#61: If Covid Policy Were Rational (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 61st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we discuss kambo, the poison of an Amazonian frog, which is being used by Americans who are seeking a purgative and possibly spiritual experience, but the people at the NYT once again reveal that they have no idea even how to speak science, much less assess it. From there, down the rabbit hole we go to a di...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 61.
Happy New Year to you all.
For you, Heather, and for I assume everyone in our audience, it is January 2nd, 2021.
I am still stuck in late December.
I have some work that I didn't finish, and I will be catching up to you all in 2021 in maybe a week and a half, two weeks tops.
Hopefully you're not the guy who ate the silica gel who caused 2020, but if you're the guy who gives us a 40-day December 2020, I'm going to come for you.
No, I think it's just me.
It's interesting.
2020, I can tell you, is now quite deserted.
I seem to be the only one here.
I'm glad to hear it.
Yes.
Things still go wrong, though.
Sure.
The toaster exploded this morning.
Flew out through the window and put a hole in our new porch.
What's going on in the kitchen?
Yeah, that explains a lot.
I thought it explained something.
All right, so today we are going to do a few announcements first, which we're going to start with, and we're going to talk about frog poisons, of course.
The diets of some Amazonian peoples move from there to a natural segue into vaccines, some drug treatments that are not vaccinations for COVID, and then finish it up by talking a little bit about the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, who is still the mayor after this last round of elections.
Will we be making recommendations for dietary upgrades for Amazonian people?
No, we will not.
We will not.
We will not.
Alright, well that's a shame.
We will not.
Teaser!
Some of them seem to specialize on macaws.
They eat very large parrots.
Ooh.
Yeah.
I have something on that, which you don't know that I have, but when we get there... Excellent.
No, I don't.
I don't.
Alright.
I don't.
So, announcements, yes.
Let us start with, we have added some items to the... I am not going to say merch, I just won't.
Yes, there you have it on your screen now.
The First Against the Wall Club.
We have some shirts and hoodies and stickers and cups and things like that.
So anyway, I did want to say a word about what first against the wall club means what it is supposed to evoke It was a very popular thing that was discussed on the podcast and many people requested that we get some stuff out there in the world what first against the wall club is an allusion to is the fact that the the enemies of reason are not likely to be nice if they win and that in some sense we are watching an epidemic of cowardice which is allowing
This woke revolution to take over the world.
And if we're going to to beat it, we have to get over the cowardice.
And so there's a sense that one of the things one really has to do is you have to find your courage and you have to budget for what that means.
And it means confronting the the understanding of the fact that you will not be treated well If they win, but what it really means is not that any of us want to end up against the wall I certainly don't expect to be lined up against the wall myself And the reason I don't expect to is because I know that failure is not an option that we can and must win and So we will do it
So anyway, if you are of like mind then consider, I don't know, the first against the wall club and grabbing a mug.
And also it occurred to me that we are frequently asked about what advice we can give people who are facing a woke confrontation of their own and it occurs to me
That one thing you could do to encourage people to find their strength and their willingness to say what's true in spite of the risks and hazards would be to, I don't know, give them a sticker or if you don't want to buy a sticker you could write out your own card inviting them to the First Against the Wall Club.
Final thing I'll say is the recognition of the hazard of standing up against these sorts of foes is frightening, but you get used to it, and many, many humans have confronted very frightening things because history demanded it of them, and we are no different in this regard.
We are lucky that we are not facing a literal battlefield with bullets, but nonetheless it is our obligation and future generations require of us that we become courageous and fend this off because everything seems to depend on it.
So if people are interested in that, where do they find it?
Oh, they would find that at the Dark Horse.
It is store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
That will take you there.
All right.
So hopefully you enjoy those things.
Second announcement is it's sort of a correction.
It's an odd one.
Some of you will have noticed that the podcast that we did live last week was briefly unavailable and then went back to availability.
The reason for that is that we discovered that a story that had been forwarded to us that we had talked about, the story about a trans woman in the evergreen locker rooms, we discovered that that story, though it was forwarded to us in the present, was not modern.
And we thought it was modern at the time.
We pulled it down to make sure that we hadn't said anything that wasn't right.
We went back and looked at it carefully.
We didn't say anything That was incorrect.
And so we elected to put it back up as is.
But do know that we should have known that that story took place, in fact, in 2012 when we were at Evergreen.
Somehow that story did not make it to us, which I still find surprising.
Indeed.
But in any case, apologies for the error.
But like we said, the story and nothing we said in there is untrue.
So in the original episode is unadulterated backup.
Yep.
All right.
So that takes care of announcements.
It does.
So let us start with a tale of frog poisons and the awful, terrible, very bad New York Times.
And from there, in part because I ended up finding this story just fascinating about the differing diets of some of the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazonian tribes, But also as just an indicator of how one can end up in interesting scientific territory by following some sort of chain of research and links to end up someplace really unrelated to where you started.
We found yesterday this story in the New York Times.
Can you poison your way to good health?
West Coast wellness elites think combo an Amazonian frog poison drug is helping them purge toxins in quotes from their lives.
Note the toxins here is in quotations, but if you go down to the third paragraph, and I've lost control of my screen again, um you can read combo long used by some indigenous tribes in south america as a sort of rainforest vaccine is not a recreational drug you don't trip in the tangerine trees and marmalade skies sense did they say vaccine I can't imagine why they would have said vaccine.
Right.
It's an incredibly irresponsible, especially in the modern moment, use of this term.
And so I, because I do not have access to my computer, I cannot, do I have it back?
There we go.
Later in the same article, if you can just give me a screenshot real quick here, Zach, literally one of the subheadings of the sections is a reinforced vaccine, question mark.
And, you know, I have yet to explain what this is.
What this is, it's this frog.
It's a hylid, which is a tree frog.
And actually apropos our conversation, our phylogenetic conversation last week, tree frog can be both an ecological descriptor, a frog that hangs out in trees and is adapted for trees, And it is also a phylogenetic description of all of those frogs that are in the group known as Hylidae, the family of quote-unquote tree frogs.
So there's this frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor, which is also known as the Amazonian monkey frog, the Amazonian leaf frog.
There are a lot of common names.
So the reason that you use the Latin term is that there's only one scientific name, binomial, Phyllomedusa bicolor.
When captured and hassled, as is the case of many other rainforest frogs, including the ones that I studied, both in the New World, the dart poison frogs, and in Madagascar, the mantellas, when hassled, they will produce a white exudate on their skin that is toxic, that is poisonous.
This toxin that Phyllomedusa bicolor produces is totally unrelated to the lipophilic alkaloids, I think, that are present in the frogs that I studied.
Which it would be expected based on the fact that in spite of the fact that both Mantellian frogs, oh they're not Mantellian frogs anymore, are they?
No.
Oh, Mantellian frogs.
Mantellian still works.
Those are the Malagasy frogs.
The Malagasy poison frogs and the poison dart frogs, which were Dendrobates, have they been moved?
They're still dendrobatids.
They've split the genus into oophagia and various other things.
Okay, good enough.
They're still dendrobatids.
That's fair.
Okay, so the point is, despite the fact that ecologically speaking these are both heavily tree-associated clades, these are neither of them hylids.
They're not tree frogs in the phylogenetic sense.
They are tree frogs only in the ecological sense.
And so you would expect that a toxin that was unique to these groups Could only be found in hylids if it was separately and convergently evolved, and it is therefore no surprise to find that some other toxin—many frogs, many amphibians, in fact, are toxic—and it is not surprising to find that some other toxin has evolved, presumably to dissuade predators.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's lots of little fingers to go down here, but just because you mentioned it with regard to convergence of diet, in fact, these two really distantly clades of frogs that are not the ones that produce combo, but the dart poison frogs from the New World and the Mantellas from Madagascar do have the same class of alkaloids that they produce in their skin, which therefore produce the same kinds of
Really undesirable effects in those who eat them and that is in fact convergently evolved as a result of them sharing aspects of their diet.
It is the ants and mites in the frogs diet that produce, that provide the building blocks for the alkaloids that the frogs then convergently produce.
And I actually did not.
There is, by the same researchers who discovered the nature of the chemistry in the frogs that I worked on, Meyers and Daly, there is some work on these guys, on phyla medusa.
I did not track it down.
I don't know to what we attribute their poisons, but it's different.
So Combo, which is the name of this, this, oh boy, I just don't have my computer.
There we go.
Yeah, that might be that might be useful Okay Well, we'll just see if it's working at the moment.
No, it's not yeah, it's like I think you just need to give me my computer and Okay, we are having I don't know why Why do you go trackpad?
Okay Okay.
So Combo has been described as a vaccine by the New York Times, but in no way is it.
It is in fact, of course, a toxin that produces strong purgative effects and diarrhea as well, both vomiting and diarrhea very quickly upon taking it.
And it's sort of, although I have not said it called this, it sort of seems like it's the first hour or two of ayahuasca with none of the euphoric hallucinogenic effects.
All the bad part of ayahuasca.
All the bad part and none of the euphoria.
Some of the people in the Amazonian tribes who actually do use it do report, oh, I'm a better hunter afterwards.
I have a reduction in pain.
You know, it's not clear.
This work has mostly not been done.
But what it's definitely not is vaccinating you against anything.
And so the reason I first went to this story was not because, oh, Amazonian rainforest frogs, I know something about those, I'm interested, and in people, but in what the hell is the New York Times doing calling this a vaccine?
And it turns out there's this original, the first description in Western literature of people using this toxin in this way is from a 1925 report originally written in French, in which the author uses the French verb vacciner, which can mean vaccinate or inoculate, but that doesn't mean that the local people were saying that they were being vaccinated, nor that the author of that paper actually thought so.
And it is, frankly, gross journalistic malpractice, once again, to be talking about giving yourself a poison that causes purgative effects as if there is any kind of equivalent with regard to it being a vaccine.
Sorry, I'm Super distracted because there's all sorts of tech stuff going on here.
So let us just point out that the term vaccine, I believe, comes from the Latin vacca, or some version of cow, and it is the result, the reason that it accompanies what we modern term vaccines.
Is because Jenner, the way he discovered the process of vaccination, this is not the only time humans have discovered it, but it is where the West derives its history of vaccination, was from the observation that milkmaids did not get smallpox by virtue of having been infected by cowpox, which is a trivially harmful infection that cow, that milkmaids got from milking cows.
And that therefore created this cross immunity.
So the point is this process is in no way, it's not an arbitrary term at all.
It applies to the triggering of the immune system to be alert.
For something that it then sees later, which is pathogenic, has nothing to do with this process.
I mean, is there a blanket term?
Maybe medicine is the blanket term they're looking for.
Although, frankly, if it's straight up a toxin, it's even questionable if you call it a medicine.
But medicine is at least a plausible term that you could defend.
It's a pharmaceutical.
It's a pharmaceutical.
It's not a vaccine.
It is not in any way a vaccine, and the New York Times uses this word twice.
Why?
Because, I mean, I think because, as we'll get back to later in this episode, the very concept of vaccine has now become yet another completely polarizing, completely politicized topic.
And so actually, I forgot to ask him if I could use his name, so I'm not going to use the name of the former student of ours, yet another former student of ours, Who we were in touch with this week, who said, it's like MAGA hats and it's like masks.
Vaccines, whether or not you're pro or con, has becoming the new star-bellied snitches and snitches without.
That, you know, that reference to Dr. Seuss being one that I was using a lot earlier in our live streams.
And the fact is that the idea that you are simply pro-vaccine or simply against vaccine is an insane position.
It's an anti-scientific position to simply be opposed to all vaccines and it's an anti-scientific position to simply be in favor of all vaccines no matter what.
Both of those are uninvestigated, knee-jerk anti-scientific positions and the idea that a large proportion of the country Seems to be really happy in one of these two camps.
Why?
Well, in part because the journalists, who are the people who are supposed to be interpreting the high-level work for the rest of us and giving us information which we can use to decide for ourselves, are incompetent.
They are doing a terrible, terrible job.
At the point that you call combo a toxin from a rainforest frog that will cause you to puke for two hours a vaccine, of course many people don't trust you anymore.
Yeah, it's this this will come up in a couple different ways.
This is a hell of a moment to decide vaccines are all one thing or the other.
This is exactly the moment that we can't afford that.
But what they're effectively doing here is borrowing from the fact that for their audience, vaccine is an unalloyed good, which is preposterous, and they are using that illegitimately to cast this other thing in a positive light.
Now this other thing may well be positive, but if they used the technically correct term, if they said pharmaceutical, right, then The pharmaceutical has a very ambiguous valence, right?
We all have suspicions about pharmaceuticals, don't we?
But we're supposed to think vaccines are an entirely different phenomenon with, you know, no risks or anything associated with them.
And so, in effect, they are abusing the illogical circuitry that we have built around these for, frankly, nefarious purposes.
To do what Eric has pointed out, Russell conjugation, Russell being Bertrand Russell, basically the idea that one uses slightly different wording to say things that have the same literal meaning but carry a very different emotional connotation.
They're doing that, they're abusing the term vaccine in order to borrow its Unjustified, very positive connotation for this story about a rainforest toxin.
Right.
No, I think that's exactly right.
We do.
This is very much related to smack in the middle of this whole concept of Russell conjugation.
That we can deceive with language and have plausible deniability afterwards.
Although in this case, I would say there is no plausible deniability.
This is simply not a vaccine in any way.
It's not related to vaccine.
Yes, they indict their own credibility.
They indict their own credibility.
Yeah, exactly.
Just one more thing about the frogs.
I was reminded reading this, And the New York Times article says, oh, you know, 10 years ago, these people would have been doing ayahuasca in, you know, yurts in the backyards of people in Southern California, and now they're doing combo.
And, you know, it definitely invokes an image.
I got it.
I'm right there.
And it also invoked for me, however, it reminded me of my very first study abroad program, not actually at Evergreen.
I ran a study abroad program, as you know, Through an independent field school before I started at Evergreen and after I got my PhD.
And I had students, none of whom I'd met before, meeting them in Panama.
We're in Bocas del Toro Archipelago.
And I had students from the U.S.
and from Europe.
And after one of the first days of field work where they were supposed to be collecting some data on their own, a couple of the guys came back and told me they'd licked some frogs.
It's like, guys, you have no idea what you're doing.
You heard somewhere that some frogs will get you high, and this is really not a safe practice.
Oh boy.
This is really not a safe practice, but amphibians are actually really well-equipped to hurt you, and they don't have fangs.
They don't have teeth.
Well, no.
The ones they were licking don't have teeth.
Some of them do, but they don't come with spikes and horns and claws and such.
They come with the poisons in their skin, and not all of them are, but for God's sake.
You know, get it right.
Do your research.
It's frog roulette in the neotropics to me.
So first of all, just to wrap things up nicely, the idea that harassing frogs causes them to exude this substance makes perfect sense behaviorally because in general it doesn't take much contact with a toxin For a predator to realize I don't want to eat that thing, which means that in many instances, the animal will not be killed at the point that the predator realizes it's made a mistake, right?
So, you know, toxins tend to be very, very bitter.
And in fact, if I can confess, you know, the quick and dirty way of figuring out whether some fruit you found in the rainforest Is okay to eat, is to take it and dab it on your tongue.
And in general, the stuff that you shouldn't eat is bitter as all hell.
And the stuff, you know, Spondius, which I love finding on the forest floor, which is perfectly edible and delicious.
Spondius mambin, that's the scientific name of this beautiful, it's a canopy tree, right?
Oh yeah.
With fruits that must be dispersed, at least in part, by monkeys.
We like it too.
Yep.
Monkeys and bats, I believe, are the primary dispersers.
Monkeys sometimes being lousy dispersers because they will sit in the tree and eat all day and drop the seeds right into the tree, which the tree can do itself without making a fruit.
We don't need to send it through a monkey to do that, thanks much.
Right.
So bats are great dispersers.
Why?
Because two reasons.
One, they fly, so they tend to, if they swallow the seeds, they'll crap them out somewhere else.
But they also have a very fascinating aversion to hanging out in fruit trees.
Even the ones that eat only fruit don't hang out in the fruit trees, and the interpretation of this is that those fruit trees attract predators looking for fruit dispersers, and so the fruit tree is simultaneously a source of food and a very dangerous place to be, which it's possible that the fruit trees actually have a branch structure that increases the likelihood of predators to be there in order to make the The frugivore is nervous, so they'll leave and go do a good job of dispersing.
Anyway, it's an interesting story, but the point is, your students who licked these frogs probably would have the experience, if they found a particularly toxic one, would probably have the experience of Making their mouths very numb and tasting something very bitter and realizing they've made a mistake.
But there is the occasional... Numb is only one.
So numb would be the effect from the dart poison frogs.
I have stories about that.
Maybe I'll share one of them here today.
I don't think combo actually produces, for instance, numbness.
It's not going after sensory neuron synapses.
Yes, but I would just point out that in the Dendrobatids, this is really your story, but in the Dendrobatids there are the occasional frog that is so toxic that mere contact with the animal is enough to knock a person flat on their ass, so Phyllobates terribilis.
Right.
Had we been in a place where that was true, I would have obviously provided them that information in advance and told them to stay the hell away.
And in fact, across, it's since been developed, which is a terrible tragedy, or at least it was in the process of being developed and it's possible it got stopped.
But there was, this is related, but not quite the same, the highest density known of eyelash vipers, which is just this beautiful snake named because it has these scales above its eyes that look like they're wearing fancy fake eyelashes.
And they're tree snakes, and they come in a plethora of colors.
They, you know, usually in the rest of their distribution, the rest of their range, they're yellow, but on the Serrapta Peninsula, which is just a short boat ride away from this field station we were at, they're sometimes pink, they're sometimes green, they're sometimes pale with some splotches.
And I had actually one of the students who had looked frogs earlier ended up doing some research on these snakes, but I was over with him for the first several times that he was there and I made sure that he was, you know, not acting like a yahoo because you just you cannot operate the same way in a tropical forest as you do in a temperate forest or anywhere in a place that hasn't been made safe for you.
Because there is no one who could possibly make it safe.
Yeah, and eyelash vipers being one of these things, even those of us who are used to dealing with poisonous snakes, right?
The eyelash viper is where you put your hand, which is not the usual for such an animal.
Yeah, and they're little too, and they'll, you know, they'll bite you.
Little and inconspicuous, and so, as you know, I have a hypothesis about what the value of the eyelashes on the eyelash is.
I do too!
I find this, okay, you can do it, you can save it.
One of my favorites.
No, I'll use it, why not?
So, unfortunately we don't have a picture of this animal, or this would be much more, yeah, can you get one?
Well, like, even if I could, I...
I don't, no I can't.
Okay, so the eyelash viper has these little like, it's scaly, it's basically the same material as the face of the animal and it sticks off above the eye and these are little vipers that hang out on various plant parts and wait for prey.
They're sit and wait predators and being camouflaged is key to their niche.
And so, as Heather mentioned, there are a tremendously large number of colors, even within a brood, as I understand it.
You can get many different colors, which means... So I wish we had one of our pictures, like you and I both have taken some beautiful pictures, but here's one.
This isn't a very good picture.
Here's one again showing... The face.
Yeah, it's tiny though.
Yeah, these aren't great pictures and I didn't prepare for this so I don't have any of ours.
Anyway, keep going.
Oh, but there you go.
That's not bad.
That's not bad.
Can you show it?
Can you full screen it?
Not really.
There we go.
So now you can see the little eyelashes that stick off above the animal's eyes.
So the hypothesis, and again, this is a hypothesis as far as I know, completely untested.
In fact, I don't think anybody has taken it seriously.
No, I didn't.
I know.
See, look at you.
You're smiling over there.
I just remember you doing this in class, and it was the first time I heard it when we were teaching together, and I think I just started laughing.
But you have no idea.
This warms my heart so.
I know, I know.
To be the only person who believes in something, and then, you know, if this turns out to be right, which I think is pretty likely.
I'll be thrilled.
Yeah.
I'll be thrilled.
But anyway, the hypothesis is... That doesn't mean it's not ridiculous.
It is.
Nature is ridiculous.
True.
So, the hypothesis is that this animal, in order to do what it does, needs to find a place where it is camouflaged in order to sit.
And because you have many different color forms of these snakes within a brood, You can't just wire in, you know, you're a green, you're a light green snake, look for light green places to hide, because the animal doesn't really know what color works, right?
Because it could be any color.
And so if the genome had that programmed in, you'd somehow have to coordinate the color of the skin with the preference in the eye, and that's not an easy job to do.
So what about having a little eyelash that sticks up that allows the animal to look around and match its color To the substrate on which it's going to sit.
So my point is, they're snakes.
Why don't they look at their own tail?
That's cool, but they're snakes.
They have a lot of body that they can look at, and they're pretty much the same color the whole way.
If the animal is looking around, by definition it will have its eyelashes right where it's looking, right?
Whereas having to sit somewhere and pull its tail up and match it up to some flower, while that would also be a cool adaptation, I don't think it's nearly as cool as having just a little thing.
So this makes predictions.
One prediction is that the eyelashes are within the view of the animal enough to work this way.
And you're going to find this out through interviews?
Yes, that's how I'm going to find it out.
I'm going to ask the animals if they can see their eyelashes.
But also, the prediction would be that the eyelashes are never of a different hue than the animal, right?
True.
So anyway, things like that.
So this is how we entertain ourselves.
It is.
It is this and pinheaded shrews.
So there you go.
Oh, the last thing.
Yeah.
Yes.
As long as we're on the topic.
Amphibians, toxic.
Our newts, our local newts here, are maybe the most toxic pound-for-pound animal on planet Earth, which was discovered through an accident where some hunters, I believe, had accidentally scooped a newt into a coffee pot and then boiled the water to make coffee and were found dead.
And this alerted people, these must be very toxic animals, they searched and something like there's enough toxin in an individual newt to kill 50 average people, something like that.
And I believe the story is not specious that the people in North America who then did work on Taurica granulosis and isolated the molecule which they called Taurica toxin based on the genus name of the newt, the Latin name of the newt, Taurica, ...went to present their work at some big toxicology conference or some such.
Some few decades ago, this wasn't a hundred years ago, this was fairly recently, and in the audience, I think I'm getting the details right and I think this is a true story, in the audience were the Japanese researchers who had worked on the toxin that the pufferfish, the genus for which is Tetrodus, I think.
I may have that quite a little bit wrong.
But they actually were presenting at the same conference, Tetrodotoxin, which is the toxin of the pufferfish.
And I don't remember who was up first, but either the Tarika Toxin guys with the newts or the Tetrodotoxin guys with the pufferfish toxin were up there presenting and the other people were in the audience.
And they looked at the molecular description, the chemical description of the toxin and went, oh my God, it's the same thing.
So it turns out pufferfish in the western Pacific and newts on the west coast of North America, separated by a large Pacific Ocean across which the newts cannot cross and the pufferfish do not cross, have convergently evolved exactly the same toxin.
Right, which makes a weird kind of sense because all of these toxins are basically interference molecules with the physiology of critters and to the extent that critters are variations on a theme there's a limited number of molecules you could build and there will be selection for that which most effectively disrupts the creatures in question and so it's not surprising that selection again and again finds Well, you would expect it to find analogs.
You would expect it to disrupt the same system.
What is a little surprising is that it finds exactly the same structure that interfaces with... Right.
And in that case, not because as with, as I already mentioned, the poison frogs in the New World, the dendrobatids and the mentellas, the poison frogs of Madagascar have converged upon exactly the same lipophilic alkaloids.
But we can trace that to an environmental similarity, which is that the building blocks for those alkaloids are in the mites and the ants that they eat.
Even though the species of ants and mites, like the species of frogs themselves, are so distantly related in Madagascar versus the New World.
Despite having a Gondwana distribution that is shared, but we're talking about tens to well over 100 million years since Gondwana has been separated.
Anyway, biogeography for another time.
Which is one more thing about these frog toxins.
When I was in the business of tattooing frogs, which I was for a spell, only because I needed to mark them in order to know who was who in order to do the behavioral work that I was doing on them, And I tried putting little beaded waistbands around them and I, you know, I tried a number of things and none of it worked.
In part, it turns out the frogs have neither necks nor waists, really.
Or they have waists that if you cinch something tight enough you're going to hurt the frog.
And these are little tiny frogs.
So I ended up tattooing them, which didn't please them too much.
And you have to be really careful.
They've only got two layers of skin to R3, so you have to be very, very careful.
And I had this little handheld tattoo machine that was part of my field gear in Madagascar.
But much like the people in the Brazilian Amazon who use various toxins as, you know, as tips for their darts or as, you know, purgatives for their own health, You have to aggravate the frog in order to get them to start producing this white milky toxin on their skin, and I was never trying to.
That wasn't part of my research.
I wasn't studying their biochemistry or their toxins, but what I found was that when a frog was particularly squirmy and I had to really, you know, hold it for a while in order to get it tattooed, that even when I wasn't aware of it, if I had spent a morning tattooing frogs, And then was uncareful in the way that many of us discovered we were at the beginning of COVID and you're often touching our face and such.
That if I touched my fingers that had been on the frogs to my lips or any mucous membrane or any cut, I would get a quick burning followed by numbness that would last for anywhere from a few minutes to up to an hour or two.
In one case.
And that this was very clearly the toxin, the lipophilic alkaloids, in these frogs that was doing its work, which is, as I mentioned earlier, blocking the synaptic transmission of sensory neurons.
Hmm.
Hence the numbness.
Hence the numbness.
Makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
I should just say, because certain people will be wondering, yes, you had a tattoo gun on your study island in Madagascar, and because the days are long and there's not a whole lot to do, you also at one point did my tramp stamp.
And I think you did very excellent work.
Oh, yeah.
Are you going to show it?
Not today.
No.
All right.
All right.
That took a weird turn.
Yeah, it did.
Yeah.
OK.
So that included a number of, I think, interesting rabbit holes.
But as I was looking into this combo phenomenon, which I'd never heard of before, I've run into this frog, Phylumedusa bicolor, but I've never run into combo and its uses before.
I find in various of the studies the suggestion that this anthropologist Catherine Milton, who actually we know by reputation a friend of ours was her graduate student, and I guess you met at some point.
Yeah, I was on BCI with her for some... I forget whether it was...
weeks or a month but uh yeah katie was on the island with me so she was at that point so that would have been in the 90s um mostly a heller monkey researcher right like that was she did these longitudinal meaning long-term like time-wise longitudinal studies on heller monkeys but i was fascinated by the suggestion that she after this french guy back in the 1920s had been one of two people uh in the 1980s to separately observe
um some people in the it was the mairuna tribe in the brazilian amazon using combo in the way described that's currently being done in like new yurts in southern california um I'm not going to be able to show the paper.
Well, I found this paper.
Okay, so I found this.
Cool.
Thanks, Zach.
Comparative Aspects of Diet in Amazonian Forest Dwellers, in which she looks at the dietary ecology of four forest-living indigenous groups, the Arara, Paracana, Arawete, and Mayoruna.
I did not find here what I went looking for, which is her initial observation of combo being used, but this paper is actually super fascinating.
So, Zach, if I may have this back for a moment.
Um, so she, um, I'm just, I'm going to share a few of the conclusions and then show one more screenshot and then have us talk about this a little bit.
Um, she, she, this is actually, this is really good work.
She starts with a hypothesis, which I'm not going to share until the end.
This is not simple descriptive.
This is not data-driven.
This is hypothesis-driven science, which is particularly tough when you're doing cultural anthropology.
So, she looks at four tribes, all of whom inhabit what's called terra firme Amazonian forest.
There's a lot of flooded There are a variety of forests in the Amazon, actually, but she goes looking for and at four distinct tribes that are not exactly sympatric.
That is, they don't overlap, but then tribes don't overlap in the Amazon, and that's part of what's going on here, but they inhabit very similar ecological spaces.
That is to say, even people who know the Amazon could walk into the forests in which each of these four tribes live and immediately see a lot of similarities in terms of the species composition.
All of them have distinct both carb, the plants that they eat, and prey diet compositions.
I wanted to say just a few words specifically about the prey.
are dietary generalists.
Specifically, here I quote, the Arara consume the widest range of prey species including stingrays and electric fish, the intestinal tract of a wide variety of mammals, and Pinto, Milton reports in her 92 paper, Pinto from 1989, reports that vultures, house rats, and hawks are eaten by the Arara when other meat is not available, But the single most important prey item of the aurora was monkeys, particularly capuchins.
Okay, so they get capuchins the most.
I don't remember if they state a preference for capuchins.
Some of the other tribes do state a preference even when it's not predominant in their diet, but they're really wide generalists.
So I would just point out capuchins are Almost the only thing on that list that sounds like it would be at all palatable to somebody who shares our diet because they're frugivores.
House rats.
I mean, I don't want to eat house rats, but yeah.
In a pinch.
Yes, capunas are frugivores and frugivores taste better than carnivores or omnivores.
Yep.
And folivores taste good too.
Uh, folivores.
Including grazers.
Yeah, grazers.
Almost all of our meat animals are folivores.
A rainforest folivore might be particularly awful by virtue of all of the toxins in the leaves of durable trees.
Oh, actually, so we're getting to something interesting here.
So the Paracana, and incidentally none of these four tribes that she was looking at are any that we have spent any time with.
We haven't, we don't, I at least didn't know any of them by name.
The Paracana are specialists on terrestrial game, in particular land tortoises, tapir, peccaries, which is wild pigs, armadillo, and paca, which is a big rodent.
They report that they are most interested in eating tapirs, however, whereas both the Arara and the Aruate say that they avoid eating tapirs whenever possible.
So they didn't get a lot of tapirs when she was there observing them and instantly she took in all of her own food, which is pretty rare for cultural anthropologists, but she took in all of her own food in order not... She brought in food with her.
She brought in all of her own food to prevent the local people from either hiding food that they found particularly precious they didn't want to share with her so that she would get a skewed vision of what she was eating.
And to avoid basically changing how much they needed such that they had to hunt more and thus change the fractional composition of what they're eating.
So really well done again.
All right.
Who were these people?
Those were the Paracana who specialized in terrestrial game.
And these are in...
This was in the Brazilian Amazon.
Okay.
So, and they avoid eating tapir?
No.
Oh, yes.
Sorry.
Yes.
Yep.
No, no, no, no, no.
They prefer eating tapir.
And the Arara and the Arawete avoid eating tapir.
Avoid eating tapir.
I must say, there is no job on earth easier than avoiding eating tapir, given how skittish and hard to find this animal is.
It's really, it's amazingly easy not to eat tapir.
If you're hunting all of your own food.
And so for those who don't know, tapirs are big.
They're really big.
And one tapir could feed a village for a while.
Yeah.
But if it's not your thing, I mean, you're not going to find yourself accidentally consuming a tapir.
That's probably true.
Oops, I killed a tapir.
Got to eat it.
Yeah.
Yep.
Nope.
Okay.
The Arawete, again, Brazilian Amazonian people specialize on large birds, including macaws and toucans.
Right?
Plus, check this out.
Toucan I can almost see.
Toucan I can almost see, but not only do they specialize in your macaws, but they have macaws as pets.
Their villages are filled with pet macaws and their diet is leaning heavily towards macaws that they are catching wild and eating.
Catching wild but not raising.
Not raising.
Interesting.
What do those pet macaws think?
Macaws are frickin' smart.
They have theory of mind.
Them and, I wanted to say corvids, like the crows and jays, are incredibly smart, social, long-lived, generational overlap, all of this.
They must be appalled.
The macaws.
Yes.
They are feeding these macaws.
The pets, presumably.
I don't know.
Maybe not.
I understood you to suggest that they were catching and raising for food, these macaws.
Or is there a distinction?
No, no, no.
They're hunting macaws and eating them, and then they also have pet macaws.
They also have pet macaws that they never eat.
Apparently.
This is almost a throwaway line in this paper that I found.
I was unable to track down further, but the author here, Milton, who again seems to have been doing really careful work back in 1992 is when it was published, lived in the villages with each of these tribes for some period of time and was She was a careful observer and cultural anthropologist, and usually a primatologist.
Also, the Arawete, unlike all three of the other tribes that she's looking at, have no dogs.
And they have no desire for dogs.
When asked, they say, why would we have dogs?
Whereas all the other three tribes largely have dogs and use dogs to help them hunt.
And when you say dogs, are you talking about domestic dogs?
Are you talking about forest dogs that they have domesticated?
I believe, she doesn't specify, but I believe we're talking about domestic dogs, given what we've seen in Amazon and elsewhere.
Yeah, so that would be a modern change.
Sure.
Yep.
Exactly.
Oh, one more thing.
The Arawetai apparently also have 45 different classifications for, not snow, as you might imagine.
I would imagine they have none.
Right.
They don't have a word for snow, I'm making that up, but probably not.
They have 45 different classifications, and I don't know if classifications means words or what, for honey.
That makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Oh man, in an environment like that where you have so many different source plants.
Yeah, and age and a lot of different species of bees, although most of the bees aren't going to be making honey.
Yeah.
But there are more, I mean, it's not just Apis mellifera, I think, that is going to be making honey, is it?
It's Apis, it's other Apises.
I don't know.
I am going to opt out of venturing a guess on that.
I would have said maybe it is.
But I don't know.
Or, you know, really the question is make enough honey to be worth pursuing.
Right.
Yeah, a solitary bee is not going to be worth pursuing.
So finally, we have the Mayoruna, who are actually in the Peruvian Amazon, who specialize in peccaries.
But they state that they prefer eating tapirs and sloths.
even though tapers and sloths are harder for them to find and most of their diet consists of peccaries.
And this is a little violent, so close your ears if you don't want to hear how they do with the sloths.
When they find them, quote, sloths are captured by climbing their tree, lassoing them with a noose made of vines, pulling them free, and then clubbing them to death on the ground.
That's the sloth killing activity.
And while she was there...
She's probably a lot more humane than, you know, what other option do you have?
Yeah, I mean, you could shoot him out of the tree and have him fall.
But that ain't going to be a fun death.
Yeah, which is how at least some, like at least how the Wurani hunt monkeys.
Yeah, monkeys and sloths and things.
Oh, incidentally, speaking of the Wurani, Milton, the Wurani, who are people whom we have spent time around and with in the Ecuador and Amazon, she points out that the diet of the Mayaruna, who are the people I was just talking about, actually most closely matches that of the Wurani.
So that is more similar to something that we have known.
The Mayaruna have the longest list of foods that they will not eat of any of the tribes she looked at.
And here we go, some that are developmental stage specific.
So specifically with regard to howler monkeys, adult Mayaruna do not eat howler monkeys, but children do.
That's exactly the opposite of what I would predict.
Right, why?
Because howler monkeys are obligate folivores and the toxins are liable to be more dangerous to a developing child or a pregnant woman.
In fact, there is a lot of anecdotal stuff and I believe a certain amount of Data to suggest that aversions during pregnancy may be about protecting fetuses and things.
So, anyway, I would have expected an obligate folivore A to taste really terrible.
In a landscape like the Amazon, where there's so many species and the obligate foliars themselves are sampling from a wide variety of species, where they're taking in the secondary compounds of the plants that have produced those secondary compounds in order to protect themselves.
Right, right, exactly.
So anyway, yeah, what is the explanation for that?
I don't know.
Lots of little juicy stuff in here, right?
And some not so juicy stuff, including Macaws.
Yeah.
Which Charles Handley, he didn't specifically tell me about Macaws, but he told me he was the great Batman of the Smithsonian.
Who was a mentor of mine on BCI.
And anyway, I've forgotten why he found himself eating parrot at some point, but he reported that it was a lot like eating a shoe.
So I'm guessing macaws are rather like that.
Yeah.
No, I may actually have less interest.
If I had to choose, if I was starving and I had to choose between monkey and parrot, I really don't want to have to ever eat either.
Oh, monkey stands a good chance of being tasty.
Well, not just for edibility, actually.
Oh, I get there.
I don't want to eat a monkey because it's a monkey, but from the point of view of what would the meat taste like, except for howlers, which are the exception, all those frugivores probably taste just fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And peccaries surely taste good.
Yeah.
I mean, if you like bacon, you probably like peccaries.
It's a pig.
I bet it's a lot leaner.
And also... And tapirs might...
I bet you tapir's good.
No, no.
I bet you tapir's good.
Yeah, because they're giant ground dwellers, so they're in part, I mean the intact Amazon doesn't have much to graze per se, but the browsing at ground level is, I think, I mean maybe just because there's a lot of new growth that they're going to be able to access and the new growth has fewer secondary compounds.
Yeah, and I bet they eat a lot of fruit too.
Yeah.
And the thing that is most famously delicious are the paka, the pakas and agoutis.
Agoutis, yeah.
Are supposed to be absolutely delicious.
Yeah, those are big, big rodents.
Yep.
And you know, Pakas are mentioned once here, Agoutis are never mentioned, Capybara are never mentioned, but I imagine that the large, slow, somewhat dim, ground-dwelling rodents get hunted out pretty quickly.
Yep.
Yeah.
That would be likely.
Yeah.
And I'm going to catch it from all of the Capybara enthusiasts out there for calling them dim, but sorry, compared to most of the other things on this list, they are.
Yeah.
So from the discussion, I'm just going to read a couple more of the things that she has written.
Yet beyond very general and obvious environmental differences, none of the environmental factors I examined appeared sufficiently distinct to explain most of the dietary differences observed.
Here we go.
Here she is repeating, in different language, the hypothesis that she leads with, which I didn't share with you guys yet.
These different dietary practices appear to reflect, as do the distinctive facial perforations and body decorations of each group, a type of cultural character displacement in which the members of Group A seek to differentiate themselves from members of Group B or C by means that are distinctive but do not pose any actual economic disadvantage.
And this struck me as interesting in part for her choice of the term character displacement, which I think we probably need to define here, which I might have called niche partitioning.
I was going to point out that very connection.
Yeah, so these are two terms from ecology basically.
Character displacement referring to two closely related organisms that are often sympatric or adjacent to sympatric.
One of whom begins to change his actual characteristics in order to inhabit a different space, in order to make use of a different resource.
Whereas niche partitioning refers to finding a different niche in which to inhabit.
So as not in both cases, it's about avoiding direct competition with a close relative who would be a very close competitor as well.
Yeah, I would say one is the evolutionary consequence of the other.
Yeah, so character displacement being the evolutionary consequence of niche partitioning, but niche partitioning is also an evolutionary process.
Right, but, so when you described this to me, I thought that the hypothesis was going to be about people living very close to each other engaged in niche partitioning and resulting in character displacement.
Sounds to me like these people are sufficiently separated Well, I'm going to doubt the hypothesis, if I'm right in interpreting it that way.
Yeah, you keep going.
Unfortunately, I've turned my side here.
What it sounds to me like, you just read from that abstract, No, that was the discussion.
From the discussion is the argument that the specific preferences and aversions of these groups carry no cost and therefore as a matter of culturally separating oneself, you know, that it is star bellies versus no stars.
But here's what I doubt.
I doubt that in isolation that these could be low enough cost choices to be arbitrary.
In other words, anything that you fail to hunt because those people eat it and we wouldn't dare, right?
Anything that you turn down is a cost.
Well, except that, for instance, the group that specializes on large birds and doesn't have dogs is presumably not as good at hunting, for instance, tapir and agouti, precisely because the dogs would help and the dogs are a hindrance in hunting birds.
I 100% agree with you, but then what you would expect is that the specialization Would be whatever is optimal.
Over time, it will move towards the optimal diet for that habitat, independent of what anybody else does.
Right?
If the populations are close together, then you could decide, we don't eat agouti and we therefore specialize on parrots, and the reason would be if we hunt agouti and you hunt agouti, we're gonna drive them extinct here, and so You could have like a cryptic partnership where by not hunting the same stuff that your neighbors eat, your habitat fuels their access to resource and their habitat fuels your access to resource.
And, you know, nobody has to formally exchange anything.
Yeah.
But if these are large enough geographic regions, which it sounds like they are, Well, I mean if you would let us show the map of her paper here.
Let's do it.
This is northern South America.
In white we have Brazil, Ecuador is off the west edge here, but we've got the Brazilian Amazon with the two main states Pará and Amazonas.
And the circles here, this is, I'm going to scroll up just a little bit, this is the Arara people, the Parakana, the Arawete, they're all really close together.
Oh, I wouldn't call that close together.
And then the Mairuna are in fact quite distinct and they're over closer to Orani territory as I mentioned.
I think the argument I'm making is that in order for that hypothesis to be right, this has to be effectively within home range distance for the animals in question.
Right?
And absent that, what I would argue is that you've got specialization on whatever the optimal diet is.
Specialization because, you know, to the extent that you're a generalist, you'll hunt everything badly.
So you'll specialize on that, which is particularly huntable in your habitat for whatever reason, your diet will move, you know, as there's difference, you know, somebody prefers this bird, somebody prefers that bird, the bird that's the highest ROI will, you know, come to dominate the diet.
Anyway, you get this evolution towards the optimal diet for your local habitat.
And then what I would argue, You will get the tendency to view those other people the rare cases of an encounter and their weird dietary preferences as You know an indication of their inferiority or distinction or whatever But that it can't be driven by niche practitioning at that scale I just it's too far for you know, maybe in the case of some very far flighted birds But other than that, it seems unlikely
I don't think that you have falsified her hypothesis based on the point locations of the particular villages that she went.
Oh, that's true.
We need to see the actual territorial delineations of where these tribes exist.
The Mayoruna are farther afield.
They're far west, which apparently is that way today.
In fact, it's that way.
And farther south from here at the moment.
But the other three tribes, she chose, I believe, in part because the historical anthropological understanding, which is obviously nowhere close to the full lifespan of these peoples, is that they were neighbors.
And I'm not sure if they still are.
So this is why you tune in to the Dark Horse podcast and not all of the other podcasts that talk about the rainforest dietary choices, right?
Because here you get the hypothesis with the prediction.
Now if I am right about the causal mechanism here, then what you will see is the tendency towards this dietary specialization to increase at the borders between And that you will find that those populations in each of these groups that are very far from those borders are much less picky and, you know, belly to take care, right?
Perfect.
Love this.
Yeah.
Yep, that's great.
There it is.
That's excellent.
All right.
Shall we move on?
Why don't we?
Why don't we move on?
Yeah, let's talk about, oh boy, I can't find anything on my computer at the moment because it's not organized the way it was supposed to be, um, the vaccine, uh, which we spent a lot of time talking about a little bit a few episodes ago.
I'm just going to keep talking until I can find this thing, which is not coming up.
Here we go.
And it's so tiny.
Um, let's see.
Nope.
The Oregon, oh boy.
Okay, can you start talking for a minute while I find this?
Nothing about the computer is quite working today.
All right.
Yes, I'm going to start talking about vaccines.
Vaccine derives from the term vaca.
Okay, fine.
Lord.
So, the Oregon coronavirus update letter I get on email every weekday, I think.
And two of the most recent ones, Had such weird errors or claims that it reminded me once again of how politicized this landscape is and why, if you are trying to think for yourself, you are likely throwing up your hands in dismay at all of the scolds telling you you absolutely must not take a vaccine or you absolutely must take a vaccine because obviously science says or obviously science doesn't say.
Because those blanket proclamations are So, I can't pull up a screenshot for you guys, but I'm going to read from the Oregon Coronavirus Update Letter from December 28th, which says, The Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs announced today that residents and staff at its Oregon Veterans Homes in Lebanon and the Dalles received their first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from Consensus Healthcare over the weekend.
Vaccinations were made available to all staff and residents.
The vaccine has been proclaimed safe and effective by scientists and health professionals, including a four-state scientific safety review group comprised of experts from Oregon, California, Washington, and Nevada.
Let me repeat the phrase.
The vaccine has been proclaimed safe and effective by scientists and health professionals.
It's a scientific proclamation.
It's a scientific proclamation, because that is the way that science is done.
By a show of hands, by a desire to move forward, not by hypothesis and prediction and data collection and analysis.
Certainly not.
No, it's by proclamation.
It's by fiat.
In fact, it's science by fiat.
Well, when I ascend to the position of extreme, actually unlimited power, it will no longer be done by proclamation, it will be done by encyclical.
Encyclical?
Encyclical.
Oh, good.
Yes, we will issue scientific encyclicals, and in fact, nature will be forced to abide by them.
Nature the magazine or nature the nature?
No, no, no, no.
Nature the processes outside there.
Yeah, exactly.
So, um, boy, then we have this.
I guess you can show this, Zachary, from yesterday.
The same, the same email newsletter from January 1st, 2021.
Case of severe allergic reaction to COVID-19 reported in Wallowa.
Individuals employed at Wallowa Memorial Hospital and recovering.
And it goes on and on and on.
And in the first paragraph it does say, oh actually, it's not a severe allergic reaction to COVID-19, it's a severe allergic reaction to the Moderna vaccine for COVID-19.
In fact... The headline, the subject of this email, the headline of this email says there's been a severe allergic reaction to a disease, which makes no sense.
It makes no more sense than the idea that Combo is a vaccination for anything, right?
This is...
Presumably in this case, not intentional, not intentional politicization of science.
It's just complete incompetence, because this is not a mere copyediting error.
It completely renders this entire thing meaningless.
Well, I would bet it's, you know, it's beyond an error.
I would bet that somebody having been browbeaten into the belief that these things are good and those things are bad, right, did not to internalize the message here, which is vaccine caused severe allergic reaction.
That's a very dangerous phenomenon.
I thought vaccines were good.
And so some part of them probably made that error because it resolved a cognitive dissonance.
Yeah.
I mean, in fact, the fact that someone experienced a severe allergic reaction from vaccine, that's going to happen no matter what the vaccine is.
Anything is likely, any medicine is likely to cause some allergic reaction, some extreme reactions, perhaps even some fatalities in some people.
And that's terrible and also true and also says very little about the overall efficacy or safety of that thing.
But when you have the report on it, which conveniently disappears the salient term, you are left to wonder what it is that you are supposed to believe.
Right.
In fact, what a vaccine does is almost literally create an allergic reaction to the pathogen.
That's how it works.
That's when a vaccine is working appropriately.
Right.
We don't talk about it in those terms, but that is effectively what is going on.
So the whole thing turns to gobbledygook if you try to morally sort the logic and, you know, write your titles based on it.
Yeah, so gobbledygook for some reason.
Gobbledygook for some reason.
Do you want to talk about some of the other treatments for COVID that are out there?
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about them.
Zach, are you able to show things that I sent you?
So, unfortunately we're a little discombobulated here because Okay, can you show the piece on Remdesivir and... That's that.
the piece on remdesivir and...
That's that.
That's not...
Okay, so this is a piece that was forwarded to me by a good friend.
And what it does actually...
No one, including me, knows which piece you're talking about yet.
The piece on your screen there which is now up.
So the argument here is that the policy in the US in particular, the policy in the US appears to be To basically convalesce in place if you contract COVID until you are sick enough to go to the hospital, at which point we deploy various remedies.
And the position that this journalist takes is that, in fact, this is an absurd response because what we have, which Americans are largely unaware of, is a large body of information about treatments that are highly effective at reducing harm, both preventing people from getting COVID and reducing the harm when they do get COVID.
And that this has somehow fallen by the wayside.
And I will argue that this is because what we have is a system in which our narrative surrounding everything Has been politicized and that this has resulted in basically a run of the mill kind of corruption that causes the narrative to be bent to various peoples.
Desires and this is not only affecting our discussion about vaccines, which we will get to shortly But it is directly affecting both the policy surrounding when we treat people in other words Do we wait till you're sick enough to go to the hospital or do we treat you?
Upfront and basically the argument is if you're somebody very important you're going to get medical treatment right away we will treat you with things that work and And you will miraculously have a mild case, but if you are a commoner, you will get very, very sick before that happens or you will recover.
And so the argument here is that remdesivir, which is the gold standard in standard channels, is actually not a very effective drug at all.
It is at best mildly effective, reduces the course of infection by a couple of days.
But it's expensive.
It does have that going for it.
It does have that going for it.
Whereas... Ivermectin.
Ivermectin.
Ivermectin.
Appears to be highly effective.
It is a drug with a long safety record.
I was going to read... So, yeah, I've got... I have a couple here that I want to read.
You want to read something?
Yeah.
Maybe it won't be the same thing you had found, but maybe it will be.
So, you can show it if you want, Zach, you don't have to.
Just one paragraph early on, not directly related to what you were talking about.
Brett, this fixed narrative has led YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to practice a new and insidious form of censorship under the dictum that emerging studies are fatally flawed and fostered by fringe elements.
Quote, there's no evidence that Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19, declared an Associated Press fact-checking article.
Similar reports regurgitate government pronouncements that journalism, at its best, ought rather question.
And then, down below, we have this section on Ivermectin.
Three paragraphs I'm going to read.
In a 2011 article, the scientist who discovered Ivermectin in 1975 in a patch of Japanese soil, Satoshi Omura, called it astonishingly safe and, quote, a wonder drug, akin to penicillin and aspirin.
After more than 25 years of use, a review in the Journal of Drugs and Dermatology concluded, Ivermectin continues to provide a high margin of safety.
But the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration seems bent on ignoring both safety and efficacy findings.
In a Q&A on Ivermectin, the agency lists side effects from nausea and swelling to neurological events and liver injury.
FLCCC President Dr. Pierre Khoury described the list for me as, quote, purposefully alarmist.
Indeed, despite more than 40 positive studies in Ivermectin for COVID, the FDA seems stuck in a time warp.
Its website calls the Australian study from eight months ago, recently released, while still declaring, without acknowledging newer studies, that additional testing is needed.
That's fine, if only there was support.
Just three studies in Ivermectin are proceeding in the United States, and none is funded by the National Institutes of Health or any other U.S.
agency.
Yeah, I find this absolutely stunning.
Here's another section I thought was pretty remarkable.
For 25 years, Ivermectin has been distributed free in 19 African countries to control parasites.
Is it a coincidence that those countries had 28% fewer COVID deaths and 8% fewer cases than 35 other African nations?
Is it a coincidence that the 240 million resident Indian state of Uttar Pradesh Which distributes free ivermectin, has a COVID death rate that is 116th that of the United States.
160th.
Sorry, I'm reading very small font.
Yeah, it is.
So, are those things conclusive?
They are not, because you have an uncontrolled environment, but they are certainly provocative.
Let's see, there was another section I wanted to...
Ivermectin, the most promising COVID treatment to date, won its developers the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 and a place in the World Health Organization's Model List of Essential Medicines.
Since the 1980s, with billions of doses given, the drug has cured crippling tropical diseases that have devastated African countries while curbing scabies, lice, and protecting livestock and dogs from parasites.
Spurred by pre-COVID studies showing ivermectin killed Zika and other viruses, Australian researchers last spring tested the drug in a petri dish where it obliterated coronavirus in 48 hours.
Since then, more than three dozen studies have shown good results in preventing and treating COVID-19.
To be sure, some of the results sound too good to be true and are based on small patient samples.
Others are available only in online drafts and have not been officially published.
But, 16 studies have been peer-reviewed, and 11 are randomized controlled trials that compared patients who did and did not get the drug.
So, that is all very provocative.
It sure is.
is emerging and I don't know quite how to cast it.
It has nothing to do with ivermectin and remdesivir or vaccines in particular.
It is a more general malady.
Before you do that, can we just finish this off before you go into more general malady?
This paper that you were just reading from links to this site, Zach, and it's just a COVID-19 basically clearinghouse site, which is done anonymously.
Let's see.
You had found the facts before.
I don't see them here.
Oh here.
Frequently asked questions about this site.
Says we're a bunch of researchers who aren't interested in going public but we are basically just putting together evidence for a number of different drugs that are currently being used.
This is not about the vaccines, it's about drugs for treatment rather than vaccines for prevention.
And their collated information on Ivermectin here shows tremendously, and this is a complicated page, I'm not going to walk us through what it is, but this page is still up, C19Ivermectin.com, and you can go through efficacy across lots of studies of Ivermectin, vitamin D, Hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and remdesivir, which has much lower efficacy.
But interestingly, and fairly appallingly, what we find is... I now can't find the site that... Oh, here we go.
Twitter suspended the account that was being used to basically publicize this work at Covid Analysis on December 27th and there's no explanation or response from Twitter as to why.
What exactly on this page is dangerous?
It is a collation of extant research on a number of possible treatments for the scourge that is threatening to wipe out people and economics across the entire world.
What exactly is so dangerous about this?
Right.
And why does Twitter think that it is expert enough to decide whether or not we are able to look at this and discuss it, right?
Who the hell are they?
Yeah.
And so the site is still up, but the Twitter account is not.
So, yeah, what I wanted to argue is that what we find evidence for across the board, anywhere where we take the narrative that we are handed And we scrutinize it with tools that we happen to have because we're biologists, right?
Obviously, we're not epidemiologists, we're not virology specialists, right?
But the point is, basic scientific literacy, a willingness to dive into these things.
What we find again and again is that the narrative that we are being handed and the narrative we see being enforced on social media is itself garbage and politicized.
And one can deduce what its purpose is by virtue of the fact that clearly it is willing to harm people in order to keep the message simple and on track.
In other words, why all else being equal, why would the narrative center around remdesivir, a drug that has dubious effectiveness and systematically shun ivermectin when the safety and efficacy appears to suggest a drug that has dubious effectiveness and systematically shun ivermectin when the safety and efficacy appears That is a preposterous thing for it to do, and the obvious result is that people will be harmed, right?
We should be thinking about treating COVID, Treating COVID is almost certainly a good way to prevent people from communicating COVID.
And so, you know, there's no way in which this is responsible, or if it is somehow responsible, why are we not allowed to have the discussion that then will inevitably reach that conclusion?
Because we will discover the reason that remdesivir is the right choice.
And even if, even if these two drugs, ipramectin and remdesivir, had exactly the same results in the variety of research that's been done with regard to treating symptoms of COVID-19, The fact that it's ivermectin,
That has been around, that was discovered in Japanese soil in the 1970s apparently, and has been used in millions of people for other conditions, and therefore has a decades long history of studies of safety of places where it's not presumably,
We should prefer that drug, all else being equal, over a newer one, just as if there is a vaccine that is made in the traditional style that is available, all else being equal, we should prefer that over an mRNA vaccine, simply because there is no way, proclamations from scientists notwithstanding, to know whether or not the new technology is safe, yet we simply cannot know.
Right.
We, the public, right?
We, who are united against COVID and its transmission, ought to prefer that.
On the other hand, there's a very small group that might have exactly the opposite incentive.
Oh gee, who could they be?
Well, and we see this all the time in pharmaceutical development, where basically patent protection expires on a drug And some new, either a new drug that isn't any better is introduced because it's patented or some little tweak has been made in order to make these things more profitable.
And the fact is, this is just a place where markets do a piss poor job of managing the public health.
So, anyway, we see this all over the place.
So I don't know what the patent situation is for ivermectin, but my guess is given that description of how long it's been around, probably cheap and readily, you know, generics available.
And just, you know, just one other line of evidence to support that is if it is really being deployed at the millions of people level across Africa, it's probably not a super expensive drug to be producing or to be giving out.
Excellent point.
And the other thing is, It has generated exactly the natural experiments that would allow you to deduce pattern.
In other words, the fact that you've got a bunch of different African countries, you know, I think it was 18 of them had widespread and 30 some odd that didn't.
That allows you, it doesn't mean that that's why the 18 seem to outperform the 30 some, but it's a strong indication and that itself is a testable hypothesis.
So there's lots of, there's lots of landscape to look at in order to figure out what is actually going on and what it says about what we should do.
Yeah.
All right, so should we move on to the vaccine question here?
Oh, okay.
What do you got?
I thought we'd already done it.
No, we did the Remdesivir versus Ivermectin.
And then we do want to hit Ted Wheeler before we're done.
Oh, we're gonna... Okay.
Okay, so the last thing, Zach, could you show the... Did I just say we want to hit Ted Wheeler before we're done?
You did say that, yeah.
I might have meant that.
We are peaceful people.
I want you to show the New York Times piece on the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine.
Okay, so I cannot read that.
Can you show it on the other screen?
There we go.
Thanks.
So, in any case, what we've got here is a situation with the vaccines that is far more interesting and in which there is far more for us to discuss than I believe we realize.
So we have two first-past-the-post vaccines of this very new type, this mRNA vaccine platform, which is untested in humans, which has only been around tested in humans for the last nine or so months.
And then we have a third vaccine.
So those are the makers of those, which are the names with which people will be familiar, are Pfizer and Moderna, right?
So the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are separately created mRNA vaccines, which is a new vaccine technology, the advantage of which is they can actually be developed in like a weekend apparently, whereas traditional vaccines tend to take a lot longer.
But we have no safety record of their long-term implications.
We have no concept of how they interface.
They're extremely expensive to deploy because of the need for extreme refrigeration, etc.
So anyway, I feel like we shouldn't have to say this every time, but because we're going to get clipped again and again being called anti-vaxxers and all of this garbage, Let us hope that these mRNA vaccines are what they promise to be.
This is an entirely new mechanism for delivering vaccines, and it is quite possible that these will be lower side effect, better, and because they're rapidly deployable, this may be the answer to some of humanity's greatest new problems, which involve emerging new viruses, either through bioterrorism or who knows what else.
COVID-19 won't be the last.
If mRNA vaccines are effective and safe, that could be the way that we survive the emerging viruses and even perhaps viral bioweapons that could be emerging.
Right.
So you and I are rooting for these vaccines to be an awesome addition to our antivirus quiver.
Really hope so.
Right.
On the other hand, frightening that we are going to deploy these at such large scale with some of the most important people in society in the midst of a pandemic.
Um, without properly investigating or properly considering what it means to deploy something on which we have no long-term data on the safety.
We don't know if these cause something, you know, months or years, uh, years down the road.
So actually, let me say that if these mRNA vaccines, five years down the road, do prove to have been safe, safe-ish, relatively safe, you know, there will always be some problems, right?
If they do... Relatively harmless.
Okay, relatively harmless.
And a new virus emerges and a mRNA vaccine is produced very quickly to deal with that virus.
We would not sound the same way about that mRNA vaccine as we do about this one.
Now there are still concerns with any brand new vaccine that doesn't have a long period of safety testing, But just as I believe where you're going to go here with regard to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is that that is a traditional vaccine, is that right?
Yes.
And without knowing anything more than that about it, I prefer that one, simply because the traditional way that we have been developing vaccines has problems, for sure.
But we have decades, we have many, many decades of safety testing and efficacy testing and all of this on this route by which to end up with vaccines.
You and I are more vaccinated than just about anyone else we know because of the time we've spent in the tropics, all of this.
And that like, yes, at the moment, because we don't have the history on mRNA vaccines, we are concerned about what we don't know.
But if it is a class of vaccines that has five or 10 years behind it, at that point, every new vaccine that is trotted out with that technology will cause less concern.
It should cause less concern.
It should cause less concern, and so there's a question.
We now have a third vaccine emerging slightly later.
It has what should be several things about it that should cause us to strongly prefer it.
One is it's a normal vaccine that doesn't require extreme refrigeration, so it's easily deployed.
It's comparatively cheap, and AstraZeneca, who has teamed up with Oxford to generate this thing, has agreed to have it be profitless for, I don't know what the period is, but for an extended period of time.
So they've offered it into the public space.
I think it's I think it's $3 a dose or something like that.
It's very inexpensive.
We have the increased... Oh, yeah.
It's like $2.50 a dose if deployed by the government, $10 a dose if privately acquired, something like that.
Right.
Very interesting fact about it.
So you will hear, reported everywhere, that it's much less effective at preventing COVID.
Now this makes an error in two ways.
One, we don't really know what the mRNA vaccines are doing.
In fact, there is caution in some circles about the fact that it may be that people who have been vaccinated with these mRNA vaccines are still perfectly capable of transmitting COVID to other people.
They just don't show symptoms is the idea?
Or they never show up as having tested positive somehow?
Somehow.
So, I don't expect it will.
I expect we will find that it does prevent the disease and that people don't therefore transmit it.
But we don't have the data.
It's all too new.
But in this case, you will see, well, okay, those mRNA vaccines are 90 or more percent effective.
AstraZeneca's, unfortunately, is only 60 some percent effective.
But get this.
Well, but actually the second sentence here says a clinical trial revealed the vaccine was up to 90 percent effective.
You know why?
Why?
They made an error in the testing.
Who did?
Those who were doing the testing.
Okay.
In this... Welcome to complex systems, folks.
They made an error in which they accidentally halved the dose, right?
So they ran an experiment they didn't mean to run, and they now have data comparing what they thought was the full dose, which has something like 60% effectiveness, and half the dose, which has 90% effectiveness, very much like these mRNA vaccines, right?
So, okay.
A, why does that happen?
An inadvertent experiment that also runs exactly counter to what you would expect and makes you wonder how is it that the people who developed the vaccine decide on the dosage in the first place?
Well, right, and doesn't it just say that what we ought to be doing, one of the things we ought to be doing is figuring out, you know, whatever the mechanism is that we figure out what a dose is and whether or not you need two of them, we need to vary a lot of stuff in order to figure out, did we miss it because we, you know, we're ten times over the magic number?
Right.
You know, and in lots of cases we've seen stuff like that.
So anyway, the point is, okay, so it turns out that the most effective dose is probably half what we thought, or maybe it gets even better if you cut it below that, who knows, right?
Wouldn't that be good news?
Right.
So why does it happen?
We don't know.
I sort of have a guess, which is if you think back to... So is this also a two-dose vaccine like the mRNA vaccines?
Yes.
So it's a half.
So the idea is it was up to 90% effective when it was a half dose to start and then a full dose for the second one, if memory serves.
Yeah, I think that's right.
But so anyway, I was going to take a guess and I was going to say one of the things that you and I puzzled over at length on early live streams Was the fact that the thing that you see in the textbook about how a virus gets you doesn't predict the fact that there's like a threshold dose.
That briefly passing through a room in which some very COVID sick person has been exhaling probably doesn't get you sick, but if you spend a few minutes there, it probably will.
So there's some thing that fills up.
There's some non-specific immunity that gets overwhelmed.
And at the point that it gets overwhelmed, a virus does what's in the textbook.
It invades your cell.
And starts replicating, right?
But until then, the nonspecific stuff is probably good enough at clearing the garbage without recognizing it.
So your prediction here is that at the higher dose, it's actually making people sick.
Right, that it's basically... So what this vaccine does, and you can put the... That's totally consistent with other vaccines.
You need to trigger your immune system to recognize and develop the right response.
Without triggering it so much that you get full-blown whatever it is, the diseases you're vaccinating against.
Well, you won't get full-blown, you won't get the disease from the vaccine no matter what.
But the test was, if you get the vaccine, are you vulnerable if you encounter somebody with COVID?
So scroll up if you can, Zach.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that.
No, that's okay.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Alright, so here you've got this adenovirus vaccine.
This is the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine.
It enters the cell and it does a much more standard thing than the mRNA vaccines.
The mRNA vaccines bypass the nucleus and what they do is they dump mRNA into the system which ribosomes then transcribe into proteins that then get displayed to the immune system.
In this case you have this virus, this harmless virus introduce DNA with the proper information in it into the nucleus in a standard way.
The nucleus then transcribes it into mRNA which then does effectively the same thing from there that the mRNA vaccines do.
So keep scrolling up.
So let me just say that the only reason that this feels less science fiction-y than the mRNA vaccines is because we've been doing this for decades already.
It is inherently moved from the realm of science fiction to science fact decades ago, and the mRNA vaccines moved from science fiction to science fact in 2020, and therefore we don't know what all is downstream of that move.
So anyway, the hypothesis that we are playing with here, which again, this is not our area of expertise, but just based on everything that we've talked about with respect to threshold doses and the like, the possibility of the reason that a higher dose gave lower effectiveness is that there's some fraction of the immune system that is capable of recognizing particles that look something like the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, and if you gum them up,
Uh, with, um, these viral particles, with these, uh, vaccine particles, these vaccine generated particles, that it may paradoxically open up the chance that a COVID particle that you encounter in the wild can get by because they're all gummed up.
So anyway, I don't know if that's a different mechanism.
It's a hypothesis.
Um, so anyway, it's a testable hypothesis, which is what we like.
Um, And, you know, so that predicts things about the curve that you would see for various dosages.
Yeah.
Right.
That effectively higher would give you lower effectiveness at some point because it would effectively gum up all the works.
But OK, so back to the point here.
We got three vaccines.
Two of them are in a totally novel platform and therefore carry what you and I have described as high risk, which does not mean high harm.
It means we don't know what happens long term when you've had this and things on the list probably include things like autoimmune disorders.
Will it give you an autoimmune disorder?
No idea.
Hopefully not.
High risk because high uncertainty.
Because high uncertainty, exactly.
And we have seen a bunch of stuff in the article that we covered A couple live streams ago about the very poor reporting on the side effects of the mRNA vaccines.
Ought to loom large here too.
People are getting very serious reactions sometimes to these things.
But anyway, in a universe where you've got three vaccines, two of which are of this very extraordinary new type, that come with high risk because high uncertainty, one of which is on a familiar platform.
It's still new, but we know a lot about it because a lot of it isn't new, right?
The basic virus that delivers the thing isn't new.
And so-- This is the one I want.
Right.
And it is being portrayed as much less effective, even if it was 60% effective.
I think I still prefer this one.
And why is that?
Is AstraZeneca not an American company?
It's British.
Well, actually, I don't want to say it's British.
I think it is.
But Oxford certainly is a British institution.
Yeah, and the US, we put so much of our funding to vaccine development and not to treatment, not to these other drugs and also if we're right that AstraZeneca having signed up with Oxford indicates it's not an American company,
Much of those, the return on investment would be far lower for the in-house, in-American house developed vaccines if people start preferring the traditionally developed vaccine that came from outside of the country.
At the very least we ought to be discussing, you know, the cost of a dose is very different.
The architecture you need to deliver the dose is very different.
Rural areas.
Already exists here.
We ought to be discussing, okay, We're going to give it to all of the medical personnel, right?
Makes sense to protect medical personnel.
Can we give A quarter of them or half of them?
This other one in case there's something we don't know?
I mean that obviously makes sense, right?
So the point is you've got this... No, any demographic population, any demographically described population should get a mixture if we are going to continue to learn, not any combination, but some people in that demographic should get one of these types of vaccines and some should get the other and then those results should be tracked.
The disturbing conclusion, I think, from the last little thing where we talked about the comparison between two drugs where the world seems to have concluded the opposite of what would make sense, the comparison here between these vaccine technologies, the nonsensical discussion early on about face masks, the nonsensical discussion we are now having about face masks where outdoors people are still looking at each other as morally deficient for Not wearing them.
I got into a thing on that this week.
I won't go there now.
The discussion that we are having about lockdown and the inability seemingly of anybody in charge of policy to juggle the various costs of lockdown versus not lockdown.
All of these discussions.
Are, as far as I can tell, complete garbage.
One afternoon with five smart people and decent information would cause a radically different policy decision than we are being fed.
So what we've got is just some narrative generated some way.
Now either it's generated Undoubtedly the incompetence is a feature not a bug from the point of view of the corruptors.
which I think is more likely.
We're at every little stage of the process.
I think we're lucky enough to have both.
Undoubtedly, the incompetence is a feature, not a bug from the point of view of the corruptors.
Yeah.
But it is amazing, I think, how far we are likely underperforming by virtue of the fact that what drug you're going to take and when you're going to take it has apparently been politicized.
Can you think of something that could possibly be a less political question?
Right?
So, I don't know what we're going to do about this, but the whole narrative surrounding COVID, which should unite us, we should have our very best people coming up with the very highest quality insights, they would no doubt make mistakes.
And there should be pushback against them, and no amount of pushback should be read as a political maneuver.
Right.
Their work shouldn't be political or politicized and the criticisms and trying to figure out if they're actually saying what they think they're saying and all of that shouldn't be read as political either.
Right.
This is what science is supposed to do.
And we should be discussing this on Twitter and YouTube and every other place without fear of being thrown off the platform for having violated these sacred conclusions Or being placed into your tribal affiliation on the basis of whether or not you are wearing a mask when you're outside, or are questioning whether or not to take the new vaccine, or are 100% going to take it no matter what and you're willing to call people dummies if they don't.
None of this is smart.
Any of those responses is, at best, dim, and at worst, as you said, corrupt and corrupting.
Yeah.
So just think about how different the prescription looks if you just sort of look at these analyses.
I mean, these analyses could be wrong.
Maybe we've seen the wrong stuff and there's more compelling stuff elsewhere.
But if this stuff is right, then the answer is don't close your state parks and other stuff.
Encourage people to spend as much time outdoors as possible because, among other things, vitamin D and they won't lose their minds.
Okay?
So that's good.
Vitamin D won't lose your mind.
Those are two protective things.
If you get sick with COVID, you probably want ivermectin and you want it right away rather than waiting to see if you get super sick.
And from the point of view of vaccinating people, we've got some new technologies which are promising.
We've got a tried and true one which is also rapidly developed.
incredibly impressive there.
- Oh man, yeah. - And may be equally as effective, much cheaper, right?
So at least some of us ought to be getting-- - Easier to deploy. - Easier to deploy.
Some of us ought to be getting that one instead and maybe the fact is we should be trying to get that to as many people as possible because it's a better bet, right?
So that's a, you know, that's like not radical, except in an environment where we are told that that's all heresy.
Right.
Because if you take that approach, you can't get looked at and immediately be put in a box and be labeled and be dismissed or embraced on the basis of what it is that you concluded.
It is actually responsive to what the research says.
You and I have talked extensively on here in the past about why we don't like to say what the data say, right?
It's not about data-driven.
It's about having a model of the universe and testing that model over and over and over and over again.
And whichever parts of that model keep on persisting, keep on not being falsified, as you test your assumptions and your ideas and your predictions over and over and over again, the longer they persist, the greater the chance is that what you've got there is a bit of the truth, a bit of reality that is actually reflective of the subjective universe that we live in, regardless of what anyone else says about it.
Yeah, yes.
Let's put it this way.
The level of our failure does not appear to be closely connected to the difficulty of the problem.
It's a difficult problem, but it's amazing what people have put together and then somehow we are going to ignore or demonize or whatever out of existence at who knows what cost.
That's right.
OK, do we want to say something about our erstwhile mayor or or should we save that?
Maybe very quickly.
It's quite timely.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
So I have it here.
If you want to.
- I have it.
- Okay.
- Yeah, why don't you show it?
This is what a two minute So it's playing, oh no, it's playing on my computer, not on... Okay, you can show my computer if you want, because I've also got it... Oh, okay.
You can't play it.
Well, we can sort of say what it is that Ted here has...
Ted, this is actually a quote.
Ted Wheeler is speaking, I think this is yesterday, in the wake of riots by Antifa throughout, I think it was North or Northeast Portland on New Year's Eve.
Including attacks on the federal buildings downtown.
In downtown, which is the Northwest or Southwest, whatever, right across the river.
Um, and you know, it's just, it's just so much of the same garbage that's been happening since the end of May, almost, almost uninterrupted.
Um, and should we just go on or should we let him show it?
Um, yeah, why don't you show it?
Okay.
My good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical Antifa and anarchists.
Yes.
In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end.
Lawlessness and anarchy come at great expense and with great risk to the future of our community.
It's time to push back harder against those who are set on destroying our community and to take more risks in fighting lawlessness.
In closing, once again, I condemn anyone who engages in violence or criminal destruction, no matter what their ideology.
All right.
So that is our mayor finally figuring out which way is up.
It's about time.
It's amazingly overdue, which, you know, one does not want to punish the man for finally realizing that he's going to have to enforce the goddamn law against people who are willfully destroying things in pursuit of, at best, a nonsensical utopian vision of Portland and how the rest of the world should look.
Now I did notice, and I thought it was particularly delightful, that in his statement he says, my good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn.
Right?
As if violence weren't bad enough, there has been scorn.
My God!
I think he's actually surprised and actually a little hurt that they don't love him for all of his efforts.
I think he is.
They never will.
No, it's... They won't... They will never come to adopt you, Ted.
No, they won't.
And hopefully that message sticks, because if I am not mistaken, he is in the process of regrowing a pair.
I mean, he is.
Let us hope.
He is.
He has landed on his seasonally appropriate grounds.
Breeding spot.
He has regrown a pair.
He is regrowing a pair.
It will no longer be true if this process continues, that the only thing about him that is male is his pronouns.
Alright, I don't know why I said that, but he does have three pronouns.
I've never seen three pronouns before.
He declares three pronouns, not just the usual two.
You gotta be well covered.
He, him, his.
Yep, he does.
So anyway, this is good news that he will be enforcing the law.
He does... I mean, if you think he will?
Well, let's put it this way.
I think that this state... He might actually be fed up.
I think at this point he has realized that there's no... there's nothing down this road.
Right?
And it is amazing to them.
I mean, these people literally lit his building on fire with his neighbors present, right?
And he apologized to the neighbors and moved.
He moved.
I mean, I think apologizing to the neighbors made good sense, but… Actually, I'm not even sure he apologized.
I think he might have apologized to Antifa.
He did?
Okay, Zach says he apologized to the neighbors.
But in any case, as residents of Portland, it is about time.
It is amazing that it took so long to get here.
Let us hope that he does a good and competent job.
He does say the right things in that clip about the fact that we will need to avail ourselves of new technologies and apply the ones we've got.
Hopefully it's done well, but That sounds ominous.
Right, it does, but nonetheless, you know, you have ongoing lawlessness.
Obviously there's no choice here.
So, um... Well, I mean, they could have fully availed themselves of the technologies they had from the beginning.
Well, in fact... I think that would have worked.
He kept taking them off the table.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's, uh, it is good news.
Hopefully it works out.
All right.
All right.
Maybe we have reached the end... I think we have reached the end...
Live stream of episode 61.
Yes, so we will take a 15 minute break and for those of you who are watching on YouTube be back for our second hour, hour plus, to answer your questions, super chat questions that you ask in this hour and in the next hour.
We have that new First Against the Wall Club stuff available at www.store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com can be emailed with logistical questions like, how do I pose a question?
When is the private Q&A?
Speaking of the private Q&A, that's available on my Patreon once a month.
We did ours last week.
Man are the questions good.
They're so good and it's a lot of fun and it's small enough that we can watch the chat as it happens and actually interact with the chat some which you know we don't receive the chat.
But no scorn, please keep the scorn to... Violence is okay?
No, I would say it's limited by virtue of the technology, but you could sneak a lot of scorn through a chat, but I'd appreciate it if they didn't.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, please give the scorn to a dull roar.
You have your second monthly Patreon conversation tomorrow.
Evolution Conversation will happen tomorrow.
Had the Coalition of the Reasonable Conversation this morning.
It was quite excellent, as it has been.
And in the next hour, we will, among the other questions that you guys asked during Super Chat, also, as has become our want, answer a question voted on on the Discord server, which you can also access at either our Patreons.
