Diversity, Equity, & Explosive Decompression: The 208th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 208th 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 how not to hand Goliath a win. Letting Goliath in on the social landscape of the dissidents, on the petty feuds and disagreements, is giving it power that it should not have. And we discuss Boeing’s 737-9 Max airplanes: the one that blew out a door plug above Oregon; the FAA’s response to that...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 208, which is a special edition not on our usual day.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And this is Tesla, our darkest cat.
This is the darkest cat we got.
Yep, he just sucks in the photons.
Yep, he does.
And the eggs.
Yes!
Never met a cat as much of a fan of scrambled eggs as this one.
He loves the scrambled eggs.
He loves the scrambled eggs.
All right, today we're going to talk about a variety of things.
I don't even know how to summarize it, so maybe I should not try to.
I think actually, given the temperature, we should winterize it.
Winterize it.
Man, it is cold here.
Oh boy, as have, unfortunately, our pipes.
Yes, as have our pipes.
But, you know, we persevere.
We go on.
Luckily, live streaming doesn't require water.
I mean, it requires some water, but, you know, we figure out the fragility in our system, and we get better over time.
We get anti-fragile.
Yeah, hopefully.
Hopefully.
Okay, so we're here on Saturday, talking to you.
We won't be doing a Q&A today, and we won't be back until not next Wednesday, but the following Wednesday.
So this is standing in for our normal Wednesday live stream, but we encourage you to join us at the watch party that's happening right now at Locals, and there's lots of great stuff that happens at Locals.
When we do do Q&As after these, they'll be on Locals only.
We did one this last Wednesday.
It was great, very successful.
We do some AMAs, mostly with Brett.
Zach and I did an AMA at Locals.
We release our guest episodes early at Locals.
And our Discord server is available at Locals.
And I did want to say one thing about that.
We want to mention that the Dark Horse Discord community, which has been going strong basically since we made it available as COVID started and as we started doing these live streams in the spring of 2020, That our Discord community is grieving a loss this week.
Brian Williams, whom we did not know, has been active in that Discord community since Unity 2020, actually.
And he died this week far too soon.
And I've been told there's been an open voice chat going on for more than 24 hours celebrating him and commemorating him, and that Sunday's karaoke, which is a regular feature at the Discord community, will be held in his name.
I did not know about this.
Wow, that's sad.
It is.
It is.
So, we are going to save everything else that we would normally talk about until after the main part of the episode, but for our sponsors.
We, as usual, have three sponsors, three ads that we do right at the top of the show.
We do not read ads, we don't accept companies as sponsors unless we truly vouch for their products or services, and this week we have not one, not two, but three sponsors that are brand new to us, and we're excited about all of them.
So, without further ado, here we go.
They are Momentous, Maui Nui, Venison, and Freespoke, and the descriptions and offers are already in the video description if you're interested as we're reading these.
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He's going to the web.
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I'm betting he misspells it.
He probably will.
Yeah, he's not a good speller.
No, no, he takes after you that way.
Wow.
That's L-I-V-E-M-O.
See, if he had waited, I would have spelled it for him.
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That's Maui as in the Hawaiian island, Nui, N-U-I, Venison.
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I should just add, we had a tremendously good conversation with one of their founders and pushed them around a little bit to see whether this really was the environmentally responsible, high quality food Yeah, we knew it tasted good, but we wanted to know if all the other stories were true.
Yes, and I was amazed at the quality of the answers.
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Now, the stuff is not cheap compared to the high production stuff that you're buying at the supermarket, but when you realize all of the corners that have been cut and all of the consequences, some of them about your health, that follow from that corner cutting, you realize that this is actually extremely high quality food at a good price for the food.
Exactly.
Nutrient-dense, high-protein, and utterly delicious.
Yep.
Utterly delicious.
Absolutely.
For good reason.
Because your body can taste that it's good for you.
That's right.
All right.
Our final sponsor is FreeSpoke.
Now you may be asking yourself, what is FreeSpoke?
It is not a bicycle part welfare program.
No, sir.
It is a search engine.
And it is a search engine that is targeted to solving some of the very important problems that we face.
A long time viewers of Dark Horse know that we have talked about the Cartesian crisis which derives from the fact that we must take almost all of the information that we have at our disposal on faith from some authority who is often not especially trustworthy.
Puts us in a position of either becoming Overly credulous and believing things that are nonsense or becoming overly or becoming cynical and not believing things that we really need to believe.
So what are you going to do?
Well, I know that one of the things that I do is I often look at multiple different sources that lean different ways to the extent that all the sources that we have available to us are biased.
Looking at multiple sources so that you can correct for the bias of one by looking at the bias of the other is a pretty good solution.
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You don't need it here because this is absolutely free.
No code Dark Horse for Freespoke.
Well, you still, you can use the code.
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It's still a useful code, even if it doesn't save you anything on this excellent free product.
Yeah.
So before we launch into what we're going to be talking about today, let me say that when we started doing ads in, boy, what was it, like April of 2021?
Something like that?
A good year after we started doing these live streams, we had been resistant to taking ads.
And in fact, the first episode in which we ran any paid ads, we dedicated entirely to sort of an analysis of why we're concerned about ads in general.
And it's been a very, very interesting run.
We work with a fantastic ad broker who is utterly sympathetic to our position and understands that, you know, in our case, most of the opportunities it brings to us, we're going to say no to.
And I don't know, I think it's been almost since then that we've had an episode with three due sponsors at once.
And I'm just super thrilled about all of them.
Yeah.
Again, Free Spoke, a new kind of search engine, Momentus for excellent high-quality supplements of all sorts, and Maui Nui venison for the most nutrient-dense, protein-rich, actually wild and humanely harvested venison on the planet.
It's extraordinary.
Invasive deer brought to Hawaii by King Kamehameha the 5th, right?
I think that is right, yes.
Yeah, there's so much in that story that just didn't fit into an ad read, we'd have to do a whole episode on it.
But yeah, invasive deer that are taking over and they're not trying to eradicate them, they're trying to get them down to a limit that is then sustainable and they will only hunt to that limit and it's all extraordinary.
Yep.
All right.
Do you want to talk about Goliath first?
Or do you want to talk about... Yeah, let's talk about Goliath.
Just get this over with.
So, unfortunately, we are still enmeshed in the same saga that we talked about last time.
I will say, I am personally in a different place.
It was very unpleasant to face some of the pushback.
And feel like I needed to respond to all of it, which is the way it feels if you've ever been demonized online.
You just, you see all of the things that are being said about you that aren't true and you feel like responding to all of them.
I am now, I feel like I have moved into the next level of understanding what is going on and I of course feel much better about it because This is, frankly, about some very important stuff and the fact that it's happening is indicative of, well, the thing that triggered it when we talked about it last time.
The thing that had triggered it was my interview on Tucker Carlson, which reached something like six million people in three days and made a couple of important points.
One, it Explored the topic of the WHO pandemic preparedness treaty and it pointed out the danger of the mRNA So-called vaccines deployed against kovat.
And so anyway much pushback came But some of it came from a quadrant which I wasn't expecting which was the dissident movement who many of whom reacted very badly to my having said that That Goliath had made a terrible error by taking all of the competent people and demonizing them and shoving them out of the institutions and that in so doing he had created a kind of a dream team.
Many people felt excluded by that statement and I couldn't figure out why.
What I'm realizing now is that we have talked about a strategy that we are vulnerable to with respect to Goliath and whatever it is that Goliath wants.
And that strategy follows from the fact that Goliath, whatever it is composed of, has all of the intelligence agencies at its disposal.
And those intelligence agencies have something like all of our communication, right?
They have all of our text messages, our emails, our phone calls.
And what that means Is that if you wanted to put together a map of, let's say, a dissident community, and you wanted to figure out where the tensions were, where the blind spots were, where the resentments were, who the people were who were capable of being corrupted based on some sort of an incentive.
If you just wanted to map all of that out, And then you wanted to destroy the dissident community or neutralize it, you would have a very effective mechanism for doing so.
You could simply seed things into the online world that would cause people to pop off and go after each other, which is exactly what we are seeing.
And what I... Actually, Zach, will you show that tweet that Polly put up?
I think she put this up the day after that Tucker interview came out.
Anyway, what she has put together is a... Can you zoom in on the...
So she's put together a graphic in which she claims that all of the people pictured are the new establishment narrative gatekeepers and it contains everybody from Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and Russell Brand and Tim Poole and me and Douglas Murray and Megyn Kelly and
Zubi and John Campbell and Robert Malone, and then in a separate category, she's got the cross promotion and she's got, you know, X and Rumble and Daily Wire and Rebel News, the Blaze Info Wars.
She's got Bobby Kennedy Jr., Vivek, and Elon Musk as somehow involved.
And then over in investors, Musk again, looks like Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, I'm not sure who the fourth person is, I don't recognize him.
But in any case, This is somebody I don't know, Polly.
I take her to be a real person.
She at least does videos.
I'm sure she's not a completely phony individual.
My guess is she's a real human being.
But she has gotten herself in the situation where she is now calling all sorts of people Um, controlled opposition, limited hangout, saying that this is what the establishment wants.
And she's doing this in the immediate aftermath of what I take to be a major setback for the establishment.
The establishment was trying to get the World Health Organization to draft new rules that would give it absolute authoritarian control over the populations of most of the countries of the world in the event of a future emergency which they've so vaguely defined that it could be anything, including global warming.
Why, if I'm on that list, and I go on Tucker Carlson's program, and Tucker's on that list, and I out that plan to a larger audience than had seen it before, that seems like a setback for Goliath.
And yet, the idea is, oh, well, that's how it's supposed to look.
You would say that, because you're part of the new establishment, and this is supposed to look like you're a dissident fighting Goliath, but in fact you are Goliath.
And it's like, well, Okay.
First of all, even if you just suggest this as a paradigm, right?
Everything that looks like it's a valid challenge to Goliath is in fact Goliath misdirecting you into something.
Then how do you even do battle, right?
So my point is, if you were to imagine That one of the things that Goliath was going to do was it was going to play the resentments and the suspicions of people within the dissident group.
Of course, there will be suspicions and resentments and all of that.
If you were going to play them and get that group to destroy itself, wouldn't it look exactly like this?
I think it would.
And it reminds me of something else that we lived through, actually.
I hadn't seen that tweet before.
I hadn't seen that specific approach.
It seems quite explicit at some level.
And of course, there are alternate explanations possible.
But remember Evergreen?
The college?
Yeah.
I do.
Yeah, yeah.
It's funny, my blood pressure goes up.
Yes, so there was this new president who was hired to replace the outgoing president who was actually beyond competent, you know, not beloved by everyone because he didn't do everything that everyone wanted, but Les Peirce had been a very, very qualified president.
who left the college stronger than it was when he started, and then George Bridges came in.
And I'm trying to remember, was it 2015 that he came in?
2016?
I think it has to have been 2015.
Yeah, I think so too.
So it's going to have been fall of 2015, and one of the very first things that he did was he said, now guys, guys, guys, Our younger son used to do that when we were little.
When he was little.
Well, all right.
A little digression.
So when you have very little kids, right, you sort of exaggerate.
If you're going to get in the car to go to dinner, right, you need to get everybody excited about the thing.
And so we would do the guys, guys, guys thing.
And Toby picked that up without the follow-up of the announcement that he had gathered everybody for.
He just realized that it was guys, guys.
Yeah.
So anyway, George Bridges was never as cute as Toby, I'm sure of that.
But George Bridges, the then new and now gone president of Evergreen in fall of 2015, said, guys, guys, I've got a friend, Stan, if I remember correctly.
And I think he'd been a geology professor at UW or maybe still was at University of Washington.
And the story was, was, okay, we of course can't talk to all the faculty, but I'm going to have Stan come around and talk to select faculty and just figure out, like, what your aspirations are for the college, what you dream of for this school that I've just been hired to be at, and it's amazing, and just such a, you know, such a clearly glorious place, and I'd love to know what more you think it can be.
And, of course, just that setup means that if you get the call, okay, you know, can you spare an hour, um, you know, to spend sitting down with Stan?
He'll come to you, he'll come to your office and, uh, and, you know, chat with you in your office.
Um, of course, it was the very rare, if not the non-existent faculty, who would say, I don't have time for this, right?
Um, so Stan came and talked to you, and he talked to me, and he talked to, well, it turned out we'd later heard pretty much everyone, right?
So it wasn't actually a selective group, but you were made to feel like it was selective because that was part of how they guarantee that you would talk.
And then in the conversations, it became a little bit clear.
And then once we started comparing notes about all the conversations that we're having, or, you know, some of us started comparing notes about what had been said and what Stan had asked in these conversations, what he was really doing was digging for dirt on relationships within faculty and between faculty and staff.
And I'm not talking about like romantic liaisons.
I'm talking about where were the allies?
Where were the enmities?
Where were the problems and the historical feuds and the unresolved irritations?
And he effectively mapped us.
The new president came in and brought his guy, who was this esteemed academic from the premier research institution in the state, And had him sit down with us in just kind of like a buddy-buddy way and he mapped our tensions.
And this then allowed the new president to use that map of the social tensions on the Evergreen faculty and staff to divide and conquer.
And he went and befriended the activist faculty and promised them goodies, and any time anyone would appear to stray, he promised them more goodies.
And he offered you a bunch of goodies, and you kept saying no, much to his surprise and distress.
Yeah, he asked me what I wanted.
Yeah, he asked you what you wanted.
And at that point, I was on sabbatical, so he didn't have an opportunity to ask me what I wanted.
But yeah, this is what he did.
He used someone to map our social tensions, and that map I don't know if what ended up happening at Evergreen would have been possible without that map.
Well, I agree entirely with the parallel.
This is like a mini Goliath, right?
Evergreen was a microcosm of all of it.
It was a microcosm of the academic insanity, the intersectional nonsense.
It was a microcosm of all of that, and then it became a microcosm of Goliath's divide-and-conquer strategy, where you had a faculty which was unusually strong.
Administrations usually have a lot of control over faculty, but at Evergreen that wasn't true, and so dividing the faculty was necessary in order to transform the college.
So by strong, you mean that the faculty had power to affect administrative decisions and the direction of the college in a way that at most colleges and universities, while it may seem to outsiders like the faculty are driving things, and it may even feel to some faculty like, of course they must be driving things.
In fact, faculty have almost no power in most places.
Right.
Especially junior faculty who are forced to comply with everything until they've gotten tenure.
That was not true at Evergreen, and so Bridges needed a plan to divide us against each other in order to be able to override what would otherwise have been too often a reflexive veto by faculty who didn't trust administrators because they saw it as a mirror of the management versus labor dynamic, right?
Which it never had been.
Right, it never had been, and so that was a blind spot of the faculty.
But look, I want to tell on myself Because I see a mirror beyond just simply what Bridges pulled off.
I didn't like Bridges from the very moment I laid eyes on him.
I really did not trust the guy.
There was something about him that... Yeah, from during the hiring process, I remember.
From during the hiring process, I really did not want to see this guy ascend, and I can't remember... there was some... couldn't be avoided.
When he arrived and he announced that his friend Stan was going to interview us, I thought, well, okay, here's this guy that I really don't trust, but he is not doing the thing that I would fear he was going to do, which is come in and start changing stuff based on his vision of the college.
He is at least listening to us first, and he wants to hear what it is that's really going on here, which would be important because teaching at Evergreen, if you did it right, wasn't like teaching anywhere else.
So my sense was my guard went down as I watched somebody behave in a way that I thought was laudable.
And I felt like, okay, it is incumbent on me to give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
And I did sit down with Stan and I told him what I thought because I thought if this guy's going to play, if he's going to be a good president, then I'm going to give him good information.
Give him good information, which turns out to have been a major mistake.
And the reason that I say that I'm telling on myself is that I see, and I'm not sure what the alternative to this is.
I don't know that I made an error there.
Obviously, in retrospect, given that the guy was a maniac, I wish I hadn't given him any information.
Right.
But I mean, I just want to specify, like, neither you nor I talked about other faculty in those conversations.
But we know what the questions were, and we know that he was constantly asking us to, okay, but what about this problem over here?
In my case, he was specifically focused on, like, What's going on at the museum?
You're a curator, there's other curators, and there were tensions, serious tensions, but why are you so focused on that?
There were these bells, but... Well, but, you know, everything constitutes a weaponizable piece of information in this context.
Even just knowing what a good classroom looked like and why it worked, right?
What the relationship with the deans was.
All of that stuff armed him.
And it also, I think, Got you and me selected as targets because it became obvious in this context that, you know, we could stare down pretty much any challenge to us because we had classes overflowing with students who almost all ended up happy at the end of that process.
And so there wasn't, you know, in a in a cash strapped situation that gave us a lot of leeway to just simply say, no, that isn't true.
It's not how it works here.
So.
Anyway, but the larger point is this.
I did have suspicions about George.
They were right.
I extended him the benefit of the doubt at the point that he indicated something that I thought was a positive sign, and that turned me into a sucker.
Now the problem is, the alternative to being a sucker in that case is to be a cynic, and to have it be impossible for somebody to demonstrate that they actually are on the right side.
And so would I prefer to be a cynic who, you know, yes was right about George the whole time, but Um, would have been wrong about anybody trying to do the job correctly?
No.
Which error do you prefer to make?
Right.
And in this case, the point is what is the presumption, right?
There's a lot of stuff about COVID where obviously this was phony baloney from the beginning.
And I'm not saying that COVID was phony baloney.
But the response to it was not well intended.
We now know that because effectively everything that might have been useful was shut down and everything that wasn't useful was promoted and that can't be an accident.
That pattern is too broad and... Go ahead.
Well, let me just say, I mean, we started saying at some point, I don't remember exactly when, like, literally do the opposite of what they're telling you to do and you will be better off.
Even, like, a static rule is almost never the right thing to do, but if you just listen to what they say and you do the opposite, you will do better than acting randomly.
Certainly that was not our position at first, right?
Our position at first, we assumed at first that what was coming in reflected everyone's good faith attempt to make sense of a chaotic and emerging situation.
And that was certainly what we were doing.
And it did not seem at that point that everything was wrong, because as we talked about on the last episode, you know, we were in favor of masks at first and very limited lockdowns.
But very quickly they started to make errors that seemed so grossly negligent was my interpretation at the time, not my interpretation now, with regard to, you know, not letting people go outside and putting caution tape on playgrounds and using bulldozers to fill in skate parks and chasing people down beaches to tell them to get back inside with sick people or, you know, whatever.
Like, very, very clearly it became, it became, very, very early it became clear, but it wasn't clear from the beginning.
Like, we did not approach it with a, everything they say is wrong, because if you approach anything with a, everything X says is wrong, you are going to miss, you're going to miss things.
And this is, this is a point that we have made many, many times, but You know, to be completely cynical is just as rife with error as it is to be completely faithful in such a situation.
There are still those who, if it comes down the pike from CNN or MSNBC, they say, okay, God's honest truth.
And there are still those who say, if it comes from them, it must be wrong.
Now, I'm closer to that second position now, but it's still a matter of assessment.
And so skepticism involves assessment, whereas cynicism and faith say, I'm going to set up a static rule and I'm just going to follow that no matter what, and that's the error.
It's the error, and the only reason that cynicism worked in this case was that for whatever reason, the thing on the other side was committed to a program of doing the inverse of what was right for the public.
And so anyway, yes, that did end up being a better rubric, and we would have been better off if we had all treated these people with that cynicism.
But the problem is, You have to decide what your orientation to a new emerging situation is.
Is your presumption going to be that, you know, the experts are telling you something real?
You know, maybe that should no longer be our expectation.
We've seen the expert class has invalidated their own expertise by doubling down on nonsense over the course of multiple years.
But was that the correct orientation at the beginning?
My feeling is We were suckers because these people were worse than we had imagined.
We leveled up quickly and well and that that's what you should do.
Now my feeling is I'm not I recognize that the cynics were right in this case, right?
They get a claim on that rightness.
People who leveled up, I have no problem with, and we have all leveled up to different places.
There's real disagreement over what actually happened and what it means, and that's healthy, right?
That's what you want, is you want that discussion to have people who are willing to outline each of the positions and do so forcefully so that we can figure out which ones are the most robust.
That's all to the good.
Demonizing each other, however, is insane.
And what I came to understand in looking at all of this pushback and thinking carefully about it, and certainly thinking about Goliath and what it might want, is that there is this shocking mirror.
It's really like a mirror.
It's the exact same thing on a different topic.
This is DEI, right?
You have a large number of people who are motivated by resentment or In their minds not being included, and I'm not saying they were or they weren't, as it was with DEI, you and I said from the beginning, is there lots of unequal opportunity that actually would be good to remedy?
Absolutely.
There are lots of people who are excluded from Scientific fields, let's say, because of the zip code that they were born in, which put the getting into some field that they might be very good at that much farther away, and it had nothing to do with their personal characteristics.
It has to do with the misfortune of a history of oppression, right?
In the same way, it may be that there are lots of people in the dissident community who paid a price and didn't find themselves rescued by public attention.
For reasons of bad luck or reasons of the deafness of some of us.
I don't know.
But, nonetheless, a argument for the redistribution of attention.
Here is a bunch of people whose faces you know.
Don't listen to them, right?
They're the establishment.
They're the old white men, right?
You want to listen to these other people who are the true blue dissidents, okay?
That sounds a lot like And what's more, it is very focused, right?
So they've been going after me over my early support of masks.
And to be honest with you, I'm not exactly sure, you know, I certainly thought masks might stand a chance of being helpful.
And I certainly thought for adults that they were not a huge concession.
As for mandates, that's a different question.
But nonetheless, even though I have many times publicly said my stance on masks was wrong, I have acknowledged that, and other people had it right, they are not interested in the fact that I have corrected the error.
Their point is, we're not satisfied until you deliver an apology, which sounds exactly like this mob mentality.
Let me just be clear about this.
Correcting my errors is my responsibility in this case.
Here is why apology is a completely inappropriate thing to demand.
Some of you will remember I've discussed the first lesson I ever gave as a professor, the first assignment, which was to write on the question of why an apology works.
It's just people saying stuff, vibrating air molecules.
Why, if you've been injured by somebody, does them saying, I'm sorry I injured you, have any material meaning at all?
It doesn't un-injure you, does it?
Well, yeah, it does in a couple of different ways.
One, if somebody Harms you and they acknowledge it.
Then A, they are making it much harder for them to make that same mistake later because they are making eye contact with it.
B, and more importantly, they are giving you effectively an IOU.
You were damaged by something I did and therefore I am in your debt.
My apology is a debt.
Now here's the point.
I have corrected my error.
I have made eye contact with what I did wrong.
Does it make it impossible I will do it wrong again?
Nope.
But it does make it more likely because I have consciously been through it a hundred times.
Do I owe you an apology because I've injured you?
No, because if you look at the sum total of what you and I did over the course of COVID, at the same time where we were too credulous on the question of whether or not masks might function, we were shouting at the top of our lungs about the fact that it made no sense to be keeping people out of outdoor environments or masking them outdoors.
That never made any sense to us.
You and I built a model of The effective volume of a space as it related to the transmissibility of COVID, which meant that you could actually adjust your behavior.
If you were getting into a car, the danger to you was much greater.
If you were in a large auditorium, the danger was much less.
If you open the windows in the car, the danger goes down.
So the point is, if you take all of the things that we talked about, If we take our assessment of the safety of the so-called vaccines, if you take our analysis of what kinds of behaviors might make you safer, being outside, getting sun exposure, supplementing with vitamin D, etc.
If you take the net of all of the stuff we did, you ended up way better off.
And so in demanding an apology, it is like saying, imagine that some army was fighting a great battle against some terrible enemy, and it won the war, but it lost some battles.
Does that army owe you an apology for the battles it lost?
No.
The net effect of that army was positive on you.
There were things, maybe those battles were lost because of errors that were made.
Still, apology is the wrong thing to be demanding.
So my point is, The net effect of the divisions inside the Dissident community will be to embolden and empower Goliath.
No question about it.
Are there some limited hangouts and controlled opposition in the Dissident community?
I'd be shocked if there weren't.
It would be a crazy error for Goliath not to have seeded that community with a certain amount of that stuff.
But let's be clear, we don't know who those people are and, you know, peeking into every statement or claim and imagining that you can see this stuff, you can't.
You might see it as a result of a pattern of things, but... Well, I mean, to the degree that the complaints here are honest and organic and real.
I think it does also reveal this position that many of us feel that we're in, which is this… This crazy making moment, which has now gone on for years, which forces you to question just about every relationship you have.
How did they come into my life?
How long have I known them?
What have they said?
What have they known that surprised me?
What haven't they known that surprised me?
What are the chances that they are who they say they are?
This is no way to live.
This is absolutely no way to live a life.
It's exhausting, and it makes you paranoid, and it makes you seem like a crazy person.
So, are, you know, are other people also finding themselves having to do this?
Yes, no doubt, of course.
And will absolutely honest and honorable actors in, you know, in this landscape find themselves questioned?
Yes, obviously, and you are being, and I have been, and there are many others who have been and will be, who don't actually deserve that.
But you have to look skeptically at the entire landscape in order to have some chance of discovering who those people who are actually acting as controlled opposition and such might be.
That said, it's pointed not only I can say for sure that I know that you're not that and this is actually so I recorded a podcast yesterday and he and he asked the very last question Sean Newman asked me was what to what do you attribute the length of your relationship Our relationship.
Our ability to do what we appear to do and have been doing for decades.
Presuming that as all people, as all two people have, we have conflicts, we have arguments, we get emotional, we feel betrayed when we're not, we feel betrayed when we are, like all of these things are true.
And one of the things that I said was, For, you know, since Evergreen basically, but since before that actually, we have had to question so many people whom we thought we knew, who turned out to not be who we thought, and then we welcomed in so many new people into our world.
Most of whom have turned out to be extraordinary, but you can't ever know if they're new, right?
Like if you don't have the history, there is no replacement for having the history with someone.
And that no matter what, no matter, you know, how difficult a time you and I may be having personally, which is not that common, but of course it happens.
We know that we are who we say we are.
We are true.
You are true, I am true, and we are true to one another, but I'm not talking about loyalty here.
I'm talking about we've known each other since we were young.
We met at 16, right?
So that is part of why these movements like Black Lives Matter are so dangerous when they say, we're going to try to tear apart the nuclear family.
Like, who else am I utterly sure of?
My children.
Right?
Our children.
They may end up believing things that we don't understand, that we wish they didn't, they may end up doing things that we wish they didn't, but we know who they are, and we know who they have been from the beginning.
And even though I haven't known you since birth, I know you, and I know that these accusations are, you know, to the extent that they are good faith, they are wrong, and to the extent that they are themselves part of Goliath, or controlled opposition, or whatever, well then, we can see you, or we can at least interpret that that is one possibility of what is happening here.
Yeah, I mean, I would say You have to be open to the possibility.
I don't even mind the question.
If somebody says, hey, how do I know you're not controlled opposition?
I'm perfectly comfortable having that discussion with them.
And, you know, I will lean heavily on if I were controlled opposition.
How does that map on to what you can establish yourself, origin story as far as being in the public eye, what, you know, what I have stood for and how you think that fits with what Goliath would want me to be doing, right?
So we, you know, we can narrow it down and I'm, I'm...
Comfortable with the idea that I can be 100% certain.
I can't be certain that I'm not being steered by some force that feeds me things that cause me to act in ways that are in violation of my values.
That could be.
But I'm not a willing participant on Goliath's team, right?
I don't get a paycheck from Goliath and I take myself to be Goliath's enemy.
So anyway, but you know, I know that.
You don't know that.
But you can have an estimate about the likelihood that that's true, and my guess is for most people, especially if you know me in person, but even if you've just spent a lot of time watching Dark Horse or, you know, interviews with other people, it's pretty unlikely that Goliath would come up with me as a fake human.
But here's the thing.
You mentioned The experience of people disappointing us and other people shining in crisis.
And I realized over the last few days that that was happening again.
And I hate it, right?
That crisis does this.
I've called it the painful upgrade, where people you thought you could rely on, you can't.
And then people show up out of nowhere that surprise you.
And the net effect of this is very positive, but the pain of discovering that somebody you thought you could trust isn't trustworthy is quite severe.
Yeah.
And I would just say that, you know, this is happening right now on both fronts, right?
We are seeing people who absolutely should know better, right?
You know, it Tempting to point a few of them out, but my guess is you know who you are, right?
There are a bunch of people who, you know, there are disagreements that we have inside of the dissident community.
You know, there are people who believe there was no pathogen.
I know what evidence they're looking at.
I don't agree with them, but the point is that's not a...
We can either, you know, either COVID was made to look much more dangerous than it was, or we're talking about some other pathogen, or there was no pathogen.
I'm open to that possibility.
But in any case, people have turned these disagreements into fundamental critiques about the quality of one's character, and they've started using litmus tests.
And this, again, is exactly what Goliath would want.
Whether or not Goliath is behind it, I can't say for sure, but my guess is, given Goliath's history disrupting organizations from the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the environmental movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, all of these things.
There's a history of getting movements to turn on themselves.
And of course it would be doing that now.
So we should be expecting it.
Now on the positive side, I wanted to highlight...
Actually, there's one negative and one positive.
The positive side, somebody alerted me to a piece that Scott Adams did in a...
I think yesterday's Coffee with Scott Adams.
And I haven't checked in with Scott Adams in a long time...
We had some disagreements during COVID about what was going on, and then at some point he said something which I still quite disagree with.
He said something In the context of a battle over race relations that basically one side was cheating and he advised white people to get away from dark-skinned people.
I know what he meant, and the reason I disagreed with him about that was that I feel like we have an obligation to take care of those who, you know, dark-skinned people who aren't playing DEI are in need of our allegiance.
And so, anyway, I didn't think it was simple.
Scott did a segment in his recent Coffee with Scott Adams that he covered the pushback on the Tucker Carlson discussion that I had.
And he also covers the mass question and he talks about it from a risk management perspective.
Anyway, I was impressed with the quality of what he said, not just that he was supportive, which is, of course, nice, but the quality of his analysis and his willingness to push back on his own audience, actually, some of which was reflexive in their dismissal of this.
Yeah, I will just say I haven't listened to all of it, and he does say, OK, now I'm going to spend some time critiquing Brett.
And so he's very forthright and honest.
He says, you need more bread.
And he salutes your ability to explain complicated things and your bravery and your dedication to following the data where it takes you.
And I of course agree.
I mean, I get a lot of you, but I still think the world needs more bread.
You don't need more bread, but other people might.
Yeah, and it was truly heartening to see this bit from him.
Yeah, it was good.
Now, I did want to clarify one thing.
I wasn't sure.
The little pushback that he gave was somebody challenged me online how they couldn't figure out how anybody educated as I was could possibly have thought that a mask would stop a virus, given the relative size of the holes in the mask and the tininess of the virus.
And I responded, I said, Riddle, why would anybody think that you could affect the spread of malaria with a window screen, given the size of the holes in the window screen and the size of the plasmodium particle?
And some people didn't understand that I wasn't challenging the effectiveness of window screens relative to malaria, that I was pointing out that there's more going on.
The viruses aren't traveling through the air unattached to other things.
They're traveling through respiratory droplets.
Right.
And so in the case of malaria, it's traveling on an insect.
In the case of COVID, it's traveling on a water droplet.
But it's not a simple matter of The size of the hole and the size of the pathogen.
And at first I thought that Scott had misunderstood what I said, but then he seemed to correct, of course.
So anyway, if anybody was confused by this, what I was trying to say was, welcome to complex systems.
Sometimes the size of A and the size of B isn't the story because there's some third-party C that is relevant.
From non-pathogen land, we have a few colanders, and one of them has pretty big holes, and yet it collects spaghetti just fine.
Occasionally, you'll get a piece of spaghetti that hits it just right and can go through, but in general, because of the shape of the thing, even though its diameter may be smaller than the holes in the vessel, that doesn't mean that mostly it goes through.
Yeah, that's a good point, that's a good point.
Rice, not so good.
Rice, you want to use a strainer rather than a colander.
Yeah, you do.
But okay, so anyway, really appreciate it.
Actually, I didn't, when somebody pointed me to the Scott Adams thing, I didn't pick up that his discussion of me was very late in the coffee thing, so I listened to the whole thing, which was actually really interesting.
Scott has a pretty advanced perspective politically across the whole map.
He covers multiple topics and I thought it was well worth a listen.
We'll post it in the show notes.
Yeah, so anyway, appreciated the support and appreciated the nuance in what Scott had to say.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I was also pointed to David Pakman.
David Pakman, who reacted to the Tucker interview and put up his own little video taking me to task and using this very unfortunate screenshot.
But anyway, Pakman... Because of course he did.
Of course he did.
Well, I don't know where that screenshot came from, so sometimes YouTube picks stuff that's weird, but let's put that aside.
David is, of course, scandalized by my having referenced Dennis Rancourt's work suggesting 17 million deaths so far from COVID vaccination.
He goes through a bizarre, in my opinion, refutation of Rancourt's number.
Rancourt explores the question of excess deaths and the timing relative to I don't think it's conclusive, but I think it's quite compelling evidence that the timing suggests that the excess deaths are not the result of COVID and are the result of the vaccination campaign.
Hackman refutes this and he acknowledges that he's playing with anecdotes here, but he goes through a rhetorical interchange with his audience who he can't hear answering, but his point was Does anybody know anyone who had a serious vaccine injury?
No, I don't think maybe one or two of you do, but almost nobody does.
So he's just talking to himself?
Yeah.
Does anybody know anybody?
That's not an anecdote.
That's pretending to be anecdote.
Right.
It's like a pseudo-thought anecdote.
And I will say, I saw your thing.
I'm in your audience, I guess, David.
I know lots of people who were hurt.
Actually, you know some of them.
You don't know others, and I'm not going to out them.
But yeah, the number of people who I know who actually did have a serious adverse event, including one person— Many of whom are still hiding that fact because somehow being injured is now itself a crime.
It's a moral crime to have been injured by something the government told you to take.
What's more, somebody who was a friend of mine got an injury, and I interviewed him about it.
And that's on Dark Horse.
So this is somebody, I didn't pick him because he was injured.
He and I knew each other before he was injured.
He believed the shots were a good idea, got one, was severely injured.
I then got him to a doctor who knew how to treat his injury, and he's much better.
But nonetheless, the number of people in our circle who do have a serious injury, and the number of famous people... Well, I mean, so the, you know, the thing that will come back there is because we are people who have been talking about the lack of safety and efficacy of these vaccines, of course we will collect such stories.
I will not.
That is also true, but we know people, many people, whom we knew before COVID ever existed who have been vaccine injured.
That's right.
People who we knew, and that really is a measure.
Yeah, you can't use the other because it could just be an attractor.
But no, the number of people that we know, we knew beforehand, who have a serious injury is substantial.
And if you don't, David, my guess is, and I've said this before, you need to ask the question in such a way that people will give you the answer.
If you go around demonizing people who talk about vaccine injuries, and then you say, by the way, anybody got one?
Yeah, no kidding, those people won't be in your audience at a very high level, and they won't be in your social circles.
And if they are in your social circles, they're going to be quiet about it because you're asking them to out themselves as the enemy.
And I think the thing that is very difficult to talk about, well, to get appreciation for is how many people We know and how many other people we know who in turn know many people who are vaccine injured and are not out even many in many other cases to their families, to their employers, to their friends who are skeptical that anyone is getting injured.
So again it's this it's considered a moral failing you know just as it used to be just as you know being a woman in Victorian era In Victorian times, it was a moral failing of some sort, right?
It is considered a moral failing by people like David Pakman to have been vaccine-injured.
That is diabolical.
But what that does do is it changes the behavior of those people who have been vaccine-injured, not all of them by any means, but it is certain We know some of these people, and we know many others by reputation, by, you know, two degrees of separation, that many people who have been injured and who are able to obscure it in some way try to pass, and they are successful in passing.
And yes, it's not the usual context in which you hear passing referred to, but there are a lot of people out there right now who are passing as being vaccinated and being just fine, but no more boosters, thank you very much.
But actually, what went into that decision to not take any more boosters was the fact that they were injured by the previous iteration.
Yes, he has got a self-reinforcing pattern.
It does not match What one sees from a different perspective, lots of injured people.
He then goes on to use, so Rain Court looks at many different countries and looks at the independent data sets of deaths, which are very Studiously recorded in all nations, or virtually all nations, and Pacman thinks he refutes it based on his thought experiment, which is deeply flawed.
He says he knows nobody who was vaccine injured, and he knows several people who died from COVID.
Now I would point out, Chances that the people he knows that quote-unquote died of COVID were also vaccinated and therefore you have to ask the question of what were the factors that contributed to their death is high.
And given how many people are asymptomatic when testing positive for COVID, and given how many people have been very, very sick while never testing positive for COVID, COVID is clearly a fellow traveler for some people, and many deaths that have been attributed to COVID were not of COVID, but with COVID.
But with COVID, which is something Rancourt covers very carefully.
Finally, Going from Rancourt's study, which covers many different nations, Pacman claims to refute it on the basis of a pattern he says took place in Peru.
Now, I watched Rancourt's presentation.
Rancourt is very careful to point out those circumstances in which a pattern goes in the other direction.
I suggest David Pakman have Dennis Rancourt on and they can have this out.
If David, if you think you've got this analysis beat, then you should definitely have Dennis Rancourt on and you can humiliate him and the world will know that this, uh, these excess deaths are not the result of the vaccine campaign and you will have done a lot of good in your, in your mind.
I don't think that's what's going to happen.
And finally, I would just say, Pac-Man, at the very end of his little piece, says that five years ago, he would have thought I was too smart to fall for the idea that these vaccines are causing substantial excess deaths.
And Now he's caught between two possibilities.
One possibility is that I'm lying, and the other is that I don't get it.
And he has a little debate.
He says lying is worse, but these things are both horrifying.
He has that little debate with himself?
Yeah.
Let me clarify this for him.
I'm not lying, David, and I don't think you know what you're talking about.
So I suggest have Dennis Rancourt on.
I'm not saying Dennis Rancourt's number is right, but I do think it's credible.
I think the methodology is valid and the nature of excess deaths is that one has to infer based on other evidence what would be causing them, which Rancourt is careful about.
So if you think you've got this one nailed, then show us.
All right.
And one other thing, which I think we just have to pay the rent on.
We showed a clip on Wednesday of a podcaster who took me to task falsely for having claimed Jewish genetic superiority.
Right.
Um, we pointed out that I had never said that.
I don't believe it.
And, um, to his credit, he checked into the matter and apologized and corrected the record.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Well, no, no, this isn't on him.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
You want to show the screenshot from Foster?
So he corrected the record.
I thanked him for it publicly.
Next thing I see from him says, YouTube has now deleted all my videos from my channel without notice or reason.
Take this as a sign that I'm doing the right thing.
Now, let us talk about what predicament we are in.
I don't know if this guy is for real.
This obviously could be a ploy, but it could also be next level chess by Goliath.
Yeah.
Right?
This could be, if you wanted to make it look like I was on Goliath's team, Then removing this guy's videos in the aftermath of that exchange might make it look like that.
Now, again, I don't know what's going on.
I don't know.
You know, it's a hall of mirrors, so take it for what it's worth.
But in my opinion, One should act with generosity towards dissidents.
One should have forgiveness in their hearts if people level up.
But there are a lot of people who are taking themselves off the Dream Team.
Nobody's excluding them.
And they're taking themselves off the dream team by deciding that it's an exclusive club and that they get to decide who is sufficiently hardcore to be on it.
My feeling is anybody who's trying to do the right thing has courage and insight is on the team.
And you don't get thrown off for honest errors.
Yeah.
And hardcore does not come with cynicism and certainty.
Cynicism and certainty actually are going to occasionally yield the right answers, but in general are going to make for a less flexible, less powerful toolkit with which to understand the world.
Yep.
Should we move on?
Yeah, let's move on.
I'm going to talk about Boeing and the FAA and DEI and other letters and apparently random but not actually that random orders.
Very good.
All right.
Okay, so everyone will know, have heard about this Alaska Air Flight out of Portland that some small number of minutes after takeoff, it was I think three miles up, a mid-cabin door blew out just after takeoff.
Both seats next to the door were unoccupied, everyone in the plane survived, and in the aftermath the FAA has grounded several 737-9 MAX, is the specific, planes across the industry until they can get full checkups.
Uh, and, uh, there is, um, here's, here's the first thing the FAA put out.
You want to show my screen here, Zach?
This is their Emergency Airworthiness Directive, dated January 6th.
Uh, the background is, um, just as I said, this Emergency AD, this Emergency Airworthiness Directive was prompted by a report of an in-flight departure of a mid-cabin door plug.
In-flight departure.
Departure.
Yes.
It's a very odd turn of phrase.
Which resulted in a rapid decompression of the airplane.
The FAA is issuing this airworthiness directive to address the potential in-flight loss of a mid-cabin door plug, which could result in injury to passengers and crew, the door impacting the airplane, and or loss of control of the airplane.
That is all written about some hypothetical future event, although it clearly did just happen, which is why this EAD is happening.
And yes, the in-flight departure.
unauthorized departure of the jar from the flight.
Did not take a hall pass.
No, exactly, didn't get a hall pass.
So that's what they're responding to.
Can I say a few things about this event first?
Maybe you're headed here.
Let me just say a couple more things first.
The EAD, it's sort of a long technical document, but another thing it says is this Emergency Airworthiness Directive, as issued by the FAA on January 6th, Sixth.
Sixth.
Quote, requires operators to inspect affected aircraft before further flight.
The required inspections will take around four to eight hours per aircraft and the EAD will affect approximately 171 airplanes worldwide.
So unfortunately one of the downstream effects of this of course is that Alaska Air's stock is is going down and this It has nothing to do with Alaska, right?
This is Boeing.
This is about Boeing having produced a bunch of aircraft, and this is not the first time that this particular model of aircraft has come under scrutiny for maintenance and safety issues.
And, you know, Alaska happens to have been the unfortunate carrier where there was an incident, but it was about the plane being one of these Boeing 737-9 MAX planes, not the fact that it was Alaska.
And I say that, like, I cannot believe that I'm a fan of any airline, but Alaska is, you know, hubs out of Seattle.
And we've ended up flying a lot of airlines in the last few years, and Alaska is heads above every other carrier.
And so, you know, I just feel bad for them that they happened to have been the one that had the door take an unexcused absence from the plane.
And so then on January 11th, a couple days later, they... I want to talk about the incident itself.
But they say, this incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again.
And I lost the rest of the statement.
So go for it.
Okay, there are some facts about this that people should understand.
One, from the inside of the plane, it was not apparent that there was even a door there.
Okay?
This is a door that is built in so that you can have a door there if you want, and on the Alaska versions of this plane, that door from the inside of the plane just looked like another window seat.
Which is why there were seats sitting right next to it.
Right.
Right, because we don't... Well, no, there are lots of exit rows that have a seat right next to them.
That's true.
The important thing about this is that because this happened right after takeoff, I think they were, you said... Three miles up.
I think it was 10,000 some odd feet up.
But anyway, whatever.
Maybe I have that wrong.
Nonetheless, it wasn't 30 plus thousand feet.
And what that means is two things.
One... Three miles, 4.8 kilometers.
Okay.
Seven minutes after takeoff.
So, A, the pressure differential between the inside and the outside of the plane was much lower than it would ultimately have been, which has... The plane was at an altitude at which people can breathe without assistance.
Right, absolutely, absolutely.
But that also means that the violence of the unexcused absence of this door was much reduced, yet it still pulled seats out of the playing.
I don't think that happened.
You don't think that happened?
No, I don't find any evidence that that happened.
The two seats nearest the door plug that departed without the due authority were empty and there was no mortality, I think even no injuries on the plane, but I don't think any seats got...
The point is, the violence of the decompression was much lower than it would have been, and also that means that the stress necessary to push this plug out of the wall of the plane was lower than it might have been, too.
So the degree to which this plane had been compromised and nobody had known about it was much greater than you would imagine, because it took much less of a differential in pressure to blow the door out.
So you can understand, I mean, in my opinion, I don't know that the FAA isn't going to have some responsibility for having licensed this plane in a form where such things could happen, but the FAA did the right thing grounding these planes.
They need to all be inspected, because to the extent that something that could blow this plug out at that low altitude Uh, was capable of doing it.
Yes, that could be a fluke, something that happened to one plane.
But, you know, there's a reason that air travel is as safe as it is, and that's because checks are thorough, and things are built fail-safe, and you know, whatever cracks they're ultimately gonna find, or whatever it is, You know, cracks in something, bad rivets, I don't know, but whatever it was should have been noticed many times before this was able to happen.
There should have been, you know, and in fact there was, I think, something about a pressure light having fired multiple times indicating that there was some breach that should have resulted in an inspection.
So, 171 planes are grounded until they undergo four to eight hour safety checks worldwide, but that is all what it is.
But now there's a kerfuffle, a hubbub generated, because James Lindsay unearthed some documents from Boeing that suggest that maybe we actually could have kind of seen this coming.
And I'm going to start, however, with the Elon Musk tweet in which he quote tweets James.
Because that, of course, is what got the attention of the mainstream media who are trying to downplay this.
So I'm going to walk through first what Musk says about what Lindsay says and what the mainstream media says about Musk before going into some of the nitty-gritty of what Lindsay has actually unearthed.
So here is the tweet by Musk.
Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritize DEI hiring over your safety?
That is actually happening.
And that is a quote tweet of the initial tweet in Lindsay's thread, which we're going to look at a little bit more later.
But the initial tweet of James's is, let's have a close look at Boeing and DEI.
Boeing's corporate filings with the SEC reveal that in the beginning of 2022, The annual bonus plan to reward CEO and executives for increasing profit for shareholders and prioritizing safety was changed to reward them if they hit DEI targets.
And specifically here is it's a Boeing proxy statement 2022 proxy statement in which in 2021 Executives, their operational performance areas that were being looked at were product safety, employee safety, and quality.
And those did not disappear in 2022, but they were added to.
So now you also have climate and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Okay, so we had three areas by which executives at Boeing were being assessed in 2021, and in 2022 that has changed.
We've got two more areas, climate and DEI, if I may, Zach.
The mainstream media Basically, he says in response to this, how could Musk be so crass and ridiculous, right?
What actually is he doing?
So we have at Barrett, there's a number of these articles, of course, but we have here At Barron's, Elon Musk says Boeing has a diversity problem.
The evidence says otherwise.
Let's see if I can find a particularly remarkable paragraph.
Here we go.
Starting here.
Musk's tweet is also misleading.
Safety is still used to determine bonuses.
Sadly, this is a quote now, as a key international figure and icon, Musk is being inflammable.
I like that.
And taking the DEI out of context, says Kristen Hull, founder of NIA Impact Capital.
Quote again, if you look at the bonus incentive, the language is adding DEI as an additional focus criterion, not taking away focus on safety.
It's not either or, said the woman who called Musk inflammable.
You know, apparently she has neither linguistic nor quantitative skills, right?
So, like, you had three things that they were being assessed on, and now you have five.
Unless these executives were working at 60% capacity, and they just had a lot more room to do a lot more stuff, and therefore you can just add more stuff in and not take away from the stuff that they were doing, in which case those are some pretty overpaid executives, I would think, and they needed to have some better executives there in the first place.
If these executives were actually working at full capacity, which we generally expect executives of major corporations to do, You add two more things to a list that was only three long of things that they are going to be incentivized to be excellent at, and what's going to suffer?
The other things that they were supposed to be focusing on, which again, was product quality and employee quality, and I believe it was safety.
Obviously.
So you have pointed to one obvious trade-off cost here, that to the extent that you have added an extra criteria and you expect a decrease in the success on the other criteria to drop, unless the thing was fatally underperforming to begin with.
Precisely.
But here's the other thing.
Is in this case, there's a very specific reason.
It isn't just that you've added something else that would be nice to accomplish, but that to accomplish a diversity, equity, and inclusion goal implies hiring different people.
We'll get there.
But my point is, that's two distinct trade-off reasons that you should expect this problem to happen.
Well, given what the standards are, we don't yet know how it is that they're going to happen, right?
So I'm trying to just be very clear.
This Kristen Hull character, who apparently has tried to give Musk grief in the past – I don't know if she's a gnat in his world, or he doesn't know who she is at all, or if she's actually a player – But given that there's just, you know, five areas now, we don't know how any of them are being implemented.
We don't actually know, you know, product safety, employee safety, quality were the areas before, and now we've got climate, which I assume means like global climate, and we have no idea, you know, this is Boeing.
What are they going to do?
They've got a climate problem, right?
And then diversity, equity, inclusion.
Now, probably, And we will see actually from James's further research into this, I'll show you a couple things, how they're going to do that is by hiring disproportionately based on demographic characteristics as opposed to based on merit.
In which case, obviously safety and product quality and probably product safety and employee safety and quality are going to take a hit.
But given that we don't know, they don't specify, we All we can say from this, from what we are seeing right here, is actually if you had three standards that you were being assessed on and now you've got five, unless you were wildly underperforming before, those three initial standards will be done to a lower level now.
Well, I disagree with you a little bit, because if you had discrimination In Boeing's hiring policy, then actually you could increase both diversity, equity, and inclusion and merit at the same time.
But absent that, because... If you were discriminating against French people.
Every so often a French person is going to be the most qualified person for the job and some fraction of the time they should get the job, they won't.
And so you won't have the best people in the job.
The best people in the job comes from a completely colorblind and sexblind application process in which merit is the only thing that causes you to get hired.
And you may find afterwards, I don't know why you would at a company like Boeing, but you may find afterwards, oh, we've got an overrepresentative of French people.
Right.
Or it's the NBA.
We've got an over-representative of tall people, and the tall people are often the darker-skinned people.
And we weren't trying to do that, we swear, but that's what happened.
Yeah, we're trying to win games, and it resulted in a non-random sample of the population.
OK, so my point is, look, if there was discrimination, that's bad for merit.
If there was no discrimination, then DEI is bad for merit, because what it does is it forces you to add other considerations that then compete with merit.
And that means you don't have the best people designing door plugs for airplanes.
So I think we can infer I think we can infer, and in fact, you know, the evidence that James outlines allows us to do that.
But I don't think we even need to go to the inference level, because I think there's a more basic – there's a fundamental math thinking error happening here.
And it's apparently being made by someone who is, what is she?
The founder of Nia Impact Capital?
Like, I don't know what that is.
I didn't look into it.
But that sounds like someone who has some skills and knows some things.
And the point that you are making, A, requires inference and is a little bit more abstract.
Like, maybe I get why some people aren't going to get that, but the, actually you had three things and now you have five.
Yes, some among the original three are going to suffer, unless you were underperforming to such a degree that you could add these and not take anything from the first three.
Well, I don't see any reason not to put them both on the table, especially in light of the fact that the intersection lists pretend that the world is postmodern.
Therefore, what would merit even be in relation to?
They pretend that these skills aren't real things, and so they discount the possibility that by prioritizing something other than merit that you're going to compromise all of these functional systems on which we depend, which would of course be a very forceful argument against their nonsense.
So I think it's, you know, as somebody who has studied and thought a lot about trade-offs, both of these things are clearly, clearly hazards.
And, you know, again, the also, what was the phraseology for what they're prioritizing?
Climate and... Oh, the actual things that they're not prioritizing are, that's a different one.
We had originally product safety, employee safety, and quality, and now we've got climate and it's DEI.
It's diversity, equity, and inclusion.
So then even the phraseology, diversity, equity, and inclusion, is an allusion to a very specific perspective.
It's not anti-discrimination.
It is specifically a affirmative correction that in this case is going to compete with design.
So their invoking DEI means we can infer that they are not talking about getting rid of discrimination.
They are talking about working to be inclusive in an environment where merit is obviously relevant to safety.
I think I'm pushing back against this because this requires inference.
And I know you're right.
I know that this is actually the effect.
And in fact, again, as I'm about to show you, the other evidence that Jim has put together demonstrates that the stuff in the details proves that this is actually how DEI manifests.
But at the most simple level, at a level that anyone should be able to understand.
If you've got Barron's and a lot of other mainstream articles that I found just saying, Musk was clearly wrong.
How dare he?
He's an awful racist tycoon, right?
You know, they're just, it's all the same stuff over and over again.
And you have someone who is charted out as powerful, you know, founder of whatever it was, Nia Impact Capital, right?
who makes such a mind-bogglingly basic mistake of simple logical reasoning that that can be pointed out, whereas what you were just talking about is, you know, maybe more important, ultimately, and definitely true, but harder to explain.
And people will get lost in those details, and they will want to get lost in these details, And I guess part of what I'm trying to do is say, you know what?
When you had three things that you needed to focus on, and now you have five, those original three will suffer unless you were underperforming.
It can be said that simply.
Yeah, the other problem though, and I know you're headed here, that you did the work to find it, but we have predicted this outcome, and because we predicted this outcome on the basis that diversity and equity and inclusion would come at the expense of merit, right, the second kind of dangerous compromise, Well, why don't we just look at the actual evidence?
So what you're doing is requiring inference, and I don't think it's necessary, because there's actual evidence of this, okay?
Well, but a prediction that manifests potentially... We'll get to the prediction, too.
Like, yes, we predicted that this would happen, but that...
Having three areas go to five, yes, will result in what you're talking about, but that requires analysis and care, and this does not.
So this is another of the documents that James Lindsay unearthed, a letter from leadership.
Progress isn't a moment in time and it's not a set of metrics.
Progress is commitment and action from all of us every day.
This is from 2023 Boeing Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Report.
One, two, three, four, five, fifth paragraph in which the stuff in red have been blocked, bracketed out by James, but I'm going to read this whole paragraph.
Also in 2022, for the first time in our company's history, we tied incentive compensation to inclusion.
There it is.
Okay.
Our goal was to achieve diverse interview slates for at least 90% of manager and executive openings.
I don't know what a diverse interview slate is.
Okay.
We exceeded that target, with 92% of interview slates being diverse, resulting in 47% diverse hires at the management and executive levels.
At the point you're over 50% isn't the opposite diversity, but okay.
For 2023, we've raised the bar and expect at least 92.5% of those interviews say it will be diverse.
These people are so insane.
ESG is thriving.
But I mean, among everything else wrong with this, they made 92% and they're going to raise the bar and go to 92.5%.
Like, what a climb.
The goal is not laudable, it's anti-laudable, and they're like, we're gonna keep on going, but just this tiny little bit.
Well, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We do not, just one last sentence here, we do this not to hit a certain number, like, yes you do, we do this not to hit a certain number, but because meritocracy demands the opportunity to compete.
Wow.
So, like, they just, like, they're just claiming the opposite of what they're doing.
They're claiming that this is in service of meritocracy when it cannot be, and that's back to your point.
Yep.
Now I would also point out that the achievement, in quotes, of whatever their... 92% diverse interview slates.
That was their target?
No, their target was 90.
90.
And their new target will be 92.5.
Okay, so but my point is going to be what people are not going to spot is that this is clearly a diminishing returns realm, where the point is those fractional advantages that come very late are going to come at spectacular cost, right?
As you try to increase the diversity of your slates, you know, you've worked hard, you've gotten everybody you could possibly apply, and you're going to work that much harder.
That means that the compromises are actually expected to be large for these little gains.
That's what diminishing returns is.
That's right.
Little gains at huge cost.
So again, to that point, and also to the point that putting DEI as something by which your executives will be compensated will inherently cause a decrease in quality and in those other things that presumably are what helped make you a global corporation in the first place.
The final paragraph.
Again, from the 2023 Boeing Global Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Report, progress is every teammate acting on our seek, speak and listen habits.
This Progress is every teammate feeling physically and psychologically safe, and ensuring that safety for each other, and ensuring that safety for each other.
Progress is reflecting the diversity of the world's talent within our workforce.
Progress is being the destination for great people to build amazing careers in aerospace.
Not the best people, but great people.
Progress is equity.
Progress is diversity.
Progress is inclusion for all and by all.
What, are they going to hire all 8 billion of us?
Like, what even is the claim here?
And, you know, right there, like, okay, this is the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion report, but their measures of progress don't say anything about quality or safety.
Nothing at all, except feeling physically and psychologically safe.
They are prioritizing the feelings of their new great workforce, but not the actual safety of that workforce or its customers or the quality of the products that they are making.
It is unfortunately even worse than that.
Because what this is, is the transportation of the rules that are being instituted inside the student level of participation in colleges into a corporate environment where your and my safety is being determined.
And when they say everybody needs to feel safe, what they mean is Um, certain people will not have the right to critique other people.
Right?
And here's my problem.
Let's say you have some annoying, impolite white guy who, uh, has a bee in his bonnet about a broken calculation or a manufacturing process.
He's a little spectrum-y and he kind of, uh, makes one of the women uncomfortable because he asked her out once and it was awkward.
Or worse, he's going to say something that makes the person who's making the error look dumb.
Right?
He's not sensitive, so she's not going to feel safe, or he's not going to feel safe.
And the point is, you need to have, especially in a safety context, You need to have something where somebody who's got an actual observation to make about errors that are being made or opportunities that are being missed or processes or whatever it is.
Those people have to be emboldened and protected in saying that you can't do this.
If you do this in a DEI context, then what you're doing is you're setting an intersectional priority over who gets to say what, who is allowed to level a critique.
So even to the extent that you've DEI'd the hiring process and you've brought in people who are unlikely to be as meritorious in order to achieve these high DEI numbers, then you've made things worse by creating a hierarchy of who can critique whom because that wasn't so, then you've made things worse by creating a hierarchy of who can critique whom because that wasn't so, I mean, it's dangerous, but it's not But you put it in this context and it's freaking lethal.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is exactly right.
And you know, the fact is that college seminars don't matter.
The stakes are zero, right?
That is both for the better and worse, right?
Like, you're supposed to be able to explore everything in a classroom, Where actually the real world consequences don't exist.
If, however, you convince yourself, if you create a system in which you convince yourself and you convince everyone in these seminars that this is the highest stakes possible, and that if they feel a little bit uncomfortable or they feel like they're about to cry or they feel anxious or something, then that really, really, really matters, and that this needs to be paid attention to right away.
They go out into the real world where there's actual gravity and shit, like there's actually forces that matter, and people fly places and drive places and take bridges and are in buildings that were Built, that were designed and built by people who had their feelings hurt in a college class once, and they think that's what matters?
Of course the bridges are going to start falling down, and the buildings and the planes are going to start falling out of the sky, and the door plugs are going to be invited to leave.
So this goes to another piece of toolkit that we have deployed.
It needs a better name, but the theory of close calls.
Yeah.
Right?
The idea is You can infer something about dangers that you can't afford to face even once by the close calls that suggest you're doing something wrong that keeps putting you in danger, right?
A door plug flying out of an airplane in flight is a close call that is now calling our attention to the process that allowed that to happen.
The fact is airplanes are essentially the safest thing going.
And there's basically an institutional memory about how to create them.
And because they stay in service for a very long time, and because presumably, you know, mechanics and engineers and safety inspectors have long careers, the DEI madness has not yet created a wave of airplane crashes.
However, it will.
This is the first close call we spot, maybe, in which this kind of stupid logic is resulting in a compromise in the structure of actual physical planes.
And frankly, you know, a hundred and some odd planes have now been taken out of service, which creates more stresses on the system.
It's not going to be a problem.
It's going to mean airlines are reluctant to take other planes out of service that might need something.
They're going to be pressured to keep them in service because they don't have enough seats flying from here to there.
So the cascading effects for this are serious.
We're still early in the process of DEI eroding the thing that made air travel safe.
We've still got a lot of stuff that works out there, and stuff that works tends to work for a long time.
And so, I mean, this is, it's, it's the same thing that is true, actually, about, you know, back 10, 10, 20 years ago, as people started to talk about, well, we need, you know, we, we need greater representation in academia of, like, what the American populace looks like.
I don't know that we need that, but say that it is a goal.
Say that that is a value that we hold and that we, that we need.
It's going to take a while, because it's quite one thing to say we would like the student body to look like the population of the US.
That should be able to happen relatively quickly, but you want Higher admin at colleges and universities to be representative at the same like the student body is?
You realize that 40 years ago, there weren't many people of color doing the work that would have given them the experience and the accolades so that they could be in a position of such higher power now.
And therefore, it's going to take a while.
This is the flip side of that.
Our things that are engineered and built are not going to start falling apart right away as soon as you implement DEI practices, because most things continue to work.
Because the designs that were working, that were designed by people who were hired for their merit and not for their sexual orientation, continue to work.
But time is ticking.
With every passing day, those systems that have been working are closer to not working because things fail, they age, they become obsolescent, and new designs are coming down the pike.
And any of these new designs That have some DEI hire on the team who was actually hired because of their skin color and not because of their merit, has a greater chance of, you know, and was sitting in these college seminars where if they started to feel uncomfortable, they got to stop the conversation and talk about their discomfort, means that those designs and therefore those builds are much more likely to be flawed and perhaps fatally so.
And in fact, when we have predicted this, we have always said this, that there's going to be a delay between the compromising of merit and the collapsing of these structures.
And, you know, just think about it, you know, if you decided that furries had been underrepresented in bridge design and you started hiring, you know, only... You know, I think they have been, actually.
Almost certain of it, but if you've decided.
And I'm glad for it, I'll say it, I'm glad for it.
If the time has come and we're going to hire only furries in the design and inspection of bridges, you're not going to see bridges collapsing suddenly, right?
You're going, it's.
See, it was safe, guys.
I mean, it's the same, it's the same misunderstanding of safety.
Yep.
Actually.
as what happened with the rollout of the vaccines.
So I don't think it was the first time, but I did find one of the previous times that we have specifically made the prediction that you bring DEI into a corporation as one of its important principles and you will begin to see things fail.
We talked about it About a year ago, actually, on January 28th of 2023 on episode 159, Monkey Business at Pfizer, when we discussed that – remember that Project Veritas video in which the founder, whose name I've forgotten, who was then drummed out for crazy reasons… Oh, I'm O'Keefe.
Yeah.
He pretends to be on a date with a Pfizer employee, and the Pfizer employee just dishes dirt, and then at the point that it's revealed that he's not talking to a possible date, he's actually talking to someone from Project Veritas.
First he responds, well, I was lying about all of it.
And then he plays the race card.
He's like, oh, I'm a black man.
I'm being harmed here.
And I don't remember exactly what he does, but it's ridiculous.
And a year ago, episode 159, we specifically talked about that and predicted that, once again, that moving DEI initiatives into places of influence in corporations are going to cause those corporations to end up doing damage as they begin to fail.
Here we go, Boeing.
Yep.
And, you know, we've seen it in government too, you know.
Rachel Levine is not the person you want managing public health.
No, he is not.
Sam Brinton was it, was not the guy you wanted managing nuclear waste.
But he stole some fabulous dresses.
I would imagine he did.
But anyway, yeah, enough of this, right?
Enough of this, yeah.
Let's put it this way.
You've got essential systems.
Compromising them on a transparently insane compromising of merit is not something a rational civilization would do.
We have not been a rational civilization.
We've started doing that.
It's time we stopped.
Yeah, we need to stop.
We need to stop.
How many wake-up calls do we need before enough people wake up?
I don't know.
But I wonder, actually.
All those people on that plane out of Portland.
It was a plane out of Portland.
There are a lot of people on that plane who don't want to think that DEI initiatives could have any negative consequences at all.
This is out of the city that we called home, and we know just how ingrained DEI-style thinking is there.
Maybe the mainstream media pushback against James Lindsay's Relatively straightforward research into what Boeing just puts into its documents.
And Elon Musk's retweeting it.
But the mainstream media is already going, like, no, it had nothing to do with it.
It couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it.
So maybe no one on that plane even runs into the possibility.
But I would hope that something could be learned from being on a plane where a door plug blows out and, you know, some number of phones get whipped out of the plane.
And, you know, it's got to have been hopefully the most terrifying several moments of All of those people's lives, right?
And they got lucky because they were at low altitude.
And they got so lucky.
Well, some of them begin to wonder, how could this be allowed to happen?
And well, then they begin to talk to some of their friends and their family, and it begins to spread.
How is it that we are beginning to see failures where for a very, very long time we didn't see failures?
I think for the moment, at least, we should rename it Diversity, Equity, and Explosive Decompression.
Right.
I think so.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yes.
The unexpected departure of the door plug left an opening in a plane.
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
I think we are.
I think we are.
All right.
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