Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Gen Z Rising? The 333rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Gen Z Rising? The 333rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:04
  Hey folks, meaning you.
• 0:06
  Welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream number 333 and you can call me a conspiracy theorist, but I feel you have been called a conspiracy.
• 0:17
  Yeah, you won't be the first.
• 0:18
  What about this number is going to prompt you to be called a conspiracy theorist?
• 0:22
  I don't think it's prime due largely to the action of 111 with a strong assist by the number three at the very least.
• 0:30
  I mean, I'm not going to be surprised if nine or six is involved, but I know that those two at least have their fingerprints all over it.
• 0:38
  Yeah, yeah, they do now.
• 0:41
  And you, and you know that nine six are involved because one 11 isn't divisible by three, which would be required for nine to be involved and it's not divisible by two, which will be required for six to be involved.
• 0:51
  So it depends what rules of division you're using, because I can get three to divide into 111 by noticing that there are three ones involved, but that's next level math.
• 1:00
  If you know what I mean.
• 1:02
  That's lesser level math.
• 1:03
  It's math-ish pseudo logic, I guess.
• 1:09
  Yeah.
• 1:09
  But anyway, yeah, I take your point.
• 1:11
  I take your point.
• 1:12
  Yeah.
• 1:13
  So 333 here we are.
• 1:14
  Yes.
• 1:14
  I'm Dr.
• 1:15
  Bret Weinstein.
• 1:15
  A third of the way to almost a thousand.
• 1:17
  Remarkable.
• 1:18
  That's true.
• 1:19
  Actually a third of the way through this episode will be there.
• 1:23
  Yes.
• 1:26
  Right.
• 1:27
  Or the next one.
• 1:28
  It's an inclusive exclusive issue.
• 1:29
  Oh God.
• 1:30
  Those always trip me up.
• 1:31
  Yeah.
• 1:31
  Yeah.
• 1:32
  Yeah.
• 1:32
  My, my, my liberal background.
• 1:34
  It's the next one.
• 1:35
  It's a little bit the way too close to us.
• 1:36
  But, uh, but I end up having to be exclusive for reasons of logic sometimes.
• 1:41
  Yeah.
• 1:41
  Anyway, I'm Dr.
• 1:42
  Bret Weinstein.
• 1:43
  You're Dr.
• 1:43
  Heather Heying.
• 1:44
  We've already named the podcast.
• 1:46
  No need to do that again.
• 1:48
  And today we're going to talk about how to avoid mosquitoes without DEET.
• 1:52
  Okay.
• 1:53
  New research that's out.
• 1:54
  It's promising.
• 1:55
  Whether Gen Z is really doing better than its, uh, than its predecessors as some headlines at research would suggest, despite what all of our, um, lived experience would, would, uh, would tell us.
• 2:07
  And what the hell happened to Wikipedia?
• 2:08
  Yeah.
• 2:09
  What the hell indeed.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:11
  Uh, so, uh, no Q and a today, but check out past Q and a's on locals.
• 2:15
  And we also got the watch party going on now.
• 2:18
  And, uh, let's just, uh, let's get right into it with our sponsors right at the top of the hour.
• 2:23
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• 2:28
  Let's do it.
• 2:29
  You want to guess what the first one is?
• 2:30
  I know what the first one is because I can't read the sheet of paper.
• 2:32
  Yes, you did.
• 2:33
  Yes.
• 2:33
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• 3:52
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• 4:03
  I have now discovered that when numbers are written out long hand, it's hard for me to read.
• 4:07
  It is hard to read actually.
• 4:09
  So I'm going to say a little bit about that and then we'll say the number again.
• 4:14
  You're going to have to hand it to me for me to say it.
• 4:16
  Oh, you're going to say it.
• 4:17
  So we really like these guys, but they specifically wanted us to make sure that it was said that way and they wrote it out this way.
• 4:26
  And I rewrote it as numbers.
• 4:28
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• 4:32
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• 4:36
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• 4:42
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• 4:51
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• 4:54
  Intention with one another, which was, I don't know, it's a little surprising I think that I wasn't expecting to find when putting the other in ad reads.
• 5:01
  It sends the work that is ordinarily done by your numeric brain over to your language brain, which is not well practiced at it.
• 5:08
  Yeah, not at all.
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• 8:02
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• 10:12
  Okay.
• 10:14
  We got a few stories, a few three stories this week.
• 10:18
  As we said, we're going to talk about, let's just talk about mosquito repellent first.
• 10:22
  It's summer, right?
• 10:23
  It's summer in a lot of the country, in a lot of the Northern Hemisphere.
• 10:26
  It is the entire Northern Hemisphere.
• 10:29
  It is summer.
• 10:30
  In much of the Northern Hemisphere, it is therefore also mosquito season.
• 10:35
  We've talked about sunscreen in weeks past and why you should likely avoid sunscreen and get your used to being in the sun slowly at first and then soak in its healthful, healthful rays rather than slathering yourself, especially with chemicals, but even with the physical stuff that is in, say, zinc-based sunscreens, do that as little as possible and get as much sun as possible without burning.
• 11:05
  So we've talked about sun and one of the other harbingers of summer is mosquitoes, of course.
• 11:14
  So I found this story in The Guardian this week.
• 11:22
  Can you see my...
• 11:22
  You can see my computer.
• 11:23
  Awesome.
• 11:25
  Catnip lotion as effective as DEET at repelling mosquitoes study finds.
• 11:30
  That seems promising.
• 11:32
  I'm going to just, you know, in general, I don't know that I trust The Guardian.
• 11:35
  In fact, I got to The Guardian from a different headline, which turns out not to be all that trustworthy and we'll get there next in the next story, but scroll down a little bit.
• 11:45
  Let's make this a little bit bigger.
• 11:46
  Oops.
• 11:46
  Wrong way.
• 11:48
  Researchers testing a cheap homegrown oil in Uganda found what cats knew all along.
• 11:52
  It worked as well as the artificial chemical used globally.
• 11:55
  Now I'm going to stop right there and say what cats knew all along.
• 11:58
  So...
• 11:59
  Well, their argument is going to be that cats have an affinity for this stuff because it repels mosquitoes.
• 12:06
  That is the implied evolutionary argument.
• 12:09
  I don't think they have any idea.
• 12:10
  That's what they're claiming.
• 12:11
  Really?
• 12:12
  Oh, it's certainly not.
• 12:12
  Oh, they're just being clever.
• 12:13
  Like...
• 12:14
  Yeah, they're just being clever.
• 12:14
  Hey, look what cats do.
• 12:16
  Yeah, they're being clever without being clever is kind of their specialty actually.
• 12:20
  But I mean, I think that's exactly what might be going on.
• 12:24
  That cats are attracted to catnip because it does provide a benefit in keeping mosquitoes away, which cats, as much as I think any mammal want to do, because while many mosquito vector diseases are pretty clade specific, many of them are not.
• 12:45
  And there are plenty of carniviran specific diseases out there.
• 12:50
  So we're never going to know, but I'm just wondering if all this is true.
• 12:53
  If the cats are looking at the dogs thinking, like, what's wrong with you?
• 12:58
  This is good stuff.
• 12:59
  Why aren't you into it?
• 13:00
  Yeah.
• 13:01
  Yeah.
• 13:01
  Maybe the cats are like you prefer deep.
• 13:04
  Really?
• 13:04
  Yeah, really.
• 13:07
  So I'm actually going to skip out of here because the paper, I mean, the article is what the article is.
• 13:14
  But what it does say in the fourth paragraph is in a study presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Conference in Florence on Tuesday.
• 13:22
  This is literally, this is not a research paper yet.
• 13:25
  It is a talk that was presented at a conference yesterday, as we're speaking right now.
• 13:29
  So I'm now going to go to that.
• 13:32
  Go to that if I can have my screen back here for a second.
• 13:37
  Yeah, go to now.
• 13:46
  Go to that spot.
• 13:48
  Okay.
• 13:49
  So here we go.
• 13:50
  Here is the way of academic conferences is that most of the time you've written your abstract in advance of actually knowing what you will find and certainly well in advance of having therefore been able to put all of your research into a paper format and gotten it published in a journal.
• 14:07
  And so very often what happens at conferences is the leading edge of science.
• 14:12
  And sometimes it turns out not to be that much.
• 14:14
  And sometimes it is.
• 14:15
  So this is the Society for Experimental Biology, a conference that is happening right now in Florence.
• 14:21
  And yesterday, this piece, this paper was delivered.
• 14:29
  That is to say there was a talk delivered at the conference called "Developing a Nepetolactone-based Mosquito-repellent to Reduce the Incidents of Malaria in Uganda, a Community Enterprise Model." It's got a bunch of authors on it, mostly from a combination of Cardiff University in Wales and a number of universities in Uganda, which is where the research was done.
• 14:51
  And here is the text of the actual abstract, which I will read.
• 14:55
  "Volatile plant secondary metabolites have a range of biological functions, including insect attraction and repellents.
• 15:01
  Volatile iridoid monoturpein nepetolactone is primarily found in the essential oil of catnip, family lemaceae nepetacateria.
• 15:11
  Nepetolactone acts as a natural insect repellent." Now they say that is if we already knew that, which I don't know if we already knew that, but they say it is if it's already known.
• 15:19
  "Nepetolactone acts as a natural insect repellent and is highly effective at repelling mosquitoes, which are responsible for the transmission of malaria and other vector-borne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa." Obviously not just in sub-Saharan Africa.
• 15:31
  "Miscuito repellents represent one of the primary measures used to reduce the risk of malaria by reducing mosquito landing and biting events.
• 15:36
  However, Nepetolactone has not been widely exploited as a mosquito repellent in malaria endemic regions such as Uganda.
• 15:42
  In our recent work, we evaluated the potential of a containing catnip essential oil comprising over 92% Nepetolactone locally produced using a community enterprise model for uses of mosquito repellent in eastern Uganda.
• 15:56
  Using the human landing catch method and field trials together with laboratory experiments, we found that our repellent lotion was highly effective at preventing mosquito landing with performance equivalent to DEET." Wow.
• 16:07
  Without melting your camera or pocketing it.
• 16:10
  Let me finish before the editorial.
• 16:12
  "Our findings suggest that Nepetolactone could be used as a locally sourced and effective alternative to synthetic commercial mosquito repellents, thereby representing a viable import substitution option for protection against mosquito-borne diseases in malaria endemic regions." Obviously we weren't influenced to see the talk.
• 16:29
  This is all we have to go on.
• 16:32
  It seems to be making primarily an economic argument as opposed to a health argument.
• 16:37
  The health argument overall is mosquitoes aren't just a nuisance.
• 16:41
  They vector killers such as malaria, also yellow fever, dengue, lots of other things.
• 16:49
  DEET is expensive because it's not made in-house in Uganda, whereas something that can be grown and then turned into a lotion right in Uganda could be more economical.
• 17:01
  That is one argument that I think is a good one.
• 17:05
  The better one, which you began to get to, is DEET is crazy toxic.
• 17:10
  DEET is really nasty stuff and as you alluded to just now, we have been tropical field biologists.
• 17:20
  We have spent a lot of time in the field contending with a lot of mosquitoes and being tropical field biologists, especially if what you're doing is animal behavior, which requires that you sit totally still for long periods of time, means that you draw a lot of attention from mosquitoes.
• 17:34
  Both of us have tried all sorts of things.
• 17:36
  Unless you stop exhaling, but that's a sure thing.
• 17:39
  Then the observations that you make get less and less and less and then you get your head.
• 17:45
  It's not a plan.
• 17:46
  It's not a great plan for avoiding mosquitoes.
• 17:49
  If you're going to insist on continuing to do the whole respiratory thing, how is it that you're going to avoid the attraction, being attractive to mosquitoes and getting bitten and perhaps getting any of the diseases that they vector?
• 18:01
  Well, you can put a giant head net on yourself.
• 18:03
  You can carry around those mosquito coils and occasionally set fire to your field clothing.
• 18:07
  I did this a lot.
• 18:08
  I was going to ask you how you knew, but I don't.
• 18:11
  You could use citronella for a while.
• 18:13
  Was it Avon's?
• 18:14
  Skinsosoft was a suggested thing.
• 18:16
  I think we tried that for a while.
• 18:17
  I have no memory of how successful that was.
• 18:20
  Early on, much to our chagrin, we didn't like doing it because you can smell how toxic this stuff is, use DEET.
• 18:29
  Just like some people don't realize that when they're using Roundup, what they're using is glyphosate.
• 18:34
  You'll actually get people saying to you,"Oh, I don't use glyphosate.
• 18:36
  I just use Roundup." No, no.
• 18:39
  The active ingredient in the Roundup that you're using is glyphosate.
• 18:41
  Same thing with off.
• 18:43
  Off.
• 18:44
  The active ingredient is DEET.
• 18:45
  If you're using off, you're using DEET, and there's lots of other products out there that use DEET as their primary or only ingredient in them.
• 18:53
  Hold up.
• 18:54
  I once, early in our time as tropical field biologists, when I was still doing a fair bit of photography with really nice cameras, and I had a beautiful, I think it was a Canon SLR, and I had applied DEET to my hands to avoid the mosquito bites.
• 19:15
  I went to take a photograph and came away with my fingerprint permanently reflected in the camera body, which was made possible by the DEET.
• 19:26
  It is a decent anti-theft measure, but...
• 19:29
  That moment of seeing my fingerprint reflected permanently embedded in the camera body as if I had put my finger in wet concrete, the only possible way that that had happened, the only thing that could have facilitated that was the DEET, because that's the only thing that I had done that was unusual, prompted me to say, "That's it.
• 19:49
  I'm done.
• 19:50
  No more DEET for me ever, because if it can do that, who knows what it is doing to us?" Yeah, it's clearly a solvent.
• 19:58
  Clearly a solvent.
• 19:59
  It's a very...
• 20:00
  It's bad stuff.
• 20:02
  I would also point out in the case of off that we see a common failure in thinking about health, which is as bad as DEET is to rub on as liquid, the last thing you want to do is put it into tiny droplets in the air that you and others are breathing.
• 20:21
  And we see this with spray on insect repellent.
• 20:26
  We see it with spray on sunscreen, all of these things, you're compounding the damage because as vulnerable as you are putting the stuff on your skin where a lot of it crosses, you're even more vulnerable if you're breathing it indirectly where it's like in intimate contact with your blood itself.
• 20:42
  You are more vulnerable by potentially inhaling the aerosolized sunscreens and insect repellents, and you have now made your poor choice other people's problem as well, which is actually not your right to do, I would say.
• 20:55
  Like you perhaps can choose to put toxins on and in your body that will have bad effects on you, but the idea that people around you have no choice but to also inhale the toxins that you are choosing to use for yourself is not a legitimate choice.
• 21:11
  Yeah, you're externalizing a hormone to others even if they're making better choices, which is something you shouldn't be able to do.
• 21:18
  I think also, we cover in our book a point that I don't hear made elsewhere.
• 21:22
  I think it's really important, which is that once upon a time, things that smelled bad, that was an indicator that you shouldn't interact with them, but it wasn't harmful for you to smell them.
• 21:35
  If there's a rotting fish and you think,"Oh God, that smells terrible," there's no downside that we know of from having smelled the fish.
• 21:42
  And it may have been an indicator of like I'm walking towards more and more of the smell, I should turn around, I should veer away.
• 21:48
  Like maybe the strong smell of sulfur means I'm about to fall into a boiling sulfur pit.
• 21:54
  Right, exactly.
• 21:55
  For instance.
• 21:55
  It's a warning mechanism, but being warned is not any more harmful than getting an alert on your phone that there's wind coming that might be devastating or something like that.
• 22:08
  But in modern times, something like this, A, it doesn't smell noxious.
• 22:13
  For those only listening, Bret just held up an open Sharpie.
• 22:16
  I did.
• 22:17
  And every time I opened the Sharpie, I smelled a little and I think I should story for another time.
• 22:22
  But point being- I don't think they smell as strong as some of the pens did when we were young.
• 22:27
  They don't.
• 22:28
  They don't.
• 22:28
  But nonetheless, the fact that that smell isn't noxious, maybe it should smell just absolutely godawful in light of the danger of whatever solvent it is I'm inhaling by opening it and you're inhaling, not even having opened it.
• 22:42
  But the act of smelling itself, if it was just warning you not to put the tip of the pen on your phone because that's poisonous, that'd be one thing.
• 22:52
  But in fact, you're not getting an alert because it doesn't inherently smell bad.
• 22:56
  It just smells weird.
• 22:58
  And the act of smelling itself is you bringing in the solvent, which is dangerous in a way that our ancestors didn't anticipate.
• 23:06
  So we don't intuit that smelling things that are off can now be the hazardous activity in and of itself.
• 23:12
  Yes.
• 23:14
  So I think this research is super promising.
• 23:18
  Obviously, we can't fully assess it because all we have is an abstract and it's based on a- and a talk was given just yesterday in Florence.
• 23:25
  Haven't seen the talk.
• 23:27
  Haven't yet seen any more elaboration on the research.
• 23:30
  But there's a lot going on in that family.
• 23:34
  So it's the mint family, the sage family.
• 23:37
  So all of these herbs with square stems that have a ton of secondary compounds that are either enticing or useful to humans in some way.
• 23:48
  And the idea that plants are creating or putting forth molecules that we could use to good effect that might actually be a little bit better for us in the end than slathering ourselves with something that was dreamed up in a lab and no plant has ever managed to produce.
• 24:05
  This is not to say that if it's natural, it's good.
• 24:07
  That's of course not true.
• 24:08
  There's plenty that you can produce in a lab that would be safer than any number of things that we could name from nature.
• 24:14
  But in this case, this plant with whom- with which- because a plant doesn't deserve a whom.
• 24:19
  This plant with which we have extensive history and our cats have as long a history as we do, presumably.
• 24:25
  Cats haven't been investigated for that long.
• 24:27
  Bret keeps saying three or four thousand more years and they'll be ready.
• 24:30
  They'll be excellent pets.
• 24:32
  Yeah.
• 24:32
  I don't think they're excellent pets now, but that's partly because they keep their wildness.
• 24:37
  And so you like you get to bring the wild inside and then deal with it when they bring in, for instance, a vole as Fairfax said yesterday.
• 24:44
  Yes, they are pets.
• 24:47
  They need another three or four thousand years to achieve excellent status.
• 24:50
  Isn't that right, Maddie?
• 24:53
  Yeah.
• 24:53
  All right.
• 24:54
  She likes the cats.
• 24:55
  Oh yeah, well enough.
• 24:56
  But she also recognizes their defects, which are not that subtle, to be honest with you.
• 25:01
  All right.
• 25:04
  I dealt with the vole, not you.
• 25:05
  So that is true.
• 25:06
  Had I been home?
• 25:07
  I don't know.
• 25:08
  But all right.
• 25:09
  I see a couple- I like the idea of catnip as a mosquito repellent.
• 25:15
  I would use it.
• 25:16
  And like making an essential oil out of it.
• 25:18
  Right.
• 25:18
  You don't have to be like rubbing catnip all over you.
• 25:21
  Frankly, if that worked, I'd do that too.
• 25:23
  My sense is the likelihood that this is dangerous is pretty low.
• 25:27
  And especially in light of the baseline danger of all the synthetic stuff that we interact with day to day.
• 25:32
  My guess is catnip is a pretty good bet on the toxicity front.
• 25:37
  I will also say once and only once I smoked catnip to see if there was something to be found in there.
• 25:45
  There wasn't.
• 25:45
  Not so much.
• 25:46
  But you were free of mosquitoes for minutes.
• 25:48
  For minutes.
• 25:49
  And I'm out for about two weeks afterwards.
• 25:52
  But okay.
• 25:54
  But I spot- That's what that was.
• 25:57
  Yes.
• 25:58
  Honey.
• 25:59
  That's what that was.
• 26:01
  I spot two tiny flies in the ointment of this plan.
• 26:05
  Okay.
• 26:06
  By the way, tiny flies in the ointment.
• 26:09
  Mosquito means tiny fly.
• 26:11
  That's true.
• 26:12
  Oh, good.
• 26:12
  Yeah.
• 26:13
  See, not bad.
• 26:14
  Not bad.
• 26:15
  Yeah.
• 26:15
  Well done.
• 26:15
  Well done.
• 26:16
  Two tiny flies in the ointment.
• 26:18
  Okay.
• 26:19
  You put this stuff on.
• 26:20
  Mosquitoes are in fact tiny flies.
• 26:21
  So that's not one of these crazy words.
• 26:24
  It's a pineapple.
• 26:25
  It's neither of those things.
• 26:26
  What are you doing?
• 26:27
  A mosquito is actually a fly and it's a tiny fly.
• 26:30
  So our word in English is actually- It's a diptorin, right?
• 26:34
  Yeah.
• 26:34
  Yeah.
• 26:34
  So- Which is a fly.
• 26:35
  Which is a fly.
• 26:36
  Yeah.
• 26:36
  My guess is they were named tiny fly before we understood what they were- Perhaps, but we got it right in the sky.
• 26:42
  Yeah, which is great.
• 26:43
  Which is great.
• 26:44
  But anyway, here are the two tiny flies in the ointment.
• 26:49
  Okay.
• 26:49
  So you put on the catnip-based mosquito repellent and let's say it works.
• 26:56
  It's repellable mosquitoes.
• 26:59
  But it attracts cats.
• 27:00
  You're a dog person.
• 27:01
  Yeah, exactly.
• 27:02
  Yeah.
• 27:03
  So that's- For some of us, this is an obvious plus.
• 27:07
  Okay.
• 27:07
  But not in Uganda.
• 27:09
  That's the second fly.
• 27:11
  Why not?
• 27:13
  Have you seen the kinds of cats they grow in Uganda?
• 27:15
  I really have not.
• 27:16
  They never have been.
• 27:17
  They're very dangerous.
• 27:19
  Oh, you're talking about big cats.
• 27:21
  Well, I'm just thinking.
• 27:22
  Yeah, you're worried about leopards.
• 27:26
  More like lions.
• 27:27
  Leopards, I feel like, you know, a person who keeps their wits about them can handle that.
• 27:32
  Isn't it leopards that we attribute to the early Homo, like Homo erectus with the giant fang marks in their heads that apparently were killed by leopards and then dragged backwards up trees and then eaten and then dropped and they were done?
• 27:47
  Yeah.
• 27:47
  So the story on this is quite right.
• 27:50
  What we have are- For those leopards.
• 27:52
  Cave, yeah.
• 27:53
  Caves in which there are human remains.
• 27:57
  And the interpretation is that there was a tree growing above some depression where whatever the leopard dragged into the tree, the remains fell into the cave and then was buried by a sedimentation process.
• 28:10
  And so anyway, we have these- It's excavatable.
• 28:12
  It's excavatable in a way that it wouldn't have been had it just been on the weld.
• 28:16
  Yes.
• 28:16
  And cave is misleading.
• 28:17
  We excavate it from a cave, but it's not a cave that somebody lived in.
• 28:20
  It's a cave that they, well, they didn't die in it, but they went into it after death.
• 28:24
  Yeah.
• 28:24
  And there are, is at least one, and I think a couple of these fossils with these- And it's like, it's early Homo.
• 28:30
  It's like Homo erectus.
• 28:31
  It's not Australopithecus, I don't think, but I think it's like Homo erectus, maybe Homo habilis.
• 28:35
  I don't remember, but- I would have thought Australopithecus, but I can't remember.
• 28:38
  But anyway, there's at least one of these fossils where amazingly enough, they not only have this skull, which has what appear to be fang marks, but they have the skull of a leopard that matches perfectly.
• 28:51
  The animal probably died- Oh, I didn't know that.
• 28:53
  I don't know this.
• 28:54
  Yeah.
• 28:54
  It's one of these great fossil stories of which there are surprising numbers.
• 28:58
  So anyway, I'd like to hear the adaptive story around, like what happened to the leopard who was so distracted by eating his delicious little human that he was killed at the same time, maybe the tree fell?
• 29:11
  Yeah, or he or she died in their sleep.
• 29:15
  That's what I hope.
• 29:17
  But in any case, I like cats, despite the danger.
• 29:20
  And in any case, yes, you are right that there are these multiple cases, I believe, where we have evidence of predation of early hominids by leopards.
• 29:33
  And so leopards are a danger to people, but- And lions can climb, but they don't tend to.
• 29:38
  They would- If I remember correctly, the tooth marks in the skull or in the back of the skull, this person was not paying attention.
• 29:46
  So that's just selection at work.
• 29:48
  Yeah, but I mean, you've met cats.
• 29:50
  Yes.
• 29:51
  They're stealthy.
• 29:52
  Yes, but a pride of lions is what I'm really worried about.
• 29:58
  The leopard thing, you stand a chance.
• 30:02
  The lion thing, it's pretty rough if they're on you.
• 30:05
  If they want you, if they're hungry.
• 30:07
  Yeah.
• 30:08
  All right.
• 30:08
  Well, I feel that my addendum to this story has been full of useful information.
• 30:13
  So you feel you'd rather take the risk of malaria than the pride of lions who are- But if they eat you, they lose the catnip draw.
• 30:21
  Here's my plan.
• 30:22
  My plan is to use this stuff and to think very carefully before I do it anywhere with lions.
• 30:29
  I see.
• 30:29
  That's the thing.
• 30:30
  So maybe not in Africa.
• 30:32
  You know, there are parts of Africa.
• 30:35
  The zoo, I think that could be all right.
• 30:38
  But- You think so?
• 30:39
  Yeah, but I'm not going on safari without a Land Rover wearing this kind of repellent without thinking carefully about it.
• 30:47
  It's interesting though.
• 30:50
  It hadn't occurred to me to wonder if wild cats were attracted to catnip.
• 30:54
  Yeah.
• 30:54
  I don't know what the distribution of catnip is.
• 30:58
  I didn't look into it before talking about this today.
• 31:02
  Is catnip natively in Uganda or has that been introduced there?
• 31:07
  A lot of the mints and the mint family of which catnip is one.
• 31:11
  In fact, it may be a different species or it may just sometimes be called catmint.
• 31:14
  I think it's the same species.
• 31:17
  Yeah.
• 31:18
  It seems to get everywhere, but I don't know if that was just easily traversed once we were traversing the globe or if it really is sort of circum-tropical at least, but really circum-temperate.
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:31
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 31:33
  Certainly in modern times it's everywhere, but who's to say?
• 31:36
  And I don't know what I- Well, I don't know.
• 31:39
  You said certainly in modern times it's everywhere.
• 31:40
  I don't know if that's true.
• 31:42
  I think so just by virtue of it being so easy to grow and cats being, domestic cats being everywhere.
• 31:48
  I think you'd find at least a little bit everywhere, but I don't know.
• 31:52
  Yeah, I do not.
• 31:54
  All right.
• 31:54
  So if you're in the business of making essential oils, and that sounds like a niche thing, but actually a lot of people do it, and you have catnip, maybe try this, especially if you're considering what to do about all the mosquitoes and already know that you don't want to be dealing with DEET.
• 32:10
  Do you know what makes an oil essential?
• 32:14
  Yeah.
• 32:14
  There's some clear etymological description of what that word means, but I don't remember.
• 32:21
  Yeah.
• 32:21
  I don't know either.
• 32:22
  Yeah.
• 32:23
  Now, of course, there are other egyucalyptus and tea tree oil, and I think citronella are all often used as well, but I don't know.
• 32:33
  Maybe the catnip is the thing we've been waiting for to keep the mosquitoes away.
• 32:39
  That would be great.
• 32:40
  It would be great.
• 32:41
  So not corporate, at least yet.
• 32:44
  Yeah, not corporate.
• 32:45
  Indeed.
• 32:46
  Okay.
• 32:47
  So that's one thing I picked up from the Guardian this week, and then I actually didn't start at the Guardian for this, but let me see.
• 33:01
  Here we go.
• 33:03
  We will get to Phil Harper's assessment of this, but he, this week, and we'll talk about his work, talked about this piece, Gen Z, earning more than millennials did at the same age, says Think Tank.
• 33:17
  At age 24, workers born in the late 1990s are paid more than any cohort since those born in the 1950s.
• 33:24
  Really?
• 33:25
  That seems- Very unlikely.
• 33:27
  Very unlikely.
• 33:29
  We have two Gen Z young men ourselves.
• 33:33
  They both actually are working full-time this summer and getting paid well, doing a variety of jobs, mostly outdoors, doing farming and landscaping and such.
• 33:43
  But what we hear from what they tell us and from their friends does not suggest this is true, nor does the sort of economic picture in general suggest that this rosy image is actually true.
• 33:58
  So let me just read a couple of paragraphs from this, and then we'll get into Phil Harper's analysis.
• 34:05
  Gen Z's early careers are more financially rewarding than those of millennials, research suggests.
• 34:10
  Those typically born between 1997 and 2012 are experiencing a mini rebound in pay packets according to the research by the Resolution Foundation in a seeming contrast to how the previous generation entered the job market.
• 34:22
  Millennials, those born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, are the first generation not to have enjoyed higher disposable incomes than previous generations according to the Think Tank.
• 34:30
  Again, the Think Tank is the Resolution Foundation.
• 34:34
  The researchers added that this setback was partly driven by millennials' careers kicking off at around the time of the 2008 financial crisis and the long stagnation of real wage growth that has taken place ever since.
• 34:45
  However, a preview of a report due on Thursday show the Resolution Foundation's latest number suggests that real weekly pay at age 24 of those born in the late 1990s was 12% higher than for cohorts born in the late 1980s.
• 34:57
  So the Resolution Foundation report in question is here.
• 35:02
  Let's see if I can make this a little bit bigger for us.
• 35:06
  And right off the bat, we see that what they've called the report is "They're Coming Home." And that is a preview of what is actually driving this result that they are claiming is about greater earning potential of Gen Z but is actually really in some ways pointing to exactly the opposite.
• 35:26
  So let's just review a little bit of this before we get into what Harper has revealed.
• 35:31
  This briefing, this is published June 25th, 2026 by the Resolution Foundation.
• 35:34
  This briefing note provides an assessment of the living standards of younger millennials in Gen Z given the increasing number of people in their 20s who live with their parents coming home.
• 35:43
  And what policymakers should do to help ensure generational progress in both income and wealth.
• 35:47
  So a little bit of review and then key findings.
• 35:50
  Nearly two-thirds, 63% of people in their early 20s now remain at home, up 12 percentage points since 2011.
• 35:57
  Private rent levels have not become relatively more expensive in the decade to 2022, 2024, but the private rented sector is the most expensive and worst quality tenure.
• 36:06
  So young people today often opt to live with their parents than make financial sacrifices.
• 36:11
  Generational cohort by cohort income progress has returned.
• 36:15
  Household incomes after housing costs age is 20 to 26 for those born in 1996, 2001, are nearly a fifth higher than for those born in 1986 and 1991 at the same age.
• 36:26
  However, exactly half of the apparent progress for the very youngest comes from income from other household members.
• 36:32
  Right there, you got to say, what could that possibly mean?
• 36:35
  How could you possibly be attributing if kids, if people in their 20s are living with their parents, what progress could you be attributing to the income of the people in their 20s if you're collating their income with other household members?
• 36:53
  So that right there is the first trick that they are doing, and I'm just going to skip into.
• 36:58
  So just to make it obvious, if they are living with their parents, let's say they're living in a house with two parents.
• 37:04
  We're getting here.
• 37:05
  Yeah, okay.
• 37:06
  All right.
• 37:07
  Well, I just want to point out that if you take the income of the three adults living in the house and divide it by three and make that their income, this is an obvious way to get to that.
• 37:18
  It's as cheating as you get.
• 37:20
  And it's, you know, when you see claims that seem counterintuitive,"Junzi is doing just fine.
• 37:26
  In fact, they're doing better than any cohort since the 1950s." Dig deep, as Phil Harper has here in his sub-stack, The Digger, and you will see he's identified three specific tricks that the Resolution Foundation has used.
• 37:40
  First, he says he was involved in this conversation with a friend, and the friend threw out this Guardian article and said, "No, Junzi is doing great." And this is, again, this is based in the UK.
• 37:54
  Maybe not again. I maybe didn't say that, but this is UK-based data. And here again is the headline from the Guardian, "Junzi earning more than millennials did at the same age," says Think Tank.
• 38:01
  So the play by play distortions.
• 38:05
  One, absorbing the parents' wealth.
• 38:07
  That's the one we already got to just by reading a couple of paragraphs into the Resolution Foundation's report.
• 38:12
  The report's primary metric, writes Harper, for tracking standard of living is "equivalized disposable household income." The critical structural flaw with this metric is that it treats a multi-generational household as a single harmonious unit where everyone pools their cash evenly.
• 38:28
  The report states, "Again, quote now from the Resolution Foundation report, that measure gives each person the equivalized total income of the household in which they live.
• 38:36
  This is a good measure of an individual's living standards of people in a household share their resources." Like if you're married, right?
• 38:41
  And as like if you're married and you actually share your resources, which like that's a whole other question, but married people who don't have a different set of problems.
• 38:51
  "This is a good measure of an individual's living standards of people in a household share their resources, but it is less likely to be the case in multi-benefit unit households, including cases where individuals live as housemates or when adult children live with parents." So that caveat that the Resolution Foundation itself mentions points to the deep, deep flaw in the metric that they have created and the Guardian has run with.
• 39:20
  "But it's worse than that," writes Harper, "because an unprecedented 63% of young people aged 20 to 24 are still living in their childhood bedrooms.
• 39:27
  Because of that, their recorded household income is heavily absorbing the peak career salaries, pensions, and asset values of their parents.
• 39:34
  The authors themselves emit the scale of this distortion later in the text.
• 39:38
  They write, the Resolution Foundation writes, "Just 10% of household income progress comes from that person's benefit unit's income, with 86% coming from others in the household." Again, in plain English, what the Resolution Foundation did in trying to assess or claiming to try to assess when it really looks like they were conclusion driven all along, whether or not Genesee was actually doing as poorly as we all think they are, they looked at all of these young people in their early 20s, early and mid 20s, who were living at home with their parents and said, "Huh, rather than actually assessing their income, we're going to assess household income and then divide evenly by the number of people in the household," which could not be a worse way to assess what these people are actually making.
• 40:22
  Furthermore, before you get to the next point, systematic eraser of rent, this again from Harper, "Not only does the uptick include the wage and asset growth of parents, but by ignoring the distorting nature of the hotel of mom and dad, the study's primary data model systematically reduced the impact of housing costs.
• 40:40
  That is, if you don't leave home, you don't pay market rent, which means your disposable income looks artificially inflated compared to the historical cohorts who could afford to move out." That is to say, you're more likely to move in with your parents in the first place in your early 20s because you cannot afford the rent.
• 40:54
  And then once you cannot afford the rent, your parents are either likely to not be charging you any rent at all or be charging you under market price because if you could afford market price, you'd be paying market price elsewhere.
• 41:04
  And that leaves you with a more disposable income than you would have if you were actually independent and living on your own.
• 41:09
  So admittedly, I'm not certain of this, but I think there are actually two flaws hidden by an analogous feature here.
• 41:19
  There's a third one that maybe Harper is the one that Harper's going to get to, but let's see where you go.
• 41:23
  One is the neutralizing of the rent feature of the people who have moved into their parents' house.
• 41:34
  The other is that this obscures the condition of that fraction of Gen Z that is most likely not doing well.
• 41:46
  In other words, if you took the distribution of how well Gen Z's are doing, the ones who move into their parents' house are most likely to be the ones who need to.
• 41:53
  And therefore, you are analyzing of the free Gen Z's who are living outside their parents' houses, they will be biased in the direction of those who are actually doing better than they might be.
• 42:03
  So you're biasing, you're not analyzing the whole of Gen Z, you're hiding the neediest of them under their parents' roofs and obscuring what their actual income is.
• 42:14
  At the same time, you're analyzing the income of the non-random fraction that is living on their own and therefore can.
• 42:22
  I think that is true, but it is also true that, well, yeah, I think that is true.
• 42:35
  I thought where you were going was Harper's third point, the workforce-survivor bias.
• 42:40
  Then there was the labor market data, which is sort of the inverse of what you're saying, actually, which is that the headline points to rising, median, weekly earnings to suggest the UK job market is in benign conditions for youth, but wage surveys like the annual survey of hours and earnings, which is what the Resolution Foundation used, only sample people who are actively employed.
• 43:00
  So not only does it look at the people who are living independently and doing well, look at the people who are not living independently but are employed and then are having their incomes averaged into that included, their parents' income included with theirs, which is then considered their average income, but it's also not including the people who are doing the least well because they are not employed at all.
• 43:27
  The report, Harper writes, "Casually drops a devastating counter-statistic that invalidates the broader trend." The UK has a resurgent "neats" situation, that is, people not in employment, education, or training.
• 43:38
  This is an acronym new to me, NEAT.
• 43:40
  People not in employment, education, or training.
• 43:43
  The UK has a resurgent NEAT situation with over a million young adults now in this category.
• 43:49
  So, writes Harper, "Whenever a million of the most economically vulnerable, lower-skilled young adults drop out of the workforce entirely, they simply do not turn up in the annual wage data sets.
• 43:58
  The median wage of working Gen Z adults goes up because the bottom of the stack was never included in the denominator.
• 44:03
  It is survivor bias masked as progress." So, I think we have the three things happening.
• 44:09
  There are people who are making good money, living independently, and maybe not doing better than generations before them.
• 44:18
  Certainly, there will be individuals in this generation that are doing better than the average in generations before them.
• 44:23
  Of course, that will always be the case, hopefully.
• 44:26
  And then there are the people who are living at home, often presumably because they don't have a choice, because most young people are watching themselves.
• 44:35
  Even if they want to be close to their parents, they would usually rather be living independently, even if close by.
• 44:42
  But those people are all included in these data in a way that doesn't make any sense.
• 44:48
  And then there's a third cohort of people who are not included at all because they are not employed.
• 44:53
  That is to say, not in employment, education, or training, or not included in the data at all.
• 44:59
  And if the number of NEATs, again, people not in employment, education, or training, is itself a larger fraction of the generational cohort than in generations past, then that right there puts the lie to the claim that the generation is doing better.
• 45:15
  Yes.
• 45:16
  Now, I want to add one other thing, which I suspect is in here.
• 45:19
  I don't know how big an effect it is likely to be, but because of the era that they are living in, there are a tiny number of Gen Zs who are doing spectacularly well.
• 45:34
  True.
• 45:34
  True.
• 45:34
  Right?
• 45:35
  The occasional only fans girl who is making millions, the occasional clavicular, or I don't know how old Mr.
• 45:47
  Beast is, but the point is somebody who has a gargantuan, you didn't see that coming.
• 45:53
  No.
• 45:54
  But I at least know there is such a thing.
• 45:56
  I think Mr.
• 45:58
  Beast is older.
• 46:01
  He is now.
• 46:02
  I think Clav is solidly Gen Z.
• 46:04
  Solid little sure he's breaking his own face and you'd have to be in Gen Z to do something as dumb as that.
• 46:10
  I feel like there were plenty of people in our generation who would have been willing to do it if the opportunity had provided itself.
• 46:15
  They hadn't thought of it.
• 46:16
  That's the thing.
• 46:17
  Social media didn't exist.
• 46:19
  Didn't exist.
• 46:19
  But anyway, the purpose- How would you monetize that back in the 90s?
• 46:23
  Yeah, that was a tough, that was a head scratcher back then.
• 46:26
  How would I monetize face breaking?
• 46:28
  But the point is one such person, it's like the old joke, Bill Gates walks into a bar and somebody stands up and says, "Hey, congratulations everybody.
• 46:40
  On average, we're all billionaires." And the answer is, yeah, on average, you are all billionaires, but what you really need is the median, right?
• 46:51
  The median is the middle person.
• 46:52
  If you divide the bar into, if you line the bar up with respect to income from lowest to highest, and then you pick the middle person, then you have some idea what the income tends to be in that bar rather drags the average way up.
• 47:14
  That's right.
• 47:15
  I would also just make one other point.
• 47:17
  With respect to this issue of the NEETs, and I've forgotten what the acronym stands for.
• 47:23
  People not in employment, education, or training.
• 47:26
  Okay.
• 47:26
  This is a classic of this kind of fraud.
• 47:35
  If you wish to portray the economy as- Analytical fraud.
• 47:39
  I would say policy, analytical fraud- In service of policy change.
• 47:43
  In service of policy, yes.
• 47:45
  If you want the economy to look like it's in a much better condition than it actually is, then what you need to do is find an excuse for getting rid of a tail of the distribution.
• 47:55
  And the answer is, well, those people aren't even looking for work.
• 47:57
  So the fact that they're unemployed is meaningless.
• 48:00
  Oh, I don't know that anyone at the Resolution has gone so far as to claim they're not looking for work.
• 48:07
  My guess is that the quiet part of the argument sounds more like, well, how would we even know?
• 48:18
  How do we include them?
• 48:19
  There are no data, therefore there are no data to- They've dropped off the bottom of the ladder, therefore how- It's like, well, those people fell off the ship.
• 48:26
  We don't know how they're doing.
• 48:27
  They could be living the life.
• 48:29
  The answer is no, I have a feeling they drowned hours ago.
• 48:32
  But the point is, I'm not saying that this foundation even knows that it's involved in a fraud.
• 48:39
  My point is this fraud is built in to, hey, if we want to retain power, what we're going to need to do is portray ourselves as more successful than we are.
• 48:46
  How are we going to do that?
• 48:47
  Well, let's put a smile on our face and let's justify it with certain techniques that superficially sound reasonable until you scrutinize them and realize they're batshit insane.
• 48:56
  Right?
• 48:56
  I wasn't necessarily here, but Harper actually, his next section in this piece is called, "Why Do They Do This?" So let me just read a little bit of his analysis because I think it dovetails with what you're saying very well.
• 49:09
  "It is easy to look at this," he writes,"and feel a sense of profound cynicism.
• 49:13
  Why would an organization filled with smart, well-meaning economists publish a model that relies on such transparently flawed assumptions?" This isn't bad science per se.
• 49:21
  These think tanks are well aware of everything I've just told you.
• 49:23
  They do it because they are playing the specific attention economy.
• 49:29
  Think tanks like the Resolution Foundation don't exist to publish dry, unread academic papers.
• 49:33
  They exist to actively shift government policy and shape public discourse.
• 49:38
  But the political landscape is completely deaf to status quo updates.
• 49:41
  If a think tank publishes a headline saying, "Young people are still structurally locked out of the economy in predictable ways," a newspaper editor will bury it on page 20.
• 49:49
  To command the news cycle, you need a hook and pivot strategy.
• 49:53
  Well done, Phil.
• 49:54
  That's exactly what's going on.
• 49:57
  It becomes an institutional problem where the point is if you make certain kinds of noises, then you do not rise in the institution and you will find yourself pulling your hair out and leaving.
• 50:09
  If you make other kinds of noises, you'll find yourself doing surprisingly well.
• 50:13
  The institution that is disguised as an analytical element becomes just a reflexive producer of superficially surprising positive conclusions about how things are going, which of course justifies the status quo remaining as it is.
• 50:33
  Go ahead.
• 50:33
  Well, to Harper's point, I ended up on a page at The Guardian here, which appears to be, I'm not even sure how I got here, all articles that are using information that came with the Resolution Foundation.
• 50:49
  That's a strange kind of search feature.
• 50:51
  Again, I don't know exactly how I got here, although I'll put the URL in the show notes.
• 50:56
  We have from July, 2026, already another piece, "Almost no progress made on UK regional household income divide in 30 years," report fines.
• 51:05
  In June, we had the one we were just talking about plus another one.
• 51:08
  In May, there was one.
• 51:09
  In April, there were two.
• 51:10
  In March, there were three.
• 51:11
  In February, there were three.
• 51:14
  This one UK-based think tank has been effectively placing pieces and placing maybe the wrong word that may be the wrong direction in which the movement is happening, but they have successfully gotten the Guardian's attention such that every single month, going back months and months and months, we have one, two, or three, usually two articles from the Resolution Foundation that the Guardian wholesale.
• 51:45
  Now, they're putting their sheen on it, but the entire thing is coming out of the so-called analysis, which is supposedly objective that the Resolution Foundation is producing, which is remarkable.
• 51:55
  Yes, and it points to a deeper layer.
• 52:01
  So you have this think tank and its purpose in the posse-wid sense, the purpose of a system is what it does.
• 52:10
  The purpose of this think tank is to generate surprising, happy pieces about the state of things that you might otherwise be inclined to change.
• 52:19
  The Guardian's posse-wid status is to do journalistic reporting on the analytic discoveries of these researchers and feed it to the public.
• 52:31
  Right.
• 52:31
  Okay.
• 52:32
  So that is a niche that serves, it's a boot licking niche.
• 52:38
  They're licking the boots of power and selling it to the public, and that has an obvious utility.
• 52:45
  Here's the deeper layer.
• 52:47
  One thing that is true, and we know this from the COVID era, which I will point out is the pre-AI era.
• 52:53
  Yes.
• 52:53
  Okay.
• 52:54
  COVID era, we saw approximately 16 gazillion articles written where the point of the article was the headline.
• 53:05
  Oh yeah.
• 53:06
  Where the point is, as soon as you dig, you know, the vaccines saved 3 million lives.
• 53:13
  Did they now?
• 53:14
  And you dig in, you know, approximately a millimeter and you find out that somebody built a model in which they fed it the answer that saved millions of lives.
• 53:24
  And then lo and behold, the model spit out the answer, it saved millions of lives.
• 53:27
  There's nothing to report, but it doesn't matter that there's anything to report because the fraction of the audience going to get past the headline is very close to zero.
• 53:37
  So the point is it's headline justification.
• 53:41
  It's headline rationalization that is being generated.
• 53:44
  Now, this has gotten way worse because now what people do is they consult something that seems to be intelligent and that something goes looking for, you know, what are the balance of the articles that say that the vaccine saved millions of lives?
• 53:59
  Seems to be a preponderance of articles.
• 54:00
  Yes, but they're all reporting on the same model.
• 54:03
  And it's exactly the same problem of averages.
• 54:06
  There's one measure of central tendency that we are like we are reverting to the mean.
• 54:11
  AI is reverting us all to the mean.
• 54:12
  We are getting less outliers, less uniqueness, less creative interpretations of things.
• 54:18
  And I mean, oh boy, you see this.
• 54:20
  I'm not saying I was seeing this in the Guardian articles, but so much of the text now, including, uh, sub stacks from people that I have read in the past or newsletters from organizations that I've been a part of, I read them and oh my God, that is not human.
• 54:39
  That is not human writing.
• 54:40
  I recognize that writing.
• 54:42
  It is flawless at a grammatical level, but it is, it has been, there is a gloss over the whole thing and there is nothing particularly surprising.
• 54:52
  No, and you know, for better and for worse, there aren't places where I hiccup because like, oh, there should be a comma there, or that's not the right word to have used there.
• 55:01
  But you know what, those little hiccups that we get when we read and when we listen, those are part of what keep us in tune with our humanity and also help us get better in terms of using language and discovering what is true about the world.
• 55:15
  If all we are ever fed and if all we are ever generating ourselves is the help of the averages that the AI are giving us all the time, then we become average and we lose our humanity.
• 55:28
  Yes, we become homogenized in our low quality thinking.
• 55:33
  And imagine not very far in the future.
• 55:36
  I'm sure this is already happening, but not very far in the future.
• 55:39
  Who is it who's going to have the resources to create institutions whose sole purpose is to flood the conversation with a particular perspective based on a particular analysis that if you chase it far enough down, turns out not to be analytical at all, right?
• 55:55
  You'll have the powerful people and they will be doing this and you will go to the AI and you will say, well, is that even true?
• 56:02
  Yes, it is true.
• 56:03
  And you'll think, ah, why do you say that's true?
• 56:06
  And here's why I say it's true.
• 56:08
  Here are 11 sources that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 56:10
  And it'll be nonsense.
• 56:12
  It will be a gamed AI, which will be worse by far than no AI.
• 56:18
  Of course.
• 56:19
  And so just like a gamed Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia.
• 56:25
  Wow.
• 56:25
  You said a mouthful and wouldn't you know it?
• 56:28
  That's on the agenda.
• 56:31
  Yep.
• 56:31
  Yep.
• 56:31
  I think it segues perfectly because the piece that you found that you wanted to talk about from the founder of Wikipedia says, you know, is talking about humans who are going in and basically, you know, going in with an ideology and having editing parties where they change a whole bunch of content all at once.
• 56:55
  That's just going to be way more efficient if they train something to do it.
• 56:59
  That's not human.
• 57:00
  That doesn't need to take breaks to eat and piss.
• 57:02
  Right.
• 57:02
  Exactly.
• 57:03
  And so the, um, we're going to need some new terms for things like astroturfing, you know, astroturfing used to be the creation of an apparently organic grassroots organization that was actually seated by something powerful that wanted the appearance of a grassroots organization because we're going to black lives matter like black lives matter, for example, or I was returned to the evergreen story by reference to another story that came up in which, uh, nevermind the details of it, but a group of students who had, uh, behaved badly during a protest were being effectively forced to modern times.
• 57:45
  Yeah.
• 57:46
  Uh, forced to, well, the generous interpretation would be to apologize.
• 57:51
  The more sinister interpretation was basically being forced to speak as if they were sorry.
• 57:59
  Um, and this raised the question by fire, I believe, about whether or not this was compelled speech and a violation and deserving of, uh, a, a protection for these students.
• 58:10
  Anyway, this reminded me of the little element, actually, this will be relevant to the Wikipedia story here, the little element of the evergreen story that history did not record correctly, where history recorded that I protested the day of absence and students rebelled and came out of the classroom.
• 58:33
  And then the videos that you all saw came out.
• 58:37
  The actual story, which took quite a while to become clear, was that exactly one year to the day before that protest at my classroom, I had spoken against a resolution in our, uh, faculty meeting where the faculty were voting to require all professors to reflect annually on their progress against their own racism, which was simply assumed to exist.
• 59:07
  I spoke in opposition to this very vigorously.
• 59:09
  I said, I've never been afraid to speak about anything in this faculty, but I have some trepidation about this one.
• 59:15
  Exactly one other person in the room voted with me and the rest of the faculty voted in favor of this resolution.
• 59:24
  And by the way, reflected annually, I don't remember it was somebody barely knew.
• 59:30
  I think they were an adjunct effectively, but, um, the, I wasn't in the room.
• 59:37
  I didn't vote against Bret.
• 59:38
  No, she didn't.
• 59:39
  She, she was on sabbatical.
• 59:41
  Um, no, I was recovering from a boat accident.
• 59:43
  That's what I was doing a year earlier.
• 59:46
  You're right.
• 59:47
  You were not yet on sabbatical.
• 59:48
  You were recovering boat accident.
• 59:50
  Um, forgive me for forgetting that detail, but it's hard to go back a year before the whole thing.
• 59:55
  But anyway, um, the reflections that faculty were going to be forced to make were official documents.
• 1:00:03
  These were going to be in your record.
• 1:00:04
  So basically, if you wanted to get rid of people, get them to reflect on their racism every year, either they're going to admit that they're racist or they're going to deny that they're racist either way.
• 1:00:14
  It's gold.
• 1:00:15
  Right.
• 1:00:15
  So if you want to control an institution, this is a way to do it, which is what I said in, in, in my probably too gentle, uh, attack on this ridiculous proposal.
• 1:00:25
  But after the vote, several professors came up to me, tenured professors and said, I agree with you of course, but I couldn't possibly bring myself to vote against this thing in a public forum, which is a classic.
• 1:00:41
  And that I think that we had already been discussing between ourselves, what the value of tenure is, what it's supposed to do, whether or not it actually does its job long before we actually found that our tenure was worth nothing.
• 1:01:00
  Yep.
• 1:01:01
  Absolutely worth nothing.
• 1:01:03
  So it didn't do what it was supposed to do, but it also didn't do for those who should have had no issue at all merely standing up and voting their conscience.
• 1:01:17
  It didn't even provide them, they believe the cover to vote what they saw to be true.
• 1:01:25
  In which case, what, what is it doing?
• 1:01:28
  Yeah.
• 1:01:28
  What is it doing?
• 1:01:29
  It's, it's not doing its job and it does a lot of terrible stuff where you dead wood can't be eliminated from the faculty, even though it has decided to stop doing the work.
• 1:01:39
  But anyway, my point is a year to the day later, students that I've never met show up at my classroom and initiate this protest and demand I be fired.
• 1:01:52
  There was no student presence in that faculty meeting.
• 1:01:55
  There was not a single student in the room.
• 1:01:58
  So this was faculty payback.
• 1:02:02
  And my point is it looked, if you just looked at your YouTube videos, it looked like an organic protest of students confused as they may have been, but that's not what it was.
• 1:02:12
  Those students were intentionally confused by faculty who sent them on a mission.
• 1:02:17
  Well, unfortunately, and we've, we've spoken about this at length before, but even at Evergreen, where because of the model of high engagement with students, a lot of engagement and where teaching was the thing that you were supposed to be focusing on rather than research, even there where if you didn't actually care about teaching and didn't care about students, you had no business being there because you would hate your life if that's what was the case.
• 1:02:44
  Even there, we found many, many faculty who in fact hated teaching hidden students.
• 1:02:49
  And as soon they would pitch about them and say rude things and unacceptable things.
• 1:02:56
  And clearly, many students were being used as useful idiots by faculty.
• 1:03:02
  And this is exactly what many students sometimes feel the intuitive that they're not being taken seriously, that there was nothing they can do to be taken seriously by some faculty.
• 1:03:14
  And unfortunately, they're right.
• 1:03:16
  Unfortunately, yeah.
• 1:03:18
  And, you know, maybe the reason that those videos are interesting is that the students were thrown by the fact that I wasn't what they were told I was, that I was actually willing to talk to them and that your students stood by your side, my students stood by my side.
• 1:03:33
  And some of them not only did that, but they spoke in my defense, students of color who were then denounced, denounced and punished by the protesting students.
• 1:03:44
  So anyway, the point is the story is not exactly that you've heard or read.
• 1:03:49
  If you go to Wikipedia, you'll get the standard slop.
• 1:03:54
  You won't get the detailed story, even though I've told it multiple times.
• 1:03:58
  You'll also see lots of wrong information on my Wikipedia page.
• 1:04:01
  You'll find out that you and I met in college at UCSC.
• 1:04:03
  Did you know that?
• 1:04:05
  I mean, I haven't gone back.
• 1:04:06
  I think it was shortly into COVID when we started talking about our skepticism about the vaccines that our Wikipedia pages turned like you, you had one for a while.
• 1:04:17
  I didn't have one for a while.
• 1:04:19
  It was up like it was fine.
• 1:04:20
  It was simple.
• 1:04:21
  And then they became filled with lies, hostile, vicious lies.
• 1:04:25
  Hostile vicious lies.
• 1:04:26
  That's why I haven't been back in a few years, but no, I didn't know we met in college.
• 1:04:31
  But that seems like a generic error as opposed to a hostile one.
• 1:04:35
  That's a benign enough error.
• 1:04:37
  They do go to great pains.
• 1:04:39
  They do report that our book was fourth on the New York Times overall bestseller list for hardcovers.
• 1:04:46
  But they note that the New York Times put a dagger next to it, implying that some retailers had received bulk orders as if we had orchestrated that.
• 1:04:58
  As if both orders.
• 1:04:59
  I wonder if the dagger actually means the New York Times dropped it off the list for many weeks when Amazon claimed not to have any copies literally for three weeks within a few days of it coming out.
• 1:05:12
  And everyone at the publishing house, like, nope, they got them.
• 1:05:16
  Like, the chicanery with our book was extraordinary.
• 1:05:21
  It was.
• 1:05:21
  And I think the dagger just means that they've got the daggers out for you.
• 1:05:25
  That's what I think it means.
• 1:05:26
  But anyway, I have digressed.
• 1:05:28
  The point is Wikipedia is a mess.
• 1:05:30
  It's a mess of multiple kinds, one of which would be expected.
• 1:05:33
  Obviously, an encyclopedia that is written in the way that Wikipedia is written is going to have errors in it.
• 1:05:40
  The nice thing about it would be that they should be self-correcting.
• 1:05:44
  But there's obviously something much more sinister going on at Wikipedia.
• 1:05:49
  And I was reminded of how important the story was by an article that has just been released released in The Washington Examiner by Larry Sanger, who is somebody I sort of barely know I interact with him sometimes online.
• 1:06:05
  He is one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, and he has become a Wikipedia dissident.
• 1:06:13
  He's very troubled by the way Wikipedia functions now.
• 1:06:18
  And he has been mounting a one man campaign to reform it.
• 1:06:23
  So he's going to be back to doing what it was supposed to do now.
• 1:06:27
  Do you want to share any of the article itself or not?
• 1:06:30
  I don't think we need to share it.
• 1:06:33
  I want to talk about what's taking place there.
• 1:06:35
  If you had anything you wanted to.
• 1:06:37
  Yeah, there are a couple of.
• 1:06:38
  So I've got the piece up here.
• 1:06:41
  And I referred earlier to one of the things that he was he was talking about.
• 1:06:50
  Let me see.
• 1:06:50
  We do know that special interest Wikipedia groups exist offline, such as the so-called Gorilla skeptics.
• 1:06:58
  It is an open secret that they operate a back channel discussion group.
• 1:07:01
  Similarly, as Ash, as journalist Ashley Rinsburg has shown, editing patterns reveal a gang of 40 accounts that together dominated articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with definite signs of off-Wiki coordination.
• 1:07:14
  There sure are a lot of people who call themselves anti-fascist on Wikipedia, probably activist funding pays some of them to edit.
• 1:07:19
  But since they're anonymous, how could we tell?
• 1:07:23
  In any event, we do know the Wikimedia Foundation directly funds a number of nonprofit organizations that edit articles of keen interest to progressives.
• 1:07:29
  Just for example, one group is called Whose Knowledge, which runs edit-a-thons engaged in, quote, centering the plurality of decolonial feminist practices.
• 1:07:39
  Yeah, that was that was the bit that I wanted to get to.
• 1:07:41
  Yeah.
• 1:07:42
  And this is again from Larry Sanger's piece published today in Washington Examiner.
• 1:07:48
  So I wanted to put this in context.
• 1:07:50
  First of all, I think that Wikipedia is one of the greatest human accomplishments that has ever been.
• 1:07:57
  It's like the Library of Alexandria to the 10th power, at least in principle, or at least that was its trajectory, that the idea that there is some place that you can go and you can get an encyclopedic exploration of any topic within the legitimate confines of an encyclopedia.
• 1:08:19
  It's way better than any encyclopedia that ever existed because encyclopedias are fixed in time, because they're limited in scope, because they're actually published on paper.
• 1:08:27
  There's only so many things in them.
• 1:08:28
  So the idea of a a encyclopedia without limit, equally accessible to everybody, not behind a paywall, is a truly beautiful thing.
• 1:08:41
  And I will say, I still use Wikipedia.
• 1:08:45
  Why?
• 1:08:46
  Because there are lots of topics on which you can, and there's no better way to go about stuff.
• 1:08:50
  Maybe the AI era is changing that a bit.
• 1:08:53
  But if you, for example, want to find out, you know, it turns out that Kilauea volcano, which you and I have recently visited, is involved in a spectacular series of eruptions right now.
• 1:09:07
  If you want to know what the pattern of eruptions is from Kilauea, you can go to their Kilauea page and you can scroll down and you can look at the eruptive history.
• 1:09:21
  And, you know, it will give you a compendium of all of the eruptions.
• 1:09:24
  And there's even a nice graph in here that you can look at how they look on a timeline.
• 1:09:29
  So you have some sense about the periodicity and all of that.
• 1:09:33
  Now, do I know that it's true?
• 1:09:35
  No, but the chances that this is false are very lower, that it's false in any particularly spectacular way or false, because there's nothing at stake here.
• 1:09:44
  Yeah.
• 1:09:44
  Right.
• 1:09:44
  There's no fight.
• 1:09:45
  There's no political fight over, you know, how often the eruptions happen or anything like that.
• 1:09:49
  So the point is, even those of us who know that Wikipedia is broken and has become this politically diabolical site, there's still a lot on it that's really, really useful.
• 1:10:05
  And that's a problem.
• 1:10:07
  So it's a problem, especially at a moment of Cartesian crisis, a Cartesian crisis being a moment where it's ever harder to know what's actually true because everything that is true, but in which somebody powerful has a stake, can be modified by modifying the online environment so that you can't, you know, you can't assess it yourself.
• 1:10:32
  So this is a terrible moment not to have a Wikipedia.
• 1:10:35
  And the problem is we do and we don't have one.
• 1:10:39
  We have a Wikipedia that if you want to know the depth of Lake Baikal, it's probably a reliable enough source.
• 1:10:45
  If you want to know, you know, how many quasars there are in the Milky Way, you might look there.
• 1:10:50
  But if you want to know what happened at Evergreen, it's not a good source.
• 1:10:55
  If you want to know whether the COVID shots are safe, it's a terrible source.
• 1:10:59
  So, you know, so the fact that it both does and does not exist as the thing that it was designed to be is a profound problem.
• 1:11:09
  And this is because zero is a special number.
• 1:11:13
  The fact is if the number of encyclopedias that sought to as objectively as possible portray the sum total of what we know about things that are factual, if there wasn't one, then somebody would produce one because you can now because the technology allows it to be done easier than it was done back in 2001 when I believe it started.
• 1:11:39
  But because there is one and because it has this dominant position in the landscape, it's very hard to start another.
• 1:11:46
  Now, yes, maybe I know that Elon wants to produce one.
• 1:11:50
  There was a brief flurry of excitement over Graucopedia.
• 1:11:54
  And frankly, Graucopedia did a pretty decent job as far as it went.
• 1:12:00
  But I can't remember the last time I went to Graucopedia.
• 1:12:01
  So it's not catching on the way it would have to to displace Wikipedia.
• 1:12:07
  Okay, it also I think people and by people maybe I just mean me, I think I think people are not going to be as enthusiastic about more things that look like they will collate all human experience into the place that you go from a guy who is doing that in some ways extraordinarily but who many of us do not want to see concentrating further power with regard to how we interpret our reality.
• 1:12:37
  Well, I agree.
• 1:12:38
  It's a mixed bag.
• 1:12:40
  It shouldn't be under anyone's control, which of course was the initial plan at Wikipedia.
• 1:12:48
  Right.
• 1:12:49
  Right.
• 1:12:49
  So and there's an interesting story here because the battle this article is motivated by the fact that Larry Sanger has now been permanently banned from editing Wikipedia of one of the two co-founders, the other one being Jimmy Wales.
• 1:13:07
  Now, in sorting out the story, I learned some things about Larry Sanger, one that I didn't know, I'm surprised I didn't know.
• 1:13:17
  So he actually has a PhD in epistemology, epistemology, which is the study of the nature, origin and limits of knowledge, which is exactly what you would want somebody to be.
• 1:13:27
  And I mean, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that PhD means you're a real expert, but Larry's a very deep guy.
• 1:13:33
  He's spent a PhD's worth of effort studying epistemology, which is exactly the kind of thing you would want for somebody who is in a founding role at something like Wikipedia.
• 1:13:49
  I was hoping when I dug that I was going to find Jimmy Wales had a similar origin story and he in fact does not.
• 1:13:59
  He has an undergraduate degree in finance, which is all well and good.
• 1:14:05
  I mean, I don't think there should be undergraduate degrees in finance necessarily, but at least it's a real subject and you know, I don't take anything away from him for that.
• 1:14:13
  But he also has a history in business in a site, see if I can remember what the name of it is, so some site I'd never heard of.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah, it's called BOMES and this site distributed male targeted adult content.
• 1:14:32
  So that is apparently where the money came from to start the project that both he and Larry Sanger were involved with before Wikipedia, which was called Newpedia and Newpedia was a encyclopedia and their plan for it was for it to be expert.
• 1:14:51
  The stuff in it was expert vetted.
• 1:14:53
  So they wanted to get a bunch of real experts, figure out what's true, make a global encyclopedia.
• 1:14:58
  Apparently they tacked a wiki element onto it at some point and the wiki element eclipsed the expert vetted element and went on to be Wikipedia.
• 1:15:08
  Eclipsed in terms of being able to generate content or eclipsed in terms of where people were attracted to go.
• 1:15:16
  I think it's the latter.
• 1:15:17
  I think the point is it was just so much more successful at generating an encyclopedia that there was no point in doing the expert thing.
• 1:15:22
  And it probably revealed, you know, at the beginning Wikipedia was pretty darn useful.
• 1:15:27
  And so in any case, you now have a battle between Jimmy Wales, who is, I think he's not, he's obviously not involved in the day to day operations of Wikipedia, but he has a prominent role as a founder on the board and has staunchly defended the way it works.
• 1:15:48
  And what you really have is two competing visions of what Wikipedia should be.
• 1:15:55
  Jimmy Wales is, you know, happy with it as it is, thinks it's a good encyclopedia.
• 1:16:00
  Larry Sanger is at his wit's end with the politicization of it.
• 1:16:05
  And Larry Sanger has put out a, oh, I should point out before this, that there are principles on which Wikipedia is based, two of which Larry Sanger is in particular responsible for.
• 1:16:20
  One is the impartiality.
• 1:16:25
  And two is a rule that goes by the heading of IAR, ignore all rules.
• 1:16:35
  Now, when I first read that, I thought, aha, I know exactly what he's talking about.
• 1:16:41
  And actually listeners to DarkHorse may know it too, because you will have heard me say that all complex institutional systems that actually function, function because somebody intelligent and mission aligned has discretion.
• 1:16:57
  What you want is the person at the head of the court who is in a position to say, yes, this is what the law is.
• 1:17:04
  Yes, you violated it.
• 1:17:05
  But the reason that you did violate it was not anticipated by the people who wrote that law.
• 1:17:10
  And the just thing to happen is therefore this, right?
• 1:17:13
  You want somebody with discretion in a position to make the right thing happen based on mission alignment over the ultimate mission of the thing, which in this is a global encyclopedia.
• 1:17:24
  So when I read an averages based thinking doesn't allow for discretion.
• 1:17:31
  Right, exactly.
• 1:17:33
  And the difference between so the basic point of that, as it's written into the founding documents of Wikipedia, is that if a rule prevents you from doing the thing that Wikipedia is designed to do, ignore it.
• 1:17:50
  You know, do not let the structure become sacred.
• 1:17:54
  So it's not a global ignore all rules.
• 1:17:56
  Right.
• 1:17:56
  That obviously then includes everything else.
• 1:17:58
  Yeah.
• 1:17:59
  But I mean, it's a little bit, is it a little bit like maybe this is a wrong analogy and it's obviously not the same thing, but like the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which is like everything that we haven't already talked about, anything that is not mentioned, that goes to the states that does not belong to the feds.
• 1:18:18
  And so this, like, if you're trying to accomplish something and we've, we've told you how and you can't do it that way, you got to get it done.
• 1:18:25
  Like you got to find another way to get it done.
• 1:18:27
  You're allowed to break the rules.
• 1:18:29
  And so it's obviously not the same.
• 1:18:30
  No, I think you're on the right track.
• 1:18:32
  Yeah.
• 1:18:32
  The point is you will find wise people in many places do something like this.
• 1:18:38
  Right.
• 1:18:39
  And programmers, you will find you can do something like this.
• 1:18:42
  If something escapes the bounds of what I foresaw, here's how to catch it.
• 1:18:46
  So the program doesn't crash.
• 1:18:48
  Yeah.
• 1:18:48
  By the way, I'm not omniscient.
• 1:18:50
  Right.
• 1:18:50
  I know that you should recognize that, you know, do the thing that needs done rather than try to respect me if I haven't seen the future accurately enough.
• 1:18:59
  Right.
• 1:18:59
  And so I'm probably going to get this wrong.
• 1:19:01
  You might even look it up for me, but I think it's going to be Thurgood Marshall who said the constitution is not a suicide pact.
• 1:19:10
  But in any case, the point is the constitution is not a suicide pact, is a similar acknowledgement that you can't anticipate all contingencies.
• 1:19:20
  And so if the following the constitution causes you to destroy the nation, something isn't right.
• 1:19:27
  And you have to do something other than just blindly follow it because the rule says so.
• 1:19:33
  And actually in my own group of principles, people will have heard me mention that I used to tell students, answer the question I should have asked you rather than the one I did ask you, because the number of students who would give me a dull answer when they knew something right in the right zone that was awesome was just too high.
• 1:19:54
  But you asked a question that was five degrees to the left.
• 1:19:56
  Because I don't know what a question to ask to get the student to tell me the thing that they know.
• 1:20:00
  And so I gave them the license to do it.
• 1:20:02
  So it's the same kind of thing.
• 1:20:05
  You want mission aligned, intelligent people to have discretion because nothing else makes sense.
• 1:20:14
  It's essentially why a captain is sovereign on a ship at sea is that you can't have rules that were written into a logbook and before they set sail that govern all contingencies and that sort of thing.
• 1:20:29
  It looks like we have justices talking about the constitution not being a suicide pact, but not Thurgood Marshall.
• 1:20:37
  Not Thurgood Marshall.
• 1:20:38
  Okay.
• 1:20:39
  All right.
• 1:20:39
  So originally first mentioned from Justice Robert Jackson in 1949, quote,"There is danger that if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional rights into a suicide pact." All right.
• 1:20:57
  So let's talk about what Larry Sanger has proposed that you might argue has gotten him.
• 1:21:12
  Let's first talk about the five pillars of Wikipedia as it was formulated.
• 1:21:16
  Wikipedia was formulated.
• 1:21:18
  The first pillar is it's an encyclopedia.
• 1:21:20
  It's not a dictionary or a soapbox or a news outlet or a collection of original research.
• 1:21:24
  It's not intended to be those things.
• 1:21:26
  It's supposed to have a neutral point of view.
• 1:21:29
  That's one of Larry Sanger's contributions here.
• 1:21:32
  The content is to be free.
• 1:21:33
  It's not supposed to be paywalled.
• 1:21:35
  Everybody's supposed to have access to it.
• 1:21:37
  Fourth, editors should act in good faith and treat each other with respect.
• 1:21:43
  And the fifth is that there are no firm, yeah, do me a squinting.
• 1:21:49
  You see me not reading, yeah, but I got all the words right.
• 1:21:52
  No firm rules, which was basically an argument for discretion.
• 1:21:59
  Now that was the founding principles.
• 1:22:00
  It's obviously turned into a disaster.
• 1:22:03
  So Larry has proposed nine theses for reform.
• 1:22:08
  Okay.
• 1:22:08
  And this is not in the Washington Examiner article.
• 1:22:12
  This is separate out there in the world at this point.
• 1:22:14
  Okay.
• 1:22:15
  So his nine theses is obviously a reference to Martin Luther's 95 theses that he nailed to the door of the church that started Protestantism.
• 1:22:27
  So the first one is in decision making by consensus.
• 1:22:32
  And the reasoning is that that hides dissent, that the idea that you should default to an article saying that something contentious to enable competing articles.
• 1:22:45
  This seems to me huge.
• 1:22:47
  The idea that you could have a, you know, vaccines are safe and effective article because there are a lot of things that say that it is, but you also have an article explaining why that doesn't make sense as a conclusion.
• 1:22:58
  Abolish source blacklists.
• 1:23:01
  I don't know what that means.
• 1:23:02
  It means that they say, well, if your sourcing is from the DarkHorse podcast, it's a known spreader of misinformation.
• 1:23:09
  So that's not a source.
• 1:23:10
  The point is it's a hidden structural bias that causes articles to come out one way and not another.
• 1:23:16
  Yeah.
• 1:23:18
  Revive neutrality.
• 1:23:19
  Basically go back to the principle from the original that neutrality is important because Wikipedia is obviously not neutral now.
• 1:23:26
  He wants to repeal the ignore all rules principle.
• 1:23:31
  And his point is that that was well intended and that it has become a shield for all kinds of ridiculous lawlessness.
• 1:23:42
  Of course it would, as of course did, you know, do no evil from Google become an absurdity as Google matured into, you know, the source of much evil.
• 1:23:54
  Yeah.
• 1:23:54
  Although I don't think that's the same.
• 1:23:56
  I don't feel like that's analogous because in this case, it was a well-intended anti-rule, really, that then got weaponized to do its bidding.
• 1:24:09
  Whereas Google just sort of grew beyond the scope of ever imagining that it would honor its initial motto.
• 1:24:16
  Yeah, I agree with that.
• 1:24:18
  So he wants to repeal it on the basis that it shields insiders who are doing bad things.
• 1:24:24
  Six is to reveal Wikipedia's leaders.
• 1:24:29
  And he quotes something, only 14 percent are known who they are.
• 1:24:35
  So there's a large percentage of the leaders who are effectively anonymous.
• 1:24:39
  What's a leader?
• 1:24:41
  He goes through an analysis of what actually runs Wikipedia.
• 1:24:47
  So is this from something that's out there in the world?
• 1:24:49
  It's from multiple things that are out there in the world.
• 1:24:53
  But in any case, there is a de facto structure inside what is supposed to be a horizontal editing collective.
• 1:25:02
  Of course, there would be.
• 1:25:04
  But it is amazing how non-hierarchical systems actually are covering like deep hierarchy so often.
• 1:25:12
  It reminds me.
• 1:25:13
  Almost always?
• 1:25:14
  It reminds me, Jordan Pearson's excellent point about lobsters and the ancientness of the structures that build hierarchies.
• 1:25:24
  And they therefore tend to reassert themselves.
• 1:25:28
  OK, so reveal Wikipedia's leaders.
• 1:25:31
  Let the public rate articles so that if you.
• 1:25:34
  Well, I mean, yeah, that's that seems to be returning to the roots.
• 1:25:36
  Like if Wikipedia is publicly written, publicly sourced, then let their ratings begin.
• 1:25:42
  Absolutely.
• 1:25:42
  Yeah.
• 1:25:44
  He wants to end indefinite blocking, which is, of course, I don't know if that's ironic in light of the fact that he's just been permanently blocked, but it's obviously necessary to be that a founder who is as mission aligned as anyone on Earth isn't even allowed in.
• 1:25:59
  And last, he wants to adopt a legislative process with something like a constitutional convention so that basically a system in which things can be.
• 1:26:10
  To litigate disagreements.
• 1:26:11
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:26:12
  And I would argue that this is actually something that is also missing from X and needs to be there.
• 1:26:20
  Right.
• 1:26:21
  People are still being thrown off of X sometimes for preposterous things.
• 1:26:27
  I don't know what the resolution of it has been, but Warren Smith, who has been a voice of reason, very courageous, was recently thrown off.
• 1:26:37
  I don't know if he's been restored, but was recently thrown off, thrown off for plagiarism.
• 1:26:42
  What did he plagiarize?
• 1:26:44
  His own book.
• 1:26:46
  Right.
• 1:26:46
  How dare he?
• 1:26:47
  Exactly.
• 1:26:49
  Without even paying himself royalties.
• 1:26:51
  I mean, seriously, like he quoted himself?
• 1:26:53
  Yeah.
• 1:26:55
  That's how stupid things have become.
• 1:26:56
  But you have this architecture where if it decides that you've done X, back to the Evergreen story, there's an important moment in the Evergreen story where I was being accused of racism with capital R.
• 1:27:14
  That's a quote in a faculty meeting.
• 1:27:17
  Yep.
• 1:27:20
  Before the blow up or after?
• 1:27:22
  Before.
• 1:27:22
  Yeah.
• 1:27:23
  And I started to articulate why that was an absurd claim.
• 1:27:30
  And I was told, Bret, this is not the place to adjudicate accusations of racism.
• 1:27:37
  And I literally said, fine, where is the place?
• 1:27:41
  And the literal next thing that was said was you should not expect a place.
• 1:27:46
  So, you know, so remember this.
• 1:27:48
  Yeah.
• 1:27:48
  Do you remember this?
• 1:27:49
  It was quite a wild thing.
• 1:27:51
  But the point is you don't ever want to build an institution in which that's the nature of, you know, if there's a process in which this thing can be decided about you and it has that consequence, there has to be some place to evaluate the evidence, to respond to it, to provide evidence.
• 1:28:05
  They have not if you have original sin.
• 1:28:08
  Like that's that's that's how the construct works.
• 1:28:12
  If you try like the best, the best way to put together their argument, and most of them didn't even have this right.
• 1:28:18
  But is you are only do a place to defend yourself.
• 1:28:26
  If you don't come here with so much sin in your soul, that there cannot possibly be a way for you to be innocent.
• 1:28:33
  Yeah, in fact, and because we are all born with the racism inside of us, we do not deserve to have a hearing.
• 1:28:42
  Yeah, that's that's that's the logic.
• 1:28:44
  Right.
• 1:28:44
  It was an accusation of original skin.
• 1:28:47
  I had the wrong skin color to be able to level a defense of myself, because no defense is really conceivable.
• 1:28:52
  What would it even sound like?
• 1:28:54
  That was cute.
• 1:28:55
  Thank you.
• 1:28:56
  I'm reminded too that you were accused, nay valorized even maybe for being spicy white.
• 1:29:06
  Spicy white because as Jewish.
• 1:29:08
  Yes, I'm only I'm only white when being Jewish is not disqualifying, which is another thing I would love to see the rule the rule set for.
• 1:29:18
  But okay, so I want to put this in contrast.
• 1:29:21
  You've just heard what Larry Sanger's proposal for reforming Wikipedia is.
• 1:29:27
  Nine theses.
• 1:29:27
  Nine theses.
• 1:29:29
  Now it happens that Jimmy Wales has put out seven rules of trust.
• 1:29:34
  Response.
• 1:29:36
  I don't think it's in response, but he's written a book.
• 1:29:39
  And so basically you've got, you know, the finance and porn guy up against the epistemology guy.
• 1:29:47
  And they are vying for the role of the person who best understands how you would build an organization to create a.
• 1:29:53
  Okay, before like, yeah, I actually know nothing about these people, except that I've read Sanger's article in the Washington Examiner today.
• 1:30:03
  Just.
• 1:30:05
  Just to be fair.
• 1:30:06
  Yes.
• 1:30:07
  Like what else the finance important guy is a little bit like calling Spencer Pratt the reality TV guy.
• 1:30:16
  You know, it's it's something that that, you know, I don't know.
• 1:30:19
  I like I personally, I feel like porn is disqualifying if if you want me to take you seriously, if you were ever involved in producing porn.
• 1:30:27
  But that's that's for me to decide for in my assessing you.
• 1:30:32
  If the guy made porn, finance porn, whatever, as a younger man and his long sense decried it.
• 1:30:38
  Yeah.
• 1:30:39
  I don't think that we still should be calling him the porn guy.
• 1:30:43
  Okay.
• 1:30:44
  First of all, should.
• 1:30:47
  Debatable.
• 1:30:49
  Did and feel fine about it.
• 1:30:50
  Not debatable.
• 1:30:52
  Now, in part, feel fine about it because Jimmy Wales runs a site that has been slandering you and me since early covid.
• 1:31:01
  Wikipedia.
• 1:31:01
  Yeah.
• 1:31:02
  Okay.
• 1:31:03
  So I don't feel generous towards the man.
• 1:31:07
  And the fact is, what he's accused us of is potentially what his site has accused us.
• 1:31:15
  Fair enough.
• 1:31:16
  But he's refusing to clean up that site and the process that did it.
• 1:31:19
  And a lot of people it it's harmful to reputations and more and hiding.
• 1:31:26
  But I just like there's there's so much that happens in modern times where, you know, the individual is accused of the is accused of being guilty of everything the aggregate does.
• 1:31:38
  And fair enough.
• 1:31:38
  You're making good points.
• 1:31:40
  Would it be better if I said he was the porn guy?
• 1:31:43
  Not that there's anything wrong with that.
• 1:31:45
  That's far worse.
• 1:31:46
  And you know, it's far worse.
• 1:31:47
  But it's funny.
• 1:31:48
  I thought it's it's not.
• 1:31:50
  No, the epistemology guy versus the finance important guy.
• 1:31:53
  That was funny.
• 1:31:54
  I just thought I needed to step in and defend the finance important guy because I don't know.
• 1:31:58
  That's apparently my role.
• 1:31:59
  Jimmy, are you learning something from this conversation?
• 1:32:02
  Here we have two people of good faith having a respectful disagreement over my whether or not you're worth defending.
• 1:32:11
  Frank.
• 1:32:11
  Yeah, actually that.
• 1:32:12
  So anyway, that is how it's done.
• 1:32:15
  Now, Jimmy's.
• 1:32:19
  So in contrast to Sanger's nine theses, you've got Jimmy's seven rules of trust.
• 1:32:25
  They are one, make it personal to be positive about people.
• 1:32:30
  What does that what does make it personal?
• 1:32:32
  I mean, OK.
• 1:32:34
  To be positive about people.
• 1:32:37
  Three, create a clear purpose.
• 1:32:39
  Four, be trusting.
• 1:32:42
  Five, be civil.
• 1:32:44
  Six, be independent.
• 1:32:46
  Seven, be transparent.
• 1:32:48
  And then he's got an eighth principle, which is a bonus.
• 1:32:53
  Actually do it.
• 1:32:54
  OK, I have a question.
• 1:32:55
  Yeah.
• 1:32:56
  Is he actually an idiot?
• 1:32:58
  What what is it?
• 1:32:59
  Look, what the hell?
• 1:33:00
  What the hell is that?
• 1:33:01
  Just because people.
• 1:33:03
  What and.
• 1:33:04
  Look, I mean, what?
• 1:33:06
  He may be a diabolical genius masquerading as an idiot.
• 1:33:10
  But what that list is insane.
• 1:33:11
  I know.
• 1:33:12
  This is my point is that you've got a deep guy now.
• 1:33:16
  Band rules of trust.
• 1:33:17
  The fourth rule of trust.
• 1:33:19
  Be trusting.
• 1:33:22
  What?
• 1:33:23
  It's pretty good rule if you're going to also have several rules of trust that have eight rules.
• 1:33:27
  Yeah.
• 1:33:28
  Be be and be civil.
• 1:33:29
  Like play better tennis while you're at it.
• 1:33:31
  Jimmy.
• 1:33:31
  Right.
• 1:33:32
  OK.
• 1:33:32
  Anyway, point is, look, I spot when I Larry Singer, singer, is not a natural fellow traveler to guy like me.
• 1:33:44
  Right.
• 1:33:44
  He's a religious guy.
• 1:33:46
  He's on the right end of the spectrum.
• 1:33:48
  But I love him.
• 1:33:49
  I love him because he's deep and he knows what he thinks and he knows why he thinks it and he thinks about systems in a way that's actually respectful how you might want them to function.
• 1:34:05
  You know, he spots the error in his own rule and, you know, does the right thing and argues that it should be retracted because it's an obstacle to progress.
• 1:34:14
  He understands this point about discretion, which is so vital to making anything like this function.
• 1:34:21
  So the thing is, when I look at the actual output of Larry Sanger, I think, yeah, more of that.
• 1:34:27
  Right.
• 1:34:28
  In fact, there's one thing I haven't even mentioned to you, which is that he's got another question, which he was gracious enough to send us an example of, which is he has tried to put on a single flash drive the whole of the what is it called the Gutenberg Project, some large collection of vital texts that he is afraid we are going to lose access to that you should have under your personal control.
• 1:34:54
  Also sounds like a very good idea to me.
• 1:34:55
  So the point is this person is very, and Jimmy Wales.
• 1:35:00
  So you began that by saying you wouldn't expect him to be a fellow traveler.
• 1:35:08
  You said he's religious.
• 1:35:09
  He's fairly far right politically.
• 1:35:12
  But I think anyone who pursued and earned a PhD in epistemology is inherently a fellow traveler.
• 1:35:20
  So you started with some definition.
• 1:35:22
  I happen to have just been working on a chapter, my book called epistemology, which I begin with the OEDs most recent definition of epistemology, which is epistemology noun, the theory of knowledge and understanding, especially with guard the theory of knowledge and understanding, especially with regard to its methods validity and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
• 1:35:49
  There are a lot of definitions of epistemology out there that happens to be the most recent OED definition, and it's perfect.
• 1:35:56
  And I think that anyone who earns an advanced degree in that pursuit, and I used to say, everyone with a PhD has a doctorate in philosophy.
• 1:36:10
  And I would say this to people with PhDs in literature, they're like, yes, but scientists, no, all scientists, anyone with a PhD is supposed to have thought deeply about the philosophy of what it is they're doing, which if you're in the science, that means that you have to have thought deeply about epistemological questions.
• 1:36:26
  How is it that we make claims of truth?
• 1:36:28
  What is it that we think we know?
• 1:36:29
  And how is it that we came to believe what we know?
• 1:36:33
  How would we know if it's true?
• 1:36:34
  All of these questions are absolutely fundamental to any scientific approach to anything.
• 1:36:39
  And so I think Sanger is inherently going to be a fellow traveler, regardless of what he believes about the soul or the spirit in the universe, or what political systems might work best.
• 1:36:53
  I think the epistemological foundation is deeper.
• 1:36:58
  This is one of those not very rare cases in which you are 100% right.
• 1:37:03
  I should not have said fellow traveler.
• 1:37:04
  I was grasping for the right term, and I still don't have it.
• 1:37:08
  He's not the natural person that you would generally imagine that I would hang out with.
• 1:37:15
  He's somebody I would love to hang out with because of exactly what you're pointing to.
• 1:37:18
  At the deepest level, he is, as far as I can tell, completely aligned, and completely aligned at another level that I think is important.
• 1:37:31
  My favorite philosopher is Steve Patterson, who has been a guest of the channel, who among his greatest things he said is, "Philosophy is where it's at.
• 1:37:40
  Philosophers aren't." Now my gripe with philosophers, in modern times at least, is that they seem to have fallen under the false belief that the purpose of philosophers is to talk to other philosophers, rather than to elucidate something that would be of use to the general public.
• 1:37:58
  So most philosophers are just in academic departments writing papers for each other, completely pointless.
• 1:38:03
  Rather than weighing into the important discussions of the day and talking to us about where we're doing the justifiable way, where we're violating the philosophical underpinnings of science and making an error, they should be doing that job, and they don't.
• 1:38:18
  But what's Larry Sanger doing?
• 1:38:20
  Larry Sanger is taking a deep understanding of epistemology and trying to bring it to the public in the form of the greatest encyclopedia that has ever existed on planet earth, where the basis of what is found in it is epistemologically sound, and it's been hijacked by other people.
• 1:38:37
  So yeah, absolutely a fellow traveler, and would be by his very nature, even if it's a strange bedfellow situation.
• 1:38:49
  But all right, that's about where I wanted to take this.
• 1:38:52
  I find this story is not only fascinating because you have these two competing visions of how to run this thing.
• 1:38:59
  One of these visions is obviously at least directionally correct, and the other one is obviously a train rack.
• 1:39:07
  But- Just be trusting, right?
• 1:39:09
  Be trusting.
• 1:39:09
  I should have been more trusted.
• 1:39:10
  That's Wales's fourth rule of- Am I being uncivil?
• 1:39:13
  How many of his rules make it personal?
• 1:39:15
  I've made it personal.
• 1:39:18
  Let's see.
• 1:39:19
  Be independent.
• 1:39:21
  Oh, I'm doing that.
• 1:39:24
  Create a clear purpose.
• 1:39:26
  I think I'd like humanity to survive as long as possible and people to be as free as possible while we're surviving.
• 1:39:34
  Independent, transparent.
• 1:39:37
  No, I can't see through you.
• 1:39:38
  You're okay.
• 1:39:39
  I'll work on it.
• 1:39:40
  And I'm actually just doing it, or at least attempting it.
• 1:39:43
  But bottom line of this story is- That's such an inane list.
• 1:39:49
  It's bad.
• 1:39:50
  I mean, I hope for the porn and finance guy's sake, that that came in with some context, at least some context of like when you are editing a Wikipedia entry, do these things.
• 1:40:03
  Because on its own, it makes its main is kind of- I should have dealt deeper.
• 1:40:08
  But anyway, the point is when I talk to people, I get one of two reactions about Wikipedia.
• 1:40:16
  Many people, boomers aren't aware that there's a problem.
• 1:40:22
  And so they use it as a source without realizing that every time they deal with something where something is running the risk of it being highly politicized.
• 1:40:33
  Or there are people who are aware of the bias in Wikipedia and have stopped taking it seriously.
• 1:40:40
  Just don't go there at all anymore.
• 1:40:41
  Right.
• 1:40:42
  Sort of like people treat, aware people treat the New York Times.
• 1:40:46
  Exactly.
• 1:40:47
  However, this ain't the frickin' New York Times.
• 1:40:50
  It's bad enough that something that we referred to as the paper of record has been captured by a cynical political force and is now a weapon of war.
• 1:41:01
  That's bad.
• 1:41:02
  That's really bad.
• 1:41:03
  But you could start another newspaper.
• 1:41:06
  If you started one that was any good, it would be a threat to so many things that you're going to have trouble starting it.
• 1:41:10
  But nonetheless, it hasn't absorbed the entire space of newspaper and destroyed it.
• 1:41:15
  Yes.
• 1:41:15
  The way Wikipedia has absorbed the entire space of encyclopedia and destroyed it, turned it into an absolute weapon on one side of a political battle.
• 1:41:26
  Maybe it's, you know, purchasable by dark forces that wish to portray mRNA vaccines as safe and effective or whatever it's doing.
• 1:41:36
  But the point is this is intolerable that we would face a Cartesian crisis with a Jimmy Wales version of Wikipedia rather than a Larry Sanger version.
• 1:41:48
  So I don't know how many billionaires are watching.
• 1:41:52
  If you want to back somebody to build a tool that will make humanity better, that will increase the likelihood that we're going to make it through the next 150 years, back Larry Sanger, he seems to know what he's talking about.
• 1:42:07
  He's done a lot of this work already, and he's the right guy for the job.
• 1:42:12
  He understands the deep part.
• 1:42:14
  If you, you know, giving people discretion is scary because they can misuse it.
• 1:42:17
  If you give Larry Sanger discretion, I'm not worried.
• 1:42:20
  So anyway, we need a Wikipedia.
• 1:42:23
  Wikipedia ain't it.
• 1:42:24
  So let's build one.
• 1:42:27
  Excellent.
• 1:42:29
  All right.
• 1:42:29
  I think that's it.
• 1:42:30
  I think we got to the end there.
• 1:42:32
  We did.
• 1:42:32
  Yeah.
• 1:42:33
  So check out our sponsors this week, American Financing, Massa Chips and CrowdHealth.
• 1:42:40
  All awesome.
• 1:42:41
  All worth your time.
• 1:42:42
  If you are in the market for a mortgage, something better than health insurance or some really delicious chips.
• 1:42:51
  Involuntarily open my mouth with a bag of chips.
• 1:42:55
  Yeah, that's that that'll happen to you too.
• 1:42:57
  So you know, buyer beware.
• 1:42:59
  Yeah.
• 1:43:01
  And we'll be back same time next week.
• 1:43:05
  And until you see us then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food and get outside.
• 1:43:10
  Be well, everyone.