Bret Weinstein Quotes

Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context.

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

(3) These patterns are manifestations of an evolved antagonistic pleiotropy in which extrinsic causes of mortality favor a species-optimal balance between tumor suppression and tissue repair.

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.

As far as the academy is concerned, these ideas are a direct threat to the ability of the academy to continue to teach. Because what we saw here, at Evergreen, was the descendants of critical theory challenged the right of students and faculty to engage in science. They actually confronted us as if science was just another mechanism of wielding power. And if they do that, if that happens across the country, collages and universities will not be the place where science happens. And science will continue, it will have to reformulate itself outside the collage and university system. And when it does that the justification for a collage and university system vanishes. Who's gonna send their kid to a collage that doesn't have science at its core? So anyway, I think this is actually a threat to the academy as a whole.

I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong.

[T]his feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power. ...It has installed amongst an unelected group of very powerful and wealthy people effective power over any attempt to change from the status quo.

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.

(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.

[W]e need to rethink the way we keep track of behavior in the marketplace. We need full cost accounting... every cost that is generated by an activity in the market needs to show up in the balance sheet, whether that is borrowing from future generations, whether that is putting the population at risk. ...They need to be included in the price of the product or otherwise returned to those who decided to initiate the action. If we did that, the amount of activity would drop... to exactly those behaviors that are actually beneficial to society, leaving out all of those externalities that are generating so much profit with our current system.

We have to ask ourselves, what fraction of the economic activity that surrounds us is profitable only by virtue of the fact that those who make the money are externalizing the cost to somebody else. If we were to eliminate such behaviors, we would... reduce the amount of activity by a lot... but we would reduce it by exactly the fraction of activities that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

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.

[I]n sectors of our economy where there is not a lot of room for utility-increasing innovations, we see an evolution towards ruthlessness... and that has interacted with... the central flaw in... our global system, with the U.S. at its head. What we have... are loops... Wealth that is made in the market is capable of increasing one's power over regulation. Power over regulation allows increased opportunity to make money in the market. This is a positive feedback loop. That should scare any engineer of biologist because positive feedback loops that are not bounded by some negative feedback force are unstable. They detonate. They explode.

[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.

(6) In iteroparous organisms selection tends to co-ordinate rates of senescence between tissues, such that no one organ generally limits life-span.