.
But fascism?
I can spell fascism, but not on the first try, in general.
Still?
Well, you know, the funny thing is it comes up a lot more frequently these days, and yet I still struggle with it.
So anyway, I will, this year, nail it.
You want to make a jab at it right now?
Not really.
It's still early.
It's still January.
Yeah, I know.
So I've got time.
I mean, I guess Antifa doesn't help, right, with their, like, smash-the-fash epithets and such, which would suggest that it's F-A-S-H-I-S-M fascism.
Yeah, I'm not sure actually why I have such trouble with this one, given that it's kind of an important concept and one I've done a lot of thinking and a certain amount of writing about, but somehow it alludes me.
So.
Okay.
All right.
And my third one is... You're setting the bar somewhere.
I don't know where, but you are setting the bar.
You'll admit that this one, we can at least, on the dawning of 2025, assess whether I've succeeded.
We could do a live fire exercise.
We could just have me spell these things.
Necessarily in fascism.
Yes.
In 2025.
At the beginning of 2025, we can see what they're at.
I guarantee you, you're not going to be the one who keeps track of this.
That's also likely.
No, I'm not accepting the homework of keeping track of this on your behalf.
I'm sure someone out there will remember.
All right, I'm also going to lose 200 pounds.
From what?
Oh, I'm sorry.
200 British pounds is what I mean.
By betting on?
Well, I don't know.
I just think it's been... A losing horse, perhaps?
Sure, we're a lousy business something.
Oh my god.
Well, okay.
Whenever you're done...
I do actually have a segue now, because you did not tell me you were going to do this until literally two seconds before we finally started, and you were going to start somewhere else, and you don't get to go there next at this point.
We're going to go- Fair enough.
To what the Oregon Health Authority thinks that we should resolve to do this year.
But that was three, only three for sure, so I want to know how that might have been for- Two words.
Necessarily and fascism.
I could succeed with necessarily, fail on fascism, or vice versa.
No?
I want to know what you're betting on that you're going to lose 200 pounds on.
I don't know.
I just think that the fear of, you know, the fear of losing on a bet can cause you to be risk averse and that I should just let the chips fall where they may.
And by chips, I mean French fries.
All right.
Maybe I should resolve better jokes in 2024.
Maybe.
Okay, this came into my inbox this week, or actually it was December 28th, I believe is when this came in.
This is a screenshot from the Oregon Health Authority, which I'm still, I still get emails from them.
Resolve to get vaccinated!
Wow.
It is never too late to give yourself the gift of vaccination, or think of it as a gift for those around you, or make it a New Year's resolution.
Vaccination is the best way to protect against severe illness from respiratory viruses and the rise across Oregon.
Now, we do not live in Oregon anymore, but this is what the hapless citizens of Oregon are being subjected to.
While some resolutions require making healthy changes for the rest of your life, we're asking you to resolve to make an appointment for a vaccination, said Dean Seidlinger, MD.
That's what his name appears to be.
Health officer and state epidemiologist at OHA, again that's the Oregon Health Authority, We're not asking you to change your behavior for the year.
We're asking you to change your risk of getting sick.
Yeah, like increasing it possibly, given what they're talking about.
They're talking about specifically the newest COVID-19 flu and RSV vaccines.
According to a report, and you may not be able to see that, but a report is hotlinked in the original, according to a report published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So remember when I asked you this morning, first thing upon seeing you when you got up, I said, Could the CDC get any worse?
I recall you asking me that.
I was in the middle of looking through this report.
It sounded like a trick question.
No, my sense was, I didn't think it was possible, but it seems like they're doing it.
So, according to a report published last week by the CDC, on fall 2023 respiratory virus vaccination coverage through December 9th, Among eligible Oregonians 18 and older, 25% have received the 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine, 8% have received flu shot, and 3% have received the RSV, that's the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine.
People, the OHA helpfully concludes, can get the vaccines by contacting their health plan, health care provider, county public health clinic, or a federally qualified health center, or by calling 2-1-1.
Wow.
Yeah, incredible.
By comparison, your resolutions look A+.
See?
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you spell vaccine?
Yes.
Okay, okay, so you don't need to add that to your list.
But check out these numbers, so Zach, if you would put it back.
The report says, they say, the OHA, the Oregon Health Authority says, the report published by the CDC says that Oregonians, only 25% have received their newest COVID-19 vaccine, 8% the flu shot, and 3% The RSV vaccine, and in a different part of the same email, they have like a, you know, expand here to read more, and they have this the same thing, basically, that I'm showing you here in expanded form, but the numbers are totally different.
Like in this report, I'm like, oh, are there two reports?
I click through, like, it's the same report.
So the Oregon Health Authority is putting out, like, just, as far as I can tell, haphazardly chosen Probably not random.
They probably didn't go to the effort to make it random.
Haphazardly chosen numbers to plug into these emails they're sending.
I don't even know how that's supposed to inspire you to do anything, but I went and looked at the report itself to see what the actual numbers were.
And first off, the report is a dumpster fire.
It is a disaster.
So, here it is, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, helpfully put out by the CDC.
Influenza-Updated COVID-19 and Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccination.
I also cannot spell, but... Yeah, at this point I can spell it and not pronounce it, which is generally going to be the way it is if I can do one and not the other.
I, you know, a partnership is obviously in order.
Yes.
Yes.
I can right now spell necessarily and fascism, so...
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
But maybe I should start mispronouncing them.
Faskism?
That's a good start.
If I pronounce it that way, then maybe you can spell it.
All right.
Anyway, um, coverage among adults, vaccination coverage among adults U.S.
Fall 2023.
Check out this sentence from the abstract.
I actually now know what it means, but it took me a long time.
Overall, approximately 27% and 41% of adults aged more than 18, equal to or more than 18 years, and 53% of adults aged more than or equal to 60 years reported that they definitely or probably will be vaccinated or were unsure whether they would be vaccinated against influenza, COVID-19, and RSV, respectively.
What?
So, unfortunately I have, like, just in the last hour have figured out what they, what they are on about.
I'm going to just read it one more time.
And I'm just going to go with more than 18 and more than 60 years to make it seem a little bit more like English, but you'll see that I don't get really that much closer reading the abstract from the CDC's recent report.
Overall, approximately 27% and 41% of adults age... I'm going to start over.
percent of adults age i'm gonna start over overall approximately 27 and 41 of adults god adults slow down adults overall approximately 27 and 41 of adults aged 18 years or older and 53 of adults age 60 years or older
reported that they definitely or probably will be vaccinated or were unsure whether they would be vaccinated against influenza covid19 and rsb respectively - Oh boy.
So, check it out.
We got three numbers, okay?
We got two age groups.
We got definitely will be vaccinated, probably will be vaccinated, unsure whether they'll be vaccinated, so three states of vaccination plans, and three diseases.
Which of those go together?
I think I know.
I think I know.
So they are lumping And also, this entire piece of pseudo-research is based on they called a bunch of people and were like, did you?
Okay, cool.
If you say you did, you did.
Are you gonna?
If you say you're gonna, you're gonna.
So it's entirely self-reports.
They didn't check vaccination records.
They didn't do anything, okay?
But this definitely or probably will be vaccinated or we're unsure whether they would be vaccinated.
That's everything, okay?
The 27%, the 41%, the 53%.
Those percentages, all of the like, kind of, maybe might get vaccinated, not yet, but I'm definitely not going to, that's all of this, okay?
So, 27% of adults 18 years or older say that they might get vaccinated against influenza.
41% of adults aged 18 years or older say that they might definitely kind of, maybe unsure, get vaccinated against COVID-19.
And 53% of adults aged 60 years or older say they might kind of, maybe not, don't know, will get vaccinated against RSV.
So wait, admittedly, it's a little small there, so I'm having trouble parsing it.
Am I right that they failed to resolve the question of whether the adults over 60 are included in the adults over 18, which would therefore argue that the adults between those two... Oh, you're not understanding.
Well, true.
That's clearly on you, because how could you possibly misread a sentence as clear as this?
Yeah, no, it's that 27% is adults aged 18 years or older with regard to their plans for influenza vaccination.
The 41% of adults age 18 years or older is with regard to their plans for COVID vaccination.
And then I don't know why they went with a totally different age range for the plans for RSV vaccination, but it's 53% of adults age 60 years or older think that they might, but haven't yet gotten vaccinated against RSV.
This is actually highly relevant to what we will be talking about later, but I I don't think I ever saw the sitcom ALF.
Alien Life 1.
Was that what that stood for?
I don't think I ever did either.
That was an acronym?
Yeah.
Okay, I didn't know that.
I would recognize the puppet, but I don't think I ever saw the show.
Yeah.
But I do remember an interview with one of the writers of the show, who reported that the writer's room was some cocaine-fueled craziness, and that they had a category that they would sometimes It was a half an hour show, I guess.
And they would not have enough stuff, so they had humor-like substance that they would include in the skit.
And the idea was, if you gave something that sort of took the form of a joke, Well, especially if you've got a laugh track.
Right, then the point is it's as good as a joke, right?
Because it feels to people who aren't paying very close attention that they're in a room full of people laughing at whatever was just said, therefore it must have been funny.
But anyway, that paragraph?
That sentence in the abstract, yep.
Strikes me as science-like substance, right?
Yep.
It's not clear what they are claiming.
It's not It's, I think, fairly clear that they did not intend to convey anything.
What they intended to do was give the impression to somebody who was skimming this that they're, you know... There's numbers.
Yeah, that it was quantified in some way.
There's numbers, and there's categories, and they've named the categories, and they've given you some numbers, so, you know, proceed.
In fact, the very next sentence is, strong provider recommendations for and offers of vaccination could increase influenza COVID-19 and RSV vaccination coverage.
Oh, could, really?
Like, on what basis they're making that claim.
They could have written that sentence equally easily, frankly, before COVID-19 vaccines even existed.
Right?
It's a non-claim that sounds concrete, much as a category that unites people who claim to have gotten the vaccine with people who claim that they intend to get the vaccine.
No, no, no.
This does not include those who have gotten the vaccine.
reported that they definitely or probably will be vaccinated, or were unsure whether they would be vaccinated against influenza.
The only people excluded from these, the 27%, 41%, and 53% of adults, except those younger than 18 for the first two and younger than 60 for the final one, the only people excluded are those who claim that they have gotten vaccinated, and again, no checks, or those who claim that they are not going to.
This is everyone else.
And again, they had three options.
They had five options.
Are you?
Have you gotten this vaccine yet?
Are you definitely not going to?
And then the other three are, I definitely will.
I probably will.
I'm unsure if I will.
And that's- They lumped them.
What's passing for- Yeah.
Yeah, it's obviously not.
You will grant that that paper takes the form of a scientific publication.
Science-like material.
It's science-like material.
And yet, a little bit of scrutiny reveals that it means nothing, says nothing, is based on shaky data to begin with, and that data is lumped in a way that it doesn't tell you anything.
Nothing.
It's quantified.
It's at least pseudo-quantified.
I mean, something was counted.
So for people who don't know what pseudo-quantification is, pseudo-quantification can take place in a form that is clear, right?
Where you take something that is not quantitative and you make it appear quantitative.
This is simultaneously pseudo-quantitative and Utterly ambiguous.
Yeah.
Now, creating five categories and then acting like they are discrete, and that they could be assigned integer values, where integers are playing the part of numbers and they're not actually, is what has been done here.
But note, too, that this is about the United States.
Zach, if you can share my screen again, and I'm going to go back and forth between a couple of things here.
This is the United States, and this original email that I showed you the screenshot from is about Oregon.
And what the OHA, the Oregon Health Authority, is claiming is that this very report, so brilliantly written and pseudo-quantified as it is, claims that this report shows that 25% of Oregonians 18 and older have received the COVID vaccine, 8% have received the flu shot, and 3% have received the RSV vaccine.
Keep those numbers in mind.
25, 8, and 3.
And then we're going to scroll down where they split out their crap data by state.
And they've got a bunch of graphs.
I'm going to come back to that one.
Okay, so here's the state by state table coverage.
With influenza, updated COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus vaccines among adults, and that's again 18 and over, so these are those same numbers.
And again, what the OHA said was for Oregon it was 25, 8, and 3, I believe, going across.
And here we have 40% for influenza, 25% for COVID, and 20% for RSV.
Wow.
So the numbers are just completely wrong.
I also, I don't know, I was not able to figure out in the amount of time that I spent trying what exactly how they generated these numbers, but cumulative unweighted number would appear to be just the sample size, right?
And then they've got slightly different numbers, what did they It's not clear.
They've got very similar numbers here.
Yeah, those are very similar.
Right, so maybe that's just the numerator and they're not showing us the denominator?
I don't know.
But 3080 and 3078, if that's just an N, I don't know what they've done.
So OHA clearly completely falsely portrayed what the numbers were, but in a strange direction, because I would have thought that they would have been interested in over-representing how many people were vaccinated.
But these numbers don't look anything like what the OHA reports.
And the whole thing is a mess.
Which, oh, this, yeah.
Oh, so actually, this is in a different order.
So here we have influenza COVID RSV, and here we have COVID influenza RSV.
So their number for COVID is 25, and that's actually the only correct number there.
Okay.
But 40 and 20 are not represented here at all.
You know, the funny thing is, I wish I had said it, but I was going to question that 8% on the flu, because in what universe are these people who are not paying attention enough that they're still getting COVID boosters, but they're skeptical of the flu shot?
Or like, what the hell?
Yeah.
I mean, the only thing I thought was maybe as soon as the flu shot comes out later.
I mean, I no longer pay any attention to that at all.
So if people were really quick to get their booster and then just have to make another appointment to get the flu shot, I don't know.
But part of what this reveals is you can't trust any of the stuff that's coming out of either, you know, Oregon Health Authority reporting on the CDC or the CDC.
And there was just one more sentence I wanted to I guess this is related to what I read from the abstract.
Approximately 41% of all adults, this is US wide now, and 53% of adults aged 60 or older were unvaccinated.
And this is with regard to influenza.
were unvaccinated, but reported that they definitely or probably plan to receive or are unsure about receiving updated COVID-19 and RSV vaccines, respectively, suggesting they're open to vaccination.
Okay, so no, that it's impossible to read.
That is actually COVID and RSV, again.
And why are they reporting it in this way?
Right.
If there's one thing a scientific publication should free you from, it is any need to condense things that makes them less clear.
A scientific publication, if it errs in any direction at all, it errs in the direction of being Beyond clear.
And in fact, it has to be.
In order for the scientific form to be met, it has to be something that somebody else can reproduce and check.
And to the extent that you've introduced ambiguity by jamming stuff into a sentence that you could have said in four sentences, so at least you could match up the percentages with the thing that they are claimed to apply to, Well, I mean, I think, so we've seen this move both in the abstract and here, right, where they put, you know, they put these three categories of responses.
You know, they're asking people, are you vaccinated?
Are you not?
If you're not, what are your plans?
I don't know actually what they asked, but we end up with five categories.
Claim to be vaccinated.
Claim not to be vaccinated and won't get vaccinated.
And this is for each of the three types of vaccines.
Claim to be unvaccinated but claim that you plan to.
Claim that you are unvaccinated but you probably will.
And claim that you're unvaccinated but you're unsure.
Those three categories at the end mean wildly different things.
And maybe it doesn't matter precisely because these are self-reports on a phone by the people who picked up, and we don't know if this is reliable at all.
But basically the CDC, and then the OHA is picking this up, are using the numbers from that big group in the middle to say all of these people are convincible.
All of these people are reachable with your shots if you can just remind them and make it easy and really push it on them when they show up in your doctor's office.
That is basically what the message is here.
People who say they're going to get vaccinated, okay, they aren't going to require much, just give them that little extra push, make sure you make it easy.
People who say probably they're going to need a little bit more effort.
People who say they're unsure, they're going to need a lot more of your effort, but all of these people are convincible.
The only people we're not trying to convince we say now are the people who say they're absolutely not going to get our damn shots, but everyone else is basically in this category that is of greatest utility to what is now passing for public health.
So, all right, this raises an important question.
One of the things that was done to orchestrate the madness around the COVID vaccines was that doctors were manipulated in many different ways.
They were incentivized financially, they were induced to get the shots early, which caused them to have Cognitive dissonance over whatever danger they had put themselves in, so those doctors who were prone to lie to themselves would end up lying to their patients, etc.
And so, to the extent that whatever monster decided to do that, decided to coerce our medical professionals into coercing us, is still at work.
And it isn't in any way important, because this isn't a real scientific exploration of something.
What it really is, as you point out, is a cryptic attempt to gin up that machine that induces people to get these things on the basis of social pressure.
Yes.
Look at how many people are, you know, queuing up.
Right.
Queuing up, getting ready.
If what you need is a number that suggests we've got a lot of convincible people, and you get that number by calling them up and asking, have you gotten your COVID vaccine?
In a world where you've told people that a COVID vaccine is a moral good, you are doing this as a service to your community, among other things.
Not only is it important to protect your health, a lie, but it is important to protect your community, another lie.
And so, and then, you know, Go back to that New Year's resolution thing.
Resolve to get vaccinated.
Can you put that out?
The idea that it is a New Year's resolution, again, reinforces the concept that it is somehow inherently good to be vaccinated rather than, you know, resolve not to get your COVID vaccine this year because they're dangerous, right?
That would be a more viable Uh, claim than this, but the idea is this is such an obvious good that it as a, you know, as a resolution, uh, you know, I'm going to run three miles a day, right?
I'm going to get my COVID vaccine that the idea that they would put those into the same category again suggests this, um, self betterment, um, modality.
And the point is they are getting the evidence Calling people up who they've already told that this is an unalloyed good, right?
Those people are then, you know, are you going to admit that you didn't get your COVID vaccine, right?
They're in that situation because somebody who's interested in COVID vaccines has just phoned them, so many of them are going to lie because it's socially awkward to say, fuck no.
I think it's actually, I think some of those lies will happen, but I think it's even easier to lie out of the category of, yeah, actually I'm not going to do that.
So I'll bet the unsure category was kind of high, but I'll bet people who are like, yeah, I'm really not going to do that, jumped into like, yeah, I don't know.
And some number of people who are like, jeez, I'm kind of leaning against, but I'm not sure when.
Like, No, no, I'm going to do it.
I'm probably going to do it.
Because, you know, even the language in these categories actually mimics human psychology, right?
No, I'm totally going to do that.
Now, you know, at this point, I certainly would not answer it that way.
But there are a lot of people out there who, you know, we see this, the uptake of these things at this point, of these COVID boosters, is so low.
We know that most people are not doing it.
But when called by someone who says, have you done it yet?
What are the chances you're going to do it, because you know it's good for you?
Presumably the people calling weren't allowed to add, because you know it's good for you, in the actual questionnaire part, but the water we're swimming in is, this is what you do in order to be good to yourself and to be good to the people around you.
And actually, it fits with the other thing that we've said about the psychology of folks who are not getting their boosters.
That one of the reasons that, you know, we have a majority of the public has either never wanted to get these vaccines or has switched sides, but we don't see a population that has widely acknowledged the fact that those of us who said, hey, this can't possibly be safe were right in the end.
How are they doing that?
Well, one way they're doing it is that not getting your... They may have decided in their mind, yeah, I'm not getting this one, right?
They have switched sides.
But if the idea is, well, I haven't gotten it yet, then the point is it leaves them room to lie to themselves about whether or not they have actually come to accept what some of us were saying all along.
And this exploits that very thing in order to get an inflated number for the convincible, in order to manipulate doctors into pressuring people who walk into the office.
And of course, all of that is upstream of the various hazards that seem to be associated with a massive and growing number of excess deaths.
Somehow the system is pressuring.
Instead of, you know, you might imagine that a dishonest system would just stop pushing these damn shots and, you know, would pretend that it was over and it had never tried to get you to take them.
But instead, you know, when do they stop doubling down?
What exactly would tell them that this thing wasn't worth the risk?
That's not the kind of information they're taking in.
So this actually, we're kind of going in the opposite direction from where I thought we would.
We're going to save your big stuff one more section.
I'm going to read a little bit from my natural selections piece this week.
Sure.
Um, which I called Era of the False Narrative.
New Year, same timeline.
And I start with seals, and I'm not going to read about the seals, and I'm not going to read about the soup at the end.
I encourage you to go and find that yourselves, but I am going to read this section here.
Drug us with a steady diet of titillating and banal content on those compact drug delivery devices that we carry around with us all the time, in our pockets, in our hands, glazed eyes staring down beside us as we sleep.
Drug us with substances that are not food, but which play food on TV.
Create cravings and convince us that denying ourselves real and honest food is good for our hearts, and that eating the shelf-stable stuff from labs, well, that is too.
Drug us with actual drugs, both legal and not.
Assure us that once the government has given its stamp of approval for this molecule, but not that one, then taking this molecule is a sign of virtue.
Assure indication that you too will have access to heaven, while taking that one is a sign of a weak and unguarded moral center.
How foolish we are to believe their stories.
It has been the stories all along that have been at the center of their power to control us.
So I talked about a little island near us, and here are two more paragraphs.
About that little island across the way, where the seals sleep when the tide is low enough for them to do so, I had a dream.
It's a low-slung, narrow island on which cormorants and gulls, roosts and bald eagles fly out to hunt those other birds young.
And on the far side of it, the water is so deep and runs so fast, the conditions can be so chaotic that I have sometimes seen boats of considerable size unable to make the passage, turning around after straining against the current and going back from whence they came.
In my dream, a wide, low grey boat with no markings on it at all, and no portholes, moves silently into view, stopping in front of the island.
A vast door opens in the island, a tambour door sliding up to reveal a gaping portal of rectangular darkness.
The unmarked boat glides in, then descends, as if on an elevator, out of view.
The door closes on the physically impossible portal, and life looks normal once again.
Those intimations that we get, the glimmers at the edges of consciousness, the, didn't I see something about that?
And that's odd.
And how could that possibly be given what else I thought was true?
They are worth paying attention to.
What is happening outside of our view?
What is known that we are not being told?
What are the actual risks that we face, which we have not yet understood?
These things are worth attending to, but we cannot live that way all the time, chasing the glimmers and the intimations.
We cannot be in such a state of vigilance at every moment of our lives.
That's where I wanted to stop.
Perfect.
Well, the problem is I do have a reaction.
That is, it fits perfectly with what I was hoping to discuss.
And, you know, it opens exactly the right question about it.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's switch gears briefly and then we will return to that description.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the Claudine Gay plagiarism resignation story.
For those who have been blissfully unaware, Claudine Gay is the now-resigned president of Harvard.
The now-resigned president of Harvard who resigned after, and we're going to come back to why this is interesting in a second, but she resigned after she received scrutiny following her testimony in Congress where she had been asked
I'm trying to remember the exact phraseology, but whether or not somebody proposing the genocide of Jews would be in violation of Harvard's
Code of conduct and she along with her two compatriots from MIT and from Penn Said that it would depend on context now you and I talked about that when it happened and I
What we said was that although these people are indeed full of crap, and this does indeed reveal exactly the moral defect that it appears to, the problem is not with their answer.
Their answer is correct, that context does matter.
You could imagine somebody in an exercise on a college campus proposing that, you know, if somebody was told to, you know, inhabit the role of a Nazi trying to convince the public of this, that, or the other, They could, in a formal sense, be proposing the genocide of Jews.
They could be doing it because it was the assignment.
The assignment is not inherently a wrong assignment.
It's no inherently more wrong than asking somebody to act like Hitler for the purpose of making a movie.
So, yes, it does depend on context.
The problem with what Claudine Gay said is that it is part of a double standard, and the reason that she said that it would depend on context in this case was that it was the genocide of Jews under question.
She had been asked about the genocide of transgender people or blacks or some other group that is perceived to be downtrodden.
She would have given a different answer.
Now, we can't say that for sure because it didn't happen, but we can say as people who have lived in the academy and seen this stuff unfold, yes, it would have been a different answer.
This was somehow special because it was the genocide of Jews that was under question.
So We don't need speech standards in order to protect from this.
What we need is a blind application of the principles of the university across the board, irrespective of who is being discussed.
Anyway, so all of that.
But then, following her saying of this very controversial thing, and following the resignation of the President of Penn, who had said almost the same words, Claudine Gay's scholarship Became the focus of scrutiny.
And it was discovered that there were many instances in which she had engaged in what was claimed to be plagiarism.
And I have one such example here.
Zach, do you want to put up the screenshot of... So this is a case in which... This is from the New York Times.
Yeah, this is from the New York Times, and they are pointing to an instance in which he appears to have plagiarized.
So, someone named Dr. Hohschild said, Sandy Jenks shows me the importance of getting the data right and following where they may lead without fear or favor, adding later that Mr. Jenks drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven.
Okay, so that was the work that is supposed to have been plagiarized.
Here, Claudine Gay says, or Claudine Gay thanked her thesis advisor, Gary King, who, quote, reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.
She also thanked her family, who, quote, drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven, end quote.
I have a very different reaction to this than I've read elsewhere.
On the one hand, yep, it appears she lifted some stuff from somebody else's work.
There's no idea here, and in all of the places that she lifted stuff, I don't find anything particularly meaty that she has stolen.
It's not that she's taken some great idea and claimed it as her own.
I am completely unfamiliar with her scholarship in its entirety.
Is there meatiness in the scholarship?
Oh, no.
Right, so then, you know, that's less of a kindness to say, like, well, yes, plagiarism, but not the meaty stuff.
Well, if there's no meaty stuff at all, then, you know, she's stealing other people's words, and she's not offering anything new at all, her own or anyone else's.
This is exactly what I'm getting at, is that this is phony work to begin with.
The cutting and pasting of exact phraseology And the acknowledgements, no less.
I mean, that's amazing.
Can't come up with your own words to thank your own family?
Right.
Wow.
It's incredible because it's incredibly lazy.
Yeah.
Right?
This is a person who is supposed to have written- And shallow.
Effectively, it is shallow, it's grotesque, and it suggests that she never thought anybody was going to look at this document in any serious way.
Now, So, let us just acknowledge some basic facts here.
One, the Academy has a problem with intellectual property.
This is something I take very seriously because when you traffic in ideas, the fact that within the academic framework there is no way to protect an idea is very troubling.
And the reason it's so troubling is because you have a landscape In which a really good idea is a very, it is the fuel that is supposed to drive your career forward.
But the protections that exist for something, for intellectual property in the outside world are effectively non-existent inside the academy.
So the two tools that you would use to protect something in the outside world are Trademark S3.
Trademark, copyright, and patent.
Right?
What we have in the Academy is the honor system.
At the same time, we have a dramatically hierarchical system in which the highly prized seats have a tremendous amount of power to arbitrate disagreements.
So the people at the top have the ability to take stuff from others, and there's very little that can happen to them.
Well, I mean, I think maybe this is just trivial, but you know, so you identify trademark, copyright, and patent Trademark is like images mostly, logos.
Patent is bigger, more complex ideas, and copyright generally is words.
And I believe it's universal.
It certainly was at the University of Michigan where we got our degrees that Upon your dissertation having been submitted by you and accepted by your committee, the University of Michigan accepting it into its system puts it under copyright.
It is then copyrighted, and I believe that being published in a journal then copyrights your work, but The peer review system, of course, lays bare your work to those people who are deemed most able to critique it long in advance of it ever being published, if you are so lucky as to get it published.
Right.
Now, can you show Claudine Gay's dissertation?
Can you make that bigger?
I can do it.
Yeah, okay, good.
And now scroll down page by page.
This is 1997.
Stop.
Right there.
Okay.
So the fact is, she did copyright this.
Now that would have happened automatically as a result of her submitting the dissertation and it being accepted, but that is in some ways... Yeah, I think that is what, I mean, because Unless she graduated from University of Michigan, which I don't know that she has.
I think UMI is actually, it happens to be the place that collects all the dissertations, so they do the copywriting, right?
But what this does mean is that actually, I mean look, Okay, that very sloppy, cut-and-paste stealing of somebody else's phraseology in the acknowledgments of her own dissertation, right?
This is somebody who's not taking pride in their work.
This is somebody who's sneaking one by the authorities because she believes she can.
And then, she does go on to copyright it, and the copywriting of it... Well, again... I know it's automatic, but my point is, she knew that it was gonna be copyrighted.
So, my point is, when you steal somebody's stuff, Right?
And then you copyright it.
That's actually, in a technical sense, maybe the biggest violation here.
But the important point is, the fact that one phony academic has been driven from their position, mind you, I think she got to keep her $900,000 a year salary Just to go back into the faculty and keep on producing garbage.
Right.
The point is, we ought not pretend that we've discovered a phony, because that's not what happened.
What happened is, we have universities full of phonies, where the person who's actually doing something meaningful is the exception, Rather than the rule.
We have entire disciplines of which Claudine Gay is a member of one that are phony to begin with.
And it should be no surprise at all that if you scrutinize the work from these places You're going to find all manner of laziness.
You're going to find logical inconsistencies.
You're going to find pilfering.
You're going to find every crime in the book is going to be found there, because these aren't serious people to begin with.
And in Claudine Gay's case, I think, you know, this is so troubling, right?
How much damage is done to race relations by having people wield their race as a get-out-of-jail-free card so that their garbage scholarship can land them in the presidency of the most prestigious college in the country?
Right?
That is no accident that she got there.
She's very good at playing the game, and being good at playing the game doesn't mean she's not lazy.
It doesn't mean that it isn't obvious.
It means that Harvard did not think it was hiring a great scholar to be their president.
It was not depending on that president to do anything important for them.
Right?
It was at best trying to effectively improve its ESG score, or whatever the academic equivalent of that might be.
And this is recently.
Apparently she had the shortest tenure of any Harvard president.
Six months in a couple days.
Yeah.
So it's not like this happened before George Floyd, or even right in the aftermath when a bunch of people were scurrying and trying to look virtuous for the People who were throwing fireballs in the streets.
But she had just ascended to the presidency mid-2023, apparently.
And, you know, I think if she had not had the misfortune of being hauled in front of Congress and questioned by a member of a party that is hostile to the Academy, her obvious plagiarism in the most... I mean, you know, how hard was it for me to find her dissertation?
It took me Two minutes, right?
So her dissertation has been sitting, you know, the president of Harvard had a dissertation, you know, sitting in plain view and nobody gave a damn because nobody serious thought that her position in the world had anything to do with her scholarship.
No, unlike scientific, unlike peer-reviewed papers that are often paywalled because the journals claim they need to make a book, I think that all dissertations are available, at least all the ones that have gone through the UMI system, which is where the repository for dissertations exists in America.
So I wanted to just point it to a couple things that I think we are missing.
One, You know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, but college presidents have a certain amount of power.
Harvard hired a fraud for that position, but nobody is deeply troubled by the fact that somebody was in charge of something important like our premier academic institution, who isn't qualified to teach there, much less to lead the place.
Why not?
Yeah, they're not just figureheads, and they're not just collecting funds.
Well, let's put it this way.
The I think there is a parallel here.
And you know, I think Joe Biden is just a figurehead at this point.
He was a crony capitalist politician.
He was an influence peddler.
And now he's mentally incompetent.
And we see the same lack of disturbance among the people who should be saying, Hey, Joe, maybe it's time for you to step down because you really, you know, you've aged out of the ability to even do the job.
Right?
The fact that the blue team is not doing that, and in fact are going to run him again apparently, is evidence of the same comfort that whoever the power players are behind the scenes, they know full well that they aren't hiring Joe Biden to make decisions over whether or not to attack this or that country or how to fix the economy or anything like that.
He's got a totally different job, and it's to eat ice cream and look, you know, like a grandpa and, you know, to Plausibly explain why, you know, tens of millions of Americans have, you know, gotten out of bed to go vote for him, right?
That, you know, his job is to do something and it isn't presidential.
Something else is doing the presidential thing and we don't know what it is, which means we've got a massive constitutional crisis.
Likewise, you know, one of the premier scholars in the country turns out to be a total fraud, and the evidence has been waiting for somebody to look for it, and the only reason they thought to look for it was that somebody questioned her in an uncomfortable way, and she, so...
I don't think – you've already said that she wasn't a premier scholar.
No one took her to be a premier scholar.
One of the premier academics in the country, who we might imagine would only attain that position by being a premier scholar, was clearly not, and in fact was a fraud.
It should be true.
There should be lots of people who want the job of president of Harvard.
Yeah.
And we should be able to have a system in which, well, if lots of people want the job, then at the very least, whoever's in that seat ought to be a premier scholar.
So we've got somebody sitting in a chair that ought to have premier scholar as one of its prerequisites, who isn't even that.
And, um, the, Where I wanted to go is that the collapse of the system in which the people who are supposed to have the skills don't have them, nor do they apparently need them, is I think a reflection of something quite a bit deeper.
Right?
We have newspapers that don't report the news, right?
They can be sometimes embarrassed into having to report the news late after the news has already become well known, and so it would be conspicuous that it didn't show up in the paper.
But we have newspapers that don't report the news.
Why is that?
Well, it is at the very least profitable for insiders who have high quality information to make sure everybody else has low quality information.
So, Things that take the place of newspapers.
You can go buy a newspaper, but it doesn't have the news in it.
That's good for keeping your asymmetrical advantage that comes from having information.
Likewise, universities.
You can't very well have academics whose obligation is to figure out the truth, empowered to go search for it wherever, as Claudine Gay did not say, or at least cut and paste rather than said herself, follow the data where they may lead.
I mean, that's such a nonsense thing for this person to have said.
What does she even mean by that?
She means nothing.
It just sounds good.
But the fact is academics who not only collect data that might say something interesting and then do follow it where it leads, right?
That's not what's going on in academia at all.
We have agreed upon conclusions, you know?
COVID vaccines are safe and effective.
Global climate change is the greatest threat that humanity faces and we have to get our carbon footprint under control by 2050 or blah blah blah blah blah.
These things are conclusions that we now have this pseudo-scholarship supporting, and it shouldn't be surprising that institutions that are heavily invested in that have frauds at their head.
This is all what it would look like if somebody decided, you know what, we can't very well have open exploration for the truth.
What we have to have is, you know, if we don't have any institutions that seek the truth, then somebody will create them.
What we have to have is something That takes that niche space and pretends to still be interested in the truth, but isn't.
And that means we've got some plums to hand out, like the presidency.
You could give that to a phony who would make you look like you were concerned about the under-representation of certain races in academia.
But in fact, it's the opposite.
How insulting is it to the very high-powered black academics That one of the few recognizable academic faces whose black turns out to be a total phony, right?
That she's now been driven from this office in disgrace.
It's awful for everyone.
It's terrible.
It's absolutely counterproductive.
So, anyway.
It's funny how promoting people by prioritizing their immutable characteristics turns out to be a bad idea.
Right.
And it is.
Let's put it this way.
You have Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay having tried to make this point in the honorable academic way, right?
They actually ran a kind of a test and demonstrated that the system was fraudulent.
And, you know, yes, it got discussed, but it didn't cause some major upheaval in the academy.
And I will point out that the problem here is that there's all of this crowing in the predicted places because they've brought down Claudine Gay with scrutiny that revealed her plagiarism.
To imagine that... I think gay is not a significant part of this problem.
Right.
Right?
She won some kind of a contest.
Maybe she was particularly gifted in using her immutable characteristics to get where she was going, and she knew how to do it without investing too much in rephrasing other people's scholarship.
Right?
But the point is, no.
To imagine you've solved anything.
If you haven't noticed that it was a system that was tailor-made to give you this kind of fraud in a position of power, then you've missed the point.
So, really the question is, when are we going to notice that those institutions themselves, these fields, aren't real?
They are not doing anything useful.
And, you know, as I said to Peter and Helen and James when they revealed their project to us, The problem with their work, excellent as it was, is that they didn't run the same test on the supposedly hard sciences.
They didn't pressure test the fields that we think are above this crap.
It's much tougher.
You have to sort of fabricate grants and such, but yes.
But it was a limitation that I think was impossible to get around.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that there was any opportunity to do it, but I mean, especially, you know, that was all pre-COVID, right?
We have now seen the premier journals, we've seen all the medical schools, we've seen every university embrace not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.
Nonsense that maimed people.
And there still isn't a, you know, major academic campaign to figure out what the truth of those vaccines actually was, or what the truth of the repurposed drugs actually was.
There are still institutions of higher ed in this country that have vaccine mandates for their student body.
Right.
I mean, almost every metric that you can think of to see how confused the economy remains, like, insistently so, passes the test of, yep, insistently confused and not seeing the truth.
Not saying the truth, and the fact, you know, what you would expect, if this was an organic failure of some kind, what you would expect is, as people wake up, you would expect those institutions to, you know, fine, maybe they're super tankers and they turn slowly, but you would expect them to turn 180 degrees.
And the fact that they don't, Means somebody's not surprised by the reality that turned out to be true of the various treatments and of the disease itself.
Right?
It didn't matter that the reality was the opposite of what we were told because, you know, the insiders apparently didn't believe that shit to begin with.
But when you look at the Academy and you find that everywhere that you... I guess here's the point.
I don't know how to make it exactly.
There's nothing about what caused Claudine Gay to be scrutinized and what was ultimately found that drove her from power.
Those things are unrelated.
We just became aware that this person was in the presidency of Harvard because she was questioned in a way that we saw it.
And then her scholarship was scrutinized and plagiarism was found.
She was not... The questioning had nothing to do with plagiarism or anything else.
So the point is... Your point is, she did not fall from grace because she turned out to be a bad scholar.
She fell from grace Let me describe it this way.
What is the pithy version of why?
Here's the why.
She was powerful.
And then her embarrassment in front of Congress, her public embarrassment, made it possible to scrutinize her work and have plagiarism be meaningful enough to remove her from the office.
Right?
So the point is, she was vulnerable because of the particular topic on which she was humiliated, and that meant that this whole other topic of whether she was a fraud became viable.
The dissimilarity between the two things is really the key story here.
And I guess this then makes some sense of some number of talking heads online are enraged that she should go down for plagiarism and that Chris Ruffo should have some part in this and how dare he, right?
The person who stole other people's work and put together nothing of import or innovation and got a degree for it, that's the person you should be angry at here.
But maybe in part people aren't because everyone was going along with it.
No one thought to look.
The charade is what we are all depending on.
Well, here's the troubling interpretation, is when you decide that the university can't be replaced by something else, that what it has to do is continue to inhabit that niche space so that nobody else, you know, just as Wikipedia continues to be the world's premier encyclopedia, even though it is nakedly political, The point is, if there were no Wikipedia, somebody would invent it, right?
We know that we need one.
The fact that Wikipedia still exists means you don't get a Wikipedia.
You have to take that one and you have to deal with its political bent.
If there were no universities, they'd be springing up all over the place because they're really important.
The fact that they still exist means that they don't spring up.
It's very hard to start one.
You have to confront the question of accreditation and all of that.
And so you have a system that has to continue to exist so nobody replaces it.
That system then becomes a jobs program for people who have nothing real to contribute.
Yeah.
And the point is it's full of such people.
You have lots and lots of people who are learning to go through the motions of the exercise of truth-seeking in order to gain a job, to gain something that makes you interesting at cocktail parties, to gain a position in society without actually doing anything, right?
But other than the part about the cocktail party, you also just described college and high school and middle school and elementary school, right?
All formal education from kindergarten up to the highest reaches you can go.
have largely become these charades in which I'm going to stand up here and inform you of some things and maybe they're true and maybe they're not and maybe I care about you and maybe I don't but as long as you just tell me back to me what I said to you last week when I give you a piece of paper that says it's a test on it then we can all agree that everything is fine
And I'll give you a pass, or I'll give you a diploma, or I'll give you a lot of recommendation, or whatever it is, and you can then go and jump through the next hoop that we have all collectively decided is worth jumping through.
It is utterly meaningless, and it's a betrayal of the truth of humanity, which is that there are things new under the sun, and we are capable of being innovative and creative and being exploratory, and we're all better than this.
Like, pretty much all of us.
We actually have the capacity to be better than this.
And we have had our education system just ripped to shreds while most of us weren't even aware it was happening.
Yeah, it's an insult to our humanity.
It really is.
And it goes back to your dream at the end of the piece that you wrote, right?
So you said, what is it that is happening that's just out of our view, that we're unaware of?
You know, the island goes back to looking like an island.
Which brings me to the last point, which is going to sound like a stretch for a moment, but New Year's Eve, we had an X5 solar storm, a solar flare flung off the sun.
Zach, do you want to show that picture from the Forbes article?
So you can check this out, but this was the largest solar flare for the last six years, since 2017.
And, you know, actually scroll back up to the to the title.
Yeah.
2023 ends with the strongest X-Class solar flare for six years.
Get ready for the Aurora.
Right?
Get ready for the Aurora.
Oh, maybe we get a light show out of this.
Well, it turned out I don't think we did.
But here's the problem with this.
These solar storms carry the potential to do devastating damage down here on Earth.
I think we talked in one of our last two streams about the Carrington event, about the fact that civilization has become highly electric and electronic in the intervening years since 1859 when the Carrington event happened, and that means that we have vulnerabilities.
Here's the point.
That solar storm The largest one, I think what largest one in the last six years means is the largest one facing such that we can see it.
I don't think we have detectors on the far side of the sun looking at solar flares that happen out of our view.
I don't know that, but I don't think so.
Certainly we have a lot better information on the side of the sun that we can see.
The largest... We're not, just an astronomical question, we're not effectively tidally locked to... so that's not right.
We're rotating, but so is the Sun, right?
Yes, the Sun has... So we are seeing a different part of the Sun over time.
Yeah, what different part even means, because it is effectively a fluid Right.
It's not a solid surface.
It's not a solid, but there is motion of what is on the surface.
It moves in a predictable direction, and stuff that happens on our side of the Sun, wherever we happen to be, is now highly monitored, right?
We see sunspots, we see solar storms, we see all of these things.
Now, this solar storm was not a big deal.
Even though it was an X5 class solar storm.
What made it not a big deal?
Oh, the fact that it happened on the edge of the sun that was just coming towards the Earth, right?
This got flung off mostly in a direction that didn't hit the Earth, right?
So, glancing below.
Now, here's why I want to bring this back to Claudine Gay and Joe Biden and the hollowing out of the system and what happens outside of our view.
You can bet that the next big solar storm is not going to be a big deal.
And you'll almost certainly be right, because it almost certainly won't be directed right at us, right?
The sun is immense, and if you draw, we are far from it, if you draw lines away from the sun, almost nothing hits us, right?
So you can bet, almost every time, it's going to be no big deal, even if it is a huge, huge solar storm that in principle is capable of inducing a Carrington event or worse, that it will not be directed at us.
But you could also, if you were smarter than that, right?
Instead of just betting, hey, the next solar storm, no big deal, don't worry about it, you'll be right, right?
But if you bet sooner or later, one will be direct evidence, and it will be big enough to cause completely predictable problems.
And the time to discuss that is actually right now, right?
Here's a question for you that we need to be discussing.
If you put your emergency managers in a position where, if they turn off the grid, right?
If you turn off the grid, you're gonna kill some people.
There's some people dependent on the grid.
You're gonna create some havoc, right?
With, I don't know, traffic signals, whatever it is.
There's gonna be some loss.
There'll also be a huge amount of inconvenience.
And most of the time, if you turn off the grid, if you unhook the transformer so that they are less vulnerable to these things, Most of the time you will have done it and not gotten any benefit because the storm wouldn't have induced these things.
But if you don't do it when we do get a direct hit, then you're creating a vulnerability that is a severe challenge to humanity's ability to continue to function.
So if you wanted to solve that problem, you would do a few things.
You would, A, figure out how to immunize your managers who decide whether or not to unplug these things from looking stupid if they unplug them needlessly, right?
It's no dumber than putting on your seatbelt even though you're pretty sure you're not going to crash, right?
You need to have the seatbelt on when you do crash, and so you're not being a dummy putting it on even though, you know, you can go your whole life putting on seatbelts and never have it pay you back.
and It doesn't make you dumb.
If you knew exactly when you were a crash, you probably wouldn't have gotten in the car that time.
Right.
So the point is, you put on the seatbelt.
Do we want the people who are protecting us from the bizarrely rickety system that we've established for ourselves?
Do we want them to have the confidence that when they actually are concerned about something that they make the correct call so that we don't take out a third of the North American grid and can't bring it back up for a year?
Right?
Do we want them empowered to protect us or not?
Do we want somebody empowered to spend the money to build the protective circuits into the transformers themselves so that the grid is itself not so vulnerable?
Of course we do.
But back to Claudine Gay.
Instead of having somebody who's actually capable of looking at the evidence and concluding what many of us who have looked at the evidence on this topic have understood, that we have a major vulnerability We could be a lot safer.
We can't be perfectly safe.
But we can be a lot safer than we are.
And yet, decade after decade, we don't make ourselves safer because, in general, we don't get hit.
Right?
It's coming.
It's definitely coming.
Something like a 1 in 8 chance every decade of a major grid-destroying storm.
Right?
We are gambling on that every decade.
And, you know, we could start work on it tomorrow and it could happen to us You know, in 2026 and we could only be a small way through the project, but delay?
There's no sense in that.
So what I'm getting at is you can hollow out the system.
You know what?
You can fire the conductor of the orchestra on the night of the big...
You're going to need the conductor for the orchestra.
You're going to need people who seek truth even when that truth is awful and hard to accept.
you know, participate with the orchestra and it'll be good enough.
But you're going to need the conductor for the orchestra.
You're going to need people who seek truth even when that truth is awful and hard to accept, right?
You're going to need newspapers that expose corruption and confront us with the failure of our elites and that enrage the public.
You need to have those things.
And if you unhook them because you're enjoying an economic advantage or a political advantage that comes from the public being in the dark, If you aren't troubled by the miseducation of other people's children because, frankly, when the public is stupid you have an easier time controlling them, right?
If that's the game you're playing, you are putting us all in incredible danger, and Claudine Gay didn't cause this.
She isn't important, but she is a symptom of the same malady, and we keep running into evidence of it.
Over and over and over again.
Yep.
I'm not sure what to say.
You said that... You intimated that higher ed is no longer functional.
One possibility is that people had an interest in other people's children not being educated.
That's a possibility.
I think you said another, you had another possibility as well.
I guess I'm, I'm again coming back to, why?
Like, you know, if, if there is something that it's very important that most of us not see, that could explain A lot of the behavior that we're seeing.
The unhooking of competence and of functionality across systems and people and institutions.
If not that, simple greed doesn't seem like it gets you far enough.
I mean, maybe I'm under-appreciating the role of greed in people's Motivating structure, but really the thing that I keep on coming back to is what don't they want us to see?
I think that's a good question.
I think there are things they don't want us to see, and I think COVID was a very good trial run.
Yeah.
It revealed their capacity.
There are a lot of things hidden in plain sight, and some of them seem so ham-fisted.
It's like, so you wanted some of us to discover this, and then to watch as, you know, the people who hadn't yet discovered it attacked the people who had, right?
It was so useful at a mass formation level and a Now we know, at least for 1.0, what camps people are in.
Now we can start separating people out into new roles as 2.0 rolls in.
Well, so let's say, part of it is there's some stuff up that they don't want us to know about.
And I do think one possibility is Forget wealth for the moment.
Yeah.
Wealth is really a means to an end, and the end is power.
And that you should expect that people who have disproportionate power, many of them will dream of having a lock, a way never to be dislodged from their superior position.
I imagine stasis when nothing has been static so far.
Right, but if you look at all the stuff that is being advanced, right, central bank, digital currencies, travel, restrictions, a lot of these things, if you start not from the, you know, are you imagining it or you're not imagining it, but if you start from, well, what if you did have a bunch of elites who
Wanted to make sure that nothing inconvenient like democracy or scholarship could dislodge them from their privileged position.
What would you need?
What's the minimum set of tools you would need to make sure that that can't happen anymore?
Right?
Well, you would come up with stuff like this, right?
You're going to need emergencies to justify the restrictions that will be placed on people.
You're going to need to make sure that they can't just tune you out and spend their money as they will, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, I don't know that that is what's happening, but I certainly know it's irresponsible not to wonder.
But the other thing, though, Again, it's an analog to the thing that I have said about Goliath.
Goliath is a hybrid between outright conspiracies and emergent properties, always.
This is another one of these.
You've got people who clearly will conspire to make sure that their power is as permanent as they can make it, right?
People who think in those terms.
You also have a lot of people who have gotten used to the fact that when they cheat, they get ahead and nothing terrible happens, right?
Claudine Gay is a trivial example of this.
But what that means is if you have, let's say that you were in a corporation and the corporation had inconvenient people who sought to figure out what was in the corporation's interest.
And so your, you know, backstabbing people was in danger of being discovered because it was counterproductive to the corporation's interest.
Well, maybe you would act to get rid of people who were really looking out for the corporation because they would threaten to expose you.
And the corporation doesn't collapse.
Maybe eventually it does maybe 50 years later it does but nothing bad happens So if you get a class of people who are in a position of superior power because they have ignored the possibility of creating a catastrophe you would get an emergent advance towards a very dangerous state.
In other words, you could imagine a lot of people locally blinding that which might expose them, causing a global blindness that would expose you to all kinds of dangers, very real ones like X-class solar storms.
Why are we ignoring this?
Well, maybe because the halls of power are inhabited by people who don't worry about those sorts of things, because if they had been the sorts of people who had worried about them, they wouldn't have been able to ruthlessly pursue power the way they've done it.
You should expect the people at the top to ignore everything that doesn't advance their interests.
And yes, you occasionally get exceptions to this.
But most of the people there are there because they're very good at the game, and the game involves not thinking about the long term.
It means thinking about only that which materially comes out to benefit you, and that would explain why we are ignoring things that can't possibly be in anybody's interest, right?
It's in nobody's interest to have civilization exposed to solar storm disruption.
I really can't think of, you know, Who would engineer that?
It's a vulnerability that's so frightening and threatens to disrupt anything you're trying to build down here on Earth.
Yeah.
That we should be, you know, if there's one thing that should unite us, it's this.
Let's prevent the sun from wiping us out.
But it seems like an abstraction, and you can't point to a moment when it will happen.
And both of those things make it harder for the human brain to comprehend or to continue to consider.
Yes, and you know, at a game-theoretic level, you should simply expect those people who ignore those dangers to out-compete those people who notice them.
Right?
If you are spending effort trying to protect the Earth from solar flares, that is effort you did not spend advancing your own cause.
And what we need are, you know, A sober Congress led by a courageous president backed by an independent judiciary to do what is necessary to hedge out this which we can now scientifically establish is a major threat to civilization.
And we don't get it because we have, the corruptors have enlarged the corruption loophole because they are getting ahead in the short term at risk that they are placing us all in in the long term.
Fantastic!
Yeah!
Happy New Year!
To you as well!
Resolve to get vaccinated, Brett!
Alright!
We'll solve all of your problems.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just, I don't know what else to say.
I think, you know, we'll keep coming back to things related here, but...
It's going to be an interesting year.
Well, here's the thing, you know, I'm always asked to, you know, well, what's the bright side?
And the fact is there is a real one, but it's always going to be some version of the same thing, which is, you know, the Adaptive Valley is a dark place.
And if you're going to get to the higher peak, you're going to go through that dark place and there's no guarantee that you make it.
But the fact that it's dark is not inherently in and of itself bad.
Because we were going to have to go through something and maybe we are finally getting to the point where people are awake enough to act.
All right.
I think we're there then.
We are.
We are there.
We'll be back next week at the same time, same place, and the following week will actually become due on Saturday in order to allow for some of us to go some places.
But one week from today we'll be back and we'll do a Q&A then as well.
Starting with a question from our fabulous Discord server.
So if you want to join Discord, check us out on Locals.
Lots of stuff going on on Locals.
There's been a watch party while we've been doing this.
We publish the guest episodes of Dark Horse a day early at Locals.
We do occasional AMAs.
You did another one last week or so?
Something?
Maybe not.
I did one recently, but I can't remember.
It was in the past sometime.
That's certainly true.
Yeah, so do check us out there.
And we've got of course the store, darkhorsestore.org.
PsyOp until proven otherwise feels kind of Kind of relevant.
A little bit.
Kind of relevant.
But also one of my new favorites, blueberries, because oxidants happen.
You know, it grew on me.
You first proposed that like 15 years ago probably.
Okay man, good.
Find yourself a t-shirt company and go ahead.
Wow.
Founded yourself a podcast and then we'll be able to create a t-shirt.
So there you go.
Very, very good.
Get one of your very own.
Get one of your very own, exactly.
We also had our private Q&A associated with locals this last Sunday of the month, which we have a lot of fun with.
Check me out at naturalselections.substack.com where I write every week, most weeks.
You, this weekend, are going to have your conversations from your Patreon this weekend, I believe.
This weekend?
Yes, first Saturday and Sunday of the month.
So, a reminder about our wonderful sponsors this week.
They were Helix, Armra, and American Heart for Gold.
Links will be in the show notes.
And one last reminder, we are supported by you.
We are grateful to you, our audience.
We love hearing from you.
We've been getting some great cards and such lately associated with the holiday season to the PO Box that we have.
