Bret Weinstein Quotes

The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it. My advice to this body is to put the nation and its core values ahead of partisanship and join us in the center to end this cultish power-grab, and return us to a forward path as a nation.

[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibility, towards collective action... that can restructure the s that surround the market so that we... have a chance of altering the behavior.

Human beings... we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. ...It's where our flexibility comes from. ...We are robots in which ...a large fraction of the ...behavioral capacity has been off-loaded to the software layer which gets written and re-written over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that... the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural... and the conscious layer, and not in the hardware, or a hard coding way. That layer is prone to make errors... [C]hildren make absurd errors all the time... That's part of the process... It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term, does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. ...Things are being created, they're being destroyed, and... obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like... freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies, and I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. ...I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say, I haven't heard a better idea.

Weaponized "equity" is a means to an unacceptable and dangerous end, and it is already spreading from college campuses to other institutions... The emergence of this mentality, and this style of argument, at the highest levels of the tech sector and the press should alarm us greatly. The courts will not be far behind.

In the case that... what is good for the company is somewhat different than what is good for society, the ruthless corporation has the greatest advantage... because it can do anything it wants, and the corporation that is bound by what's good for society can't do anything. The corporation that tries to balance these concerns finds that it competes best with the ruthless corporation the more ruthless it becomes, and the outcome is predictable.

[O]ne can now advance... policies, and almost certainly succeed... if they are properly draped in weaponized terminology. "Equity", for example, has taken on special properties. If a person opposes an "equity" proposal, those advancing the proposal are secure in asserting that their opponent is motivated by opposition to racial equity itself: In other words, that they are racist. ...[O]ne’s right to speak is now dictated by adherence to an ascendant orthodoxy in which one’s race, gender and sexual orientation are paramount.

[F]ree speech is the wrong framework to be thinking about this, and... it has very little to do with college campuses. ...What happened at Evergreen that caused it to become a national story was that an unstoppable force met an immovable object. ...I was the immovable object ...for the moment, let's just chalk that up to a personality defect.

I believe we have a very broken relationship, at least in the US but probably across the West, where we ask candidates for office about policies that they are going to enact. And it's like a reflex where we want them to tell us 'I'm going to do this this that you want' so they promise us stuff, it doesn't work, they don't have the power to enact it when they get in office or they never meant it in the first place. And we would be much better off, counterintuitive as this sounds, if we assessed their character and their patriotism instead of their policy proposals. My feelin is: I actually don't care what you think of policy. If you impress me, that you're a patriot, that you love the country that I'm a part of, that you want to see it improved, and that your values align with mine so that improved to you also means improved to me, then all I want to know is that you're good at evaluating what policies might get us there.

[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence.

[T]he boundaries of the evolutionary environment do not stop at the market's edge.

[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams...

[I]mmovable objects are vanishingly rare in an academic context... If you're going to do it on the faculty side, you really need to have tenure, and in order to get tenure a lot of the things that you have to do train you not to be an immovable object. So there are very few immovable objects on college campuses, and that's a problem.

The agents in the market are responding to opportunities that we have left open. It makes no more sense to be angry at them... than it does to be angry at the mosquito for sucking your blood. ...[Y]ou have to close down the opportunity.

As a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, I find myself at the vanguard of an emerging non-ideological, non-partisan movement. Along with and the (FIRE), we are fighting to restore and respect for competing perspectives.

(4) With that trade-off as a fundamental constraint, selection adjusts telomere lengths—longer telomeres increasing the capacity for repair, shorter telomeres increasing tumor resistance.