#73: Arroz by any Other Name (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 73rd 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. This episode marks the one year anniversary of the Evolutionary Lens! We discuss its origin, and talk about the books we’ve read from on-air over the last year. In other news: A ship is stuck in the Suez Canal; Bret has an Evergreen take on the situation. Also the former head of the CDC, Robert Redfield, says that lab leak ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 73, our Our last one was on the Equinox.
It was.
It was on the Equinox.
No, yes.
Yes, yes, it was that one.
Ran it through my head too.
Equinox or solstice?
No.
On the Equinox.
We are now solidly into spring, which I am pleased to say will allow us to revive a Dark Horse tradition.
What's that?
We can now start warning people that winter is coming.
That's an honorable and long-standing tradition here at Dark Horse.
Yes, a long-standing tradition that we were forced to abandon when winter arrived.
I should say, if you are one of our Southern Hemisphere viewers, you may want to hit pause and return to this episode six months from now so it all makes sense.
Yes, yes, I would say do that indeed.
So, today we're going to talk about a diversity of things, including the fact that it is basically our one-year anniversary here for the Evolutionary Lens, which is these live streams that we do together.
We're going to spend a little time talking about that at the top of the hour, and we're going to talk about The politics behind the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and a little bit about the politics of detransitioning, and about what we can blame the Amazon rainforest for.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That rainforest.
It's about time.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
And let's see.
Oh, and whether or not saffron can bring you happiness.
Yep, yep.
I feel like I've missed something there, but that seems like a good set of things.
But first, just announcements.
We do a once-a-month private Q&A for people who join us at my Patreon, and it is always the last Sunday of the month at 11am Pacific for two hours.
That is tomorrow, so the questions have already been posed for this month, but it's a It's a lot of fun for us.
It's a small enough community that we can actually watch and engage the chat as it happens, and we leave those up for patrons afterwards.
So I think we're on our, I don't know if you remember, our 9th or 10th at this point?
8th or 9th maybe?
And that'll be tomorrow.
It's gonna be awesome.
It's always fun.
It is.
We get to keep an eye on the chat and interact with people.
It's different than what goes on here, as good as this is.
Indeed.
Okay, so it is March 24th.
Three days ago was our one-year anniversary, the one-year anniversary of us beginning these live streams.
We did 72 episodes, and we've been grateful for and honored by your responses, or you know, most of them.
The vast majority of them.
There have been a few that we weren't grateful for or honored by, but yeah.
You know, it's YouTube.
I mean, frankly, that's Spectacular only to have a small number of such reactions.
Absolutely.
And, you know, including all the other sort of media response.
But why don't you start us off by just telling... How did we get here?
How did we get here?
Also, why now?
Oh, no.
You know things have gotten rough at the point we get to why now.
But Yeah, so just for those of you who have started paying attention to Dark Horse since the beginning of our live streams and may not realize how we ended up here and want to know something about the relationship of the live streams to the other stuff that goes on.
What happened was we started, or I should say I started, the Dark Horse podcast As the idea was part of a long term project and I wanted to highlight dark horses.
These are people who are difficult to predict in terms of their capacity because they've grown up in some unusual way and they do.
Interesting things.
That was the original intent, was to talk to those people.
And at the point that COVID descended on the world and forced us to change everything, we found ourselves in two predicaments.
One, we couldn't keep going to the place where the Dark Horse Podcast studio was set up, the office space that we had in downtown Portland.
And so we had to move here and Zach and I built this set here in basically an afternoon, or an afternoon, a weekend of trips back and forth to the hardware store and nailing things to the wall and all of that.
Didn't our younger son Toby also help with some of the attic work?
Oh yes, well Toby was instrumental in the wiring of the set, which is actually surprisingly complex.
But in any case, we built up the set and then tried to figure out what to do.
The ability to interview people in the studio was going to go crashing to zero, and you and I were Thrust into this discussion in a way as biologists watching a pandemic unfold, a pandemic that has obvious evolutionary dimensions, there was a lot to be said.
And we were getting this flood of information coming in on what was being discovered about the virus itself, about its epidemiology, its history and all of that.
And so we started doing Live streams, you and me.
So for those of you who are wondering why this is a Brett Weinstein StarCourse podcast, and yet most of the time when you tune in, and in fact, all of the times that you tune into the live program, it's obviously symmetrically you and me.
So why is my name on the door?
Well, early on, before we had any idea how long we would be doing live streams or what they would be about, you know, at first, it was all COVID or almost all.
We had a discussion about this was significantly different from what had been going on on Dark Horse previously and should we put it on a different channel and come up with a different title or was it temporary and should we leave things as they were in any way?
We ended up deciding to stick with the name that we had and the graphics that we had and just added in the live streams, which for those of you who are wondering why that has happened, that is the answer.
And I would say I have some regret over it because obviously the live streams are distinct from the other things and, you know, it would make sense for it not to be labeled that way.
On the other hand, I would say a rose by any other name is still rice.
I knew you were going to say that!
Did you?
I did!
You know me that well?
I do!
You know, our Spanish-speaking audience is currently laughing out loud.
Yes.
Yes.
And, you know, we have informally sort of branded what we're doing as The Evolutionary Lens.
Like, this is The Evolutionary Lens with Brett and Heather, sort of a subspecies of The Dark Horse Podcast.
You know, you have re-upped the frequency again of the one-on-one conversations that you have, which is the more, exactly as you just said, what you would originally expect to be doing.
And frankly, I mean, the last four alone, I mean, I haven't heard one yet that you've done that I felt like, yeah, that kind of fell flat.
If memory serves, the last four in order were Daniel Schmachtenberger, Tristan Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Irshad Manji.
And you've got another one ready to deploy in another conversation also next week.
But those four alone are just extraordinary and across such a wide array of topics.
And You know, although you have not, I think until now, really conveyed publicly what you had in mind with Dark Horse, I think all four of those people are, may I use Toby's pluralization, are Darkies.
Darkies.
Darkies.
Absolutely.
In their own ways and that, you know, to their credit and, you know, I highly recommend all those conversations as well.
Great.
Yeah, I think they all were really fascinating and I'm enjoying doing those conversations.
I'm glad they have sort of found a rhythm that works and I'm looking forward to doing more.
I will say it has become easier as everybody is getting effectively a master's degree in Zoom.
It is becoming now quite possible to do these things remotely, whereas at the beginning of COVID, it was pretty hit and miss as to whether or not the tech would work.
when we try to have them.
So anyway, yes, I hope the frequency will keep up and the quality of them.
I'm very happy with it.
And I hope that keeps going too.
But okay, here we are a year in, and we have now both the original Dark Horse stuff up and running at a relatively high rate.
And we have the live streams, which have been going on for a full year now.
And I don't know, where does that take us?
Well, I wanted to, we're not going to, we are not going to pretend to do a retrospective.
But one version of some of the diversity of places that we've gone in this last year can be conveyed by just mentioning just the books that I or you have read excerpts from.
The This does not include any of the essays or the journal articles, the peer-reviewed scientific literature that we have read from and analyzed, of which we've done a tremendous amount, but just the books.
It provides, I think, an interesting cross-section of some of where we've been.
I just put them in an order that groups them somewhat.
I'll post this either on the show notes or probably the show notes, I guess, if there's room.
Okay, so fitting in with no other category, we read a bit from Turin and Sanchez's Perfumes, The Guide, and then a number of pieces of fiction, including Boccaccio's Decameron, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Heller's Catch-22, Kundra's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Amato's Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands,
Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Seuss' The Zax, Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land, and Abbott's Flatland.
So that's a diverse bit of fiction there.
Then one of my favorite books of all time, now we're into nonfiction, Sarah Blaffer Herdy's Mother Nature, a truly extraordinary deep dive into the evolutionary nature of motherhood and females in general.
John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction, Decoter's The Cultural Revolution of People's History from 1962 to 1976, Demick's Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Rod Dreher's Live Not by Lies, an excellent book based, the title was taken from Solzhenitsyn's essay of the same name, Live Not by Lies, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.
We spent a fair bit of time deconstructing D'Angelo's White Fragility, and somewhat less time with Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist.
In keeping with that, but from a rather different perspective, Pluckrow's and Lindsay's Cynical Theories, and Lukianoff and Hite's Coddling of the American Mind.
And the last three, Michael Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, Sebastian Junger's Tribe, and Thich Nhat Hanh's 2012 book Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm.
So that takes us a lot of places.
Yeah, that's a very eclectic list.
But as I'm thinking, you know, you're bringing me back to all of the episodes in which those things arose.
And that is, it's a cohesive list, too.
It tells you something about the style of thinking that we have been I don't know, I don't want to say deploying because in part this is sort of a campfire phenomenon itself and so anyway we're building this perspective right here together.
And with the audience.
And anyway, I think it's a great list of things.
And even if the only packet of information that made it to people was, hey, here's a list of things that are worth engaging.
You know, you could construct a pretty good foundation for a worldview out of those those texts.
Absolutely.
I regret now using immediately.
Texts.
Yes, it's been abused.
It's academically abused.
Mm-hmm.
Indeed.
Okay, well, that's maybe all we have to say about the fact of this being our one-year anniversary episode.
And then you wanted to segue into talking about the Suez Canal, I think.
Yeah, I mean, not the Suez Canal itself so much.
I mean, although there are things to be said about it.
But I will say, I don't know about you, I'm getting a tremendous amount of correspondence from people that we know who would like us to comment on the fact that there is a large vessel with the giant letters Saying the word evergreen stuck in the Suez Canal.
Blocking world trade.
Blocking.
Blocking progress.
Blocking progress.
And somehow a great many people who follow us and know us are eager to hear our take on this, which I think you and I have spent a lot of the last three days avoiding deploying a take on this ship.
And it's Progress to a point that it has made.
So anyway, I think it is now time that we comment on it.
Okay, you do you, man.
I'm going to do my best.
I will say the people who have been contacting us, I'm beginning to suspect that they suffer from PDSD, Post-Dramatic Situation Disorder, in which they would like to see disasters and spectacular catastrophes analogized together ad nauseum.
What would make for perhaps a more parsimonious world.
Uh, yeah, yeah, at least it, you know.
Just like we got, okay, it's in that category.
It's in that category.
Yes, big things called Evergreen that have failed in an amazing way.
Yeah.
Okay, so, anyway, there are obviously some similarities between what has happened in the Suez Canal and what took place at Evergreen State College, and some differences, you know, here we have A ship that has become wedged in a canal, whereas at the college, the institution kept getting stuck under bridges.
That's, you know, similar but not exactly the same.
I will say that if the events are, in fact, really alike, then we can make some predictions about what's coming next.
We should expect to see students issue a long list of demands, then we should expect to see them flee the ship, never to return, and we should expect to see the state of Washington infuse the ship with a large amount of cash to keep it afloat.
The state of Washington, even.
Well, I mean, if history repeats itself in this case, that's what you would expect.
While doing nothing, the state of Washington will infuse it with resources while doing nothing to correct its path and allow it to free the canal.
They will double down.
On its current path.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly how you do that in this case, but yes, something along those lines.
But I will say that the whole event really can be viewed in a couple of different ways.
There's the classical view in which this is very bad for the world to have this ship.
I mean, it seems strange that one ship can create such a tangle, but when you realize Why the Suez Canal was put there and what journey it avoids, you know, around the southern tip of Africa in order to get from, you know, Asia to Europe, for example.
Wow, one ship really It creates a huge amount of trouble and so, you know, from that classical view I would say, you know, this is what happens at a canal when there's no entrance exam.
Right?
I mean, one ship can just bog down.
That's ugly math.
Is that bad?
I think so.
Okay.
How would you rate that joke?
How would I rate it?
Yeah.
What's my scale?
3 to 17.
3 to 17.
Which one is high?
17.
Yeah, it's a perfectly straightforward scale.
Yeah, I'm giving that a 5.
All right.
Sort of better than I thought it was.
Yeah, I'll take five, sure.
Also, very, very in keeping with the current theme of how do we analogize things to evergreen, to invent a scale that will be meaningless outside of the context in which we are currently discussing things.
Uninterpretable.
Uninterpretable.
Yeah, I'm very much of the moment.
That's what people say about me.
Oh, don't.
No, they really don't.
But okay, so that's the classical view, is that this is very bad, but it's not the only way to look at this.
There's also a much more modern, sort of a Silicon Valley, DNC, mainstream media view in which this isn't maybe so terrible.
You know, the New York Times points out that this ship had it coming, given the historical connection between shipping and slavery.
Yeah, it's a really... It's a classic New York Times point.
The ACLU pointed out that this ship has as much right to block the canal as other ships have to transit the canal, which I also thought was pretty insightful.
You're giving me that?
Well, I'm just wondering if we're going to get called out for libel.
No, it's satire.
Okay.
For those of you who are not good with satire, this is satire, which is why it is not libel.
So you said the traditional take is it's bad, so this is the anti-bad take?
You're right.
Maybe it's not so bad.
It's anti-bad.
Oh, it's anti-bad.
Yeah, yeah.
You are intuiting my direction here.
Not surprisingly.
We've been married a long time, so you know, intuit away.
Alright, so Planned Parenthood points out that there's no wrong way to be a ship.
I wonder about it.
I wonder if they have anyone on staff who knows anything at all about ships.
I know the answer to that.
Do you?
No.
No, they do not.
All right.
Yeah.
And Ibram X. Kendi has argued that this is a triumph of critical maritime theory over traditional colonial meridian navigation.
True dat.
Yes.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And if we extend his rubric, he didn't say this, of course, but, you know, the day-to-day transit of the canal is clearly racist, and therefore, this incident can only be... You can fill in the blank at home.
Yeah.
All right.
And, you know, I will say, okay, so that's the more modern take, but even I am forced to admit that this transit was mostly peaceful.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not bad.
Although, you know, as the clock continues to tick and it continues to be jammed up, doesn't it become less and less peaceful as it goes on?
If we take the entire I would say that the canal is more peaceful than it has perhaps been since… when was it built?
1869?
So this is a very, very clever sleight of hand, exactly in keeping with the kinds of satirical quotations you are now employing.
You were talking about the transit being mostly peaceful, and you have swapped the argument, as I suggested, that the transit actually has become more and more bogged down the longer it sits there.
And you've said, well, the canal, though.
The canal has, in fact, become more peaceful the longer the ship sits there.
Need I point out that you are deploying now-discredited styles of logic in which one statement follows from the prior statement.
You see what I'm saying?
I do, and I am not going to apologize.
Yes.
Ultimately you will.
We apologize here.
We apologize when we are wrong, and when we have wronged someone.
But we do not apologize for imagined fictions over in unicorn space.
Right.
Unicorn Space.
You've now confused every VC who watches us.
Yeah.
All right.
So.
All right.
That's the situation.
We've got the two views of what has happened.
And then there's a question about what might be done about it.
OK?
There is.
And we're going to start.
I have an idea for what to do about the... Of course you do.
Well, of course I do.
I'm a solution guy.
I know you are.
Yeah.
All right.
So my suggestion is that we get a ship full of cabbage and dried Sounds good so far.
Cabbage and dried – let's see, let me guess.
It's going to be – yeah, no, I was just trying to come up with another word that began with fr – but, you know, fruitcake?
No, it's just fruit.
No, that wouldn't work.
Actually, fruitcake would work too, but cabbage and dried fruit.
Solutions, I see in large font on your computer.
Cabbage and dried fruit, that's all I see though, so you're going to have to fill it in for me.
That's all you need.
You're not helping.
All right.
I admit that I actually don't know how to help here.
It should be obvious how that would help.
Cabbage and dried fruit.
Yes, the canal is blocked.
Cabbage?
Cabbage?
Really?
Okay.
All right, so.
Okay, I'm with you.
You're with me?
This is a nightmare.
No, it's good.
So, yeah, I don't know.
You've got more to go.
Yeah, I do.
I can't free you here.
So, that solution of mine, right, actually does suggest that this could possibly be... Now you've got the gills.
Yep.
I was just going to point out that at Evergreen, the failures there arguably were also the result of a lack of moral fiber.
See?
Connection.
All right.
Good.
Now let's move on to people who have maybe more technical expertise and would be better positioned, therefore, to suggest a more useful solution to this problem.
Elon Musk has proposed tunneling under the ship.
Geez, I thought you were going to laugh at that.
You're just trying to resist the giggles, aren't you?
Because I think that was pretty good.
No, I'm... Maybe I don't get it.
Like, I get... Go on.
All right.
Elon has a plan to solve traffic in L.A., for example, by putting tunnels under the blocked streets.
Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good show.
And he famously had a plan with the minors in... No, not the minors.
The trapped children.
The trapped baseball soccer team.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean his plan was actually pretty good.
Was it?
Yeah, he made a little submarine.
But it was not the one that ended up... It wasn't necessary.
They got them out, the divers got them out amazingly without harming anybody.
Okay, I remember that differently.
I thought his plan was discredited and mocked.
Oh, he was mocked.
I'm not sure why exactly.
I'm glad he was on the case.
But all right, so we got Elon Musk's solution, tunnel under.
And then, if all else fails, we could treat this disaster like COVID, do nothing useful, and eventually global warming will float the ship.
up and dislodge it to allow us to get it through the canal.
A rising virus floats all ships.
Something.
Yeah.
Yeah, something in that neighborhood.
All right, well, we have avoided having to shut down this episode of Dark Horse livestream over the giggles, which I fear will one day happen.
But in this case, We almost had it happen, but we're still here.
So I don't want to be the straight man here, but you were also going to say something about part of why we're avoiding even engaging this at all, is that you spent a long time in the Panama Canal.
You spent like 19 months in the Panama Canal.
Literally in the Panama Canal on an island.
I was with you there for four or five of those months.
I had a Panama Canal license, which does not mean that I was licensed to navigate large ships through the canal.
In fact, nobody is.
In the Panama Canal, the ships are turned over to I'm trying to remember what they're called.
Canal Pilots, I think?
Mm-hmm.
So there's an elite Canal Pilots Association.
You have to have a great deal of expertise.
And actually, it does tell us something if we're now in serious mode.
Well, hold on a second.
I actually didn't know this.
So the Suez Canal, of which I know almost nothing, is just a narrow canal, right?
Sea level.
Whereas the Panama Canal is two series of locks, then with basically what used to be terra firma, this was the isthmus of Panama, that has been flooded.
And so now the island on which you spent time, Baracoa Island for instance, used to be a dry hilltop, And so you've got Lake Gatun in the middle of these two locks.
And you've also got the situation of the Atlantic and the Pacific are actually at different levels.
They are at different heights, yeah.
Sea level is a different level for the Atlantic and the Pacific between the two ends of the Panama Canal.
So unlike the Suez, the Panama Canal, you have to go through locks, and then you have to navigate this lake, and then you have to go through locks again.
Yeah, so the Panama Canal is freshwater.
The Suez Canal will be saltwater and tidal.
The Suez Canal has no locks.
The Panama Canal has two sections.
You've alluded to Lake Gatun, which is a giant artificial lake that was made by flooding this valley that the Chagras River used to flow through.
But it has another section, the Culebra Cut.
Culebra meaning snake.
The Snake Cut looks like what everybody imagines the Panama Canal will look like, except it's not concrete lined.
It's a dirt trench.
But it's very narrow.
And in any case, through the entire transit, these ships, you know, we folks who drive cars and ride bikes don't intuit how hard it is to navigate these things.
These are vessels designed for the open ocean and navigating them in tight quarters is not at all easy because they have so much momentum.
And so they have to be effectively pivoted with tugboats and the captains have to know exactly you know basically their full-time job is captain of large ships in the Panama Canal so that they learn how to do it properly in any way.
It's an amazing operation when you actually see it.
I can only assume that the Suez Canal has the same issue of navigation.
It is, I think, a straight line at least.
Apparently it also has a group of pilots trying to do it.
That does not surprise me at all because, of course, one schmo who drinks too much and runs the thing aground obviously can grind a huge fraction of the world's freight to a halt, which has potentially huge impacts on things like which has potentially huge impacts on things like prices in And how you predict this, I don't even know.
We've got a lot of goods detained that were presumably going to Europe.
Will goods that have not yet been Bogged down in this situation, be redirected and create a glut in parts of the world that don't require this canal?
Who knows?
Yeah, I don't know.
But one of the things about you being on BCI, this Smithsonian run island in the middle of Lake Katoon, in the middle of the Panama Canal, Is that from one of the terraces at the field station at night after, well, you had an opposite schedule for most people because you were working on bats, but I remember sitting sometimes sort of at dusk looking out over the canal and seeing the boats.
And it felt like, I'm just making up numbers here.
One in four, one in five boats said Evergreen across the side.
It's just a massive shipping company that is on so many of the boats, a substantial fraction, minority fraction of the boats that are out there.
Yeah, it's a huge line.
At least in the Panama Canal.
And this boat is actually called Ever Given, apparently?
I think their names are all variations on a theme.
Yeah.
When somebody writes the iconic song about this, you know, like the the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it should be something like, you know, the wedging of the ever loving, ever given, evergreen line, something or other.
It's good.
Yeah.
But OK, yeah, so that's that's the confusion here is the ship is part of the evergreen line.
The ship is the ever given.
The title issue changes everything here because The buoyancy of the ship.
T-I-D-A-L, the tides.
Yeah, the tides actually affect the ship.
So my global warming joke would not make any sense at all in the Panama Canal.
Right.
Right?
Because it's not tidal and global warming would have to rise above the locks to even touch it.
But in this case, the tides actually do affect it.
I will say, knowing nothing about what the right solution is here, I do wonder if we're not going to see them unload this boat, which will be a bizarre operation.
That's what I was thinking early, you know, a couple days ago, like, well, I'm not sure.
It's gigantic.
Well, it's not easy.
Yeah.
Cranes at the dock are made to lift these containers and it's a very simple operation from the point of view of everything is where it needs to be.
You need to float something here and then put these containers on some ship that's waiting and the ships coming, you know, aren't supposed to be, you know, you even think about it this way.
You've got ships that are designed to go one direction, right?
It's not like a train where you just turn it around.
And if you pull them into the canal to take containers off the thing, you can't turn it around to go back out.
Yeah.
So, I mean, maybe that's not a big deal.
Maybe they can pull it out with tugs and it's not, you know, it's all doable.
But anyway, yeah, that boat needs to be lighter.
Clearly.
Yeah.
All right.
Are we there with respect?
I think we're done with the Suez Canal.
We're done with it.
For now.
For now.
Narrowly avoiding a third disaster involving Evergreen, and in this case, an unresolvable case of the giggles.
Yes, indeed.
Okay.
Next up, the former head of the CDC says, hey, I actually think SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wild.
Robert Redfield, former CDC director.
In this video interview with CNN, we were going to have Zach show a couple of minutes of this for people who aren't already aware of it.
Unfortunately, we can't hear it while it's showing, so we have to remember what's in this.
So, Zach, you want to show the first through 2.05, and then we'll say something, and then we'll jump to the next little section.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, All right, we're giving it a second.
Yeah.
Yes, we're apparently giving it a second.
So for those listening, this is just dead, dead time.
So let us say while Zach is working on getting the tech to work.
Former director of the CDC is speaking out on when and where he thinks the coronavirus pandemic originated.
Here is Dr. Robert Redfield when he sat down with Sanjay Gupta.
If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan.
September, October.
That's my own view.
It's my own opinion.
I'm allowed to have opinions now.
You know, I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.
Other people don't believe that.
That's fine.
Science will eventually figure it out.
It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.
It is also not unusual for that type of research to be occurring in Wuhan.
The city is a widely known center for viral studies in China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has experimented extensively with bat coronaviruses.
It is a remarkable conversation I feel like we're having here because you are the former CDC director and you were the director at the time this was all happening.
For the first time, the former CDC director is stating publicly that he believes this pandemic started months earlier than we knew, and that it originated not at a wet market, but inside a lab in China.
These are two significant things to say, Dr. Redfield.
That's not implying any intentionality, you know.
It's my opinion, right?
But I am a virologist.
I have spent my life in virology.
I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human, and at that moment in time, the virus that came to the human became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission.
Normally when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission.
I just don't think this makes biological sense.
So in the lab, do you think that that process of becoming more efficient was happening?
Is that what you were suggesting?
Yeah, let's just say I have coronavirus that I'm working on.
Most of us in the lab... Alright.
So for those who were just listening on screen throughout most of that interview with former CDC Director Redfield, it says CNN has written, former CDC director says he thinks COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab but has no evidence.
Yeah, I hear this claim a lot.
There's no evidence for this hypothesis.
Well, of course, everybody says theory, which they shouldn't.
But there's no evidence, which is preposterous.
There's a tremendous amount of evidence.
What I would say is, There is no evidence of a natural origin.
There is evidence.
It is not direct evidence of a laboratory origin.
And so that is striking.
And the idea, I mean, I'm troubled by the journalism that surrounds this.
In this case, I think this CNN report effectively doesn't Go anywhere new.
The only news here is that somebody who was in a position to know what was being said on the inside has come to this conclusion.
Right.
And, you know, we'll link to this whole little piece in the show notes, but you then have the interviewer being somewhat dismayed with the CNN people, whereas he does not appear dismayed here with Redfield.
And maybe now, before we say anything more, we should jump to the next little bit of this, Zack, starting at 3.40 that we wanted to show.
To 418?
Yep.
...expressing is that there certainly are possibilities, as I mentioned just a few moments ago, of how a virus adapts itself to an efficient spread among humans.
You know, one of them is in the lab, and one of them, which is the more likely, which most public health officials agree with, is that it likely was below the radar screen spreading in the community in China for several weeks, if not a month or more,
which allowed it when it first got recognized clinically to be pretty well adapted. - So that which allowed it when it first got recognized clinically to be pretty well adapted. - So that was Fauci for those And it doesn't look like science.
It looks like politics.
Yeah, this is clearly politics.
But it's veiled as science.
It's veiled as this, you know, the foremost authority that we are supposed to be listening to scientifically on this topic.
And being back on his heels doesn't feel good, and so it's sort of more clearly a political response.
So I would say, I think it goes one step beyond that.
In essence, what we are now watching is many mainstream publications and broadcasts That have taken up a very clear position, you know, under the false banner, follow the science, scientific consensus, whatever it is that's being deployed.
Right.
They have got themselves in a bind because one would expect that if this indeed were of natural origin, evidence for that would emerge and evidence that was inconsistent with the laboratory origin would also emerge.
And they would find themselves relieved to have taken up that position.
Instead, what we're seeing is the opposite.
And they are now figuring out how to live in a new world where this hypothesis that they did not want to survive has become unstoppable by virtue of how well it matches the evidence in question.
So I think what you're watching is a sort of jockeying for position.
So Fox News, for example, has done some actually quite credible reporting on this topic.
And CNN has been on the wrong side of it.
That's not to say that we know what happened, but it is to say that dismissing the idea of a lab leak has never been reasonable.
And Any journalistic outfit that has said there is only one possible explanation for the origin of this virus at any point up until now is not doing good journalism.
Right, they're doing something else.
And so the question is, what are they doing?
Is it a business thing, right?
Are they carrying water for somebody with an interest in where the science goes?
And so, of course, if you're not really paying attention to the lab leak question, if you have been going along With the New York Times and CNN and these other publications, and now suddenly this shows up on CNN.
It seems like news.
Oh, you know, this former head of CDC is taking this hypothesis seriously.
Of course, what he says in that clip isn't anything that hasn't been discussed here.
You know, we discussed it on Marr.
It has been widely discussed On Twitter, it has been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley has covered it.
So the point is, there's nothing new here.
All he's saying is that he's convinced, and that is interesting because it means that nothing was said behind the scenes that actually tells us this lab leak did not happen.
But that is new, right?
This is new because this is someone with both the background to understand what is potentially going on.
And someone who had access to potentially more information than any of the rest of us have.
And no, he is not laying out all the reasons that he thinks this in this very brief interview clip.
We don't know all of what he thinks or why he thinks it.
The idea that he has no evidence is not true.
What we know is that he has not presented the evidence here in this interview, in this little tiny interview.
That's all.
Well, what he says is the pattern of emergence, that this virus showing up and being very good at transmitting between people immediately with no evidence of it having learned that trick either in people or in an intermediate host, is the evidence.
And the point is, that isn't new.
I have, of course, seen lots of people say, well, this is a discredited CDC head on the basis of having botched the initial reaction to COVID, which is obviously irrelevant.
This is not an accurate challenge.
And then we have on the other side, we have Fauci, who is also highly placed, arguably, More expert in viruses and the challenges of pandemics.
However, what they don't say here, as far as I know, is that Fauci is compromised, having been in the chain of influence that resulted in the gain-of-function research taking place in spite of very serious objections.
Pre-COVID.
Pre-COVID, right, years ago.
But the point is, okay, if Fauci called it wrong, thought gain-of-function research was a great idea, and in fact I think if you look at his reasoning, assuming that his reasoning is what he said publicly, he wanted to have a very rapid pathway to generating vaccines so that a pandemic couldn't get ahead of you, right?
That's a noble and that's a good idea.
On the other hand, if that led him to advance gain-of-function research, which resulted in the lab leak, which then, you know, crashed the world economy and killed millions of people, then that's a major error, and covering his ass is not valid.
We need to know what happened.
So there's a lot of levels of what's going on here, but at some level what you're watching is the mainstream trying to figure out how to pivot to what those of us who have been paying attention to the evidence itself have recognized was a very viable hypothesis and much more viable than the traditional explanation.
You know, we've known that for, you know, since March of last year.
So anyway, interesting to watch the big players pivot, but it's also frustrating because the big players are in some sense, you know, suddenly people are now going to feel licensed to think about this as a possibility as if it just dawned on the scientific community that it is one, and that's not the case.
I'm not plagued by that.
That will always be how things are.
If a hypothesis is being subverted or not taken seriously for any reason, those few people who insist on talking about it are not going to be recognized by Everyone is talking about the important thing until something else happens.
Ah, but that's my concern.
Even that won't happen.
I don't know if, you know, there is a paper trail.
There are several papers.
Yeah.
And there's also now like a pixel trail.
It's like a video trail.
You know, there are many of us, even who haven't written papers on this, who have been talking about this.
So, you know, the fact that this may be the thing, like I'm grateful.
I thought, I was hoping that Was it Ridley's article in the... Was it like the New York Post-Intelligencer in December of last year?
Was that Ridley?
I can't remember.
Oh, no, no, no.
You're talking about... Why am I blanking on his name?
Oh, Nicholas Baker?
Nicholson Baker.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was hoping that that might be the thing that actually broke this, sort of, this loose.
There have been a number of these, like, oh, it's getting out, you know, there have been a couple of Wall Street Journal op-eds, as you say, and, you know, any one of them that manages to get the monolithic media representation of anyone who talks about this as a right-wing conspiracy theorist, I'm in favor of.
Well, of course.
I'm deeply troubled by the pattern here.
A, if history is any guide, those who talked about this early will not be vindicated by the system, right?
The pretense will be, oh, they were cranks, and then it just happened that science discovered this thing.
Isn't it nifty that we've discovered it rather than actually they weren't cranks, and you portrayed them as that falsely.
So, I'm troubled.
I'm also troubled that the pattern is a narrative pattern, right?
In other words, the truth here is what people are convinced they need to discuss rather than what the evidence says.
And the problem is that the evidence, as I keep saying, the evidence is not conclusive and there's no direct evidence of a lab leak.
There is lots of evidence that points to a lab leak.
That should have resulted in absolutely everybody who is capable of interpreting that evidence saying, regretfully, this is a possibility that needs not, you know, what they've effectively said is, sure, formally, we need to leave that on the list, but it's very, very unlikely, rather than
It is deeply troubling how likely that is and how all of the evidence remains consistent with that hypothesis so I would much rather see the spectrum of what we discuss move naturally with the evidence and That put us in whatever awkward position it puts us in because we've lost a tremendous amount of time here fighting a narrative battle over whether responsible people think this way and even in this set of clips I What Fauci says is nonsense.
Yeah.
And I have no doubt that he's smart enough to know that what he is saying is nonsense.
But his point is, oh, the solution to the problem that Redfield is pointing out, right?
A problem that I think Redfield is just reading into what the rest of us have been saying.
There's something very anomalous about this highly effective virus.
Reaching Wuhan and already being ready to go, right?
In humans.
Right.
And what Fauci says is, oh, that logically is not a terrible problem, because in fact it was probably circulating much earlier.
And so the period of time in which it's bumbling along is just one you haven't discovered yet.
But that is inconsistent with the evidence that we have about the phylogeny of this thing, where we appear to have effectively a point source, right?
Somehow, the discussion is moving too slowly, and this is progress in one regard, but it's maddening if you've been following the actual evidence.
It is moving too slowly.
I agree with you about that.
I think I disagree with you, or at least I'm going to push back against your framing of the problem is that it's narrative.
Both because I believe that we can win with narrative rather than continuing to lose with narrative.
I do think that's possible, and I'm a fan of narrative as you are too, but I think it is sort of embedded even more deeply in how I go about viewing the world.
But I also think, and maybe it's just because of that bias that I understand about myself, I think it is innate to what humans are and how we do things.
Arguing for a non-narrative approach to this sort of thing will not work, because some people will always be using narrative, and if their narrative is at all compelling, as somehow apparently this, if you're talking loudly like you're a conspiracy theorist, narrative has been compelling to many, many, many people.
Then those people using narrative will beat out those people who don't.
And I mean, I feel like this is a very analogous argument to having religion is a more adaptive position than not having.
Okay, but I am not arguing against the importance of narrative.
What I'm arguing is that it is necessary in a scientific milieu that the narrative follows from, and I don't want to say the evidence itself, because the evidence itself doesn't speak to a narrative, but the hypothetico-deductive method In light of the evidence, it does point to various possible explanations.
Yes.
And the journalists, I mean, I don't even understand how this is possible.
We are overproducing PhDs at an incredible rate because of things we don't need to talk about.
But the university produces PhDs to get its work done cheaply because graduate students are cheap labor.
So we produce a huge number of people who are never going to get a job in the fields in which they train.
Including in legit fields, including in scientific fields.
Right, exactly.
I mean, it's especially true in scientific fields because the work is expensive.
You need people who actually understand the science to teach the undergraduates, and so... Asterisk.
I would say it's especially true in fields that don't have any business existing at all.
I would say all of those PhDs are overproduced.
Yes, but from the point of view of the university needing the labor and then conspiring to get it by pretending that there are more jobs than there are, inducing people to work for less than a living wage in pursuit of a degree, we produce all of these
Experts right those people should many of them end up in journalism and frankly the things that get said in journalistic outlets are just completely Unforgivable in light of how much spare expertise there is produced by the system There's no way that this narrative needs to be driving this story because you could have people who are you know?
Educated enough to get it, tracking this and saying, hey boss, I hate to tell you this, but the lab leak hypothesis is absolutely viable.
Yeah.
I guess I hope, I feel like there may be a piece missing in the story you just told.
And you know, maybe it's, maybe the overproduction of PhDs is really of people who really are skillful and creative, like original thinkers who are able to also assess a whole bunch of technical information.
What we have seen is that a tremendous number, and I think it's a tremendous majority, of PhD programs, at least that we have had access to, do not involve people actually even doing their own research from beginning to end.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
So, you know, if you've got a whole bunch of people ending up with PhDs in sciences who walk into someone else's lab with someone else's grants, who already have a research program, And you say, okay, well, you're going to do this part.
And yeah, they maybe figure out experimental design and maybe they figure out how to do the analysis or whatever, but it's, you know, it's, it's actually somewhat rare for, for in some departments.
And I don't know how widespread that is, but I think it's pretty widespread for people who end up with PhDs to actually have even done a complete piece of their own research.
And that's, I mean, that's terrible, but that doesn't, that does mean if that's true, That you may have a whole lot of people with PhDs who wouldn't actually be able to go do journalism, because they wouldn't necessarily be able to see what is true.
But I think what it would do, implied in what you said, is it would free them from the perverse incentives.
That being in a situation where peer review depends on your peers respecting you and you not having overturned the status quo by saying, actually, I think that was a lab leak.
Like, you know, outside of academia, there are some perverse incentives that are hidden to most people.
And in journalism, I'm sure there are two, but they're going to be different ones.
I think that's well said, and this actually, I don't have it queued up here, but what the president said in response to this is indicative of exactly the problem you're pointing to.
The president basically said... You're talking about Biden, you're talking about now.
Yeah.
He said something, words to the effect of...
Of course misuse the word theory, something like I have my own theories as to what happened, but I'm going to wait until the scientific community resolves this, which is like understandable but wrong six different ways, right?
A, that's not how science works.
The scientific community is perfectly capable of being entirely wrong, right?
the science itself points to an answer and the scientific community can get it wrong.
And the point you're making, which I fully agree with, is that the perverse incentives inside of the system make that all too likely.
So if what Biden means by this is let's wait and see what mainstream virology thinks about this.
Mainstream virology has now two big problems.
One, it allowed work to go on that whether or not it did create this pandemic could have have created this pandemic.
And then two, it doubled down and doubled down isn't even right.
It did it a hundred times.
It told us this is not viable.
The evidence does not support lab leak.
And it kept telling us that.
And so the point is now, in order to not have to explain why it told us something wasn't possible that clearly is, it's just continuing to cover.
So you can't say that science is a process.
It's awesome.
You should follow it.
Yeah, I agree with that much.
Right?
And then it's like, well, how do we know what the process said?
Oh, ask the experts in it.
Ah, they all have the same conflict of interest.
God damn it.
Right?
Wouldn't it be great if a bunch of people who were trained by this system then left the conflict of interest zone and were in a position to comment on it?
Right?
That would be really useful.
And yet, instead, what we get is journalism that if you understand the basics of what's being described, you're just constantly like, did I read what I, you know, this is insane how low level the errors are.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, you've just described the like, wouldn't it be great if people who know stuff were able to leave the zone with the conflict of interest?
And, you know, in some ways, this is what we have done.
But we are also not virologists, not vaccinologists, not public health experts, not epidemiologists, but the like uber-generalist framing of evolutionary theory, which you can apply to everything outside of like rocks and quarks, allows a person to walk in if they have a bit of
a bit of background and are able to look at facts dispassionately and have the humility and demand of themselves that they come back and say when they're wrong that they were wrong.
You can walk into any number of complex systems and say, okay, nope, not my expertise, haven't published here, but let's see what this means.
What can we predict about what's going to happen evolutionarily based on what information we do know?
That's what we're doing.
Yeah, I agree.
And I want to be increasingly clear about this.
We are not epidemiologists.
We are not even molecular biologists.
But I don't think evolution is somehow secondary in this story at all.
Well, as you have already pointed out, it's exactly the thing that Redfield names.
Oh, it's what both of them are talking about.
Well, because Fauci is responding to Redfield, but they are exactly talking about, basically Redfield saying, which I believe you said on Marr, and we have both said here on Dark Horse many times, A virus that has just made the jump from another species to humans would take some time to figure out how to go human to human very fast.
And that's it in a nutshell.
And there was apparently no time.
Right, and so there are explanations that could fit.
Fauci has landed on one that doesn't, right?
So the point is, interesting now that at least the English-speaking world is now juggling something central to the COVID story.
And what does it hinge on?
Wouldn't you know it?
It hinges on a question of evolutionary dynamics, right?
And, of course, this has been true all along.
The fundamental questions here are not more molecular than they are evolutionary.
They are both molecular and evolutionary and epidemiological, right?
That's the nature of these stories.
And so the question is, what's your road in?
And if the idea is the virologists are going to pull rank on the evolutionary biologists, well, on what basis are you doing that other than power?
That's not science.
Stay in my lane.
The highway is evolutionary.
Right.
Yeah.
Very well said.
The highway is entirely evolutionary, whether it's understood to be or not.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, are we where you wanted to go on that topic?
Yeah.
Okay.
Because it connects, what we have just discussed, connects with one of the things that was on my list and I don't know if it's next on your list.
I was going to talk about Saffron next.
Is there, can I slot in the question of the Amazon I suppose you wanted to go after that for reasons, but you can go for it.
Okay, so I want to do this because it's relevant.
Zach, could you put up the RT?
Oh boy, can you put that on a screen?
I can actually see it.
All right, so here we have a story from, I think it's a couple weeks back, actually.
Amazon rainforest now most likely warming Earth's atmosphere, not cooling it, scientists warn.
Dun dun!
For fuck's sake.
Yeah, for fuck's sake.
Can you scroll down a little bit too?
I want to see if the...
Yeah, and then also on RT, in the middle of this article, pollution cools the planet.
Pandemic-induced lockdowns raised global temperatures in 2020.
Now, that second thing is actually not far-fetched, right?
It is true and it is actually pretty well known and pretty well studied that industrial pollutants do block a certain amount of UV radiation and reflect it back into space, basically increasing albedo.
And so the shutdown of some fraction of our industrial capacity is capable of doing that.
But you start to put these things together.
So scroll back up to the title.
And it's painting a picture here.
By the way, I'm a little bit tickled.
That's a picture of the Amazon, and I believe those yellow trees are going to be tababouya flowering, which is a tropical phenomenon.
And when these flowers fall to the ground, it's a little bit like fall colors.
Yeah, I'm not, I don't remember the range of Tebibuya, and that doesn't look like the same yellow as Tebibuya to me, but I'm a big fan of that tree, so.
Yes.
I'm just not going to sign on to that being that tree.
All right, well, we'll see.
Okay.
But actually, I do think Tebibuya gets that south.
But anyway, the point here is This article, if you actually read it, and I'm not going to bother going through it, but I did start to read it to figure out what the hell this was saying because that title doesn't make any sense.
No, it doesn't.
What the article describes is not that the Amazon is contributing.
And, you know, mind you, the title says the Amazon forest is contributing.
How is the Amazon forest contributing to global warming, according to this article?
By being cut down and burned.
Okay.
Right?
Yeah.
That's quite a sleight of hand.
It's quite a sleight of hand.
It's, you know, I struggle to even figure out what the... President destabilizes country by dying.
Exactly!
Or, you know, Franz Ferdinand triggers World War, right?
I mean, you know, it's insane.
Now, here's the problem.
You don't have to have a PhD.
You don't need a bachelor's degree.
You just need to have paid attention in high school science to know that the Amazon forest itself probably isn't really capable of contributing one way or the other to global warming by virtue of equilibrium.
The Amazon rainforest is made out of molecules Those molecules, overwhelmingly, are the result of photosynthesis that has taken the sun's light and taken CO2 from the atmosphere, and it has linked those CO2 molecules together into sugars and into cellulose, which is basically sugar molecule reflected, right?
Strings of sugar molecules.
That's an amazing process, but the point is a certain amount of the CO2 that might be in the atmosphere is stuck in trees and other plants and animals and everything else in the Amazon.
And no shit, if you burn that stuff, it releases it back into the atmosphere, right?
Very quickly.
If you just cut it down and leave it sitting, it'll do so more slowly, but nonetheless... This was like, this was the observation of the first ecologist.
Right!
This is really basic.
It's the most basic understanding of what this thing is.
Now, the Amazon could, over time, pick up some biomass.
You know, if you leave the Amazon be, there are processes that could result in it getting heavier and take a little bit of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
But ultimately, it's got to stabilize somewhere, right?
And at that point, if you cut it down or burn it, yep, you're going to return a bunch of that stuff to the atmosphere.
And if it's expanding in scope, it will be taking up more.
And if it is being burned down or otherwise receding as the forests that, you know, apparently once we're in Northern Africa, where we now have vast desertification, then the opposite will happen.
Right.
And there are other factors that are not involved in this equilibrium.
So can you put the article back up, Zach?
So if you look at the Amazon rainforest from above, you will notice that it is quite dark.
So that has an albedo impact, that the fact of the Amazon rainforest will capture a certain amount of heat because it's dark, and so it will absorb sun's energy, whereas if it was light it would reflect it, like the poles do.
So that's not an equilibrium question, but that's not what the article is about.
Just to be clear though with regard to albedo, cut down an acre of tropical rainforest and what tends to be exposed is darker.
The albedo effect actually goes in the opposite direction at least upon first pass with regard to the cutting.
The bare soil It tends to be dark, and I did not pull it up.
I have an albedo chart here somewhere from an old doctor.
I think this is not always the case, but in any case, my only point is it's not that every effect on global climate of the forest is subject to this equilibrium, but the topic of this article is about carbon, and it is about the title and the article effectively The underlying science appears viable here.
I can't say it's right or wrong, but I can say there's nothing in the science that's being reported that isn't correct.
But from the point of view of the journalism is absolutely insane.
And anybody with a basic understanding of equilibrium dynamics and even just the most superficial understanding of what photosynthesis is and what it produces would know that it's not right.
And yet here it is being broadcast and I saw not a single complaint about it.
Right.
So, you know, To the point about, for some reason, though we are producing a great many people who, at least ostensibly, should be leaving the academy with a great deal of expertise, our journalism does not reflect an excess of expertise.
It reflects all of these insane conclusions being spread around as if they make scientific sense, and the rest of us behaving as if that's normal.
Yeah.
An unfortunately true understatement.
Our journalism does not reflect an excess of expertise.
No, it does not.
Neither, though, does academia at the moment.
Right.
Well, or expertise doesn't mean what we would like it to mean.
It means something else, some kind of technical competence that does not involve, apparently, the ability to extrapolate.
Right, right, right, exactly.
Okay, can we talk about Saffron?
Yeah, let's do that.
Let's talk about Saffron.
Why are we talking about Saffron?
I'm not going to tell you why we're talking about Saffron at first.
I'm going to read you a little bit first, just a paragraph, from this amazing book.
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, second edition, 2004.
Really, if you're at all interested in what your ingredients are and how cooking works and various traditions throughout the world, this is your book.
It's fair to say I perused the book a little bit.
A narrative approach to cooking, both at the level of why things transition when you do certain stuff to them and where the ingredients To some degree.
I mean, I guess it really appeals to both my scientific and my narrative side.
So he's got, for instance, here, this is a survey.
He's got a survey of temperate spices, followed by a survey of tropical spices, and he spends a page and a half on saffron.
I must say, some of the intemperate spices are my favorites.
Yeah, you know, they're the best, but a little bit angry.
They're a little hot.
Yeah.
He has a whole page, whole thing on chilies and capsaicin.
So, you know, he goes chemistry, he goes molecular biology, he goes culinary history, he goes narrative, he goes cultural anthropology.
It's great.
So again, On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
Just the first paragraph on saffron before we go into why we're talking about saffron.
Saffron is the world's most expensive spice, a testament not only to the labor required to produce it, but to its unique ability to impart both an unusual flavor and an intense yellow color to foods.
It is a part of the flower of a kind of crocus, Crocus sativus, which was probably domesticated in or near Greece during the Bronze Age.
The saffron crocus was carried eastward to Kashmir before 500 BCE.
In medieval times, the Arabs took it westward to Spain and the Crusaders to France and England.
The name comes from the Arabic for thread.
Today, Iran and Spain are the major producers and exporters.
They use saffron in their respective rice dishes, pilaf and paella, the French in their fish stew and bouillabaisse, the French in their French stew, which is called bouillabaisse, and the Italians in risotto Milanese, the Indians in biryanis and milk sweets.
So there's a whole lot more about the biology and such of saffron, but that's it in a In a nutshell, he says it's probably Greek.
Some people think it's Iranian in origin.
It's not totally clear.
It's several thousand years old.
We've been apparently domesticated for several thousand years, which is remarkable.
So it's either a human creation entirely or the result of, you know, through artificial selection where we were actively putting stuff together.
Or a discovery, for reasons that I'll talk about in a little bit, of what was surely a mutation that wouldn't have persisted, that we then acted to help propagate and have moved forward by several thousand years.
So we've been using it for pigment, it's in some parietal art, some wall art, in From older humans, medicine for various ailments, which is what we're going to talk about here, and of course, spice.
Although the description of it, I admit that I think I've never had fresh enough saffron to be able to... So it's so expensive that I've never really been able to determine a flavor, but it's said to have a hay-like aroma and taste, which when said that way, one wonders why it's you know, so remarkably coveted in at least particular parts of the world.
So there's this paper Um, oh, that's unfortunate.
Uh, let's see, hold on, I can pull it up this way.
Hopefully this paper, Zachary, in a minute.
Here, you can show, um, that just came out in the journal Physiology and Behavior called Impact of Saffron, Crocus sativus lin, Supplementation and Resistance Training on Markers Implicated in Depression and Happiness Levels in Untrained Young Males.
So, I was just pleased enough with that title to end up reading this paper.
It's a bunch of people, a bunch of researchers out of Iran, and one person in some France and US, but this is the untrained young males being talked about here, young Iranian men.
They started with 36 and it went down to I think 28, so they had 14 men in one category and 14 men in another.
These are all men who weren't smoking or drinking or engaged in any resistance training in advance of this.
To half the young men, they gave them a series of resistance trainings for I think it was six weeks.
And after the resistance training every day they gave them a saffron supplement and at the same time every day when they weren't engaged in the resistance training they gave them a saffron supplement and the other half of the men same exact resistance training and they gave a placebo at the same moment.
So the only thing that was different was the saffron but they were effectively trying to control for the well-known phenomenon that resistance training …also deals with depression, right?
That resistance training itself is effectively an antidepressant.
Is there going to be a discernible difference for men who aren't already engaged in resistance training?
If you start them on it, will they get better?
Turns out yes.
Will they get more better if you have them engage in resistance training and take relatively small amounts of saffron?
The answer is yes.
Fascinatingly.
And so they looked at a number of metrics here.
You can take my screen off a sec.
But let me just see what the things that they looked at that increased were anandamide.
Oh, I can't even pronounce this next one.
I don't know what it is.
T2-arachidonal glycerol, also known as 2-AG, serotonin, dopamine, and beta-endorphin.
All increased, as did in just questionnaires, reported levels of happiness in the resistance training plus saffron group, more than they did in the resistance training without saffron group.
I think I have that right.
There's a little bit, there are a lot of things they were looking at, so I may have put one of those things in the wrong column, but all those things definitely increased in both groups, or the first did in the first group.
It seemed like you had something to say.
Well, I was going to say I have recently come to the conclusion that if you're happy and you know it, you're not paying attention.
But some of those people may just be on saffron.
Yeah, I don't like this formulation.
You don't like this formulation?
If you're happy, you know you're not paying attention.
Well, I mean, it's 2021.
It's a temporary condition, to be sure.
I hope so.
Okay, so one of the things that Saffron seems to do actually, and this is not from this paper, this apparently I did not know, so I just went down the Saffron rabbit hole today.
There's a wealth of literature, most of which is not immediately available.
You have to ask for it through interlibrary loan and such.
So I'm not going to show you any of the other papers, but on all of the actual known antidepressant effects of saffron, it appears to have a very similar actual mechanism to fluoxetine, which is Prozac, if memory serves, which is that it inhibits the reuptake of serotonin into synapses.
Okay, so this may be where you're headed, but the interesting thing here, we have a synthetic molecule that blocks the reuptake of serotonin, for which you could make all of the usual observations about the hazard of not knowing what the consequence of this will be, and then you have
Thousands of years of use of a natural molecule that does this in which we are safe to make the assumption that at least in the ancestral circumstance this was not bad for the individuals and that there's reason to think that in fact It was positive by virtue of the fact that it is not free to cultivate saffron.
In fact, it's labor-intensive, and yet it persisted and spread from one culture to the next.
It provides no caloric benefit, and it's self-limiting in terms of the amount.
So it is toxic in large amounts, but it's really hard to get enough saffron in any but a modern and incredibly wealthy environment to hurt yourself with it.
It colors things yellow, so it has a coloric value, but not caloric.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that's worth noting in passing.
I approve of that joke.
All right.
That joke?
Okay.
Feel free to borrow that joke.
That one has been approved.
Yep.
Yep.
So yeah, part of the places to think about here are exactly what you just said, that finding a similar mechanism in a molecule that is in a plant that has had been in basically co-evolutionary relationship
with humans for thousands of years is, knowing nothing else, very much likely to be a lot safer than creating, synthesizing in a lab, a molecule that has the same mechanism of action, but is also, you know, the additional reason why that might not be as safe.
Aside from not knowing what the titration level should, you know, how much you should be taking and all of this, is, you know, what else is in the saffron?
It's a complex.
It's, you know, it's pollen from a plant.
Is it pollen?
I think it's pollen.
Yeah, it's pollen.
Pollen shreds the little, what do you call them?
The pistils?
Stamens?
I don't even remember.
We're not botanists.
I wasn't going to hide behind that, but I probably should.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember what the things on the top of the corn are, but anyway.
The threads.
Okay.
I think they're anthers.
But anyway, go ahead.
I don't remember where I was going.
You were talking about the advantage of a natural molecule as compared to the synthetic.
So there's so much else also that you're getting when you're eating saffron, right?
It's not just the lab-synthesized molecule, which is what you were saying as well.
But one of the pieces of the story that I haven't mentioned yet, and there are many, but the one that I do want to mention before we move on is that the Crocus species that saffron is from is triploid.
And it cannot reproduce sexually as a result.
And it is entirely asexually reproducing.
And basically humans produce it by separating it.
Anyone who's ever planted bulbs knows, you know, sometimes it's bulbs, sometimes it's corms.
It's just that there's a botanical distinction between the two, but they seem similar to the... Well, in this case, it's going to matter.
Okay.
This is more like garlic than it is like an onion.
And because it's like garlic, you can take what's called a tooth, one clove of garlic, and you can plant a garlic plant from it.
I believe that's right for this species of Crocus.
I'm not 100% sure is why I paused.
Well, I think it's implied in the fact that it's a corm.
It's a corm out of bulb.
Yeah.
So it's dependent on us, which means It's not really changing.
It's benefiting from its association with us, in which we take its pollen and eat it and paint walls with it and use it medicinally, but it is never reproducing sexually.
So there's a question, of course, again, of where did it originate?
Was it a mutation that would have been a complete dead end, but for the lucky discovery by presumably a single human several thousand years ago, that when they rubbed up against it and then wiped their hands on their mouth, they felt Better afterwards?
I mean, that seems like an unlikely series of events, especially for them to then be like, maybe it was that orange stuff on my lips, right?
Although it being so highly colored may have made it easier to trace.
Yes, it also suggests a reason that it might have been introduced into cuisine, right?
Just as a colorant.
Right, and then it has this other effect.
Yeah, absolutely.
So in trying to figure out some of what was going on with this species that is entirely dependent on humans, I ended up at this really confused website.
And so this is my segue to the last thing we're going to talk about today.
Before you segue though, I want to make one other point about this, which is There are really two things, at least two things, that make Saffron, even if Saffron is doing effectively the same thing as SSRIs that are synthetically made are doing, there are two reasons that the natural version is probably much better.
One is the one we've already pointed to, that it comes in a context that has stood the test of time.
But the other thing is it may come in a tradition that titrates it properly.
In other words, you are hacking a physiological system.
There are reasons that you might want to hack a physiological system rather than go with your endogenous programming, for example.
This won't be the case Probably in Iran or Greece, but if you change latitudes, for example, and your serotonin system was not calibrated to your new situation, you might be able to use saffron to modulate it for, let's say, winter or something like that.
But were that the case, you would imagine that it would The world has not evolved with supermarket-like foods where you can source a strawberry in February, right?
The world functions where foods become available at different times, and so traditions have built into them A calendar of foods, as it were, and you might imagine a prediction of the hypothesis that actually this does travel with humans because of its SSRI-like effect.
You might imagine that foods that accompany the part of the year that you want to recalibrate would be high in saffron.
And that other parts of the year might be low in it or something like that.
Well, interesting, too, actually, that, you know, seasonal depression is something that afflicts many people.
And that would likely have been the case even pre-industrial lights and such.
And this crocus, unlike most, although like some others, is autumn blooming.
Whoa.
So the saffron is becoming available and it doesn't save particularly well unless you've got deep freeze basically.
It freezes okay.
You basically heat dry it and then it preserves a little bit, but it's going to be the most abundant and the freshest exactly as the days are getting darker.
So this is perfect.
It blooms at an odd time and it cannot be preserved.
Therefore, The prediction of the hypothesis is that it is properly targeted to a place where physiology is desirably hacked and that you can't screw up because it's very hard to have it at the wrong moment.
That would be fascinating.
Of course, that would require you to know Which populations have an ancestral?
It sounds like Iran and Greece would be two.
But, you know, in order to figure out where the plant picked up that trick, you know, assuming that that trick is calibrated to a population, which population was it?
Exactly.
Interesting, Iran and Greece aren't exactly adjacent.
You know, interesting that those are the two possible source populations.
Yeah, but also that sort of fits in the story too, because the nature.
So, to catch people up, because it's non-sexual, it doesn't produce a viable seed, right?
which is fine in this case because it produces a corm.
The corm can be broken apart, and therefore one plant can produce many plants by planting the corms and supplementing them, and so you get many plants.
But it also makes it highly transportable, right?
That's true.
So it may, you know, you can take the items and by keeping them in root cellar-like conditions they are dormant and you can travel over long distances and so maybe not so surprising that non-adjacent populations both have a very ancient relationship with it because it only takes one person to carry it over a mountain range for it to show up somewhere.
Yeah, that's good.
I like that.
Okay, so while I was trying to figure out some of that, I came across this website, which I'm trying to make bigger here, which you should pay no attention to at all because it's truly confused and confusing.
and I'll just read the bottom half of the second paragraph here, "The Crocos sativus is an asexual plant, meaning that this plant does not reproduce asexually.
In order to reproduce itself, the Crocos sativus must undergo reproduction with the help of tubers." So, you know, I read that and went, "There's nothing on the site that could possibly be of value because it's that confusing." And of course, I did go looking a little bit more and the site is deeply confused across a lot of things.
But this, Zach, if I may, thank you.
The fact that that is out there on an official looking site about all the information you ever need to know about saffron struck me as Another piece of the puzzle as to why we are such a confused people now, and to this point specifically, this site can't even tell the difference between asexual and sexual reproduction when it's trying to make a point about exactly that thing.
Right, that is the central issue.
It is the central issue and it's confused it twice in two sentences.
Yeah.
And it seemed to me, in thinking about confusion about sex and gender and sexuality, we are not going to spend a ton of time talking about detransitioning right now.
But there is a new thing that is happening that is worth saying some things about.
I don't like to rely on Twitter as a source, but there's a story that's breaking that seems to be almost entirely on Twitter.
There are a few just medium articles, but to the degree that they're talking about, they're citing the Twitter stuff.
So we're going to go to Twitter here.
Basically, 60 minutes we are told The long-running CBS, I think, NewsHour show has been planning a segment on detransitioners, that is people who have transitioned to the other sex or gender, depending on who you're talking to, and who have decided after some time that it was a mistake and that they're going to detransition back into their natal sex, the sex that they were born as.
And as a result of a lot of activist hubbub about this, it seems that CBS may be actually rethinking whether or not to do this.
And that I find yet another piece of dangerous evidence that our journalism is being run by narrative and by politics rather than by, you know, by actually trying to discover what's true.
So, let's just show a couple of the tweets and questions before talking about this.
We have Jennifer... I will show this in just a second, Zach.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, who's a trans woman and also a Barnard professor and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, who had 28 pieces in the New York Times in 2020 alone, so this is not an infrequent contributor, first introduced this to the world here.
Okay, Zachary.
to be able to do that.
Tweet from March 20th.
There's going to be a 60 minutes on detransitioners, she writes.
They asked me to be a talking head and I said I prefer not to be part of this story.
They said please?
I said you ought to talk to Tori Peters or at least someone AFAB, since that's the focus.
They said we'd really like you, Jennifer Phinney Boylan.
I said I'm honored but I think this is a terrible idea for a story where I focus on this small group of outliers when you could focus on the struggles and triumphs of so many other trans folks.
So just stepping out of this for a moment.
Trans is itself an outlier group and Trans has gotten a ton of press in the last five or ten years, like really more than any group of that size warrants by the numbers.
And so for people in a tiny group of outliers who have been getting much more press than their numbers represent to be complaining about people within their group Who, frankly, may or may not be outliers getting any press at all.
Seems like the best spin I can put on it is it's the height of irony.
It's the height of irony, and it's also obviously duplicitous.
Yes, so that would be a slightly less generous interpretation.
Yes, slightly less generous.
But the simple fact is, the reason that detransitioners are forbidden and that there would be pressure put on 60 Minutes, Is that the strongest argument for a go slow approach, let us leave children to develop as they will and not leap to conclusions, is that not only
Do does dysphoria so regularly clear up on its own, but that many people who do transition decide later it didn't solve the issue that they were hoping it would solve and decide to transition back at which point you can't fully transition back, right?
There are downstream consequences of this and so.
Yes.
You know, obscuring the awkward fact of many people who have thought that they wanted to transition and discover later that they got bad advice or had misunderstood things is really, it's going to put people in harm's way.
This story needs to be covered because everybody who's thinking of transitioning needs to consider the possibility that it isn't the solution for them.
Yes, exactly as, for instance, Abigail Schreier's excellent book needs to be out there and available to people and not be, you know, taken off of the virtual shelves at Amazon.
Just two more blue check marks on Twitter who are tweeting about this and who have cultural sway.
We have Chase Strangio at the, you know, Famous, at least in some circles, trans lawyer at ACLU who quote tweets the Boylan tweet thread that I just read the beginning of saying, this story is deliberately airing at a time of dangerous assaults on trans healthcare and trans lives while we as trans people are harassed and gaslit when we try to advocate for our ability to just live.
To just live.
I feel like I know who's being gaslit, and it's not Chase Strangio.
Right.
Well, that's the core of gaslighting now, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
So, you know, at a time of dangerous assaults on trans healthcare and trans lives, That will always be the claim.
That will always be the claim.
And any group, no matter how you define that group, will always be experiencing something that they should not be experiencing, because that is the nature of existence.
So, there is nothing in here that is falsifiable.
And yet the entire thing is of a tone that seems exactly wrong and actually quite deceitful.
So just one more of these.
Here we have someone, actually sorry Zach, give me my screen back just for a minute so I can see.
This is someone who is the former editor-in-chief of Out Magazine and the former chief commercial officer of Teen Vogue.
Teen Vogue, which seems to be one of the sort of spear points of a lot of this madness.
Um, so, um, the Twitter account is P.F.
Picardi.
Again, quote tweets the original Boylan.
tweet thread saying the media illiteracy around trans folks is nothing short of dangerous.
I hope the folks at 60 Minutes know there's a human toll to their irresponsibility.
Each and every person affiliated with selecting this narrative for airtime should be held accountable.
Held accountable.
The idea that there are stories of real people who have experienced real pain and real harm and their stories should not be told is a remarkable claim.
Yes, and the not in the slightest veiled threat, holding accountable people for telling stories like, for example, Jesse Singal, who has been falsely portrayed and, you know, what would the term be, demonized online, who has been quite good about reporting on all sides of the trans issue.
So I did want to add one other thing here, which in the spirit of what we were talking about last week regarding Kendi and the idea that there are certain things that fit on a card that actually tell the story, right?
It strikes me that at the heart of the issue of transition and detransition is the hypocrisy of a movement.
And mind you, I'm not talking about trans people.
You and I draw a distinction.
Trans activists are the ones who have become so troubling and frightening.
But if trans rights are human rights, right?
If the right to transition is a human right, Then surely people who have already transitioned also have the right to transition and have the right to have that story told, right?
So my point is, if the only people on earth who don't have the right to transition are people who've already done it, something is off, right?
And if those who are advocating for trans people are the ones who are ruling out the discussion, Then they are telling you what they're up to, right?
This is a one-way phenomenon from their perspective.
Yes, yes.
And we need to recognize that and we need to frankly stare down the threats because, you know, there is the group of people who have decided that transition is what they need to do and there is an infinitely large group of people who have yet to make such a decision.
Exactly.
And many of them are children, they are easily influenced, and they have a right to have normal development unfold before irreversible decisions are made on their behalf.
Exactly.
And, you know, it's not that everything in this landscape is clear cut, right?
For those extremely rare people, extremely rare people, who really would describe themselves to you, and some of them have described themselves to us, as having been born in the wrong body.
The earlier they would be allowed to transition, the more likely their understood and deeply felt brain sex could come to become in accord with the body that they are then allowed to transition into.
That is a tiny fraction of 1% of humanity, a tiny fraction, probably a hundredth of 1% for the vast majority of people, regardless of how they view themselves, how comfortable they are in their skin, whether or not they're gay, straight, bi, whatever.
The vast majority of people who do not end up feeling that the way that they must live in the world forever after is as the sex that they were not born to.
Messing with development is permanent and tragic and going to result in the things like infertility, mental health problems, and other physical problems like bone density loss.
Yeah, and sexual dysfunction.
And sexual dysfunction, yes.
And that's an incomplete list.
Yeah.
So it is not the right of a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people to change development for everyone else.
And in fact, having children have this thrust on them because they say something in the spirit of childhood where they're exploring identity because that's what childhood is.
It should be.
I would also point out that somehow we have been lured into a conversation in which everything downstream of the concept of trans is taken to be sacred.
This doesn't make any sense.
We have said repeatedly that too many cultures have trans as some role, ancient cultures, for us to imagine that this is some new invention or that it is inherently a disorder.
However, This is not the same thing as saying pharmaceutical transition and surgical transition is ancient.
It isn't.
And so to the extent that we are talking about who has surgery available to them, how early in life, when can we disrupt a developmental process in order to, you know, to ostensibly help you.
These are not simple matters, right?
And they are very different from the right to live as you would.
Right?
Yes.
Right?
The ability to be surgically altered as you would is not a human right.
Right?
We have not declared it such.
Right?
There are surgeries you can't go get.
Right?
So this is not one of those things and we need to stop pretending it is.
Compassion for people is important and the recognition that trans is something real and ancient is important.
That is very different from pharmaceutical and surgical alteration.
Beautiful.
Exactly right.
All right.
Good.
Well, we will no doubt come back to this topic and its various instantiations, but for now, why don't we share the thumbnail that we've chosen for this week?
Sure.
And just say that this is in advance of a bike ride that Zachary, our 16-year-old son and producer, took yesterday out west of Portland on the Banks-Fernonia Trail.
It was a beautiful day.
It's an even more beautiful day here today in the Pacific Northwest.
And at least in the Northern Hemisphere, although frankly near the equinox, it should be beautiful pretty much everywhere at the moment.
Do remember to get outside and make vitamin D while the sun shines, and get moving, get your heart rate up, and be with the people you love, and just enjoy what the Earth is giving us as opposed to what the media and the laboratories are giving us.
Go out and smile at someone, right?
Have a normal human interaction outside.
It's harder with the mask, isn't it?
Well, as you pointed out last time, this rubric where you need two of three of the protections means you can be outside and in smiling range without breathing down someone's neck and not wearing a mask.
Absolutely.
And that would be wise.
Actually, I will say, so Zach and I just did, you know, 20 miles yesterday.
And I don't think, Zach, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think we saw anyone on the trail with a mask.
I saw a couple, but not too many.
A couple right near the trailhead, maybe?
I mean throughout, but not too many overall.
Okay, so maybe a few.
I don't think anyone on bikes, maybe only the walkers were wearing masks.
And then we came back through Northwest Portland to pick up some food, and we had to park a ways away, and I left Zach with the car because the bikes were on the back of it, and I just walked through Slab Town, which is just a part of Northwest Portland.
Like I said, it was a beautiful day.
It was a Friday evening.
The sun was out.
The local government has allowed for a lot more outdoor seating spilling into streets, actually, than would be normal in times of a non-pandemic.
When the weather is good, there's actually the possibility for people to be seeing each other and to actually be being human with one another.
I saw almost no one with a mask Out there either on my, you know, what amounted to like an eight block round trip walk just to pick up the food that we had ordered.
And it felt so terrific, felt so human and wonderful and like, you know, like the Portland that we love.
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm glad to see it returning and I'm ready for the warmer weather.
Yeah, indeed.
So with that, we are, for those of you with us on YouTube, going to take a 15 minute break and then be back with a live Q&A answering questions from your super chat and If you have any questions about how to do that or anything else, you can send email to darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com Again, consider joining us tomorrow at 11 a.m.
On my patreon for a private two-hour Q&A Where where it is intimate enough that we can actually engage with the chat as it happens you will have before our next live stream a Your first of the month Patreon conversation as well.
So at higher tier levels, Brett has two monthly conversations as well at his Patreon.
Yeah, we've got a Clips channel where there's lots of good clips that our wonderful Clips guy is generating and maybe that's it.
Once again, be good to one another and eat good food and get outside.
We will see you next time or in 15 minutes, depending.
