#67: What the W.H.O? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 67th 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. DarkHorse merchandise now available at: store.darkhorsepodcast.org Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Pa...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 67.
This time, I don't even need to ask you if it's 67.
I'm so certain that it is.
Here we are, two-thirds of the way to 100.
I had not put that together, but you're right, now that you mention it.
Indeed.
All right, well, that's an accomplishment in and of itself.
All right, we have a lot of interesting things to talk about today.
We've got winter chaos out the window.
Those of you joining us from the Pacific Northwest, you are familiar with what we're experiencing.
Yes, and those who are not, we have a kind of an unusual buildup of snow.
We sometimes get snow here, it usually doesn't stick very well, maybe an inch or two.
In this case, what we've had It's interspersed snow and sleet, so there's ice layers and snow layers and all kinds of things.
One could do a kind of a snow geology or a snow archaeology on the layers.
If the earth form was different, we would be having avalanche warnings.
I have no doubt that large amounts of snow would be sliding off into gullies and things, but you know, not in the rolling hills here.
Not in the Rolling Hills.
Yeah, indeed.
I guess a bunch of covers at the Portland... I didn't look it up.
Not the Yacht Club.
Some boatyard.
All of the covers collapsed on the boats and they're presumably now half sinking under the snow.
So anyway, that's our situation here.
We're going to start with some announcements today and then talk about where we're going.
Lots of interesting places to go today.
But first, first announcement is that you are going to give away... Yes, I'm going to give away an invite to Clubhouse, and I'm going to defend the doing of that and then tell you how it's going to work.
Clubhouse is an interesting new social media platform.
Everything is audio.
There's actually no way to contact anybody on it by text.
Everything is done in speech, and it's all ephemeral, which has created a new kind of dynamic.
It sometimes goes terribly, it often goes in a fascinating way, and the thing is, it's an opportunity.
These invites are highly sought after, it's still in beta, so there aren't a huge number of them available, and this is a great time to get in on it, because it's still deciding what kind of social network it's going to be, and if you're there, you can participate in helping to guide it.
So, what we are going to do, is we are going to have Dr. Rollergator, our moderator, decide who in the chat is deserving of an invite.
Now I should tell you, at the moment, Clubhouse is iPhone only.
One of our moderators.
Yes, one of our moderators.
It is iOS only.
I won't say iPhone only because I think an iPad would do too.
That is not the long-term plan, so if you don't have an iOS device, you could get a cheap one somewhere, or you could bank your invite and then when it goes on to Android and other platforms, then you can use it then.
So this is legit?
As someone who has never been on Clubhouse, I'm asking you.
I understood it to be somewhat elite in some ways.
You are allowed to give away an invite?
They give us invites as a matter of course, and we are allowed to give them to anybody we want to.
I think this is completely legitimate.
If it is not, I apologize.
But I believe this is completely within the rules.
All right.
Okay, so other announcements, and you're going to finish with one, but we just wanted to remind people about one and tell people about two more.
There were three really terrific conversations, I think, that went public this week.
One of them was yours with Daniel Schmachtenberger here on the Dark Horse Podcast, available on YouTube and on wherever you listen to your audio-only podcasts.
You'll be dropping another terrific conversation next week.
We'll leave who that is Quiet for the moment.
So, you know, do listen to that.
I also had two conversations with two just amazing women this week, two different conversations, and I recommend them both highly as well.
One was with Kelly J. Keene, also known as Posie Parker, on the Newly named, newly renamed Biological Woman's Hour.
You can find that on YouTube at Biological Woman's Hour.
And then the second was with Julian Vigo on her podcast Savage Minds.
You find that on podcasts or at her sub stack and I highly recommend both of them and all of the conversations and work they're putting out in the world and the two conversations I had with them in particular.
Isn't every hour Biological Woman's Hour?
Not when it's just you having one.
Even then, I mean, female choice being what it is, it sort of seems to me like that's the law of the jungle.
Also born a woman and all that.
Born of woman, as you point out.
Yes.
Yes.
No, in so many ways.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes, well, we do live in an era in which pointing out the obvious seems to take up an awful lot of our time, doesn't it?
Yes, that is dangerous.
I think Kelly J would be, both of them actually, Kelly J and Julian would be first to acknowledge that that is one of the sillier aspects of our modern era.
Also, on the Discord tomorrow, the Discord server, which you can get access to at either of our Patreons.
You are going to be on there tomorrow on Valentine's Day for Breakfast with Brett at 10am Pacific.
So that's just an announcement for those of you who've been wondering if it might be worth it.
I think it will be.
We've also just posted a clip from last month's private Q&A.
So every month we have a two-hour private Q&A that you can access to on my Patreon.
And we are going to begin picking one clip out of each of those, maybe, and making it public every month.
And this one is a story of your firstborn, who happens to have been a crocodile.
Right, yes.
First hatched.
Yes, as you said in the clip.
So you can find that on this YouTube channel or on the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel to find the story of how it is that Brett comes to identify as a crocodile mom.
Did, at one point in my life.
At one point.
And let's see.
Oh, you wanted, because I couldn't figure out where else this might go in today's diverse show, you wanted to say something about something that happened this week.
Oh, yes.
Comedian Tim Dillon on his show, a widely circulated show, took us to task.
So just truth in advertising, I have not seen this.
I don't know.
I know something about what you're going to say, but I have not seen the clip.
So he actually took you to task in particular, yes, for that.
So being a cat lover?
Deep, lovely voice of yours.
I'm not sure exactly what his problem with it is, but somehow he was impatient with it.
Does he wish I would shut up already?
He didn't say it in so many words, no, but he rather broadly challenged the IDW for Being unable to take a joke.
Now, I would.
Yeah.
So here's the thing.
He says that we're unable to take a joke.
What he doesn't do is say it to our fucking faces.
All right.
That was a joke of mine.
Actually, I do want to.
Caught you off guard, didn't I?
I just don't know what's going on.
I actually think that among the strengths of the people who are typically associated, you know, IDW is not a membership organization.
It has, you know, flexible boundaries and all.
But I do think, if you think of all the people who are named in that cluster, I think maybe one of the few absolutely universal characteristics is that everybody can take a joke, right?
Everybody there has a sense of humor about themselves.
Oh god.
The cats.
Yeah, they are.
I know that I'm sure that Eric would not say that there were any cats associated with the IDW, but there are many cat owners.
And the cats such as this one, famously unable to take jokes.
Don't get it.
Goes right over their heads.
I don't know that Eric would acknowledge that there are, that the cats are meaningfully That was my point.
That's what I said.
Oh, right.
But nonetheless, so there's no, you know, they can take a joke or not take a joke from from his perspective, I would imagine.
He has only finally worked his way around to accepting dogs into the IDW adjacent sphere.
And what a sweet dog.
Yeah, lovely dog.
All right.
So I think that's that's basically it.
I would just say, hey, Tim, you want to make jokes about us?
Just try us and we'll see how we do at taking them and returning fire.
I look forward to it.
All right.
Okay, so I guess I want to just review some of what we're going today before we go ahead and launch into it.
But first, I will also say that every week we're getting a ton of communications from people, most of which we're grateful for, the vast majority of which we do not have time to respond to.
And one of the themes that I am seeing ramping up again, as we were at the beginning of last Northern Hemisphere summer, for instance, is a lot of chaos in the diversity, equity and inclusion sphere.
And we won't be discussing that today, but I guess I want to just promise that even though I think it's no one's favorite topic, among those who are listening to us largely, it is a really important one.
So we will probably next week, but certainly soon, talk again about some of what's happening in that space.
Yeah, it does seem to be moving rather rapidly.
It's about time we revisit it and figure out where we've landed.
Exactly.
But first, no not first, this week we are going to spend some time talking about SARS-CoV-2 origins and what the WHO Commission has said and why we should definitely listen to the authorities when they tell us to follow this science but not that science.
Right?
What the who?
What the who?
And then, you know, that'll be riffing on various topics in that space.
The things that I really want to talk about this week include how the moon affects our sleep, How fish are being affected by pollution in the water supply, specifically antidepressants, and what carnival, which should have started yesterday but has been mostly cancelled most places, including the American version of it, which is Mardi Gras, I have a prediction on one of these.
response to what its value is and talk a little bit about our actual history with Carnival and finish by showing, I've just chosen 12, 13 photographs that you took when we were able to experience Carnival ourselves in 2016.
So those are some of the places we'll be going today.
I have a prediction on one of these, so I don't know where you're headed with this fish thing, but I have the sense that antidepressants affecting fish will result in something very, very bad about which the fish will feel better than they might.
Yeah, I...
All right, we can just leave it as a prediction.
I'm not sure better.
I think there's kind of an unfortunate regression to the mean going on with regard to these mood disruptors.
Makes everyone more clone-ish, even the fish.
Clone fish.
Clone fish, yeah, exactly.
Okay, so you came to me this week and said, with regard to the origins of SARS-CoV-2, we have talked about it many, many times and we have not tried to put together an organized, here is all the evidence.
And we're not going to try to do that today either.
I don't think that a free-flowing conversation is the right place.
I think that is exactly what scientific papers are for, and there have been some good ones, although new evidence keeps on arising.
But one of the things you specifically said to me Was no matter what, no matter whether or not this thing emerged from a lab or it came or it never was inside a lab, we are missing an intermediate.
Like there is an intermediate form for which we have no evidence at this point, And, you know, it's akin to the sort of, you know, missing link talk in evolutionary biology, although most evolutionary biologists don't talk in those terms.
But what we know for sure is that there is the most closely related virus that we have, that's this wild virus that was collected in 2013 in Yunnan province, is not the same as SARS-CoV-2.
And what happened in those intervening Yes, and we don't actually know that RATG-13, otherwise known as 4991, an interesting story in itself, but, you know, we don't know that it is the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, but it does appear to be a very close relative of it.
So anyway, what I wanted to do I have the sense, you know, at some point you hear the conversation and you hear people reacting to things like the lab leak hypothesis and dismissing it and you realize they don't even understand what is being proposed.
And in fact they may be dismissing it because they have the sense that it is very different than the actual hypothesis on the table.
So what I wanted to do is recast the question so that at least we are all on the same page.
Everybody should be on the same page with respect to what it is that we are looking for and why.
And so, yes, missing link is something we are looking for.
That term really does apply here.
We're looking for a missing link in an evolutionary chain.
And what that missing link might be is the questions.
So we should all be able to see that dynamic.
But the first thing to say is that it has become clear in some of the dialogue that has gone on in the mainstream press in the aftermath and part of our appearance on Bill Maher That when people hear lab leak, they often assume that what is being suggested is that scientists built SARS-CoV-2 from the ground up.
That this is a synthetic virus.
And nobody serious is arguing for that.
I don't believe that I've seen it proposed anywhere.
I've seen response to it as if someone else had proposed it, but I at least, and maybe I've missed it, but I have not seen anyone say, I think that's what's going on.
Or even, I think that's a hypothesis that deserves to be on the table as something to be taken seriously.
Well, let's put it this way.
To the extent that people are dismissing the idea because it seems implausible, it actually is implausible.
Now it is not implausible that somebody could take a sequence from a living virus and effectively generate a synthetic version of it.
That is plausible.
What is not plausible is that human beings could design a virus that would be effective at spreading through the human population.
We don't know nearly enough.
Right?
We haven't even, as far as I'm aware, gotten to the point of putting together a protein from scratch.
We cannot write a protein that is useful.
Maybe we could do something structural, but we can't write an enzyme.
It's far too complex for us.
We don't get it yet.
So, to the extent that people are comforted by the fact that it sounds unlikely that scientists would have constructed this virus, they are right, Siren.
Scientists couldn't have constructed this virus.
But!
What they could have done is composite viruses from nature.
They could hybridize viruses and make a chimera.
They can also use evolution to do things that they themselves do not know how to do.
And so the core of the lab leak hypothesis is that serial passaging, which is basically the acceleration of selection in the lab using either tissues or creatures, If it's tissues, it's in vitro.
If it's creatures, it's in vivo, serial passaging.
Just for those of you who have heard some of these terms, right?
So, serial passaging.
And it could be both, right?
You can serial passage in tissues and then creatures.
You could also... But what does that look like?
Why don't we actually get a description on the table?
What it looks like is you force an infection of a creature and then you house... This is the in vivo version.
You House the creatures together such that they are very likely to transmit the virus to each other.
So even if the virus totally sucks at this job, it occasionally jumps.
And the ones that do jump, therefore, are the ones in the population of virus that have the characteristics that make them more likely to jump.
So if you do this enough, what you get is the accumulation of those characteristics that make the thing better in jumping.
And it's an exact analog for what takes place out in the world when viruses evolve on their own.
And what you've just described is also that in vivo serial passage-ing is a type of, it's a subset of, gain-of-function research.
Yes, the purpose is to add functionality to these things and in fact the thing it is best positioned to add functionality the type of functionality its best position to add is transmissibility right because that's effectively what you've done is you keep asking it a transmissibility question rather than for example a How long can you last dormant on a surface question?
Right, so SARS-CoV-1 was a reservoir, I don't know if that's how actually people say it, but lived in horseshoe bats, and then we believe had a spillover event into civets, was it?
It was palm civets.
Palm civets, and then from palm civets spilled over into humans.
Palm civets, which are cultivated and consumed by people.
Okay.
And murres, similarly, was in, I don't know what bats first, I think.
I believe it's horseshoe bats, although I would have to look that up to know for sure.
And then spilled over into camels.
We think.
We think.
And then camels spilled over into humans.
Now, those two stories, if they're true, don't involve any anthropogenic research.
There's no human research there.
But effectively, what selection is doing, to use the human-imposed language, is that virus is gaining function by spilling over into new hosts.
And it is not going to gain the kind of function that we're talking about with regard to serial passage research as fast, because it's not being forced as fast.
But you could think of, for instance, that intermediate host in MERS being camels as gain-of-function camels.
And you could think of those intermediate host palm civets in SARS-CoV-1 as gain-of-function palm civets.
And this week, Peter Daszak and the WHO Commission decided that we've gotten, and originally we thought we were being told it was maybe gain-of-function pangolins for SARS-CoV-2, and now we're being told ferret badgers.
Yeah, Frozen Ferret Badgers, in fact.
We will get back to the Frozen Ferret Badgers in a second.
I want to put this in context, though.
It's interesting talking to people who are looking into the possibility of a lab leak.
We differ on what we see as the most conspicuous piece of evidence that points to this not having been a natural spillover event.
In part, those differences have to do with what our areas of expertise allow us to see most clearly.
In part, it has to do with different Bayesian weightings.
The thing that jumps out to me and many others is the fact that the virus is so well adapted at the point that it first emerges, right?
And this is conspicuous in a couple of different ways.
One, Um, it's very much better at jumping between people than you would expect, and there is no diversity.
There's very little diversity amongst the early samples.
So what we do not have evidence of is a spillover event that took place in Wuhan, took months or years in order for some viral lineage to gain the capacity to jump well between people, and then suddenly we got a pandemic.
We have no evidence of that.
What we have is evidence of something that absolutely hit the ground running, right?
Now hit the ground running suggests an intermediate that we don't have, right?
That intermediate could have been pangolins, but I must say the first time I heard pangolin I thought pangolin ecology does not fit this story very well, right?
Even if this is a plausible mechanism, you have to, you know, in order, so the reason that pangolins came up is that some smuggled pangolins had a SARS-CoV with an RBD, a receptor binding domain, that was a much better match than anything else for SARS-CoV-2.
Now, that receptor binding domain is key to entering the human cells.
But in order to get a virus which is overwhelmingly like RATG13, which came from bats in Yunnan, and to get the receptor binding domain that was found in these pangolins, you need an event where, let's say a pangolin is infected with both things, and some cell ends up with both viruses, and then there could be a crossing over event.
But It's hard to figure out how ecologically that would happen and what has happened in the many months since pangolins were initially proposed is that the pangolin hypothesis has fallen apart and the reason it's fallen apart, there are many different lines of evidence, but The fact is the SARS-CoV that was found in the pangolins is actually much better adapted to infecting humans than it is to infecting pangolins.
So it doesn't look like something that was resident in pangolins, nor are SARS-CoVs widely known to be in pangolins.
So something is very odd about that story.
So SARS-CoVs?
I'm just not clear on what you're saying.
Are you saying SARS-CoV as a shorthand for SARS-CoV-1?
Or are you talking about the general class of coronaviruses?
I'm talking about the general clade.
Okay, so I think there's probably a more precise way of referring to them then, because that sounds like you're talking about... Beta coronaviruses.
Okay, good.
So, in any case, the pangolin hypothesis has become very, very unlikely, right?
In fact, I would say the evidence against it is very strong, and I was thinking about reading a little bit from a paper that describes why that hypothesis has come apart, but I think it's probably too technical and we'll leave it alone.
But nonetheless, the point is, pangolin could have been the link between a bat virus, which was not very well adapted to infect humans, but was very well adapted in bats, to a virus in Wuhan that is very well adapted to humans, right?
Except that it doesn't look like pangolins could have been the place where that took place.
So what that means is, if it isn't pangolins, The hunt is on for something, right?
And that something could be a lot of different things.
It doesn't have to be a critter, right?
It could be that a spillover event in some other place resulted in a weak exchange of viruses, a poorly adapted virus jumping occasionally between, let's say, people in some other location, and eventually learning the trick of infecting people, and then somebody getting on a train and showing up in Wuhan.
And then us monitoring it and suddenly discovering a virus that's very well adapted to people.
It doesn't say that the evolutionary phase is absent, it just says it didn't take place in Wuhan, but... Well, but when you say it doesn't have to be a critter, what you mean is that there doesn't have to have been an intermediate host of a different species than the original, which is probably a horseshoe bat, or the final, which is humans.
That's what you mean by it doesn't have to have been a critter.
Right.
What I'm saying is, You need some sort of intermediate.
It could be a critter.
Critter is most likely.
The versions of this that we've seen typically go through a critter.
But it could be that it jumped to people directly and then went through a rapid evolutionary phase.
And the reason that we see no evidence of that rapid evolutionary phase is that it happened somewhere else.
However, That's a hypothesis, and it makes a prediction, and the prediction is there's a population somewhere else in which there will have been some epidemiological pattern, something that will initially have been dismissed as some normal kind of pneumonia, will ratchet up, get spread better, and in order for something as well adapted as what emerges in Wuhan to show up, there will be the late stages of that epidemic, which will have been very conspicuous, and we would now
And an additional prediction of that is that even if it wasn't recognized as such at first, is that that population might be less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 as it circles back around and gets back there, given that we believe that there is certainly strong evidence for at least Some short to intermediate term immunity from having had SARS-CoV-2, from having had COVID-19.
In fact, this is being discussed.
This is being discussed as one possible factor.
It could be that something like this virus or this virus in some early stage circulated in Southeast Asia in places that have actually been more successful at beating SARS-CoV-2, right?
And so that is one thing that has been discussed.
The basic point for us here is there has to be some intermediate, right?
This virus knows the trick of infecting humans extremely well, right?
It is post-adaptation.
Where that adaptation took place isn't pangolins, it doesn't appear.
We don't have another candidate that has emerged.
We don't have a human population in which it could have learned this.
And so in some sense, The laboratories in Wuhan are one possible intermediate, right?
They are not the only possible intermediate.
And what Heather mentioned a few minutes ago, the WHO, in collaboration with China, appears to be steering us towards another hypothesis.
Now this hypothesis, Zach, do you want to show that Dasik clip?
Okay, so we unfortunately can't hear the clip, but you will hear, I'm just going to give you one brief, one couple minutes from this interview between Becky Anderson of CNN and Peter Daszak of this WHO Commission, who you will have heard us mention before.
Okay, show the clip, Zach.
Well, we're talking about something very different right now than, you know, a package Frozen fish from somewhere else in the world.
We're talking about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the COVID outbreak, in a market in Wuhan, the likely center of it, the early spreading of that outbreak.
And what we see there when we visit that market is a place that sold a lot of frozen products, not just the typical things we would buy in a supermarket, but also frozen animal products from animal farms in Southeast Asia and inside China.
And there is a really striking piece of evidence that was mentioned today in the press conference That in those products were included wildlife, meat and carcasses from animals that we know are susceptible to coronaviruses and also that the supply chains come from places in China where we know the SARS-CoV-2 related viruses are.
In other words, a direct link from the potential bat origins of this virus, which most scientists believe is true, into Wuhan market.
Now, scientists in China tested those carcasses and they were negative.
So that's good.
But we don't know what else was there.
We don't really know if there were live animals there.
There's no evidence of that, but we don't know.
And we don't know how many of these animals were part of that frozen market or even other types of meat.
So, you know, to many of us on the team, it was a clear clue as to what may have happened.
And it was one of the pathways that we thought was more likely than others, for sure.
Let me just be quite clear about this then.
It's one of those pathways that might be more likely, you say, and that's an agreement that you made as a team.
But I'm struggling to understand Say again?
Keep going then.
Specific evidence that you have to support this contention, sir, with respect?
Well, the specific evidence comes from the work that China's been doing, that Chinese scientists have been doing, from really day one of the outbreak.
So around about January the 1st, Scientists from China's CDC went into the market and started swabbing the market.
They looked at sewage.
They looked at stalls where they sold food.
They looked at the stalls where the people were positive for coronavirus.
They spent about a month in there swabbing, testing.
Over 900 samples collected, a really thorough, deep study.
Most of the animals' products had gone, but there were some still there.
There were live animals in the market, we think mainly aquatic animals, but we don't know.
There are rumours of live mammals in that market.
But what was really intriguing was this find of carcasses of animals, mammals, actually ferret badgers which are a type of animal that's widely eaten across Southeast Asia which we know has the capacity All right, so that was Peter Daszak, and we will put a link to that little interview in the description of this video.
You should check out the whole thing.
It's rather incoherent.
What I believe is not said anywhere is that Peter Daszak, they say he's a zoologist on the Who team, Peter Daszak is more than a zoologist.
He is also head of EcoHealth Alliance, which has been deeply involved in the funding pathway for gain-of-function research, including sending millions of dollars to Wuhan to study these very viruses.
So he has an intense conflict of interest.
But the... Go ahead.
The description of him as a zoologist across all of the major media platforms whenever they mention him is beginning to feel intentionally misleading.
It is true that he's a zoologist and that describes his training from many decades ago, but what his work has been, the way that he has made a living, for all of his recent history is as president of an organization that specifically works on gain of function research on coronaviruses, on bats, and works with the Wuhan Institute of Oralogy.
So, to be clear, we are not looking to blame anybody for the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is fault, we believe, in at least the recklessness of the gain-of-function research, which if it didn't cause this outbreak certainly could cause a very serious outbreak.
So there is something about this that requires our scrutiny, but at some level what we have Here is a failure to appreciate the hazard of gain-of-function research and that's a hazard.
That's a failure on the part of the international scientific community.
So the point though is Dasik has The strong incentive to favor any hypothesis other than a lab leak.
And so the fact that he's on the WHO team, I believe he's the only American on the WHO team, really raises the question about what sort of investigation this is.
But the key here is that you can see Dasik is very excited about the possibility, what he says is evidence, of another pathway Basically that there were frozen ferret badger steaks in the Wuhan seafood market.
And the reason that this is exciting to Dassek and others on the WHO team is that ferret badgers are mustelids, which are another creature which SARS-CoV-2 can infect.
So we have seen, unlike the case with pangolins, to which SARS-CoV-2 is not well adapted, SARS-CoV-2 is also not well adapted to bats, but it has spread like wildfire through mink farms.
So minks are mastelids, and the virus not only infects minks, we've seen it infect other things like big cats and zoos, but What it does not do is spread from them.
The case in minks is exceptional.
So minks actually catch the disease and they spread it very much like humans.
It's well adapted to people.
It's well adapted to minks and ferret badgers is a small clade of closely related creatures in Southeast Asia.
Allow me to just do a tiny bit of phylogenetic description here.
So this is from one of the tomes of mammals.
It's a little dated at this point, but this is the second volume of Walker's Mammals of the World, the one that includes the carnivora, which is one clade.
Within the carnivora we have, as you have said, the mustelids, which includes, broadly speaking, the weasels, ermine, stoats, minks, ferrets, and polecats.
Yeah.
Then also within the mustelid is the genus Melogail, the common name for which is ferret badger.
It's not a misspeaking.
It's neither a ferret nor a badger, although it is closely related to a ferret.
This is true across a lot of common names that you end up with, like, I don't know what it is.
I'm going to kind of call it both things.
But both ferrets and badgers are mustelids.
It is one of the rare cases where these two things show up in the right clait, so...
Yeah.
Spotted skunks.
Anyway, it's a cool claim.
Skunks have been moved out of the Mustelids.
Not meaningfully, but since the publication.
Including the spotted skunks?
I believe so.
Okay.
So, I just had a couple sentences to read from Walker's here about the ferret badgers.
Also at the point that this book was published in the 90s, we thought there were three species, now we think there are five.
You know, this is a splitter-lumper distinction that is not of much interest to anyone.
outside of the people doing this work, certainly have very little interest to the ferret badgers themselves, actually.
So ferret, the ferret badgers are found in wooded country in grassland, They climb on occasion.
Ferret badgers are savage and fearless when provoked or oppressed and have an offensive odor.
The diet is omnivorous and is known to include small vertebrates, insects, earthworms, and fruit.
A ferret badger is sometimes welcome to enter a native hut because of its destruction of insect pests.
Welcome in the places where they live, which is, as you say, sort of broadly throughout Southeast Asia.
So a couple things to say.
One, Peter Daszak reports that these things are widely eaten.
I don't know how widely they are eaten.
Apparently you found evidence that they are eaten by some people.
Yeah, I think, let's see, the IUCN Red List, if I can find it here.
So the IUCN being the, what does it stand for?
Why isn't it on the page?
I don't know.
The IUCN Red List did suggest that the one very widely distributed species, which is the only one that is in China, including within the range of Wuhan, does get eaten sometimes, but this is a long So this is the Chinese Ferret Badger.
Okay, so the point is, you know, so let's put Peter Daszak's motives aside.
Peter Daszak, for whatever reason, does not find the lab leak hypothesis credible and has in fact portrayed us and other people as conspiracy theorists for even considering it.
But really the point is we need an intermediate lab.
The lab would be one obvious intermediate.
In fact, the use of mustelids in the lab is likely.
Ferrets would have been a possible creature in which serial passaging might have been done, which would very well explain why this is so easily infecting and spreading between minks.
We don't know that to be the case, but it's possible.
But in any case, the fact that it spreads in mistellids means that if they can find a mistellid link, that okay, in principle, there could have been an epidemic of the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 in ferret badgers in, let's say, some other part of China or some other place where they exist.
And then he proposes that they could have that in fact there was ferret badger meat in the Wuhan market.
He says it was tested negative, which is good.
I don't know why he regards that as good.
This virus came from somewhere and this would be as good an answer as any if it was true.
So, anyway, the link would be the frozen ferret badger steaks having come from infected animals, where the function of infecting human cells was gained in this intermediate, resulted in the transportation of the virus to Wuhan, where it then infected somebody in the market or infected somebody who took the steak home from there.
Now, this is highly unlikely.
For one thing, we would have to imagine if that was the expected route, then it would have been effectively SARS-CoV-2 that came off that stake.
Because if it wasn't, then there would have been an evolutionary phase in Wuhan, for which we have no evidence.
So it effectively has to have already done all of that evolving at the point that it arrives in Wuhan on the stake.
And what we know is that these viruses don't transmit effectively this way.
It's not to say some viruses couldn't, and it's not to say it's completely impossible, but the idea that this came off of a frozen steak is pretty unlikely given how overwhelming the transmission by airborne and aerosolized particles seems to be of this virus.
In any case, this does have the sense of the WHO team grasping at straws.
They don't want to look at the lab leak hypothesis for which the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger.
It's not a settled question, but it is stronger.
And they do want anything else that could take the place of that missing link in the logical chain.
And so they are now putting, you know, one way to say this is frozen ferret badger steaks are the new pangolins.
All right.
So just to wrap that up a tiny bit more, Zach, if you would show my screen just for a minute.
Three days ago on February 10th, Nature published in their news section, major stones unturned.
COVID origin search must continue after who report, say, scientists.
Investigation team rules out idea that the coronavirus came from a laboratory leak, but offers two hypotheses popular in Chinese media.
Well, that sub-headline actually is not an accurate portrayal of what's in the piece.
Zach, if I might have my screen back here.
I'm just going to read from two paragraphs lower down in that report.
Quote, another focus of the Who's investigation was the idea that the virus leaked from a lab, a scenario that the team found unlikely.
Incidentally, unlikely and rules that are not the same.
Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety and zoonosis scientist with the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, who headed the investigation, said at the press conference that the team had conducted extensive discussions with staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been at the center of the speculation, and similar labs nearby.
He said a leak is unlikely because the virus was not known to scientists before December 2019.
Dwyer, that's a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, also a member of the WHO team.
Dwyer says, again still quoting from this Nature News article from February 10th about the WHO report, Dwyer says that the team didn't say Dwyer says that the team didn't see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident.
Quote.
Now, whether we were shown everything, you can never know.
The group wasn't designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.
End quote.
May be true.
If so, why not?
How is it that they were going in order to actually contemplate all and assess all of the hypotheses on the table, of which there is considerable evidence pointing to the idea of a lab leak, if they were not actually ready to, let's see, wasn't designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice?
Who then is?
And so what effectively this does is it conflates an absence of evidence.
Well, we weren't equipped to do that investigation.
And the people who were there say it didn't happen.
Right.
Now, I will say, were it the case that this virus did not emerge from that laboratory, You would have the people in the laboratory virtually certain that this had not been on their watch.
They would sound the same way they do, which is part of why you can't look at them and say, listen to how they sound, that's evidence.
They would sound the same either way.
Well, they would sound the same and...
I believe the strong implication is that they would behave very, very differently.
Now, nobody knows what goes on inside, you know, internal Chinese government discussions of these things.
But the fact is, the behavior of the laboratory has been incredibly suspicious.
It has been the opposite of transparent.
And under normal conditions, you would imagine that were you to run such a lab, You know, Zhang Li herself says that when this virus first emerged she didn't get a wink of sleep for fear that it had escaped from her lab, right?
And then she reports, uh, it didn't, and therefore I, you know, relaxed.
But the point is, she considered it plausible, right?
Were you to find yourself in the situation where you knew that it didn't come from your lab because you'd never seen that sequence before, it's out in the world, it's doing trillions of dollars of damage to the world economy and killing millions of human beings, you would be very inclined to show your books and say, didn't come from here, Take a look, right?
Even if that wouldn't be your normal impulse, because everything is riding on this question, including the future of this lab.
So the idea that they would want to keep, you know, so in any case, what I'm what they did was Delete a major database which would have likely contained evidence.
They haven't shown notebooks.
They haven't opened their freezers.
The WHO Commission says lab leak very unlikely, but of course we're not in a position really to have done that forensic work.
And the spokesperson from the WHO team, not the leader of it, but the main media spokesperson, Darling, is directly tied and funding the research that was being done in that lab.
Right.
So, in any case, all of this, again, raises the specter of, can we just please have an open investigation?
Every hypothesis on the table, including frozen ferret badger steaks.
That's a hypothesis.
But at this moment, what that is, is a hypothesis with no evidence.
Like, the sum total of the evidence for that hypothesis is ferret badger steaks were apparently present and tested negative.
Right?
You know, I don't know why.
I'm sure that Dasik wasn't thinking this, but whenever you say frozen ferret badger steaks, I imagine one with a stick.
I imagine actually a frozen ferret badger popsicle.
And, you know, maybe you're more inclined or more likely to get the virus by licking a slowly thawing frozen ferret badger popsicle than you would be by frying it up.
Maybe you do both, actually.
Maybe you lick the frozen ferret badger popsicle until it thaws and then you fry it and then you eat it.
Still, I think it's unlikely to transmit that way.
I think you would have to shave it and make particles, which you sort of... Oh, aerosolized frozen ferret badger steak popsicles.
Yeah, or snow cones.
No, I mean, actually, that sounds pretty parsimonious to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, the whole thing is rather remarkable.
But hey, we've got a number of, you know, Did it evolve somewhere else?
That's a hypothesis, right?
It's a hypothesis that involves a train, it makes a prediction.
There's a population somewhere else that had an epidemic that we haven't found yet in spite of the fact that... The entire world is looking.
We're all looking.
Right.
Did it start in ferret badgers who were then transported maybe live, maybe that's what happened, live to the Wuhan seafood market and they coughed on somebody and we have no evidence of it.
Ferret badgers coughed.
Presumably before being turned into ferret badger popsicles.
Well, here's the thing.
They've got the frozen steaks.
You and I regard the likelihood of frozen steaks as pretty low because this stuff doesn't... The likelihood of them having passed this on.
Having passed it on that way.
But there were also live animals in the market.
He waffles over whether or not there were any live ferret badgers.
Nonetheless, let's say, okay, the hypothesis that it was ferret badgers in some other part of China, that is a viable hypothesis, right?
What does it predict?
It predicts a population of ferret badgers who, A, probably are still circulating this virus, we should be able to find them, right?
B, will show You know, immunity to it.
In other words, we'll be able to see that they have antibodies to this very thing.
So, in any case, we could probably come up with a dozen predictions from that hypothesis.
Well, let's go to it!
That's a hypothesis on the list, but so is the lab, right?
So, anyway, that's how all of this should be dealt with.
We're looking for a missing link.
We should all agree on that.
That missing link can be anything from a laboratory to a population of mustelids.
And all of these things make predictions, that's the nature of a hypothesis.
And a proper investigation would simply sort through these things and at the end of the day we would very likely get the answer.
But we're not going to get it by saying, you know, there's no evidence for that hypothesis.
Why is there no evidence?
Because we didn't look for evidence, okay?
That's not...
Well, to the degree that we looked for evidence, we asked the people who would have the most to lose if that hypothesis were true and they said it isn't true.
And so we said, okay, we trust them.
Don't you trust them?
How dare you not trust them?
What are you, a Sinophobic?
Yes.
Like, come on!
Right.
Exactly.
Okay.
Good.
Well, I think we covered the topic.
I do too.
I think hopefully that makes it clearer why the discussion is moving in the direction it's moving, and what is really at stake in the various claims.
Yeah.
Okay, just a little bit more on COVID though, because we've got a section that I have tentatively titled here, Follow the Science, but not that science, you fool.
We have published this, oh, actually, I guess, a little over a week ago, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, an op-ed, You can just show it very briefly here.
Zach, called the Universal Vaccination Chimera.
Tools for stopping variants are limited, and like masks and distancing, vaccines are not a panacea.
By a guy named Joseph A. Ladapo, who is an associate professor at the med school UCLA.
So I came to, just in the last week, I found this because he and this piece were being discussed as if he was an anti-vaxxer.
And increasingly I distrust the assessment that someone is an anti-vaxxer, just like I now distrust the assessment someone is a racist or a fascist or alt-right or a Nazi or a transphobe or any of these ridiculous epithets that are used to shut down discussion.
And sure enough, this piece is not anti-vaccination at all.
It is saying basically that we need a multi-pronged approach to deal with this pandemic, and that masks are some of the solution, and that distancing are some of the solution, and that vaccines are not going to be a magic bullet, a panacea in his language.
And so just to read, and you don't have to show my screen here, Zach, although I guess you could have, yeah.
Um, the last two paragraphs of this Wall Street Journal op-ed are, other forces pushing mortality lower.
The CDC estimates that approximately 83 million Americans contracted COVID-19 through December.
Re-infection risk is low for at least six to nine months following infection.
And just taking out of, not quoting anymore, six to nine months, because that's how long we know.
That's, that's the, that's the length of time that we have data for this at this point.
So, you know, In line with our earlier discussions about vaccines, where we really, really, really hope these mRNA vaccines are awesome and that they have long-term safety, but we cannot know yet.
Similarly, we cannot know about long-term reinfection risk for COVID-19.
To continue quoting from this Wall Street Journal.
Op-Ed from February 4th, Ladapo says, there is also growing scientific evidence for outpatient therapies such as ivermectin, colchicine, fluvoxamine, and the politically charged hydroxychloroquine, as well as better hospital practices.
A sharp decline in mortality will give rational thinking a bigger stage, allowing schools to reopen and social and economic activities to resume.
It will also liberate American society from the fear-fueled decision-making that has dominated the pandemic response.
Which isn't that, again, what we should all be looking for here?
A reduction in fear, which is fueling a just insane level of incoherence in terms of the policies that we are seeing.
So, two pieces of evidence from this week about the ridiculousity, yes, the ridiculousity of the responses that we're seeing.
Here we have Zach, if you would show briefly from February 10th, three days ago.
Officers at dorms, outdoor exercise ban.
This is a terrible headline.
UC Berkeley extends dorm lockdown with stricter mandates.
So the message here is, okay, this is a terribly headlined article, Zach, if I may, so I can see my own notes.
On this, UC Berkeley, you know, one of the shining jewels of the UC system, has banned solitary outdoor exercise in order to tamp down the pandemic, I guess.
But that means people are now locked in their dorm rooms with circulating air that they are sharing with other people.
Yeah, it's almost certain that that policy will do harm to some people because some hours that would have been spent not in close contact with others will be spent in encapsulated with them.
Without getting any fresh air, without getting any exercise, without seeing any other human beings perhaps.
Without making vitamin D. So this is actually going to intervene in the negative.
All of this.
All of it.
This is actually going to make people sicker would be my prediction.
Yep.
Yes.
And just the second piece of ridiculousity in terms of how efforts are proceeding to affect behavior.
I'll set this up by saying, increasingly when I'm out on walks, even if I'm not within 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 feet of people, and I have my mask in my hand clearly ready to put it on if I do have to be close to people, I am, you know, I've said this for months now, but I get, you know, I get the stink eye from people for not actually being outside wearing a mask.
And you know, it's winter here.
It's actually really wintery here right now.
And I want, it's, it's healthy.
It's not just I want, but it is actually healthy for me and everyone will be healthier if they get exposure to the actual elements on their skin.
And in the winter, your face is one of the few places that you can get that.
Why are people so confused?
I mean in part it's because people feel virtuous and on the right side of history for yelling at other people for not wearing masks.
This is unfortunately the landscape we're in and it comes from a place of fear and confusion but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with.
So this week I received the Oregon coronavirus update again on February 10th and Zach, so this is just the web version of it so that So that you guys don't see the actual email, but it's the same thing.
Campaign reminds us masks save lives.
Here's one picture.
Cindy is a wildland firefighter from southern Oregon.
She wears a mask to protect her crew from COVID-19, just like she protects Oregonians from fires.
Okay, I don't see anyone else in that picture, but whatever, I'm not going to focus here.
This seems likely to not be the thing that is Necessary here, but with her crew sitting in close quarters, okay.
But the next picture here is Ethan is a rancher and pro bull rider from Eastern Oregon who wears his mask so that we can return to normal life as soon as possible.
And this picture, for those of you listening and not observing, is a vast sort of eastern Oregon chaparral scape.
Endless rolling hills for as far as the eye can see.
One person on a horse.
No other people, no other horses, no other anything that might be transmitting this virus.
And this guy's wearing a mask.
And we are being shown this picture as evidence of how much he cares about us, and as evidence that this is going to do anything to reduce transmission of COVID.
I have looked.
I may have missed it.
Please, please, please share it with me somehow.
If there is new evidence that any of these new variants, or even the older variant, can spread outside, we covered in, I think, April.
The evidence that was already out at that point, extensive evidence, that this virus is not transmitting effectively outside, and certainly if there's no one around, where could you possibly be getting it?
Right.
Why?
Why are we getting this insane advice?
It is about widespread behavior control.
I don't frankly care if it comes from a place of really feeling good about trying to help people and just being really confused.
The effect is widespread behavior control and those of us who are not interested in behaving in ways that confused authorities tell us to do are now occasionally getting yelled at by our neighbors when we are outside actually getting the wind and the sun on our face.
So, what's driving me crazy about this is that the advice is low quality and it has this kind of defect to it where the assumption is, well, it can't hurt.
Right.
Right?
Exactly.
And the answer is, of course it can hurt, right?
To the extent that people are being driven crazy by lockdowns and don't want more of it.
You want to give them as much of a reprieve as you can to the extent that outdoors when you're not near other people is safe, then the point is, hey, take your mask off.
The official advice ought to be when you are not around other people outdoors, take your mask off.
Right.
And if we should put it on when we pass each other on the trail, even though there is frankly no evidence that that is dangerous.
OK, but.
You know, look, the model that we built up was doesn't seem to transmit outdoors.
That gives us a loophole that we can exploit for better psychological health, greater vitamin D creation, all of those positive benefits, right?
We ought to protect it.
Because it could evolve to transmit outdoors.
It's one of the things that I would actually expect, and the way to prevent it from doing that is to actually be more cautious than we should be.
Put masks on when we're, you know, standing in the ski line or whatever, even though there's no evidence that it transmits in those circumstances.
And it didn't seem to have that evolutionary move to not seem to happen in the wake of the massive regular protests from last northern summer.
Right, but in any case, a rational course would be the place where we know you're safe is when you're not around other people outdoors, and not around other people might mean 12 feet away, right?
Right, 12 feet away you can afford to have your mask down and not, you know, scowl at the other person for, you know, not wearing a mask, whatever it is.
We can afford That reprieve, the risk is really, really low.
As we get closer, where it's more plausible that something could jump, we should be protective of the loophole so that it doesn't disappear on us.
But we should not pretend that the point is I'm actually exposing you to, you know, a risk just because we're standing near each other outdoors.
So the policy is just... I'm also... I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm also really concerned about caving to other people's fear.
And, you know, the fear is being generated and curated and augmented by government officials, frankly.
And by, you know, these government officials at the state level and at the federal level and I assume elsewhere in the world as well.
But then you have a populace that is increasingly just fearful, and dysregulated, and can't remember what normal was, and is frankly having an ever harder time imagining that normal will ever be back.
And in those conditions especially, really any time, but in those conditions especially, I don't, I think it's actually even more dangerous to say, I get that you're scared, I will just let your fear drive our behavior.
No.
That's the mistake of safetyism on campuses, of trigger warnings, of all of the stuff that created a whole dysregulated, unable-to-figure-out-how-to-move-forward-in-the-world generation of sort of, you know, the second half of millennials.
And you know, again, just caveat, we happen to be teaching college for like the entire millennial generation, and almost to a person, the students we met, Didn't need that stuff.
They didn't ask for it.
And when we said that's not what we're going to do, we are going to treat you with respect and we're going to challenge you.
I'm going to show you things that you don't like and that challenge your preconceived ideas.
And we're going to expose our biases and your biases and all of that.
And guess what?
People actually ended up educated and less fearful and more capable in the world.
And why the hell are we asking an entire really global population at this point to fall prey to the same garbagey Well, and at some level, to the extent that we push nonsensical, and by nonsensical I mean doesn't match the empirical evidence mask policy, we are going to cause rebellion against it.
You don't want to give people who are anti-mask, for example, more of a point than they should have.
And to the extent that you're advocating things that don't make sense, you're doing exactly that.
I got taken to task this week.
I tweeted something.
I never know which tweets are going to take off, but this is one of my most popular tweets ever, though I expected it to go not very far.
My tweet was something like, if double masking is so protective, why aren't they built that way in the first place?
And this was an honest question, right?
Because A, I don't buy that double masking is good.
That does not mean that there are not combinations of masks that would be better.
But here are the questions that immediately arise in this context.
Okay.
COVID is a, is transmitted, it's a respiratory virus.
It's not, it's the reason that we have masks for the protection of people in the context of respiratory viruses.
Is COVID different in some way that two masks are good for COVID and not for other things that are transmitted this way?
In which case, that's interesting, but I want to see that.
I want to see, oh, we've been making masks wrong the whole time.
Lots of people have been getting sick even though masks were used because the mask should have been twice as thick.
And then we should make them twice as thick.
Go ahead.
So my only rejoinder to you, and I think we did this over the dinner table, in fact, was the one reason, the one analysis that I have seen for the conditions under which two masks might be better than one.
Well, I guess two.
One is that the mask that you were wearing was a low quality mask to begin with.
And in order to make a single high quality mask, you just want to double up two low quality masks that are low quality in different ways.
OK, great.
Also, why don't you just get a high quality mask?
So like that's that's one answer.
And for
Um, you know, for me I'm wearing these masks that my mother is making, thank you, and they're they're wonderful and they have two layers of cloth and they have a layer of uh of additional, I can't remember what the specifics are mom, um you know of additional stuff in between the two cloth layers and they fit my face really well and they're comfortable and they're awesome and you can't tell by looking at it that it's not just a cheapo single cloth layer mask and that's maybe unfortunate but I know that I'm walking around when I'm masked and it is you know
Every time that I'm around strangers, and anytime I'm indoors, it's not our home, that I'm wearing a single high-quality mask.
The one place that I see, even if you've got two high-ish quality masks, is that if they fit your face somewhat differently, and each of them is a slightly imperfect fit, that potentially having the mask that fits better on top of the mask that fits worse can basically help it conform to your face better.
That's great.
Then we need the information to be given to you so that you can figure out whether double masking is better.
Because here's the problem, okay?
If two masks are better than one, are three masks better than two?
Are four masks better than three?
Right?
There will come a point, I guarantee you, there will come a point at which extra masks start working against you because what they do is reduce the ability of air to transmit through them so it will go around.
Now my point would be, if you take a high-quality mask that fits you well, and you layer another high-quality mask on top of it, you are probably reducing its effectiveness.
Therefore, it is not true that two masks are better than one.
It's true that some combinations are better than a single mask of some type, right?
But without telling us that, Saying actually double double masking might be a good idea, right?
You are going to create, again, this is another case where you are going to create more disease just like telling people they shouldn't exercise outdoors alone, right?
You are going to create more disease because they're going to do something else.
So you have to tell us what it is that we are trying to optimize so that we can operationalize it rather than, you know, come up with some overly simplistic idea like two masks are better than one Where we can now start scowling at people who are only wearing one mask, right?
That is destined to do harm.
And the fact that we aren't having the conversation, right?
It's clear what the pattern is.
You've got, you had one mask, now we're being told two.
Can we fast forward and find out what you're going to say about three?
Right?
We ought to know.
Everyone wants simple rubrics, and especially because this is confusing, and I would argue some of this is intentionally confusing.
This is being made more confusing than it need be for reasons that I will remain agnostic on for now.
A friend of ours told me a story this week that she experienced several weeks ago in which she's in a grocery store and there's some dude with a, you know, imperfectly fitted mask who is on his phone the whole time talking loudly through his phone when therefore, you know, talking, we know, spreads viral particles much more than being quiet.
Talking loudly, presumably because he's talking through his mask, and he's picking up all this produce and putting it down, and yes, fomites don't seem to be a big cause, but like, you know, most of us are trying to be a lot more careful about not handling a lot of stuff that we're not actually going to buy in stores.
So he's picking up all this produce, and he's talking loudly on his phone the whole time, and he's presumably his own little, you know, if he was sick, he was spreading this stuff.
And so as they happened to check out around the same time, and as she was preparing to go out into the winter weather, she had to adjust something here and briefly took off her mask in order to get herself adjusted.
And he walked by and saw her and voiced a nasty, snarky comment about how masks are keeping us safe and why doesn't she care.
It was the guy who was behaving despicably, frankly.
Yeah, you're right.
It's the simple rubric problem.
It's the simple rubric problem.
The fact that he was wearing a mask and behaving in every single other way badly with regard to how to reduce the chances that if he were sick he was going to get other people sick.
Didn't affect him at all.
It's like it didn't enter into his worldview, and he could still feel all high and mighty whenever he saw anyone who was, for a moment, doing the one thing that we are told we all must do if you care about your friends and neighbors.
So those of us who can think, I think, are having a problem with a complete failure to do any net analysis, right?
There is a sense that that which might help Is, should be policy, right?
Well it might be that somebody is going to catch the virus from you outdoors while you're exercising alone, so let's have you not do that, with no understanding that you will therefore do something else where it's more likely to get transmitted, right?
So the point is this is a, at best, well-intended policy that is likely to kill, right?
I would argue that the two mask thing is too.
Does that mean that most people's mask choice wouldn't be better doubled?
It might well be, but we need to know what we're optimizing before we know whether or not we should double our mask.
If you're wearing a mask with one of those vents in it, I'd like you to double mask because those masks with vents in them, they don't protect the rest of us at all, right?
Like there are some masks that are crap and no one should be wearing them.
Right.
Now, here's another one to add to the list, okay?
At the beginning of this, I was waiting for some sort of guidance about the vaccine and people who had already been sick with COVID, right?
Because there's an obvious question here.
Now, let's take the most basic level, okay?
People who have had COVID have effectively had a vaccine to this version of COVID, right?
They have been exposed to those proteins.
That's what the immune system is.
That's why they got better, right?
The point is the immune system figured out the plan.
The dead ones, the ones who died of COVID-19, they have not effectively been vaccinated.
They were partially vaccinated, but let's just say if you recovered, if you actually had it and you actually recovered, the point is your immune system figured it out.
Now, do we know that that will have the same lasting immunity as the vaccine?
No, but we also don't know that the vaccine has lasting immunity and there's every reason to expect it because what these vaccines so far are doing is they are exposing the immune system to the very spike protein in order that when the virus actually invades your system, your immune system already knows what it's looking at and attacks it.
But here's the thing.
So I was waiting for them to say, look, if you've had COVID, you at least shouldn't get the vaccine early.
There are multiple reasons for this.
One is You don't need to take the risk of the vaccine.
The vaccine isn't just the spike protein, right?
Or the mRNAs that will create it.
It's also the lipid nanoparticles.
It's also whatever medium it's in.
It's a lot of things.
And so, why take the risk if you've effectively had the vaccine?
That's one question.
And there's another question, which is, how do these things interact?
Now, it may be that some immunologically very well-educated person will have some answer to this I don't see coming, but here's the question.
Your immune system functions on the basis that your cells will be able to recognize and attach to the proteins for which they are targeted, right?
So you get spike protein into your system, your system figures out the electromagnetic sequences that result in antibodies and or T-cells being able to stick to this thing, and that's how it works, right?
Now, if you get a vaccine, right, that generates spike protein, those spike proteins, which are not associated with virus, will stick to those cells and antibodies that are targeted at them.
There comes a point at which you may saturate those things, and you may in fact open the door to COVID, because the point is your immune system was busy dealing with particles that weren't associated with virus, and that let virus get through, you know, in some other way.
That is at least plausible, right?
Now there has been guidance in the last week or so that says if you've had COVID you should get one of the two vaccinations rather than two, right?
So that is at least moving in the direction of there's a question here but my point is that question was on the table from day one and even if nothing else is true if it is the case that this vaccine is as good as we think it is and as safe as people say it is then the point is
The people who've had COVID would be a lower priority because they are already at least somewhat vaccinated and therefore if the idea is get the vaccine to as many people as possible the policy that says get the vaccine no matter whether you've had COVID or not is going to kill people because it's going to leave some people unprotected.
So it's again a problem of simple rubrics, and that's exactly the third reason that I was going to put on the table, which you just landed at, which is the third reason not to prioritize getting the vaccine if you've had COVID-19, is that if we are being told the truth, and I believe we are in this regard, that we don't have enough supply, And that we're trying to distribute the vaccines as effectively and efficiently as possible to the people who need it most.
And the people who almost certainly have on-board endogenously generated immunity already should not be first in line for the vaccine.
If there's a supply problem, the people who are particularly high risk from the vaccine, like people with autoimmune diseases or I think pregnant women and children, Probably shouldn't be first in line, and people who are likely already to have immunity that they themselves generated should not be first in line.
Yep, and I would say we can add another reason for skepticism here, at least for the already exposed or already infected with COVID once crowd, which is the way these vaccines work The mRNA is going to get into cells, it's going to cause the production of spike proteins, which are going to be displayed by those cells.
I believe the fate of those cells will then be that they will be targeted by T-cells and killed, or they will have apoptosis programs activated.
In other words, the body will deal with them like they're infected with the virus.
Right?
So the point is, you're killing tissue!
That's not going to be good for you either.
So, you know, let's put it this way.
A logical analysis suggests that there are all sorts of reasons that we should be doing a much more nuanced job rather than just wagging our finger at everybody and saying everybody should get the vaccine because vaccine good.
Right.
All right.
Well, we're already well over an hour, but we've got a little cluster of topics that I really want to spend a little time on.
We're just getting started.
We're just getting started.
I said to you today, I think we're going to need four hours to start doing our live streams.
We're not going to do that, but it's just so much all the time.
And, you know, I only got back through February 10th in terms of my list of topics that I was trying to get to this week.
Okay, so the next three topics, which are broadly speaking how the moon affects our sleep and other cycles, and how exogenous mood disruptors are affecting the personality of fish, and what Carnival is about, are all linked in my mind actually.
I was playing with all of them and I'm thinking, you know what they are?
There is actually a theme running through these.
Which is exactly the theme of our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is how the ancient forces that we evolved in and with, we might have ought to pay attention to and pretend that they are no longer relevant to us at our peril, and also pay attention to the new forces and technologies and such that we are being handed with a bit more skepticism.
Like, this is just, this is a fairly simple rubric actually, and you know, say I who have been railing against simple rubrics, that the older it is and that we have been evolving with it, the more likely it is not to cause new kinds of harm.
It's not to say we couldn't do better, and that's not to say that progress can't be made, but be the most cautious of the newest stuff with which we have the least history.
So that's the kind of lesson there.
I've told you about a little bit of what we're going to talk about here.
A couple of articles came out this week, I think, or at least they were reported on this week.
I'm going to just have you, Zach, just show very briefly.
Here's one of them.
This is Kasaragi et al.
2021.
Moonstruck Sleep.
Synchronization of human sleep with the moon cycle under field conditions.
So, may I have my screen back?
Thank you.
I'll just read a little bit from the results.
Consistent with previous studies, shorter sleep duration and a delayed onset of sleep were associated with increased access to electric light.
Moreover, both the duration and the time of sleep onset showed a clear modulation throughout the moon cycle that was evident in the whole population as well as in the individual communities.
Now this paper was interesting.
So anyway, which communities did they study?
So I was just going to go back and look.
They looked at indigenous, I'm going to mispronounce this I'm sure, Toba slash Qom communities in Argentina.
So these peoples live in all range of conditions from sort of their original hunter-gatherer-like conditions to fully urban.
And so they went and looked at, if memory serves, and I did not have enough time to look at either of these sleep papers I want to talk about today a little bit.
They looked at moon stage and sleep in the most like the original indigenous hunter-gatherer.
People without light pollution.
Right.
Very little.
Fully urbanized, industrialized, and then a sort of an intermediate stage that has some light pollution as well.
And so they've effectively controlled for a lot of stuff around culture, right?
Because it's all the same, it's all the same lineage.
And they still, even the industrialized people, I think, are still honoring some of their established cultural norms.
But what they found was that, I mean, exactly as you would expect if you've ever been backpacking, or if you've ever thought about the fact that we are evolved human beings on this planet, Um, that we are queuing into the Moon, and that when we have electric lights that replace, that effectively replace the queues that we get from the Moon, especially at night, we are less, we are sleeping less, we are sleeping less well.
Yeah.
Absent electric lights, this was something interesting.
I don't remember if this is from this article or if it's something that they referenced in this article.
Very rarely without electric lights, people often go to bed after dark, and they may use fire, they may use moonlight.
They tend to go to bed later, the more full the moon is, with a couple of interesting exceptions.
I think it was the Hadza who actually have explicit nighttime festivities on new moon nights, interestingly.
So, you know, there are going to be exceptions, but very rarely, if ever, do people absent electric lights rise before the sun rises.
That going to bed after dark is common, but rising before the sun rises is not And oh boy, mightn't that have something to do with how much more sleep deprived people feel in the winter months and especially for teenagers having to get up early when it's still pitch dark out, rouse themselves from sleep when we know that this is a time of life when
People need more sleep and rousing them when it's still dark out and sending a signal that really until electric lights no human beings were ever being sent might be disruptive not just to sleep that day but to sleep more broadly and probably to the developing brain as well.
Okay, so I still missed something though.
So there's some sort of synchrony with moon phase, which I would expect, but how does it manifest?
Is it when people go to bed?
Is it how often they wake up when they're sleeping?
What kind of thing?
There's two comparisons that we're doing here, and I was mostly talking about the other one.
The hunter-gatherer industrialized.
The more industrialized you are, the less in sync with the moon phase you are, and the more disrupted your sleep is.
With regard to how does your sleep, if you are living without electric lights, how does your sleep change across the moon cycle?
People are tending to go to bed later under full moon conditions and under a full moon sleeping less per night, but that is a, you know, predictable, fairly even curve over time.
I've always wondered about this, because I have been kept up by the moon, and it seems like we are well designed not to be kept up by firelight, something you and I have talked about a lot.
And, you know, for good reason.
You would want it not to basically be informing your pineal gland of what time of day it is because it doesn't contain that information, right?
But the fact that the moon, which is reflecting obviously some light, somehow does keep you up if you're sleeping in a circumstance where you can't block out moonlight.
It's plenty to keep you up.
Also, interestingly, many years ago when I was doing bat research in Panama, I was, I can't remember exactly what I was doing, but I spent a night at the top of one of these canopy towers.
I think I was waiting for, there were some fruits maturing there, and I was hoping to see fruit bats, which didn't work out.
But nonetheless, oh, we should come back to why I might not have seen the fruit bats.
It has to do with something called lunar phobia that exists in bats.
In any case, I discovered that I could read under moonlight.
It was just barely the right amount of light to read, which is interesting.
You know, any less, you know, just slightly less than full moon wouldn't be enough.
So I don't know if that's haphazard or not, but it's an interesting connection.
That is an interesting connection.
And so just another paper that came out recently that I was able to spend even less time with, so I'm just really going to read a couple of sections from it, is this Forster et al.
And again you can show by my screen here, Zach.
We show that women's, just the second half of the abstract, we show that women's menstrual cycles with a period longer than 27 days were intermittently synchronous with the moon's luminance and our gravimetric cycles.
With age and upon exposure to artificial nocturnal light, menstrual cycles shortened and lost the synchrony.
We hypothesize that in ancient times human reproductive behavior was synchronous with the moon, but that our modern lifestyles have changed reproductive physiology and behavior.
And I'm just going to read the very beginning of the introduction too.
In many marine species and some terrestrial species, reproductive behavior is synchronized with a particular phase of the lunar cycle, generally the full or the new moon.
This arrangement increases reproductive success by synchronizing the reproductive behavior of the individual members of a species.
In light of this fact, it is of interest that the human menstrual cycle has a period close to that of the lunar cycle and that several older studies report a relation between the cycles Women whose cycles approach the 29 and a half day period of the moon have been reported to have the highest likelihood to become pregnant.
So that was, you know, that's the very beginning of the article, but I'd never heard that before.
But the closer the length of your cycle is to that of the moon, the more fecund you appear to be.
Super interesting.
But really, you know, not surprising at all that our sleep cycles for all human beings and that for women of reproductive age, menstrual cycles are attuned to the moon in some way, should not be surprising.
And to that end, I got to these two articles by reading a This Week in Science short article, which here, Zach, the final – didn't like the final – didn't like it.
I didn't like it when I made it bigger.
Okay.
Well, okay, never mind.
The final sentence is, both studies stop short of establishing causality but suggest that even in highly industrialized societies, celestial bodies affect our bodies on Earth.
Yeah.
I think?
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
I do think the female menstrual cycle and the lunar phases are tightly connected, but it does not require an actual effect of the Moon itself.
In other words, there is a mechanism for the Moon itself to influence women this way, because they, you know, under ancestral circumstances would have, you know, been monitoring effectively the But I don't think it's accidental, that close analogy.
Anyway, maybe we'll... So, yeah, we should definitely come back to this, but you are saying that the sleep work is of a different nature than the menstrual cycle work, and that the menstrual cycle work may be, in fact, about a way that the human body has figured out to basically keep time.
Yeah.
Keep time and awareness.
Yeah.
Keep time, keep a schedule, keep an internal schedule so that a woman effectively in a species with very few external indicators of when we are at our most fecund, that if you can keep track of the moon and count to 29, then you can do a decent job of knowing when you're fertile.
Yes, and also knowing when you are pregnant which may be the most important aspect of this which is that in effect by if a woman's period has accompanied a particular phase of the moon upon reaching that phase of the moon if she is not near her next period then she is at least aware that there's something she has to pay attention to which then might have very deep implications for her behavior because
Raising a child alone is vastly dicier than raising a child with a committed partner.
Yes, good.
Okay, yes, let us do come back to that.
Okay, so this article also came out this week, Zachary.
Um, Prozac turns guppies into zombies is the headline.
So this from Science News and, uh, Zach, I'm sorry, I need, I need this back just for a minute to pull up the original research.
And here we go.
Psychoactive pollution suppresses individual differences in fish behavior, uh, says, uh, crew Pulverino et al.
Okay, I'm sorry Zee, I need to thank you.
What do I want to read here?
Okay, the first paragraph, the introduction.
In the last two decades, the variety and concentration of pharmaceuticals in the environment has grown substantially.
Most pharmaceuticals, including psychoactive drugs such as antipsychotics, anxiolytics, which is anti-anxiety meds, and antidepressants are only partially absorbed after ingestion, and once excreted are not fully removed by wastewater treatment.
Such pollutants make their way into the environment via wastewater, remaining biologically active in aquatic ecosystems.
As a result, pollution by psychoactive drugs is now ubiquitous in aquatic ecosystems around the world, entering food webs and accumulating in living organisms.
And again, see?
Sorry, I wish I had a printout that I could read, but I don't even know where it went.
Okay, yes, I was going to read the whole abstract, I guess.
Oh my god.
"Environmental contamination by pharmaceuticals is global, substantially altering crucial behaviors in animals and impacting on their reproduction and survival.
A key question is whether the consequences of these pollutants extend beyond mean behavioral changes, restraining differences in behavior between individuals.
I don't think I need to read all of this.
To understand the proximate mechanism of underlying these changes, we tested the relative contribution of variation within and between individuals to the overall decline in individual variation.
We found strong evidence that fluoxetine, which is the name of Prozac, erodes variation and activity between but not within individuals, revealing the hidden consequences of a ubiquitous contaminant on phenotypic variation in fish, which is likely to impair adaptive potential to environmental change.
In English, that is, In English, what that means is that basically fish are much less likely to show wide variation from the mean of what their personalities at the population level are.
If they've been exposed to even low levels of Prozac in the water.
And apparently most water supplies in most of the world are at this point awash in low levels of Prozac, which is something that I actually did not know.
The high levels of Prozac in the water are going to be the case at basically near sewer outlets.
But these low levels actually render these, they looked at guppies, you know, they collected these guppies from one of the few places, I think it was Australia, where there's really no Prozac pollution in the water.
And they put them in a lab for I think it was six years.
And exposed them to lab conditions in which there was no fluoxetine, low levels of fluoxetine, or high levels of fluoxetine.
And at both high and low, they found that these fish were just much more likely to behave like average fish than they did when they were not exposed to Prozac at all.
I remember when Prozac was becoming a thing, right?
And this was, you know, this was sort of the description.
You'd be like, well, you expect your moods to be like this, and some people's moods are way high and way low, and we need to flatten it out, and it's just this flattening.
You know, this is the really nasty flattening the curve, unlike what we're trying to do with COVID, right?
And, you know, maybe you don't want to flatten people's mood so much that they cannot actually experience and respond to the insults and joys that life throws at them.
And also, maybe the fact that this appears to affect fish in the same way suggests that we ought not be doing this to, you know, all of the vertebrates on the planet, including humans.
Yeah, I mean obviously the all moods, good and bad, are adaptations.
You could be dysregulated in some way that you're prone to certain moods and away from others, but the chances that that is a widespread problem rather than you live in a uh nonsense environment that's creating anxiety because it's almost impossible to navigate well and therefore we're going to medicate you out of recognizing that you're actually imperiled every day by you know a a cruddy world right that's that's a non-solution and you know okay so we're externalizing the same garbage onto fish
That will, of course, mean all kinds of things.
One, if you're taking these, you know, the equivalent of fish moods and flattening them, those fish will not do as well as they would, which means they will end up preyed upon more frequently, failing to be properly motivated to forage and probably starve more frequently than they would otherwise.
You're going to speed up the extinction crisis.
Right, you're going to contribute in some way to the extinction crisis.
It is also the case that you're now creating a weird puzzle for creatures more generally where some creatures are going to be intensely in the outflow of this stuff and they will certainly evolve to being less sensitive to it, right?
The less sensitive they are, which means that they will then experience fish anxiety at the point that they, you know, swim somewhere that it's less concentrated.
So how does that work?
We're going to have an epidemic of angry guppies.
Right, which they could be very, I don't know, nibbly or something.
But but yeah, you know, so the lesson is always the same, which is nature knows what it's doing.
And if you disrupt it, you are very unlikely to make things better and very likely to make things worse.
And, you know, it should not be any shock to us at all, but it should give us pause.
I mean, for one thing, we're also downstream from all this stuff, even those of us who don't take these things Are undoubtedly getting a certain amount of it that we shouldn't be.
And, you know, there's no way to opt out.
Yeah, there's no way to opt out.
And this observation that this observation that it doesn't get treated by wastewater treatment, like how is it that a drug as widely used as Prozac was allowed to go to market when there was no way to disable it?
Well, I mean, this is the story everywhere, is that, you know, it's hard to put your finger on exactly what the problem is going to be until the entities that created this stuff are so powerful that you can't tell them no.
But this is one of the knights of our Hanukkah tradition, right?
So long-time viewers and listeners will know, we've talked about before, and it's in fact the epilogue of our book.
For the Eight Nights of Hanukkah, we talk about one thing that we think modern humans should be living by.
And the one that I'm referring to here, I'm not going to have the language quite right, but basically anything new that you put into the world, you need to be able to undo before you put it into the world.
All human activity should be both sustainable and reversible.
And reversible is there because of this This process whereby anything that's economically profitable becomes irreversible and that you know so many you know Everybody seems to know that social media is driving us insane, right?
And yet, it's not even conceivable that we could do anything like cut it out, right?
That's not on the table of solutions.
We're going to have to find enough band-aids to deal with the insanity of the entire human population rather than realize we made a mistake and undo it.
Yeah.
So, you know, in the general scheme of things, how high does a narrowing of the spectrum of personality types and guppies rank as things you're concerned about?
I expect no one at the end of today will be able to say, yeah, that's in my top 10.
But as a horseman, as an indicator of what it is that we're doing, you know, in terms of effects that apparently no one was thinking of, Not only are we flattening whole swaths of the human population with regard to diversity of personality types, this thing that we're letting them take, all of us are then getting some of it.
And all the vertebrates who are in water or who drink water are getting some of it.
And we're all affected because these are ancient, ancient, ancient receptors.
And it's affecting everyone.
And it is going to, this is going to be one Tiny little parameter that is going to affect things like the extinction crisis.
Because you get a, you know, you effectively have a less diverse behavioral repertoire in any population, and it's going to be able to deal with change less well.
Yes.
Of course it will.
Well, and, you know, the irony of ironies, which I'm sure you're going to end up speaking about at some point at length on the podcast, is that the entire hypothesis on which this Pharmaceutical solution was predicated that was wrong to begin with and wasn't plausible to begin with right the idea that you know some large fraction of the population is suffering from chemical imbalances that need us to come in there and you know retune their reabsorption rate of these things It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense anymore than, you know, there's suddenly a genetic crisis that is causing children's jaws to be malformed relative to their teeth, or... We're a terrible species that happens to rule the world.
Oh my goodness, so much mutation that has just crept in, and we just need medicine to save us from each and every feature of our beings that is coming apart genetically.
It's nonsense.
Yeah.
We will at some point spend a long time on this, but yeah, you have it in a nutshell.
Treating chemical imbalance?
Very, very, very rarely.
Creating chemical imbalance?
Pretty much always.
That's what they're doing.
That's what these neuroleptics and antipsychotics and anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds are doing.
Creating chemical imbalance, not resolving it.
Yes.
And in fish.
Great.
Terrific.
Alright, Carnival!
Yes!
Wonderful, wonderful topic.
I'm sure there's a direct fish and sleep and moon angle, but really the theme again is what are those things that we've been doing for a long time and what value do they have and is it dangerous or in some cases like with Carnaval, it feels just sad that we're not doing it right now, but it might actually have You know, also long-term effects.
So, Carnival should have started last night.
Carnival, and it's basically cancelled.
It's at least subdued this year.
So, historically Carnival… Where?
Everywhere?
Everywhere.
So, Carnival is always the same timing because it is in the American form is Mardi Gras, even though that's obviously a French term.
It is marked the days before Lent.
It begins the Friday before Lent and goes through Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, and Ash Wednesday is then always 46 days before Easter Sunday.
So exactly when Easter Sunday is varies, and I don't know all the logic of what decides that, but Ash Wednesday is always 46 days before Easter Sunday, and Carnival or Mardi Gras always begins the Friday before Ash Wednesday.
So Lent If we're going to talk about Carnival, I think we should talk about Lent a little bit first.
Lent, in many Christian traditions, is a period of spiritual reflection, and penance is often paid, and repentance of sins is encouraged, and self-denial is a primary aspect.
It's the one with which most of us who have not honored it for whatever reason will be familiar, in which someone will give up something that they find it difficult to give up.
Like, you know, you can't give up chores for Lent.
That's not, that's cheating.
You have to, right.
So, you know, if you, if you really enjoy wine, you could give up wine.
But if wine really isn't your thing, if you try to give up wine, also cheating.
So self-denial is this primary manifestation and also actually fasting is as well, and specifically various forms of intermittent fasting, what we would call in modern times intermittent fasting, yet another way in which the modern world is like rediscovered an ancient truth.
Something, you know, intermittent fasting and longer forms of fasting are known from almost all the major religious traditions.
And then we, you know, we let Kellogg tell us how to eat for most of the 20th century, and we got big and fat and sloppy.
And now people are rediscovering that, oh, actually, if you take some time off food on the regular, you actually might be healthier.
Hey, guess what?
Almost all the religious traditions had a way of doing this.
And no, they didn't have the dietary mechanisms by which it works.
And we still don't mostly either, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
So anyway, that's sort of what Lent has been.
46 days Of penance, of spiritual reflection, of self-denial.
And in order to sort of get people on board with that, I think, and I actually don't know as much about exactly the history of how it started, Carnival began specifically in Latin America.
As the five days before Lent begins and its release, a breaking out before the inward careful reflection begins.
When I was in college and I was an anthropology major, I had this class in Brazilian culture and society.
I've now been to three different carnivals and you and I have been to one.
We're going to show some pictures from the one that we were at together, but the three carnivals that I was Depending on how you assess lucky or unlucky enough to attend, we're all with study abroad programs.
And the first one was in Chitre in Panama in 2009 for my very first study abroad program.
The second one was just a day in Coca in Ecuador in 2014.
And then we were together in Cuenca in Ecuador in 2016 for Carnival.
And in each of those cases, it wasn't that I was trying to get my students to Carnival.
It's actually that in Latin America, so much of the rest of the world closes down during Carnival that it's very hard to get to a, you know, if you're not already at a field station, it's very hard to move around and get stuff done.
And so I sort of leaned into it and went, well, okay, we're doing this animal behavior work.
And we're focusing a lot on human behavior and prehistory, early history of humans in the Americas and behavior of contemporary animals and including people.
So let's go do some kind of cultural anthropology, be ethnographers, be participant observers at Carnival.
And yes, that means participate, but also keep your observer hat on.
And so in preparation for that, for my first time at Carnival, I went back, I reconnected with my professor from that Brazilian Culture and Society class at UC Santa Cruz, a man by the name of Dan Linger, and I reached out to him about Carnival and how he understood it.
He specifically has done a tremendous amount of work in Bahia, in the Atlantic tropical state of Bahia in Brazil, and he said that the three most salient aspects of Carnival are these, symbolic reversals of power,
Rituals of Rebellion, which includes critiques of the status quo, and inviting the liminal, so like working at the edges of consciousness and, you know, trying to be in that sort of shimmery place between categories where you feel like you might fall off the edge or you might not, you might discover something if you fall and you come back.
And all of those, I think, so symbolic reversals of power, rituals for rebellion, and inviting the liminal, can be manifest in a lot of what we see in some of the more formal aspects of Carnival.
You know, men dressed as and are acting as women.
Employee as employer, and in the older days, slaves as slave owners, like actual reversals of power for just this very short period when it was acceptable.
Young as old.
These things are allowed during carnival, and we saw some manifestations of this.
These things are allowed within limits, of course, right?
So, just to give you guys a little bit more sense of it before I show it, or maybe we want to talk a little bit first about our experience.
First, I want to read, so as part of my original class that I had in the early 90s, we read, we watched the movie Black Orpheus, which is extraordinary, which really shows Brazilian Carnival.
I think it's from the 50s maybe.
And we also read what has become one of my favorite books, a Jorge Amado book, Jorge Amado, called Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.
And somehow I cannot find my copy of it, but I did find a... I had it.
I did find a description of it.
Here we go.
Not a description of it, just a very brief excerpt from the very beginning.
So this is from Donna Flora and Her Two Husbands, A Moral and Amorous Tale.
Vadinho, Dona Flora's first husband, died one Sunday of Carnival.
In the morning, when, dressed up like a Bahian woman, he was dancing the samba with the greatest enthusiasm in the Dois de Julho Square, not far from his house.
He did not belong to the group, he had just joined it, in the company of four of his friends, all masquerading as Bahianas, and they had come from a bar in Quebec, where the whiskey flowed like water at the expense of one Moises Alves, a cacao planter, rich and open-handed.
The group was accompanied by a small, well-rehearsed orchestra of guitars and flutes.
The four-string guitar was played by Carlinhos Mascarenhas, a tall, skinny character famous in the whorehouses.
Ah, a divine player.
The men were got up as gypsies, and the girls as Hungarian or Romanian peasants.
Never, however, had a Hungarian, a Romanian, or even a Bulgarian or Slovak swung her hips the way they did, those brown girls in the flower of their youth and coquetry.
When Vadinho, the liveliest of the lot, saw the group come around the corner and heard the skeleton-like Mascarena strumming his sublime four-string guitar, he hurried forward and chose as his partner a heavily rouge Romanian, a big one, as monumental as the church, the Church of St.
Francis, for she was a massive golden sequins, and announced, Here I come, my Russian from Toraro!
The gypsy Mascarenas, who was also bedecked with glass beads and spangles and had gaudy earrings hanging from his ears, pulsed his four-string guitar still more sonorously.
The flutes and Spanish guitars groaned, and a vatino took his place in the samba with exemplary enthusiasm he brought to everything he did except work.
He whirled in the middle of the group, stomped in front of the mulatta, approached her in flourishes and belly bumps, then suddenly gave a kind of horse moan, wobbled, listened to one side, and fell to the ground, a yellow slobber drooling from his mouth on which the grimace of death could not wholly extinguish the fatuous smile of the complete faker he had always been.
So, that is the very beginning of a book, again, that I highly recommend, Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands, the second husband being the man she will marry later.
This is, I won't say more about it, it's just a wonderful book.
So, before we show some pictures and maybe, you know, talk over the, you don't know which photos I've chosen, but you know what photos you've taken, I will say that the first two carnivals that I went to, I was pretty disappointed.
I actually found an essay I wrote.
I found some of the stuff that I had asked my students to write about, and some of them were just brilliant in sort of excavating what it was that they expected and teasing that apart from what we actually saw.
The modern instantiations of carnival, especially in Chitre in Panama and Coca in Ecuador, were really Just firehose-fueled, foam-fueled, beer-fueled, giant mad parties that didn't have much to do with this sort of symbolic reversals of power and rituals of rebellion and inviting the liminal.
In which a lot can be learned.
So it was a little bit disappointing.
But then when we were back there during the study abroad that we did together in 2016, 11 weeks, we had our children with us, we had 30 students, it was quite a different scene.
And it was a different place too.
It was Cuenca.
Do you want to say anything?
Yeah.
Well, Cuenca is a colonial city, and it's a very beautiful confluence of Five rivers?
Four or five, yeah.
In any case, it's a very interesting place, and somehow the carnival there has largely, though not completely, escaped the modernization that I think has ruined it in so many places.
But anyway, I mean, maybe the pictures would be useful.
A good place to go.
Okay, hold on.
I gotta find them.
So, come on.
Not yet.
Thank you.
Okay, so the first night of Carnival was the Night of the Grandfathers.
Yes.
And I just have one picture from that.
And indeed, all the rest of the pictures I have are actually just from a parade the next day.
So it's a sort of a narrow view.
We wandered the streets and experienced a lot of Carnival.
Of course, one of the things about Carnival is with the reversals of power, having a very nice camera on the streets in most places is not the thing you want to do.
Well, in this case, it's just an iPhone photo.
Right.
But that's my point is that most of most of the wandering around that we did, we did not take pictures during because we would have been inviting theft.
Yep.
In any case, this is a photo of a police band, and so you'll see a certain amount of foam flying around.
So people during the night of the grandfathers and during the parade spray each other with this canned foam, and you know, It is sort of interesting here.
I think you can see in this photo that the police band is playing and people are spraying foam at the cops and everybody's taking it in stride in a way that I think is just actually Very hard to reconcile yourself to given the tension with the police in much of the West at the moment.
And, you know, how healthy is this to have this outlet where, you know, the police and the other people of the town are interacting in this way in which the rules are temporarily suspended?
The police are grinning, they're smiling, they actually really do seem to be okay with this.
And it feels like to me, and I remember, that there was even kind of a racial component, that on average the police are a whiter populace than the larger population of Cuenca anywhere, at least the people who are We're approaching.
So there was, you know, there were reversals of power in a number of ways, you know, people spraying the police with foam, people who were often poorer and darker skinned, spraying the police and the police just playing on, you know, doing their doing their mostly brass.
It was a brass band, as I remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I was pleased to be able to get this shot.
This little girl is looking on and no doubt this is part of how she is coming to understand her world and the police in it.
And, you know, that's Her experience watching the police sprayed with foam playing exuberant music is going to affect the way she interacts with police when things go back to normal after the end of Carnival.
Yes.
So anyway, you know, we don't have these healthy outlets.
We sort of somehow bypass them.
And how much harm is there to the fact that we do?
And what kind of harm is being caused this year when apparently carnival is really not happening?
An annual outlet that people look forward to and that prepares them to go into Lent is extremely important, actually.
And it can feel just like festivities and boozing if you've never been in it, but to talk to the people on the ground, many people actually look forward to it, rely on it, need it in a way that they may never be able to explain, but that doesn't I mean, it's not needed.
So here we have a man with some kind of facial stuff on.
I don't think that's old foam.
I think he came sort of decked out in this.
I'm just like describing it for people who are listening, not sure.
He's wearing a monkey skull around his neck and he's holding two live roosters and he's got ribbon around his neck as well.
Yeah, I think he was actually an official of the carnival parade.
I didn't quite catch what his title was.
So I think I have 13 pictures here.
Here we have a man on stilts.
Stilt guy is late to his appointment in the parade and he is making up for lost time.
Yeah, these traditional dancers in front of the big church there.
And there's foam in the air, like you can see that there's actually foam in the air.
Yeah.
You can buy these cans of foam everywhere, and it really is a big part of what happens.
It's an outlet of its own.
Yeah, people on their fancy motorcycles.
Again, in front of the church, you can actually see there's a drone in that shot.
Somebody has a drone in there.
Oh, there we go.
So we wondered, this was in 2016, we wondered if this was perhaps the first carnival where drones existed.
People weren't pleased with it.
It came down low, and someone started throwing rocks at it.
No, I think it crashed into a building.
Okay.
I thought someone had been throwing rocks at it, and then it also crashed.
So here you have confetti, and the drone, and the church.
This is not a policeman, but Yeah, a guy in a brass band who's been thoroughly covered in foam and is continuing to play on.
Different kind of musicians.
And a family, again, in front of the same church.
And I included this one in part because you also have, you know, when you talk to people, locals, what they look forward to most, often they'll say the food about the Carnival in Cuenca and the stand to the right here.
They had roasted a whole pig and they were making tortillas and they had a whole bunch of salsas.
And, oh my God, was that good.
It was pretty good.
It was so good.
Here we have just a family.
You know, I think that the man in the middle, maybe all of them are going to be participating in the parade, but all bedecked.
The little girl has a can of foam ready to spray it at anyone who she thinks deserves it.
Yep.
These are indigenous Highlanders.
Yep.
So Cuenca is in the Andes.
I think this is the penultimate picture.
This is just a mother with her son on her back wearing what seems to be the traditional fedora.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially Orovalenos wear the fedora.
We're not in Orovalo here.
It's a long ways away.
And then finally, just an older Cuencan couple, not bedecked, not going to be participating, but eating plantanos or something from a bag and watching the festivities.
Yes, if I recall correctly, they arrived at the parade holding hands, which I thought was very nice given their advanced age.
Yeah.
So, um, Carnival is extraordinary and it's pretty old and people hold it in high esteem.
And in Cuenca, a lot of people will stay for the night of the grandfathers and then go to outlying villages because they find that what happens in Cuenca is too much, uh, It actually can be dangerous to be out on the streets at night, but in the outlying villages it's even more traditional.
We didn't do that, so we didn't see that, but we had some students who went there with their host families and reported something like that.
And I do, you know, one of the very, very, very many downstream effects of this pandemic is the disruption to regular and long-awaited events.
And that, you know, the day-to-day is beginning.
It has for many months, but it's beginning to get really bad for a lot of people.
And for those of us in America, most of us don't have something like this, like five days every year that you can rely on when it's going to be.
where you are allowed to play around with borders and categories and liminal space and just let it all out.
And it's more honorable if you do that with the expectation that you are then going to go into a period of some privation in advance of, you know, whether or not you believe in a Christian God or not, but in advance of then, you know, having it Go back to normal, you know, your life as of Easter Sunday.
I have often felt, since I started attending, you know, going to these carnivals, that we could use something like that.
And I've never been to Mardi Gras, but it has never looked to me, you know, it looks like a Disneyfication of carnival from a distance anyway.
But we could use something like this, and right now none of the world is getting it.
And it's going to cause further harm, mental health harm, in a world that is already plenty sad.
So I think there are two components here that I would like to see separated.
One is the failure of the West to have a deep toolkit of such traditions, which are likely necessary in order to avoid certain things that I think we are suffering from very precipitously at the moment.
And then the other is the disruption of These traditions for people who have them.
Presumably the, you know, weekly dance that would occur in every one of these towns isn't happening either.
And so, you know, we don't have that tradition and I suspect that the... But we've lived in places in Latin America where they did and we've attended them occasionally.
Yeah.
And it's, you can just see how necessary it is, how important it is for people.
Well, it's in particular deeply involved in, you know, courting.
And so the idea is there's some sort of, you know, ritualized something in which there are more or less rules and it's taking place in public.
And it is a strong counterpoint to the derangement of the West over those sorts of issues.
And, you know, carnival is an annual thing, but likely the Ability to shift civilization gracefully depends on having experimented with these things rather than just like suddenly instituting rules over how we are to interact and what you can say and what you can't say and what it means and all of that stuff.
And so we the absence of these things may end up being a much larger piece of the story of what happened to the West than than we yet understand.
I think that's exactly right.
Well, we have, as predicted, gone on quite a while.
I think it has come time to make our announcements and sign off.
All right, let's do that.
Let's do that.
So for those of you watching, we're going to take a 15-minute break and we'll be back with a live Q&A, answering your Super Chat questions.
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There's nothing regular about them except for periodicity.
You have no respect for time.
I have a grudging respect for time.
Yeah, you feel like you're under its thumb and you're just fighting it all the way.
So you can get Dark Horse stuff including some with sayings like First Against the Wall Club and such at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Email our moderator darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com for logistical questions and oh yeah and you're going to be on the discord that you can get access to with either of our patreons tomorrow at 10 a.m pacific for a breakfast with Brett Bring your own hot sauce.
And we have now gotten to the point where I think Dr. Rollergator is going to choose a worthy person and somehow you need to get your contact info to him so he can get it to me and I can get you an invite to Clubhouse.
And maybe see you on there.
Yeah.
Alright.
So as always, be good to each other, eat well, get outside.
